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This epitomizes general differential expectations of conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are regarded (and to a shocking degree, regard themselves) as lacking in agency to the point of being almost animalistic. When a conservative raves about cities are shitholes full of degenerates and criminals, that's just how they are. FEMA death camps, Birtherism, Jewish Space Lasers, etc... They're dumb, they're ignorant, they can't help themselves and we shouldn't expect anything of them. We practically talk about Trump supporters in anthropological terms with all these fucking Ohio diner ethnographies. It's on the rest of us to manage them.
Liberals, though. They're supposed to be better, smarter, more accountable. Apparently. When they think a guy who says he wants to be a dictator wants to be a dictator, they're supposed to exercise some critical thinking and realize he's not serious, that's just him being bold and masculine. They're not supposed to say West Virginia's a shithole full of drug addicts even though it objectively is. They're supposed to be adults in the room.
You are absolutely free to relentlessly plumb the problems with some specific politician's take on Jewish space lasers being weather control machines or whatever. I even think there is something directionally correct about your comment, in the sense that I think most people are somewhat low-agency by my preferred standards.
But when you additionally frame all that in a broad swipe at your outgroup, I'm afraid it just becomes a boo light instead of a meaningful contribution to discussion.
I don't think you understood what I wrote. I don't think conservatives are particularly low agency. I think there is a general tendency for everyone to act as if they are low agency. For example, the excerpt I quote from from @Goodguy's post, where he literally says they're too stupid to help themselves. So I'm a little unclear as to what the dividing line here is. You can say conservatives are too stupid to be held accountable, but you can't note that people do this?
While I would not exactly endorse Goodguy's post, (1) other people's behavior is irrelevant to your own and (2) here is what he actually said:
First off, "to me" and "seem" do some work here: reporting on your own perception in a very clear way does not excuse flagrantly bad behavior, but in the interest of encouraging honesty of self-report, it does provide some cover. Second, "supporters of those theories" is a reasonably specific group in this context, in a way that "conservatives" simply is not.
Now to what you said:
Any time you find yourself slipping into "us" versus "them" language, odds are pretty good you're running afoul of the rules somewhere. At minimum, it tends toward consensus-building or antagonism. You didn't even don the fig leaf of "it seems to me that they are ignorant." Maybe this is because what you wrote there was taking a certain outside perspective--"they" switches from "conservatives" to liberals" in your second paragraph, so you are raising the defense that "this is what some people think, not me but some people." But the level of heat you put into what "some people" think still falls on the wrong side of the rules, I think.
It's highly relevant, because I am trying to figure out what the actual infraction is, and one of the ways I'm going to do that is by comparing what I did to seemingly similar behavior from others. Right now it looks to me like it is somehow less provocative to say "Trump supporters are so stupid they can't help believing in conspiracy theories" than it is to point out that someone has said this. (The former, while directionally atypical for this forum, is within normal parameters of discussion as far as content goes, but it nevertheless seems to be a more controversial claim than the latter).
You perhaps understand my confusion.
So you're saying that if I'd sprinkled in a few hedging words, there wouldn't be a problem? Or if I'd specified "Republicans" and "Democrats"? Forgive me if I am skeptical.
That is me characterizing the pattern of thinking I am talking about, as exemplified in the excerpt I quoted. I really don't know what you want here. If I actually thought that Trump supporters were dumb animals, I wouldn't be objecting to a double standard, I would be enthusiastically affirming it.
No, don't compare yourself to unmoderated comments; we don't (can't) moderate every rules violation, because we don't even see most of them. Most of the time, a comment has to get reported first.
"Republicans" and "Democrats" is probably still too general, because those are not meaningfully homogeneous groups beyond the fact of their group membership. You need to specify to a meaningful degree. "People who believe in God" is a very general group, but you can say some things about them in a permissible way. And I definitely didn't say "sprinkle in a few hedging words and there won't be a problem," I said something more like "hedging and honest self report can be mitigating factors, provided the rest of your comment isn't too blatantly terrible in other ways."
But first, you never say "suppose someone thinks that..." and second, your characterization slips into weak man territory. Remember, you opened with:
So this sets the expectation that you think that conservatives (as well as liberals) think, concerning conservatives:
It's impossible to tell, from your comment, whether you include yourself in "conservatives" or "liberals" so it's impossible to tell, from your comment, whether you are hiding your own views behind a neutral "some people think" point of view, or what. If you're going to run with a "some people think" argument, then you need to be either steel manning it, or proactively providing evidence of what those "some people" actually think.
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As a liberal (both in the classical sense and in the liberal/conservative dichotomy sense), I feel like this is exactly the correct state of things. Because the only good justification I see for picking a particular side is if one believes that that side is, in some real meaningful sense, better than the other side. And liberals being actually responsible for getting decisions right, being the adults in the room who think through their ideas and the consequences of implementing them, while conservatives being animalistic emotional creatures following their base whims and needing faith and tradition and religion to keep them from falling to their base impulses, is one of the most meaningful ways to differentiate the former as better than the latter.
