Ideological Crisis on the American Right
The American Right is currently at a significant crossroads and I am speaking about it here not as a critic but as a lifelong insider. But even for an outsider, it should be valuable to understand why things are the way they are, why the Right currently has an ideological crisis and what this means for the future.
Some ignorant American conservatives believe that the American conservative movement dates to the time of America's Founding Fathers. This, of course, is absolutely not true nor even close. The true origin of American conservatism as we understood it in the first quarter of the 21st century starts with William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine in the 1950s.
What Buckley did was to form a large right-of-center coalition to go on a crusade against Communism and its creeping influence in American society, but to carefully moderate it enough for it to recieve and maintain mainstream acceptibility and (through efforts like his Firing Line television program) intellectual credibility. This meant that the "far Right" radicals of various stripes too far outside America's Overton Window had to go. No more John Birch Society, no more Ayn Rand and most crucially, no more white nationalism. Buckley was responsible for making American conservatism respectable, in no small part by carefully, strategically curating it so that these fringe kooks were deliberately, systematically excluded.
Buckley's fusionism explicitly embraced and promoted the Civil Rights movement not only by voting for the Civil Rights act in the 1960s but also by making Dr. Martin Luther King's philosophy in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" theirs -- permanently. They did not stay aligned with the direction of black racialist activism after King's death, obviously, but their acceptance of this as a shared premise and baseline for the American political conversation made it so that King's post-racial dream became a non-partisan consensus for nearly all Americans while also granting themselves enough mainstream credibility to have taken over the Republican party completely by the 1980s, with Reagan as their champion.
This is why American conservatives said "No" to white nationalism but "yes" to post-racial liberalism, civic nationalism and anti-Communism. The brains of the operation (Buckley & friends) constructed the coalition out of three main factions:
1. Libertarians, who got to control economics.
2. Neoconservatives, who got to control foreign policy.
3. Christian traditional moralists, who got to control social issues.
If you're astute, and not too heavily trapped within the assumptions of the American political scene of the past 40 years, then you'll notice something about the ideologies of these three factions who controlled the Republican party's platform: They have almost nothing whatsoever in common besdies anti-Communism.
If it wasn't for Buckley's fusionism, then there is absolutely no reason why Christian traditional moralism would be connected with libertarianism (they're opposites!) nor why libertarianism would be connected with neoconservatism. (again, they're opposites!) The formation of this coalition in American politics was never inevitable: it was always very historically contingent. But never accidental: this was Buckley's plan and it worked. (even though it didn't make a whole lot of sense and relied on not talking about numerous ideological premises at the same time)
Until the Soviet Union fell in 1991. This actually threw the movement into its first ideological crisis, with the question: "What do you even do after you win?" It wasn't very clear, actually, and that crisis made some of the fault lines in the coalition start showing in the 1990s. Remember, the coalition was held together by one key issue: resistance to international Communism. But Communism, after the fall of the Soviet Union, was no longer seen as a genuinely threatening international system. Communism had become a very national thing for China and a few other holdouts but was obviously no longer seriously going to be the dominant ideology of the 21st century. Capitalism had won. We no longer needed to worry about Communism so ... why do we need to vote for Republicans?
Bush campaigned as a moderate in 2000 (I supported Alan Keyes) but he barely made it over the finish line by trying to paint Al Gore as a psuedo-Communist radical. But then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.
9/11 made it so that, for a few years there, the neoconservative faction became absolutely dominant. Their rhetoric about security threats seemed to have been vindicated, and the idea in the Bush years was that Buckley's coalition could be revitalized and held together by identifying a new civilizational enemy to replace Communism, which they called "radical Islam" solely because they didn't have the balls necessary to just call it, "Islam."
And at the time, I totally believed in what the Bush administration was doing, I supported the Iraq war and believed we needed a crusade to change the Middle East the same way we had changed Europe and Japan after WW2. Indeed, I saw Bush's War on Terror as a direct analogue to WW2 and the only opposition I heard from popular media at the time didn't even seem like a live option to me because it was coming from people who pretty much were Communists, who were only anti-war when non-Communist countries went to war. They saw it as a direct analogue to Vietnam and didn't seem capable of evaluating any war outside the context of Vietnam -- and I still don't agree with their premise about Vietnam.
But it turns out, Bush was in fact wrong about Iraq. And critically, what I didn't hear in the 2000s -- what I wasn't ALLOWED to hear in the 2000s -- was one specific voice that could have changed my mind: William F. Buckley's. In his old age, he disagreed with the Iraq War, identifying it as a mistake and as not being what he had built this coalition for. A principled conservative opposition to the Iraq War was absolutely not within the Overton Window of the time and frankly seems hard to imagine fitting into that world. But it was there, just suppressed. I think that's something Buckley should be remembered for. He didn't just create our movement but also, he was right when the rest of the Republican party was wrong. He warned us and we should have listened.
After Bush, we got two very, very moderate candidates in McCain and Romney. Despite McCain's "maverick" reputation, neither of those guys were going to rock the boat. They were going to carry on Buckley's fusionist coalition just like George H. W. Bush had tried to do back in 1988. The GOP primaries from this period were funny, because the question everyone was asking was, "Will the real Ronald Reagan please stand up?" Every single candidate was trying to make the case that they, and not the other guys, were the new Ronald Reagan. And none of them actually were.
Here's where I get beyond just the history of the Republican party and into my opnion of what's happened: The failure of Iraq disqualified the neoconservatives as incompetent to govern. The 2008 financial crisis, the dominant mass censorship of Big Tech from 2014-2024, the massive inflation and the rise of "You'll own nothing and be happy" rent seeking literally everywhere have disqualified libertarians as incompetent to govern in much the same way. And the clear, undeniable loss of the culture war has pushed the Christian traditional moralsts (That's my faction) out of the mainstream voting bloc status we used to have. These events have created not just a power vacuum, but also a massive internal ideological crisis for the American Right. The Buckley fusionist coalition worldview has been tested against real world conditions and, without the threat of Communism to excuse its mistakes, has been found wanting in practice. Followers of Buckley have been labelled as, "Conservative Inc" or "Boomer Conservatives" now, because they dogmatically cling to an ideology that has manifestly failed. An ideology that I used to hold and which I still admire certain aspects of, has failed in practice.
Into the power vacuum created by the slow but steady death of fusionism in the 2010s stepped Donald Trump. Love him or hate him, he's America's first "Meme President." I hope he'll do some good things and I hope we can survive the bad things he does and I don't see him as either the savior of America or as the absolute devil that the American Left always says every Republican President always is and always has for my entire life and probably always will. He's no angel, but there's also no sense in crying wolf about him. Trump is, for the most part, a pretty normal politician.
Except for one thing: Trump isn't connected to the old Buckley fusionist coalition. He and his followers call themselves "conservatives" but in fact, their ruling ideology is even less clear than Buckley's fusionism was. At least fusionism dividied up policy into distinct areas and then handed out control of those policy areas to different Republican factions.
Trump's populism does not have an underlying philosophy of governance! And that's why you can't even meaningfully attack it, since it isn't ideologically solid enough even to attack! The idiotic critiques of Trump I usually see fail to recognize this! They want to say he's a Nazi. LOL. A Nazi would have definite stances Trump doesn't have! If Trump was a Nazi, then at least his stances would be clear!
And please note, my point isn't that Trump's populism is good or bad: it's that it's temporary! It can't be permanent! That's the problem with it!
This cannot last. The American Right needs a new governing philosophy. It needs a coherent, less interventionist foreign policy to replace neoconservatism. It needs a new, more interventionist economic policy to replace libertarianism. And while I can't advocate for it to replace my own faction as well, I can recognize that this is likely to happen.
What I would like to happen is for the new American Right to:
1. Reject anti-white policies & rhetoric, but on the grounds of a moderate liberal civic nationalism, not white nationalism.
2. Stop seeing "socialism" as the boogeyman and instead work to get responsible people appointed and responsible policies made for real governance, not just opposition.
3. Actually get control of Big Tech, reigning it in so that tech works for the benefit of people and not the other way around.
4. Pursue pro-natalist, pro-family, pro-home-ownership policies across the board. See if we can make friends with labor.
5. Stay home from foreign wars.
But the future I actually see happening for the American Right, without a new governing philosophy is that it will fall prey to two possible dangers:
1. Once Trump's populism runs its course, how ideologically vacuous it is will become evident and it will be abandoned by the American people, taking the American Right with it.
2. The white nationalist kooks from before Buckley, who have been lurking underground for over 40 years, may truly emerge into mainstream political prominence again. And they're armed with a great deal of truth on their side this time, because overtly anti-white policies, explicitly written to reject liberalism in order privilege "historically marginalized groups" (meaning non-whites) have become not just openly debated but normalized in both government and corporate policy. There's a backlash against this coming, and without some force to moderate that backlash, to keep it contained within reason, we may see the American Right go in some very ugly directions.
The Left has actually identified this danger, but foolishly, they think it's already here and often they think that people like Charlie Kirk, who just wanted to debate them, were the threat. Idiots. The debate guy isn't the threat. The armed militia guys are the threat. Obviously. The debate guy is what's keeping them in check, keeping alive the belief that differences can be settled and an amicable solution can be found through the democratic process in civil society. Don't attack the debate guys as if they're the threat because, in reality, if your project is to preserve and maintain civil society, then the conservative debate guys are your allies.
You can't fly a plane with two left wings. (or two right wings) There's going to be an American Right, in some form. It's a two party system. This is reality. I am just hoping that the new American Right after Trump can be one which still promotes liberty and justice for all -- and to do that, it's going to need a new political theory, beyond Trump's populism.
Some ignorant American conservatives believe that the American conservative movement dates to the time of America's Founding Fathers. This, of course, is absolutely not true nor even close. The true origin of American conservatism as we understood it in the first quarter of the 21st century starts with William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine in the 1950s.
What Buckley did was to form a large right-of-center coalition to go on a crusade against Communism and its creeping influence in American society, but to carefully moderate it enough for it to recieve and maintain mainstream acceptibility and (through efforts like his Firing Line television program) intellectual credibility. This meant that the "far Right" radicals of various stripes too far outside America's Overton Window had to go. No more John Birch Society, no more Ayn Rand and most crucially, no more white nationalism. Buckley was responsible for making American conservatism respectable, in no small part by carefully, strategically curating it so that these fringe kooks were deliberately, systematically excluded.
