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Conservatism is Brain Damage
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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It isn't, he's just trying to pull mainstream conservatives in to defend him. The far right has been very successful at getting normal conservatives to cover for them over the last 50 years. The actual ideas of fiscal and social conservatism are only partially aligned with fascism. The far bigger problem with regards to sliding into fascism is America's pro corporate stance.
"Fiscal conservatism" has always been a straw man though. Literally nobody holds the policy that government should be reckless or wasteful. All fiscal conservatism does is promote one vision of fiscal responsibility, linguistically represented as some ideal.
And of course, social conservatism is just very thinly veiled hate politics.
It's been a straw man for some people certainly. That's what I was saying. But it's also an honestly held belief going back right to the original liberal political philosophers. And we absolutely worked in a bipartisan manner towards balancing the budget until Reagan.
It's also incompatible with a pro corporate oligarchy/dictatorship. One thing people don't learn about Hitler is the reason he wanted "lebensraum" and to legally steal from Jews. Other than his meth addled hatreds, the government of Germany was still broke. He issued new currency that was literally a loan marker to solve this. But then he had to get actual capital and fast. So he stole it. He never stopped issuing those bills and there's a very good argument to be made that the Third Reich was a ponzi scheme kept afloat because it's stakeholders ran the government. This kind of fast and loose repeatedly plays out in fascist dictatorships.
Social conservatism is hate politics now. But for hundreds of years it was patronizing and parental. Of the two it's definitely closer and easier to turn into fascism. But we had it as a characteristic of both parties in the US for 150 years without it turning into fascism. So while it's hate based now and it's easy to turn hate into fascism, it too is capable of being a separate honestly held belief. Even if it is scientifically debunked in every way.
So back to the original point, this far right knucklehead is attempting to convince normal conservatives that they're the target and not the far right so they should ignore the warnings and keep voting for Trump and Co.
Balancing the budget is profoundly foolish fiscal policy. Long evidence has shown that countercyclical fiscal policy (running deficits during recessions; paying them down during times of growth) is far more effective. It is imbecilic to cut government spending during recessions when the need for government services is greatest, and it exacerbates economic downturns by removing liquidity from the economy at a time when it's already short.
I never said it was good policy. Clinton was the last president to make it a thing, and by the time Obama came into office MMT was taking precedence. Bush either didn't care or shrewdly covered his use of MMT with PR about fiscal conservatism. Now days I hardly ever hear about balancing the budget, fiscal conservatism is also being reduced to hate. They're just weaponizing it against the poor instead of people who aren't CIS het. god fearing, white men.
I suppose you could say packing the wad into the cannon after the gunpowder is an indirectly related development to the lethality of the cannon ball subsequently fired from the cannon….
….but I prefer to see it as one continuous gigantically stupid process beginning with centrists priming the chamber with gunpowder via repeated thrusting of a neoliberal austerity rod to crush the working class and then packing in a wad of rightwing conservatives to shape the social upheaval towards meaninglessly violent vectors when the inevitable explosive juncture is reached.
The cannonball loaded last is the dead brain weight of all the fascists gleefully rolling down into the breach of their fiery demise.
The cannonball is what kills people usually (though many a centrist has died in the process of packing the gunpowder in and setting off a premature explosion), but all the steps are necessary to firing the cannon.
That is... A very involved analogy. The thing is people who are actually committed to conservatism inside classical liberalism aren't fascist. They want a functioning democracy with rights. Fascists have been a mess of corrupt oligarchs stealing everything that isn't nailed down every time we've seen them in history. The three biggest warning flags have been a collective ideology held above helping the poor/disabled/marginalized, (like nationalism); getting too friendly with corporations, which begins to create the oligarchy; and racism to give the masses a common enemy.
So while fiscal and social conservatism are the public rallying cries, they aren't actually much in line with fascism. Which is why our would-be oligarchs are spending so much money to make conservatives feel like they have to vote Republican or else.
Social conservatism is, at best, fascist-adjacent. Singling out social minorities for harassment and legal persecution is very closely akin to fascist scapegoating.
Oh it's certainly not a pretty picture. But if we go around attributing everything to fascism then that's what we'll end up with because nobody will be able to see it coming. And they're always trying. Social Conservatism is a moral cesspool of hate not because that's inherent to it but because of the American experience with it and the modern reaction to most of it's ideas being debunked by science. We tied it up with the civil rights movement and weaponized it. But it spent something like 300 years happily living within the realm of liberalism. So while I don't like it, it is not in and of itself fascism.
Please cite your sources because I have never seen a scrap of evidence that social conservatism is anything but thinly disguised hate and fear of the other weaponized into political ideologies.
