right-wing imprints in recent years are almost invariably distinguished by their numbing sameness: a shrill cry of victimhood, a hunt for scapegoats, a tone that alternates between hysteria and heavy sarcasm, and a recipe for salvation
Man this rings true for my experience growing up in a conservative area
As these comments are mostly outrage over the headline, I’d like to hear which republican policies people here are particularly happy about.
You won’t get an honest answer, because an honest answer is about how they want to go back to 1950s American, where straight white men were the only demographic that mattered.
And they can’t be honest about that because they know it’s a bad opinion. At least if they outright said the honest answer, I could understand it a little. If they’re a straight, white male and have zero empathy for anyone else, it would probably benefit them (at the cost of everyone else).
But even if they have zero empathy, they still know that anyone who does have empathy (or isn’t a straight, white male and has the slightest bit of understanding for what’s going on) will never agree with them. So they have to come up with all sorts of bullshit. Hence how we get stuff like comparisons to lobsters, unsupported claims that LGBT whatever is harming kids, and general turning a blind eye to any blatantly harmful stuff that progresses their goals.
And don’t forget that the corporate tax rate was “insane” compared to current times. Something like 80%+.
While I don’t disagree in principle – corporations need to be paying taxes, and in fact, so do wealthy individuals – the effective tax rate on wealth since the 50s has changed very little. Those extreme tax rates you see from the era – 91%, 80%, etc., often only applied to a literal handful of households or businesses.
And, again, because our tax system is progressive, those extreme rates only applied to income above extreme (for the era) thresholds.
The biggest issue is not the tax rate, but that corporations (and rich individuals) have so many different ways to avoid paying any tax at all. To the point that, in 2020, it was literally newsworthy that Amazon had to pay more than $0.
Apparently I won’t receive any answer, which further highlights the issue. “Someone curious about beneficial conservative legislation? Gotta be a trap, go around.” The hoop is entirely open and a yet they refuse to dunk, because they lack the ability.
I mean, I think I’ve noticed that there is a much lower presence of right wing ideas on lemmy in general. My conspiracy is that is because a large amount of right wing sentiments are coming from fake to try and make it look like the sentiment is there. There is clear evidence this has happened with Russia in the 2016 election and the Rand Paul sentiment that preceded it.
I think you don’t see that on lemmy because it’s not a popular platform ATM so opinions tend to be a little more genuine.
4chan is probably the counter example to my belief.
Straight white men weren’t even particularly well off as a whole. Yes, The upper middle and upper class were almost exclusively white men but that was a small portion of their entire demographic. What they really want is to be able to go back to a time when they could beat their wives, divorce was not available, black people had to call them ‘sir’ or get strung up, and all the gay people were ‘where they belonged’, i.e. France, dead, or in the closet.
Ah yes, the “anyone I disagree with is racist” schtick. Keep running with that.
So I would consider myself at least reasonably inclined to thinking and somewhat conservative. Note, however, that does NOT mean Republican. When I use conservative, it’s in a different context than the modern “conservative movement”. The modern movement seems to be more regressive than conservative. Conservative in my way of thinking is about calm, measured progress. Don’t upend everything in massive sweeping changes… but don’t reject change either, change is necessary and inevitable. The more moderate Biden-y neoliberal wing of the Democrats is probably the closest to that these days - the more progressive Democrats with wanting massive social upheaval type changes and the Republicans favoring the repeal-and-replace burn it down and maybe fix the ashes approach to undoing those changes, neither of which appeals to me.
The chances you are neoliberal isn’t zero.
Given the amount of time I spent over on r/neoliberal, it could fit, although I do tend to fall a bit on the libertarian side of it.
I know plenty of conservative intellectuals, they are not Republicans though. Look up topics on individual freedom, limited government, or the rule of law to find thousands of examples.
Most would call themselves moderates as conservative is a poisoned title, but they exist.