Buckley's fusionism explicitly embraced and promoted the Civil Rights movement not only by voting for the Civil Rights act in the 1960s but also by making Dr. Martin Luther King's philosophy in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" theirs -- permanently. They did not stay aligned with the direction of black racialist activism after King's death, obviously, but their acceptance of this as a shared premise and baseline for the American political conversation made it so that King's post-racial dream became a non-partisan consensus for nearly all Americans while also granting themselves enough mainstream credibility to have taken over the Republican party completely by the 1980s, with Reagan as their champion.
This is why American conservatives said "No" to white nationalism but "yes" to post-racial liberalism, civic nationalism and anti-Communism. The brains of the operation (Buckley & friends) constructed the coalition out of three main factions:
1. Libertarians, who got to control economics.
2. Neoconservatives, who got to control foreign policy.
3. Christian traditional moralists, who got to control social issues.
If you're astute, and not too heavily trapped within the assumptions of the American political scene of the past 40 years, then you'll notice something about the ideologies of these three factions who controlled the Republican party's platform: They have almost nothing whatsoever in common besdies anti-Communism.
If it wasn't for Buckley's fusionism, then there is absolutely no reason why Christian traditional moralism would be connected with libertarianism (they're opposites!) nor why libertarianism would be connected with neoconservatism. (again, they're opposites!) The formation of this coalition in American politics was never inevitable: it was always very historically contingent. But never accidental: this was Buckley's plan and it worked. (even though it didn't make a whole lot of sense and relied on not talking about numerous ideological premises at the same time)
Until the Soviet Union fell in 1991. This actually threw the movement into its first ideological crisis, with the question: "What do you even do after you win?" It wasn't very clear, actually, and that crisis made some of the fault lines in the coalition start showing in the 1990s. Remember, the coalition was held together by one key issue: resistance to international Communism. But Communism, after the fall of the Soviet Union, was no longer seen as a genuinely threatening international system. Communism had become a very national thing for China and a few other holdouts but was obviously no longer seriously going to be the dominant ideology of the 21st century. Capitalism had won. We no longer needed to worry about Communism so ... why do we need to vote for Republicans?
Bush campaigned as a moderate in 2000 (I supported Alan Keyes) but he barely made it over the finish line by trying to paint Al Gore as a psuedo-Communist radical. But then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.
9/11 made it so that, for a few years there, the neoconservative faction became absolutely dominant. Their rhetoric about security threats seemed to have been vindicated, and the idea in the Bush years was that Buckley's coalition could be revitalized and held together by identifying a new civilizational enemy to replace Communism, which they called "radical Islam" solely because they didn't have the balls necessary to just call it, "Islam."
And at the time, I totally believed in what the Bush administration was doing, I supported the Iraq war and believed we needed a crusade to change the Middle East the same way we had changed Europe and Japan after WW2. Indeed, I saw Bush's War on Terror as a direct analogue to WW2 and the only opposition I heard from popular media at the time didn't even seem like a live option to me because it was coming from people who pretty much were Communists, who were only anti-war when non-Communist countries went to war. They saw it as a direct analogue to Vietnam and didn't seem capable of evaluating any war outside the context of Vietnam -- and I still don't agree with their premise about Vietnam.
But it turns out, Bush was in fact wrong about Iraq. And critically, what I didn't hear in the 2000s -- what I wasn't ALLOWED to hear in the 2000s -- was one specific voice that could have changed my mind: William F. Buckley's. In his old age, he disagreed with the Iraq War, identifying it as a mistake and as not being what he had built this coalition for. A principled conservative opposition to the Iraq War was absolutely not within the Overton Window of the time and frankly seems hard to imagine fitting into that world. But it was there, just suppressed. I think that's something Buckley should be remembered for. He didn't just create our movement but also, he was right when the rest of the Republican party was wrong. He warned us and we should have listened.
After Bush, we got two very, very moderate candidates in McCain and Romney. Despite McCain's "maverick" reputation, neither of those guys were going to rock the boat. They were going to carry on Buckley's fusionist coalition just like George H. W. Bush had tried to do back in 1988. The GOP primaries from this period were funny, because the question everyone was asking was, "Will the real Ronald Reagan please stand up?" Every single candidate was trying to make the case that they, and not the other guys, were the new Ronald Reagan. And none of them actually were.
Here's where I get beyond just the history of the Republican party and into my opnion of what's happened: The failure of Iraq disqualified the neoconservatives as incompetent to govern. The 2008 financial crisis, the dominant mass censorship of Big Tech from 2014-2024, the massive inflation and the rise of "You'll own nothing and be happy" rent seeking literally everywhere have disqualified libertarians as incompetent to govern in much the same way. And the clear, undeniable loss of the culture war has pushed the Christian traditional moralsts (That's my faction) out of the mainstream voting bloc status we used to have. These events have created not just a power vacuum, but also a massive internal ideological crisis for the American Right. The Buckley fusionist coalition worldview has been tested against real world conditions and, without the threat of Communism to excuse its mistakes, has been found wanting in practice. Followers of Buckley have been labelled as, "Conservative Inc" or "Boomer Conservatives" now, because they dogmatically cling to an ideology that has manifestly failed. An ideology that I used to hold and which I still admire certain aspects of, has failed in practice.
Into the power vacuum created by the slow but steady death of fusionism in the 2010s stepped Donald Trump. Love him or hate him, he's America's first "Meme President." I hope he'll do some good things and I hope we can survive the bad things he does and I don't see him as either the savior of America or as the absolute devil that the American Left always says every Republican President always is and always has for my entire life and probably always will. He's no angel, but there's also no sense in crying wolf about him. Trump is, for the most part, a pretty normal politician.
Except for one thing: Trump isn't connected to the old Buckley fusionist coalition. He and his followers call themselves "conservatives" but in fact, their ruling ideology is even less clear than Buckley's fusionism was. At least fusionism dividied up policy into distinct areas and then handed out control of those policy areas to different Republican factions.
Trump's populism does not have an underlying philosophy of governance! And that's why you can't even meaningfully attack it, since it isn't ideologically solid enough even to attack! The idiotic critiques of Trump I usually see fail to recognize this! They want to say he's a Nazi. LOL. A Nazi would have definite stances Trump doesn't have! If Trump was a Nazi, then at least his stances would be clear!
And please note, my point isn't that Trump's populism is good or bad: it's that it's temporary! It can't be permanent! That's the problem with it!
This cannot last. The American Right needs a new governing philosophy. It needs a coherent, less interventionist foreign policy to replace neoconservatism. It needs a new, more interventionist economic policy to replace libertarianism. And while I can't advocate for it to replace my own faction as well, I can recognize that this is likely to happen.
What I would like to happen is for the new American Right to:
1. Reject anti-white policies & rhetoric, but on the grounds of a moderate liberal civic nationalism, not white nationalism.
2. Stop seeing "socialism" as the boogeyman and instead work to get responsible people appointed and responsible policies made for real governance, not just opposition.
3. Actually get control of Big Tech, reigning it in so that tech works for the benefit of people and not the other way around.
4. Pursue pro-natalist, pro-family, pro-home-ownership policies across the board. See if we can make friends with labor.
5. Stay home from foreign wars.
But the future I actually see happening for the American Right, without a new governing philosophy is that it will fall prey to two possible dangers:
1. Once Trump's populism runs its course, how ideologically vacuous it is will become evident and it will be abandoned by the American people, taking the American Right with it.
2. The white nationalist kooks from before Buckley, who have been lurking underground for over 40 years, may truly emerge into mainstream political prominence again. And they're armed with a great deal of truth on their side this time, because overtly anti-white policies, explicitly written to reject liberalism in order privilege "historically marginalized groups" (meaning non-whites) have become not just openly debated but normalized in both government and corporate policy. There's a backlash against this coming, and without some force to moderate that backlash, to keep it contained within reason, we may see the American Right go in some very ugly directions.
The Left has actually identified this danger, but foolishly, they think it's already here and often they think that people like Charlie Kirk, who just wanted to debate them, were the threat. Idiots. The debate guy isn't the threat. The armed militia guys are the threat. Obviously. The debate guy is what's keeping them in check, keeping alive the belief that differences can be settled and an amicable solution can be found through the democratic process in civil society. Don't attack the debate guys as if they're the threat because, in reality, if your project is to preserve and maintain civil society, then the conservative debate guys are your allies.
You can't fly a plane with two left wings. (or two right wings) There's going to be an American Right, in some form. It's a two party system. This is reality. I am just hoping that the new American Right after Trump can be one which still promotes liberty and justice for all -- and to do that, it's going to need a new political theory, beyond Trump's populism.
Comments (121)
Is there really a right wing and a left wing in the US, or was Gore Vidal right when he said, “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat”?
It certainly seems to an outsider that the current government has less competence and seems much cruder than previous administrations. But in the end it's mostly neo-liberalism, what varies is the capability.
I’m interested in how the Right is best understood. Is the word really that meaningful? There used to be reactionaries, libertarians, and conservatives, but do any of these distinctions really mean anything anymore? Trump doesn't seem to be a conservative, he's more of a radical.
Quoting BenMcLean
Or are they just a showbiz distraction? Aren't some of the debate guys also canaries in the coalmine? Testing sometimes appalling positions to see if the public has an appetite for them?
Quoting BenMcLean
You sound like an old fashioned conservative with an isolationist bent.
What is your potion on corporate power in general?
It's amazing how that one debate of Buckley v. Vidal in 1968 continues to define American politics!
Vidal was just a Communist bemoaning the fact that neither American political party was explicitly Communist because both of them preferred living over dying. I notice Vidal was absolutely protective of his own property and the profits from his book and film royalties. Vidal's life illustrates Conquest's First Law: "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best."
What do you even want in a political party that doesn't protect property at all? Bread lines? Purges? Gulags? Chernobyl?
I'm willing to move left on economics ... but within some limits.
