“What do conservatives want to conserve?”
It’s a question we reactionary troglodytes hear often, sometimes as a taunting gotcha from the left or as an exasperated cry from the right. And it’s not something that’s easy to answer.
Very broadly speaking, when it comes to political coalitions in the United States, the left tends to agree on the general goal but fiercely disagrees on how fast to go there and how to divvy out the patronage and benefits (I refer to both in neutral terms here; every political party engages in some form of patronage).
The right, certainly since FDR, has always been a much more chaotic business. We all agree that we don’t want what the left, broadly speaking, has to sell. What we *do* want has rarely been a stationary or single target. Part of why it’s so hard to answer the question is we’ve never really had a single answer, or even an answer that’s easily articulated.
The wrong direction?
Few things demonstrate the internal contradictions of the right’s approach to nostalgia and conservatism in America than the following election film from 1964, made for the Barry Goldwater campaign but ultimately pigeonholed. Worth watching in full (warning: it’s about half an hour long, and it contains NSFW images even by our standards), the film tells us a lot about the dispositions and thinking of the average conservative since WWII; the subjects may have changed, but the core approach has not.
So what does the film show?
Per the movie, American society in the 1960s is like a speeding car careening out of control – crime is on the rise, consumption of porn is skyrocketing, respect for basic societal authority and for law and order is plummeting. Scene after scene of ruined stores, sexually suggestive dancing and images, and exasperated political leaders and police officers decrying the growing chaos get a clear point across.
This picture of the country literally and figuratively careening into a ditch is contrasted against two orderly images of American progress: the religious pioneers who conquered the frontier, and the great industrial cities of the 1950s and early sixties, fully formed and a marvel of modernity.
Indeed, the movie hardly feels political at all in the conventional sense. The presidential candidate this movie was meant to promote, Republican Barry Goldwater, isn’t even introduced until the very end of a half-hour film. The tying of senior Democratic corruption to the many scenes of anarchy and lawlessness throughout the film feel tacked on and artificial. Nor, indeed, does the film offer or suggest anything practical Goldwater could or would do that would change what was going on in American society (and it’s hard to believe he would do them, anyway, as he was a life-long libertarian).
Nevertheless, it taps into a powerful vein of a complicated impulse present in American conservatism – the fear not of change per se but of destructive change. The film, echoing the ads of one Richard Nixon four years later which literally had the slogan “VOTE LIKE YOUR WHOLE WORLD DEPENDED ON IT” (caps in original), is a call for politics not as a practical effort for policies good or bad, but rather voting as a kind of primal moral outcry, tens of millions of people yelling “Stop!” at everyone else.
Make America Great Again…Which America?
Critics of all kinds will of course point to the hypocrisies of these sorts of politics. They will note how they lead nowhere because no American would tolerate the totalitarian power needed to come close to “doing” something about society at large aside from enforcing laws, how it ignores many genuine injustices people were protesting, and how the beatified images of American pasts won’t pass even the most minimal critical scrutiny.
But the problems go deeper than that. All periods have their injustices and problems, virtues and vices, their hypocrisies and their disfunctions. We are no exception, nor will future generations be.
The real problem is that the film’s vision of America’s pasts is both wrong and seemingly mutually exclusive. Neither the conquering of the frontier nor the country’s urbanization was an orderly, peaceful process. Even if we set aside the violence against Native Americans and other abuses, both involved the dissolution of rooted communities, disruption of older ways of life, and a lot of chaos, heartbreak, and trouble. “Conservative” they were not, in the sense most would understand the term.
Supporters of the film’s message might concede the point – I think they’d have to, given that there was a lot of consternation over both these processes at the time in the United States – but they’d still argue that at least those ended well in the settling of the country and its becoming an industrial behemoth. The process shown in the film, on the other end (and which is still ongoing today, IMHO), will end up like that careening car – in a ditch or over a cliff.
But that still leaves the question: Assuming that car is heading into a ditch, where do you want the car to go? The two pasts mentioned in the film are very different; religious, small-town America and big, semi-secularized urban America are and remain two very different worlds and visions of American society. They were thought of that way when they were being formed, and if anything the contradictions have only deepened.
But even more important: America has always been a country on the move, and that move was always forward in one way or another. From the start, whether conquering the frontier, growing cities, “renewing” religion, the desire for people coming to the US to retain old ways was always overtaken with the desire to change or revive them in some way. A “normal” country might have celebrated when the frontier closed in the 1890s, seeing it as a time for society to rest on its laurels. In America, it caused great anxiety and consternation.
Ronald Reagan was a serious conservative. He read Russel Kirk, harked back to the Founding Fathers and many of the core founding values of the country. But he ran on selling the country a new day, famously saying that America’s best days are ahead of it. Deep down, I think most American conservatives want to feel the same way.
Conserving the Future
Which brings us back to the original question: What do conservatives conserve?
The answer is that it’s complicated, and it’s complicated because America has always been a country that looked to the future – a period which is always unknowable and unclear, as Yoda famously noted. We draw on past values and periods to renew and revive the best of what the country has to offer in changing circumstances, but we forever have to cope with the fact that those pasts are no less contradictory than the possible futures.
We want the car continuing to go forward, not back. Carefully, with awareness of the dangers of recklessness, but towards a brighter future, based on the already messy experience of the country’s history and the road behind us, rather than a precise road map we know cannot exist.
How we do that, where we head, &c is a very big part of what we argue over. Hopefully, without crashing the car.
Part of the issue is the issue of a childish homogeneity that integrates into the adult heterogeneity and finds itself shell-shocked. Holy cow! There are Catholics!
There’s this weird idea that, when I was a kid, it wasn’t like this. Everybody said “Merry Christmas” and there wasn’t much crime and things were safe.
Well… that’s because you were in a bubble, you only knew 40-50 people, half of whom were relatives and the other half were schoolmates from the same school district and likely from the same zip code.
And you grow up and, shiver me timbers, you meet people from the zip code two zip codes over and it’s like meeting people from a different country.
Then you meet people from, like, two towns over and it’s even more crazy. If you happen to go off to college, you might even meet people from Cleveland or Pueblo (Cleveland West).
And the less resilient of those people say stuff like “we should go back” but they just want to return to a bubble.
(But there’s a similar experience for the people who go back to Cleveland or Pueblo after having been at college.)Report
This is true and a real way people think and also itself a giant bubble. For the huge number of Americans like those living in big cities it is always known and understood that there are very different people all over the place. The “we’re WASP’s living in Springfield, USA” is itself a partial creation of media. Certainly true in some places but very much not the american experience.
My cousin gave me a history book about Newark NJ where the father’s side of my family settled. It had a map from 1910 showing where each ethnic group settled. Albanians over there, greeks over there, etc. Being next to and living in relative harmony with people from all over is a very American thing. Not the heartland line that gets sold about who is a real american.Report
My town had a large Hasidic population. We’d regularly see our Jewish neighbors walking to temple on Friday or Saturday, wearing the traditional black and white clothing, the men with long beards, etc.
My good friend’s college roommate came to visit. She lived at the other end of the state which, in NJ, means she lived a couple hours away. She took one look at a family walking to temple and said, “Woh, Amish people live here?!?!”