So ask yourself, what perspective have conservatives been groomed view the United States? Roger Kimball describes it as, “A damsel (America) is locked in a dark castle, which was once a glorious palace in years gone by.” But now “liberal elites, the bureaucracy, academia” have sapped “her vitality,” turning her “weak and infirm” due to a dastardly belief system in “left-wing ideology, political correctness, egalitarianism. Using this metaphorical trope, Kimball continued to describe citizens as having turned into weaklings who secretly long for a return to national greatness. This view of decline and decadence, so core to the conservative intellectual tradition, is prone to eventual faith in a strong, authoritarian leader. And thus, Donald Trump becomes, for Kimball, the only one ready to rescue the country from its demise.
Their perspective is so vastly different due to indoctrination from years of talk radio, right wing news, and sites like facebook, reddit and 4chan where echo chambers reinforced the indoctrination.
The aspect free minds are missing us that, to quote Kimball again, “Trumpism represent[s] conservatism at its essential core, a kind of return to its roots in monarchism”. This “monarchism” is now being nurtured by a populist faith—a combined belief in the supposed goodness of the masses, led by the sort of paternalistic authoritarian leader that conservative intellectuals can get behind.
A free mind can obviously see through the deception has it is full of holes. If you don’t believe Steve Bannon is the next Pluto than you’ve already come to the conclusion that these buffoons are actually fascists attempting to strip American citizens of their rights and to gain power through the courts, through the power of the mob, and to gain power through forced religion, just as the Nazis did in the 1930s. The difference is they have absolute imbeciles in charge who have mucked up the process and exposed what they are doing. The mirror was broken for the vast majority of the American people to see. Thus this movement stalled, but it isn’t dead yet.
… individual freedom, limited government, or the rule of law…
There is nothing inherently conservative about any of those values. Depending on the ruling government at the time, those concepts were often considered decidedly progressive. In fact, it could be both at the same time depending on which freedoms, which limits, and which laws you’re discussing.
Conservatives at every point in history redefine conservativism to encompass the values that most benefit themselves at the time. If conservatives own businesses and do not control the government, they support limited government and deregulation. If conservatives face competition and can capture regulatory bodies, then strict guidelines and requirements are absolute.
The reason why conservative intellectuals don’t exist is simply because any non-trivial thought dismisses most arguments they have and would make them leave their conservative position. They ignore constant massive contradictions, bad faith arguments and misused language. The closest you could come to an intellectual position as a conservative is to openly say you want to power trip, enslave, kill, imprison people that disagree with you etc, which you obviously wouldn’t say(in this lemmy instance).
One thing to understand is that our ability to reason comes down to how we weigh our knowledge of the material in question. Someone can be extremely knowledgeable (and through that knowledge, intellectual) about one topic; and dumb as rocks in another. One of the culture shocks for me when I started working in the medical field was not just the existence, but the prevalence of stupid doctors. You’d think that someone who could become a doctor would be an all around curious and open-minded person… and when they’re talking about their area of expertise, it 100% seems that way; but once they deviate into other areas, it starts to show that they’re just as much a joe-dipshit as the rest of us.
So, you could have someone who’s intellectual as fuck in the context of like orthopedic surgery; but even in other parts of the field of medicine, their brain hits a brick wall and suddenly your ortho doc drinking the covid conspiracy theory koolaid; or conned by some talkshow host into paying money for NFTs; or swallowing the lies about dragshows somehow being about grooming children.
There is absolutely such a thing as a conservative intellectual: just means they’re really smart in some unrelated area; and really stupid with politics. There are also plenty of folks who buy into the hatred spewed by the political rightwing. Tricking rednecks into voting against their own interests is one thing - a bigger problem is that for a lot of voters, the cruelty is the point. They don’t give a fuck about children: they just want to hurt trans people. They don’t give a fuck about fetuses: they just want to hurt women. Assuming that conservatives are just politically stupid is actually giving them the benefit of the doubt - cuz the alternative is that they’re just evil… and evil paired with intellect is both real and incredibly dangerous.
I’m changing careers to become an engineer so I have been keeping an ear to the ground in those industries.
When COVID rolled around, there were engineers on reddit complaining about thier peers buying into the vaccine and anti-mask bullshit.
