I really don’t think this is an accurate description of what an average ageing conservative German is.
Conservative means what it means - people who want to conserve rather than change, and are comfortable with how things are and, in their opinion, have always been. It’s a naïve world view based on a lacking understanding of how society changes. The people who hold it tend to be of privileged groups who can afford to be blind to injustice. That doesn’t mean they are fans of it - their privilege has just left them with a blind spot, and when injustice is pointed out to them they tend to blame those showing it to them for creating it in the first place. Again, they are not brilliant people, but they’re generally not evil, just a bit dumb.
When American self-proclaimed conservatives storm the Capitol building and make an active effort to fuck up their country as much as humanly possible they are not conservative in the same way some Günther riding the Deutsche Bahn is conservative. Similarly, I’m not a socialist in the same way Pol Pot was a socialist.
American fascists have intentionally stripped the word “conservative” of meaning, and if we accept their narrative we allow them to make us dumber.
I’m not saying CDU and CSU are brilliant parties, but the fundamental idea of German conservitivism is not the idea of “conservatives” as a select group of people for which society should work. If anything this is a description of populism.
I’ve never met anyone who called themselves conservative who wasn’t actually a radical extremist. They don’t want to conserve, they want to destroy the current institutions and somehow “return” to a dreamt up idolised past that never existed.
I feel like this is a good attempt at a description of what conservatism is, but I’d like to share my own - conservatism is the natural political philosophy of people living in danger and scarcity.
Hence -
Valuing stability, order, and predictability. When the outside world is violent and chaotic, you want your home and society to be as non-chaotic as possible. So, strict gender roles, supporting police and military, sacrificing individual expression for social predictability.
Deference to authority and strict heirarchy. In times of crisis, having an obvious chain of command makes it easier to get things done. So, patriarchal family structures, authoritarian governments.
An emphasis on practical or traditional knowledge over theoretical knowledge. Anyone who has done hands-on work can tell you how often theory falls short of practice. So, distrust of academics and dislike of book-learning.
Belief in a higher power. When you have no control over your life, you try to find that control by believing in god(s) and prayer.
Distrust of outsiders. Your family and tribe can be trusted - outsiders should be kept at arms length until proven trustworthy. And along with this - hostility towards members of enemy tribes. So, racism, xenophobia
Lack of empathy for outsiders or social “parasites”. When resources are limited, you must ration them, and giving away resources to people who give you nothing in return will hurt you and your tribe. So, hostility towards immigrants and the homeless.
And of course, the conservative response is driven by belief, not reality. So if someone believes that the world is dangerous and their way of life is precarious, they will quickly adopt conservative attitudes. So it doesn’t matter if you yourself are actually safe and your way of life is quite robust - if you get sucked into a fearmongering news cycle, you can become conservative.
Interesting thoughts. Though I’d be curious whether its just an ebb and flow of economic cycles that change peoples political leanings. Such as growing debts and a debt crisis from a progressive governments leading to the pendulum swinging right, and then a period of muted growth and feelings of inequality lead to the pendulum swinging left. Not counting modern republicans as conservatives here of course.
What happened in the 60s and 70s to turn a large number of “great society” voters towards Reaganomics?
What happened in the 60s and 70s to turn a large number of “great society” voters towards Reaganomics?
To be super broad with it: Nixon, an Oil embargo, and Civil Rights.
The Great Society was predicated on the New Deal, which relied on an alliance with segregationist conservatives who resonated woth infrastructure and an industrial war economy. When it came time to extend the gains of the Great Society to non whites, they ultimately rebelled in practice.
It was also Carter who adopted the precepts of what became Neoliberalism to try and sustain the political alliance. So the oil embargo of 1979 after Iran kicked us out for doing imperialism is a huge component that crushed the party leading into Reagan.
And so Reagan followed with his conservative plans to squelch the economic futures of those guaranteed civil rights, sealing the deal by offering a solution to those threatened economically.
But finally it was Nixon before Carter who broke the trust between the American public and government. Nixon came with the prestige of being Eisenhower’s VP for 8 years. His resignation was an admission of defeat that the GOP learned to never repeat at any cost, the effects we see today.
This is all brushing past the assassination of JFK that put LBJ in his position to begin with.
