I read often on reddit that American and European conservatism is very different and European conservatives typically support public healthcare, education, social safety nets and high taxes.(for high earners anyway) Which makes me wonder what is the European conservative standpoint as opposed to liberal/progressive standpoint in that country. In countries with monarchies, I think conservatives would favor in retaining it rather than abolishing it, but I couldn't think of anything much else. In my country, Turkey, conservatism has strong religious and ethno-nationalistic/militaristic undertones but I believe that's not really common in Western Europe for the last 50 years except for very far-right fringe parties with very old dinosaur voterbases. What do German conservatives(CDU for example) want to conserve that SPD doesn't for example?

I will start out saying that I am 24 years old.

I got caught up in the conservative movement in 2016. I was brainwashed into supporting trump and just being a staunch maga supporter. I became semi famous on youtube and facebook for my extremist views of being a black conservative. I wanted a place to feel like i belong. I wanted to be part of something special.

Over the time I had this feeling of something being wrong. It was a nagging gut feeling that, I was caught in a cult. It was like being in a hivemind. In 2017 I began to hear about this Q anon thing. I paid no attention to it and i thought it was weird. Suddenly I began to listen to it. At first it seemed as if it made sense. I felt like i finally cracked the code(so i thought) to why things were the way they were.

I felt like i had some secret knowledge. In truth i was stupid. For 2 years 2018-2020. I was somewhat heavy into Q anon. Then something broke in me. That same feeling came back.

The feeling of being in a deadly cult. I felt like i was part of the modern day branch davidians. If i thought differently, i was insulted and berated. I got called liberal, fake, idiot, and other things that i wish to no repeat on here. I felt alone.

I began to "deprogramme" around late 2020 to early this year. I started to talk to and ask doctors about the vaccine and the science behind it. I asked politicians and business owners about the political aspects of america. I asked my friends, family, and coworkers the same questions. As i asked around, i slowly began to come to my senses.

I began to realize how, extreme and radical i became. I lost friends, family members, good romantic relationships all because of my actions and viewpoints. The world wasnt against me. I was against the world. I was at war with myself.

I realized how brainwashed these q anon people were. How flawed their world view was. I feel like i wasted my youth. I wish i never even met these people. I regret my decisions and i miss my old self.

I used to be such a nice person. I loved anime(and I still do), i treated everyone equally. I wasnt always angry or depressed. I wasnt a flaming racist(even though im black), nor was I a "redpilled" person.

2021 has been a year of deprogramming myself. I spat that redpill up and became somewhat normal. I dont see myself being radical anymore. That mindset changed and as a result my life changed for the better. I met new friends, and reunited with old ones. I found myself being less angry,

The former Bush (43) speechwriter and token conservative on the Atlantic staff today published an essay outlining how modern Trumpian conservatism differs from the historical intellectual tradition of conservatism as defined by Edmund Burke.

Brooks' idea is that classic Burkean conservatism is based on community, family and tradition, and that strong social institutions do a better job of creating good citizens and societies than ambitious plans concocted by technocratic elites.

However, he also admits that the seeds of the type of authoritarian conservatism practiced by Trump and Fox News are also present in traditional conservatism. The conservative emphasis on community can turn into xenophobia; its reverence for the past can stifle necessary social and economic change.

I've personally long though that the intellectual tradition of conservatism as described by Brooks was created by Buckley et al. in the 1960s in an attempt to smooth the rough edges from the burgeoning American conservative movement and make it more palatable to the American political establishment.

On the other hand, Brooks' descriptions of traditional conservative values have given me an insight into conservative communities (especially the rural communities that are the backbone of modern conservatism) that I had not previously considered. His arguments for the virtues of community and tradition are very persuasive.

Was the decline of Burkean/Buckleyan conservative ideals into Trumpism inevitable? Is it possible to have traditional, community-centered politics based on classical liberal ideals without xenophobia, anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism?

So is it just me or are most fitness influencers right winged? Like they’re some that are really open about it, like Emily Hayden and others who are super low key about it like Whitney Simmons. I’m also starting to see a trend of more and more fitness influencers hiding their political affiliation as to not lose ✨engagement✨ What are everyone’s thoughts on that?

Hi there! I’m interested in politics and the nature of the political situation in America (in a phrase - pretty screwy). I’m pretty well exposed to both sides of the spectrum (I hope!) - liberal media and conservative ideas at home and just in general where I live, as well as practically growing up in a conservative presidency (I’m 16 right now).

