It isn’t, he’s just trying to pull mainstream conservatives in to defend him. The far right has been very successful at getting normal conservatives to cover for them over the last 50 years. The actual ideas of fiscal and social conservatism are only partially aligned with fascism. The far bigger problem with regards to sliding into fascism is America’s pro corporate stance.
“Fiscal conservatism” has always been a straw man though. Literally nobody holds the policy that government should be reckless or wasteful. All fiscal conservatism does is promote one vision of fiscal responsibility, linguistically represented as some ideal.
And of course, social conservatism is just very thinly veiled hate politics.
It’s been a straw man for some people certainly. That’s what I was saying. But it’s also an honestly held belief going back right to the original liberal political philosophers. And we absolutely worked in a bipartisan manner towards balancing the budget until Reagan.
It’s also incompatible with a pro corporate oligarchy/dictatorship. One thing people don’t learn about Hitler is the reason he wanted “lebensraum” and to legally steal from Jews. Other than his meth addled hatreds, the government of Germany was still broke. He issued new currency that was literally a loan marker to solve this. But then he had to get actual capital and fast. So he stole it. He never stopped issuing those bills and there’s a very good argument to be made that the Third Reich was a ponzi scheme kept afloat because it’s stakeholders ran the government. This kind of fast and loose repeatedly plays out in fascist dictatorships.
Social conservatism is hate politics now. But for hundreds of years it was patronizing and parental. Of the two it’s definitely closer and easier to turn into fascism. But we had it as a characteristic of both parties in the US for 150 years without it turning into fascism. So while it’s hate based now and it’s easy to turn hate into fascism, it too is capable of being a separate honestly held belief. Even if it is scientifically debunked in every way.
So back to the original point, this far right knucklehead is attempting to convince normal conservatives that they’re the target and not the far right so they should ignore the warnings and keep voting for Trump and Co.
And we absolutely worked in a bipartisan manner towards balancing the budget until Reagan.
Balancing the budget is profoundly foolish fiscal policy. Long evidence has shown that countercyclical fiscal policy (running deficits during recessions; paying them down during times of growth) is far more effective. It is imbecilic to cut government spending during recessions when the need for government services is greatest, and it exacerbates economic downturns by removing liquidity from the economy at a time when it’s already short.
I never said it was good policy. Clinton was the last president to make it a thing, and by the time Obama came into office MMT was taking precedence. Bush either didn’t care or shrewdly covered his use of MMT with PR about fiscal conservatism. Now days I hardly ever hear about balancing the budget, fiscal conservatism is also being reduced to hate. They’re just weaponizing it against the poor instead of people who aren’t CIS het. god fearing, white men.
The far right has been very successful at getting normal conservatives to cover for them over the last 50 years. The actual ideas of fiscal and social conservatism are only partially aligned with fascism.
I suppose you could say packing the wad into the cannon after the gunpowder is an indirectly related development to the lethality of the cannon ball subsequently fired from the cannon….
….but I prefer to see it as one continuous gigantically stupid process beginning with centrists priming the chamber with gunpowder via repeated thrusting of a neoliberal austerity rod to crush the working class and then packing in a wad of rightwing conservatives to shape the social upheaval towards meaninglessly violent vectors when the inevitable explosive juncture is reached.
The cannonball loaded last is the dead brain weight of all the fascists gleefully rolling down into the breach of their fiery demise.
The cannonball is what kills people usually (though many a centrist has died in the process of packing the gunpowder in and setting off a premature explosion), but all the steps are necessary to firing the cannon.
That is… A very involved analogy. The thing is people who are actually committed to conservatism inside classical liberalism aren’t fascist. They want a functioning democracy with rights. Fascists have been a mess of corrupt oligarchs stealing everything that isn’t nailed down every time we’ve seen them in history. The three biggest warning flags have been a collective ideology held above helping the poor/disabled/marginalized, (like nationalism); getting too friendly with corporations, which begins to create the oligarchy; and racism to give the masses a common enemy.
