What Happened to American conservatism?

“… which condemned the Brown v Board of Education decision and the order to desegregate school….”

Of course this was the tipping point. The watershed moment. I should add this to my timeline in an earlier post. It should be:
Brown v Board… Buckley/Goldwater… Civil Rights…. Dixiecrats switched to Republican…. Southern Strategy etc.

Brown v Board Started it.
Obama in the Whitehouse was the last straw.
MAGA grew out of it all and matasticized into what we see today.
David Brooks says goodbye to his Old Party which isn’t so Grand anymore.
 
If only a thoughtful conservative board member would post on this thread and engage in a discussion.

Am I a Diogenes searching for a serious conservative...or am I just a hapless Vladimir waiting for Godot ?
How is it in their self interest? While I've never seen it expressed openly, it seems like the core of conservatism that if it is not directly in their self interest, it's not worth doing.
 
Conservatism was Once Upon a Time pragmatic and somewhat moral restraint, for example Eisenhower's speech warning of the Military Industrial Complex, which of course happened and became outrageously, impossibly worse than he feared. Back further, it was moral guard rails of the Adam Smith variety. I am certainly not going to digress on any of that, which today is as gone as the brontosaur. As I wrote in my here be dragons thread, I am devoutly limiting my own processing of all that is going on for reasons of my mental health, but I have been sent some brilliant links that I have chosen to read. The following is a superb Big Picture/historical contextualizing essay (I know there has been a flurry of such articles and books on this everywhere), but I invite you to make the time for this one.

 
Conservatism was Once Upon a Time pragmatic and somewhat moral restraint, for example Eisenhower's speech warning of the Military Industrial Complex, which of course happened and became outrageously, impossibly worse than he feared. Back further, it was moral guard rails of the Adam Smith variety. I am certainly not going to digress on any of that, which today is as gone as the brontosaur. As I wrote in my here be dragons thread, I am devoutly limiting my own processing of all that is going on for reasons of my mental health, but I have been sent some brilliant links that I have chosen to read. The following is a superb Big Picture/historical contextualizing essay (I know there has been a flurry of such articles and books on this everywhere), but I invite you to make the time for this one.

Thank you for that link. It will take folks several minutes to read the article, but it is time well spent.

Placing Trump's "counterrevolution " in this historical context reminds us that everything old is new again.

I cling to the hope that the closing sentence holds true this time around...

"There are many ways to revolt, as Marcuse reminds us in the very title of his book Counterrevolution and Revolt, and history shows that when people retain their values, counterrevolutions rarely succeed."
 
Looks like while Welch was born in Chowan County, his father bought a famous home in the Perquimans County town of Woodville in 1903 (when he was 4). I think the Hertford reference as given in some sources must come from the proximity of the two places.

Famous Home in Woodville; Until the Civil War, this was a Large Prosperous Plantation in NC
not to be confused with lewiston-woodville about 45 mins away in bertie county.

thanks for sharing this stuff, i was totally unaware of the JBS grand poobah being from ENC. my family has been in ENC for @ 300 years now.
 
not to be confused with lewiston-woodville about 45 mins away in bertie county.

thanks for sharing this stuff, i was totally unaware of the JBS grand poobah being from ENC. my family has been in ENC for @ 300 years now.

Same goes for my father's family. 300+ years in Hertford / Perquimans County.
 
I don't have any remaining family in the area--probably haven't been to Hertford in 35 years. My grandmother lived at one end of Dobbs Street.
my roots are hertford county, i have several friends whose families are from hertford the town, though.

its probably even slower/quieter than the last time you were there.
 

Not really a good thread to post this in, so I’ll do it here. Really interesting and wide-ranging interview with Ross Douthat in the New Left Review.

Paging @lawtig02 since you’re one of the only ones on the board who has the patience and interest to read it in it’s entirety.
Thanks! Will read this afternoon. Appreciate the heads up.
 

Not really a good thread to post this in, so I’ll do it here. Really interesting and wide-ranging interview with Ross Douthat in the New Left Review.

Paging @lawtig02 since you’re one of the only ones on the board who has the patience and interest to read it in it’s entirety.
Ok, read it. Like you say, that covers a lot of ground, but here are a few initial thoughts.

1. I’ve always kind of liked Douthat and this is close to the best version of him. He’s an astute student of political history and does a good job putting the present in the context of western political traditions. These questions gave him a lot of opportunities to do that, which made for a good discussion.

2. Douthat’s critiques of modern liberalism are worth listening to. He’s often wrong, but he’s wrong intellectually instead of reflexively, which is how most current Pubs (and every one of them who posts here) tends to operate. I generally agree with his assessment that liberalism has been decadent and static for most of the last fifty years, and that post-modern liberalism (“woke”-ism) is no less decadent that Clinton-era neoliberalism. I personally struggle with this because I benefit a lot personally and professionally from our general state of decadence, but I certainly understand why a younger, more attractive version of Bernie is appealing to huge percentages of liberals, and especially younger ones.

