There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual — only apologists for right-wing power
From Burke to Buckley to Patrick Deneen, we've seen a 200-year history of defending the indefensible
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As these comments are mostly outrage over the headline, I’d like to hear which republican policies people here are particularly happy about.
You won't get an honest answer, because an honest answer is about how they want to go back to 1950s American, where straight white men were the only demographic that mattered.
Even better when you talk them through that and watch them realize we will never go back to that post war economy because America can’t compete with a global stage that wasn’t bombed into oblivion by the Nazis.
Most conservatives are woefully ignorant of actual policy or what conservatives do. I have a friend who leans conservative, and asked him what he thought Trump did well. His first point was Trump helped to reduce the deficit, despite Trump massively increasing the deficit
And they can't be honest about that because they know it's a bad opinion. At least if they outright said the honest answer, I could understand it a little. If they're a straight, white male and have zero empathy for anyone else, it would probably benefit them (at the cost of everyone else).
But even if they have zero empathy, they still know that anyone who does have empathy (or isn't a straight, white male and has the slightest bit of understanding for what's going on) will never agree with them. So they have to come up with all sorts of bullshit. Hence how we get stuff like comparisons to lobsters, unsupported claims that LGBT whatever is harming kids, and general turning a blind eye to any blatantly harmful stuff that progresses their goals.
And don't forget that the corporate tax rate was "insane" compared to current times. Something like 80%+.
While I don’t disagree in principle – corporations need to be paying taxes, and in fact, so do wealthy individuals – the effective tax rate on wealth since the 50s has changed very little. Those extreme tax rates you see from the era – 91%, 80%, etc., often only applied to a literal handful of households or businesses.
And, again, because our tax system is progressive, those extreme rates only applied to income above extreme (for the era) thresholds.
The biggest issue is not the tax rate, but that corporations (and rich individuals) have so many different ways to avoid paying any tax at all. To the point that, in 2020, it was literally newsworthy that Amazon had to pay more than $0.
"Insane" for the rich too. The top tax bracket was taxed at 91%. But they don't want to go back to that 1950s.
Apparently I won’t receive any answer, which further highlights the issue. “Someone curious about beneficial conservative legislation? Gotta be a trap, go around.” The hoop is entirely open and a yet they refuse to dunk, because they lack the ability.
I mean, I think I’ve noticed that there is a much lower presence of right wing ideas on lemmy in general. My conspiracy is that is because a large amount of right wing sentiments are coming from fake to try and make it look like the sentiment is there. There is clear evidence this has happened with Russia in the 2016 election and the Rand Paul sentiment that preceded it.
I think you don’t see that on lemmy because it’s not a popular platform ATM so opinions tend to be a little more genuine.
4chan is probably the counter example to my belief.
My comment was caught in the outage, so forgive me for paraphrasing. 4chan used to be just as progressive as we are here, before they poe's law'd themselves into a nazi haven. Upside, their fall created a broad online understanding of radicalization methods, which I've found several people consistently using here, like disillusionment and appeals to open information sharing. No, telling nazis to leave isn't censorship, rando 1 through 8. Anyway, that's all to say that they're probing for opportunities to do the same thing here, and, like you, I can only wonder if it's actual bigots or state actors.
Straight white men weren't even particularly well off as a whole. Yes, The upper middle and upper class were almost exclusively white men but that was a small portion of their entire demographic. What they really want is to be able to go back to a time when they could beat their wives, divorce was not available, black people had to call them 'sir' or get strung up, and all the gay people were 'where they belonged', i.e. France, dead, or in the closet.
Ah yes, the “anyone I disagree with is racist” schtick. Keep running with that.
Go ahead and answer the question, then.
They're excited to force women to have babies against their will.
The answer for people here is probably no republican policies, ever.
The onus is on Republicans or so-called conservatives to name one, just one time they have been on the right side of history in the last 100 years.
So I would consider myself at least reasonably inclined to thinking and somewhat conservative. Note, however, that does NOT mean Republican. When I use conservative, it's in a different context than the modern "conservative movement". The modern movement seems to be more regressive than conservative. Conservative in my way of thinking is about calm, measured progress. Don't upend everything in massive sweeping changes... but don't reject change either, change is necessary and inevitable. The more moderate Biden-y neoliberal wing of the Democrats is probably the closest to that these days - the more progressive Democrats with wanting massive social upheaval type changes and the Republicans favoring the repeal-and-replace burn it down and maybe fix the ashes approach to undoing those changes, neither of which appeals to me.
The chances you are neoliberal isn't zero.
Given the amount of time I spent over on r/neoliberal, it could fit, although I do tend to fall a bit on the libertarian side of it.
Ooh, libertarian neoliberalism is like catshit wrapped in dogshit
There is a 99% chance you are a huge Destiny fan.
Nope, had to look it up (I think I'm a bit older than Destiny's original target audience), but just from a summary written about his political discussions I could see his brand of a pragmatic take on traditional liberalism being a good fit and am now curious to watch a couple of his videos.
The title is pretty bad. All the conservatives I know are monarchists. Not republicans.