My college was a Jesuit institution with its off-campus housing mixed into a neighborhood that had many reformed Jewish families. I still remember friends asking why our neighbor’s had “forts” during Sukkot. These are kids in grew up throughout New England.
It was wild to me how little they knew about folks who weren’t exactly like them.Report
I don’t really see a contradiction. The conservative movement in the past 60 or so years has been focused on conserving the principles of the Founders. Their vision wasn’t contradictory but balanced between the rights of the individual and the need for order. Their approach was with restraints on government and a hope for a moral people. The conservative isn’t out to conserve the way things looked in 1790, or 1860, or 1981. He’s looking to conserve Christian / Enlightenment morality in the form realized by the US.Report
Maybe old school conservatives. But modern conservatives seem to be reactionary against whatever seems to be irking their pundit class today.
I mean, listening to Desantis wanting to send CPS after parents who take their kids to drag shows is not the kind of conservatism I can sign on to.Report
The hope was for a moral people to sustain it. Drag shows for children is outside any conventional definition of morality. I don’t know where DensityDuck falls on this topic, but I had the same thought reading his comment: conservatism in the era of The Golden Girls is going to be different from conservatism in the era of Drag Queen story hour.Report
Drag shows are what??? Free country covers all the morality. Parents can hit their kids and do all sorts of stuff they can take them to watch people dancing. JFC people smoke and get drunk around their kids. You wouldnt’ even know about DQSH if it wasn’t for rw blogers/media making it the boogie man.Report
Have you BEEN to a drag queen story hour?
I have. It’s dress up. What is immoral about that?Report
Hell actual adult drag shows at bars aren’t any wilder then any other bar and dancing night.Report
What does a normal, well-adjusted kid see when he or she sees a man dressed up as a woman? They may not remember Milton Berle, or Flip Wilson, or Benny Hill, but what they see is a CLOWN. I mean no disrespect to drag queens by likening them to a well-established form of comic entertainment, but that’s the niche they occupy. The kids think it’s funny. They get it. I have to wonder about the parents, who, whatever their adjustment problems are, retain the authority to tell their kids not to go to Drag Queen Story Hour, but they should leave the rest of us alone.Report
Kids completely get dressing up to play as something different then they are. They get that what we wear isnt’ a uniform indicating everything about us.Report
We have Dramatic Play areas in our classroom for a reason. Sometimes you want to ‘try on’ a role or personality that isn’t your own. It is how you gain perspective. It is a means to both share and acquire knowledge about people who aren’t you.Report
It’s also worth noting that for some kids, being forced to wear the clothing of a certain gender is itself freakish and traumatic.
For these kids, being exposed to adults who role model the ability to wear clothes that fit your true self is liberating and delightful.Report
I’ve been to a drag show. It was fun. I choose to go. If I had kids, I’d sure as hell want to be the one who decided my kid could attend a drag queen story hour. Me, not the school, not the teacher, etc. Why? Because not all kids mature at the same rate, and since SOMEONE has to make the determination for them about a whole host of activities/opportunities/stuff, the person best qualified (in general) are the parents.Report
I’ve yet to have seen any examples of kids being taken to Drag Queen story hours at libraries or to Drag Shows at bars by any third party other than their parents. I’d be fascinated if you could post some examples of non-parental figures taking kids to drag shows.Report
If the objection to Drag Queen Story Hour is that kids are being taken or sent to it without the knowledge or consent of their parents, I suppose we can all agree that that is a Bad Thing, if it is happening, and it ought to stop.
But I suspect that the real objection is to the mere existence of Drag Queen Story Hour. To which the only possible answer is derisive laughter.Report
Exactly.Report
I can’t say that that I’m aware of any specific examples, and frankly, I’m not going to go searching for them either. As I don’t have kids, it’s not an issue I worry about. My statement was more positional, but hey, if you’re a parent and you want to take your kid to this, enjoy.Report
Fair enuff.Report
“My statement was more positional, but hey, if you’re a parent and you want to take your kid to this, enjoy.”
Governor DeSantis would like a word with you.
And my school did take students to a Drag Queen Story Hour. We were personally invited by our local library to attend the first such event hosted in Manhattan. We had many, many communications with parents and gave everyone the opportunity to opt in/out. All families opted in.
Even in the evil liberal bastion that is Greenwich Village, we proactively communicated with and got consent before taking kids to watch someone in a costume read picture books.Report
Gawd, remember the days when men dressed up as women and got on stage to perform, back when the Globe (or was it the Rose) would put on Shakespeare’s latest work.Report
Remember when men used to get together dressed up in wigs and makeup? I think they called it the Continental Congress.Report
Those were very boring wigs and makeup.Report
“Me, not the school, not the teacher, etc. Why? Because not all kids mature at the same rate, and since SOMEONE has to make the determination for them about a whole host of activities/opportunities/stuff, the person best qualified (in general) are the parents.”
Now, to expand on this a bit… would you apply this to ALL assemblies and outside speakers and presenters? Or just certain ones? Schools bring folks in all the time based on a general developmental understanding of the targeted age range and there are always going to be kids who fall outside of that. So should we just not have assemblies? In fact… all of our curricular decisions are made based on a general understanding of development… of which there are always going to be kids who fall outside. Maybe we should just stop teaching everything in case there is a kid in the class who isn’t developmentally ready for it. Compulsory home schooling!Report
“”would you apply this to ALL assemblies and outside speakers and presenters? Or just certain ones? Schools bring folks in all the time based on a general developmental understanding of the targeted age range and there are always going to be kids who fall outside of that.”
Can you expand on that? As I said, I don’t have kids and am unfamiliar with the workings of schools, except for having dated teachers in the past. I can’t really answer your question until I get some concrete examples to respond to.Report
Schools might arrange for the Harlem Wizards (think Globetrotters Lite) to play a game against the teachers. Someone usually gets pantsed during the act and there is usually some PG to PG13 humor mixed in.
Someone might come in to talk about suicide prevention… it is often a parent who lost a child who will share that story.
Someone might come in to talk about drug use and abuse… they often share pretty intense stories of the worst case scenarios of drug abuse.
Someone might come in to talk about drunk driving…. they often share stories of fatal accidents.
To give a specific example that some folks balked at, we brought in a professional story teller. One of his stories was a dramatic telling of the traditional “Going on a Bear Hunt” call and response. A line which was repeated that I had never heard in any rendition before mentioned “packing his gun”… presumably a hunting rifle because, well, it IS a bear hunt. And I imagine in the original version — before Raffy got hold of them — they routinely had a gun. But no one THESE days mentions a gun and, let me tell you, some folks had feelings about him making reference to it.
Those are just some of the sorts of outside presenters that might come in. But suffice it to say, I could probably always find someone who would object to something an outside present says or does or whatever. So the question becomes… do we just never do anything that anyone might find objectionable? Because then we just need to shut every school down.
Should high school freshmen read Romeo and Juliet? Like my socially delayed step daughter is? There is quite a lot of sex, drugs, and violence that at times is confusing to her. And I’m sure she isn’t the only one nor the most confused/unsettled one. So should we remove that?
