To my knowledge, the concept of “conservatism” is the will to conserve, preserve past values that are seen as superior. While I don’t agree with this either, this community has almost exclusively posts about fearing new things and trying to show them as evil. Evil migrants, evil new generations, evil new sexualities, whatever.
I do not see any “values” in it, only fear. Rejecting migrants is not based on morals or values that are rational, but on fear. Same for the rest. Which leads to the question, what is the point of this community? It does not lead to debate, people calling it out as fascism on one side (which is quite justified as the root ideas are seemingly identical) and the other side just saying that it’s wrong and that’s it. There’s no debate of values, as there are no values to debate about.
I do not agree with the concept of conservatism, and I couldn’t care less if this place is forever doomed to be downvoted in oblivion. But if you actually want to do something else than fear-mongering, even if you insist on talking about conservatism, then maybe it would be a good idea to refocus the community on actual ideas, and not the typical far-right speeches of hatred and fear that already flood a lot of media.
Of course I believe that it would be better to reconsider opinions that basically encourage the worst of humanity; but even aside from that, there is more to do than to replace every possibility of a conversation with the (stereo)typical “immigrants bad, jesus good, gays evil” speech.
What I find strange is that for a community that seems to be about discussing politics there is a huge absence of politics. I think the best way to explain is with a few examples. I’ll post a few of the newest headlines from other political communities and we’ll compare.
- Feds’ water legislation needs to do better around Indigenous rights
- Recall campaign launched to oust B.C. education minister over SOGI
- Danielle Smith to invoke Sovereignty Act on Ottawa power rules next week, say sources
- Trudeau government claims victory in latest trade dispute with U.S. over dairy
- Feds want Toronto to do more in exchange for housing cash — the mayor says she’s ready
Each one of these headlines mentions a politician or government agency and something they’ve done or said
- ‘I Will Come For You’: Court Filing Reveals Judge in Trump Case Received ‘Hundreds’ of Threats
- Andrew Cuomo accused of sexual harassment in new lawsuit filed by former executive assistant Brittany Commisso
- Republican Senate candidate’s family egg company caught in price-fixing plot
- ‘Pipe down’: Biden allies step up calls for Dems to rally around president
- Backlash to affirmative action hits pioneering maternal health program for Black women
The slant here is a lot more obvious with headlines being more sensationalized, however, except for the last one it’s all about what politicians have said or done. The last one is about a conservative group suing to end a government program that provides charity to pregnant Black women which opens discussion about weather or not that program should exist.
- One of America’s fastest growing high school sports has ‘no benchwarmers’
- Pro-Palestinian protesters disrupt Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City
- Migrants Take All Free Thanksgiving Turkeys Intended For Struggling New Yorkers
- Poll: Gun ownership reaches record high with American electorate
- USAToday Fact check: Yes, there’s a vehicle ‘kill switch’ in Biden’s 2021 infrastructure bill, and we lie about it.
Only the last article has anything to do with politicians or the government. The rest are just articles about guns, migrants, and protests. If the aim is for political discussion, articles should be about politics. I’m not sure what discussion can had with these kinds of articles, other than “that article is stupid” which is said more often with a downvote than a comment.
Only the last article has anything to do with politicians or the government.
And on top of that, that particular post misrepresented the actual article. So the conversation on that one was ~90% calling out the post for misrepresenting the article instead of the policy itself.
Only because you morons are absolutely dedicated to proving that a kill switch is not a kill switch because it would make your policy look bad
Your use of name calling makes you look worse.
He doesn’t have a real argument and he knows it, so he resorts to ad hominems. As usual.
I don’t care about how you think I look bub
I honestly don’t see the problem here. It sounds like celebrity gossip versus actual news.
The rest are just articles about guns, migrants, and protests
Are these not highly politicized topics, at the bare minimum? I mean for fuck sake, you genuinely believe protests to be a non-political subject? It just sounds more like you’re upset that not everyone agrees with you.
Gun policies, immigration policies, and the government’s stance on the Isreal-Palestine conflict are politics. Gun sales, migrants receiving charity, and protests are only tangentially related.
I’m not mad at all. I’m genuinely interested in reading what people think about government policies. I’m just pointing out that this community doesn’t make many posts where people can actually discuss policies. “Gun sales are up”. Alright? And? What’s the discussion to be had? That’s not a political stance that can be debated, that’s a sales report.
