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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32253 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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The American right doesn't believe in its own ideology of individualism and therefore is stuck in a losing spiral of hypocrisy.

Isn't conservatism to some extent at odds with atomistic individualism? Conservatism has always been in a losing battle, save for a handful off issues like taxes and guns, because of the tendency of norms to not stay fixed but move leftward .

They may say they want a separation between church and state and that they think that religion is up to the individual.

Few conservatives argue this. This would be libertarians. Religion being up to the individual is not the same as separation of church and state.

Isn't conservatism to some extent at odds with atomistic individualism?

I believe that's the point. American conservatives employ individualistic and libertarian rhetoric in support of their political goals, but while this makes some amount of sense in the context of opposition to welfare or regulation, it is more broadly incoherent because they're religious communitarians rather than libertarian individualists. You might be able to square banning abortion with libertarianism on the grounds that you regard it as murder, but it's harder to do that for, e.g. restricting drugs and alcohol, wanting Christianity to have a privileged status, banning immigration, or more generally wanting collectively enforced conservative social norms.

I'm not entirely convinced by the above; I think the GOP's failure to achieve many of its goals are less a matter of a mismatch between goals and rhetoric and more a matter of being unable to resolve real tension between disparate goals (or between their stated goals and maintaining electoral success). Of course, a mismatch between goals and rhetoric may impede the resolution of these tensions, but the root issue is their existence in the first place.

American conservatives employ individualistic and libertarian rhetoric in support of their political goals

Do they? As I alluded to up thread I feel like this post is in large part motivated by a failure to recognize that "Libertarian" and "Conservative" are not the same thing and that Libertarians are tiny minority within the US right relative to conservatives.

I have the impressions sometimes that people who rediscover non-individualistic ideology end up looking even less individualistic than those that are already there. Their conclusions from it tend to be very ant-colony-maintainance and top-down-rule, because theyre applying the same egoist materialism as before, but now from the perspective of the community instead of an individual.

This is how many people see things even after doing the first step away from individualism, and most definitely before that. So when you talk about Great Men in any context other than them already being leaders who are followed, it will sound relatively more individualistic to them.

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