Because you get rid of that, then what do we have left with, just that this set of ideas labeled L are better than this other set of ideas labeled C? But how could I justify holding such a belief, if the process by which those L ideas were produced wasn't, in some meaningful way, better than the process by which those C ideas were produced? Because I've reasoned to myself that those L ideas are better than those C ideas? Why should anyone, especially myself, who grew up in an environment that was biased heavily towards L ideas and away from C ideas, trust that my reasoning on this preference is sound, when the more likely explanation is that I have a set of preferences inculcated in me by my society, which I've used motivated reasoning to justify as "correct" in my mind?
Now, I've seen enough to recognize that most people on any side are just tribalists blindly following their animalistic urges, but even so, in the world of ideology and politics, I'll always insist on double standards, where my side is held to a higher standard than the other one, so as to make myself feel more secure that I've actually chosen the correct side. Otherwise, it's basically guaranteed that I've just chosen the side that happens to match up with my preferences and reasoned my way backwards that it's the correct one (even with double standards, this isn't off the table, but it at least helps to make me feel somewhat more secure in it).
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I don't know if this was intended to be taken literally or not, but this is mostly my position.
The blue tribe is the ruling class. They need to be held to a higher standard than rednecks in West Virginia who have no power or influence.
I don't want the red tribe to run things. They would do a terrible job. But I want to keep the blue tribe honest. And we are dangerously close to becoming a one party state.
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WV is objectively non-shithole compared to many urban neighborhoods, so maybe you are confusing realities here.
The parts of WV without West Virginians are objectively non-shitholes and actually pretty incredible. The inhabited parts, on the other hand, not so much. Rural squalor is truly an underappreciated part of America, especially in the South. I would say it's tragic, but they mostly seem to prefer it and who am I to tell people how to live? So godspeed and all, but don't try and tout its superiority.
Its not superior to a nice upscale neighborhood, just not as bad as the inner city or rural south, which is of course a different type of rural.
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Well sure. But it isn’t as bad as the ghetto.
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I’ve always seen that as a perception of social class. The left sees itself as the upper class ruling elites and the conservatives are seen as lower class. They’re “the help” the kind of people who fix your toilet, or install your new energy efficient air conditioner, or the ones who cook in restaurants or make stuff in factories or raise your food. They’ve called it Flyover country for decades because they see it as the places where the losers live.
I think at least half of the conspiracy theories started as jokes. They know that their ruling class sees them as idiots, and they might well choose to have a bit of fun pretending to believe in weird stuff just to annoy their betters. Jewish Space Lasers is certainly a joke — I know of no one anywhere who believes that the Jews have space lasers.
The left sees itself as a mix of hard-working urban middle class + discriminated minorities, while they see conservatives as a bunch of bigoted country club members.
I know an unfortunate number of people who think Obama is a secret Muslim, that the government is trying put them into camps or controls the weather, that the 2020 election was stolen with millions of fake votes. Let me be blunt: both parties have more than their share of cranky stupid people, but the major difference is that the Dems have (correctly) corralled their idiots and generally have more of a problem with the galaxy-brained wing of the party. The GOP, meanwhile, has been taken over by the morons and wishes they had enough smart people to have a galaxy-brained wing. Saying it's just an act is cope.
It’s a lot easier to “corral your radical elements” when you have a firm grasp on most institutions and are firmly in power. They essentially don’t need the votes and vocal support of the far left wing. They can tell them to sit down and shut up because even if that 3-5% of far left tankie communist group stays home on Election Day, democrats will still have substantial power, influence, and support. They will have 240 or so electoral votes in the can. They own the deep state, the university, the media, and so on. The GOP doesn’t have th3 luxury of telling the far right to bugger off. They lose if that faction stays home, and if they lose, a lot of the current project of trying to reconquer the institutions will be put off for another generation or two.
And I would consider Mises and Heritage foundation to be fairly galaxy brained institutions. They put out plenty of projects exploring how a conservative might go on to solve pressing issues in our society. There are also church institutions that give reasons for social conservative ideas.
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You are correct about the GOP, but dead wrong about the Democrats. Sheila Jackson Lee, who was until her death this year a long-serving Democratic congresswoman and a member of several important committees, was shockingly stupid. She recently claimed that the moon is made mostly of gases. She asked, at a 1997 visit to the Mars Pathfinder operations center, whether the Pathfinder rover had taken a picture of the flag planted by Neil Armstrong. In 2010 she asserted that North Vietnam and South Vietnam are still separate countries.
Meanwhile, Brandon Johnson, a police abolitionist and black racial chauvinist, is the elected Democratic mayor of Chicago. Maxine Waters, an extremely politically powerful Democratic congresswoman, is a long-time associate of Louis Farrakhan. The Democratic party is full of dim-witted and politically radical black officials, and is powerless to sideline them because of the stranglehold their constituencies wield over the party.
Don’t forget Georgia Representative Hank Johnson, who famously worried that the island of Guam might tip over and capsize.
