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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29309 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Is this meant to appeal to conservatives?

Who do you mean by "conservatives"?

The GOP establishment, for whom lower taxes on Big Business is priority one?

The "I didn't leave the Left, the Left left me" trailing edge of the perpetual revolution, who want to go, as Neema Parvini puts it, "back to Fresh Prince"? Or the Obama voter who's now voting Republican because they have nostalgia for the 2009-2010 "post-racial moment" and think that rationing covid vaccines by race is a step too far?

The "conservatism" that Michael Malice called "progressivism driving the speed limit"? The one of which Robert Lewis Dabney wrote in 1871:

This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.

American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.

Or maybe there's the "paleoconservatives," perhaps the sort about whom Wikipedia says:

Samuel T. Francis, Thomas Fleming, and some other paleoconservatives de-emphasized the conservative part of the paleoconservative label, saying that they do not want the status quo preserved.[15][16] Fleming and Paul Gottfried called such thinking "stupid tenacity" and described it as "a series of trenches dug in defense of last year's revolution".

As one of the Brits at the Lotus Eaters podcast put it recently (this is from my imperfect memory), "we live in a revolutionary time, so any 'conservative' opposition must actually be counter-revolutionary."

So, do I expect to appeal to the temperamentally conservative sort who stands athwart history yelling "slow down just a little"? No.

Do I expect it to appeal to the people who hold to some standard beyond a mere affection for the status quo? Who believe there's precious little left to conserve, and that every day we keep on "playing the game" by the current rules we see a tiny bit more of it chipped away? Who see that, much like planting a tree, the best time to "flip the table" was 30 years ago (or more); the second best time is today?

Perhaps.

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