I think I could make a strong case in 1000 or so words as to why the Republican party is no longer a conservative party in any meaningful way. But since, George Will has already made the case in a couple of dozen columns the last few years I’m not going to waste everyone’s time. Conservative has no meaning other than Republicans are conservative, Democrats are liberal. The Republican party is the Trump party, ergo Trump is conservative.
Gee Matt, I really appreciate being compared to Al Qaeda, and for the record, I was happy to vote for Joe Biden.
I think the answer to this is to continue to point out the words they are using to hide. “Heritage” used to mean something real too and could be a good thing if it wasn’t tainted. Nationalism too. Some words might be worth fighting over (like who gets to be a patriot), and some the fight isn’t over yet (like socialist), but this one is over. It’s better to say, “people who call themselves conservatives are the ones trying to overthrow the government. If you don’t want to be part of that, call yourself something else.” Communist used to mean something noble too. Assholes co-opted it and it became theirs. Hell, Pepe the frog used to be something silly and fun. At some point, descriptive language wins.
Sorry about the implication. It wasn’t my intent. Rather the opposite actually. AQ are a tiny contingent of radicals. Most Muslims are “moderate.” Most of the GOP are a radicals. Only a tiny contingent are moderate conservatives.
Right. There’s never been a more gross, lazy, incompetent President, but “conservatives” don’t care. They turned out in even greater numbers for him in 2020. Run an economy on deficit and they don’t care as long as they don’t hear about it and have liberals to blame. Hundreds of thousands dead, and it doesn’t even make them blink.
I don’t know how to parse that result, frankly. How to disentangle conservative media, conservative voters, and conservative politicians from the meatball shaped wrecking ball that is Trump. But separating out “extremist right wingers” from “normal” conservatives seems a bit of a hopeless sifting now, since the behavior of normal conservative voters is indistinguishable from “extremist” voters.
They also self-identify as patriots. Do you call them patriots?
Cool. Not my concern and not what I’m talking about.
Uh, I think you just made my point. And the funny thing is I don’t even agree with your assessment. The party has been abandoned to radicals for the last four years. Seems to me the number of people with political integrity who self-identify as Republican is pretty close to zero.
Hey, look, you’re putting it in quotes! Now you just have to get used to how easy it is to swap in terms like “Republicans”, “Trump supporters”, or “radical right wing”.
I think I blocked a member of these esteemed forums for his shit-headed, stubborn, painfully ill-informed prescriptivist opinions for the better part of 2 years at one point.
TBH I don’t think I gained much when he got unblocked one way or another, though at least I haven’t seen him banging on about how the Youths are ruining English in the interim :)
But for the conservative-v-radical debate, it helps if you, like me, regard anyone who’s ever advocated for a tax reduction or regulation repeal, or against immediately banning all religion, guns, and straight marriage as wholly and irredeemably evil!
Well, I’m not arguing that conservatism is now conservation of privilege but used to be something else. I’m saying that it has always been conservation of privilege.
They were also conservatives using that definition.
I’m happy to draw a distinction between, say, Trump and Reagan, and even between Trump and McConnell. Trump is a crook, a mobster, an amoral monster without a shred of ideology in his head. McConnell, on the other hand, is a conservative, a man intent on preserving privilege and willing to use almost anything — even Trump — to accomplish that. The idea that McConnell isn’t a conservative; that he is somehow substantially ideologically different than Romney or Hatch or Bush the Younger or Gingrich or Dole or Bush the Elder or Reagan or Thurmond or Goldwater or anyone else you can name along the way is, well, absurd.
It’s true that conservatism in decline, in extremis, embraces fascism. Why we want to make an effort to pretend that isn’t the inevitable path conservatism ends up taking, though, is beyond me.
Coming at it from a very different angle, I think you could make a strong case in 1000 or so words that the Republican party was never a conservative party in any meaningful way but sold a certain segment of people on the belief that they were somehow in control.
Trying to believe in non-trump conservatism is even more of a lost cause than trying to bring back the antebellum south. At least the antebellum south actually existed at one time.
I could understand this comment if you’d been asleep for the past four years when the party abandoned all ideology to support Trump, his revanchist populism, his sloppy trade wars, his above-the-rule-of-law grift, and his predilection to get cuddly with dictators and antagonistic to allies. But other than that stuff, yeah, good point? You clearly have an axe to grind, and that’s fine. I can even be sympathetic to the idea that the last four years have been inevitable. But pretending the last four years haven’t been exceptional just makes you seem out of touch.
If I see anyone doing that, I’ll let you know! Meanwhile, why you refuse to call out radicals and extremism is beyond me. @scottagibson gonna @scottagibson, I suppose.
I think you’re continuing to miss the point. The essence of conservative ideology is preservation of in-group privilege, and conservatives will ultimately abandon everything else they have espoused to adhere to that core ideology. Thus free trade is an espoused conservative principle until it isn’t; the rule of law is an espoused conservative principle until it isn’t; democracy is an espoused conservative principle until it isn’t. That conservatives like McConnell abandoned these things in order to get tax cuts for the wealthy and judges who will protect white privilege doesn’t mean that he isn’t a conservative, it means that conservatives were never serious about those other things.
I think conservatism is a radical, extreme philosophy, a philosophy of wealthy white male privilege at almost any cost. I am calling it out.
Normalizing is not “calling out”. Just because you think they’ve been radical for 60 years, and that there’s nothing exceptional about the last four years, that doesn’t make “conservative” the special insult you think it is.
The exceptional thing about the last 4 years is that they — conservatives — had to support an open criminal to get what they wanted. So they did. They’ll do it again.
“The vast majority of the people currently labeled as conservatives are radicals and extremists” and “conservative means something different than radical and extremist” are contradictory statements. If most of the members of a group are extremists, it is an extremist group. You are giving it legitimacy by claiming there is something noble about being conservative, because you then have to point out how each person who claims that mantle is actually extreme and/or not conservative. The way to delegitimize it is to make it a dirty word, by showing pictures of the Insurrection every time you say “conservative voters” or “conservative leaders” or “conservative values.”
So if Democrats resorted to criminal activity to get what they wanted, would they then be “conservatives”? Or would you call them “criminals”? Would you distinguish them from other Democrats in any way?
Republicans who resort to radical measures deserve radical in front of their name. And if you’re going to be honest about what they doing, and how they’re doing it, and even why they’re doing it, you can actually just substitute radical, especially if they’ve abandoned the principles that used to define them. Your refusal to even use the term “radical” is odd, but hardly surprising since you think there’s no difference between Barry Goldwater, Josh Hawley, and Bill Kristol.
Well, for starters, the term exists outside the realm of contemporary American politics. There’s a problem with the right-wing pulling right around the world, but conservative is part of a political spectrum. That that end of the spectrum is pulling from conservative into extremist isn’t something I dispute, but that doesn’t mean the spectrum has ceased to exist.
Wait, who are you even talking to?
Remember when the Republicans did that with liberal? It kind of worked, didn’t it?
But again, in each case, there is a more precise word: extremist voters, Republican leaders, and radical values. Much more precise ways, if you ask me, to say the same thing.
If they resorted to criminal activity in pursuit of their core conservative philosophy of preserving the privileges of the in-group by cutting taxes on the wealthy and installing judges who would prevent the out-groups from benefiting from the protection of the law, then yes, they would be conservatives. If on the other hand they did it in order to get massively progressive tax rates and a tax on wealth and universal health care and expansive voting rights — i.e. breaking down the privileges of the in-group and extending those privileges to out-groups — then they would be liberals supporting a criminal, not conservatives supporting a criminal.
