But "cheaters never prosper" while it may not hold 100% of the time, is an idiom for a reason. Those Copybook Headings said what they said for a reason. Those Sesame Street values are the way they are for a reason. Conservatism used to mean knowing that. 🤷♂️
With regard to Sesame Street values, this story is from 1970. I should add that the ban was quickly rescinded.
I feel like the issue is that the General feeling is that the saying is just a lie and the reason it is a saying is that pushing the idea is usefull for the powerfull. Because looking at the highest levels of sucess it almost feels like only cheaters prosper.
Of course, MAGA isn't conservative in any meaningful way: it is radical and reactionary in equal measures, just radically bigoted. It is not 'going back to' or 'preserving' a system we had, but inventing an entirely new one.
If you go back and look at the intellectual horsepower of the Reagan movement today, guys like Buckley and Gilder, pretty fn racist. The southern strategy brought the racist elements of southern society to their real home. It's been a challenge for Democrats ever since.
It is traditional for radicals trying to create a new system to pretend that they were restoring an earlier (since "corrupted") one, stretching back millennia to at least that "...and put together the common thing causa". These "conservatives" are proudly continuing this most ancient tradition. /s
I’ve had a lot of thoughts about the difference between conservatism as a mindset and right-wing reactionary radicalism lately.
re "conservative in any meaningful way", that seems to imply that there's a "respectable" form of conservatism, but i'm starting to feel like all conservatism is just varying degrees of adherence to Wilhoit's Law. sometimes conservatives tolerate democracy, but they always really want Wilhoit's Law.
I think in a country founded, however imperfectly, on liberal values which is, on the balance, substantially more liberal than most countries, it is possible to have a sort of 'liberal conservatism' which is suspicious of change but nevertheless affirms the liberal values of a free society.
That basically describes Eisenhower/Rockefeller Republicanism. The last elected politician to fall under that category was probably Arlen Specter, and he had to switch to the Democratic Party at the end of his career.
This basically sounds like the old strain known as Rockefeller Republicans.
If that's the case why not use cautious-liberals or pragmatic-liberals instead of including those that are hostile to liberal values? I think the problem with liberal conservatives is that its a contradiction in terms, what values are going to win out when push comes to shove, tradition or liberty?
i agree with you in general but i think we're also down the rabbit hole of the Labeling Trap™ where we're concerned more about whether a concept matches a preexisting label than we are about the details of the concept 1/
[spitballing from here on out] it occurs to me just now that people being "resistant to change" (or "cautious" as you put it) is also vague. i'm resistant to some kinds of change because those changes are obviously bad and wrong. i'm perfectly happy with other kinds of change. 2/
the changes "progressives" want are typically changes in power structures so that fewer (or ideally no) people are oppressed. people who resist such changes value hierarchy and domination. if "conservative" means "adherent to Wilhoit's Law" then yeah, you can't have liberal conservatives... 3/
...because liberalism is inherently cooperation-based and conservatism is inherently domination-based, and those are incompatible. for a while we had conservatives wrapped in some amount of liberalism, but as you say, when push came to shove, they chose domination. end/
other than some of them, who chose freedom, again, mostly the never-trumpers in an american context, but also i’d include right-wing market liberal reformers in post-soviet states, or italian monarchists fighting in the partisan movement against the fascists
notably i think liberal conservatism gets its coherence, as Bret says, from having an authoritarian enemy to define itself against, an actual, red-line choice between domination and cooperation, because when the choice is purely theoretical it’s very easy to make exception after exception to freedom
I think the incompatibility between the two is that Conservatism worship of tradition means it cannot stomach the inevitable culture tides and changes that liberalism allows. Eventually conservatives will seek the coercive power to prevent change and that means destroying liberty.
Generally speaking, I break up current ideologies as: 1) Progressives believe in shaping institutions to produce positive change 2) Liberals believe individual liberty is a high (or highest) value 3) Conservatives are skeptical of (1) 4) Reactionaries want to return to an imagined past.
