Understanding Conservatism : The long con

I don’t read Mother Jones, but yes I think it would be reprehensible to allow advertising on your website that is essentially false, or advertises things that are counter to your principles.

I guess that’s fine. For me, I don’t really care that much. I block all the ads. Given how internet advertising works, I understand that a site did not actually pick those random ads that show up.

How do you respond to Pearlstein’s other criticisms? Or do you generally agree with him perhaps?

How do you respond to Pearlstein’s other criticisms? Or do you generally agree with him perhaps?

If a site actually pushes out garbage stuff to its readers directly, then that’s terrible… but the site he mentioned doing that is Newsmax… which I already regarded as terrible, so it’s not really anything new to me.

I think some of his statements about how Romney is a huge liar ended up falling kind of flat for me. Obama’s campaign lies too. The Washington Post pointed out some clear lies that Obama’s campaign was mailing out in Virginia, just yesterday. Here’s a big list of the worst lies from both sides throughout the campaign so far.

I’m sure that I’m gonna get shouted down now, for “trying to draw false equivalence”, but whatever. I don’t care that Romney “lies more” or whatever. I do not trust either campaign. I think they are lying. But, of course, I’m evil and/or stupid.

The reality is this… I still, believe it or not (I’m sure you do not) don’t know who I’m voting for next week. I do not really like either candidate. I worry about what what might happen if Obamacare is repealed, because I have loved ones who would be hurt by removing all of it… and yet, at the same time, I don’t really like it. Given a lack of a Romney plan, I realize that the alternative to the current plan could certainly be worse. Honestly, I feel like both candidates fail here, because no one is addressing the real problem of skyrocketing costs. But some aspects of Obama’s current system, that protect people with pre-existing conditions, is important enough to me the merit my consideration.

But the biggest thing that makes me question the idea of voting for Obama, is that I really have zero faith that he can actually make things better. I don’t think he’s a terrible person… I don’t think he wants to destroy the country, or institute Sharia law, or whatever crazy stuff folks say about him.

I just can’t find it in my heart to believe that he’s gonna make anything better. I’m sure he WANTS to, but I don’t believe he can. Even if you believe that everything is the republicans’ fault, and they are just obstructionists and don’t let the President do all the stuff he wants to do… that’s how it’s gonna be for the next four years too then. It does not appear that the Democrats are gonna somehow seize both houses of congress. So, Obama will just be stuck in the same boat as he was this term.

If Obama couldn’t get the republicans to work with him the last 4 yeas, then he won’t be able to get them to work with him in the next 4 years either. So why should I vote for him? To watch another 4 years of incompetent governing, with both parties locked in a standstill, pointing fingers at each other? That is not appealing to me.

So I may not vote for Obama… but it’s not because I have been duped by the republicans… it’s not because I hate poor people, or want to murder and eat babies. Or possibly make bombs out of babies that I drop on other babies to kill them. It’s because I’m not feeling that Obama has made things significantly better since his election.

Folks can list a bunch of things that go on the “awesome stuff that Obama did” list all they want, but the reality is that things do not feel better than they did 4 years ago, and that makes me question voting for an incumbent. I don’t like how our political system exists currently. It has me very disillusioned.

Folks can do what they’re doing here, and blame everything on “the other guys”, but I think that’s what has gotten us where we are today. It’s what lets the parties avoid any kind of compromise or negotiation, because demonizing the other party lets them argue that not working with them is a good thing. That doing nothing is better than making a deal with the devil.

You do understand that whether or not you are going to vote for Obama or Romney has literally no bearing on what Perlstein was writing about, right? Your entire post is a non-sequitur.

You do also realize that Perlstein isn’t making statements about all conservatives. Actually based on your posts (and the posts of most other people in this thread, you don’t. Movement conservatives, Republicans, and Romney voters are separate sets. There’s some overlap, but Perlstein’s main concern is with the first. The whole “Perlstein thinks all Republicans are stupid/evil” response is as wrongheaded as it is depressingly predictable.

Yes, it was mainly just about my perspective as a conservative, who has a perspective that is perhaps a tad more complex than simply being tricked into thinking the republicans are “right”, or being evil and hating poor people.’

You do also realize that Perlstein isn’t making statements about all conservatives.

Yes, hence my statement here:

Regardless, his piece is what I would expect. But I think that what conservatives may find offensive about this thread isn’t even that article… but rather the fact that the article was then twisted into an even more offensive form in this thread. The title of this thread is even more slanted than the original article… the first comment is, “Yeah, ALL conservatives are either idiots or evil… It’s funny to wonder which one your conservative friends are!” I’m guessing you don’t actually have any conservative friends, if that is actually your opinion… because most folks aren’t friends with people that they think are stupid/evil.

I originally posted in this thread, not because I found Pearlstein’s article offensive, but because of the way it was presented here, and the responses that people made to it… apparently without even realizing what they were doing.

“Dupers and The Duped” /= “ALL conservatives are either idiots or evil”

“Dupers and The Duped” /= “ALL conservatives are either idiots or evil”

Uh, ya, it kind of does… It says that all of the republicans are either tricking people (evil) or being tricked (stupid). That there cannot be any other reason for them to vote that way.

And then you have the title of the thread, which does not make a distinction of “mail-order conservatism”, but just says “Understanding Conservatism: The long Con”.

So your objections are basically to the various shorthands and imprecisions people are using in an internet discussion, rather than to the substance of the article?