So while fiscal and social conservatism are the public rallying cries, they aren’t actually much in line with fascism. Which is why our would-be oligarchs are spending so much money to make conservatives feel like they have to vote Republican or else.
The three biggest warning flags have been a collective ideology held above helping the poor/disabled/marginalized,
Explain conservatism to me in terms of the specific real world policies it pushes for in opposition to progressive policies specifically designed to help poor/disabled/marginalized people with a better social safety net?
Because y’all are literally on the wrong side 99% of the time with this, conservatism is fundamentally a “fuck you I have mine” philosophy dressed up by hacks like Jordan Peterson to seem intellectual and thoughtful. It is a joke on the whole at least in places like the US, it is no more than a mask used by selfish broken people to spread suffering.
You’ve misunderstood. I’m not a conservative. I’m not trying to defend conservatism. I’m just trying to explain why it isn’t the same thing as fascism. Conservatives on the long scale are simply those who resist change for whatever reason. For the last 70 years that’s been racial equality and helping poor people. Which incidentally, lines them up really nicely to be recruited by authoritarians and fascists.
They believe, as part of fiscal responsibility, that everyone is responsible for themselves and their family. That the government helping them actually reduces that family’s ability to get out of poverty. The important thing to notice here isn’t the logical imbalance, but that they believe they’re helping. Obviously we aren’t talking about the extremists who are more than happy to demonize the poor and marginalized. The far right has a completely different set of ideologies. That’s why they have to pay Jordan Peterson to convert normal conservatives.
They believe, as part of fiscal responsibility, that everyone is responsible for themselves and their family. That the government helping them actually reduces that family’s ability to get out of poverty. The important thing to notice here isn’t the logical imbalance, but that they believe they’re helping
These beliefs are just a thin veneer of bullshit, both for conservatives and for rightwing extremists because the hate and exclusion is the point. I see no evidence that rightwing extremists are ideologically any different than normal conservatives at a fundamental level, they just have different ideas about tactics and the tone/rhetoric they actually are willing to publicly commit to (instead of doing it behind closed doors like normal conservatives/republicans). Conservatives will always roll out of the red carpet for fascists, they are intellectually lobotomized by their ideology in a way that has been shown throughout history to be essential for the rise of fascism to power, thus my cannon metaphor.
I consider it all part of the same firing process even if the cannonball is usually the fascists.
I think you’re confusing the Republicans with Conservatism. Fully half the Democrats hold these conservative ideas too. And they certainly aren’t rolling out a red carpet.
So while fiscal and social conservatism are the public rallying cries, they aren’t actually much in line with fascism.
Social conservatism is, at best, fascist-adjacent. Singling out social minorities for harassment and legal persecution is very closely akin to fascist scapegoating.
Oh it’s certainly not a pretty picture. But if we go around attributing everything to fascism then that’s what we’ll end up with because nobody will be able to see it coming. And they’re always trying. Social Conservatism is a moral cesspool of hate not because that’s inherent to it but because of the American experience with it and the modern reaction to most of it’s ideas being debunked by science. We tied it up with the civil rights movement and weaponized it. But it spent something like 300 years happily living within the realm of liberalism. So while I don’t like it, it is not in and of itself fascism.
Social Conservatism is a moral cesspool of hate not because that’s inherent to it
Please cite your sources because I have never seen a scrap of evidence that social conservatism is anything but thinly disguised hate and fear of the other weaponized into political ideologies.
Cite what? The entire existence of modern political philosophy? Look nobody is denying that it gets misused. Nobody is denying that it’s thoroughly debunked. Nobody is denying that Republicans are using it exactly as you say.
But if you want to deny that a sizeable portion of Democrats are conservatives who have beliefs about traditional family homes because they believe it’s better for the people involved then you’re ignoring an entire demographic just to paint something as purely far right. Going straight to the extremes is considered a logical fallacy for a reason.
