@maiamindel.bsky.social was talking about how the belief-having right thought that all the authoritarian right wing populists were doing a bit to win votes, but the thing is that the authoritarians thought the principled ones were also doing a bit to win votes.

Having seen an age before it all totally went to shit, having seen the turn from bad policy bad people to lying evil own the libs bad policy bad people. He also was a neocon. He wanted a strong America, American interventionalism, & *switched* to the Cons for that, if he is definitionally neo-con.

and ethics and morals

Yup. The substrate is decency. Sad that it is so remarkable.

Endorsed as someone who took the same journey he did. The republicans who believed in anything but power aren’t republicans anymore, and any argument they make from principle should be ignored.

YUP

yeah that's really all it is they don't even have to be particularly good beliefs!

yeah he actually has beliefs. The democracy stuff wasn't a sham.

Neocons in spite of their many crimes are pretty utopian and liberal in their ideology. Seems natural tbh.

Their utopianism is part of what got them in trouble - that they could make a utopia in a situation where they really, really couldn't.

Utopianism with a Shakespearean level of hubris, sure

Ah. Well. Nevertheless,

(specifically the historical materialist inevitability of world revolution)

"I should be in charge" is a belief, I guess.

I don't think that's the animating sentiment, here.

Not for Bill Kristol, but "I think we should be in charge" is the ideology of the modern Republican Party.

beliefs and betrayal is all one need so says exit, voice, loyalty, and neglect

hegel teaches the dialetic hesiod teaches ELVN and the gods figure out the rest

The core belief of Trumpers today appears to be "He will show that we prefer the worst White man to the best anyone else." This structure of belief is fundamentally unchangeable. He can betray them over & over again - and they will still cling to it.

To paraphrase Donald Trump- he can literally line his supporters up on Madison Square and shoot them in the head one by one - and they will die without abandoning the core belief. Even there, he will not lose a single supporter.

Sorry to say, but a lot of them have "beliefs"!

Values

Beneath Kristol's policy preferences is a deadly serious belief in democracy & "liberalism" (life, liberty, pursuit, Bill of Rights, etc) Disagree politely on taxes eg, but fight to the death for the right to disagree.

When you swap the two (disagree politely over foundational American values while fighting to the death for policy preferences) you get maga. No rules or values. Just armed goons barking orders.

I think this is just what neocons do. Overthrowing regimes that oppose US interests. bsky.app/profile/did:...

Pretty much, yeah. He’s in the relatively small camp of ideological conservatives who Meant It. It wasn’t just power fantasies or making rationalizations for bigotry and provincialism. A lot of the neocon types were like that which is why they became Never Trump!

We are now also basically extinct.

I think most ideologues just discover a gas pedal that makes money when they step on it so examining the pedal never makes a ton of sense to them

Postmodern conservatism! When following the cultural logic of capitalism, it is best to be unencumbered by "sincere beliefs" or "a soul."

95% of american disorder comes down to the total evaporation of any sincerely held belief in the GOP (see Rubio)

One of my strongest held beliefs is that this is primarily due to voter realignment.

How so?

Democrats exchanged low trust, low education, voters to the GOP over the course of 2010-2020 in exchange for high trust, high education suburban voters.

Sure, but I think that needs better connected to why the new Right has no belief in anything but selfish power. Beliefs enable larger orgs/wider trust? The right is socially isolated and therefore for prone to schizo (this seems to imply L:autist/R: schizoid spectrum, which is at odds with Gender)

Low trust - low education heavily weights you towards believing in a zero sum world, meaning both that helping someone else hurts you and hurting someone else helps you. Thus the shift towards the emphasis on selfish power above all else.

Was that more prominent on the left in the past? The only example I can think of is some versions of left-unionism, where the main goal is redistributing money from bosses/owners to workers.

Much, much, *much* more prominent. It's why 2016 Bernie had to walk back a lot of his positions and statements from the 2000s and why he continues to remain much squishier on immigration from a philosophical viewpoint than most of the party.

Socialism itself was popular from the start because it promised barely literate people thrown together in factories that they'll rule the world and destroy the degenerate bourgeois democratic elites This idea of cuddly "after the revolution i'll read tarrot cards" is post-70 New Left

It was pure zero sum as well. Utopia could not be delivered until the parasitic Bourgeois was not exterminated People should think a lot more on why the professional urban classes were ready to accept anything to protect them from them, even if 1 century earlier they were the rev vanguard

Immigration is a good point. The Left makes for a bigger circle of who counts as in-group, which complicates this comparison.

None of them would be involved if there weren't so much money in it

I think many of them have sincerely held beliefs. We just wouldn't support those beliefs if they were bluntly stated. I mean, one could sincerely hold the belief that Wilhoit's Law is how things should operate. It's a shitty belief, but still a belief.

I think it's just that, in times past, there was more overlap between what many/most in the GOP wanted, & what people in general wanted. The points of contention in the past were often more how to achieve the goals, rather than the goals, themselves.

