What destroyed the American conservative MIND?

[Wilson23]

When Movement Conservatism got started in 1964, its public faces were at least pseudo-cerebral types like William F. Buckley and George Will.

But it is a very long time, now, since American conservatism has been able to rise above the intellectual level of a claymation Christmas special. It is a very long desclension from Buckley and Will to Beck and Carlson.

Why IS that?

 

[eric_erosfan]

When Movement Conservatism got started in 1964, its public faces were at least pseudo-cerebral types like William F. Buckley and George Will.

But it is a very long time, now, since American conservatism has been able to rise about the intellectual level of a claymation Christmas special. It is a very long desclension from Buckley and Will to Beck and Carlson.

Why IS that?

Because pundits dumbed it down for the masses to be "if government runs it. It is communist "

And the Southern Democrats "Dixiecrats" joined and turned it racist. So now it is "I hate brown-skins and commies".

 

[Wilson23]

I know from experience there are NO smart conservatives or RWs on THIS board.

But might it have been a different experience if, perhaps, the Intertubes had existed in the 1980s?

 

[Sean Renaud]

When Movement Conservatism got started in 1964, its public faces were at least pseudo-cerebral types like William F. Buckley and George Will.

But it is a very long time, now, since American conservatism has been able to rise about the intellectual level of a claymation Christmas special. It is a very long desclension from Buckley and Will to Beck and Carlson.

Why IS that?

I was going to ask what you would know about when the movement got started but then you mentioned the intellectual level of a Claymation Christmas Special. Goddamn you're old as fuck. Just curious battle royale. Frosty, Cold Miser, the California Raisins, a T-Rex announcer and Gumby. Who you got in a fight?

 

[Wilson23]

I was going to ask what you would know about when the movement got started but then you mentioned the intellectual level of a Claymation Christmas Special. Goddamn you're old as fuck. Just curious battle royale. Frosty, Cold Miser, the California Raisins, a T-Rex announcer and Gumby. Who you got in a fight?

The Abominable Snowman.

 

[icanhelp1]

Because pundits dumbed it down for the masses to be "if government runs it. It is communist "

And the Southern Democrats "Dixiecrats" joined and turned it racist. So now it is "I hate brown-skins and commies".

Government doesn't do a lot thing well. The government's abuse of taxpayer's money is proof of that. Most blue urban shitholes run by democrats are communist/socialist sanctuaries.

Who hates brown people? Conflating border security and cultural protectionism as hating brown people is moronic on your part.

 

[Saint_Ann]

Corrupt democrats.

 

[Wilson23]

Corrupt democrats.

No, Dem corruption would only serve to STIMULATE the conservative intellect.

 

[Wilson23]

Who hates brown people? Conflating border security and cultural protectionism as hating brown people is moronic on your part.

Like HELL it is!
https://forum.literotica.com/threads/it-really-is-all-about-race-stop-denying-it.1653614/

 

[Wilson23]

Government doesn't do a lot thing well. The government's abuse of taxpayer's money is proof of that. Most blue urban shitholes run by democrats are communist/socialist sanctuaries.

You are confusing cause and effect. Those areas are full of poor people. They are NOT poor because Dems run them. They are run by Dems because the poor vote Dem (when they vote at all). The poor vote Dem for very GOOD reasons.

 

[icanhelp1]

You are confusing cause and effect. Those areas are full of poor people. They are NOT poor because Dems run them. They are run by Dems because the poor vote Dem (when they vote at all). The poor vote Dem for very GOOD reasons.

Dems love to make poor people poorer. They love creating a dependent class of people, it gets them votes. They love giving freebies at other's expense.

 

[Wilson23]

Dems love to make poor people poorer. They love creating a dependent class of people, it gets them votes. They love giving freebies at other's expense.

Every word of that is a lie and you know it.

 

[Wilson23]

The real tragedy here is that American conservatives HAVE a rich intellectual heritage to draw on -- and all they can do any more is shit all over it.

