You might be hanging onto a media driven idea of what conservatives are, not what we really are.
1. I personally know no racist conservatives. I do know left wing racists.
2. My right wing friends came around on gay marriage before my left wing friends. Cons are not homophobic. They don’t care about stuff like this. They do care about children far more than lefties. That is one huge difference.
3. Our society has been ‘default’ left for forty years. Unthinking people align left. You have to think your way to conservatism, as you yourself are doing. Hence the right wing core is pretty brainy. Educated or not, they are thinkers. Mostly.
4. The right is not a monolith. Walk into a room full of righties and you will hear pro abortion, anti abortion, pro Israel, pro Palestine. Laissez faire on LGBTQ and very anti TQ. Opinions vary on everything. What you usually won’t find is anyone getting furious at someone over an opinion. And more or less never if the opinion has been reasoned out. Even if we don’t agree. With the possible exception of anyone pro gender transing children. You are adult, you’re 50, and you want to wear a dress and call yourself Mary, not Fred. Go for it. Just don’t expect me to believe you.
Re the LGBTQ stuff. About 20 years ago I was meeting a gay friend for coffee. He showed up wearing a summer dress, white low rise sandals, a red bead necklace. Still bald. Still rugged lined face. He was a part time actor. I had never seen him not wearing t shirts and jeans. He was HIV positive and lived very healthily. He was ripped. I asked ‘just off a movie set’. No. He explained he needed to do this from time to time. I asked if he felt he was a woman. Nope. He felt the need to periodically express himself as a female. He asked if it bothered me. I said ‘I don’t tell my friends how to dress.’ That was that.
What was interesting was the different response between right and left when I told people about it. Keep in mind this was well before it was mainstreamed. The left WERE OPPOSED. Somewhat. About half and half. The right were derisive. ‘Does he say he is a woman?’ When I explained it was just something he felt the need to do, to express himself in a feminine way, and he didn’t expect any affirming response from anyone, every single rightie said ‘whatever. If he needs to do that, good for him for doing it.’ That was the end. Only lefties said they wouldn’t have sat with him in public. They were concerned should others see them.
Righties always affirm liberty. But your liberty can’t negate mine. Pretend you are a woman. That’s fine. But don’t tell me I have to go along with it.
Lefties are seemingly very concerned with how others might see them.
This was 20-25 years ago. The left had not embraced LGBTQ yet. Around that same time the Canadian Liberals had passed a law in Parliament saying marriage is only between a man and a woman.
However, the main objection was how they would look in public sitting with a bald, ripped man dressed as a woman about to attend a summer afternoon garden party. Which didn’t bother me in the slightest. But they assumed I had beaten a hasty retreat and were shocked when I said we sat in a popular cafe for a couple of hours.
"The left calls us closet conservatives, though nothing we believe is compatible with modern Republican/conservative politics."
Clearly they are compatible, as I'm a conservative republican and I've found far more to agree with than disagree with in your writing since subscribing here. I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy being made here. I'm also something of a Classical Liberal (of the John Stuart Mills, John Locke, more Enlightenment thinker and American Founding Father variety, not what gets labeled 'liberal' since progressives misappropriated the label). I find very little contradiction between those particular philosophies. When you call for foundational liberal beliefs and values to be constantly defended, that is an essentially conservative sentiment that you've expressed. You're upholding and defending a long-standing intellectual tradition against forces that seek to corrupt, distort, or replace it: actively 'conserving' a more classical liberalism.
I'm not sure if this is deliberate or not, but I suspect that we aren't quite using the term "conservative" the same way though. The way you've used it in this post at several points seems to be as a synonym for "collectivist", which it very much is not, especially in the American political context. The modern illiberal left is many things, but 'conservative' isn't remotely one of them, not politically or psychologically.
Words make things a lot harder. I'm from Canada, and until relatively recently, Canadian conservatism and American conservatives were so different, they couldn't be called the same thing
I struggle with the term "feminism" in the article. Over the years I've seen that tent grow and shrink so much that I have no idea what it means and who gets to call themselves one anymore
I admit I'm not well versed on Canadian conservatives, though I assume they're broadly similar to UK conservatives, so yeah it's a bit different than American conservatism. Still, that's kinda the thing about 'conservatism'; it isn't a single universal ideology. Political Conservatism is a philosophy that respects the particularity of each place and people, their history and traditions, so it naturally differs across different places and peoples.
As for feminism, I 'think' this is mostly talking about the generation that grew up with 1990's 3rd Wave Feminism (people less than 45yr old) and those born since because that's the inflection point where Feminism shifted from focusing on Civil Rights and equality under the law towards intersectionality analysis and forced equity of outcomes ('got woke' in modern parlance), though there ARE still some significant internal conflicts between 3rd, 4th, and 5th Wave Feminism on certain recent culture war topics (like 'TERF' vs trans-inclusive Feminism).
Anybody can theoretically call themselves 'feminist', but at least here in America self-identification with that label has been dropping consistently as it has become more and more associated with radical 5th Wave 'feminazi' types who seem obsessed with performative excesses like 'pussy hats', 'shout your abortion', and "deconstructing", "dismantling", and "queering" everything. Pretty typical left-leaning purity death spiral.
You might be hanging onto a media driven idea of what conservatives are, not what we really are.