Should we remove Dr. Seuss? Oh wait…Report
Kazzy, I assume that all these activities are announced in advance and parents have the option of “opting out” their kids should they so choose. I’d be concerned about some of the things you mentioned for small children, as it might give then nightmares or such, but as long as it’s “age appropriate” and parents have ample warning of the event (hell even if they are invited as well–I’d love to see the basketball game-that’s be a hoot if I was a parent), I’ve got no objection to the activities you described. Some of the activities I might want to attend, especially if it was stuff like suicide or drugs and such. Appreciate the details!Report
Assemblies rarely have advance notice. All would be considered age-appropriate. DQSH is age-appropriate.Report
So, no parental consent/inform is going on. I got problems with that. It’s not necessarily that I don’t trust people, but, I don’t trust people.Report
But where do you draw the line? Every book that’s read? Every topic of convo? Do we need parental consent to have an assembly where Smokey the Bear talks about forest fires? Or only “controversial topics”? Who decides what’s controversial?Report
Not sure I have a answer for you Kazzy. Some of this is going to be impacted by how much time I have, whether or not I’ve met the teachers and gotten a feel for them, the subjects, etc. Again, since I don’t have kids, I have no idea how “realistic” my position is. I know that my parents did similar stuff but I was in a small town 40 years ago…..Report
It’s funny, this exact same conversation has occurred off and on for over a century, on the topic of evolution and creationism in schools. It’s interesting to watch it play out now on this subject, in no small part, I’m sure, because the conservatives have so thoroughly lost the debate over evolution in schools that it’s not possible to even have that conversation right now.Report
“Should we have pole-dancers read stories to children in the school library? After all, pole-dancing is just another form of gender expression, and people engage in the activity every day across thousands of towns in America, with enthusiastic approval I might add. And there are even ways that people perform pole-dancing for non-prurient reasons! Clearly there’s nothing at all to be concerned about here, and it says quite a lot about you and your prejudices that you think there might be. I think maybe we need to explore why it is that pole-dancing in front of children makes you so nervous and upset!”Report
Look at the view of us, the American citizens that is expressed here.
That, without the self-appointed vigilante censors keeping an iron grip over them, teachers are going to rush out and start doing Awful Things, horrible things.
Teachers, and by extension us American citizens, simply can’t be trusted to behave responsibly. Without vigilante parents acting as self-appointed censors, American teachers will run amuck and corrupt the youth.
This is the exact argument that has always been made since Socrates, and always supported by lies and fearmongering.
On these very pages of our civil and polite discourse, we’ve seen hysterical claims of teachers grooming children for sex which is a baldfaced lie.
And yet, these people demand that we take them seriously.Report
Your point?
My position isn’t “Everything goes!”
The position is “We have ways of identifying what is and isn’t age-appropriate and we should let this guide us when making choices about what we offer children in schools.” I mean, this is a pretty foundational concept to everything that happens at school.
So, no, we shouldn’t have pole dancing at school. And we shouldn’t teach AP calculus in 1st grade.
Like, this isn’t hard. It’s literally what we do every moment of every day in schools. We don’t bat 1.000… what professionals do? But we have tons of evidence and data and research to guide us.
If you’d rather we just defer to every individual parent’s personal whims… well… do you want be in charge of fielding all those phone calls?Report
Not to mention, pole dancing doesn’t have to be sexual, it can be very acrobatic, just like any kind of dancing.Report
I’ve seen some very good pole dancers, but damn few of them could work the pole and read a story at the same time.Report
“My position isn’t “Everything goes!””
nah; your position is “it’s okay when it’s me doing it”
“The position is “We have ways of identifying what is and isn’t age-appropriate and we should let this guide us when making choices about what we offer children in schools.” ”
I would absolutely adore watching you try to explain how drag queens are age-appropriate for six-year-olds but pole dancers are not.
Actually? Seriously, do that. Explain why pole-dancing is not appropriate to watch. No, not “well you just KNOW”, I’m pretty sure you’d say “I can’t define obscenity but I know it when I see it” is a cop-out, I want you to tell me why.
(I’ll do you a favor and not point out the idiocy of your suggestion that either A) drag queens do not emphasize the sensual aspect of female identity, or B) that this emphasis is age-appropriate for six-year-olds. Wait, I did? oops.)Report
Based on today’s SCOTUS decision, biological males wearing dresses while gyrating on poles is a protected form of sincerely held religious expression.
Don’t hate me, it’s in the Constitution. Notice all the Founders wearing wigs and heels.Report
If I thought you had a shred of open-mindedness on this issue, I’d consider answering your query. But… nah… not taking the bait.
You’re wrong. Period. And not just wrong but willfully ignorant on pretty much all matters of this topic. Enjoy that.Report
In case you actually DO have an open mind, I’ll provide visuals. Here is an image from an actual drag queen story time:
https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Drag-Queen-Story-Hour_01774c.jpg?resize=1800,1200&w=450Report
I’ll chime in with the rest and say that if you think a drag show is outside of conventional morality, then you’ve never actually been to a drag show (or drag queen story hour).Report
Really it reflects what Avi doesn’t realize is the central thesis up above.
Conservatives don’t know what they want. They know they don’t want *that*.
What they don’t realize is the “that” that they don’t want is something that they really don’t know anything about, and their problem is that they don’t want to listen to the current icky folks talking about that.
Which is why recent history is replete with stories about some conservative coming to grips with someone in their family being out or whatever as the moment that they realized that “that” is actually… fine, really. No big deal. Why was anyone ever against two dads, my cousin is gay and his husband is fine. Not my thing, but I don’t know why I ever thought they couldn’t raise kids.
Basically this is also why some of them are also mad that they’re tarred with the brush of being racist or bigoted against gay people: because they think being biased means putting on a wife beater and riding in the back of a pickup looking for a black dude to lynch or a gay person to beat up.
That’s not what being bigoted is.
Being bigoted is assuming that drag queen story hour is beyond the moral pale when you don’t know a thing about drag queen story hour.
Pinky is a goddamn bigot, and it does nobody any good to not start calling him out for it in the terms it deserves.Report
I’d think we can call agree –
– that “drag for kids” is becoming more common. I think that’s true, right? I don’t think that’s just a creation of the press.
– that drag differs from regular costuming. It deliberately seeks sexual ambiguity, not simply with reference to cultural standards but also with reference to physiology. That is to say, it’s not merely a man trying to dress differently, nor merely a man trying to dress like a woman, but a man trying to appear more like a woman.
– that this increase in drag for kids is happening simultaneously with a push for greater trans acceptance, and is part of that push.
– that, whether you think trans acceptance is good, bad, or mixed, trans acceptance falls within the realm of societal or moral ethics.
There’s nothing odd about noting the above, is there?Report
LOL. The definitional ‘Tell me you’ve never seen drag without telling me you’ve never seen drag.’
Most of drag is literally just singing acts or even just lip syncers. (And honestly, not very good ones.) Some of them are sorta commedians with the audience, but not all.
There aren’t really sexual explicit drag performances that I’m aware of (Most places that do drag literally couldn’t, they aren’t strip clubs.), although depending on the audience and setting, like a bar, they can get be a little lewd…just like any performer.
This is drag: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZuI9-7-5EA
That is what drag is.