3. I also really liked Douthat’s comments here on AI. Nothing terribly novel, but this part in particular resonated with me —

“On AI, I think it depends on how far the technology actually goes. If it stops where it is now, then I agree, it seems likely to resolve itself back into decadence, into internet slop—AI scriptwriters for terrible Netflix shows, no one ever speaking to a real person again, and so on. If it goes further, though, even if it has bad social effects—even if it destroys us all—it wouldn’t be decadent. If we’ve invented a robot mind capable of curing cancer, I don’t think that’s decadent any more. But there’s a related point, which gets us back to demographics. AI could deepen decadence to a point where it just yields collapse: a world of AI porn, AI girlfriends, AI entertainment, AI old-age retirement homes, and so on. That’s a world that gets everybody to South Korea really fast. It’s not a terrain of stagnation; it’s somewhere worse. Even a limited form of AI probably gets us somewhere worse than the decadence I was describing in 2018.“

4. There are two things about Douthat that I can’t stand, though. First, his Catholic fervor leads him way too close to arguing for a theocracy. Like Ben Shapiro and J.D. Vance, he’s one of those Catholics who automatically assumes every Catholic doctrine is correct, except of course for anything said by a Pope he considers to be too liberal. While I’m still deeply religious myself, I have come to think there are few things more dangerous to our democracy than people (especially people in power) who conform their religious beliefs to their political preferences rather than vice versa. Douthat falls into that trap frequently.

5. Second, and much more importantly, Douthat comes nowhere close to holding conservatives, and especially MAGA, to the same standard he holds liberals. He’s not a complete sellout like Shapiro and Vance, but he’s pretty deep into the sanewashing business. Take this response —

“In hindsight, it was always unrealistic to imagine that you would get a successful Republican-led healthcare reform. What we ended up with, which was Obamacare reformed by Trump, was probably the more plausible path, but not one that a policy wonk in 2007 would sit down and design. Our view was: the libertarians are right that Medicare and Social Security need to be reformed, but we want to combine that with opportunity-enhancing Clinton-style programmes. Let Paul Ryan cut a deal on entitlements and then use the savings to do things on education, on family policy, and so on. But what Trump intuited was that voters actually want the big existing programmes. It’s more attractive to a lot of right-of-centre voters, who are not hard libertarians, to say we are not going to touch Medicare and Social Security, we’re going to protect them. If you map it, Trump found a different way to navigate between Christian Democracy and hard libertarianism than the one we were trying to push.“

That’s just revisionist bullshit mixed with a complete misrepresentation of everything Trump has ever said and done regarding healthcare. I really wonder if he would still give that answer to that question after the last month. If he would, then he’s moving closer to the sellout category with rapidity.

On the whole, I deeply, deeply wish there were a million more Douthats among the conservative commentariat, and even more among the Republicans leaders in Congress and the White House. If that were the case, I might very well still be voting Republican myself. But unfortunately, the distance on the political and intellectual spectrum between Douthat and Trump or Mike Johnson is about a hundred times greater than the distance between Douthat and, say, Bernie.
 
What is this? The first thing out of Douthat's mouth in the interview:

Those resources can be self-regenerative. I don’t fully buy the argument that, with the advent of Locke, there is an automatic decline into hyper-individualism. American history provides plenty of evidence that a liberal superstructure doesn’t necessarily prevent great awakenings. To the extent that it does so, it is under particular technological conditions. The vindication of the older conservative critique of liberalism as atomization—which looks more potent today than it did when I was at Harvard in the early 2000s; and looked more potent then than it did in, say, 1955—is technologically mediated. There have been technologies that accelerate individualism, ranging from things we take for granted, like the interstate highway system and the birth-control pill, through to the internet, a particular accelerant. As a metaphor, you can think of individualism’s tending towards atomization and despair as a gene within the liberal order, which gets expressed under particular environmental conditions, but doesn’t necessarily emerge if those conditions are not present. In recent years, the internet in particular has helped that gene be expressed more fully than it was.

Fucking meaningless drivel, that. "To the extent that it does so, it is under particular technological conditions"? Yeah, everything occurs under particular technological conditions. Is Douthat going to tell us what technologies? He will not, but he will say stuff is technologically mediated because someone once taught him the word.

Oh, he will mention the interstate highway system, which I suppose you could maybe consider a "technology" if you strain. The interstate is about individualism? Who knew. Because in most situations, roads are seen as bringing people together. Consider a prospector who went from LA to CA in the 1840s. That's less individualistic than someone who makes the trip today knowing they can visit everyone?

Birth control is about individualism? Fascinating. I thought it was about sexual liberation, which is very much not the same thing except maybe to a prude like RD. And that metaphor is completely unhelpful. You could also think of it as a light bulb that only gives off light under particular conditions as well, the condition of electricity flowing through.

Ugh. Should I continue, or is it not going to get better?
 
Interesting. I’ve got Paine on ignore so I have no idea what he’s on about. But reading through the responses from Super and lawtig02 tells a story.
 
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