I do find this to be an interesting perspective, because in general, I wouldn’t consider these to be tangential, but rather the real-world nature of political topics. Immigration isn’t just some nebulous political topic that gets discussed as a matter of theory up in DC. It’s a real thing that has real, tangible effects, and those merit discussion, not just as some tangential foot note of the theory.
And the sex lives of ex politicians aren’t tangential? The shit you listed is just celebrity gossip for broken millennials.
can you point to the list of sex lives of ex politicians
Andrew Cuomo.
you misread, i asked for the list of sex lives of ex politicians
‘andrew cuomo’ is not a list, nor is a criminal case about power abuse in local government ‘the sex lives of former politicians’
I didn’t claim that was the full list. I chose an example.
Capital c Conservatism is about hierarchy. Hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, or whatever. Any category imaginable must fit into an order with some on the top who rule over the masses at the bottom. Egalitarian ideals like democracy are disgusting to the Conservative, unless the franchise is exclusive to the “right” people.
God, guns, country, freedom, and capitalism are trends that come and go, but from Edmond Berk to Jordan Peterson, hierarchy is the throughline.
Not sure I agree with this. I could care less about your sexuality, gender or race. It’s the least interesting thing about you. To liberals it’s the only way they define themselves. It’s the only thing they are. It’s weird to me.
It’s weird to me to be in a conservative thought space like this and see someone say they don’t care about my sexuality among other things. Because when I am in a real life conservative space, and I (69f) walk around town with my spouse (67f) literally minding our own business and not so much as holding hands, we regularly get stared at, laughed at, and occasionally spit at. We get denied restaurant service. Sales clerks may permit us to make a purchase, but they take a step backwards while taking our payment. Or instead they might disappear into the back room and not reappear until after we leave the store.
Trust me, it’s not ME focusing on my sexuality. It’s the conservatives around me. I’m just window shopping and stopping for lunch in a town I haven’t visited before.
I don’t know any conservative who cares about your sexuality.
I’ve never seen that happen and my best friend is a trans woman who looks like a dude in a dress. She is not the least bit passing to anyone other than herself. She’s liberal. I’m conservative and nobody ever says a word to us when we are out and about. So maybe you need to stop and think about what you’re doing to repel people. My brother best friend was openly homosexual in the 80’s and no one ever denied us service when we all went out. I mean he was openly flaming gay. Never an issue.
So I am not saying your experience is false, but doesn’t match the experience I’ve had being around people of different sexualities than my own. Most people just don’t care unless you make a weird scene.
I would dearly love to live in the world you believe you inhabit. I won’t bother continuing this discussion with you though, as I KNOW I’m doing nothing socially inappropriate or offensive beyond walking or eating next to my wife.
I just have a hard time believing people are spitting about you in the modern age.
When Growing up in the Bible Belt with an openly gay person in my social circle didn’t ever cause an issue. This is back when homosexuality was still a crime in many places.
I would say your experience is very unique in 2023 and it’s nothing I’ve ever seen or experienced. It’s nothing any of my friends have mentioned in their personal lives which normally would come if they were routinely being persecuted or assaulted with a deadly weapon.
So it just leaves me puzzled.
You don’t have to keep lying. No one here believes you, but it doesn’t fucking matter anyway. You don’t get to use your ignorance and naive conservative experience to claim that bigotry doesn’t exist.
Everyone here believes me. It’s a liberal lie that you are repeating.
This is just overwhelmingly false on just about every manner. Try getting your information from somewhere other than r/politics
Don’t forget that conservatism exclusively punches left.
Sure there are Nazis marching alongside conservatives, but the real enemies are the people who say “maybe we shouldn’t be the only developed country where people routinely bankrupt their life savings to pay for healthcare.”
Our side may support Nazis but at least we keep the wrong people from being happy…
What’s weird is I thought I left a comment giving you an official warning.
Well, here it is.
Rule 3, bad faith. Official warning.
Bad faith? Like censoring users who don’t support the echo chamber?
Please read the sidebar. Also the pinned post might help clarify.
Fuck off with your censorship bootlicker
Rule 1 Abusive Language, Rule 3 Bad faith. 1 day ban.
Rule 4 mods should jump off cliffs.
It always cracks me up how wrong liberals are about everything.
I support a single payer system.
Even Trump praised it.
https://pnhp.org/news/trumps-forbidden-love-single-payer-health-care/
Maybe you’re a closet conservative and you didn’t even know it.