I don’t think things like debt actually make people more conservative. I think that effect has to flow from things which actually impact peoples lives - so if the government takes on too much debt, and then cuts public services to manage that debt, which makes people feel more economically precarious, then people will statistically become more conservative. But if the debt isn’t impacting people directly, then it isn’t increasing conservatism. Instead, existing conservatives are predisposed to care about increasing public debt and see it (rightly or wrongly) as a threat to their way of life. But if conservatives constantly talk on the internet about how increasing debt is going to collapse the government, then more neutral people might feel threatened, and will start adopting more conservative stances.
As for what caused the shift towards Reaganomics - I’m sure we could come up with a just-so story. But I don’t know if I’m the one to do it
I agree, though if you take on unsustainable debt without yield then you do inevitably get a credit rating hit, and you have to retreat. Keynes had a good idea of paying off the debt when times were good, but that has never been done without crisis it seems. When you do get austerity after credit ratings fall it means a lot of misallocated capital unwinding, and it was probably better the spending programs never existed at all, as you’ve created a dependency and a void for the service.
I’m quite left leaning, though my idea of raising taxes to keep debt loads in check is further right leaning these days.
Conservative means what it means - people who want to conserve rather than change, and are comfortable with how things are and, in their opinion, have always been.
One might argue it is about maintaining constants through change.
Most ideological conservatives that I know are well aware change is inevitable (and probably the most constant thing out there). What separates and divides them are what constants they seek to maintain, and some systems are categorically more damnable than others.
What happens when conservatives lose this constant, or are threatened to lose it, is when they become reactionaries or fascists respectively.
EDIT: I misread the comment above, which I completely agree with. I ended up writing a reply about the dangers of allowing the meaning of concepts to change along with dominant narratives. Not really relevant to the discussion, but keeping it below because why not.
I understand this argument from an American point of view - if I were conservative I certainly wouldn’t brand myself as such if I were American.
I have two counterarguments. First, this is a form of surrender, where we accept that the word has lost its meaning and we no longer have the vocabulary to talk about conservativism in its original sense. Language is essential for thinking, and by destroying the language and the words we use to understand concepts the ruling classes can keep us from understanding them at all. Everything becomes meaningless. Fascists, conservatives, nazis, libertarians, libarals, centrists all become the same as concepts are blurred and lose their meaning to the point where we cannot think of anything any more. This type of rhetorical class warfare is common in the US - there has been active efforts to destroy any word associated with socialism for a hundred years now. I think we should insist on the meaning of words and their distinctions because we should insist on thinking. The two are, fundamentally, the same thing.
My second counterargument is that this guy on the train was German. Europe is not America, we don’t want to import your stupid politics. We are better off on our own. Call this a conservative argument if you will.
Please understand my point was a deference towards a more precise and accurate definition of conservatism and an appeal to understanding the difference of when conservatism becomes reactionary or fascist.
It was kind of a corroboration of your point.
…which now I am unsure of since you are so readily disagreeable with it on grounds of American.
Ah, yeah, sorry, I didn’t read your comment carefully enough. Misread it as being a point about constants through change in terms of understanding ideology, and that conservatives are becoming something new that they were not before. My bad! It has been a long day.
Well the original conservative liberal divide was whether you supported the french revolution or preferred the gradual change of england. That was really it, conserve institutions and gradually change over many decades or have a revolution and install democracy immediately. The US founding fathers were all fully in the liberal camp, obviously.
I appreciate you taking the time to write all of this, but you’re buying the bullshit. The question that you haven’t answered is the crux of my point. “Conserve what?” And the answer is always the same, for every conservative, everywhere, since the first conservative: “Whatever I think is important.” That’s why they are constantly shifting their positions, why they seem hypocritical or paradoxical when they say one thing and do another. It’s how they criticize their opposition for the same choices they make themselves. They rail against abortion and have abortions. They complain about immigration but demand freedom to travel where they like. They want low taxes for themselves, government spending on their preferred programs, and strict regulations that benefit their businesses.
It’s not ideology, it’s narcissism. And there are zero exceptions.
It’s a naïve world view based on a lacking understanding of how society changes
Or they dislike how things have changed. Like the Ron Paul types who think medical costs, housing bubbles, university prices, etc… are due to government interference and control of the money supply. Theres a lot of believers in austrian economics as well, and they arent unsympathetic to the poor, they just believe the good things in society are due to technological progress and overwhelmingly more bad things due to government involvement.
Which isnt illogical or crazy, its very probable. Its also very probably we need more government intervention. In the end there are far too many variables to be definitive, and our economy isnt flexible enough to even change, as every tweak rewards one group and punishes another. Which I think is why we have bailouts after every recession, attempting to quell changes to the status quo and existing wealth distribution, which then leads to further moral hazard.