1. I personally know no racist conservatives. I do know left wing racists.
2. My right wing friends came around on gay marriage before my left wing friends. Cons are not homophobic. They don’t care about stuff like this. They do care about children far more than lefties. That is one huge difference.
3. Our society has been ‘default’ left for forty years. Unthinking people align left. You have to think your way to conservatism, as you yourself are doing. Hence the right wing core is pretty brainy. Educated or not, they are thinkers. Mostly.
4. The right is not a monolith. Walk into a room full of righties and you will hear pro abortion, anti abortion, pro Israel, pro Palestine. Laissez faire on LGBTQ and very anti TQ. Opinions vary on everything. What you usually won’t find is anyone getting furious at someone over an opinion. And more or less never if the opinion has been reasoned out. Even if we don’t agree. With the possible exception of anyone pro gender transing children. You are adult, you’re 50, and you want to wear a dress and call yourself Mary, not Fred. Go for it. Just don’t expect me to believe you.
Re the LGBTQ stuff. About 20 years ago I was meeting a gay friend for coffee. He showed up wearing a summer dress, white low rise sandals, a red bead necklace. Still bald. Still rugged lined face. He was a part time actor. I had never seen him not wearing t shirts and jeans. He was HIV positive and lived very healthily. He was ripped. I asked ‘just off a movie set’. No. He explained he needed to do this from time to time. I asked if he felt he was a woman. Nope. He felt the need to periodically express himself as a female. He asked if it bothered me. I said ‘I don’t tell my friends how to dress.’ That was that.
What was interesting was the different response between right and left when I told people about it. Keep in mind this was well before it was mainstreamed. The left WERE OPPOSED. Somewhat. About half and half. The right were derisive. ‘Does he say he is a woman?’ When I explained it was just something he felt the need to do, to express himself in a feminine way, and he didn’t expect any affirming response from anyone, every single rightie said ‘whatever. If he needs to do that, good for him for doing it.’ That was the end. Only lefties said they wouldn’t have sat with him in public. They were concerned should others see them.
Righties always affirm liberty. But your liberty can’t negate mine. Pretend you are a woman. That’s fine. But don’t tell me I have to go along with it.
Lefties are seemingly very concerned with how others might see them.
I don’t get it. What was the leftist objection?
This was 20-25 years ago. The left had not embraced LGBTQ yet. Around that same time the Canadian Liberals had passed a law in Parliament saying marriage is only between a man and a woman.
However, the main objection was how they would look in public sitting with a bald, ripped man dressed as a woman about to attend a summer afternoon garden party. Which didn’t bother me in the slightest. But they assumed I had beaten a hasty retreat and were shocked when I said we sat in a popular cafe for a couple of hours.
I guess it’s emblematic of the old horseshoe, wherein the far left reminds of the right some decades ago
"The left calls us closet conservatives, though nothing we believe is compatible with modern Republican/conservative politics."
Clearly they are compatible, as I'm a conservative republican and I've found far more to agree with than disagree with in your writing since subscribing here. I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy being made here. I'm also something of a Classical Liberal (of the John Stuart Mills, John Locke, more Enlightenment thinker and American Founding Father variety, not what gets labeled 'liberal' since progressives misappropriated the label). I find very little contradiction between those particular philosophies. When you call for foundational liberal beliefs and values to be constantly defended, that is an essentially conservative sentiment that you've expressed. You're upholding and defending a long-standing intellectual tradition against forces that seek to corrupt, distort, or replace it: actively 'conserving' a more classical liberalism.
I'm not sure if this is deliberate or not, but I suspect that we aren't quite using the term "conservative" the same way though. The way you've used it in this post at several points seems to be as a synonym for "collectivist", which it very much is not, especially in the American political context. The modern illiberal left is many things, but 'conservative' isn't remotely one of them, not politically or psychologically.
Words make things a lot harder. I'm from Canada, and until relatively recently, Canadian conservatism and American conservatives were so different, they couldn't be called the same thing
I struggle with the term "feminism" in the article. Over the years I've seen that tent grow and shrink so much that I have no idea what it means and who gets to call themselves one anymore
I admit I'm not well versed on Canadian conservatives, though I assume they're broadly similar to UK conservatives, so yeah it's a bit different than American conservatism. Still, that's kinda the thing about 'conservatism'; it isn't a single universal ideology. Political Conservatism is a philosophy that respects the particularity of each place and people, their history and traditions, so it naturally differs across different places and peoples.
As for feminism, I 'think' this is mostly talking about the generation that grew up with 1990's 3rd Wave Feminism (people less than 45yr old) and those born since because that's the inflection point where Feminism shifted from focusing on Civil Rights and equality under the law towards intersectionality analysis and forced equity of outcomes ('got woke' in modern parlance), though there ARE still some significant internal conflicts between 3rd, 4th, and 5th Wave Feminism on certain recent culture war topics (like 'TERF' vs trans-inclusive Feminism).
Anybody can theoretically call themselves 'feminist', but at least here in America self-identification with that label has been dropping consistently as it has become more and more associated with radical 5th Wave 'feminazi' types who seem obsessed with performative excesses like 'pussy hats', 'shout your abortion', and "deconstructing", "dismantling", and "queering" everything. Pretty typical left-leaning purity death spiral.