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“Everybody I disagree with is a dumbass.” Thankfully, the world is more complex than that.
No, just regressives (aka conservatives).
So essentially the half of the country that doesn’t agree with you.
There absolutely are conservative intellectuals, they just don’t tend to endorse MAGA.
Here’s a great example: https://scholars-stage.org/ Knocks it out of the park all the time. Then again, he rarely spends his time talking directly about culture war topics.
It regretfully doesn’t matter how intellectual they are if the two-party system forces them to let their anti-intellectual minorities run the party. Once a governing body decides that keeping power away from “the other team” is more important than their principles, they cease to have the merit of those principles. Middle of the road negotiation simply ceases to exist. Either you have an overwhelming majority and don’t need the other party’s consent, or you have a narrow majority and policy making gets held hostage by the most belligerent minority faction within the party. When that belligerent faction is anti-intellectual, the result is the current shitshow.
Since American politics are right-leaning on the Overton window, that makes both parties more susceptible to getting kneecapped by their most right-leaning belligerents when they hold a narrow majority. A narrow Republican majority gets kneecapped by the Freedom Caucus, and a narrow Democrat majority gets kneecapped by the likes of Sinema and Manchin.
You… know it’s possible to be a conservative without being a Republican, right?
If you want to say there are no politically relevant conservative intellectuals, that I would agree with. the Republican party is currently dominated by grifters, so anyone involved is going to be doing a lot of shoddy post-hoc justifications. But to say that being conservative of any stripe bars one from actually thinking deeply and critically is narrow minded.
One thing to understand is that our ability to reason comes down to how we weigh our knowledge of the material in question. Someone can be extremely knowledgeable (and through that knowledge, intellectual) about one topic; and dumb as rocks in another. One of the culture shocks for me when I started working in the medical field was not just the existence, but the prevalence of stupid doctors. You’d think that someone who could become a doctor would be an all around curious and open-minded person… and when they’re talking about their area of expertise, it 100% seems that way; but once they deviate into other areas, it starts to show that they’re just as much a joe-dipshit as the rest of us.
So, you could have someone who’s intellectual as fuck in the context of like orthopedic surgery; but even in other parts of the field of medicine, their brain hits a brick wall and suddenly your ortho doc drinking the covid conspiracy theory koolaid; or conned by some talkshow host into paying money for NFTs; or swallowing the lies about dragshows somehow being about grooming children.
There is absolutely such a thing as a conservative intellectual: just means they’re really smart in some unrelated area; and really stupid with politics. There are also plenty of folks who buy into the hatred spewed by the political rightwing. Tricking rednecks into voting against their own interests is one thing - a bigger problem is that for a lot of voters, the cruelty is the point. They don’t give a fuck about children: they just want to hurt trans people. They don’t give a fuck about fetuses: they just want to hurt women. Assuming that conservatives are just politically stupid is actually giving them the benefit of the doubt - cuz the alternative is that they’re just evil… and evil paired with intellect is both real and incredibly dangerous.
hopefully lemmy will not become gab for the left…but it’s a free world!
What a horrendous take
Reality is definitely something the conserved brain cannot handle. Cracking open that tin can is sure to relieve some of that debilitating pressure bearing down on the logic of basically any situation. In my exerience not one conservative has a good argument about their viewpoints, as their viewpoints are grandfathered in and pasted over their ability for compassion, logic and critical thinking. If the world weren’t in the hands of people using dumb conservatives to rob and maintain wealth, it would be classified as a mental illness akin to schizophrenia.
Well not every intellectual was born in the past century. Virtually all of these would be conservative based on our modern values. Virtually no one 100 or 200 years ago would have been in favor of gay marriage. There were plenty intellectuals 100 and 200years ago.
So, no.
I’m a leftie, but I’ve found my beliefs challenged, altered and enriched by debating right wing intellectuals.
It’s possible for two ideas to be equally right and incompatible
This is the most progressive type article ive read in a while.
A lot of you people haven’t read this, and it shows.
https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/conservatism.html
Ps. You can literally just ask yourself what it is conservatives want to conserve…
Paragraph after paragraph of head canon without any sources. Lovely. And conservatives are delusional.
Rabbits
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So what’s one good conservative position?
I agree with some conservative positions like Americans have an individual right of freedom. I can and should be able to live my life in manner that I want to without the government forcing me to live it another way. I view things like LGBTQ rights fall under this surprising core conservative belief. Now most conservatives would view it as individual freedom mean they can be a racist bigot and discriminate, but that isn’t individual freedom.
I also agree with the concept of limited government, but from the view that government even in its best state is a necessary evil. It should not govern our everyday lives but it must serve the people. Government isn’t a power, it is a service that ultimately serves the people.
some conservative positions like Americans have an individual right of freedom.
