Is there anything good about being "conservative?"

Except that wahoo was using that same ridiculous extremism to support conservatism. His argument was that the French Revolution and other Communist Revolutions (because apparently it was the OG Communist Revolution) lead to mass executions and therefore conservatism is the better philosophy. So saying that Fascists and other reactionary regimes lead to mass executions, imprisonment, etc. also seems like a totally fair point. It isn’t only liberal philosophy whose extreme versions tend to get carried away.

This article contains some information which tends to bolster my hypothesis that modern conservative thought regarding smaller government is at least somewhat rooted in a response to the civil rights movement

Cross posted in the moral bankruptcy thread. Conservatives have been broken for a long time.

How the Right-Wing Convinces Itself That Liberals Are Evil

This did not begin with Donald Trump. The modern Republican Party may be particularly apt to push conspiracy theories to rationalize its complicity with a staggeringly corrupt administration, but this is an extension of, not a break from, a much longer history. Since its very beginning, in the 1950s, members of the modern conservative movement have justified bad behavior by convincing themselves that the other side is worse. One of the binding agents holding the conservative coalition together over the course of the past half century has been an opposition to liberalism, socialism, and global communism built on the suspicion, sometimes made explicit, that there’s no real difference among them.

And this observation on Republican support for McCarthy sounds eerily similar to current GOP support of trump:

Although popularly remembered today as a drunken punch line discredited by crusading journalists like Edward R. Murrow in the 1950s, McCarthy is actually an important figure in the development of American conservatism. Almost every major conservative journalist and politician in the 1950s defended him. Senator Barry Goldwater voted against McCarthy’s censure in 1954. Conservative radio pundit Fulton Lewis defended McCarthyism in his broadcasts even after the senator’s death. William F. Buckley was no exception: he went to the bat for McCarthy in the 1954 book McCarthy and His Enemies. Buckley applauded McCarthy for recognizing that “coercive measures” were necessary to enforce a new anticommunist “conformity.” While Buckley—unlike many of his peers—did distinguish between “the Liberals” and “the Communists,” he suggested that “atheistic, soft-headed, anti-anti-Communist liberals” were ultimately little better than communists, and by far a greater danger to American democracy than any supposed excesses of McCarthyism.No real place to put this, but this excellent piece traces the history of the right wing demonizing liberals. (Many of the liberals-are-communists tropes shared by even rational conservatives has roots in this history, particularly in their jaundiced view of higher education and the media.)

I got deja vu halfway through that post.

Yeah sorry cross posted in two threads. Indecision is annoying.

The post also repeats itself halfway through.

Doh. Thanks for letting me know. Fixed.

Hooray! So we can look forward to the “Trump wasn’t that bad” and “Say what you will about the excesses of Trump, President Gillibrand is the one actively destroying America.”

“don’t demonize the right” they say. Fuck that.

Still wondering who the true scotsman are, and where they’ve been hiding.

There are plenty. Unless you mean elected ones in Congress because they’re universally cowards.

Then again about half the House caucus is white supremacist or sympathetic to the cause, so I wouldn’t expect Steve King to take a stand anytime soon.

Are they in hiding?

Not remotely.

Rick Wilson, Tom Nichols, General Hayden, Joe Scarbourgh, Garry Kasparov, Arnold, Evan McMullin, George Will, Joe Walsh, Charlie Sykes.
Those are just off the top of my head for people “in politics”.

Good grief, what a list. Joe Scarborough? George Will? Joe fucking Walsh?

I was mostly going off anti-Trump conservatives. I’m not sure I’d qualify Walsh as conservative per se, but the rest if them are.

Many of them are in the Democratic party

Paul isn’t a conservative, he’s a glibertarian. Scarborough is a rodeo clown who spent all of 2016 handing his microphone to Trump. George Will basically lies in print for a living - try reading his stuff on climate change. Joe Walsh is a child support deadbeat. Sykes spent years selling false news and now feels bad about it. Hayden is an unindicted criminal.

Wilson and McMullin are bog standard Republicans, on board with fully 90% or more of the Trump agenda. Kasparov isn’t a conservative by any normal definition. Neither is Arnold. And Tom Nichols? He really is hiding.

Being an anti-Trump Republican, is that the definition of ‘conservative’ these days?

I think that this is the best the conversations have to offer.

A conversative seems to be someone who benefits and defends the status quo.

Sometimes the status quo isn’t bad bad for the majority of people. I would be pretty happy to defend the status quo if I lived in one of the Scandinavian nations, with the strong safety net.

That being sad, the status quo in the US is a disaster, especially currently, with the majority of wealth transferring from the poor and middle class to the wealthy, the poor state of healthcare, racisms, education expanses cost loving housing, lack of public transportation, poor condition of infrastructure and basically fairness.
Also, we spend way too much on the military industrial complex.