As I see it, we need to protect private individual property from corporate overreach, not abolish private property!
I don't know if Trump is radical enough for me.
Like Gore Vidal was? He was clearly part of the show if anyone ever was, not above it.
I can't say there are none, but that is in general not the problem you're facing.
That is, I think, my main point. The Right needs to go anti-corporate in a big way. Wall Street abandoned us in 2008, then actively persecuted us from 2014-2024. It is time they got what's coming to them: a massive regulatory backlash. An American right wing actually willing to wield political power because it has ditched libertarianism to reign in and stop Woke Capitalism.
Interesting. I would place him as a right-centrist, certainly not a communist. It’s amazing how McCarthyism continues to define American politics!
Quoting BenMcLean
Who wants to abolish private property? No point answering this since it certainly isn’t me or Vidal.
Quoting BenMcLean
Some people would call this Communism too. But I would agree with you on this point.
Can you see seriously any elements of the US right going agaisnt the corporations?
Quoting BenMcLean
Yes, I think Vidal is a Kirk forerunner, just a difference in performance.
All that stuff about Big Tech, wokeness, shipping jobs overseas and DEI: that's not really about women or brown people. That is about corporate HR.
But it isn't enough. They won't make the reasons explicit yet that libertarian economics (lack of regulation) is the problem. I am hoping soon they will get there.
You were right, it is interesting and well written. It’s also complete fucking bullshit. Self-serving lying bullshit. I started laughing when he started talking about “fusionist coalitions.” And then I had to stop reading when he said “Trump is, for the most part, a pretty normal politician.” I don’t hate President Trump and I don’t think he’s a Nazi. What I do think is that he’s a very bad president and bad hollow man.
Here is the OP’s big lie— since the late 60s and early 70s, the Republican party has a self-consciously and cynically set out to split American society along racial and social lines in order to gain political advantage. What we see now is the end product of that disgusting, intentional strategy.
That’s all I’ll have to say in this thread. I don’t think I could hold my lunch down to say anything else or to listen to any more of the lies. Of course OP has the right to say these things and what he’s written doesn’t violate any of the site guidelines as far as I know. Still, this discussion is a blight on the forum.
I understand that Buckley took a very principled position on antisemitism in the Right and was instrumental in reforming American conservatism.
It's likely to be Vance's Christian nationalism in 2028 if the Republicans win. Conservatives today are deeply concerned with mass migration and political Islam rather than free market capitalism. In any case, I haven't seen this level of polarization in my lifetime.
He hangs out with Christian nationalists, but hasn't claimed to be one himself, unless you know where he's said otherwise?
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
The people who are worried about "political Islam" are also anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist, and sexist. They praise freaking Adolph Hitler.
He has said that Christianity is America's creed.
Quoting frank
Ad hom.
He said the two coincide in terms of values. Christian nationalism is the attitude that all Americans should be Christian.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
The people who are worried about "political Islam" are also anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist, and sexist. And they publicly praise Adolph Hitler.
Quoting BitconnectCarlosThey haven't yet become willing to acknowledge the fact of the failure which has ocurred. Libertarianism offers no defense against Woke Capitalism and that's why it has to go.
Quoting frankThe people who are worried about "anti-Semitic, homophobic, racist, and sexist" are lunatics who think every politician from the party opposite theirs is literally Hitler, no matter what they say, no matter what they do. Always Hitler. And not even any other monster of history like Stalin, Mao or Pol-Pot: always always Hitler and only Hitler. Every time all the time Hitler everywhere Hitler everyone is Hitler.
Have you ever considered mixing it up a little? It doesn't even have to be a Communist dictator. How about mentioning Mussolini, Franco or Pinochet?
You're @Bob Ross right?
They'll get around to banning you again. Eventually.
Now, if anyone wants to talk about WW2 nostalgia then I'm all for that, outside of politics. I could talk about WW2 cinema like "Sargeant York" or "Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon" and how great the golden age of Hollywood and old timey radio was. I'm a huge fan of Wolfenstein 3-D to go shoot the Nazis. But uh, that's cause, y'know, they represent actual Nazis. Knowing that a woman is an adult human female doesn't make someone a Nazi.
Should be in the Lounge.
Hey, this is a new person on the forum. Inappropriate to go around publcally accusing people. Report a post if you suspect an issue, please don't make a hostile environment for new people. Reading their OP, they've posted absolutely nothing ban worthy.
Welcome Ben, this is a pretty good post. I often don't hear measured viewpoints from the right. Please ignore the trolls and continue discussion with those who want to engage with the OP. As I've mentioned before, I stay away from politics in philosophy, but I'm sure you'll find a few good people to engage with. I also agree with Banno that this is more political discussion than political philosophy.
My advice is to read a few more posts first and see what philosophy is. Your post is more of a fact/perspective viewpoint about the political right. But does it examine what it means to be conservative? Is the current Republican party conservative? More questions that either you build answers to with logic and facts, or questions that you use logic and facts to explore and leave open ended for others to provide their input.
He joined 9 years ago. This is known as a "zombie account" and reuse generally signifies that the user was banned and is now resorting to the use of a former sock puppet.
However, the point I make in the essay is the need for a new unifying political philosophy on the American Right. Understanding the recent history I discuss would be a prerequisite for developing any such theory. It's an essay about why political philosophy is needed, who needs it and where it's needed. So even though it's technically more politics than philosophy, it is an essay about the necessity of political philosophy, which does make it relevant to political philosophy.
I clicked "join" many years ago but just didn't participate much at that time.
Maybe Vidal wasn't really a Communist sympathizer: maybe he was just another Chamberlain who let his rhetoric against the Vietnam war go too far on occasion. But combining that with his extreme views on sexuality which seem not just hedonistic but intentionally subversive and the result is that I don't perceive him as really being right-of-center at all.
Just a minor clarification here. In the 1950s & early 60s, Buckley was still aligned with the (for want of a better description) the racist elements in the conservative movement. You can check out the famous BBC debate between Buckley & James Baldwin in which he (sort of) blamed blacks for their problems.
By late 1965 tho, Buckley had changed his tune a bit, but it was not until later in life that he acknowledged that he was wrong about the civil rights movement.
I thought your exegesis of the American Right was worth reading, even though it is a much longer post than I usually engage with. It's well composed. Is it gospel? Probably not, but the gospel truth is pretty hard to find.
When the adjective "true" is attached to some noun, like 'origin', it becomes suspect. I view "conservatism" as a fairly durable, on-going aspect of American history, along with its "liberal / progressive" opposite. Neither are static; they are rather, renewable from decade to decade.
The interests that opposed Social Security and Unemployment Insurance in the 1930s, opposed Medicare in the 1960s, ended "welfare as we know it" at the end of '90s, and oppose the Affordable Care Act, are pretty similar.
Quoting Tom Storm
@BenMcLean: I think Gore Vidal was quite right. The "property party" isn't about the working class owning a car and a house (if they are lucky). It's about the rights and prerogatives of the wealthiest class who own and control capital wealth -- stocks, bonds, factories, income-producing properties, businesses, and so on. The 1% is not a new group in American society; the rich we have with us for a long time, generally calling the shots.
Most of the time, most of the decisions of government are controlled indirectly by the wealthiest class in their interests. Sometimes those interests match political party interests, sometimes not.
It is just a fact that American blacks are in fact responsible for many of their problems -- just like American whites are in fact responsible for many of their problems. Not all, but many. The narrative that systemic oppression is to blame for every single problem anyone ever has ever is indefensible. And this is a truth that every group is eventually going to have to acknowledge about itself if they're ever going to truly become real citizens, not just formally, but morally. Real citizens aren't just victims of circumstance -- they're moral agents.
But it's true that Buckley didn't come right out of the gate with support for the Civil Rights movement initially. It was a transition which took some time. But the point is that it was a real transition. And not just for Buckley personally, but for his movement. It wasn't a cynical plot to fool minorities into voting for Republicans in order to get white nationalist policies passed once in office. It genuinely became not just acceptable and not just a historically contingent strategy, but fully internalized institutional dogma.
This is an ideological stack which was preceded by influences from people like Whittaker Chambers and Russell Kirk, was first articulated and formed into a coalition by William F. Buckley, was championed into national public office by Ronald Reagan, was further popularized by Rush Limbaugh, started to break under the attempt to redirect it under George W. Bush and finally has broken against the reality of Woke Capitalism in the 2010s having openly demonstrated the faillure of Buckley fusionist conservatism to deliver on its own promises, combined with Trump's far less intellectual populism making it seem not just wrong, but irrelevant to current events.
Milton Friedman's doctrine of market self-correction -- Adam Smith's invisible hand -- has been definitively discredited by seeing what happened to Americans freedom, especially during COVID. The people still preaching that crap, I now see as fundamentally unserious, not willing to base their beliefs on data from the real world. This time, the rich really are getting richer and the poor really are getting poorer. Libertarian economics has to go.
Quoting BCI think real historical Communist regimes really were against the working class owning a car and a house and were simultaneously just as supportive of societal elites owning a limo and a mansion as any Capitalist regime ever was and the reasons for this are structurally unavoidable. All they did was a reshuffling of elites in such a way as to discard merit as a criterion for elite status. That killed their project.
And that's also why the current year wokists project is also doomed.
Quoting BCThat's not just American society: that's every society. That's the Golden Rule: "Whoever has the gold, makes the rules."
I'm not at all confident in utopian schemes which make grand claims that we can somehow get away from this near universal reality of human life. I would instead be inclined to look at policy to align incentives so that the reward of wealth stays linked to socially constructive and morally positive behaviors.
Quite right. As an old-fashioned socialist, it's clear to me that "the left" lost its way when it turned from class (working class, ruling class conflicts) and toward identity -- all the woke crap of gender, race, etc. I am also an old fashioned gay, the sexual liberation era immediately post Stonewall. "We" (whoever belongs in that collective noun) weren't interested in gay marriage and family and trans identity (etc). I'm still not (though at 80 years old, it's now kind of irrelevant). Whether one is gay, straight, some sort of transgender, male, female, and so on is only personally important. Economics trumps identity.
It's somewhat disconcerting that the once clear certainties of the LEFT and the RIGHT have both been blurred and made difficult to decipher.