Conservative British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write in The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America:

The exceptionalism of the American Right is partly a matter of its beliefs. The first two definitions of "conservative" offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary are "adverse to rapid change" and "moderate, avoiding extremes." Neither of these seems a particularly good description of what is going on in America at the moment. "Conservatism" -- no less than its foes "liberalism" or "communitarianism" -- has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged. Open a newspaper and you can find the word used to describe Jacques Chirac, Trent Lott, the Mullah Omar and Vladimir Putin. Since time immemorial, conservatives have insisted that their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed.

But, in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism. Winston Churchill happily accepted these principles: he was devoted to nation and empire, disinclined to trust the lower orders with anything, hostile to the welfare state, worried about the diminution of liberty and, as he once remarked ruefully, "preferred the past to the present and the present to the future."

To simplify a little, the exceptionalism of modern American conservatism lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke's principles and contradiction of the last three. The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility towards the state than any other modern conservative party. . . . The American right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party, and prepared to tolerate an infinitely higher level of inequality. (One reason why Burke warmed to the American revolutionaries was that, unlike their dangerous French equivalents, the gentlemen rebels concentrated on freedom, not equality.) On patriotism, nobody can deny that conservatives everywhere tend to be a fairly nationalistic bunch. . . . Yet many European conservatives have accepted the idea that their nationality should be diluted in "schemes and speculations" like the European Union, and they are increasingly reconciled to dealing with national security on a multilateral basis. American conservatives clearly are not.

If the American Right was merely a more vigorous form of conservatism, then it would be a lot more predictable. In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke's last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don't know their place: entrepeneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West, and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right -- unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort of another.

The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. By contrast, Burke has been described flatteringly by European conservatives as a "prophet of the past." Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting.

As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated "clerisy" of clever rulers (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the "silent majority." In 1988 the aristocratic George H.W. Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W. Bush, a president's son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up his role as a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington. As a result, modern American conservatism has flourished not just in country clubs and boardrooms, but at the grass roots -- on talk radio and at precinct meetings, and in revolts against high taxes, the regulation of firearms and other invidious attempts by liberal do-gooders to force honest Americans into some predetermined mold.


Now, if you read the above carefully and think about it carefully, one thing that emerges is that modern American conservatism is more compatible with FASCISM than the old-style Euro conservatism. It is forward-looking, revolutionary, like fascism was. (Franco was not really a fascist -- all he wanted was to put everything back the way it was before 1789.) And American conservatism's rejection of elitism is entirely compatible with RACIAL elitism -- under Hitler, the old aristocratic social order was rejected and all were equal, so long as they were of pure German blood.

 

[Wilson23]

I was going to ask what you would know about when the movement got started but then you mentioned the intellectual level of a Claymation Christmas Special. Goddamn you're old as fuck. Just curious battle royale. Frosty, Cold Miser, the California Raisins, a T-Rex announcer and Gumby. Who you got in a fight?

I'm 62, BTW. I was born in 1963, about 3 months before the Kennedy assassination.

And, yes, I did it. I was very precocious. It was nothing political, I was just jealous of him and Marilyn. I weren't the only one, neither, there was this toddler on the grassy knoll who kept going, "For Mawilyn! For Mawilyn!"

Too soon?

 

[justawnnabewriter]

I know from experience there are NO smart conservatives or RWs on THIS board.

But might it have been a different experience if, perhaps, the Intertubes had existed in the 1980s?

You over value yourself

 

[YDB95]

Every word of that is a lie and you know it.

No, I don't think he does. He has always sounded to me like a Fox News addict, thoroughly brainwashed but a true believer nonetheless. It's a documented phenomenon; there have literally been books written about it.

 

[Wilson23]

No, I don't think he does. He has always sounded to me like a Fox News addict, thoroughly brainwashed but a true believer nonetheless. It's a documented phenomenon; there have literally been books written about it.

But that Democratic-welfare-plantation shit is too stupid to believe even by Fox standards.

 

[YDB95]

But that Democratic-welfare-plantation shit is too stupid to believe even by Fox standards.

