What Non-Liberals Dislike About Liberalism (restored)

lol at this thread now

I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen a thread get ejected OUT of P&R.

******CONTAINMENT BREACH******

To answer the original post (because I’m someone who will not support either the mainstream right or mainstream left in American politics), I mostly detest both sides because of their support for these principles:

  • unfettered globalist economics
  • radical individualism
  • the expansion and enrichment of institutions that are too large to be accountable or responsive to everyday people (the federal government, international organizations, global corporations)

I expanded on this a little more here:

Jonathan Haidt, in The Righteous Mind:

When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” foundations – Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity – I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbo-jumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia.

In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He’s more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.

I think the issue with the assertion that conservatives are heavily influenced by right-wing news media is that, really, there isn’t all that much consumption of right-wing news media relative to the consumption of progressive-slanted pop-cultural media. I can’t get through a season of Arrow or an episode of Supergirl nowadays without hearing about the progressive bugaboo du jour. Both of those are tiny in influence relative to big TV shows, and yet both are way bigger than any conservative-leaning pop culture institution.

And I guess that’s what I dislike about modern progressivism: it invades shared cultural spaces, turns them into progressive cultural spaces, and shouts down anyone who says maybe we shouldn’t be tearing down the places where we can be apolitical humans with one another.

(To be fair, conservatives share some blame for that re: churches, but I don’t have data to say whether the progressive, “Oh yeah? Well, we’ll make our politics our church!” or the conservative, “Oh yeah? Well, we’ll make our churches political!” came first. A travesty either way, but this is now getting a little off-topic, and although the original forum for this thread does have ‘religion’ in the name, I don’t expect there’s very much interest in a discussion of why support for a welfare state is neither necessary nor sufficient to fulfill a Christian’s obligation to charity.)

How does the ACLU count to ten? 1, 3, 4, 5…

it’s interesting, conservatives prefer authority, ingroup and purity. Taken to an extreme, and it that looks a lot like what Donald Trump tapped into.

This thread is more on-topic (the original topic anyway) now that it’s out of P&R

This is a good point, and good post. I grew up in a conservative evangelical Christian household. There was always a pervasive sense that our values were under siege by cultural forces. Right-wing media at the time was mostly Christian radio, and it really felt like there were only very limited ways that I could legitimately participate in general pop culture.

That said, I left evangelicalism in part because I thought the persecution complex was protesting a bit much and tended toward hatred, in part because of insane conspiracy-theory mongering, and in large part because young earth creationism is such obvious bullshit that I felt like I’d been brainwashed for my whole childhood.

I don’t think that pop culture really lacks for reactionary influence. But, it’s harder to see because it’s, by definition, the status quo. Progressivism makes itself conspicuous because it’s challenging the status quo. I like finding interests that I can share with other folks without delving explicitly into politics. There’s a die-hard libertarian Trumpist here at work (one among many in my workplace) who I regularly shoot the shit with about guitar bands and live shows and stuff. But I’m not sure those interests are really ever apolitical. With guitar bands, for instance, there are a host of unspoken large-scale issues both political and non-political–the origin of blues as the music of African American slaves and sharecroppers, the dearth of women, the corporatization of popular music, the morality of consumer culture, art as a reflection of or reaction to culture, etc. A failure to address those is tacit acceptance of the status-quo, which is what most of us do most of the time.

Honestly, in live person-to-person interactions I don’t like discussing politics with anyone–I’d rather not damage relationships with people I disagree with, and choir preaching is tiresome with people I agree with. I like online forums because there’s more space and time to consider and articulate ideas than in typical face-to-face conversations, and because relationships aren’t usually at stake.

I’d be interested to hear perspectives on this. I suspect it feeds into a larger discussion about what the purpose of law is, i.e. should it reflect our morality or try to achieve pragmatic ends.

To be fair to my point, I was rebutting the claim that progressives (which the ACLU is generally considered to be an institution of) are enemies of free speech. I don’t think there’s any question that the ACLU starts that count with a vigorous “1”. Also, the organization is up-front about its stance relative to 2: it interprets it as a collective right, which until Heller in 2008, was how the court generally interpreted it as well. Still my point was that here’s an organization that is a lion for the first amendment that no conservative would ever claim membership in.

Anyway, I’ve rambled here and not said much. Thanks for your post though; it’s the best one I’ve read in this thread.

What the bloody fucking hell is this? P&R is infecting other subforums?

These people boggle my mind, because as someone who has strong libertarian leanings, one of my biggest problems with Trump is his overt authoritarian tendencies.

Authoritarianism is literally the opposite of libertarianism.

The weird thing is, I don’t recall seeing it in P&R. It’s like it materialized out of thin air.

Originally titled along the lines of “Non-Liberals: What do you dislike about liberals/liberalism?” but some P&R posters just couldn’t control themselves.

‘Some’, in this case, meaning ‘all’.

Didn’t we just elect thread splitting powers to the moderators by popular vote? Cut the stuff out that doesn’t belong and let the P&R wonks keep their stuff where it belongs.

Mostly meaning you, if we’re being honest.

Oh, me too. ‘All’ includes me.

It wasn’t as clean a split as that. It’s not like we went off topic, on-topic responses were continually challenged as being “wrong” answers to the question.

I’m just impressed at how good someone’s English gets when they’re trying to make a point in this thread. :D

Why the hell this went to Everything Else is beyond me.

Have you ever seen the Andromeda Strain?

Sometimes a strange virus, perhaps an alien virus, mutates. Do the math. We have an outbreak here. WILDFIRE wanted to use a nuke to destroy the alien virus. But they found that the alien virus would use the energy from the nuke to grow and divide. It would eventually cover the globe. It would also mutate and kill all life on Earth. Think about it.

This thread defies time and space and all sense of decency. I feel like it’s that castle in Krull that teleports every day. Where will this thread be tomorrow? Will it be in gaming, in movies, in its own new subforum? From whence did it come? To where shall it go? Will it be locked tomorrow or split into three child threads? Mortal minds cannot comprehend the twisted logic!