I think the problem with this notion is that it is too easy to apply it lazily. That is, thereâs something to the idea that well-worn solutions are good solutions, but only when you can actually assess the context. For example, freezing in place when you hear or see something strange in a forest at night is a well-worn solution to not being eaten by surprise predators. Itâs a terrible solution when the context changes to a road with cars driving on it. Similarly, letting the market set prices is generally a good idea, but not when buyersâ lives are on the line and sellersâ lives arenât (or vice versa). âCommunities and churches should take care of thisâ works great when everyone is born and dies in the same community, knows the people there well, and knows that those same people will be there a long time. It doesnât really work when people move to different communities frequently, live in massive apartment buildings, and no longer go to church.
So while the traditional effectiveness of a particular policy or system is certainly something to consider, the reflexive assumption that traditional > newfangled is less of a principled ideology and more of a rationalization for those who donât want to work out an actual stance.
Sharpe
3189
That was very well said, ravenight.
I think one of the ideas, though, is that the laziness is itself a somewhat-rational, if tacit, acknowledgment of the work that has already been done by decades (centuries/millennia) of tradition, and the danger of being too quick to reinvent the wheel. A respect for the idea that âtheyâ must have had a good reason for doing what they did.
The problem is it doesnât really hold up under scrutiny for various reasons. Even assuming benign motivations, which IMO is deeply naive (I think many political/social faits accomplis came about because certain individuals simply were the cruelest the fastest), the âperfectly goodâ reason why something might have been done in the past doesnât necessarily apply now. For instance, we are in the current climate crisis because of lots of perfectly rational-short term decisions by very intelligent people, but acknowledging that fact hardly informs the question of what to do now.
Nesrie
3191
I think your point is good, but this is not just a well-worn solution⌠itâs instinctual. We do retain some instinctual responses, the others are more, shall we say, society driven than this one is.
Instinct is also a kind of embedded wisdom, of course â not learned but encoded in DNA and purchased with the blood of whose who failed to reproduce. Applying it metaphorically to social and cultural issues may be somewhat apt.
Thanks!
Sure, but thatâs why most things arenât questioned most of the time. To respond to people who are presenting arguments for questioning them by saying that it isnât worth a bother because the status quo must be correct isnât rational laziness, itâs just laziness. Though usually, as you say, it isnât laziness at all, but rather an appeal to laziness intended to preserve an existing advantage.
Actually, I believe there is a consistent ideology behind Trump supporters:
pwn teh libs.
Thatâs pretty much it.
Right. Like football or whatever, itâs a team sport. You want your team to be the winner. And just as there is no ideology in football beyond scoring points (not an ideology!), thereâs no ideology among Trump supporters beyond scoring points.
In other words, itâs not conservative, because itâs not even a frickinâ political concept. Although, I dunno, would you call tribalism an ideology? As the only guy here trying to maintain the integrity of the English language, that I could get behind.
-Tom
Carto
3196
My issue is that Trumpâs GOP claims to be the conservative party and the âtrueâ conservatives / never Trumpers donât seem able to contest that. The analogy Iâm thinking of is a government in exile. They can make a philosophical claim to be the best representatives of conservative ideology, but in fact theyâve been push out of what once was the conservative party and have nowhere meaningful to go.
Iâm not sure how to handle this as a liberal. On the one hand, Trumpâs GOP gets a lot of social and political capital by calling themselves the conservative party, and itâs in our interests to deny them that legitimacy. On the other hand, Iâm not sure if itâs worthwhile to maintain the linguistic integrity of âconservativismâ if the term no longer applies to American politics. Even if Trumpâs GOP is qualitatively different from pre-Trump conservativism, one led to the other and this might be the chance to make a clean break from both.
Those musings aside, Iâd be happy to see a political party that identified as conservative and explicitly called out Trumpâs GOP as fake conservatives.
Since when is language something that can be preserved?! Itâs evolving literally all the time.
Yes, but if it evolves too quickly, it becomes hard for people to argle bargle foofy foo.