Not if you really, really want to believe it. As you know, there's literally a cottage industry dedicated to pretending the Republicans are the heroes of the civil rights movement. That claim is just one of many that people like Icanthelpit tell themselves every day.

 

[SoCalAshley]

The question was, 'What destroyed the American conservative MIND?' But the responses quickly turned into the typical Democrat versus Republican argument. While 'conservative' and 'Republican' are often used interchangeably, they aren't the same; one is a philosophical belief system while the other is a political organization. So I will argue that the conservative mind hasn't been destroyed. What’s been destroyed is the leadership. The principles are still there, but they’ve been abandoned by a Republican establishment that’s more interested in serving themselves and holding onto power than actually representing the people who voted for them.

 

[Wilson23]

The question was, 'What destroyed the American conservative MIND?' But the responses quickly turned into the typical Democrat versus Republican argument. While 'conservative' and 'Republican' are often used interchangeably, they aren't the same; one is a philosophical belief system while the other is a political organization. So I will argue that the conservative mind hasn't been destroyed. What’s been destroyed is the leadership. The principles are still there, but they’ve been abandoned by a Republican establishment that’s more interested in serving themselves and holding onto power than actually representing the people who voted for them.

Well, that's just the difference. Since the Movement Conservatives became prominent in 1964, the GOP has evolved into an ideological party. But the Dems remain a coalition of interest groups. But that means that only the GOP can be said to speak officially for conservatism -- which means the content of official conservatism has changed since the Tea Party/MAGA wing took over the party. Which means it has become a whole lot stupider than it was. And conservative media have been dumbed down to reflect this.

 

[PaxNurgle]

Government doesn't do a lot thing well. The government's abuse of taxpayer's money is proof of that. Most blue urban shitholes run by democrats are communist/socialist sanctuaries.

CASE IN POINT... THIS POST.

There have been a few intellectual posters on this board who lean conservative, and have rational and reasonable views and are capable of discussing things in a rational manner. Dan O'Keefe (i.e. Icanhelp1 in this particular post) obviously isn't one of them. They sadly seem to be few and far between, but I have encountered them. SkyBubble tries. I have taken issue with a few of his posts but he seems at least more reasonable than some. Lance Castro was another one, as is Chernosoth. Some of Chernosoth's "Extreme Doom and Destruction" attitudes give me a headache but by and large, he is more respectable than a lot of people on here.

 

[SimonDoom]

When Movement Conservatism got started in 1964, its public faces were at least pseudo-cerebral types like William F. Buckley and George Will.

But it is a very long time, now, since American conservatism has been able to rise about the intellectual level of a claymation Christmas special. It is a very long desclension from Buckley and Will to Beck and Carlson.

Why IS that?

There are still conservatives with minds. George Will is still among us. Ross Douthat is not an idiot. But the Republican Party is no longer "conservative" in the sense that it was conservative from the time of Barry Goldwater through the time of Paul Ryan. It's been hijacked by a populist movement led by a cult leader-con man. The Republican Party right now is a lot like the Know-Nothing American party of the early 1800s. They're defined by what they are angry about, which is just about everything. For years they've railed against the Democrats and the Left for their politics of grievance, yet, now their politics are even more grievance-based than those of the Left.

You're not wrong if you say: if there are real intellectual conservatives out there, they sure are quiet. Most of them are afraid to say anything that crosses the Boss.

 

[Wilson23]

What it comes down to is, the nationalist-populist form of conservatism has become ascendant, and that is the stupidest of all its forms, short of white nationalism. But it is also the form with the broadest voter appeal.

 

[SoCalAshley]

And conservative media have been dumbed down to reflect this.

And liberal media hasn't been dumbed down to reflect the views of the coalition of interest groups?

 

[Wilson23]

And liberal media hasn't been dumbed down to reflect the views of the coalition of interest groups?

That's the kind of purpose for which you need to smarten it up. Everything and everybody stupid has just sort of gradually been sliding down to the RW side since 1964. The division is now sharp. There just ain't much brains left on the RW side.