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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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This is meant to be taken as a thesis, and as a start of a discussion of what conservatives actually want to achieve rather than soap-boxing.

As I've pointed out here in the past, conservatives do not actually want to achieve anything - they don't have a grand utopian vision that they want to realize. They are perfectly happy to do nothing, so long as nobody else gets to do anything either.

The problem isn't that conservatives don't want to actually achieve anything, it's that they are much less ideologically consistent than liberals. Just from seeing people post 'what conservatives value' in this thread indicates the wide spread of ideological differences that conservatives align themselves left, from libertarian types who believe in individual liberties to evangelicals who desire a God-centric government to business owners looking for less regulations to lower middle class complaining about taxes. The modern conservative group is more against anti-woke ideology than they are a cohesive voting block; this makes actually constructive policy much harder to pass (see the recent McCarthy voting fiasco because conservatives congresspeople could not agree on a vote).

Just from seeing people post 'what conservatives value' in this thread indicates the wide spread of ideological differences that conservatives align themselves

All of this has been argued before.

The Dark Enlightenment, by Nick Land, 2013:

The left thrives on dialectics, the right perishes through them. Insofar as there is a pure logic of politics, it is that. One immediate consequence (repeatedly emphasized by Mencius Moldbug) is that progressivism has no enemies to the left. It recognizes only idealists, whose time has not yet come. Factional conflicts on the left are politically dynamic, celebrated for their motive potential. Conservatism, in contrast, is caught between a rock and a hard place: bludgeoned from the left by the juggernaut of post-constitutional statism, and agitated from ‘the right’ by inchoate tendencies which are both unassimilable (to the mainstream) and often mutually incompatible, ranging from extreme (Austro-libertarian) varieties of laissez-faire capitalist advocacy to strains of obstinate, theologically-grounded social traditionalism, ultra-nationalism, or white identity politics.

‘The right’ has no unity, actual or prospective, and thus has no definition symmetrical to that of the left. It is for this reason that political dialectics (a tautology) ratchets only in one direction, predictably, towards state expansion and an increasingly coercive substantial-egalitarian ideal. The right moves to the center, and the center moves to the left.

Etc.

On a separate note: I am still not sure why exactly we have to reinvent some stilted "Right Rationalism" now, at the cusp of Singularity, as if this line of thought, clear and precise, was deboonked by Scott in his NRx critique of obscurantist Moldbuggian gobbledygook and we had a decade to ponder on merits of polyculae and gender theory. Scott, of course, is in a traditional marriage with a straight woman these days, and I gather their planned children will be more traditional still – perhaps even Orthodox.

AutisticThinker with his assabyiah fixation was a hundred times more insightful than mainstream rats. It's telling that he became akin to a plague to the respectable Mottizens.

AutisticThinker was either a troll, or someone whose mental disability caused him to act like a troll, which should be handled like a mental disability forcing someone to rob banks--you may have slightly more pity for him, but he doesn't belong anywhere near a bank.

AutisticThinker with his assabyiah fixation was a hundred times more insightful than mainstream rats. It's telling that he became akin to a plague to the respectable Mottizens.

I'm reminded of the old "Jews in the attic" (something came up a number of times in my arguments with AT) the idea being that regardless of truth value the correct response to "are you hiding Jews in your attic?" is always "no". Insert quip about context here.

If you're sure that there are no Jews in your attic, 'yes' is defensible.

this makes actually constructive policy much harder to pass...

Can you give some examples of "constructive policy" enacted in Conservatives' absence? Perhaps at the state level?

Maybe constructive policy isn't correct - I just meant policy in general simply because there is a lack of uniformity of opinion

I've been arguing for a while that what people generally think of when they hear the term "policy" doesn't, strictly speaking, exist. Laws get passed with some frequency, but it seems to me that there's very little observable connection between the laws being passed and the outcomes those laws are supposed to generate, and that this fact doesn't actually seem to have any impact on either the people writing the laws or the people voting for them. Having watched this process for more than two decades now, I find it impossible to maintain credulity that the standard model of our political system is descriptive.

When you talk about "policies", I think you're referring to a planned intervention in our social systems to try to improve some specific thing. We make all the cops wear body cams, or we start teaching the 1619 curriculum in fifth grade, or maybe we start allowing prayer in school, and each of these is supposed to improve metric x or y or z. Can you think of such interventions in your lifetime that have clearly worked? Where has policy been a clear win, to give us an idea of what obstruction is costing us?

They are perfectly happy to do nothing, so long as nobody else gets to do anything either.

This isn't really true. First, for plenty of conservatives there are a lot of progressive measures which they believe are harmful and they would like to roll back. That alone means that conservatives would like to do something, and they would only accept "everybody does nothing" as a compromise solution to stop further progressive measures they think would be harmful.

Second, as @aqouta recently put it (with respect to conservative views on finances): the conservative vision is that things are pretty good right now, and that they don't want to ruin a good thing by messing with it too much. However, that does not preclude careful improvements. Conservatives don't believe that the world has ever been literally perfect, and they are in fact open to making changes. They simply want reforms to be of the incremental variety, not the "reshape large swathes of society all at once" variety.

I mostly agree with this but I'll slightly quibble with word choice. It's less that things are pretty good now, although they are, and more that the conservatives view the motive force of progress as private action that depend only partially if at all on what the government does; mostly in the form of upholding private property rights, fixing rare tragedy of the commons/multi-polar trap situations and more than anything staying out of the way. As things stand the government not changing anything at all accomplishes 1 and 3 pretty well and neglecting 2 as a compromise is probably worth it.

The progressive formulation however views collective/government action as the main thrust of progress citing things like the civil rights act and legislation enshrining minority rights. In it's proper place this isn't wrong or anything and has some positive trade offs but it's going to lead to pretty different perspectives on how tragic a government that does nothing is.

You've presented a conservative libertarianism, @SubstantialFrivolity a Burkean conservativism. Both are at odds with progressivism, which is going to use state action to drag you kicking and screaming into the future whether you like it or not, and a more harsh traditional conservatism which would use state action to force you into your proper role or into prison (or exile in times when that was an option). They are also at odds with each other but less so. But this doesn't mean they don't have a vision.

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