Commentary: Longtime former Republican on Patrick Deneen and the demise of the conservative intellectual
This is incorrect.
There is a such thing as a “conservative intellectual”. It’s just that they’ve been long since drowned out by the rest of the party, and the right-wing voting base has no appetite for actual, sensible conservative policies right now.
Name one conservative policy that has furthered mankind. Prohibition, voting rights, sexuality, drug war, terrorism; time after time they’ve been wrong. Even fiscally they run up the deficit. Their only role is to preserve hierarchy and maintain power
Intellectualism is not an inherently moral thing. One can be an amoral, selfish, narcissistic, intellectual.
I didn’t mean to give the impression that it is a moral issue. I consider it from a populist societal perspective. The majority (liberalism)wanting to do one thing, and the minority (conservatives) preventing progress. If conservatives had it their way, we’d still have feudalism… oh wait.
I mean, that’s also taking an “us vs them” mentality that isn’t helpful either. The middle ground is where the vast majority of people sit, and often swing to one side or another based on the situation surrounding them. Taking a “If you’re not with me, you’re against me” stance, just puts those people off. Either they just refuse to engage (which is a big factor in lack of participation in voting in the US) or they move towards the people who are willing to pander them. More often than not the conservatives.
Apparently I suffer from what is called naive realism. I’m working on it. I just wished conservatives would too.
Problem is human rights have become the giant center of it all, and it IS if you’re not with me you’re against me. There’s no fence from where I stand because stripping rights to play games can’t be an option. All these bills being passed with no legs just to keep fires alive. I say this from a safe state, I’m white, born straight, all the simple stuff. I try not to be off-putting - but “I’m a fiscal conservative and a social democrat” is a cop-out these days
I almost deleted all this lol but I may as well post. I find all that you’ve written thoughtful. I’ve stayed out of politics for the past few months because it’s was all just been too much these past 6 or 7 years…and it’s about to get awful again. I think I’m glad I’m off Reddit for politics season. There were good discussions there, but I think there will be more to get out of it here
Anyway, thanks for your replies
Those sound like the exact kinds of people who shouldn’t have any influence over our politics
Those are core conservative "intellectuals’.
Name one conservative policy that has furthered mankind.
Richard Nixon was at the helm when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded. I believe he also was responsible for protecting national parks, but I didn’t bother fact-checking that one.
https://www.epa.gov/history#:~:text=EPA was created on December,human health and the environment.
Now, granted, modern conservative politics are garbage-culture war bullshit, but we need to be cautious of forgetting history. Rewriting history is their game.
Progressive policies implemented during a conservative presidency don’t seem like conservative policies.
If you can just hijack any and all “good” policies as inherently progressive then you’re just a self-fuelling fire who wants to hate conservatives no matter what.
I wouldn’t be crediting them with enacting good policy if it wasn’t progressive.
If you can show an example of opposing progress that is good I’m all in on that conservative policy.
The ESA was not good because it maintained the status quo. It was good because it was progressive. The fact that it was implemented during a conservative presidency is irrelevant.
May I also just add, that for his example he had to go, 60 years into the past…
My entire lifetime, the GOP has simply don’t nothing that has helped the average Joe. It’s always hate based culture wars, tax cuts and protect guns. That’s it.
They provide zero solutions for anything. And if you do try to provide a solution, which inevitably will have painful parts to it because fixing things is hard, they blast propaganda how you’re anti American. They are just not interesting in governing.
You’re buying in too much to the branding of big-P Progressive. The EPA, and environmental protections, are inherently little-c conservative positions.
Not everything that is good is Progressive, and not everything Progressives want is good, or even intelligent. Rent control, as one very basic example, doesn’t work, and yet Progressives across America push it.
What doesn’t work about it? (I honestly know nothing about it, but I know there are things that sound great on paper and propaganda but in practice it’s bull)
You made me think about this. Thanks
George W Bush massively expanded US Free Trade agreements. We went from 3 to 16 under his admin. That’s good for the entire world.
