I keep hearing them say things like “oh, no, Trump isn’t a real conservative, he’s an insult to the true and honorable conservatives who helped make this nation great” But I think my brain is too functional to understand what point they’re even getting at.
What possible meaningful definition of “conservative” includes the decades of shit ass doodoo ass Republicans but not Trump?
There are three political frameworks.
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Conservative: There is an individual moral imperative to know your place and behave in a proper manner, anything else is degeneracy. Societal problems are the result of degeneracy, and not your problem.
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Liberal: Everything can be solved by individual kindness and acceptance of others and the free (capitalist) market. All disagreements are fundamentally about achieving acceptance or how to manage market failures, which are best answered with rational debate.
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Leftist: Society is best understood by looking at who has power, especially to control the means of production. In our society that’s capital, which is a garbage system that we should replace with worker control, which is best achieved by [infighting here].
Each of these frames struggles to understand the others.
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Conservatives see liberals accepting differences so they’re degenerates, and leftists rejecting their place at the bottom of the capital hierarchy so they’re degenerates.
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Liberals think conservatives need to be debated until they understand that gays need rights (or think conservative views need to be accepted too because they have the wrong answer to the paradox of tolerance), and misinterpret entrenching capital hierarchies as being pro free-market, so liberals think conservatives are liberals. Liberals see leftists try to correct the problems of capital and think they’re trying to manage market failures, so they think leftists are liberals (socdems specifically).
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Leftists see conservatives upholding all hierarchies including capitalism so they’re capitalist bootlickers, and liberals unable to conceive of any system other than capitalism so they’re capitalist bootlickers.
Leftists see conservatives upholding all hierarchies including capitalism so they’re capitalist bootlickers, and liberals unable to conceive of any system other than capitalism so they’re capitalist bootlickers.
But this is correct tho
They think being conservative just means you’re more traditional and that you don’t like taxes but you’re still a good person for the most part. They’re largely unaware of what conservative members of government actually do. They just think it’s their conservative grandpa being like “I don’t want to pay more taxes” and then some Democrat Sorkin-splaining why paying for kids to play music is a good thing. They’re just willfully ignorant of what goes on in government. Their lives are pretty comfortable despite all the austerity and stripping away of rights so they don’t notice. They live in bubbles so they don’t even see it indirectly. They just view poverty and discrimination as some kind of vague affliction.
When you hate gays and brown people, but in a classy way, not like Drumpf