The major debate is how to fund it, how to change the system and not end your like Canada or Europe where it’s in name only. I don’t want Medicare for all. I want something more akin to the Australian system.
with the (stereo)typical “immigrants bad, jesus good, gays evil” speech.
That middle part has all but vanished here. We can’t have compassion for migrants because we have “limited resources” and clearly they’re all just bad people (totally unrelated to their skin color they’ll tell you). They gladly elect politicians that destroy the social safety net for the poor.
The only thing even remotely related to Jesus being here is supply side Jesus.
You have a weird view if you still think all conservatives are christians. Hell, have I posted a single christian thing here?
I think your problem is you have this inaccurate preconceived notion, and its just not jiving with what you see.
You have a weird view if you still think all conservatives are christians.
I do not think that, and never said I did. However, the majority of republicans/conservatives are christian, and the party/ideology are irrevocably intertwined at this point.
I’m an atheist/agnostic. Most conservatives I know are hardcore atheist.
Now none of are anti-religion. I do attend mass from time to time as I like the tradition but I have never had faith.
I remember reading the description of the values of the Republican party in the voter guide when I first could vote and thinking it made a lot of sense. Then I learned that instead of states rights, support of small business, and individual liberty it’s all about pushing conformity at every level based on repressive ideology and taking over the federal mechanisms of power to enforce their will, I got a lot less interested.
At this point I have seen so many rabid, judgemental, hateful conservatives that I am convinced they need to burn the party to the ground and start from scratch.
At this point I have seen so many rabid, judgemental, hateful conservatives that I am convinced they need to burn the party to the ground and start from scratch.
Something about glass houses and stones seems pretty relevant here
To my knowledge, the concept of “conservatism” is the will to conserve
That is not how any label has ever worked.
As if you’d know anything about it
Ideally Conservatism should be about being reserved/realistic and Liberalism should be about being optimistic/hopeful. Kind of like finding balance between art and science if that matters any sense.
Let’s take imagination for example. A liberal view would be too help everyone that comes to America looking for help. A conservative view would be America can’t just have an open border and let in everyone from every country. These are both rational views. Ideally both sides would compromise and find balance somewhere in the middle to help as many imagrants as is reasonably possible. Sadly that’s not the case.
Yeah, it’s hard to compromise with people who’s only response to anything is to try and yell “racism” as loud as possible
When someone largely supports programs that primarily exacerbate ethnic, minority, or racial disparity. What’s the correct terms?
The correct answer is to take a long, hard look at why you’re so obsessed with people’s skin color
Yes, that’s the question we want to know about you. Why do you all enact policies that focus so much on hurting people who share ethnicities, skin colors, etc. That’s the question. That’s why I asked you what the correct term is. But you don’t have an answer. Just straw men and deflection.
We arent focused on skin color. You’re just the ones picking everything apart based on it, and acting like everyone else must be just as obsessed as you are.
Then why does popular conservative policy consistently disparaged certain skin colors and ethnicities so commonly. It couldn’t happen just by chance or accident. The rates that it’s happening aren’t coincidence. So someone sure is. And it’s sure popular with conservatives. That’s interesting right?
No, your obsession with race, and assumptions that everyone else just must be as obsessed as you is the only interesting thing here
We call those democrats.
They absolutely were from at least 1870 to 1964. But something happened that made them largely leave the party. If only we knew what it was! We do, actually. We totally know. You know too. But you’ll still go ”reeeeeeee! Thing that historically happened never happened! We all went to Disneyland that year!” Rinse repeat because all you have is deflection. 🤔
Still are democrats. The myth of the party switch is just that. A myth.
Yawn. You all are so predictable. If you actually could go off and live in denial and leave everyone else alone it would be nice.
When you rely on facts. You tend to be predictable.
Note: I’m the main poster, and head mod. I’m trying my best, but I’m kind of a fuck up, and have a hard time explaining myself well.
When you’re posting news articles, it’s usually about the stuff that happened recently. Combined with “Not all progress is good progress”, it’s basically indistinguishable from “fearing new things”. But fair point, and I’ve been trying to find good stuff happening, like the rates of gun ownership going up, and high school skeet shooting clubs. I’ll give it more thought on what quality content actually looks like. In the meantime, I’ll keep going.
Removed by mod
I would describe conservatism as the belief that changing things can make them worse, which can manifest (or appear to manifest) as a fear of change.
