General Politics Thread

Indeed. The evolutionary advantages are obvious.

All of those are getting massively discredited nowadays. Skepticism over new ideas is considered a villainous trait and of course, hostility to outgroups is a even biggest one in fiction.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jul 22nd 2019 at 10:29:57 AM

I’d hardly call any of those things discredited. Skepticism is almost universally seen as a positive virtue, and traditionalism and tribalism permeate every part of the political spectrum.

Conservatism being discredited is a far-left fever dream that conflates reactionary evangelism and the far right with the entire concept of conservatism as a whole.

You need some level of skepticism in order to weed out "good" progressive ideas from the "bad" and the pseudoscientific, so that you avoid ending up like the Green Party fanatics and other such leftist lunatics. Respect for tradition isn't inherently bad, as in many cases policies have a long lifetime of usefulness and shouldn't be tampered with willynilly.

Edited by AlleyOop on Jul 22nd 2019 at 12:51:06 PM

Not to mention all the evidence that conservative values are based on deep seated personality traits arising from differences in the neurological functioning of the brain in a certain portion of our population. Conservatives are not wholly made, they are born.

I've always wondered about the role of genetics. I do wonder if discovering that genetics influence political views might lead to a new eugenics era.

I mean, a government desiring that their ideological rivals simply don't exist might have a actual change to prevent them for existing.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jul 23rd 2019 at 9:19:51 AM

The problem is that those traits are indeed beneficial in a perfectly spherical vacuum. But we do not live in one, hostility to outgroups is hardly linked to good things when you consider the US' long history with racism.

Same with support for tradition, there's a reason that the people who most enthusiastically defend traditional hierarchies are all horribly bigoted. Because our traditional social structure was extremely sexist, racist, LGBT-phobic, and a number of other profoundly unjust prejudices.

Same with a skepticism of change, sure it leads one to oppose bad change but that's hardly much of a comfort when deeply necessary reform is being slowed by conservatives who are skeptical of it and very little else.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Jul 23rd 2019 at 8:02:15 AM

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Edited by KazuyaProta on Jul 23rd 2019 at 10:29:18 AM

I’m not sure any of that is particularly relevant to the idea that conservatism will be discredited as a philosophy, though. After all, we’re talking about the philosophy as a whole more than its particulars.

All of those characteristics can be linked to positives as well as negatives.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jul 23rd 2019 at 9:02:49 AM

It's not supposed to.

I was responding to the claim that those are all good traits to have. Theoretically maybe, but de facto they're associated with toxic cultural undercurrents.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Jul 23rd 2019 at 9:41:09 AM

We cant discredit "conservatism" for the same reason that you cant discredit introversion. At best we can try to mitigate the damage that extreme forms can do. Fortunately there is a reasonably good track record for that.

Does that make them inherently bad, though?

Everything in moderation. There's nothing inherently bad about many of the values espoused by conservatism. You need a certain amount of them to avoid going the other extreme. But that doesn't make them good either, and you don't want too much of them or else you stifle progressiveness. The bigots in charge clearly have an excess of it, as the threshold of acceptable levels isn't particularly high, but at the same time, you absolutely need some of it so as to not become a homeopathy-loving RAF tankie just because a charming person who believed in those things told you to just maybe consider their viewpoint for a second.

In a vacuum? No, but we don't live in one.

And we aren’t debating whether self-proclaimed conservatives in the modern US are good or bad.

Defending the virtues of conservatism while ignoring actual conservatives seems... odd to say the least.

I mean, what's the worth in saying that "conservatism is not intrinsically evil but all manifestations in the US that actually exists are likely to be bad"?

Well, for starters I’d argue that most people who label themselves conservatives in the US aren’t really conservatives at all but instead reactionaries, which is a different thing.

But basically, yes. The US having a toxic conservative movement doesn’t discredit the concept of conservatism as a whole any more than a country having a toxic leftist movement discredits the concept of leftism as a whole. If you remember, this whole conversation was started by a troper speculating on the end of conservatism as an ideology.

I suppose that's fair.

Conservatism to me just means resistant to change in the status quo.

Which means it depends on the status quo.

Basically. There's a reason the the more heavily anti-capitalist politicians of the Communist Bloc in the 80s were known as the conservatives, while capitalist types like Deng Xiaoping were viewed as the reformists. Hence why I said conservatism might more accurately describe moderates, not as a matter of which wing of the spectrum they occupy so much as the degree of change they desire. Radicalism is generally associated with the left but I would consider rightward reactionaries to be a subgroup within them since they too want to enact change at the level of the very roots of society..

Edited by AlleyOop on Jul 23rd 2019 at 1:33:18 PM

Regarding Conservatives...

The world has experienced.massive social changes in merely two decades. I have Values Dissonance to stuff from the 2010.

That's a lot.

Honestly, a lot of the radicalization among Conservatives is their realization in that they have lost.

We joke that Reactionaries want to go back to the 1950.

...that's kind of the point. Social Changes now are the most sudden ever. That Gen Z and Millienians work together against Boomers just hide the fact that there's notorious differences in the worldviews of someone born in the 1990 and the 2000 (and when those born in 2010 become legal adults...Oh that will be hilarious).

The Conservative of yesterday become the Reactionary of tomorrow. And tomorrow came faster than people thought.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Aug 3rd 2019 at 5:48:04 AM

Well...not really. Social changes now aren’t any more significant than they were 50 or 100 years ago, comparatively. And today’s reactionaries have always been virulent reactionaries, not radicalized conservatives.

That all just seems like more “conservatives are pure evil” nonsense.

The only reason it seems fast is because social media has accelerated the feeling . A lot of conservatives I know (my mother who is a 90s liberal and my father who is a center-right DINO, who for example are a little slow when it comes to many racial and LGBT issues) are willing to begrudgingly move with the times, albeit not as fast as an already more progressive leaning person would. At worst they might think things were better with respect to a previous time point they lived at, but rarely will they ever take dramatic action to recreate it.

Meanwhile reactionaries can't. their mindset is inherently about enacting social change to go back to a mythical time period, or a romanticized version of a past they inhabited far too long ago. Reactionaries abhor the status quo that conservatives cherish.

Edited by AlleyOop on Aug 3rd 2019 at 7:59:34 AM

There has been a lot of change in the degree to which members of minority communities are willing to stand up for themselves today.

I don't think Reactionaries are that unflexible. I'm sure a lot of them didn't start like that and others will likely change with times.