I was not trying to dispute that Democrats are the “good cops” to the Republican “bad cops” and often implement just as draconian and cruel policies in the name of austerity of whatever dumb bullshit as do Republicans.
I consider centrist democrats conservative, especially from a perspective of leftism that is bigger than the US both in geography and time.
Basically admitting that mainstream conservatism is indistinguishible from fascism.
It isn’t, he’s just trying to pull mainstream conservatives in to defend him. The far right has been very successful at getting normal conservatives to cover for them over the last 50 years. The actual ideas of fiscal and social conservatism are only partially aligned with fascism. The far bigger problem with regards to sliding into fascism is America’s pro corporate stance.
“Fiscal conservatism” has always been a straw man though. Literally nobody holds the policy that government should be reckless or wasteful. All fiscal conservatism does is promote one vision of fiscal responsibility, linguistically represented as some ideal.
And of course, social conservatism is just very thinly veiled hate politics.
It’s been a straw man for some people certainly. That’s what I was saying. But it’s also an honestly held belief going back right to the original liberal political philosophers. And we absolutely worked in a bipartisan manner towards balancing the budget until Reagan.
It’s also incompatible with a pro corporate oligarchy/dictatorship. One thing people don’t learn about Hitler is the reason he wanted “lebensraum” and to legally steal from Jews. Other than his meth addled hatreds, the government of Germany was still broke. He issued new currency that was literally a loan marker to solve this. But then he had to get actual capital and fast. So he stole it. He never stopped issuing those bills and there’s a very good argument to be made that the Third Reich was a ponzi scheme kept afloat because it’s stakeholders ran the government. This kind of fast and loose repeatedly plays out in fascist dictatorships.
Social conservatism is hate politics now. But for hundreds of years it was patronizing and parental. Of the two it’s definitely closer and easier to turn into fascism. But we had it as a characteristic of both parties in the US for 150 years without it turning into fascism. So while it’s hate based now and it’s easy to turn hate into fascism, it too is capable of being a separate honestly held belief. Even if it is scientifically debunked in every way.
So back to the original point, this far right knucklehead is attempting to convince normal conservatives that they’re the target and not the far right so they should ignore the warnings and keep voting for Trump and Co.
Balancing the budget is profoundly foolish fiscal policy. Long evidence has shown that countercyclical fiscal policy (running deficits during recessions; paying them down during times of growth) is far more effective. It is imbecilic to cut government spending during recessions when the need for government services is greatest, and it exacerbates economic downturns by removing liquidity from the economy at a time when it’s already short.
I never said it was good policy. Clinton was the last president to make it a thing, and by the time Obama came into office MMT was taking precedence. Bush either didn’t care or shrewdly covered his use of MMT with PR about fiscal conservatism. Now days I hardly ever hear about balancing the budget, fiscal conservatism is also being reduced to hate. They’re just weaponizing it against the poor instead of people who aren’t CIS het. god fearing, white men.
I suppose you could say packing the wad into the cannon after the gunpowder is an indirectly related development to the lethality of the cannon ball subsequently fired from the cannon….
….but I prefer to see it as one continuous gigantically stupid process beginning with centrists priming the chamber with gunpowder via repeated thrusting of a neoliberal austerity rod to crush the working class and then packing in a wad of rightwing conservatives to shape the social upheaval towards meaninglessly violent vectors when the inevitable explosive juncture is reached.
The cannonball loaded last is the dead brain weight of all the fascists gleefully rolling down into the breach of their fiery demise.
The cannonball is what kills people usually (though many a centrist has died in the process of packing the gunpowder in and setting off a premature explosion), but all the steps are necessary to firing the cannon.