That’s not a conservative position. Proof: Conservatives don’t want women to have the freedom to end their pregnancies (or just get basic prenatal care in general apparently). They also don’t want universities to have the freedom to choose who they admit based on race (trying to undo historical racism or to prevent a single race from taking over).
In Florida the conservative government removed the freedom of local government to decide how they handle a great many things from elections (can’t have them using ranked choice voting) to what they teach in schools (e.g. teaching about historical racism).
In other states with conservative governments they are banning books, limiting citizens right to sue for damages, making it harder for minorities to vote, and generally reducing the people’s power to change how their government is run. They’re very anti-democracy lately (it was talked about in the article).
What individual freedoms are liberals trying to take away? The historical record here is vastly in liberals favor.
This is silly analysis. They’re religious nuts and that supercedes their views on human rights. People refuse to use a consistent or sane definition of conservative. If you’re just gonna say “proof: thing that violates the very premise of their presumed identity” then fucking give up. You’re not criticizing any coherent model of thought, you’re engaged in shit slinging.
Bro, that’s exactly what liberals want.
The government is a tool to ensure the good will, safety, and prosperity of the people. What we can’t achieve on our own gets done through the collective power of the government.
Liberals aren’t trying to force government on people, they’re trying to ensure that the rights of everyone take precedent over someone’s perceived “right” to discriminate.
Do you consider a business employing people to mutually ageed standards moral?
Business aren’t moral entities and it should never be assumed that they will act as such. In fact, the basis by which one should assume a business will operate is on profits and profits alone.
Therefore, if you want to make business behave in any sort of moral fashion their behavior must be regulated and businesses with a history of societal harm must be highly regulated.
Based on these truths one must view with a highly skeptical eye anyone who wishes to broadly remove regulations without specificities as to which ones they want to remove and why the regulation is unnecessary. The belief that regulations are bad–generally speaking–is an inherently unethical and immoral position.
Yeah. So literally using police to force shit is just bros being bros. Hiring someone to paint your fence, oppression. Got it.
What a completely dishonest and bad faith response.
On the surface personal responsibility and free market, howeverz there is no thing really conservative about it it gets twisted into some perverted way to punk minorities and to obtain preferential government treatment.
For example koch brothers and few other select clowns fundd Prager U… To shill these ideas…
Kuck brothers are some of the largest well fare queens in the US…
They don’t oay much taxes either due to their lobbying.
So I guess none…
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Heavy immigration hurts wage slaves… Where they are born is not relavent. Cute phrasing on this one BTW… Shows your bias nicely.
Nobody is killing babies. Again phrasing showing bias. Also, if this your ideological position. Get a life.
America first is not a a political idealogy, it is a brain dead position that practically means nothing aka “anything I like is america first!” “Anything you like is communism”
2nd amendment protect rights to own guns, nothing ideological about that. Red herring to get cOseRvatives riled up.
With that said, equal treatment under the law and socially, does indeed stand on its own but it ain’t left right thing IMHO. We can all agree that’s just the right thing to make our society function. Which it currently does not for various reasons.
I’m of the belief police should be disarmed and laws put in place that gun violence of any kind is a minimum 50 year sentence. Select police can be armed, but not everyday peace officers.
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Good point
I mean 2 for 5 ain’t too bad I guess. I’m out here trying to defend you fucks and you come out with this idiocy.
what do you mean?
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This type of article is just absolute garbage
Fucking salon Jesus Christ
You are aware that scientific studies have shown a clear correlation between conservative thinking and lower cognitive ability?
You can make studies say anything you want. just throw the lab some money. The tobacco studies are a great example of thst.
Which tobacco studies?
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There’s nothing there about any studies claiming tobacco was good for you. Just finding doctors to say so.
Then try finding a single study that says the opposite.
Is it hateful, or just critical?
Just hateful.
How’s it hateful? At least in a way that modern right wing ideology isn’t?
ah, there’s the victimhood the article spoke of
It’s hateful? How exactly?
Well I hated it!
--Michael ScottIs basically what all the arguments I’ve seen boil down to
I know plenty of conservative intellectuals, they are not Republicans though. Look up topics on individual freedom, limited government, or the rule of law to find thousands of examples.
Most would call themselves moderates as conservative is a poisoned title, but they exist.
So ask yourself, what perspective have conservatives been groomed view the United States? Roger Kimball describes it as, “A damsel (America) is locked in a dark castle, which was once a glorious palace in years gone by.” But now “liberal elites, the bureaucracy, academia” have sapped “her vitality,” turning her “weak and infirm” due to a dastardly belief system in “left-wing ideology, political correctness, egalitarianism. Using this metaphorical trope, Kimball continued to describe citizens as having turned into weaklings who secretly long for a return to national greatness. This view of decline and decadence, so core to the conservative intellectual tradition, is prone to eventual faith in a strong, authoritarian leader. And thus, Donald Trump becomes, for Kimball, the only one ready to rescue the country from its demise.