I’d also say many people think we can simply take money from the wealthy and distribute it with no side effects, without taking into account the velocity of money or interest rates. If you taxed the rich 90% and distributed it you’d obviously have massive inflation, rising interest rates, and people with a mortgage would default like they did during the Volcker shock. We arent on the gold standard, fiat moneys value is dynamic, the wealthy are only nominally wealthy given the current velocity of money.
Valid point. A well-documented human bias is also that we tend to think everything was better back when we were young - all ageing post-war age groups think society worked best when they were in their 20s. It’s natural that some people bass their political belief on this sense of nostalgia.
I really don’t think this is an accurate description of what an average ageing conservative German is.
Conservative means what it means - people who want to conserve rather than change, and are comfortable with how things are and, in their opinion, have always been. It’s a naïve world view based on a lacking understanding of how society changes. The people who hold it tend to be of privileged groups who can afford to be blind to injustice. That doesn’t mean they are fans of it - their privilege has just left them with a blind spot, and when injustice is pointed out to them they tend to blame those showing it to them for creating it in the first place. Again, they are not brilliant people, but they’re generally not evil, just a bit dumb.
When American self-proclaimed conservatives storm the Capitol building and make an active effort to fuck up their country as much as humanly possible they are not conservative in the same way some Günther riding the Deutsche Bahn is conservative. Similarly, I’m not a socialist in the same way Pol Pot was a socialist.
American fascists have intentionally stripped the word “conservative” of meaning, and if we accept their narrative we allow them to make us dumber.
I’m not saying CDU and CSU are brilliant parties, but the fundamental idea of German conservitivism is not the idea of “conservatives” as a select group of people for which society should work. If anything this is a description of populism.
I’ve never met anyone who called themselves conservative who wasn’t actually a radical extremist. They don’t want to conserve, they want to destroy the current institutions and somehow “return” to a dreamt up idolised past that never existed.
I feel like this is a good attempt at a description of what conservatism is, but I’d like to share my own - conservatism is the natural political philosophy of people living in danger and scarcity.
Hence -
And of course, the conservative response is driven by belief, not reality. So if someone believes that the world is dangerous and their way of life is precarious, they will quickly adopt conservative attitudes. So it doesn’t matter if you yourself are actually safe and your way of life is quite robust - if you get sucked into a fearmongering news cycle, you can become conservative.
Interesting thoughts. Though I’d be curious whether its just an ebb and flow of economic cycles that change peoples political leanings. Such as growing debts and a debt crisis from a progressive governments leading to the pendulum swinging right, and then a period of muted growth and feelings of inequality lead to the pendulum swinging left. Not counting modern republicans as conservatives here of course.
What happened in the 60s and 70s to turn a large number of “great society” voters towards Reaganomics?
To be super broad with it: Nixon, an Oil embargo, and Civil Rights.
The Great Society was predicated on the New Deal, which relied on an alliance with segregationist conservatives who resonated woth infrastructure and an industrial war economy. When it came time to extend the gains of the Great Society to non whites, they ultimately rebelled in practice.
It was also Carter who adopted the precepts of what became Neoliberalism to try and sustain the political alliance. So the oil embargo of 1979 after Iran kicked us out for doing imperialism is a huge component that crushed the party leading into Reagan.
And so Reagan followed with his conservative plans to squelch the economic futures of those guaranteed civil rights, sealing the deal by offering a solution to those threatened economically.
But finally it was Nixon before Carter who broke the trust between the American public and government. Nixon came with the prestige of being Eisenhower’s VP for 8 years. His resignation was an admission of defeat that the GOP learned to never repeat at any cost, the effects we see today.
This is all brushing past the assassination of JFK that put LBJ in his position to begin with.
I don’t think things like debt actually make people more conservative. I think that effect has to flow from things which actually impact peoples lives - so if the government takes on too much debt, and then cuts public services to manage that debt, which makes people feel more economically precarious, then people will statistically become more conservative. But if the debt isn’t impacting people directly, then it isn’t increasing conservatism. Instead, existing conservatives are predisposed to care about increasing public debt and see it (rightly or wrongly) as a threat to their way of life. But if conservatives constantly talk on the internet about how increasing debt is going to collapse the government, then more neutral people might feel threatened, and will start adopting more conservative stances.