I'm not going to defend the brutality of the USSR or China. But it is true that the Soviet regime did improve the lot of working people in the Soviet Union. However, the good has to be weighed against the bad aspects of Soviet / Stalinist rule, the gulags, purges, etc. The benefits that accrued to the higher tiers of soviet rule were nothing like the lavish rewards showered on the top tiers of American rule.
Quoting BenMcLean
Generally, yes; but the concentration of wealth in the USA has few parallels elsewhere, especially in other democratic industrialized countries.
Quoting BenMcLean
Sure. I don't know how old you are, but I found utopia schemes a lot more attractive when I was a young man. That's sort of the way of the world. Fizzy utopian cocktails are a drink of youth.
Quoting BenMcLean
As has been pointed out, Buckley himself was not exactly an enthusiastic supporter of the Civil Rights movement when it counted. According to Wiki:
Quoting BenMcLean
Buckley rejected Rand’s insistence on absolute rationalism and her rejection of tradition and religion as arbiters of morality. Rand, in turn, thought Buckley’s reliance on faith and hierarchy undermined human reason and freedom. While I am no fan of Randianism, I think she has a point here.
Quoting BenMcLean
Many of the most direct and scathing attacks on Trump I have read have come from old line National Review conservatives like David Brooks, Peter Wehner, David Frum, George Will, William Kristol, Charles Krauhammer, Michael Gerson, Ross Douthat , and many others. These conservatives were the first to raise the alarm that Trump is ANYTHING but a normal politician, and that his playbook is explicitly autocratic and a direct threat to the survival of American democracy.
Horseshoe theory is real.
Maybe I expressed the conservative movement's embracing of liberalism on race in a way that was a little revisionist about the early 60s, but what I'm trying to articulate is the actual content of the ideology that formed a core tenet of the movement by the time they really got into power: that all men are created equal. I may need to revise how I discuss this, but I'm not imagining the fact of this as a core tenet.
Quoting JoshsI think Buckley rejected Rand's atheism -- which is not synonymous with rationality and rejecting it is not an anti-reason project -- and Rand's moral framework of altruism being evil, largely following Whittaker Chambers on this.
Quoting JoshsNational Review had changed a lot by then, no longer being the central vangard of the broad movement that it once was, no longer representing the cross section of different factions it once did. But even still, the real cause of these people's alarm isn't that Trump really is so extreme (that's ridiculously overblown) but that the massive success of Trump does stand as a public indictment of the older ideology of National Review (and what remnants of it are still represented by its current editors) as dying, on a civilizational level. Doctrinaire retrenchment of Buckley fusionism is not going to save the American Right. In my opinion, only a new construction can -- and it's going to have to be a lot more flexible.
As such, if I was to do apologetics for the Trump administration's immigration enforcement, it would seem like I am arguing with a strawman, because Democrat politicians have not been willing to explicitly embrace the open borders rhetoric of their base. The press will do it, but never the politicians.
Trump's actions on immigration are just a more consistent enforcement of existing laws that both parties voted for and neither party was willing to repeal and that's all.
Some of the rhetoric and new policy direction has been trying to reform the system in order to make enforcement practical, because we can't spend months arguing in court to deport every individual when it took only minutes for them to enter. The policy will need to adjust for the reality that the overall migratory flow direction needs to be outwards, not inwards, at least until we've got things settled. But none of it has been all that radical: it is all based on existing American law with longstanding bipartisan support.
This isn't just a right wing action and it's ridiculous to smear Trump as extreme for doing the exact same stuff as Obama and Biden, just more consistently.
You can have a welfare state xor you can have open borders, but you can't have both.
I have no problem in accepting that a broad swath of the American public always harbored autocratic instincts, but that until the past 50 years this segment was hidden within a mixed electorate characterizing both parties. As intellectual republicans of the George Will-David Brooks mold left their party, and that broad traditionalist swath inclined toward autocracy left the Democratic party, it exposed a long-hidden truth, not just in the U.S. but in Europe and elsewhere around the world. Traditionalists gravitate to leaders like Orban, Putin, Erdogan and Trump, and when they all concentrate within one party, their numbers allow them to dominate at the national level. That’s not an indictment of anything, it just says that your way of life was never as popular as you thought it was and now that the electorate has split along geographic lines coalition may no longer be possible.
It is becoming less and less likely that some political middle ground can be reconstructed any time soon, because the left has been moving farther and farther away from the traditionalists, which is why the latter fled liberal parties. Just as important, the two factions have segregated themselves geographically. If you live in a large city, it is likely your view of the world socially, scientifically, politically and ethically is so far removed from that of a rural resident that for all intents and purposes you live in a different country from them. Is Trump extreme? No more than MAGA. Is MAGA extreme? Yes, of course they are. They are extremely far removed from any political, ethical, social or scientific values that I and the majority of those
living alongside me in my urban community relate to and thrive within. I am not judging their values and positions as right or wrong in a moral sense. I am simply saying that when implemented by a community as a whole they are incompatible with the kind of life I need to live. Under such circumstances, the best strategy for a federalist country like the U.S. is separation and soft secession.
I am not worried that the Right is at risk of imploding.
On the contrary, it is quite possible that the MAGA numbers will increase over the next decade as more socially conservative minorities flee the democratic party. It’s only your vision of the right which has imploded because you are outnumbered. This may go on for a long time, and that isn’t a tolerable scenario for urbanites since it means their needs will go unrepresented. It will require aggressive , creative thinking about how to re-align the relationship between municipalities, states and the national government in the direction of forming local and state alliances and coalitions which fill in for what will be lacking from the national level.
I have a non-socialist, non-leftist, non-progressive view: Sovereign states are obligated to control their borders. First, for the protection and security of its citizens, second, for the protection and security of its neighbors (also sovereign states). Uncontrolled immigration allows individuals from other countries to make policy on the hoof. A handful of unauthorized immigrants might have a negligible effect on society; 14,000,000 unauthorized immigrants is another matter altogether, having large consequences for citizens and governments at all levels.
Can they be removed? They can, of course. It's possible. The question is whether the citizens have the stomach for the kind of enforcement that would be required to expel large numbers of unauthorized immigrants from the country. I have no enthusiasm for mass roundups. So far, many Americans have found roundups, detention centers, and expulsions quite unappetizing when they shift from the abstract to the concrete. Then there are the militant pro-immigration groups who agitate against ICE enforcement. Besides that, ICE is hardly a sympathy-generating organization.
Besides removal, there is the matter of the economy. Immigrants become an important part of local and national economies--not altogether positive. A large number of unauthorized immigrant-workers willing to work at substantially lower wages than America citizens, undermines wages. It depends on whose ox is getting gored. Companies employing cheap labor don't complain.
On a global level, millions of people are already on the move, from areas of less opportunity and less favorable conditions to places where they can hope for better--like it or not. Managing global population movement is something that no government has tackled, other than to maintain tight borders.
On the other hand, you do have a legitimate insight that there seem to be "two Americas" -- and the division is not just about means nor even about ends, but is increasingly about epistemology. We don't even have shared facts anymore.
Quoting JoshsOh please. Science is downstream from money which is downstream from values. You get whatever science you fund. If the Nazis fund science, you get Nazi science. If the Communists fund science, you get Communist science. If the Capitalists fund science, you get Capitalist science. There are no such things as "scientific values" produced independently of the real deciders of the kinds of questions scientists will be given the funds to research. Scientists are trained monkeys in lab coats with delusions of grandeur, not leaders.
I gave you a chance to get beyond the ‘you guys vs us guys’ rhetoric when I gave you a long list of the kind of people you said in your OP that you endorsed as thoughtful role models of Buckley-National Review political thought. I explained that none of them had any problem making a distinction between executive overreach and straight-out autocracy. They all placed Trump in the latter category. Most of the figures on that list have explicitly singled Trump out as exceptional among U.S. presidents in the degree, explicitness, and persistence of his autocratic instincts, not merely as “another flawed president” or an intensification of familiar abuses of power. What distinguishes their criticism is precisely that they do not treat Trump as continuous with Nixon, Bush, Obama, or even earlier illiberal moments in American history, but as representing a qualitative break in norms.
For writers like George Will, David Frum, Peter Wehner, Michael Gerson, Jonah Goldberg, William Kristol, and Charles Krauthammer, the claim is not simply that Trump governed aggressively or expansively, but that he rejected the legitimacy of constitutional restraint itself. They repeatedly emphasize features they regard as unprecedented in the modern presidency: the open denial of electoral legitimacy, the personalization of state institutions, the systematic attack on independent courts and the press as enemies of the people, the use of office for personal loyalty rather than institutional fidelity, and the willingness to praise or emulate foreign strongmen as political models. Will, in particular, has framed Trump as the first president to govern as though the Constitution were an inconvenience rather than a binding structure.
So you and I belong to two different communities. I side with that thoughtful community of National Review pundits in their assessment of Trump. You side with the community which dismisses these views as ridiculous and overblown. I suspect you and I have different criteria for what constitutes autocracy, which is why on such an issue having a deep impact on the quality of our lives we should separate and focus on building up our respective communities in the direction we need it to go. I want to hang out with the people on that list , even though they are to the right of me politically. You go hang out with whoever considers them ridiculous.
The American right should understand that Trump is the real RINO and his populism is extremely toxic and destructive for the right. It just leans on the worst aspects of what the right has been about.
I think first it should be noted the fears that are typical for present day populism: take the replacement theory, for example: that the evil elites want to replace ordinary people. MAGA people don't dare to say the racist fears out loud behind these ideas, but they can project these fears to Europe and declare that in Europe European civilization faces civilizational erasure. But the real fear is that white Americans won't be a majority in the US anymore. In a truly multicultural country like the US with it's painful history starting with slavery, it would be too much to say this out loud such racist lies. But when referring to Europe, it works fine.
This racism is something that is truly ugly and something that the right has to fight against. These are the worst kind of "radicals" on the right, if in the left the worst are the "Shining Path maoists" or people like Pol Pot who want really radical change by killing many, many people. You should never confuse those lunatics with your average social democrat. But also one should notice the difference with the traditional right and the Trumpists.