Literally the only part of that that could be ‘inappropriate for children’ is ‘man wearing woman’s clothing’. (And no, I’m not misgendering him, that’s a cis man named Richard Cherry.)
No, that’s not how drag differs from costuming at all.
Drag is a performance art. Specifically, it’s the means of performing feminity or masculinity (Yes, there are drag kings.)…usually while doing something else, like singing.
It doesn’t really seek ‘sexual ambiguity’, from what I can guess you are mean? If someone in drag is mistaken for someone not doing drag, that drag has utterly failed. The actual premise of drag is exaggeration.
No. People _currently yelling about it_ is happening because those people are trying to push back against trans acceptance and think drag is close enough that they’re attacking it too.Report
At least we’ve established that the real objection is trans acceptance.Report
Yes, all of this. Especially the part about exaggeration. It’s all about the performance.
If you think it’s sexual, you are projecting.Report
Some folks just shouldn’t talk about sex.Report
“There aren’t really sexual explicit drag performances that I’m aware of”
um
this ain’t just “you haven’t looked”, this is willful avoidanceReport
“Drag shows are awful, intensely erotic and sexually explicit.
Trust me, I’ve never missed one!”Report
I just watched Tim Pool’s video entitled
Drag Show For Kids Sparks OUTRAGE, ‘Its Not Gonna Lick Itself’ And Men In Thongs Dance For CHILDREN
I’ll admit I haven’t dug any further than that.Report
I like the comment in this from The Hill.
“My kid is never going to a drag show. It’s inappropriate for fully-clothed drag artists to dance in front of kids. Instead, I’m taking him to an NFL game where he can sit beside me as I drink and watch a cheerleader twerk in her cowgirl boots at midfield.”
Been swimming in sexual references and innuendo you prefer for so long it’s become water.Report
Steelers, Packers, a few other teams don’t have cheerleaders. I gave up on the NFL for a few reasons including the gay agenda stuff. You can stop swimming in this any time you want to.Report
I’ll say this for OT: it has remained consistent in its tolerance for homophobes over the last 13 years.Report
Since I just unblocked Mike to respond to a smear, I’ll do the same thing here. It’s not homophobic to oppose an agenda. We don’t attack people here but we do argue ideas. I’ve run the gauntlet on this before on OT, and I can usually get people to conclude that I’m arguing in good faith against the promotion of what the majority of Christianity sees as sinful.Report
Yeah, yeah, that’s homophobia. I believe you are homophobic in good faith, though, if that helps.Report
“We don’t attack people here”
Dude.
People who dress in drag are people. You *just posted* a misrepresentation of what they are doing and you think this isn’t attacking people.
You may not realize what you are doing but I am begging you to step back and think about the fact that you have absorbed enough of some sphere of something to turn a group of people into “an agenda”, which is like a huge red warning flag about propaganda.
Or don’t, but then realize that you really deserve the tag homophobe.Report
I think Pinky knows exactly what he is doing. He is not attacking any drag queen or LBGT person that happens to post here. So Pinky thinks they are playing by the rules of OT. The rule is being defined narrowly.Report
Yeah, frankly fuck that noise.
It was embarrassing as shit when Tom told Doc Saunders in writing that he thought his existence was immoral and we sat there and clucked about the discourse.
I’m not doing that any more.Report
This.Report
Yeah, this is my point: he can be as homophobic as he likes on here, so long as he doesn’t direct it at any of the gay people around specifically. “I don’t mean you; I mean everyone like you, so it’s cool.”
The “it’s just my religion” excuse is, of course, as old as religion.Report
I was going to write a snarky humorous comment about how what if, Black Mirror style, conservatives woke up tomorrow in a world where religion was considered some perverse mental illness, where speaking to an invisible being was on par with getting messages from your dog.
But in this world, they were grudgingly tolerated so long as it was between consenting adults, but of course it was taboo to allow children to take part or be groomed into the lifestyle.
But maybe there were still pockets of the country where religious people were given electroshock therapy to cure them of their perversion.
And how would you like it then, Mr. Conservative, how ’bout that, huh!
But…this has already been written, many times by conservatives themselves!
We’ve all seen them, those essays written from the POV of a rural conservative young person who suddenly finds themselves in a new world of urban seculars. Or those bizarre “This is the world liberals want” memes.
And they write with such eloquence and clarity!
About their own minority status, and their own sense of being marginalized and misunderstood and slighted. Rod Dreher is the master of the genre, but there are many others.
So I frankly don’t believe them when they feign incomprehension as to why we call them bigots because hey look, they are using perfectly civil tones amirite.Report
It wasn’t that long ago, during the height of the New Atheist movement, when Dawkins and his epigones explicitly referred to exposing children to religion as child abuse. I thought it was pretty gross, but yeah, I suppose turnabout is fair play.Report
Saul, we disagree on principles. You think my side is bad for the country and say so at every opportunity; I think the same of your side although I try to mix up my comments a little. If the rule here is “if you can’t say anything good about your opponents’ positions then don’t say anything at all”, then I’ll see you on the movie reviews.Report
So he’s doing two of his favorite shticks at once: playing hall monitor and grading his own papers. How very economical.Report
Not really, you can’t (which is the point Chip often makes).
The reality is that cishet sexual innuendo is all around us, every day, in shows, songs, advertising, etc.Report
Anyone remember the J-Lo/Shakira Super Bowl halftime show? That had a much bigger erotic charge than Drag Queen Story Hour.
At least to those of us who don’t have very specific tastes.Report
This is also a generation of parents that largely group with hair metal and glam rock and none of them seem traumatized from having watched men in leather pants, no shirts, long hair, makeup, and body glitter prance about a stage.Report
Seems weird you watched a video of someone ranting about it instead of the _actual thing_.
The actual thing is, a bar that sells ice cream cones and thus has a big neon sign on the wall that says ‘Its Not Gonna Lick Itself’, someone fully dressed danced around poorly to music.
And drag is, by definition, not done in thongs.Report
There’s no indication online that Mr. Misster sells ice cream. Maybe during brunch. But at least do us the courtesy of admitting that “It’s Not Gonna Lick Itself” is at least a double entendre.Report
That neon sign is part of the bar, not something part of the show. It is literally installed on the wall, and, yes, it’s because they sell ice cream.
And now you’ve gone from ‘sexually explicit drag performances’ to ‘gay bar has double entendre on wall’! That’s not the same thing at all…
…and actually doesn’t have anything to do with drag whatsoever, so basically you’re just objecting to a gay bar allowing kids inside.
Hey, fun question: When is the last time you had a moral panic over the _name_ of Hooters, which I must point out people _outside_ the establishment are subjected to, via big ‘owl eye’ circle O that are very clearly a double entendre for something else? You know they let kids in there, right?Report
“you’ve gone from ‘sexually explicit drag performances'”
Yeah, when did I say that? It’s hard to think of this as a good faith debate when you’re expecting me to defend things I never said and you’re reluctant to concede that “It’s Not Gonna Lick Itself” at a gay bar is sexual.Report
Chip, sarcastically: Drag shows are awful, intensely erotic and sexually explicit.
