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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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What does conservative mean that's not "there must be in groups for the law to protect but not bind, and outgroups for the law to bind but not protect "?
Conservative ideas like "we should just let people pour mercury into the river " and "it's cool to have kids work in factories " and "you entered into the contract willingly so you can't sue Disney for killing your wife" and "how about women can't vote " and "we don't need a fire department we'll just oh shit the whole town burned down? To shreds, you say?" are all bad ideas, and that's about the tier of thought I expect from conservatives.
You are confusing conservatism with fascism, and I don't blame you or anyone else for not being able to tell the difference at this point.
It's important to first understand that conservatism is a descriptor for a concept rather than a grouping of people. Yes, I know you can categorize certain people as "conservatives," but doing that has the pitfall we are seeing now, where they start describing themselves as such and then proceed to degrade ideologically over time until their beliefs and actions do not even resemble the original meaning, all the while clinging to this tribalistic, meaningless word that they choose to identify as.
Conservatism is supposed to be about conserving values that, ideally, you or your parents fought to establish in the first place. Things like "regulation that prevents mercury from being legally dumped in rivers," and "you have to be of at least a set minimum age for employers to be allowed to hire you" are laws that prior generations bled for to bring to reality. These are, by definition, conservative values because someone else established them before your time. We want to conserve them, because the benefits they bring us are still very relevant to us today. They are worth holding onto.
The second thing to understand is that conservatism, and its converse liberalism, are both relative terms. "Conservatives" do not actually have an objective hard set of views or dogma, otherwise they'd still be clawing at the dirt in caves while praying to the sun, and "liberals" do not have some sort of objective hard set of opposing views either, otherwise they'd be conservative by definition.
A healthy society utilizes both of these concepts in delicate balance--even down to the individual person holding viewpoints rooted in both preserving some values, while simultaneously working to change or enhance others. Again, conservatism and liberalism shouldn't be seen as belonging to opposing groups of people, but as concepts that we all use every day without even thinking about it.
Conservatism is a neutral stance. It represents stagnation, which isn't always bad if used to protect the right things. Liberalism is the progressive stance. It moves us forward and helps us understand what is good and what is better.
However, conservatism can also (and often does) start moving backwards instead. That is called regression, and is exactly what you were referring to with that list of regressive ideas. Most of those were defeated long ago by progressives of the time, many of whom paid dearly to make sure that their kids wouldn't have to suffer the same way they did. Spitting on their graves by rolling back their hard-fought victories is not "conservative" at this point, only regressive, and it should start being correctly identified and called out as such before it's too late to stop it from regressing further into the worst case scenario.
I think that's a highly, highly idealized idea of what conservatism means, and as someone in my fifties I don't think that has been seen in US politics since my parents were children (Edit: and in thinking about this comment after leaving it, I'm not even sure who I'm imagining from that time who fits the bill - Eisenhower maybe? Gotta love this from him.) - and we all know the social ills we've had to stamp out since then. Those sort of "principled" conservatives may have been "better" people than the trumpists, but were still not compatible with any modern non-regressive attitudes regarding LGBTQ+ rights, modern views of women's rights or the degree of agency that modern women have, nor modern understanding of racism and bigotry within individuals and systemically throughout our institutions.
In the same way that communism has enough widely known examples of how badly it can go that most people in the US run from it politically* (I acknowledge people disagree with that assessment, and that it's oversimplified, but I'm not here for that argument - it's how most people feel, deserved or not) there is or should be no one with a modern understanding of conservatism who doesn't likewise run from it. How can a conservative party exist in the US which doesn't get overrun by maga-types? What other party would they join? Even the Democrats are too conservative for many (including me), but the magas aren't going to run there for sure.
*I frankly think that a hundred years from now the US will be held up as an example of the perils of rampant, corrupt, unchecked capitalism in a way that is viewed equally abhorrently as folks from my generation and earlier viewed the USSR and other "communist" nation examples. The air quotes are a nod to those who argue that none of those commonly touted examples of the ills of communism were truly communist nations, though again I'm not here for that argument.
I appreciate the lengthy and well written response. But I don't really agree.
When the current state of things is bad, pushing to conserve it is also bad.
Sometimes things can seem good from the perspective of the hypothetical conservative, but actually be pretty bad from a more zoomed out one. For example, someone might want to "conserve" their suburban lifestyle. They might not realize the racism that went into establishing it. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Color_of_Law is a pretty good book.) Worse, they might support the racism. "Our parents fought to keep people of life ancestry together. That's just how the world is. Those people should live somewhere else.". There are countless other examples. "My dad employed children in his factory and my golly I want to do the same." Something being a tradition doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Conservatives do not have a lock on keeping good laws. Progressives do not want to change things for the sake of change. No progressive is going to look at a law that says you have to be 18 to work dangerous machinery and be like, "This is a good law, but we can't leave it as-is because then we'd be a conservative." Progressives would also support a law against dumping mercury in the river, because the underlying values ("don't poison people for profit", i guess?) are progressive values.
I think the underlying value system of conservatism is hierarchy. The world must have hierarchy. You see this with like monarchy and nobility, you see this with the rich being treated differently than the poor, and you see this with racism. Other ideas like "Oh, we should preserve our traditions" are mostly paint jobs on top of "There must be outgroups to bind and ingroups to protect".