Pretty much the only thing I don’t like about Biden is his protectionist stance.
I’m gonna assume you think Capitalist expansion and colonialism is a good thing.
The former, yes, the latter I bet we have significant disagreements on the definition of
Tangentially, if you’re interested in rabbit holes, there’s a book by Matt Kennard called Silent Coup that deals with corporate influence over trade, it looks at the agreements countries have to sign to get corporations into their countries.
I’m well aware of this process and support it. Countries are welcome to make any deals they’d like. They’re presumably intelligent, independent entities making decisions in their own best interest.
So you’re in favor of BRICS and the devaluation of the petrodollar, if those countries choose to do that?
Progressivism is moving towards collective goals. Conservatism is protecting individual freedoms.
You many see individual freedoms differently than they do but that is the core fundamental policy they protect.
But they don’t protect individual freedoms.
They have taken a hard stance against body autonomy, free speech, individual identity - all in support of corporate and state control over the individual.
This is the same argument as saying conservatives are fiscally responsible. It’s just something people say with nothing historically supporting it.
Neo-conservatism is what you are referring to and yes they are doing those things.
What you’re saying is true in theory, but the American Republican party has absolutely nothing in common with it.
Just look at the patriot act, torture, detention, TSA, and all the other shit pushed through by the GOP that has decimated freedoms and privacy.
The ONLY individual freedom the GOP protects unconditionally is for everyone and their uncle to own guns. Nevermind if your uncle is a lunatic, they’ll protect his freedom to be armed to the teeth.
The republican party isn’t conservative. They are neo-conservative. Different problem.
Everyone living depends on huge networks of interdependent actors for basic survival. Never mind quality of life. The political reality of the individual is that they are the smallest and weakest political unit; least equipped to petition for change.
Conservatism may have individualism all over the label, but conformity is what’s inside the box.
Go ahead and list an example of one of those past conservative intellectuals and we’ll see how long it takes to dig up an example of them saying something like Civil Rights protesters are all secret communist agents or that child labor and vagrancy laws and debtors prisons are good things.
Like, I get the appeal in wanting to believe the other side is just as smart and well meaning as our side is, but there’s just no basis for that in the historical record. They’ve always been like this and we just keep forgetting.
One can be an intellectual and still a huge piece of shit. Theyre not mutually exclusive. People like Milton Friedman or Henry Kissinger a undebatably intellectuals… but that doesn’t mean they’re angels. It just means they wield their intellect as a whip to beat their opponents with, rather than raising society as a whole.
Honestly this whole “conservatives are just a bunch of dumb rabid animals” is they exact sentiment they want us to feel. Because then we never look at the deeper issues that are actually affecting our world.
Honestly this whole “conservatives are just a bunch of dumb rabid animals” is they exact sentiment they want us to feel. Because then we never look at the deeper issues that are actually affecting our world.
I for one would love to look at the deeper issues that are actually affecting our world, but I end up wasting a ton of my time replying to dumb rabid animal shit David Brooks gets to smear all over the New York Times op-ed page when my older relatives who vote in every single election send me his columns because they think that he makes some good points about “Cultural Marxism”
And that’s their entire ploy. Keep people engaged with pointless dialogues that don’t mean anything. It’s better to point them to an article refuting such claims and move on. The debates aren’t worth getting into if they’re not made in earnest.
For example, Karl Marx. Clearly an intellectual as evidenced by his writings. But his colorblind/radical centrist take on minority rights fits right in with modern conservative extremists. And then the way he framed his opinions led to far right authoritarian regimes co-opting the label of communism.
Muh nazis were akschually leftwing and communists rightwing… Typical nazi tactic
If you think that right wing authoritarianism is communism, I’ve got a democratic republic to sell. The only way tankie logic is consistent is if you believe that Nazis were socialists and North Korea is democratic. But somehow those are not true yet the USSR was communist? You gotta stop gulping down the imperialist propaganda. I could forgive someone for believing it during the Red Scare, but these days there’s no excuse.
