I describe Candace Owens as a “moron.”
This is why conservativism is just not compatible with democracy. You can’t have a society that adapts to a changing world and growing understanding of reality if people’s political ideology boils down to “We need to ignore new information and instead keep trying the failed ideas of the past.”
This is why when the Democratic party talk about the need for “balance” between the two parties it’s so toxic.
I don’t know if this is conservatism anymore. My Grandfather was conservative, and he was an engineer. He would have loathed the amount of misinformation and straight up lies being flung around these days. As much as his views were disagreeable, he never tried to manipulate or lie to anybody and always wanted to get to the truth of things. This is something else.
It’s still the end result, and while your grandfather might’ve been an engineer and accepted some science as an individual, his political ideology is what has contributed to the slow creep of increasing ignorance because his conservative views are what prompt him to vote for conservative politicians who obstruct attempts to improve society for all of us. Conservativism degrades a society’s ability to access the truth.
There actually is no reasonable form of conservativism. You’re either looking for ways to improve and integrate new understanding about the world based on the best information available to you at the time, or you’re trying to preserve ideas simply because they existed beforehand.
It would be like if someone brought a newer, safer design to your grandfather and he rejected it simply in the interest of preserving the old design because its old. He couldn’t function as an engineer if he applied his conservative thinking to his work, so I don’t see how people expect that philosophy to work in politics either. There is no effective scientist who, upon recieving new information, rejects it because it doesn’t fit with what they already believe, they try to adapt their model to fit the new facts.
We accept conservativism as some kind of immutable facet of politics, but we don’t actually need to. Making itself seem intrinsic is how the ideology survives, but really all it is is the remnant ideology leftover ftom the death of monarchy, it was injected into our politics early on in order to protect an aristocratic class, allowing it to continue on in a new form (corporate oligarchy).
Very well said.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that conservatism is an inherently reactionary and counter-revolutionary ideology: it is primarily concerned with protecting the powerful by entrenching privilege and maintaining the structural oppression of the underclasses.
Sounds like your grandpa might have been conservative as in slow to change.
Nowadays, conservative in politics means deepthroating fascism.
Conservatism has always been authoritarian. The notion of “slow to change” has only ever been a fig leaf to obfuscate that fact.
I don’t know if this is conservatism anymore.
It’s a return to what conservatism always was.
Conservatism isn’t compatible with a lot of things in the modern age: social programs, military industrial complex during arms races spanning decades, late-stage capitalism in a social Republic…etc. I wouldn’t say Democracy in general though.
Also, these whack jobs are not Conservatives with a capital ‘C’, they are Radicalized Religious Zealots at a minimum. They think their way is the “right way”, and are on some mission to ensure everyone else gets on board, or else. It’s how they approach everything.
The nutty thing about Candace Owens is that as much as she is a liar and scammer, she’s just jumping into the deep end with all these people who are working against her own best interests. She’s not completely stupid, so she must realize this, but refuses to be deterred because she thinks she will somehow benefit in the end. To what end that is for her, who knows. She’s working hard to enable a bunch of racist, misogynistic, assholes though, but she’s also profiting from it and couldn’t care less about who she’s impacting elsewhere with her vitriolic bullshit.
Also, these whack jobs are not Conservatives with a capital ‘C’, they are Radicalized Religious Zealots at a minimum
Yes, there are degrees of commitment, but the normie conservatives are still enabling the extremists and play a key part in the progression from democracy to fascism, you can’t just flip from democracy to a fascist state, you need “respectable” conservatives to start to ease people towards the notion. There’s still no value in their conservative leanings, even if it’s watered down.
I don’t want any lead in my water ideally, even if slight amounts aren’t immediately harmful, the lead traces in the water has no benefit regardless of the degree.
Radicalized Religious Zealots
Run of the mill, average religious people. Religion is one of the many reasons the working class must never disarm. The cult followers literally cannot help themselves. At some point, they all will work to make their delusions your reality.
Well that’s not true. I know plenty of religious people who don’t give a shit about what other people do or believe, and that’s the standard. Anyone who is out trying to recruit, guilt, or force fear onto others in the name of religion is absolutely just a Zealot (capital “Z”), and that is not the standardnof behavior for what I would say is most people.
There’s certainly something about the Southern US that really churns these pieces of shit out like a factory though.
You are in a abusive relationship with the democratic party. You are a domestic abuse victim.
And the Republicans burnt your house down every once in a while.