5) Authoritarians want the warm embrace of an all-decided, all-controlling state and to wield it against their enemies. You can obviously have authoritarian-progressives (those are your Maoist/Stalinist communists) and liberal-progressives (social democrats, democrats).
an eminently reasonable taxonomic starting point, but [deep breath, 8000 word rant]
I think conservativism needs to have a positive definition, not merely skeptical of change or progressivism. The less hostile definition I like is that conservativism believes that some people are more capable than others, and society is better off when those people have more power and privilege.
It's a sort of 'Chesteron's Fence' conservatism that wants to be careful about reforms, but is willing to enact reforms that are proved to have a high likelihood of enhancing liberty or improving wellbeing without injury to liberty. That form can exist and does exist, but it is not MAGA.
A hesitance to enact reforms paired with a willingness (at least ostensibly) to enact well justified ones is *centrism*, not conservatism. Conservatism is a desire to prevent / roll back reforms, and this is the natural outcome of pursuing that even after losing the battle to prevent change.
I disagree here. 'Centrism,' I see, as an ideology of consensus and compromise, regardless of the ideological coherence of either. Meanwhile 'roll back' reforms is not conservatives, but reactionaries, a distinction that matters.
I think you're focusing on political behaviors, in which respect yes, the positions you're describing are different. But when interrogating party transitions, I think that's less useful than focusing on how political ideologies behave in different contexts.
What I'm describing as centrism can be incoherently focused on finding a middle ground, especially in the current context. But in a different context with broad political cohesion and functioningly moderate parties, it looks like hesitance and possible acceptance of light reforms.
What I'm describing as conservatism often looks like hesitant resistance to reforms in the same context, because often an most effective way to resist change. But once that change has happened it becomes reactionary, because that's what's required to roll reforms back.
And I think you are taking some conservatives at their word when they protest that this isn't the inevitable reaction of conservative parties which fail to prevent change. They say they were just legitimately hesitant about radical reform, and all this chaos is evidence they were right to do so.
Not sure that works because the reforms are radically faster than a human lifetime now. If you are conservative to the values of the 80s then you will oppose gsy marriage and be sceptical about interracial marriage. The Status quo goal for conservatives does not change as fast as the Status quo.
But not one that conservatives can hold to because they aren't going to suddenly end up okay with a new status quo when progress happens. They want the status quo of their past, and that means reaction.
Exactly. Conservatives will ask you to believe that they are resisting change out of hesitance because it implies a more reasonable response to those changes happening anyway. But that's just not how it has ever worked in practice.
That said, this sort of 'liberal conservatism' really only finds expression in opposition to radical authoritarianism, which is why, I think, it was relatively more prominent during WWII and the Cold War, when there were obvious right- and left-authoritarian models that attacked liberty.
I'd suggest you see a resurgence of this kind of 'liberal-conservatism' among what remains of the NeverTrumpers: both the Bulwark and Dispatch crowd, annoyed by the radicalism of the farther left, but also far more alarmed and angered by the authoritarian radicalism of MAGA.
one problem that I have with the 'Never-Trump'ers is that they have yet to repudiate the reactionary bigotry and conspiracy theories of the neo-Confederates, allowing what used to be the 'John Birch Society' to morph into MAGA
also there’s a sense in which all of the progressives now calling for a return to civic virtue espousing traditionally conservative positions: there is a correct standard of behavior, a proper way of doing things, that people must be held to for the good of the community.
this is a common joke among the liberal currents folks, recognizing the kind of irony of how more and more of us progressives start to sound like old-fashioned small-c civic conservatives because we're reacting to such open evil and moral degradation
After 2016, I observed: when reactionaries are ascendant, the progressives become conservatives, to preserve their gains.
like i legit know more than one progressive that's started going to church (UU or open liberal nondenom sects) this year, and not out of newfound religiosity
FWIW, as a European I feel the US-progressive debate about convervatism sorely lacks examples from beyond their own borders. No broad political movement is without sin, but many Republican sins are particularly American. E.g. for all her faults, Merkel's convervatism couldn't be less like MAGA.
I am not sure Merkle is a conservative in a german context anymore. And looking at the trajectory of german politics since her...nah, this works.
