Commentary: Longtime former Republican on Patrick Deneen and the demise of the conservative intellectual
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 🤔
This was a thoughtful and dense article but I’m glad I finished it. I learned the name of a pedophile priest in the process (Marcial Maciel) but otherwise only reinforced what I already know from other sources. Oh, and it led me to a WP article from 2021 about how the GOP inflates book sales, which I posted on Lemmy.
Just because media and conservative leaders think Kissinger and Friedman are intellectual’s doesn’t mean history will. Define intellectual. IMHO it’s someone that the majority of people think of as thought leader, who has good ideas for society. Cambodia and Neoliberalism will not age well. Just because someone does a big thing doesn’t make them an intellectual. By that metric, Trump is an intellectual.
This article - and its headline - aren’t perfect. But the anti-intellectualism that’s deeply rooted into American leadership of what’s now seen mostly in the conservative platform is well documented and known. Check out Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter for a lot of support for what this short article tries to convey. And since that book’s 1964 writings, it’s only become stronger.
The conclusion paragraph is what I think most people are best taking away from this piece (not the overly-broad headline, which honestly is just clickbait compared to the substance of the article): “Ideas those may be, but the product of genuine intellectuals — those who employ critical reasoning and approach facts honestly — they are not. Ever since the Enlightenment, there has been a perpetual battle, a war of words, between those who would make the world a little freer, a little healthier, a little fairer and a little saner, and those who are viscerally repelled by such markers of secular progress. We see the practical consequences of this conflict everywhere, from the ruined cities of Ukraine to our own barbarously retrograde state legislatures. It is necessary for each of us to know which side we are on in the intellectual struggle of this chaotic century.”
There is a battle for truth, facts, and logic happening right now. And while there may be some conservatives who abide by those values, the party and its leadership have verifiably demonstrated otherwise. From trickle down economics to opposing universal healthcare (and nearly every major issue between), the facts simply do not support the party stance. Anti-intellectualism in real life, played out with real consequences, supported by masses willing to vote against their own interests.