Your response: I just watched Tim Pool’s video entitled Drag Show For Kids Sparks OUTRAGE, ‘Its Not Gonna Lick Itself’ And Men In Thongs Dance For CHILDREN
Your argument is that you watched a video talking about sexually explicit drag shows, and you posted that in response to someone sarcastically talking about sexually explicit drag shows, but…you don’t agree with the video?
Pssst: When your sole response to a comment is ‘Here is a video that claims to rebut what you just said’, we are allowed to infer that you do, indeed, agree with the things said in the video, at least in a general sense.
I’m reluctant to concede that, am I?
I pointed out it was part of the bar, not part of the drag show as _the video_ claims. I have at no point claimed it wasn’t a double entendre. (Not ‘sexual’, a completely meaningless term.)Report
It seems like there is a double standard of tolerance and acceptance of sexuality extended to cis het people that is denied LGBTQ people.
Like how heterosexual kissing was always G rated but two men kissing is R.Report
Actually, it’s from the brand of ice cream served:
https://www.cauldronicecream.com/
Mr. Misster (the gay bar that had the drag show) serves Cauldron Ice Cream, which is a small chain in TX & CA (& Qatar, apparently).
Cauldron Ice Cream has the logo/catchphrase of “It’s not gonna lick itself”.Report
You’re wasting your time bringing up facts, Oscar.Report
Perhaps it’s tilting at windmills, but it’s my windmill to tilt at goshdarnit!Report
Have you watched Shrek? Or Shrek 2? Or Shrek 3? Or any kids movie made in the past 20 years? They’re FULL of double entendres. It’s how they get the parents to show up.
Let’s stop acting like any of this is unique. It isn’t.
Source: Someone who has basically never left the world of children.Report
What was Popeye muttering under his breath 80-90 years ago? And whose kid was Swee’pea anyway?Report
Drag in thongs kind of defeats the purpose.Report
Yea, drag works precisely because of the clothes that are worn. Like, a drag strip show isn’t a thing because… I mean, the same way dry water isn’t a think (cue Oscar/Michael to explain why it actually IS a thing… but still).Report
Dry water isn’t a thing, but dry steam is…Report
Oh ffs…Report
Don’t worry, it’s a term of art for boilers and steam turbines. It’s just steam with humidity below a certain level.Report
“The other day I bought some dehydrated water and I don’t know what to add to it.”
Steven WrightReport
I’m sure that if you go to places where everything is very sexually explicit, you could find very sexually explicit drag shows, but I’ve been to many shows, and never seen one that was more sexually explicit than, say, your average Super Bowl halftime show, and most of the ones I’ve seen have been pretty wholesome.
This is because the people who perform in these are adults, and they’re capable of reasoning about what is and is not appropriate in a given context. They’re not any more, or any less, sexual than any other people, on average, and the fact that conservatives cannot think about them without sexualizing them says something about conservatives, but nothing about drag performers.Report
Likewise, my wife and I have been to a few near our house and they are all G-rated.
Part of this is that to many people LGBTQ people are sexualized by their very identity.
Like, a Disney movie that shows a mommy and daddy is wholesome, but one showing two mommies is raunchy hardcore sex.Report
No, this is you not knowing what sexual explicit means, or possibly being transphobic and thinking that someone dressed as the wrong gender is inherently sexually explicit.
There are actually laws defining what sexually explicit live shows are, and I’ve never heard of a drag show that even comes _close_ to them. At a minimum, it usually requires some level of nudity and/or simulated sex. Which is not something that drag generally does. (Nudity, in particular, is rather counter to the premise of drag.)
Most drag shows are at gay or gay-friendly bars where they legally _couldn’t_ do sexually explicit performances, as they are not zoned for it.
I’m sure at some point there has been a strip club that has done something with drag, probably with drag kings, but fun fact about businesses that do sexually explicit shows: Children are not allowed inside. At all, not just during the show. Children cannot go into strip clubs. So it seems like that’s not what we’re talking about.Report
“a double entendre”
[stares in the history of Looney Tunes and Disney movies]Report
this is such an enlightening quote. To start, why do Conservatives believe they have a lock on morality? Have you seen the coverage of the clergy sex abuse scandals in the Sothern Baptist Convention? And lets not forget that most of the Founding Fathers (where were the Mothers) thought forced chattel slavery was moral.
That aside, why is a person, in costume reading stories to kids immoral? Would you have the same reaction to McGruff the Crime Dog or Snow White doing the same thing?
Christ warned the Jews – and by implication us Christians – that casting the first stone against an adulterer when they themselves were riddled with sin was a BAD idea. Given American Conservatism’s long standing riddling with Sin, I’d think you all would be a tad more humble about this.Report
As I noted above, drag isn’t simply dress-up. Sexual confusion is the point, and it comes at a time when sexual confusion is being promoted throughout culture. So, no, it’s not like McGruff. I tell ya, though, if a group of men suddenly got really serious about being seen by kids while dressed up like dogs, and the C for canine started showing up in the rainbow letters, I might change my mind.Report
There’s no sexual confusion on the part of Drag performers. Nor is that the point. Drag queens perform as women to both explore their own femininity – which every person has in some form or extent – and to show the dynamic of female power in a different way. Really good drag queens are indistinguishible from the women they seek to honor.
Oh, and pro tip – discussing the “promotion” of “sexual confusion” – which I think you mean as “gender appearance confusion” – is deeply transphobic language. Your lack of pastoral Christianity is definitely showing.Report
As I said before, there are some people who just shouldn’t talk about sex.
It’s a more-or-less free country, of course, so they can talk about it if they insist. But they can’t complain when people point and laugh.Report
No, it’s not, but you keep insisting it is like you actually understand what drag is about.Report
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1537807543895998464
You might object that they’re neither trans nor strippers, but that would miss the point of Rufo’s art, like telling Quentin Tarantino that the human body doesn’t contain that much blood. His genius is to rile up the rubes, and he’s one of the best.Report
“Their vision wasn’t contradictory but balanced between the rights of the individual and the need for order.”
Rights for me and order for thee may be traditional and may be conservative but it sure as fish ain’t right.Report
Did I say “rights for me and order for thee”?Report
No, you didn’t, but that is how Republicans these days tend to pursue the type of ‘conservatism’ you are describing.
For months, all we heard about was parental rights and how they ought to have a say on what was (or wasn’t) taught to children (theirs and other people’s) in public schools. Now, those same people want to sic the government on parents for making decisions about what their children are taught.Report
And siccing the government on parents for those parents agreeing with children and allowing them to socially transition genders. Let’s not forget that.Report
Thomas Jefferson said those exact words to his slaves.Report
The mask comes off. Not even the fig leaf of “Judeo-Christian” remains.Report
I typically have you blocked, but I noticed this comment on the Recent Comments, and I figured I should reply to it. I wasn’t trying to edit out Judaism. I just didn’t want the sentence to get out of hand. I would have made reference to Judaism, Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Aquinas, which are the building blocks of the Enlightenment. I might have included the English approach to individual rights versus the state, which is an element in some Enlightenment thought, but I figured that was covered by “the form realized by the US”.