Tankie apologetics are a farce.
You are the imperialist here, yankee. Did you send tanks into iraq, huh? Will you call me a judeo-bolshevik now?
You’ll never be an ally to communists, no matter how hard you perpetuate Cold War propaganda.
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Since you capitalised National Socialists like a proper noun I’ll assume you are referring to Nazis. The answer to that is yes, Nazis were not socialists. Socialists were among the first groups targeted by the Nazis after attaining majority power.
A bit like how communists were oppressed in the USSR, or how democrats are oppressed in North Korea.
The U.S. was more than happy to conflate Marxist-Leninists(tankies) with communists because it made communists look bad. Tankies are all in on continuing to conflate their own ideology with communism because they understand that being proud of right wing extremist ideology is a bad look.
“sensible” conservative policies is such a heavy cope
Name one.
You could read the article instead of just responding to the headline.
This was a thoughtful and dense article but I’m glad I finished it. I learned the name of a pedophile priest in the process (Marcial Maciel) but otherwise only reinforced what I already know from other sources. Oh, and it led me to a WP article from 2021 about how the GOP inflates book sales, which I posted on Lemmy.
This article - and its headline - aren’t perfect. But the anti-intellectualism that’s deeply rooted into American leadership of what’s now seen mostly in the conservative platform is well documented and known. Check out Anti-intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter for a lot of support for what this short article tries to convey. And since that book’s 1964 writings, it’s only become stronger.
The conclusion paragraph is what I think most people are best taking away from this piece (not the overly-broad headline, which honestly is just clickbait compared to the substance of the article): “Ideas those may be, but the product of genuine intellectuals — those who employ critical reasoning and approach facts honestly — they are not. Ever since the Enlightenment, there has been a perpetual battle, a war of words, between those who would make the world a little freer, a little healthier, a little fairer and a little saner, and those who are viscerally repelled by such markers of secular progress. We see the practical consequences of this conflict everywhere, from the ruined cities of Ukraine to our own barbarously retrograde state legislatures. It is necessary for each of us to know which side we are on in the intellectual struggle of this chaotic century.”
There is a battle for truth, facts, and logic happening right now. And while there may be some conservatives who abide by those values, the party and its leadership have verifiably demonstrated otherwise. From trickle down economics to opposing universal healthcare (and nearly every major issue between), the facts simply do not support the party stance. Anti-intellectualism in real life, played out with real consequences, supported by masses willing to vote against their own interests.
Just because media and conservative leaders think Kissinger and Friedman are intellectual’s doesn’t mean history will. Define intellectual. IMHO it’s someone that the majority of people think of as thought leader, who has good ideas for society. Cambodia and Neoliberalism will not age well. Just because someone does a big thing doesn’t make them an intellectual. By that metric, Trump is an intellectual.
I remember as a kid Kissinger being revered as this great diplomat… Then I read Christopher Hitchens book about him… Holy shit… That man is pure evil.
Intellectual or not, he’s a monster.
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I was hoping this politics community would be reasonable and have good discussion.
instead we just get more of r/politics
Social media perpetuating identity politics then acting confused when there’s such a big divide in this country.
I liked r/politics. My political identity is enlightened centrist.
Nah lemmy is even further left than Reddit. What would you expect from an anti corporate decentralized group. Lemmy is basically communism of social media.
You are either a far left echo chamber member here or human trash. They see no difference.
Your comment implies we’re all assholes on here, then you’re surprised people aren’t treating you with respect 🤔
Not assholes. Just you are almost all part of the same echo chamber and have very similar beliefs and values and those without those values are shunned because the majority rule on lemmy is far left.
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I wouldn’t say human trash, more like deplorable
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“No true Scotsman” fallacy in action. It’s rare to see it in such a pristine condition.
(For the record, I’m an unabashed, unapologetic leftist. But this article is bullshit from graf 1 to the end.)
That’s not really how that fallacy works. No True Scotsman is a reactionary fallacy.