Trump is not a "threat to democracy" unless the term "democracy" means "permanent, one-party rule by the Democrats." There's going to be an election in 2028. There's going to be a peaceful transfer of power, no matter who wins. Things are going to be normal.
Quoting JoshsThat's only because it's usually the losers who waste oxygen on complaining about the legitimacy of past elections they lost. But complain they do, as the Democrats in fact did in 2000 and again in 2016 when "Russian bots" and Cambridge Analytica were the reason for Trump's victory, not Americans dissatisfaction with the status quo.
Quoting JoshsTrump is a real narcissist, naming things after himself instead of after past historical figures, which is in real bad taste but not deeply significant long term.
Quoting JoshsAbout the courts: You attack the courts whenever Trump appointees didn't rule your way, most notably in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. That's normal whenever the ruling doesn't go the speaker's way and not significant.
As for the press, Trump is absolutely right about the press and you're even willing to accept that as being right when the same words, with nouns swapped out, come from leftists regarding FOX News, politicall talk radio and anywhere else that isn't perfectly aligned with your politics.
I've seen firsthand the kind of lies the Leftist press constantly do, where a gathering of thousands versus a tiny contingent of 16 was selectively photographed and narratively framed to make the sides look evenly matched. They are the enemies of the people, they chose to become the enemies of the people and it was past time someone said it.
There's no such thing as a political independent, let alone a politiclly independent journalist.
Quoting JoshsThis is something Democrats have always done and which Republicans, if they ever want to do more than setting speed limits on Democrat policies, cannot avoid doing. Frankly, Trump can't do this fast enough as far as I'm concerned -- not based so much on personal loyalty to Mr. Trump, but making appointments based on ideological alignment with the larger project of the American Right is something that strategically cannot be avoided for them if they like still existing culturally in the long term -- and it's something Democrat administrations have never shied away from doing.
Quoting JoshsActually, I would identify that as not being the most recent Republican President, but instead as having been the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln.
And I actually like Lincoln. I think naive Constitutionalism is one of the false premises that has to be let go of on the American Right. The Constitution was made to serve the people, and not the other way around.
If you say that the Great Replacement is real, but is a good thing, then this is an argument that is allowed to be taken seriously and given real credence.
But if you say that the Great Replacement is real, but is a bad thing, then that is dismissed as a racist conspriacy theory which is beneath rational discussion.
The exisence of the phenomenon as a statistical fact is subject to epistemic uncertainty a lot like Shrodinger's Cat until the moral evaluation is brought forward to frame it, thus collapsing the waveform. Only once the speaker's morality is observed do their statistical facts become distinguishable as reality or conspiracy theory.
In this way, the fact of the existence of the Great Replacement is determined, not by statistics, but by moral evaluation and rhetorical framing.
That aspect of the Left's argument on this is utter bullshit. Settle whether it's happening or not first, which should be strictly based on the data, before we go evaluating it as good or bad or neutral.
Here's the thing on the demographic shift: I am perfectly happy to replace certain categories of whites whom I don't like with browns. If the browns coming in are family oriented Catholics while the whites getting replaced are wokist vegans with alternative sexuality from San Francisco, then I say hell yeah, let's have more browns. What I really don't want is criminal or slave class browns coming in to replace blue collar working class whites, in a way that I think of as more about class than race. I'm OK with bringing in non-whites as long as they are the kind of non-whites who are going to help build a civilization and not the kind who are going to tear one down.
But fundamentally, completely apart from any ideology which says there's anything particularly special or superior about whites, absolutely nobody should be expected to just accept a system which is deliberately, maliciously stomping on their people's faces, no matter what color they are, no matter what period of history it is and no matter whether academic elites say they get to count as "historically marginalized" or not.
They’re despicable to you not because they aren’t taking an honest, principled stance but because they aren’t as conservative as you are. It shows how fringe Trump is that even you don’t like him.
(later edit: OK, maybe not every one of their critiques is non-constructive, because heaven knows it's easy to point out real flaws in any administration, but this is definitely the overarching impression I get of the current National Review types)
The Left finds them useful now not just because they hate Trump but because the Left has internalized the same libertarianism on economics, so long as they agree with the sexuality and color of the people on the executive board of the corrupt megacorporation and the DEI quotas are met.
If I thought these people were ever going to be able to truly revitalize the Buckley fusionist coalition and it could work and they had a viable strategy to reign in Big Tech and if all it cost was contracting a case of TDS then that would be great news for me! It'd be a very high reward, low risk proposition. The trouble is that I know they can't do that -- libertarianism CANNOT meaningfully coherently explain what's wrong with Big Tech. Nothing they can propose which fits within their ideological framework can address the problem.
Now I don't think Trump necessarily solves this problem either. But Trump functions to widen the Overton window, which is desperately needed if anyone's ever going to emerge with a plan that actually can solve this. These old guys are trying to narrow the Overton window, which is precisely the opposite of what's needed right now to face the real problems of the current generation.
Who is a good exemplar of non-libertarianism on the right? Do Trump’s tariffs count?
One thing I see as positive is Trump's proposal from just this week that big institutional investors buying up single family homes should be regulated. That is NOT OK with the Buckley types! That is NOT "free market" at all! But it seems like it could be the right direction, depending of course on how it's implemented becuase we haven't found out a lot of details yet.
On the tariffs, I'm not sure. Tariffs definitely aren't libertarian, because tariffs are taxes and libertairans are for cutting taxes. So raising tariffs is definitely a non-libertarian move -- I'm just not sure it's the right one because Trump's version may be going too far on it and may not be adequately judging which imports to levy the tariffs on strategically enough. On top of this, Trump kept going back and forth on his public plans for tariffs, probably as a negotiating tactic when dealing with foreign leaders, but this did cause a lot of short term economic damage, possibly more than was necessary. So while I'm not opposed to tariffs as one tool of government in principle, I'm not sure Trump is going about this the best way he potentially could and remain reserved about it because it could backfire. I don't know. Tariffs as a policy are inherently a long term play with known short term costs.
I do think some kind of digital bill of rights for Americans which outlines what we do get to be able to do with technology would be something we need for the future. It should involve loosening up IP law (which libertarian philosophy says we should do but the libertarians themselves will almost never talk about) and placing mandates on technology companies which guarantee user rights for repair, customization, backups, tinkering, etc. Something that aligns incentives to structurally protect free political speech online and to foster innovation by preventing technological enclosure. That's really important for me personally -- and that's really really not "free market" compatible.
Still, he did mellow over the years. And he had our Dear Leader pegged as a narcissist years ago. Compared to the freak show administration now in charge of our Great Quasi-Republic and those posing as conservatives in these sad times, he was a titan.
There's more to it than that. Sending immigrants to CECOT was never policy before Trump. The Trump Administration behaved in despicable fashion with Abrego Garcia, violating a court order by sending him to CECOT, than dragging their feet on bringing him back, then throwing bullshit criminal charges at him, and then having him go free when they couldn't produce a proper deportation order. And I don't remember previous administrations sending out masked ICE agents. Joe Rogan, who supported Trump in 2024, said the ICE raids are insane, and the country as a whole has given Trump bad marks on immigration (separate from how they view border security). And since we're talking about National Review:
"[i]My guess is that at some point in your life, you’ve been falsely accused of something, and you didn’t like it one bit. Now imagine how it feels to be a Latino U.S. citizen and worrying that someone might accuse you of being an illegal immigrant, or you might be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some ICE agent thinks he should slap handcuffs on you.
Yes, U.S. permanent residents age 18 or older are required to always have a valid green card in their possession. But if you’re a U.S. citizen, you’re not required by law to carry anything. And remember, a driver’s license is not necessarily proof of citizenship, because 19 states and the District of Columbia allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. Are Latino U.S. citizens supposed to carry around their passports at all times? Wear your best suit everywhere you go, and think you look too well-dressed to be an illegal immigrant?
For some Latino American citizens, this is not a hypothetical concern:
At least 35 events celebrating Hispanic heritage across 21 states have been canceled or postponed, with most organizers citing concerns relating to the political climate and possible interactions with ICE, according to a Washington Post analysis. One example: Organizers said they couldn’t risk going forward with the Salvadoreñisimo Festival — usually held in Maryland’s Montgomery County — out of fear that the event would lead to detentions.
Abel Nuñez, executive director of the Central American Resource Center in D.C., said there has been a “dampening of all activities that put people in danger.” . . .
As Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” took off in Chicago in early September, residents of the heavily Mexican neighborhoods of Pilsen and La Villita noted how quiet and still their streets had become.
Maritza Lara, a vendor selling fruit out of a cart in Pilsen, estimated her sales had dropped about 50 percent from the day neighborhood WhatsApp and Signal groups started reporting ICE vehicles in the area.
“It’s pretty serious. There’s no people around,” she said. “Nobody knows how it works anymore. Even if you have papers, even if you have everything, they’re still stopping people.[/i]”
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/gee-how-did-latino-americans-become-so-alienated-from-the-gop/
Did you vote for Trump in 2024?
You didn't mention the conspiracy theory lunacy that has taken over much of the Right. Don't you think that's a big problem?
First of all, nobody's replacing anybody.
The theory Renaud Camus is there with David Lanes "White Genocide" conspiracy theories. If you truly believe in those, I think you are on a wrong forum. See the site guidelines: "Racists, homophobes, sexists, Nazi sympathisers, etc.: We don't consider your views worthy of debate, and you'll be banned for espousing them."
What countries have done is to have immigration because a) they lack workforce and b) growing population bring economic growth while decreasing population hinders economic growth. That has been the basic reason, not an idea to change the population.
Population growth has nearly everywhere except in Sub-Saharan Africa gone negative as people have become more wealthy. That the fertility rate is falling and basically the fertility rate is below 2.0 has not happened because of some active policy from any administration (even the Chinese have gone back from their one-child policy), but many other reasons. There's an universal demographic transformation which hasn't been decided by elites. This transformation is not related to policies or agendas of any elites may have. Here lies the error which puts Camus etc. into conspiracy theories: that this has been some great plan pushed by certain groups.
Yet when you add up the two, having immigration while also then lower fertility rates, some argue illogically that this is an active policy truly "to replace" the existing population.