That is… A very involved analogy. The thing is people who are actually committed to conservatism inside classical liberalism aren’t fascist. They want a functioning democracy with rights. Fascists have been a mess of corrupt oligarchs stealing everything that isn’t nailed down every time we’ve seen them in history. The three biggest warning flags have been a collective ideology held above helping the poor/disabled/marginalized, (like nationalism); getting too friendly with corporations, which begins to create the oligarchy; and racism to give the masses a common enemy.
So while fiscal and social conservatism are the public rallying cries, they aren’t actually much in line with fascism. Which is why our would-be oligarchs are spending so much money to make conservatives feel like they have to vote Republican or else.
Explain conservatism to me in terms of the specific real world policies it pushes for in opposition to progressive policies specifically designed to help poor/disabled/marginalized people with a better social safety net?
Because y’all are literally on the wrong side 99% of the time with this, conservatism is fundamentally a “fuck you I have mine” philosophy dressed up by hacks like Jordan Peterson to seem intellectual and thoughtful. It is a joke on the whole at least in places like the US, it is no more than a mask used by selfish broken people to spread suffering.
You’ve misunderstood. I’m not a conservative. I’m not trying to defend conservatism. I’m just trying to explain why it isn’t the same thing as fascism. Conservatives on the long scale are simply those who resist change for whatever reason. For the last 70 years that’s been racial equality and helping poor people. Which incidentally, lines them up really nicely to be recruited by authoritarians and fascists.
They believe, as part of fiscal responsibility, that everyone is responsible for themselves and their family. That the government helping them actually reduces that family’s ability to get out of poverty. The important thing to notice here isn’t the logical imbalance, but that they believe they’re helping. Obviously we aren’t talking about the extremists who are more than happy to demonize the poor and marginalized. The far right has a completely different set of ideologies. That’s why they have to pay Jordan Peterson to convert normal conservatives.
These beliefs are just a thin veneer of bullshit, both for conservatives and for rightwing extremists because the hate and exclusion is the point. I see no evidence that rightwing extremists are ideologically any different than normal conservatives at a fundamental level, they just have different ideas about tactics and the tone/rhetoric they actually are willing to publicly commit to (instead of doing it behind closed doors like normal conservatives/republicans). Conservatives will always roll out of the red carpet for fascists, they are intellectually lobotomized by their ideology in a way that has been shown throughout history to be essential for the rise of fascism to power, thus my cannon metaphor.
I consider it all part of the same firing process even if the cannonball is usually the fascists.
I think you’re confusing the Republicans with Conservatism. Fully half the Democrats hold these conservative ideas too. And they certainly aren’t rolling out a red carpet.
Social conservatism is, at best, fascist-adjacent. Singling out social minorities for harassment and legal persecution is very closely akin to fascist scapegoating.
Oh it’s certainly not a pretty picture. But if we go around attributing everything to fascism then that’s what we’ll end up with because nobody will be able to see it coming. And they’re always trying. Social Conservatism is a moral cesspool of hate not because that’s inherent to it but because of the American experience with it and the modern reaction to most of it’s ideas being debunked by science. We tied it up with the civil rights movement and weaponized it. But it spent something like 300 years happily living within the realm of liberalism. So while I don’t like it, it is not in and of itself fascism.
Please cite your sources because I have never seen a scrap of evidence that social conservatism is anything but thinly disguised hate and fear of the other weaponized into political ideologies.
Cite what? The entire existence of modern political philosophy? Look nobody is denying that it gets misused. Nobody is denying that it’s thoroughly debunked. Nobody is denying that Republicans are using it exactly as you say.
But if you want to deny that a sizeable portion of Democrats are conservatives who have beliefs about traditional family homes because they believe it’s better for the people involved then you’re ignoring an entire demographic just to paint something as purely far right. Going straight to the extremes is considered a logical fallacy for a reason.
I was not trying to dispute that Democrats are the “good cops” to the Republican “bad cops” and often implement just as draconian and cruel policies in the name of austerity of whatever dumb bullshit as do Republicans.
I consider centrist democrats conservative, especially from a perspective of leftism that is bigger than the US both in geography and time.