Smile, for you are fully represented by the greatest democracy on planet earth! Feeling free yet?
We are all in an abusive relationship with our government here in the US. For some reason we are accepting being lied to, gaslight, and manipulated by our ruling class.
For all their faults the Democratic party is the only one doing something about it. From trying to hold police responsible to protecting our most vulnerable people.
Meanwhile Maga is repealing transparency laws, taking away women’s rights, and othering people at an alarming pace.
The two side of the same coin rhetoric grows old and at this point is only here to blur the lines and continue to give conservatives control due to apathy.
For some reason we are accepting being lied to, gaslight, and manipulated by our ruling class.
We have been bred to be moral. To NOT accept abuse and lies implies to fight. And fighting is never considered moral. To fight you have to admit there is a conflict (your interests vs the billionaires aka “the owner class”), then escalate the already existing conflict, do lots of deeds considered atrocious by society, etc.
Morality, like religion, is a conservative policy meant to protect the status quo at all costs. That’s why no one ever went to jail for preaching or exercising morality. If morality could change the status quo, it would be prohibited and punished.
It’s less than ideal, but is still preferable to many places, if for no other reason than its potential for reform. We still have some insight into things like campaign finance for now, which makes it possible to fight from an informed position.
I’m actually not that committed to the Democratic party itself, but you’re right that they’re abusive. Acting politically based on the division between conservative and progressive, regardless of any label a politician might self-apply, helps clarify the way forward for me. As far as my mental model of the political landscape goes, conservative/neoliberal democrats are quarantined off with the GOP, they’re the same in terms of their potential to produce lasting change. I’m not going to support an AIPAC democrat the same way I’m not going to ever support a MAGA conservative.
But yeah, our democracy is functioning incredibly poorly at the moment.
This is why conservativism is just not compatible with democracy.
You can’t have a society that adapts to a changing world and growing understanding of reality if people’s political ideology boils down to “We need to ignore new information and instead keep trying the failed ideas of the past.”
These two statements do not logically follow each other. There’s nothing inherent to democracy that makes Progressivism necessary
Progressivism is just a label for people who believe in things like science and humane, fact-based policy. There’s no continuum between that thinking and conservativism, it’s a binary. Either someone is ready to accept the truth about any given issue as its revealed or they’re not. They’re either able to admit when something doesn’t work or they’re not.
Conservativism is, fundementally, trying failed ideas over and over in the hopes they’ll work. It’s an ideology that’s constantly falling behind reality, and as it falls behind and gets out of sync with the real world your average conservative becomes more extreme and more detatched from the reality around them until a breaking point is reached and either they finally accept reality or they try to implement fascism so they can try to force reality to conform to what they think should true, to validate their old failed notions.
You can’t have a democracy run under the idea that things can always stay the same. Because what are conservatives actually trying to conserve in the US? The 1950s was not some golden era of democracy, it was actually a period of severe disenfranchisement and if we successfully conserved that system the civil rights era would’ve never come to be because conservativism does not improve anything. There was no benefit to thinking “We need to be conservative about this whole giving people voting rights thing.”
Conservativism is dead weight that becomes malignant naturally as part of its regular life cycle, it’s not a counter balance.
You can’t have a democracy run under the idea that things can always stay the same.
Literally untrue. You seem to have a very idealistic definition of what a democracy is. Democracies can follow any policies they want, as long as they’re based on the popular vote of the people.
Inherent to democracy, no. Inherent to a well-functioning society in a world where changing circumstances are inevitable, yes.
A broadly educated population is toxic to conservative ideologies.
An oxymoron. The principals of science are provable through repetition. Faith implies lack of proof. An oxymoron.
Where I think she has a point (whoever she is) is that most people don’t repetitively prove science’s principles themselves. So for the vast majority of people that believe in science, they take their world view on faith from a book written by someone they don’t know.
They grow up with the understanding that it’s the truth, so they accept it. They have no idea how to actually follow the scientific process and test the theories themselves, they just trust the authority of the institution distributing the knowledge.
You might think this is a false equivalency. But with religion collapsing more and more each day, they’ve mapped their bullshit quite nicely on to science. Generating plenty of pseudoscience for anyone who believes in science but is made uncomfortable by its findings. Religion lives on in how the masses actually perceive science. Because the mechanism is no different:
I don’t understand the universe, but I have faith that someone does. I’ll put them in charge so they can give me the bullet points of how I should live.
Who?
Actually, never mind. I don’t want to know.