To that end, I don’t feel like I can trust any established news sources to give me the factual, objective news without attempting to sell their own ideology to people who don’t look around them. Having seen the events of January 6th and current political war, I’m sure conservatives have a lot of misconceptions and overgeneralizations. I’d like to see a few of them that you all receive and hopefully provide my own take to see where I fall! I enjoy some civil political discourse, which we really need in this country right about now.

(Happy holidays, guys! Thanks in advance!)

What's the role of integrity (party), good faith, conviction, position, ideas, debate? Traditionally speaking. Is it a winnable strategy? Is it disheartening, boring, frustrating, valid? Is obstruction, contrarianism the future of politics?

*I gladly concede at least a version of this question concerning the DNC as functionally representative of the left is equally valid but this is ask conservatives so I thought I'd ask.

Synopsis

In Preserving the White Man’s Republic, Joshua Lynn reveals how the national Democratic Party rebranded majoritarian democracy and liberal individualism as conservative means for white men in the South and North to preserve their mastery on the eve of the Civil War.

Responding to fears of African American and female political agency, Democrats in the late 1840s and 1850s reinvented themselves as "conservatives" and repurposed Jacksonian Democracy as a tool for local majorities of white men to police racial and gender boundaries by democratically withholding rights. With the policy of "popular sovereignty," Democrats left slavery’s expansion to white men’s democratic decision-making. They also promised white men local democracy and individual autonomy regarding temperance, religion, and nativism. Translating white men’s household mastery into political power over all women and Americans of color, Democrats united white men nationwide and made democracy a conservative assertion of white manhood.

Democrats thereby turned traditional Jacksonian principles—grassroots democracy, liberal individualism, and anti-statism—into staples of conservatism. As Lynn’s book shows, this movement sent conservatism on a new, populist trajectory, one in which democracy can be called upon to legitimize inequality and hierarchy, a uniquely American conservatism that endures in our republic today.

Excerpts

The 1850s Democracy rejuvenated conservatism by reimagining individualism and democracy as “conservative.” Democrats lost their republic. But they did wrench American conservatism in a new direction. Traditional conservatism, taking solace in social organicism and antipathetic to liberal democracy, persists. Yet a thoroughly modern and distinctly American conservatism has also emerged. Individualism and democratic populism characterize contemporary conservatism in the United States, especially with the ascendance of the New Right after the Second World War. Americans trumpet their exceptionalism. They can at least cite their conservatism as unprecedented, untethered as it is from Europe’s anti-Enlightenment reactionaries. The intellectual forerunners of this ideologically virile political coalition are antebellum Democrats, who squared liberal individualism and majoritarian democracy with social and racial order. Democrats discerned that

Submission statement: I believe the value system of conservative/liberal needs to be separated from conventionally labeled standards. The abstraction, at this point, appears to me to have become fully divorced from the implementation. Unfortunately, I don't know what to do with the conventionally labeled standards except declare it as "[former definition] in name only" (e.g., CINO/LINO).

I've been thinking about this for a very long time, and have finally nailed it down: leftist ideology is presently in some ways conservative.

If we strip away the implications of the word, "conservative" and "liberal" sit on a spectrum between "liberally" doing something new versus "conserving" what exists.

When it's considered hate speech to express a dissenting view, or it's a defiance of science (which has become loosely defined), the leftist norm is enforcing a type of standard.

Basically, a group that is publicly shaming is likely the "conservative" group, since they're trying to enforce a scope of behavior or thought that was established, while the "liberal" group is trying to defy it. This gets very complicated if we get into the weeds about *what* we're talking about, since it becomes a values dissonance.

As an example, there was X point in time/space where being publicly gay was Y-amount unfashionable. There is another X+σ time/space where being Christian is Y unfashionable. Both of those are equally liberal ideologies because of the reaction they're surrounded by.

Conservative and Libertarian views and that whole “I don’t wanna pay taxes”, “I wanna work until I’m rich” and genuinely our whole system is designed after the world view of a 14 year old. Once you mature you should realize that in order to live in a functioning society you need certain rules and that it’s much more important that every person lives a life where they can enjoy themselves instead of being slaves to their jobs and be in huge debt.

Submission Statement: Analysis of a quote and podcast by IDW-adjacent Marxist intellectual Slavoj Žižek, in which I make and defend the claim that his commitment to the ideals of fighting for social and economic change can— if that change is construed to be undertaken with the primary goal of undermining ideology— be understood as an ultimately conservative position, one that highlights what he and more accepted IDW figures have in common.

