I want conservatism to thrive. It does have a place in a healthy political system.
What place is that? Conservatism at it’s core is about maintaining the aristocracy/hierarchy. That’s what it started as, and it’s never wavered from that mission. All of the claims towards ‘conserving what is good’ or ‘fiscal responsibility’ or ‘protecting individual rights’ are just that: claims. They have never acted in ways that would back those claims up unless their actions also helped maintain/promote the aristocracy. The rest is just noise and propaganda designed to make their positions sound palatable.
I don’t see any place for that in a healthy political system.
I disagree with you, but respectfully. Conservatism is basically just people who, for a variety of reasons (not all of them bad), generally vote for the status quo. This is human nature. Progressives are willing to push forward but also sometimes without regard to some of the consequences. Also human nature. Some people are bold and some people are timid. Having both around in a balanced way helps us all move forward with careful thought. That system is good overall.
The problem is that conservatives are really moderate democrats now. The modern Republicans are not conservatives. They are fascist cultist morons. I believe I explained myself fairly well in my first post. You might want to read the whole thing next time :)
I disagree that it is “good” overall. Conservative policies have always stood in the way of any movement to treat all people equally because the status quo benefits a sections of the population. Slavery. Racism. Sexism. Etc. None of these needed to be “conserved” and we would be a better society if we had been able to address them sooner. Also, conservative power structures when threatened by progress default to authoritarian in brutal fashion. The Holocaust. The Civil War. The Inquisition. Etc. And this is just in the West.
The modern Republican is not an aberration. It is the final form of Conservatism.
I have seen no proof that the consequences of rampant Progressivism are in any way equal to the horrors of rampant Conservatism. The idea that we need to validate Conservativism to “balance out” Progressivism seems to me to be a dangerous myth that is paid for with the blood of oppressed people.
I have seen no proof that the consequences of rampant Progressivism are in any way equal to the horrors of rampant Conservatism.
There have been many cases in history where the forces in society seeking positive change have caused untold damage to their societies. The French Revolution started out with the oppressed peasantry seeking liberation from a decadent and constrictive nobility, but ended in hundreds of people getting their heads cut off before the pendulum swung back and Napoleon took control, and briefly created one of the biggest empires in European history. Napoleon was less conservative than the Ancien Regime but he certainly wasn’t a revolutionary.
Another example is the Bolsheviks, who started out as oppressed workers in Russia who wanted liberation from an exploitative and authoritarian tsar, but as soon as they actually gained power, were usurped by a complete megalomaniac who sent thousands of people to labor camps, destroyed most of Russia’s social institutions in order to subsume them into the state, committed numerous genocides (some more direct than others), and destroyed Russia’s demographics and long-term economic prosperity with a breakneck-pace industrialization. Joseph Stalin’s ideological offshoot, Mao Zedong, also did similarly horrible things in China, like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, despite starting out as the leader of a peasant rebellion seeking liberation from literal feudalism.
Apart from the Nazis, who can only debatably be considered “conservative” considering they didn’t really wanna conserve much of anything about society, conservative insanity doesn’t tend to be anywhere near as destructive to society in the short term as progressive insanity is. Instead, conservative insanity causes society to completely stagnate, remaining behind socially and technologically while other societies rush ahead, as happened to Tsarist Russia.
Seeing all this, you’d have to be either biased or stupid to deny the necessity of conservativism in society. Progress is often necessary, today included in many areas, but society must have a conservative wing to prevent the progressives from changing things which are better off left alone.
I strongly suggest reading Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. He makes an excellent case that, from Edmund Burke to now, conservatism has been about preserving historical hierarchies. Men over women, straight over gay, white over Black, religious over not, etc. The status quo just tends to be full of hierarchies we haven’t rooted out, so their claim seems believable even though it’s false.