On the other hand, none of the Burkean conservatives were peasants or servants or slaves laboring under the lash, or even poor people, so of course they argued for the value of the tradition that had seen them to and through public school and prestigious exclusive universities, and against the sort of changes that might put a dent in their lifestyle.
Conservatism is about conserving privilege.
Edit: I left this unsaid, but shouldnât: that is why Trump is essentially a conservative. He has identified a privileged group â white men â and is embarked on a project to preserve, even expand their privilege at the expense of everyone else.
Why is that relevant? Communism and libertarianism similarly donât apply to American politics these days. You still want to use those words correctly, donât you?
Other than caring about what words mean, hereâs a way to express it as a political issue. Is there any difference between the ideology of Bill Kristol and Ted Cruz? What about the folks write at his site, Bulwark, and Lindsay Graham? What about William F. Buckley as he split off from the Republican party and Sean Hannity? If you concede there is a difference â you canât very well say there isnât a difference â why do you think we shouldnât express those differences using pre-existing political concepts?
I listen to the Bulwark podcast regularly (strange bedfellows and all) and those guys hate Trump, but I strongly disagree with their politics because Iâm not a conservative anymore.
Look, Iâm not trying to challenge anyoneâs ideas of whether conservatives appeal to racism or whether Reagan actually liked immigrants or the vileness of Newt Grigrichâs effect on political discourse. Iâm just saying, very simply, that we already have a term for the overriding political ideology of the Republican party: âTrump supporterâ. Thereâs no need to co-opt the term for an actual political ideology that still exists despite its absence from the current political process.
-Tom
Reductio ad absurdum much? By this facile rationale, I can say the Democrats arenât liberal because liberalism is about freeing people and Democrats donât believe in emptying prisons.
-Tom
The problem here â respectfully â is the disconnect between the opening sentences and the closing ones.
If I think Reagan was a racist and enjoyed the support of real conservatives, and I see that Trump is a racist and enjoys the support of those who call themselves conservatives, then the word for his supporters is âconservativesâ.
There is only a need for a different word if the phenomenon of Trump is markedly different than the phenomenon of Reagan.
As I think they are not different, it looks like a continuum of conservatism to me. I get that it doesnât look that way to you, but the only way to settle that is to resolve our presumed differences with respect to e.g. Reagan. The question is key to the disagreement, not tangental.
Is there a reduction more absurd than to say that the political ideology of Trump supporters is that they support Trump? There were no fascists, only Mussolini supporters. There were no Nazis, only Hitler supporters. There were no Falangists, only Franco supporters.
ShivaX
3204
Trump has no ideology though. They just worship him, no matter what he does.
Now you can say that Italian fascists and Nazis wouldâve done the same thing if their leaders had randomly changed their positions on stuff. Maybe youâd be right. Or maybe theyâd âsupportâ them because they lived in fascist states where not doing so would mean bad things for them.
Mussolini and Hitler both had popular support from their ideologies, as loathsome as they were. Trump gets his support by simply existing. He doesnât have any brownshirts or the like to enforce it, so people are just willingly agreeing to whatever random word salad comes out of his mouth on any given day.
I doubt Hitler wouldâve had much success if one day heâd said the Jews were a plague and then literally the next day (or hell the same day in the same speech) talked about how he loved the Jews, great people the Jews.
Hitler strongly believed what he believed. It was horrific, but he believed it. Trump doesnât believe anything. Literally everything can randomly be supported or denigrated. Hitler directed the mob, Trump is directed by the mob and random firing of what stands in for his brain on a minute to minute basis. There is no ideology, even one poorly executed. Itâs just monkeys, typewriters and stupidity. Oh and manipulation, since basically anyone in the world can get him to do whatever they want if they just word it right.
See, I donât agree. Trump is consciously selling white male privilege and white male supremacy and the fear of threats to that privilege and supremacy. Thatâs an ideology, one that has been sold by the Republican Party and its conservative leadership since Nixon. Trump may be more strident about it, and it is possible that he doesnât even believe it, but itâs a clear ideology that motivates his supporters.