Quoting BenMcLean
It's not about helping "to build a civilization", it's about helping your society, your civilization.
The real question is how an society, any society, responds to an influx of foreigners. The basic answer here is that IF the foreigners bring wealth to the society, then the foreigners are accepted. Yet if this is questionable or it seems to be questionable if the foreigners do add any wealth to the society, then anti-immigration views, prejudices and also racist thoughts emerge about discussing the foreigners. And if the foreigners are indeed in the country to pillage the wealth of the society without any attempt to contribute to the society, we have a common term for them: the are then the enemy, an invading force. And the usually every society is up in arms to fight and kill the foreigners.
And that's basically it.
You can see the above three foreigner types in everyday discourse. Everybody is happy with tourists that come with their money to spend it in one's own local economy. If you start complaining that there are too many foreign tourist in your city, you'll likely be approached by some telling that he or she feeds his or her family thanks to tourists, so why don't you just mind your own business.
If the inflow of foreigners has a questionable effect on the economy, then you basically have an "immigration-debate" like in Europe. But similar would happen anywhere.
And if the foreigners are there to steel your wealth and subjugate you, you fight back like the Ukrainians are doing now against the Russians.
(This is btw something that the Trump administration should take into account when "running Venezuela".)
It's not just a questionable effect on the economy. The British grooming scandal wasn't economical. There are real concerns with male immigrants from countries with institutionalized misogyny.
What of immigrant groups that claim to possess absolute truth and consider it their prerogative to spread or impose it on the native population?
You should know that from the outside BOTH parties in the US are very much Right Wing. You have had no Left Wing in my lifetime. I would say that over the last few decades there has been some Leftist posturing but that is all it is, 'posturing'.
Bernie is the only true voice of the Left I have seen in the US and I imagine the Democrats would have pummelled Trump if he was leading the line. Sadly, the US is so opposed to anything that leans towards socialism that they cannot handle holding a Leftist line.
I think the overall global picture is simply due to the death throws of nationhood. The experiment of Nation is coming to an end and this is simply an attempt to cling onto what is already pretty much over--it just hasn't been fully realised by everyone yet.
But when you talk about socialism, do you mean government ownership of the means of production? Or is it more bread and circuses you're referring to?
An example of a country where a significant chunk of industry is actually nationalized is Russia.
Strictly speaking, that's bread and circuses, not socialism, but it's not true. Medicare is essential to the financial stability of every hospital in America. If Medicare withdraws support from a hospital (for instance, due to fraud or poor quality care), that hospital goes under. Medicaid pays for a wide range of health costs, and Social Security pays out for disability. My uncle had Downs and all his bills were paid for by his father's social security, so that was decades of care.
Obamacare is also alive and well, contrary to what you may hear.
Quoting I like sushi
You pay for healthcare. If you think that many European countries are more right leaning than the US over the past half-century I woudl have to say 'not true'. You can disagree if you want to.
For the most part, Europe is not socialist. Private ownership of the means of production is the rule there. What you're calling socialism is actually just government hand-outs.
How are we supposed to have a conversation if we're in agreement?
If you wan tto show evidence that the US governements ,over the past 50 yrs or so, has been more left leaning than European countries go ahead. Would be interesting to see.
I didn't say it was more left leaning. My point was that except for maybe France, Europe is not left of the US in any significant way. Europe is a land of private ownership.
In the US the democrats have always been centrist (at best) in comparison europe. When has there been a significant (or any) government representatives in positions of governmental power (voted in) in the US who were clearly Leftist? If there were how do those numbers compare to European countries where a constant significant proportion of Left leaning representatives have been voted in.
In terms of welfare state policies there is no real contest. In terms of economic distibrution the same is true enough.
So, no. I strongly stand by my initial claim. The US has been more right leaning compared to Europe for the past 50 yrs or so.
And yet there's still little in the way of socialism in Europe. That's because the EU controls economic policy, and it's firmly neo-liberal. Again, what you're pointing to as evidence of European leftism is just government handouts in an otherwise liberal domain.
Watch what happens to the handouts as European nations attempt to create their own defense. :confused:
Never underestimate the impact of the economy, as these tensions flare up in economically distressed areas. There's a lot of foreigners in Mayfair and other posh sites in Central London with a lot of foreigners, but .
In a way the grooming scandal was more about the actions of the police and the officials. There's an antidote to this: the police will openly go public with the statistics of who are the criminals, what crimes have immigrants done and simply don't have double standards when it comes to immigrants. The credibility of the police isn't then on the line and this takes way the opportunity of conspiracy theorists to take hold on the public discourse.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
What immigrant group are you talking about acting this way? Americans in Latin America or what? I think you confuse those vocal people speaking on the behalf of immigrants, when it comes to Western countries.
Usually migrants do understand the age old truth of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do". Especially when it is religion that makes the people not to behave this way, then there's friction. Yet if the foreigners, just like tourists or foreign investors, do bring money into the economy, they usually are tolerated. If not, then these differences emerge far quicker.
Just think of what would be the attitude towards tourists, if they wouldn't buy souvenirs and use local services. Who would tolerate cheap vagrants just strolling everywhere eating their own food or worse, just begging for food? In India they absolutely hate the Western people who live as hippies with a shoestring budget and are on a "spiritual trip" in the country.
You are obsessing about this. I said leaning towards socialism not that there are socialist countries in Europe. No point in discussing further if all you can do is keep repeating the same thign as if I said 'Europe is Socialist and the US is not Socialist'. That is not what I said at all.
Quoting frank
Incorrect. I actually said the number of officials voted for (based on policies; which is kind of rare in the US as the campiagn system is basically little more than advertising rather than presenting any kind of manifesto) to represent the population and that are therefore in government positions.
Let me surmise:
- Actual left leaning representives voted into office in the government (Europe is hands down the winner here both now and over the last half century).
- No contest in terms of welfare state.
- No contest in terms of economic distribution.
If you wish to contest these then go ahead. If you say Europe has no socialist governments once more I am just going to disengage and assume you have no real response to anything I am stating.
One note to the discussion that you and @I like sushi are having: the political discourse is obviously quite different between the continents, but the actual government spending is quite the same. Which is quite surprising as the US doesn't have universal health care etc. Even if the US usually denies it and thinks the European countries are the "welfare nanny-states", the similarities are obvious.
Just compare this to let's say German budget in 2020, when the rearmament issue hadn't emerged:
Quoting RogueAIFrankly, no. Ever heard of Snowden, Wikileaks, GameJournoPros, JounoList, Madoff, Epstein, Sam Bankman-Fried, the laptop from Hell or the Twitter Files? Hell, have you ever heard of Watergate?
How many documented credible disclosures does it take for basic pattern recognition to start working for you?
The age of conspiracy theory is over. We are now living in the age of conspiracy fact.
But the American Left is very, very far from center on social issues -- and that's what I care about. It gets its leftism not direct from Marx, but from the Frankfurt School & critical theory. Which is, despite not being economic, still very far from anything any reasonable human on Earth could consider centrist.
This is always strange to me, and before we go further, I want to ask if you think the 2020 election was stolen and if you think Trump tried to steal that election. I'm thinking primarily of his phone call to Raffensperger asking him to find exactly the number of votes Trump needed to win, his pressuring of Mike Pence to not certify the election, and the various fake elector schemes. Do you think any of that constitutes an illegal effort on Trump's part to stay in power.
Yes, Frankfurt school Critical Theory has been trickling down from academia over the past few decades to shape the political views of politicians on the left. Is it centrist? Not if we take a poll of country as a whole. But if we poll residents of the 20 most populous American cities, as happened when the mayors of Chicago and New York were elected, it may be argued that some of its broadest concepts are being integrated into centrist perspectives in urban America. My advice to you is to stay away from the cities, especially the northern and west coast ones. You won’t like it there. Their centrism is not your centrism. I recommend suburban Dallas. Oklahoma City is good, too.
Interesting post.
Couple of points:
1) What if there is no right or left in any meaningful sense?
2) I’m surprised you didn’t give much time to the financial crisis and the Tea Party movement that followed. I think that (and Occupy) accounts for the different “populist” streams we currently see, with Trump riding the wave of one and Bernie the other.
Remember how popular Sarah Palin was for a large group of people? That amazed me— and even though she lost, that’s where the excitement was. Trump could see this. If anything, Trump is good at reading the room— and it was clear that Bush, the iraq war, and the establishment (represented by Romney and Ryan) were unpopular and were losing. The energy was among the crowd craving WWE type politics.
Regardless, most of this is superficial. Look at the actual policies, and the core element of it hasn’t changed: both parties are factions of the Business Party— that is to say, the ruling class. In its modern form, its business. That’s where the ruling power is. Trump — for however different he is in many ways — hasn’t really strayed from the very policies that have been championed for decades: tax cuts, deregulation, small government, privatization. Same old, same old.
Obviously I wasn't conflating Trump and Kim Jong II, any more than I was conflating Buckley and John Calhoun. Trump and Kim both, however, need and demand sychophancy and obtain it from their minions to an absurd, even embarrassing extent. They're also similar in the enormity of their self-love. Being called "Dear Leader" or something similar would please Trump, I think.
So the comparison, you see, was figurative; mildly humorous and somewhat sardonic. I don't normally have to to explain such things, but judging only from this thread, humor doesn't seem one of your strong points.
Careful what you wish for. Be thankful we have a federalist system with many local checks and balances. Without those deep constraints, the direction Trump would take the country would be unrecognizable relative to the standards of a constitutional democracy.
I’m not sure Trump has a direction.
Q: Was the 2020 election stolen?
A: Technically yes, but crucially, not through mass vote fraud. That is Trump's mistake. An electoral college majority of American voters really did vote for Biden. However, real American elections involve more than just counting slips of paper on election day. The whole 2020 campaign season was heavily manipulated by mass social media censorship, more than any election ever was before and by every major social media company in one exclusively partisan direction -- for Biden. The most obvious smoking gun we have on this is the Hunter Biden laptop story. The October Surprise of 2020 -- the most explosive and entirely true political story of the whole campaign, brought forward by the New York Post, a 200 year old bastion of American journalism founded by Alexander Hamilton -- was systematically suppressed by this totally impenetrable megacorporate monopoly / cabal all acting together in completely aligned and coordinated ideological lock step. That's where the election was stolen -- not on election day, but by depriving the American people en masse of the ability to talk to each other, deliberate about this election and make up their own minds. The gatekeepers of truth utterly failed us during that whole period, putting their own agendas over any sense of objectivity or integrity. And the subsequent buyers remorse during the Biden administration was real.