Cite what? The entire existence of modern political philosophy? Look nobody is denying that it gets misused. Nobody is denying that it's thoroughly debunked. Nobody is denying that Republicans are using it exactly as you say.
But if you want to deny that a sizeable portion of Democrats are conservatives who have beliefs about traditional family homes because they believe it's better for the people involved then you're ignoring an entire demographic just to paint something as purely far right. Going straight to the extremes is considered a logical fallacy for a reason.
I was not trying to dispute that Democrats are the “good cops” to the Republican “bad cops” and often implement just as draconian and cruel policies in the name of austerity of whatever dumb bullshit as do Republicans.
I consider centrist democrats conservative, especially from a perspective of leftism that is bigger than the US both in geography and time.
Then why are you only talking about the most extreme parts?
When people talk about a cannonball causing destruction, they often don’t focus on describing the gunpowder and wad loaded into the firing chamber, just the cannonball.
There are a few problems with that. If you "other" people who aren't already fascist then you're likely to push them straight into it. You also run the risk of losing your legitimacy. People will think Anti Fascists just call everything fascism. And finally, that leaves no path back for fascists. If they're either fascist or progressive then they'll stay where they are. You defeat an idea by giving its people a path to come back to mainstream society.
So you can't just describe the entirety of conservatism as part of a fascist mechanism and get a good result. It's not true and it will back fire.
Why not?
It is evidently true that conservatism usually leads to fascism, the ideologies share essential elements.
I would say treating conservative snowflakes with kid gloves is what has backfired.
Shame them for hiding behind hateful and cruel ideologies, point out their ideologies are childish and have been tried repeatedly over history never to the benefit of the average person, and don’t let them ever say they’re dumb bullshit unchallenged.
“Reaching across the isle” doesn’t work (Do you need MORE proof of that?), these people don’t want to have a conversation, they want to take away my healthcare so I die, they want to take away my girlfriends birth control and abortion access so she dies in a child birth complication, they want to take environmental protections away so they can poison the land and destroy the nature that supports us all, they want to destroy clean air and water, they want to give all the power to the rich, they want to hurt trans people they have never even met, they tend to be racist af in the policies they support if not the flags they fly… need I go on?
Sorry I don’t respect conservatism, it is and will always be the gateway drug to fascism.
Liberalism shares essential elements too. Like nationalism, corporatism, and a fetish for crime and punishment. Should we call them fascist too?
Oh and there's people on the far left who think Stalin was right.
The seeds of Fascism are everywhere. That's why it's a dangerous ideology. You can come to it from any angle. Ironically your take on conservatives fulfills the requirement for a chosen enemy of the people.
This argument of yours is ridiculous and again leans on only the most extreme of conservatives.
Explain conservatism to me in terms of the specific real world policies it pushes for in opposition to progressive policies specifically designed to help poor/disabled/marginalized people with a better social safety net?
Because y’all are literally on the wrong side 99% of the time with this, conservatism is fundamentally a “fuck you I have mine” philosophy dressed up by hacks like Jordan Peterson to seem intellectual and thoughtful. It is a joke on the whole at least in places like the US, it is no more than a mask used by selfish broken people to spread suffering.
You've misunderstood. I'm not a conservative. I'm not trying to defend conservatism. I'm just trying to explain why it isn't the same thing as fascism. Conservatives on the long scale are simply those who resist change for whatever reason. For the last 70 years that's been racial equality and helping poor people. Which incidentally, lines them up really nicely to be recruited by authoritarians and fascists.
They believe, as part of fiscal responsibility, that everyone is responsible for themselves and their family. That the government helping them actually reduces that family's ability to get out of poverty. The important thing to notice here isn't the logical imbalance, but that they believe they're helping. Obviously we aren't talking about the extremists who are more than happy to demonize the poor and marginalized. The far right has a completely different set of ideologies. That's why they have to pay Jordan Peterson to convert normal conservatives.
These beliefs are just a thin veneer of bullshit, both for conservatives and for rightwing extremists because the hate and exclusion is the point. I see no evidence that rightwing extremists are ideologically any different than normal conservatives at a fundamental level, they just have different ideas about tactics and the tone/rhetoric they actually are willing to publicly commit to (instead of doing it behind closed doors like normal conservatives/republicans). Conservatives will always roll out of the red carpet for fascists, they are intellectually lobotomized by their ideology in a way that has been shown throughout history to be essential for the rise of fascism to power, thus my cannon metaphor.
I consider it all part of the same firing process even if the cannonball is usually the fascists.
I think you're confusing the Republicans with Conservatism. Fully half the Democrats hold these conservative ideas too. And they certainly aren't rolling out a red carpet.