As for what caused the shift towards Reaganomics - I’m sure we could come up with a just-so story. But I don’t know if I’m the one to do it
I agree, though if you take on unsustainable debt without yield then you do inevitably get a credit rating hit, and you have to retreat. Keynes had a good idea of paying off the debt when times were good, but that has never been done without crisis it seems. When you do get austerity after credit ratings fall it means a lot of misallocated capital unwinding, and it was probably better the spending programs never existed at all, as you’ve created a dependency and a void for the service.
I’m quite left leaning, though my idea of raising taxes to keep debt loads in check is further right leaning these days.
One might argue it is about maintaining constants through change.
Most ideological conservatives that I know are well aware change is inevitable (and probably the most constant thing out there). What separates and divides them are what constants they seek to maintain, and some systems are categorically more damnable than others.
What happens when conservatives lose this constant, or are threatened to lose it, is when they become reactionaries or fascists respectively.
EDIT: I misread the comment above, which I completely agree with. I ended up writing a reply about the dangers of allowing the meaning of concepts to change along with dominant narratives. Not really relevant to the discussion, but keeping it below because why not.
I understand this argument from an American point of view - if I were conservative I certainly wouldn’t brand myself as such if I were American.
I have two counterarguments. First, this is a form of surrender, where we accept that the word has lost its meaning and we no longer have the vocabulary to talk about conservativism in its original sense. Language is essential for thinking, and by destroying the language and the words we use to understand concepts the ruling classes can keep us from understanding them at all. Everything becomes meaningless. Fascists, conservatives, nazis, libertarians, libarals, centrists all become the same as concepts are blurred and lose their meaning to the point where we cannot think of anything any more. This type of rhetorical class warfare is common in the US - there has been active efforts to destroy any word associated with socialism for a hundred years now. I think we should insist on the meaning of words and their distinctions because we should insist on thinking. The two are, fundamentally, the same thing.
My second counterargument is that this guy on the train was German. Europe is not America, we don’t want to import your stupid politics. We are better off on our own. Call this a conservative argument if you will.
Please understand my point was a deference towards a more precise and accurate definition of conservatism and an appeal to understanding the difference of when conservatism becomes reactionary or fascist.
It was kind of a corroboration of your point.
…which now I am unsure of since you are so readily disagreeable with it on grounds of American.
Ah, yeah, sorry, I didn’t read your comment carefully enough. Misread it as being a point about constants through change in terms of understanding ideology, and that conservatives are becoming something new that they were not before. My bad! It has been a long day.
Totally agree with your point.
Well the original conservative liberal divide was whether you supported the french revolution or preferred the gradual change of england. That was really it, conserve institutions and gradually change over many decades or have a revolution and install democracy immediately. The US founding fathers were all fully in the liberal camp, obviously.
I appreciate you taking the time to write all of this, but you’re buying the bullshit. The question that you haven’t answered is the crux of my point. “Conserve what?” And the answer is always the same, for every conservative, everywhere, since the first conservative: “Whatever I think is important.” That’s why they are constantly shifting their positions, why they seem hypocritical or paradoxical when they say one thing and do another. It’s how they criticize their opposition for the same choices they make themselves. They rail against abortion and have abortions. They complain about immigration but demand freedom to travel where they like. They want low taxes for themselves, government spending on their preferred programs, and strict regulations that benefit their businesses.
It’s not ideology, it’s narcissism. And there are zero exceptions.
Or they dislike how things have changed. Like the Ron Paul types who think medical costs, housing bubbles, university prices, etc… are due to government interference and control of the money supply. Theres a lot of believers in austrian economics as well, and they arent unsympathetic to the poor, they just believe the good things in society are due to technological progress and overwhelmingly more bad things due to government involvement.
Which isnt illogical or crazy, its very probable. Its also very probably we need more government intervention. In the end there are far too many variables to be definitive, and our economy isnt flexible enough to even change, as every tweak rewards one group and punishes another. Which I think is why we have bailouts after every recession, attempting to quell changes to the status quo and existing wealth distribution, which then leads to further moral hazard.
I’d also say many people think we can simply take money from the wealthy and distribute it with no side effects, without taking into account the velocity of money or interest rates. If you taxed the rich 90% and distributed it you’d obviously have massive inflation, rising interest rates, and people with a mortgage would default like they did during the Volcker shock. We arent on the gold standard, fiat moneys value is dynamic, the wealthy are only nominally wealthy given the current velocity of money.
Valid point. A well-documented human bias is also that we tend to think everything was better back when we were young - all ageing post-war age groups think society worked best when they were in their 20s. It’s natural that some people bass their political belief on this sense of nostalgia.