Maybe Trump's response to this problem has been misguided and disproportionate. But he's not wrong in the basic belief that something fishy was going on -- not just on that one day, but for that whole year.
I see Elon Musk buying X as an attempt to address this problem and it has been making a difference, but one billionaire breaking the monopoly doesn't address the underlying systemic causes of this mass institutional failure. I was once a true believer, but Boomer Conservatism cannot address see or think in systems and that absolutely kills it for me. Long term, policy is going to have to address this large scale civilizational problem that is far bigger than just one election.
Q: Do you think any of that constitutes an illegal effort on Trump's part to stay in power?
A: I don't care about it very much frankly. I think Mr. Trump was acting foolishly but I can also see why he and many around him thought there was something fishy going on. I think Mr. Trump sensed something really crooked was going on in this election -- and it was -- but he misidentified where, probably because he's an old guy who doesn't understand technology. And it is a huge problem that he didn't and apparently still doesn't have enough responsible people around him to push back and stop him from going as far as he has on this whole mass vote fraud thing, no matter what evidence comes out. For him to keep hammering on this and not shut up about it is embarassing, I admit it. Even if he was right, which he isn't, it's a bad political strategy and a distraction from the real villain of 2020 -- BIG TECH!
I actually respect how Mike Pence said no to Trump's alternate electors scheme. Alternate electors, as I understand it, would be a way to address mass vote fraud if it was in fact going on (which it wasn't) and Pence was correct to identify that this was an inappropriate move by Trump, not because it was illegal or even immoral but because it was based on materially false premises.
I just wish Pence hadn't then gone on to keep making a big stink about it for years afterwards. That kind of tarnishes the achievement in my eyes.
I also feel like we need to recognize the world that Trump was acting in. We were dealing with a situation in which the people involved had materially substantiated reasons to distrust the institutions of consensus generation across our whole society. There was a system-wide cascade failure of epistemic credibility, where no one could trust anyone anymore -- one from which we still haven't fully recovered.
I might also make a case for why we need to replace the "Libertarian - Authoritarian" scale on the Political Compass Test with a "Liberty - Security" scale, because the "Libertarian - Authoritarian" naming convention is a dead giveaway that the compass and test itself is designed by and for exclusively libertarians. Nobody calls themselves an "authoritiarian" but concern about security is a human universal, just as at least some concern for liberty is. The Political Compass Test should be a diagnostic tool for ALL political beliefs, not a polemic one to argue for libertarianism.
The problem with the political compass isn't the left vs right axis -- it's the other axis!
Quoting MikieThis is very true, but this event only caused immediate political change for the Left. The Right did not have an immediate reaction other than to scramble to fit it into their existing narrative: blame any problem on government overreach, no matter what's really happening. That's what the libertarians did in response to the 2008 financial crisis and, at least for the short term, the other right wing factions let them do it. So, for the Right, it wasn't a catalyst for major political change. But wow, on the Left it sure was! This is, again, something I have difficulty articulating without getting polemic, not being a Leftist myself, but if I was writing the story of the current American Left, instead of the Right, then the 2008 financial crisis and the Occupy movement would be a major transformative event!
Quoting MikieOh, hell yeah. I felt like I wasn't really even voting for McCain -- I was voting for Sarah Palin. She brought all the energy to that campaign and putting her in the forefront of it was smart, because having a woman in charge broke every negative stereotype. That was strategically brilliant. Too bad it didn't actually succeed.
Quoting MikieI know. You're not wrong -- and this is the real problem with Trump. Not that he's a Nazi. Not that he's secretly a Russian asset. Not that he's a pedophile with Jeffrey Epstein. Not any of that stupid crap. That he's precisely all the things he says he is -- a rich New York real estate mogul and reality TV star.
If the Democrats had a young, handsome, non-gay white male version of Bernie Sanders to say that, especially if he had a legit family with kids, then he'd be in the White House right now. Policies wouldn't matter. Appear normal, be JFK, appear genuinely more in touch with the voters than the other guy, that's all.
I'm not afraid to give that advice because I'm pretty sure the Democrats aren't going to do it. Because aesthetically, the person I'm describing is pretty much J. D. Vance.
It’s the autocrat’s direction. Everything points back to the king. Total one-man control of power.
Tbh, I’ve been almost completely ignoring the political news the past 6 months to preserve my sanity. My guess, though, is that the separation between federal, state and local judicial and governmental institutions, not to mention robust civic institutions and a very diverse media landscape, will be enough to restrain Trump from seizing complete control. I think only a minority of the population truly supports autocracy. I don’t think our friend Ben does, but like many, he isn’t able to recognize those instincts in Trump. He thinks he’s just “a rich New York real estate mogul and reality TV star.”
Look, there was some rioting. Rioting's bad. The people who did that should have been treated the exact same way as the rioters from the George Floyd protests of the previous summer -- the exact same way, to the detail, because they did the exact same thing.
Before January 6th, I would have absolutely said, "Leftist riot. We don't. That proves we're morally superior." Which makes January 6th uniquely embarassing for me as a moment when my side did lose the moral high ground and showed we belonged right down in the same filthy dirt as all those rioters from the previous summer. It did make me ashamed to be a Republican.
HOWEVER, January 6th was not an organized plot to carry out a coup against the United States government. We know this from lots of evidence but more fundamentally, anybody who's going to be honest about right wingers in America knows that these are not the kind of people who are going to try to do anything like that and leave their guns at home. I could believe that some right wing protesters might have tried to take over the government by force, but not if they weren't armed. These are the kind of people who think you should take your guns with you to the grocery store and you're telling me they intended to take over the government without guns!? That simply did not happen. It's not in their character. To be absolutely clear -- they might do it, but absolutely not without bringing their guns. It's not something they would forget, if this was the plan. Anyone who really knows these kinds of people knows they are absolute gun nuts. It's not just a stereotype, I swear.
As for Mr. Trump, his clear intention was to hold a peaceful demonstration outside the Capitol, asking Congress to vote against election certification which is a real decision made by Congress and therefore within what American citizens can demonstrate about both legally and morally if they want to. But I personally wasn't and wouldn't have been out there because I don't believe it would have done any good even if they did have a peaceful protest at that juncture.
The narrative that Trump encouraged a violent attack on Congress is libelous and relies on deceptive edits of his speech, linking remarks from about an hour apart to digitally construct a whole new sentence. That is a really vile lie. What Trump actually said might not have been the wisest or the truest, but he never said that crap. Furthermore, Trump tried to get on TV to tell the crowd to dispurse and go home. Maybe too late, but he did, because a physical invasion of the Capitol building was not anticipated. Maybe it should have been anticipated, but it wasn't. They couldn't see the future and didn't think of it, unfortunately.
Understand, they had a mindset that Republicans just don't riot ... because they're Republicans. It's conventionally just not something Republicans do. It just wasn't thought of by the Trump people as something they even needed to worry about. And I wish that had been true. I mean imagine, a "conservative riot" -- it sounds like a contradiction in terms! I really think part of what happened that day was a failure of imagination.
Some of the Jan6 prisoners got sentences and treatment far in excess of what they actually did. Understand, these people deserved some time in jail. But not years. Not in solitary. It did get really disproportionate, especially when compared to how the George Floyd riots had been handled the previous summer -- a context which was in every single rioter's mind that whole day. Rioting had been normalized as a political tactic and "the hell with the rules if the Democrats don't have to follow them." That is what every single one of them thought. And you should be able to see why a reasonable person could get to thinking that.
Any Democrat politician has to toe the line on certain policies to win the primaries. No matter how telegenic a person is, they're not going to be the Democrat nominee if they don't check certain boxes: pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-environment, pro-gun control, pro-immigration, etc.
You’re right. Thus far, we have been successful in keeping them out of Chicago.
Thanks. Just wanted to add this from conservative Peter Wehner, who Ben calls ‘despicable’:
Also, nobody's anti-environment. But blocking oil pipeline construction just burns more oil to transport the oil. Electric vehicles are just coal-powered cars. Corn based ethanol was idiotic. Wind and solar do not scale. If any of you really believed in any of this climate change alarmism stuff at all then you'd be cheerleading a fast track to a nuclear+hydrogen energy future because that is the only real, scalable answer to it, assuming it is a real problem and not just a scam. But Leftists are so hostile to nuclear and so duplicitous on multiple other issues and so obviously using the same tactics on this one that you should be able to understand why I, not being a scientist, would get suspicious.
There's some wiggle room a Dem politician has. A lot of old school dems like myself were turned off with Biden's open border policy.
Hey, I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions honestly.
Yeah, right. We're a predator nation. Our taxes pay to secure the international shipping of the entire world for free -- which this guy insists we keep on doing forever -- but we're a "predator nation."
Too many examples to name.
Quoting ssu
Yes, there is mimicry and the adoption of what is useful. Sometimes this leads to full-scale assimilation where one group loses its identity and joins the other, but with Abrahamic religions, at least, this sort of thing is tantamount to annihilation. E.g., Jews could adopt Roman technology and dress, but they could never worship the Roman cult.
Quoting ssu
It's not this that concerns me. It's the foreigners who buy up large plots of land and make large donations to politicians and universities. Everyone notices the poor foreigner; the rich are more subtle but far more dangerous.
If your politicians can be bought to play the tunes of foreigners, which especially now they surely can be (starting now from Trump himself), you should blame your own people, not the foreigners for this.
If your country is corrupt, don't blame others for it.
No philosophy. Just a lot of special pleading and tu quoque.
It's about more than just politicians. Land. Universities. In any case, our original topic was the role of religion in political discourse, or the use of appeals to God/absolute truth in the political sphere.