Im a libertarian-leaning socially-liberal economically-conservative person rather than a standard Republican so I don’t know how representative I am, but here are my conservative values: the people of the USA are amazingly free, wealthy, and safe. I am an immigrant; my family got enough government support to survive when we came here with almost nothing, I attended excellent public schools and went to college with a generous scholarship, and now I live a secure upper-middle-class lifestyle. For me, the American Dream is very much real.
I worry when I hear people (most of whom had great opportunities like I did) claim that America is exceptionally bad and demand drastic change. I would say that they want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, but many of them are worse than that because they apparently don’t recognize that the eggs that the goose is laying are even golden. I’m not claiming that there’s no room for improvement, but improvements must be made slowly and carefully in order to avoid breaking what we do have already, which is both precious and fragile.
my family got enough government support to survive when we came here with almost nothing, I attended excellent public schools and went to college with a generous scholarship
And most of those things have gotten significantly worse because of “conservatives”. And the people who want “drastic change” are the progressives who want to restore the old values. What you already have is getting worse all the time.
Because the problem in the US is that political left is seen as the same as progressive and political right is conservative. And the right opposes government interventions in the form of social safety nets, free education, etc. Those are not conservative values, but since the US only has 2 parties, they’ve become conservative value because the conservatives are also right-wing.
If you’re a libertarian, I don’t see how you even support tax-funded programs like these.
I don’t think these things have gotten worse, but my perception is based on looking at immigrants in NYC, which isn’t a Republican area. With that said, I don’t disagree with you. A lot of current Republicans are willing and even eager to break things - the distinction between them and the most extreme Democrats seems to be which “utopian” vision they want to reach by burning down the current system, and IMO that willingness to destroy what we already have should be unacceptable to reasonable conservatives.
As an aside: I’m not captial-L Libertarian. I lean towards libertarianism because I really don’t like being told what to do and therefore I oppose both Democratic “nanny state” policies and Republican moral busybodies. However, I think that government is the best tool for providing a level of social services that almost everyone is willing to support out of basic human decency, and I also think that these social services make good economic sense from a purely selfish perspective too - I pay a lot more in taxes than I ever received in social services so the USA got a good deal on me.
I’m a republican and I do think the moral majority is too much involved in the party. Abortion is a perfect example. A small government republican would leave it up the woman to make her own decision. Instead we have people pushing Jesus as the answer.
and IMO that willingness to destroy what we already have should be unacceptable to reasonable conservatives.
Why? A huge amount of what we already have fucking sucks. Why should it be unacceptable to get rid of it?
Because it’s better to fix an existing system than to have none at all.
Why is more government always the answer?
Fix != more
…this community has almost exclusively posts about fearing new things and trying to show them as evil. Evil migrants, evil new generations, evil new sexualities, whatever.
I do not see any “values” in it, only fear. Rejecting migrants is not based on morals or values that are rational, but on fear. Same for the rest. Which leads to the question, what is the point of this community? It does not lead to debate, people calling it out as fascism on one side (which is quite justified as the root ideas are seemingly identical) and the other side just saying that it’s wrong and that’s it. There’s no debate of values, as there are no values to debate about.
Fear is a valid emotion when it comes to politics. Underlying articles based on fear, if that’s what you see, are the values to be protected, sustained, or advocated. I don’t really see fear itself as a problem.
That you see only fear is reductive. Isn’t “conservatives are afraid of everything” too easy? For me, it has no explanatory power. Why are they afraid?
it would be a good idea to refocus the community on actual ideas, and not the typical far-right speeches of hatred and fear that already flood a lot of media.
Yeah, but also meet them halfway.
Go beyond the hatred and the fear to what values they’re really trying to communicate. If all you see in a Trump speech, for example, is his fascist tendencies (of which there are many, don’t get me wrong), then you’ll miss the appeal to regular people on the losing side of Democratic policies. The pathetic, in both the colloquial and rhetorical sense, appeal to leftists as invasive vermin is itself an expression of values defined in opposition.
As far as I’m concerned, the job of leftists in this community is to tease out the values that conservatives routinely fail to identify clearly and discuss that. That should be what makes this place different.
Fear is the mind killer. It’s rarely valid, despite being an emotion. Often highly irrational. Leading to bad decisions. Policy and legislation should never be based on fear. Fear should be the last thing anyone accommodates politically.
Just declaring that everyone you disagree with has no values doesn’t make it so.
Then what ARE the values of conservatism?
That highly depends on the individual.