This seems true, though it’s sad they are so few. Short of a universally recognized disaster (which I’m not ruling out given gross incompetence) it’s hard to see how those guys can become the core of moral conservatism. Maybe best case is dems becoming big tent that dominates 55-60% of electorate?
i suppose that "l-c" idea manifests as people who identify as conservative but cannot be frightened into supporting illiberal forms of governance. [conjecture] US conservatives in the post-WW2 era were mostly pro-liberal, but applying neoliberalism to them for 40+ years made them mostly anti-liberal
I think the brainrot of Fox News needing to present a vision of the world that justified voting deep red even when GOP policies were not succeeding played a big role in it.
On some level, I think personalities are just naturally either excited by or worried by change and I don't think the slice of people in either group changes very much. A healthy politics is when the first group is excited by pro-freedom change and the latter group worried by anti-freedom change.
Yes, though the latter group will also naturally be scared by trying to right lacking Implementation of liberal values.
Right liberal conservatives are just Dems, now, Generally. We just don't have political language in this country for such a thing as in the US 'liberal' means something more specific as, until quite recently, all actors in US politics were politely assumed to be liberals in the classical sense.
Which itself was not true, as it's difficult to call a segregationist classically liberal, but whatevs.
It's possible, sure, but does it have any actual traction over the decades-long flood of shit that modern conservatism has become?
I mean, "conservatism," in the sense of wanting to CONSERVE things, can in fact apply to good things. I would like to conserve the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act, among other things.
In my lifetime Canada had a conservative Prime Minister who was the greatest creator of protected public spaces the country has ever known. Now, conservatives spend their days hacking those spaces to pieces for their billionaire sponsors. The whole movement is as corrupt as it is bigoted.
Wow. I hadn't heard of Wilhoit's law before, and I'm glad you brought it up. Not only does it seem to fit the situation, when I looked it up, I stumbled upon an interview with Wilhoit, where he comes across as a very intelligent and interesting person, very worth reading. slate.com/business/202...
glad to help! it's the gift that keeps on giving. other fun eponymous laws you might not have heard of * Brandolini's Law * Betteridge's Law
I'd say its bigotry is very conventional for reaction - reaction has been tied to bigotry just about forever. What makes it radical, like Nazism/fascism generally, is that it is anti-institutional. Institutionalism is typically part of at least small c conservatism but very much is not for fascism
'Cheaters never prosper' is manifestly untrue. Saying so was about policing the behaviour of those who might be tempted to cheat, not changing the behaviour of actual cheaters. It would be more honest, but tougher to say 'cheaters often do prosper, but cheating is unethical and socially harmful'.
A society of cheaters, or ruled by cheaters lacks the internal cohesion necessary to ward off threats, either natural or by foreign powers.
A society can still function while tolerating cheaters, so long as they are confined to certain areas of activity and never exceed a certain proportion of the population. If cheating were to be normalised through a population and in all areas of life, you would be right: but does that ever happen?
Trump's America is now a society where the ruling class are cheaters and this behaviour will percolate down into broader society. We'll see how it goes.
I think you'd enjoy reading this as an antidote to that entire style of religious thinking. Rigorous rather than lazy, empathetic and kind rather than selfish and cruel. www.quaker.org.uk/documents/re...
That's actually making me chuckle a little - in appreciation! Love how the 1st page is mostly 'Here's how we're going to undermine your attempt to subvert our inclusive cultural norms, while staying true to those norms and our faith.'
It's beautiful to read something that is so kind and empathetic, but also rigorous and thought through. There's no laziness in the thinking, scarely an extra word beyond what is needed. It doesn't leave anything to respond to.
Maybe you know - does the salutation 'Friend' imply that the anonymous recipient is a Quaker? Or is that a standard Quaker salutation?
The anonymous recipient is a leading figure of some sort in "Sex Matters to Quakers" and is a Quaker themself. I think that salutation "Friend" does imply that.
I'm not sure it did. Limbaugh and his performative cruelty, the overt lies and shock-jocking, started so long ago that I'm not sure there's a "conservatism" to save.
To mangle an aphorism: "Cheating never prospers, For if it prosper, none dare call it cheating." -- no apologies to John Harrington