I don’t think your implication is fair (which is one of the reasons I leave you blocked). I think anyone who can follow along with a conversation on political philosophy would understand that your comment wasn’t fair. Nevertheless: I deny the accusation of any kind of anti-Semitism.Report
Not anti-Semitism, just the assumption that all virtue lies in Christianity, in the face of all the evidence.`Report
An important thing to remember in this discussion is that Reagan and Goldwater were hardly on the same page, ideologically (a 2020-election analogy would be that Reagan was the Biden to Goldwater’s Sanders.)
Reagan’s “conservatism” was actually a more moderate concept than Goldwater’s the-best-government-is-no-government libertarianism, which usually manifested itself as reactionary responses to government-backed social initiatives. (If anything, conservatives liked the idea of government-backed social initiatives, they just thought these initiatives should be “stay with one partner, have lots of kids, God Bless America”.) Conservatives at the time were what we’d call “centrists” today; the modern usage of “conservative” as a synonym for “reactionary right-wing” didn’t come into common language until the mid-1990s when Perot screwed HW Bush for refusing to go back into Vietnam and Gingrich took advantage of the resulting confusing in Republican leadership.Report
I think your overall point is pretty great though I don’t see in what way or manner ol’ Joe is an intellectual successor to Uncle Bernie. Certainly not in policy but maybe you mean in style or something? Even then I don’t see it as Joe was avuncular whereas Bernie was generally peevish. Other than their both being very elderly white guys I just don’t see it. Certainly not even remotely in a way that resembles how Reagan was a successor and heir to Goldwater.Report
In the world of conservatives and libertarians, there is no gradation. There is only unvarnished anarcho-capitalism as ordained by the Gods of the Austrian School or the Soviet Union. There is nothing else.Report
Mani was a prophet.Report
So was Isaiah. And Mohammed.Report
Less accurate, those two.Report
I’d be interested in seeing the scorecards.Report
“Reagan was a successor and heir to Goldwater.”
(He wasn’t.)Report
he was the successor in as much as he became party head when he was elected president. Intellectual heir, not so much.Report
This may be the truest thing you’ve ever written here.Report
“Assuming that car is heading into a ditch…”
Eh, why assume such a thing?
Question for all conservatives here. If the makers of that film could see you and how you live today in 2022, how do think they would react?
Consider that in 1964, one of the biggest hot button issues that outraged conservatives was that people were having S-E-X before and outside of marriage, and that many marriages ended in D-I-V-O-R-C-E.
Were you, dear traditional conservatives, a virgin on your wedding night? The first one I mean. Were your adult kids?
Do you listen to rock n roll, with its jungle beat?
This isn’t the hypocrisy charge.
It’s to say that all of us even conservatives, behave in ways that 1964 people would classified as being ” in a ditch”.
Does anyone here feel they are living in a ditch?
In 1964, everyone was aghast at the idea that Ermagerd, what if people are allowed to be gay, like, openly like walk down the street being gay wouldn’t that just be bizarre.
Today gay people are open and yet hark! Did the sky fall? Did the sun not rise this morning?
What is this ditch that Avi refers to?Report
Conservatism is a living and ongoing example of When Prophecy Fails.Report
Conservatives have managed to pretty consistently be wrong about basically everything they said would end disastrously that we eventually did.
Now, of course, there’s a caveat there we didn’t do some of the stuff, they managed to block it, and maybe that _would_ have ended in disaster, but quite a lot of those things have been done in various places and generally worked out well.
They’re notably, to the level to a near-perfect record, wrong about every social change. They think social changes are apocalyptic, and in reality most just have a decade-long slight adjustment period and then it just works.
They might have a _slightly_ stronger argument to make about other changes, perhaps, if we want to be especially kind and give them a _lot_ of points. If we accept the idea that ‘interfering in the market’ is ‘communism’ or something, and, well, communism, it turns out, actually does not go well. (Of course, it’s not communism, but we’re being nice.)
But their social forecasting is…wow. Just horrifically bad.
I remember back when I was a kid, here in Georgia, the big discussion was ‘Sure, we’re not racists, and I guess interracial couples are okay, we’re not racists…except I’m very concerned about parents choosing to have biracial kids. Won’t someone think of the kids, and how they’ll have to grow up?’.
This was a _legitimate_ talking point. Back in the 90s. By conservatives.
Gee, I wonder what happened to those kids? I wonder how horrible their lives were? Oh, wait, that’s right, they weren’t.Report
And even when they’re right, they’re wrong!
Just kidding.
But one of the biggest claims made by conservatives is that everything they like is part of some inherent natural order, hardwired into our DNA, fixed and immovable.
What’s fascinating is to see how much of this was proven wrong, but how much appears (so far) to be right.
Take marriage for example. In the Sexual Revolution, there were plenty of predictions- by liberals- that marriage would become extinct, that people would cohabit in group marriages* and so on.
But….not only has that not happened, when given complete unfettered freedom, gay people eagerly choose to get married, with all the white lace and promises.
Its perfectly legal now to form and attend orgy clubs and have wild unihibited sex with complete strangers. But..how many people do that?
Its perfectly legal to buy and smoke weed 24/7, nonstop as much as you like to the point of becoming catatonic. But who does that?
It does seem that even given total freedom, most people generally choose to live sober responsible lives. They date a while, explore different partners, then find a long term partner, and most often, build a household and family. That is, most people live pretty much like people have lived for tens of thousands of years.
Conservatives appear to be right that many traditional norms are deeply embedded in our natures.
They are just wrong about the need for a church or state to tell them how to do it.
*Curiously, these proposed group marriages always seemed to consist of one dude surrounded by a bunch of hot chicks. Weird.Report
You’re holding up the modern state of marriage as an example of what conservatives got wrong?Report
Conservatives back then thought that anything but the strictest no sex before marriage policy would lead to the complete destruction of marriage and family.Report
I guess there aren’t any windows where you are, but if you do get a chance to look outside…Report
You mean outside in the real actual world where the divorce rate has been trending down for decades?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/195955/divorce-rate-in-the-united-states-since-1990/
The high of the U.S. divorce rate was in ’81 or ’82, when I was not yet a teenager.Report
sfx: cricketsReport
I’m supposed to respond to every comment? OK, then, take a look at the US marriage rate, or the US illegitimacy rate.Report
As someone who’s had two children out of wedlock, I’m proud to have contributed to the “illegitimacy rate.”Report
What would either of those show?
Marriage rates are down. Are they down because people who, formerly, would have gotten married and then divorced are now just not getting married in the first place? That would be… good… right?
Are they down because the population is aging and there aren’t as many people of marriageable age as a proportion of the population now today that might have been the case 40 years ago? That’s… neutral, right? No?
Are they not getting married because they don’t have the financial stability to get married? Well, that might be bad, but… maybe expected?
Or are they not getting married because teh transgender agenda?Report
The notion expressed on this sub-thread was that conservatives predicted the destruction of marriage. The liberals on this sub-thread appear to be arguing that marriage has never been stronger. I’m saying that the marriage rate is a better indicator than the divorce rate. I think it’s far more complicated than rates, but Pat introduced the divorce rate as proof of his side, and I wanted to push back on that.
ETA: Actually, I didn’t want to push back on that, but then those crickets started.Report
It does matter, however, that the mechanism of decline matches up.