“…but what I’m saying is that—okay, there is nothing will happen, I don’t like the society which will emerge with nothing will change, if nothing will change, things will soon change even more radically. I predict that if the existing global system is, as it were, left to itself, the new authoritarian society with new apartheids, new divisions, and so on will gradually emerge which will not be the old Fascism— I absolutely don’t like the way whenever you have some authoritarian tendencies, people say Fascism, Fascism— this means the laziness of things, the easiest way instead of confront what’s going on today is to simply— to apply an old label.”

-Slavoj Žižek, Slavoj Žižek - Collected Recordings Podcast, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (41:18)

What does it mean to be a conservative? I feel it can mean many things, but one of the main ones is a desire not to change things all that much. To find out what things are important to us, and to keep those things the same. But I feel in some ways this definition rests on an assumption of the type of society one lives in. That is, it assumes that such a society is a model of stability. What would one do in a dystopia, for example? Well, one might want to revert back society to an earlier and more stable form. Is that not conservatism? I’d say it could be. It’s changing things, in order to keep them the same.

In a lecture recorded at a book signing for Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek discusses a number of things, most of them humorous, but if there was to be one common thread, I feel it would be the discussion of ideology, and how one might be able to recognize and address it. Most who have listened to Žižek speak know that he is no stranger to mocking the Left. At first I thought that an odd sort of self-deprecation, and perhaps a sign that he didn’t really believe in his own principles so strongly. But I’ve come to find that it might mean something quite the opposite

Immigration.

Immigrants (both legal and illegal) vote majority Democrat. The voting population decides the laws. There are plenty of other important issues, but they will all be decided based on what happens with immigration, so this needs to be addressed before anything else.

If we keep taking in immigrants at the rate that we currently are, then the future laws are guaranteed to all be decided by Democrats. That means tax payer funded abortions everywhere up to the moment of birth. That means teachers informing you your child is transgender and if you disagree then child protective services takes your custody away. That means CRT/cultural Marxism in classrooms. That means removing zoning for single family home neighborhoods and everyone is forced into apartments. That means defunding the police and appointing more district attorneys who refuse to prosecute rioters. All of those examples are important issues, but the outcome of all of those issues will be decided by if we continue to import millions of Democrats each year.

There are other issues with mass immigration that could also be discussed: displacing the original demographics, making US a majority Spanish speaking country, ruining any sense of social cohesion, overcrowding like Tucker Carlson talked about in the clip I posted the other day, etc. BUT the effect that it has on voting, and thus on the laws we end up with, is THE single biggest effect in my opinion.

If you read my whole short essay here, thank you for taking the time to do that, and please share your thoughts in the comments if you want to.

The Scary Future of the American Right

What I saw at the National Conservatism Conference.

David Brooks | November 18, 2021

Rachel Bovard is one of the thousands of smart young Americans who flock to Washington each year to make a difference. She’s worked in the House and Senate for Republicans Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee, was listed among the “Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35” by National Journal, did a stint at the Heritage Foundation, and is now policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose mission is to train, equip, and unify the conservative movement. She’s bright, cheerful, and funny, and has a side hustle as a sommelier. And, like most young people, she has absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group.

One of the ideas she’s absorbed is that the conservatives who came before her were insufferably naive. They thought liberals and conservatives both want what’s best for America, disagreeing only on how to get there. But that’s not true, she believes. “Woke elites — increasingly the mainstream left of this country — do not want what we want,” she told the National Conservatism Conference, which was held earlier this month in a bland hotel alongside theme parks in Orlando. “What they want is to destroy us,” she said. “Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal,” but they’ve already been doing it for years “by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.”

As she says this, the dozens of young people in her breakout session begin to vibrate in their seats. Ripples of head nodding are visible from where I sit in the back. These are the rising talents of the right — the Heritage Foundation junior staff, the Ivy League grads, the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land. In the hallway before watching Bovard’s speech, I bumped into one of my former Yale students, who is now at McKinsey.

Bovard has the place rocking, training her sights on the true enemies, the left-wing elite: a “totalitarian cult of billionaires and bureaucrats, of privilege perpetuated by bullying, empowered by the most sophisticated surveillance and communications technologies in history, and limited only by the scruples of people who arrest rape victims’ fathers,

I hear the term conservatism said a lot in leftist spaces but it never feels like I truly understand what you mean by it. When I hear it used it's almost synonymous with fascist as if the two are one and the same. So, what do you think conservatism means?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how American politics is framed as an “us vs. them” philosophy.