Quoting Ciceronianus
The supposed "ideological crisis" is a result of dropping any pretensions of acting ethically, in favour of just openly being inconsiderate, narcissistic twats. Trying to rake back any intellectual dignity from the mess that is the GOP is a lost cause. Intellectual dignity is not on the menu. One cannot have such an "ideological crisis" unless one is committed to at least appearing to have a standing commitment to coherence, justification, or ethical self-understanding. Those pretensions have simply been abandoned.
It’s not that the GOP can’t supply a philosophy, so much as that supplying one would be instrumentally pointless given the current incentives. Attempts to reconstruct "Trumpism" (which is not even a "thing", as the kids say) as a coherent doctrine (national conservatism, post-liberalism, etc.) are absurd; trying to smuggle normative seriousness back into a practice that now explicitly disavows it.
But I would say that.
Carry on.
Yes, it’s a case of populists exploiting the phenomena of social media gaslighting along with religious fervour and dogmatism. If they can confuse the populist message with religious righteousness it can be smuggled through into mainstream opinion and work as a powerful force to divide and rule. And guess who’s the poster boy for all this. It will descend into chaos, corruption and economic failure.
The "custom of the land" as often corruption is referred to.
Politics deals also with moral and ethical questions, hence it is no wonder that in religious societies God (and hence absolute truth) would play a part. Yet politics in a democracy is about compromises to get agreements and a consensus. Political polarization makes that very difficult.
Basically every political party and movement should at all times be frightened of losing elections and power. A very entrenched political system where that isn't a problem is one reason (among others) that increases the possibility of corruption. And if the legal system isn't working or itself is corrupt, then corruption is rampant.
Perhaps conservatism might be a problem for the right if those "old values" are things like corruption, yet there's ample ideology in the right to eradicate these problems starting simply with the rights of the individuals and the ever important separation of powers.
Centralization of power, usually to one leader, is a cause for corruption and the destruction of the institutions necessary in a republic. This has been the real problem in leftist ideology (which doesn't care about separation of powers and the necessary institutions), but can also lead the right-wing astray when people want "strong leaders" to fix things.
There are a few issues where I do doubt that the other side is acting in good faith, where they agitate for causes they know aren't actionable or say they care about reducing emissions while opposing nuclear power. But I think they do see themselves as the good guys in their own story most of the time and understanding that about your opponents is absolutely vital to keeping your views grounded in reality.
Quoting BannoThe problem isn't that the GOP can't supply a philosophy: it's that it can't narrow down the field to just one which is internally consistent! The historical narrative I gave showed how there used to be an ideology that was constructed piecemeal out of the concerns which were most important to each of several factions but then also described how that contract has broken down. It's not that there's a lack of people with ideas or priorities: it's that there's a lack of a unifying synthesis between numerous competing factions and ideas right now. The Trump people don't clarify things, but in order to keep hold of power past 2028, they will need to. The present ambiguity and lack of a unifying ideological synthesis cannot last.
Exactly — politics is about compromise, so claims to absolute truth throw a wrench into it. Yet it is also true that religion is simply an inextinguishable part of life and does bear on moral/ethical questions. Previously, we would say things like 'religion is a private matter' or 'religion belongs in the private sphere.' I question the feasibility of this view, yet I remain sympathetic to it.
Quoting ssu
Any rational person should be cautious against the centralization of power. Yet sometimes it is necessary. FDR circumvented Congress to provide material aid to the UK prior to WWII, when the US public and Congress were largely isolationist. There are many examples of the centralization of power being used in beneficial ways. Of course, it is right to be cautious of such a thing.
I'm sympathetic to it also. For example it's a very reasonable etiquette let's say in a workplace. Yet if we talk about for example Middle East politics and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, not to take into account religion would be an huge error.
Quoting BitconnectCarlos
Politics is many times a complex balancing act.
I'm talking about claims to absolute truth in the context of a community and its political processes. Connected with that would be the question of the role of outsiders who arrive into a community and claim to possess politically-relevant absolute truth and how that community should view them.
Nobody cares
Where are the libertarians, the neoconservatives and the old republicans? Seems to be that not many are with Trump MAGA crowd. It might be just the algorithm that US policy commentaries that I read from conservatives are highly critical of Trump.
A lot of people, including myself, have changed their views significantly in response to the high tide of Leftist domination that occurred civilization-wide in the 2010s, culminating with the COVID panic measures which were just too far for many. This means that a lot of people were made very unhappy by the evident policy failures of the neoconservative and libertarian factions to have prevented those excesses and are therefore now open to more radical stances than they previously were.
Traditionally, conservatives are happy and progressives are not. Conservatives are conservatives because they are happy (they oppose change) and progressives are progressives because they are not happy. (they support change)
But the radical changes in the 2010s (remember, Obama opposed "gay marriage" both times he ran for President) have made conservatives (or "ex-conservatives" if you prefer) radically unhappy. So what's emerging on the right is a rejection of "conservatism" for some kind of postliberal or neo-reactionary worldview, which is far from settled because the Trump administration really doesn't provide a coherent direction for it and, being populist, tends to instead be trying to get its direction from it.
Populism is surely not conservatism. Never has been. Populism is a tool of the radicals, for whom the "us" the good and "they" the evil fits nicely to the revolutionary goals. What the problem is that the populist will say clearly what is wrong in the society, but the real issue is what the populist offers to be the solution. Usually it's just a nightmare, but sounds to the ignorant a great idea. Or then he just does like Trump did: declare simply that you will solve it and say nothing else.
But it's interesting how America became divided by COVID, whereas nothing of the sort happened in my country. The inability for the US to come together is actually very alarming. Here it's different: when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, both the opposition and the administration joined ranks and the strange event of administrations in both Sweden and Finland lead by leftist Social Democrats opted to join NATO, which earlier had been the view of only right wing parties. When the shit hit the fan, the politicians become team players, which is very nice to see. Otherwise it's the normal quarreling about taxes and legislation that any democracy is about.
Our "left" cohort is divided fairly sharply into two camps, as is our "right" cohort:
On the left, we have:
1. the "current" standard - what would cartoonishly be illustrated by piercings, blue hair etc.. and all the beliefs and hopes that tend to come along with that caricature (notice, I am not saying this caricature is right - but the expectations that underlie it do seem to be highly, highly relevant to the cohort I'm discussing) - essentially socialism lite with some un-examined social liberality, unexamined "trust the science" type thinking spurred by having never read the science; and
2. the 90s type of lefty - new-agey, hippie, and generally traditionalist in the sense that things like sex and sexual roles/energies are highly important, self-determination is important, skepticism of "big pharma" and similar concepts, skepticism of any government, rather than just right-wing ones among some other stuff.
You can probably see where the divide was. Camp 1 were literally calling for the assault and death of anti-vax or even vax-skeptical people. Camp 2 were basically saying that the government was a fascist propaganda machine visiting chemical warfare on the population.
I see the merits in both, but as we've discussed elsewhere, these radical positions became the norm during that time. The fear people felt caused them to lose their minds.
On the right, it was pretty much the same. True conservatives who saw emergency legislation as illegitimate and a mandated medical procedure to be ultra vires in every possible way - and then "modern" conservatives who called their dads "hateful cunts" for not wanting the vaccine when they live i the same house.
Again, I see the merits of both - but fear had us literally dobbing in neighbours, assaulting each other and calling for the country to basically be seized by a medica-military style dictatorship due to the emergency. Wild times. It wasn't just the US.
It's Pagan, that is pre-platonic or non-universalist. Trump doesn't have a coherent direction or principles other than doing or saying what keep him in power. In the West we have trouble getting our heads around that because we are so used to thinking 'platonically', but it was probably the norm for most of history, and still is in large parts of the world.
But as far as the Western tradition goes, it is pretty radical. It's a break from a tradition of more than 2000 years with only a few brief exceptions here and there, like the fascists in the first half of last century (not that I necessarily want to equate Trump with the fascists, but they do have that in common).
That's true, but the ideology that's gathered around him wants to be post-liberal. Sometimes I think about the world Trump came from. It was a morally bankrupt, take no prisoners, greed-is-good NY scene.
Alan Greenspan ran the economy like we're a bunch of apes on the plains, so to predict the future, just look where the pendulum wants to swing next.
I've seen the term used a lot lately, but I'm not sure what post-liberal is supposed to mean exactly.
That NY scene you describe is similar to how things go in other more lawless societies, like for instance Putins Russia... I think that's pretty much the default way things tend to organise at least originally out of disorder... a more tribal structure with hierarchical organisation according to power.
Where does the pendulum want to swing? An idea I've been entertaining is that liberalism or cosmopolitanism is historically a set of 'empire-values', or a set of 'meta-values' to allow different cultures to live together under one larger super-structure. And perhaps it only really works or is useful for such an empire. Should the geo-political balance continue to swing further to the east, on might expect a new order starting to emanate from China, as they have the most to gain from it. If one listened to the different leaders speak at Davos, that was indeed the general trend, the US and other Western countries talking about resilience. self-sufficiency and strength, while China was putting the emphasis on cooperation and maintaining global order.
Very much so. Reverting to a more chaotic economy (starting with the Reagan administration) allowed a new elite to emerge. It crippled American and UK labor, which I think was partly the point of it.
Consider the possibility that anytime things start to become too egalitarian, the economy occasionally falls into stagnation. For a society whose fundamental values orbit around growth, this is unacceptable. Stratification has to be reintroduced to get the ball rolling again. So this was the goal behind prioritizing Wall Street above "Main St." The result was amorality coming from the top down. We're several decades down stream from that.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
That's interesting. I don't think tolerance has ever been a virtue in Chinese culture. Has it? It will be interesting to see.
I'm surprised that Ukraine has held out as long as it has. I thought the Ukraine war would have resulted in a Russian victory years ago. Not that I wanted that outcome: only that I had predicted that outcome.
Quoting AmadeusDYeah these were the baby boomer liberals. They want the liberty of the sexual revolution for themselves personally without the sexual revelution actually changing society on a large scale. This is less consistent than the wokists but it ends up at the same place, because you can't have everybody doing something for themselves personally without everybody doing it, thus the whole society doing it, thus getting society-wide impact and change.