this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Commentary: Longtime former Republican on Patrick Deneen and the demise of the conservative intellectual

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (5 children)

This is incorrect.

There is a such thing as a "conservative intellectual". It's just that they've been long since drowned out by the rest of the party, and the right-wing voting base has no appetite for actual, sensible conservative policies right now.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Name one conservative policy that has furthered mankind. Prohibition, voting rights, sexuality, drug war, terrorism; time after time they’ve been wrong. Even fiscally they run up the deficit. Their only role is to preserve hierarchy and maintain power

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Intellectualism is not an inherently moral thing. One can be an amoral, selfish, narcissistic, intellectual.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I didn’t mean to give the impression that it is a moral issue. I consider it from a populist societal perspective. The majority (liberalism)wanting to do one thing, and the minority (conservatives) preventing progress. If conservatives had it their way, we’d still have feudalism… oh wait.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Those sound like the exact kinds of people who shouldn't have any influence over our politics

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Those are core conservative "intellectuals'.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Name one conservative policy that has furthered mankind.

Richard Nixon was at the helm when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded. I believe he also was responsible for protecting national parks, but I didn't bother fact-checking that one.

https://www.epa.gov/history#:~:text=EPA%20was%20created%20on%20December,human%20health%20and%20the%20environment.

Now, granted, modern conservative politics are garbage-culture war bullshit, but we need to be cautious of forgetting history. Rewriting history is their game.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Progressive policies implemented during a conservative presidency don’t seem like conservative policies.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you can just hijack any and all "good" policies as inherently progressive then you're just a self-fuelling fire who wants to hate conservatives no matter what.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I wouldn’t be crediting them with enacting good policy if it wasn’t progressive.

If you can show an example of opposing progress that is good I’m all in on that conservative policy.

The ESA was not good because it maintained the status quo. It was good because it was progressive. The fact that it was implemented during a conservative presidency is irrelevant.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

May I also just add, that for his example he had to go, 60 years into the past....

My entire lifetime, the GOP has simply don't nothing that has helped the average Joe. It's always hate based culture wars, tax cuts and protect guns. That's it.

They provide zero solutions for anything. And if you do try to provide a solution, which inevitably will have painful parts to it because fixing things is hard, they blast propaganda how you're anti American. They are just not interesting in governing.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You made me think about this. Thanks

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

George W Bush massively expanded US Free Trade agreements. We went from 3 to 16 under his admin. That's good for the entire world.

Pretty much the only thing I don't like about Biden is his protectionist stance.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (32 children)

I’m gonna assume you think Capitalist expansion and colonialism is a good thing.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Go ahead and list an example of one of those past conservative intellectuals and we'll see how long it takes to dig up an example of them saying something like Civil Rights protesters are all secret communist agents or that child labor and vagrancy laws and debtors prisons are good things.

Like, I get the appeal in wanting to believe the other side is just as smart and well meaning as our side is, but there's just no basis for that in the historical record. They've always been like this and we just keep forgetting.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (9 children)

One can be an intellectual and still a huge piece of shit. Theyre not mutually exclusive. People like Milton Friedman or Henry Kissinger a undebatably intellectuals... but that doesn't mean they're angels. It just means they wield their intellect as a whip to beat their opponents with, rather than raising society as a whole.

Honestly this whole "conservatives are just a bunch of dumb rabid animals" is they exact sentiment they want us to feel. Because then we never look at the deeper issues that are actually affecting our world.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Honestly this whole "conservatives are just a bunch of dumb rabid animals" is they exact sentiment they want us to feel. Because then we never look at the deeper issues that are actually affecting our world.

I for one would love to look at the deeper issues that are actually affecting our world, but I end up wasting a ton of my time replying to dumb rabid animal shit David Brooks gets to smear all over the New York Times op-ed page when my older relatives who vote in every single election send me his columns because they think that he makes some good points about "Cultural Marxism"

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

And that's their entire ploy. Keep people engaged with pointless dialogues that don't mean anything. It's better to point them to an article refuting such claims and move on. The debates aren't worth getting into if they're not made in earnest.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

"sensible" conservative policies is such a heavy cope

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You could read the article instead of just responding to the headline.