You can’t, as a movement, declare that LGBTQ rights will destroy marriage and family, then claim victory if the marriage rate declines for completely unrelated reasons.Report
Yes you can. He just did.
Unless you mean he can’t honestly do it. That’s a whole different thing.Report
Again, it’s a good thing I didn’t say that. Because I didn’t. Because I don’t believe that. Which is why I didn’t say that.
I don’t want to put you on the spot, but I’ve been getting hit a lot today, and I think you’re an honest commenter. Could you just confirm that I was talking about marriage in one section and trans acceptance in a different section?Report
“The notion expressed on this sub-thread was that conservatives predicted the destruction of marriage. The liberals on this sub-thread appear to be arguing that marriage has never been stronger. I’m saying that the marriage rate is a better indicator than the divorce rate.”
This is a delightful, real time re-writing of what just happened, along with a helping of ambiguity. Allow me to respond.
“The notion expressed on this sub-thread was that conservatives predicted the destruction of marriage.”
Is that a “notion”? Or is it something you will agree is correct, given that two comments after someone suggested that conservatives predicted the death of marriage you confirmed that you thought marriage was in a poor state?
“The liberals on this sub-thread appear to be arguing that marriage has never been stronger. ”
Is that what happened, or is what actually happened was that “the liberals” on this sub-thread asked you to explain some data?
“I’m saying that the marriage rate is a better indicator than the divorce rate.”
Great, can you explain why, by addressing the questions asked to you?
“Could you just confirm that I was talking about marriage in one section and trans acceptance in a different section?”
You mentioned elsewhere:
“– that this increase in drag for kids is happening simultaneously with a push for greater trans acceptance, and is part of that push.
– that, whether you think trans acceptance is good, bad, or mixed, trans acceptance falls within the realm of societal or moral ethics.”
Put your stake in the ground, man, stop equivocating.
Is trans acceptance good, bad, or mixed, and if it falls in the realm of “moral ethics” where does it?
Because absent you putting a stake in the ground I think it’s pretty fair for people to assume that if you’re talking about drag as being beyond the moral pale in one part of the commentary and bemoaning the moral state of marriage that you might have some thoughts about how those two things are intertwined, and your desire not to state so explicitly is unauthentic and not engaging in good faith.Report
“The notion expressed on this sub-thread was that conservatives predicted the destruction of marriage.”
Yeah. I wouldn’t have said “destruction”, but I’m sure some did, and others said damage, and others said bad idea. I’m not interested in getting pinned down over whether marriage is “destroyed”. I’m more interested in:
“The liberals on this sub-thread appear to be arguing that marriage has never been stronger.”
Chip indicated that gay marriage is proof that marriage is stronger, and Pat (I’m not sure if that’s the same commenter as Patrick) said the divorce rate has been trending down for decades, so yeah, “never been stronger” was an overstatement of Pat’s position but not of Chip’s.
“I’m saying that the marriage rate is a better indicator than the divorce rate.”
Yes, for the same reason that an improvement in the graduation rate of HS seniors is an unilluminating indicator in a school district where most kids drop out in their first two years.
As to the rest, you can confirm that I was talking about marriage in one part and trans stuff in another. I did so without drawing a connection between them. I also mentioned the NFL and ice cream, but I didn’t draw a connection between them either.Report
So you’re still not actually going to put a stake in the ground, then.Report
You’re the only one accusing me of not committing, but look, just tell me what you think I’m being evasive about.Report
“You’re the only one accusing me of not committing, but look, just tell me what you think I’m being evasive about.”
I’ve asked you about twelve very specific questions and in all your replies to me you haven’t answered any of them.
So. Those questions and your inability to answer them would be at least some of the things I think you’re being evasive about.Report
This still runs head first into my point that you can’t claim victory by accident.
So sure, marriage rates are down, but if you want to call it for your team, you have to prove that it’s down for the reasons your team specified, and not an unrelated reason.
If marriage rates are down because wages are stagnant relative to housing and other cost of living expenses (or tax policy), that’s entirely unrelated to gay marriage. It’s also something that, should wages rise or costs come down, we can expect marriage rates to recover.Report
Chip said that conservatives in 1964 feared that a liberalization of divorce law would negatively impact marriage. He also said the same thing about liberals and their thinking about the sexual revolution. I don’t think I’m stealing any bases here. Chip is the first person I’ve ever heard imply that there isn’t a direct cause and effect here. I’m not making a fringe argument. I can only guess that you think I’m making an argument over a shorter time period.Report
Even if the concern was the liberalization of divorce law, you still have to show that that is clearly the reason. As an added bonus, it’s good to also look at why the liberalization happened (IIRC a big part was domestic violence, but that was before I was born).
In my life, the refrain has always been that the liberalization of marriage would destroy marriage.Report
It is the power of true belief for the more religious especially from various hardline sets. The evidence can always be explained away.Report
There are the Bulwark Crowd who realize that Trump is a continuing disaster for the GOP and the GOP might have been in serious rot for a long time before Trump. Then there are the other people, who will continue to insist until they are blue in the face that Trump was not the ethnonationalist, corrupt, fascist he is and that the old “high-minded” conservatism of people like Goldwater, Buckley, Kirk, Hayek, and others is still the vital and animating force in the Republican Party and conservatism. Trumpism will pass and the old-fusionism will return.
The second group is in deep, deep denial. The denial is deep enough to last until it is too late.
As a liberal Jewish guy from New York, I have to admit my perplexity at Jewish conservatives and reactionaries like Ben Shapiro, Stephen Miller, Lee Zeldin, Chaya Raichik (the woman behind Libs of TikTok). I will tell you why I am perplexed: the right-wing unleashed by Trump wants to kill us and is only getting worse. To quote Chris Rock, “those trains are never late.” Even if you are skeptical about whether Drag Queen Story our is morally wrong or not (reader: there is nothing immoral, unethical, or wrong about Drag Queen Story Hour), people who like harass while wearing the symbols of the old Confederacy and/or the 1930s German reactionary party are not our friends.* They are not even our friends in the enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of way.
Is the left a bit harder on Israel than I would like often? Yes. Do I fear them more than I fear right-wing anti-Semites? Not for 999 trillion years.
Trump and his would be successors are not conservatives. They are radical reactionaries who want to install a Herrenvolk, theocratic, authoritarian government which lets them rule in perpetuity. Steve Bannon called himself a Leninist and I believe him. I’m not a fan of public money being used on private ventures especially those owned and run by billionaires but DeSantis did not cancel the special admin zone for Disney based on public policy philosophy and he did not veto funds from the Tampa Bay Rays because of policies on public money subsidizing billionaires either. He did both because both companies made milquetoast statements in support of LBGT rights and gun control respectively and how dare they disagree with the little Orban of Jacksonville.
The old National Review-Reagan fusion has gone the way of the Dodo. What is present now is no longer conservative but radical and dangerously so.