Heh, I think those statements were perfectly precise.

I’ve long maintained that the modern Republican Party is comprised of The Dupers and The Duped. It’s fun, when discussing politics on the Internet, to guess which category your conservative friends belong to.

Rightbug wasn’t talking about some particular subset of conservatives. He was talking about all conservatives. He didn’t forget to include some word. He clearly stated that all conservatives fell into the categories of Duper and Duped. There was no misunderstanding there.

Which category do your imaginary conservative friends fall into?

It doesn’t matter, anyway. Either you have more sophisticated views than that, in which case it’s not an issue… or you don’t, and there is nothing that someone on the internet is going to be able to do to convince you that it’s not true. You’d have to encounter a conservative “in the wild” as it were, and talk to them to realize that they are not the monster and/or idiot that you have constructed in your mind.

Moving back to the actual article - it was amazing to see how much of the non-commercial fundraising was constructed to benefit the fundraisers rather than the ostensible cause, and then how once the target group of willing donors has been identified, they continue the same fundraising for commercial / snake oil products.

It certainly puts another spin on the Republican War on Science - the more educated your target audience gets, the less likely they will presumably be to fall for snake oil pitches.

The whole “Lying for the Lord” (and the related “milk before meat”) stuff was new to me. If you believe that the end justifies the means, I guess all this seems to be fair game.

As for the insider stuff - I agree - that seems like a seductive part of the con - ‘Only now can we reveal this secret to a select audience of newsmax readers…’ How tempting to feel like you are on the inside, and yet that’s part of the hook that gets you to buy overpriced gold coins, or donate $25 to some nonsense fundraiser that only funds the company making the pitch. It is infuriating because a lot of these pitches go to people for whom that $25 is a big deal.

If you think about it, conservatism is completely dependent on this misconception. The root of conservatism is conservation, or the resistance to change. It’s the notion that things are as good now as they will ever be, and they were better before. Lumped into that idea is that if things are as good now as they will ever be, then I am doing as well as I will ever do, politically. It actually carries two complementary mistakes with it, both a misconception of the general state of the world and a misconception of your personal place in it.

They were: “duper” does not mean “evil” and “duped” does not mean stupid.

Of my two most outspokenly conservative friends, one is a physicist and the other is a rocket scientist. Neither is stupid. Yet they believe things that are manifestly untrue: “environmentalists are anti-human,” “Fox News is fair and balanced.” They’ve bought into an ideology that’s absurd, but makes sense in the context of their world view.

Believe it or not, I don’t consider you–or the majority of the conservative posters on this board–stupid. You write well, you construct strong arguments, and you obviously think about what you post. But I do think you’ve been duped, in part because you reiterate talking points from people who are lying to you.

My first exposure to conservatives in the wild was a friend I had in High School.
He wasn’t stupid. On the IQ tests we took at our school, which regardless of the relative merit of these tests it is comparing apples to apples with everyone else who took the test - he scored a 165 (most of my friends were in the 130s.) Now, few talked about politics but Paul did - and his views would have been considered extreme at the time (this was in 1981) as he was a Bircher. In today’s GOP that’s closer to the mean.

When I began my college career as a political science major, my circle of friends then were all conservatives, primarily due to the value they placed on small government. I was in a distinct minority during the 80’s, because then as now I hated Reagan. I didn’t buy the line that big government stifled freedom or that single mothers were the scourge of the country or that the best and highest value we could have as a country is the acquisition of wealth. Or maybe because when Reagan was elected I lived on the ‘front lines’ so to speak as an Air Force dependent living on SAC bases (strategic air command, i.e. the bases that had the nukes.) To this day I clearly remember his Star Wars speech - I watched it live - and was just left dumb founded that that was his vision of world peace. In Reagan I always saw a strident conservative with a smiley face - and I thought that was far more dangerous than Nixon or Goldwater ever were.

For me government doesn’t interfere in my life in any way (well aside from making it difficult to play OL poker.) But if the GOP had its way it certainly would in any number of ways for a great many people who do not share my circumstances. I value rational policies based on science and facts. I don’t believe, nor do I think most liberals or progressives do either - that government is the answer for every problem. But it’s government that curbs abuses of corporate America, it’s government that funds research that saw Apollo and Voyager and Hubble and Curiosity. The private sector would never build particle accelerators. Etc, etc etc.

The conservatives who post here do not represent the extremes I see when I dare to read comments on other sites (I often feel the need to scrub my brain afterwards) - and also give them great credit for continuing to post. I disagree with their philosophy but that doesn’t make them evil. But that element from the right seems to be largely missing these days. Somebody from the GOP is going to need to wrench that party off the extremist cliff. And I am starting to think I’ll be dead by the time that happens.

Well the whole ‘you on the left think conservatives must be stupid’ thing is also part of that self-serving delusion the right-wing movement NEEDS to keep repeating amongst itself. It is part of the grand lie, part of that pattern. Without hate to fuel it’s agenda, all right-wing ideology fails, as ultimately it is the ideology of persecution of the weak/meek and being able to take from them what you want. If you don’t generate that hate, it makes it much harder to see policy enacted that allows this to happen (this extends to national wars of aggression, often led by the corporate interests etc).

Having media propaganda like Fox News is essential to generate that hate, and they do a really good job at it, employ the right kind of smart people for that method etc. Murdoch and company really know their Goebbels very well.