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Look at the democrat ticket. Two mid wits. Very unimpressive people who are kind of dumb. Maybe even knuckleheads.
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Can you expand on this a bit? It runs very counter to my impression, given that conservative discourse is full of self-defense, gun-ownership, homesteading, build your own business, build your own mannerbund, a focus on individual heroic virtue, etc. These things all seem focused on building and developing personal, as opposed to institutional or collective agency. What are you looking at/seeing which leads you to draw the opposite conclusion?
I could just as easily ask where you see that. This sounds like a fantasy version of conservatism peddled by 4channers who haven't seen the sun in weeks. Mannerbund? I have never heard any normiecon talk about this. If you were to ask the average Midwestern conservative what that was, they'd assume it was a niche beer.
It is true that conservatives often fancy themselves rugged outdoors types, and nevermind the fact that they're an insurance salesman who lives in a Dallas suburb. This has about as much credence as the pseudo-intellectual pretensions you get from a lot of college-educated liberals, i.e. none.
It is also true that conservative political narratives tend to play up reactive grievance - Trump was/is present as a natural reaction to disdain from 'coastal elites' - while playing dumb about the phenomenal amounts of bile spewed towards others. And this is what I mean. Conservatives have this bizarre tendency to posture as if they had no choice, as if the unbearable rudeness and condescension of liberals forced them into their positions. And we're expected to take them seriously for some reason.
For example: the quote I quoted. Other things in this genre: McCarthy blaming Democrats for Speakership chaos, as if it were the Dems responsibility to sort out GOP coalition woes. The endless Diner Safaris are another prime example. Or, for that matter, the fact that large swathes of rugged, independent Deep Red America are basically collective welfare cases that would've died out long ago if not for Federal transfers and spending.
Right here, in mainstream polling: a majority of Republicans have a firearm in their household. About 25% of Democrats do. (Independents just below 50/50).
Right here, in mainstream consulting research: Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 2:1 among respondents in a poll of hunters and anglers.
Right here, in mainstream social science: conservatives live happier, more fulfilled lives, with fewer divorces, less mental illness.
I think that gross polling averages like this often obscure more interesting dynamics. But there's a reason that conservatives have the "rugged individualism" discourse that Supah mentions - they are more likely to have an inner locus of control.
Do we know to what extent these are rural/urban differences vs rep/dem?
I think it depends on the specific question we're looking at – for instance, I could see rural/urban being much more predictive than political affiliation for guessing if someone hunts or fishes. But on the other hand, for another example, a lot of benefits are provided by religion, independent of conservatism, so some of what I describe above is differences in religious belief – but it also seems like together they are a very potent combination (for instance religious conservatives are less likely to report they are mentally ill than equally religious liberals; see my third link above.)
But overall, since rural areas are more conservative than urban areas, I think it shakes out to being close to the same if we're just curious about Team Red and Team Blue.
I'm glad you're asking these sorts of questions, though. Personally, I think there's more than two (or three) "tribes" in America, and there's a lot of interesting work to be done untangling them.
For example, Skibboleth could argue (and he might be right, although I suspect, at least by some metrics, that there are many more hunters and fishermen in the United States than insurance salesmen) that a conservative is more likely to be an insurance salesman than a hunter or an angler. But that doesn't stop the hunter-fisher breakdown from skewing red. And while some people are interested only in the degree to which Red Tribe is comprised of hunters and anglers, I think it's interesting to ask what Hunter and Angler Tribe looks like. The United States is a big place, with room for more than two teams.
I've posted on this before, but the red tribe is really a catch all term for three main groups and a bunch of small ones- they'd call each other the church crowd, the country music crowd, and the red dirt crowd. The first is kind of obvious, the second is the party-hearty 'conservatives' who don't go to church but admit they should, if only Sunday wasn't the best day to take the powerboat out, and the third genuinely have ties to rural communities.
Hunting and fishing are high status in all three and more popular than in America as a whole, but probably most popular in the red dirt crowd.
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You can be both an insurance salesman and a hunter. I knew quite a lot of people like this growing up (admittedly, in the upper Midwest, not Dallas). It was entirely normal for white-collar suburbanites to put on an orange vest, get a little drunk, and sit in a tree during deer season. Significantly, this is a sporting hobby. They may eat the deer meat, but they're doing it for some combination of social reasons, trophy hunting, and just liking hunting. Also significantly: this does not make you a rugged outdoorsman. If you were to make these people to survive in the woods, they would die.
I think it is probably true that the average homesteader is pretty conservative. The average conservative, however, is a suburbanite, and their nods towards that sort of lifestyle are affectation. (And again, lest it seem like I am beating up on conservatives, I think these affectations are mostly harmless and liberals certainly have their own set of silly affectations). They are not cultivating mannerbund or heroic virtue, or even trying to. They are grilling and shitposting on the Hawkeye Report forums.
IIRC hunters who get lost in the woods have a much higher survival rate than hikers, but selection effects based on the kind of hunting are probably part of that. Agreed that lots of the people at deer camp are fat accountants who don't know how to build a fire without gasoline.
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