I guess I’m asking what that reason is. The Republican Party of today is no IMO markedly different than that of 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, or 20 years ago. And so on. If they are not conservative now, they were never conservative. And that seems like a strange idea.
Sorry, I missed this. My problem with this time timing is the Reagan legacy of racism and debt, and his generally autocratic approach to the office. It’s a clear precursor to what came later.
You basically stated that the defining creed of liberalism is “your rights stop where your words offend me,” and now you’re getting pissy that some actual liberals disagree with that characterization.
ShivaX
5974
No I’m “pissy” because I will have to spend hours finding things, organizing them, posting them, and then you’ll claim I “cherry picked” them or some other hand wave crap and I’ll have wasted my time. So instead, I choose not to play.
Yes, you can’t say that because of some dumbasses in Massachusetts, liberalism is fundamentally about making it illegal to say offensive things. You can’t even say that based on the actions of a bunch of mollycoddled undergrads. It’s going to take a lot more than that; I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you.
Matt_W
5976
Right, I think the point we’re trying to make is that the current state of the GOP is what conservativism looks like when it’s metastasized. That the GOP’s descent into idiocy and authoritarianism and racism is the natural result of trying to pursue conservative policies. Not that those policies are themselves idiotic and racist, but that they are largely only preferred by and benefit elites and thus, in a democracy, require a constituency of useful idiots to actualize them. The attempt to rescue conservative ideology from the throes of the GOP divorces it from the tactics that the proponents of that ideology have used. But the problem is that conservative policies don’t work, at least not for most people. Once exposed to the air, they rot.
KWhit
5977
And conservatives throughout the twentieth century were MUCH more opposed to free speech than liberals. Now they use the concept when it’s convenient to them to get dark money into campaigns and to force colleges to allow white supremacists to speak on campus.
Man. If there’s one rake-stepping, thumb-hammering, own-goal-scoring less-than-useless cohort in the discourse, it’s mollycoddled undergrads. Eugh.
Nesrie
5979
Whoa, whoa whoa. Wait a minute here. A lot of those Republican/Conservative polices totally were and are racist. This is not new. It’s been like this for decades. The decent happened a long time ago. Certain Republicans who like to call themselves conservatives just can’t ignore it anymore.
What’s the current conservative position on affirmative action?
I’ll go ahead and use your example to disagree. That law is not making it illegal to offend someone. It is making it illegal to use a specific, highly charged word to attack another person. And the Connecticut case is the same thing - using words to create a situation where someone significantly hurt (publicly ridiculed or held in contempt), not just offended. It isn’t illegal to just curse in someone’s presence.
Conservatives are totally fine with laws like this if they involve “fighting words” that make it legal to kill someone yourself or restricting the ability of someone to “slander” or “libel” powerful people. Or with policies / verdicts when they involve the cops beating the shit out of someone who doesn’t treat them respectfully enough.
So your characterization is bad and your example is bad, not because it is cherry-picked but because you are wrong about liberalism.
magnet
5981
They are against it. So they changed and then changed back. Or at least, the National Review changed and then changed back.
Look, I’m not defending conservatives here. I just think it’s silly to use a 1957 article as though conservatism is written in stone. If someone brought up an Adlai Stevenson quote to discredit progressives, it would be laughable. Liberal and conservative positions are constantly evolving, so supporting references should be more recent.
Nesrie
5982
And of course by evolving, it means going right back to the 50s and 60s… you know, the whole again part, wet dream thing the Republicans keep referring to as their heydays… when women and minorities had basically no rights.
It’s a sham to think the GOP somehow evolved to Trump. They’ve been working their way here/back, for a long, long time now, and all the conservatives were happily following along until it was so damn in their face even they couldn’t explain it away anymore.
magnet
5983
Yeah, well, a lot of creatures get uglier as they evolve!
Menzo
5984
50s socially, 2019 economically (i.e. tax rates) is the dream.
ShivaX
5985
Sure, let the government get to decide what words you can say. I mean the people running things seem totally cool and level-headed.
Fighting words died a horrible death. It’s basically never been upheld.
Yeah how do those end? They pretty much always end in dismissal.
Also the concept of doing that isn’t a conservative one, quite the opposite. Oh people who call themselves conservatives love doing it, but I can call myself a cat. I’m still not a cat.
Again, conservatism is opposed to the police as they are agents of the State.
You stockpile guns so you can shoot the cops. The whole “cops can do no wrong” thing is a fairly recent change and not conservative. It’s authoritarian if anything.
My off-hand joke wasn’t a completely accurate description of an entire ideology? No shit.
Apparently almost no one here even knows what conservatism is, so it’s pointless to even talk about it.
Everyone equates “Conservative” with “Republican that licks Trump’s balls” then claims victory by pointing out that current Republicans aren’t really conservatives ipsofacto conservatives don’t exist. Also they’re all racist.
Matt_W
5986
I’m pretty sure that’s a minority position, even among NeverTrumper conservatives. Hell even most 2A libertarians don’t really think this way.
This is certainly true. I actually get that sense that what you call conservative, I would call libertarian. But I really don’t have a sense of what you mean. If Ken White is a conservative, then so am I.
Nesrie
5987
You mean ideas like: smaller governments, balance budgets, property rights, deregulation, state rights, free market… I think you’re selling us short. Just because so many are hypocritical about these ideals does not mean we don’t know what it means? This group simply does not exist in any meaningful way.
This obviously isn’t a full-spectrum litmus test, but when I’m evaluating who is actually conservative in principle, one place I start is whether they support one of the most obviously conservative of projects, namely environmental conservation.
Nesrie
5989
Well even if you can find a conservative that hits enough bullet points to fit in the conservative shoe, you usually wind up in some other weirdo ends of things like… family values. And at first that sounds good right. Let’s support families! Oh but not that kind of family. They meant only the right kind of family which means not interracial marriages, not gay families, not divorcees, unless the guy is rich and supports other values they like then it is totally okay… and then you start questioning what someone reallymeans when they say family values.
You can do the same thing with state rights. Yes, states should have some rights sounds good, keep the federal government out of areas a tighter, closer region control would do better. Oh except, not when it comes to pollution, totally not that, not okay. Oh and don’t any sort of religious restrictions, unless it’s abortion, then that’s totally okay no freedom there. So when you sort of boil these claims down, like only balancing budgets when Democrats are in charge but go to town when it’s the GOP… what, you start to question what exactly these values really mean and why do they shift so much based on who’s in charge of the federal government?
But that’s not why I brought it up. I brought it up in response to a false claim about what conservatism stood for at the time of the Civil Rights Act.
Perhaps I’ll regret it, but I would like to see a quote from Adlai Stevenson which casts as a bad a light on liberalism as Buckley’s quote does on conservatism,
Well, it’s hard. There are a whole bunch of politicians in the Republican Party who tick most of the boxes, and there is a Republican Party platform that ticks most of the boxes, but apparently that isn’t enough, because I’m told the Republican Party isn’t a conservative party.