Their perspective is so vastly different due to indoctrination from years of talk radio, right wing news, and sites like facebook, reddit and 4chan where echo chambers reinforced the indoctrination.
The aspect free minds are missing us that, to quote Kimball again, “Trumpism represent[s] conservatism at its essential core, a kind of return to its roots in monarchism”. This “monarchism” is now being nurtured by a populist faith—a combined belief in the supposed goodness of the masses, led by the sort of paternalistic authoritarian leader that conservative intellectuals can get behind.
A free mind can obviously see through the deception has it is full of holes. If you don’t believe Steve Bannon is the next Pluto than you’ve already come to the conclusion that these buffoons are actually fascists attempting to strip American citizens of their rights and to gain power through the courts, through the power of the mob, and to gain power through forced religion, just as the Nazis did in the 1930s. The difference is they have absolute imbeciles in charge who have mucked up the process and exposed what they are doing. The mirror was broken for the vast majority of the American people to see. Thus this movement stalled, but it isn’t dead yet.
The reason why conservative intellectuals don’t exist is simply because any non-trivial thought dismisses most arguments they have and would make them leave their conservative position. They ignore constant massive contradictions, bad faith arguments and misused language. The closest you could come to an intellectual position as a conservative is to openly say you want to power trip, enslave, kill, imprison people that disagree with you etc, which you obviously wouldn’t say(in this lemmy instance).
right-wing imprints in recent years are almost invariably distinguished by their numbing sameness: a shrill cry of victimhood, a hunt for scapegoats, a tone that alternates between hysteria and heavy sarcasm, and a recipe for salvation
Man this rings true for my experience growing up in a conservative area
“People that don’t agree with me are dummyheads! Wah!!!”
While I do agree that’s where OP article is going with this…
American right produces fuax intellectuals that are more focused on justifying current regimes existence at any costs. it is not logically congruent or grounded in any sound philosophical underpinnings beyond I am rich, I got mine, slave for low wages BC you are poor and stupid, youare poor stupid BC your parents suck, I am good cuz I gotz money, I am better BC I crawled out of rich womans vagina, look at these tests score, they prove whyte b smart…
American left shares much of similar clown idealogy, although there are some independent thinkers but they end shilling tankie shit which ends with some weird positions just to create opposition to the right
Either way, you can’t have an intelectual discussion within the framework of two party political system and most Americans can’t get over this hurdle.
People always shilling some predetermined point for “their side” this is literally definition of anti intellectualism
“People that want others to exist peacefully and be able to love who they love are dummyheads! Wah!!!”
As these comments are mostly outrage over the headline, I’d like to hear which republican policies people here are particularly happy about.
So I would consider myself at least reasonably inclined to thinking and somewhat conservative. Note, however, that does NOT mean Republican. When I use conservative, it’s in a different context than the modern “conservative movement”. The modern movement seems to be more regressive than conservative. Conservative in my way of thinking is about calm, measured progress. Don’t upend everything in massive sweeping changes… but don’t reject change either, change is necessary and inevitable. The more moderate Biden-y neoliberal wing of the Democrats is probably the closest to that these days - the more progressive Democrats with wanting massive social upheaval type changes and the Republicans favoring the repeal-and-replace burn it down and maybe fix the ashes approach to undoing those changes, neither of which appeals to me.
The chances you are neoliberal isn’t zero.
Given the amount of time I spent over on r/neoliberal, it could fit, although I do tend to fall a bit on the libertarian side of it.
There is a 99% chance you are a huge Destiny fan.
Nope, had to look it up (I think I’m a bit older than Destiny’s original target audience), but just from a summary written about his political discussions I could see his brand of a pragmatic take on traditional liberalism being a good fit and am now curious to watch a couple of his videos.
You won’t get an honest answer, because an honest answer is about how they want to go back to 1950s American, where straight white men were the only demographic that mattered.
Even better when you talk them through that and watch them realize we will never go back to that post war economy because America can’t compete with a global stage that wasn’t bombed into oblivion by the Nazis.
Most conservatives are woefully ignorant of actual policy or what conservatives do. I have a friend who leans conservative, and asked him what he thought Trump did well. His first point was Trump helped to reduce the deficit, despite Trump massively increasing the deficit
And they can’t be honest about that because they know it’s a bad opinion. At least if they outright said the honest answer, I could understand it a little. If they’re a straight, white male and have zero empathy for anyone else, it would probably benefit them (at the cost of everyone else).
But even if they have zero empathy, they still know that anyone who does have empathy (or isn’t a straight, white male and has the slightest bit of understanding for what’s going on) will never agree with them. So they have to come up with all sorts of bullshit. Hence how we get stuff like comparisons to lobsters, unsupported claims that LGBT whatever is harming kids, and general turning a blind eye to any blatantly harmful stuff that progresses their goals.
