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To be clear, I’m trying to identify conservatism as a social and political current across history, not as it exists in our society today. But I largely agree that today’s so-called conservatives are nothing of the sort. True conservatives in our society would be moderate liberals.
I think this is an important thing to understand both because traditional conservatism is a recurring theme in many political contexts, but also because many people think of conservatism as a relatively moderate and common-sense position. People need to realize that the people today calling themselves conservatives do not have as their main goal a preservation of existing society. They are instead attempting a radical transformation to something that either never existed or at most existed in the distant past.
But it sounds like you are saying conservatism in the sense I mean has never existed and it’s always been merely a rhetorical shield for more revolutionary ends. I am not sure I see evidence to support this outside of modern times but perhaps I’m not fully informed on the topic.
“Traditional conservatism” is this tribalism. The tribalists are not “so-called conservatives.” They’re what the word has meant, since its very modern inception, circa the French revolution.
So yes, we are both describing people pushing a made-up golden era, which they will tear society apart to allegedly pursue… but that’s not distinct from people claiming they’re preserving the common-sense soul of et cetera. That’s what they’ve always said. They’re just plain lying. The unmistakable pattern of their behavior, independent of these claims, is the consolidation of power for the automatically righteous, over a permanent underclass who are lucky to fight over scraps.
When you find yourself writing things like ‘progressives are the real conservatives,’ step back and ask what the fuck you’re doing with words.
First, all humans are tribal, not merely conservatives, so I don’t think this observation is very astute or relevant. Secondly, I definitely didn’t say progressives are conservative, so I have no idea where you got that from.
Only some humans use tribalism to decide what’s real.
‘Everyone’s tribal’ is undermining the ability to say anything. Like I can’t be talking about people who denied there was a global plague, even as they gargled their own lungs - because I used words you insist apply to everyone.
This is an attack on meaning. You sound confused that anyone could possibly paraphrase what you explicitly wrote - like calling liberals conservatives makes perfect sense, but calling liberals progressives, well, you have no idea where that came from. What are you talking about?
I am trying to defend meaning from people who are willing to distort words to mean anything that matches their current political agenda.
If you had approached this conversation with more authentic curiosity I might have been willing to explain the widely understood difference between moderate liberals and progressives which is important to understand the point I was making. But at this point you don’t seem very genuinely interested in what I’m trying to explain. So I recommend using Google to understand the basic terms here before proceeding.
Ironically, your unquestioned assumption that liberals and conservatives are two mutually exclusive and opposing ideologies rather than adjacent and even overlapping ones is, itself, a product of the tribalist thinking you’ve criticized.
You’re pushing the myth of little-c conservatism, and you’re bad at it. If you genuinely wanted to explain a distinction then you presumably would have done so instead of scoffing that you don’t understand. Like the problem of saying ‘by conservatives I mean liberals!’ is an additional adjective.
You don’t get to condescend to me about argumentum ad webster when I keep specifying tribalists and loyalism and you pretend that’s the same as having an ingroup. You just toss out that “all humans are tribal,” as if that remotely resembles what I’m saying about a specific pattern of behavior, and then you dismiss your own wishy-washy assertion as irrelevant. Zero self-reflection. All attack, no defense.
Meanwhile:
There are clearly people who only view the world through loyalty to hierarchy. That’s overwhelmingly described as conservatism, even when people aren’t fully cognizant of why they’re calling it that. You must acknowledge that’s less of an ask than insisting tankies are right-wing. That one-dimensional horseshoe thinking completely misses how they’re never gonna get along with right-wing conservatives, because those pricks aren’t their ingroup. Nothing else matters, in their worldview.