Sort of summarized by Frum saying if conservatives could no longer win democratically, they would not abandon conservatism, they'd abandon democracy. Conservatives liked democracy when it basically guaranteed conservative outcomes. Their support was contingent, not principled.

Similarly, they've repeatedly changed judicial philosophies, bc they really just care about the outcome. I think RFK Jr has sincerely held beliefs. I think he sincerely believes in eugenics.

I misread that as Rufo at first, but Rubio also works.

Sure, if you don't consider legislatively disenfranchising PoC from US politics a "sincerely held belief" But that's also why I'm not surprised that we are where we are.

Rubio doesnt get enough shit for being responsible for the whole shitshow were in right now. All he had to do was keep it together for ONE DEBATE, and the GOP couldve rallied around him to stop Trump, but instead he had to shit the bed in the most embarrasing way possible

Bidens literal face exploded in one of the 2020 debates, and its still less embarrasing to watch than Christie breaking Rubio on live television

Mild disagreement here… they do have sincerely held beliefs, they just aren’t the ones they advertise. Rather, they are incredibly sincere in their belief that they are entitled to power and that everything is negotiable in the pursuit of that entitlement

Yes—and I think actually we all want power. I think some of us feel safest and happiest when power is distributed and collective, though. I hate feeling powerless these days. I also think folks from privilege of various kindsdon’t have a sense of how to pursue collective action/struggle

And that’s not to blame anyone necessarily. Americans have an utter individualist fetish in what has long passed for normie discourse. It’s going to take a lot of adjusting to recalibrate that sensibility in a way that we can trust on a guy level, as routine.

*gut level

I’ve felt snippets of collective euphoria when I’ve been involved in election organizing. My strongest sense of that came in Obama 2008 and the passage of the ACA.

Anyway, I’m probably not saying anything revolutionary. But I wish collective power were easier to represent, to render more tangible, to activate. Seems like one of those hard things that’s just hard and slow and maybe our current social structures actually make it harder.

Social media is such a double-edged sword on that front. Connects us; isolates us. Amplifies voices; silences voices. Anyway. I just hope our sense of collective strength coalesces and mobilizes before things go too far.

Trump is a constellated archetype.

christ even hanania has recognized this

Trump's superpower is submitting the GOP to so much humiliation that it breaks them of the capacity to feel shame.

I think Trump just showed how shallow and racist the whole edifice was under the patina of false values. A few of them turned out to believe in something, but not many.

Many things can be true

Also the Epstein files give him total control over the GOP Pedocon core so there is that at play.

Absolutely the correct take. Principles matter, as it happens.

Can't remember the name of the book but pre-Trump, there was something written about the GOP wilderness after the 2012 election (before 2014 obviously). Rubio was gonna lead the charge on immigration reform but he got pushback led by Glenn Beck of all people and was cowed back to xenophobia.

That business with “unleash Chang (sic)” in 2016 tells a tale

Honestly, a good number of Dems are in the same boat just on the other team.

The fact that every GOPer with beliefs (Flake, Romney, Corker) bowed out instead of staying and fighting is also relevant

Unfortunately limited replicability

I was talking to someone about all these people and this is basically what I said: there used to be a core of people within the post-liberal / theocon world who actually believed things. But at this point "Flight 93" thinking has so infected the movement that most who did no longer believe anything,

and the movement at large has been folded into a contrarian neo-fascist aesthetic which doesn't *need* anyone to believe things.

In fact, believing in things can be actively a problem if you're trying to fit in with the neo-fascists!

it's admirable and welcome

Yeah, for better or for worse Kristol thought that we should be spreading Democracy to the world because he truly believes in it and is now aghast that his fellow travelers in the neocon movement were just trying to get power

I was a half hour late, but...

No he believed in something more thanbhimself

Unfortunately, it was probably education. Almost impossible to apply to most MAGA.

standing on business

he really meant it about the whole democracy thing, is the key to his transformation it’s why almost all the never-trumpers came out of the neocons

They’re trying to take our party over from within. It used to be theirs, you see. They’re just a vanguard.

This is absolutely correct, and not to shit on Kristin, but financial dependence plays it into also

Neocons reverting back to being 1960s liberals when conservatism went mad is fairly straightforward. The bigger trouble now is reactionary centrists.

Age of bsky.app/profile/nata...

The rise of a nihilistic type of politics really annoys me.

Having principles is good and we should shame people out of society for shrugging their shoulders and being like fuck it I don't know.

What's the phrase? Stand for something or fall for anything?

i was just thinking that even though you gotta squint you can see how he got from place a to b, easier to see that than with newsom

Yeah babe, that's not gonna work on the rest of them. 😒 What's the second option?

This is exactly correct. Imagine my shock when it turned out that all that neocon palaver about "spreading democracy" and how important it was turned out to not be palaver. Bill Kristol really does believe in democracy and the rule of law.