Commentary: Longtime former Republican on Patrick Deneen and the demise of the conservative intellectual
This is incorrect.
There is a such thing as a “conservative intellectual”. It’s just that they’ve been long since drowned out by the rest of the party, and the right-wing voting base has no appetite for actual, sensible conservative policies right now.
Name one conservative policy that has furthered mankind. Prohibition, voting rights, sexuality, drug war, terrorism; time after time they’ve been wrong. Even fiscally they run up the deficit. Their only role is to preserve hierarchy and maintain power
George W Bush massively expanded US Free Trade agreements. We went from 3 to 16 under his admin. That’s good for the entire world.
Pretty much the only thing I don’t like about Biden is his protectionist stance.
I’m gonna assume you think Capitalist expansion and colonialism is a good thing.
Name one conservative policy that has furthered mankind.
Richard Nixon was at the helm when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded. I believe he also was responsible for protecting national parks, but I didn’t bother fact-checking that one.
https://www.epa.gov/history#:~:text=EPA was created on December,human health and the environment.
Now, granted, modern conservative politics are garbage-culture war bullshit, but we need to be cautious of forgetting history. Rewriting history is their game.
Progressive policies implemented during a conservative presidency don’t seem like conservative policies.
Progressivism is moving towards collective goals. Conservatism is protecting individual freedoms.
You many see individual freedoms differently than they do but that is the core fundamental policy they protect.
Everyone living depends on huge networks of interdependent actors for basic survival. Never mind quality of life. The political reality of the individual is that they are the smallest and weakest political unit; least equipped to petition for change.
Conservatism may have individualism all over the label, but conformity is what’s inside the box.
But they don’t protect individual freedoms.
They have taken a hard stance against body autonomy, free speech, individual identity - all in support of corporate and state control over the individual.
This is the same argument as saying conservatives are fiscally responsible. It’s just something people say with nothing historically supporting it.
What you’re saying is true in theory, but the American Republican party has absolutely nothing in common with it.
Just look at the patriot act, torture, detention, TSA, and all the other shit pushed through by the GOP that has decimated freedoms and privacy.
The ONLY individual freedom the GOP protects unconditionally is for everyone and their uncle to own guns. Nevermind if your uncle is a lunatic, they’ll protect his freedom to be armed to the teeth.
Intellectualism is not an inherently moral thing. One can be an amoral, selfish, narcissistic, intellectual.
I didn’t mean to give the impression that it is a moral issue. I consider it from a populist societal perspective. The majority (liberalism)wanting to do one thing, and the minority (conservatives) preventing progress. If conservatives had it their way, we’d still have feudalism… oh wait.
Those sound like the exact kinds of people who shouldn’t have any influence over our politics
Go ahead and list an example of one of those past conservative intellectuals and we’ll see how long it takes to dig up an example of them saying something like Civil Rights protesters are all secret communist agents or that child labor and vagrancy laws and debtors prisons are good things.
Like, I get the appeal in wanting to believe the other side is just as smart and well meaning as our side is, but there’s just no basis for that in the historical record. They’ve always been like this and we just keep forgetting.
One can be an intellectual and still a huge piece of shit. Theyre not mutually exclusive. People like Milton Friedman or Henry Kissinger a undebatably intellectuals… but that doesn’t mean they’re angels. It just means they wield their intellect as a whip to beat their opponents with, rather than raising society as a whole.
Honestly this whole “conservatives are just a bunch of dumb rabid animals” is they exact sentiment they want us to feel. Because then we never look at the deeper issues that are actually affecting our world.
For example, Karl Marx. Clearly an intellectual as evidenced by his writings. But his colorblind/radical centrist take on minority rights fits right in with modern conservative extremists. And then the way he framed his opinions led to far right authoritarian regimes co-opting the label of communism.
Honestly this whole “conservatives are just a bunch of dumb rabid animals” is they exact sentiment they want us to feel. Because then we never look at the deeper issues that are actually affecting our world.
I for one would love to look at the deeper issues that are actually affecting our world, but I end up wasting a ton of my time replying to dumb rabid animal shit David Brooks gets to smear all over the New York Times op-ed page when my older relatives who vote in every single election send me his columns because they think that he makes some good points about “Cultural Marxism”
I was hoping this politics community would be reasonable and have good discussion.
instead we just get more of r/politics
Social media perpetuating identity politics then acting confused when there’s such a big divide in this country.
Nah lemmy is even further left than Reddit. What would you expect from an anti corporate decentralized group. Lemmy is basically communism of social media.
You are either a far left echo chamber member here or human trash. They see no difference.
At base, it is about how you treat people. That is the issue, no more. GOP and rightwingers intend to harm, limit, exclude people for unilateral reasons. The rest of us want to be left alone, and leave others alone, to varying degrees, and yeah some of us, like me, radically so, to let people decide for themselves how to live.
There are and have been plenty of people we’d describe as “conservative” at some point but who work towards collective and individual freedoms.
Not fucking one of them is a republican today. NAME ONE.
And fuck you weasels trying to twist words into lessening the impact of right wing extremists.
There are not “two sides”. There are extremists, a minority, then the rest of us.
The problem is the minority has the money and the power to expand.
Your comment implies we’re all assholes on here, then you’re surprised people aren’t treating you with respect 🤔
“No true Scotsman” fallacy in action. It’s rare to see it in such a pristine condition.
(For the record, I’m an unabashed, unapologetic leftist. But this article is bullshit from graf 1 to the end.)