*Really? You want to ban this word because it is impolite but essays seeping in cultural resentments are fine as long as the word is ignored?Report
This is a great post Avi, but I feel that Kristin in her “Socialism is Anti-Choice and Anti-Life” post far more accurately demonstrated the tone, intellectualism and argument style of contemporary conservativism (and what remains of popular Libertarianism).Report
The thing is,
(a) Avi has to know that
(b) He is deliberately pretending he doesn’tReport
The people at the Bulwark are not exactly adamant liberal Democrats but they are cleared-eyed on what the GOP has become after Trump and they believe it is getting worse. Plus a good number have questioned their former policy beliefs and ideological priors generally. Jennifer Rubin is pretty solidly Democratic these days and has come a long way from being Mitt Romney’s number 1 fan. Avi knows Trump is bad and Trumpism is bad but there appears to be a mental blocker that prevents him from going over to the Democrats or thinking the GOP might not be that grand. This essay adheres hard that the masses really want Michael Oakeshot’s political philosophy.Report
I don’t assume either.Report
You take way too many things in good faith.Report
And you take too few. If you assume everyone’s lying all the time then why talk to them at all?Report
Because who would accuse them of wanting concentration camps otherwise?Report
Come on, North, really?
You are telling me that Avi never reads the replies in his own Twitter feed? He is completely oblivious to what trends everywhere on social media? He never watches Fox? He’s ignored *every* Republican primary for nationwide office that *just happened*?
The guy *writes about American conservativism*.
This would be like me writing as if I hadn’t paid attention *at all* to either the 2016 or 2020 Democratic primaries.
If he *doesn’t* know this and isn’t pretending that he doesn’t, he’s *so completely disconnected from American politics that he probably should learn something about it before he writes anything*
This isn’t good or bad faith, brother.Report
I have no idea what he does on twitter- I do not involve myself in that that dumpster fire and feel better for not doing so.Report
Okay… all the rest of it, then?Report
Does Avi not, you know, pay any attention at all to the legislative priorities of the party he supports in the largest state in the country controlled by that party?
https://twitter.com/scottbraddock/status/1537865221536194560?s=20&t=wqg8TUmH-CotkMCOHpoBvAReport
I’m not going to high mind myself onto a train bound for Dachau. There is this weird tendency in American media to write about something and then memory hole it for reasons I find perplexing. Jeffery Goldberg wrote an essay a few months ago which basically stated the GOP as it stands is in a position of moral rot and an existential threat to democracy. And then they seem to take no editorial stance or action based in that view? Then they invite Ben Sasse to write an essay to write about why student loan forgiveness is just a bad idea and other things should happen. Or they invite someone even more vile than Trump to write a cover story about turning the United States to an archly-reactionary Catholic theocracy.
This is why people like me think our media treats it all like a game and they are just blase cynics chuckling along. If you really think that the right-wing as it stands today is an existential threat to Democracy, you need to maintain an editorial stance against that. This means saying no to Republicans discussing other matters and saying no to publishing the outline for how archly-reactionary Catholic theocracy will work in the United States. The Atlantic can’t just hide behind their supposed high mindedness of being of “no party or claque” Ideas and actions have consequences. Ideology shapes very really into how we want the world to look and operate. There is this very strange desire in the United States to think that we can make ideology a 9 to 5 thing and then turn it off for after work drinks and dinner.Report
“There is this very strange desire in the United States to think that we can make ideology a 9 to 5 thing and then turn it off for after work drinks and dinner.”
American politics is, in the eyes of the media, the sheepdog and coyote cartoons from Warner Brothers.Report
A good chunk of our media seems to think two things:
1. Their wealth and position will insulate them from the bad parts of fascism. Or they will be able to escape to somewhere else before it does.
2. They simply don’t believe that anyone really believes the really far out stuff at the elite level. “Oh come on, Adrian Vermeule doesn’t really believe in arch-reactionary Catholic theocracy? He is a Harvard Law Professor for god’s sake.” So they treat it as a parlor game like an undergraduate debate club.
A lot of people still have a hard time with “when people tell you who they are, believe them.”Report
I reached a breaking point with the whole “grooming” episode.
Every single person above idiot level knew it was all bullsh1te, just a fairy tale concoction by Republican strategist Chris Rufo.
Yet entire swaths of the media and pundit class treated it as a debatable point to be soberly argued point by point, without ever using the word “lie”.
And even now strain very hard to not see the straight line connecting the lie they printed to the planned violence against Pride events.
On some level they know where this bigotry and eliminationist rhetoric leads but they pretend not to and indignantly demand that we pretend as well.
I’m done pretending and playing along.Report
I take a backseat to noone in my contempt for the mainstream media- how its prominent voices are utterly consumed with BSDI nonsense or how its support level staffers have collectively vanished up their own identarian posteriors. But I am not The Atlantic or part of media at all.Report
This puts it best, I think, in the abstract at least:
Rather than make an unvarnished demand for freedom to oppress he is more apt to present himself as the defender of certain values. It is not in his own name that he is fighting, but rather in the name of civilization, of institutions, of monuments, and of virtues which realize objectively the situation which he intends to maintain; he declares that all these things are beautiful and good in themselves; he defends the past which has assumed the icy dignity of being against an uncertain future whose values have not yet been won; this is what is well expressed by the label “conservative.” As some people are curators of a museum or a collection of metals, others make themselves curators of the given world; stressing the sacrifices that are necessarily involved in all change, they side with what has been over against what has not yet been.
The paragraph that precedes this one gets at the motivations more directly.Report
A return to feudalism and serfdom with the company town is the future conservatives want: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-oracle-larry-ellison-lanai-hawaii-plans-tourism/Report
If you ever start to feel that accusations of bigotry towards LGBTQ people are too strident or harsh, consider this from Candace Owens today:
The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens calls for the state to take away children from parents of trans kids and parents who take their child to drag queen story hour
https://www.mediamatters.org/candace-owens/daily-wires-candace-owens-calls-state-take-away-children-parents-trans-kids-and
This is where this sort of loose casual talk leads, and we should never forget it. However politely worded it is, no matter how it is framed and covered with euphemisms, it leads directly to horrific violence and injustice.Report
Never ceases to amaze me how people like Owens or Justice Thomas repay those who died for them to have a seat at the table by yanking away the chairs for anyone else.Report
Them ******s should be grateful to people like you!Report
Because I want every one to have the same seat at the same table? What’s so wrong with that?Report
That you want everyone to have the same seat at the same table, perhaps?Report
“What do conservatives want to conserve?”
Their own power.
There’s no other reason for their continuing embrace of Trump.Report
Bingo!Report
Conservatives lie, a continuing series:
https://twitter.com/tomscocca/status/1537859072892063745?cxt=HHwWgsC-pbmrydcqAAAA
Chris Rufo is now telling his fellow conservatives to “use the phrase “trans strippers” instead of “drag” because it sounds more lurid.”
I’m done with taking these people seriously or in good faith.
Its lies and liars, all the way down.Report
Surprise, surprise, the dude who started out at the Discovery Institute, then made conservatives across the world obsessed with “CRT”, is not a particularly honest person.
I believe a few of the conservatives here, including one of the front pagers, are fans.Report
Dude is just Goebbels, and he’s out here admitting it on the TL.Report
What’s distressing isn’t that liars lie, but that they find so receptive an audience that admires them for it.Report
People admire then for trying to end Constitutional government, so what would you expect?Report