How could someone who needs to be versed in the difficult subject of physics be hoodwinked by con men?
Stupid people are truly everywhere.
DUDE… I don’t even work in the medical field. But I have such a similar experience. I grew up going to private schools and had lots of friends as doctors… so many of them were dumb as rocks outside of their area of expertise… Especially socially. To this day I constantly meet doctors that have no “social” or “street smarts” and are dumb as hell at technology, etc etc etc. I know that becoming a doctor takes a lot of effort, and focus, and specific knowledge… But… There’s a certain intuitiveness that comes with being generally “smart”. And for whatever reason, doctors don’t have that. I don’t think all doctors are “stupid”. But it seems like a profession you send someone who is stupid into, to do well… I really hate saying that but I relate so much to your comment its crazy lol.
The social bit is pretty wild. I’ve seen doctors - in the middle of surgery - lash out yelling at the techs and nurses, throw instruments, stomp their feet… straight up like a toddler, but with 20+ years of education. You’d think part of medschool would include some basic social and leadership training. I mean, in terms of the team dynamic, the doctor is always the leader, and it’s not a great look when your leader is throwing a tantrum like some 4 year old who just got told ‘no’ for the first time in their life and is an hour passed nap time.
The other extreme exists too ofc - some of the absolute best people I’ve ever met are doctors.
The takeaway is there isn’t really a correlation, or at least not near as much of one as you’d expect. Take almost any slice of the population and you’ll find a handful of genuinely outstanding human beings; a few absolute wastes of oxygen; and a horde of folks scattered in between. Take a slice exclusively of doctors, and… same. You’d expect that slice to be heavily weighted on the positive end, but the reality doesn’t pan out that way. I suspect you’d get similar results with a random sample of physicists, or highschool students, or people living in some ghetto - you get the point.
The only times I’d expect it to deviate much from that are population samples that are in a position to abuse power. CEOs, oligarchs… looks at thread title …those guys.
I only disagree on one thing:
- I don’t think they mainly “want to hurt”. I think what they want is to control: force others to follow their own moral beliefs or even to just do what they think will be good for that doing the forcing.
What we think as Evil is not done by charicatural evil people with who enjoy hurting others, rather it’s done by people who see themselves as good people and have massive excuses to hurt and even do harm to others, and sometimes that’s to such a level that they believing they’re actually helping those other people their forcing to comply with their own morals.
So a lot of that stuff is Moralism, practiced by people who actually see themselves as good people, which is why you’ll also find people who believe themselves to be lefties trying to force others to comply with their own beliefs (rather than, you know, trying to convince them). That said, this kind of leveraging social systems to stroke their inner authoritarianism seems to be a lot more common in the rightwing.
PS: By the way, I think it’s because of this paradox of people who see themselves as good people forcing their moral compass on others all they while telling themselves they’re “doing the right thing” that is so difficult to stop this kind of thing. Such righteous autoritarians are extremelly defensive when confronted with what they’re doing because they genuinelly think they’re good people doing what’s-right/needs-to-be-done/some-other-excuse.
Oh for sure – but I’d categorize those as the ‘politically stupid’ variety. They’re the ones convinced that they need to step up in defense of all the damsels in distress from the trans boogeymen just waiting to pounce in womens’ restrooms. They think they’re doing good, it’s just their gullibility has been taken advantage of and steered into unwittingly supporting horrible things. Not evil, just stupid, and thjus a tool for evil.
Then there are the ones who just straight up hate trans people. Evil.
It’s more of a spectrum than a dichotomy, but the modern ‘red team’ falls somewhere between those two points.
A lot of you people haven’t read this, and it shows.
https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/conservatism.html
Ps. You can literally just ask yourself what it is conservatives want to conserve…
Paragraph after paragraph of head canon without any sources. Lovely. And conservatives are delusional.
I mean, tell me you didn’t read it without telling me you didn’t read it.
I regretfully did. It was quite painful. And as bad as it is, I try to listen to progressive “intellectuals.”
I’m sorry every time I do. I should really stop.
