I'm doubting myself here. Maybe they didn't make a website like Zuckerberg, but maybe that's actually a good thing. In fact, with this example, I'm certain it would be better if Zuckerberg made nothing.

Reading the book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. This section stood out to me:

``Asked in May 2017 what the Republican Party stands for, Nebraska GOP Senator Ben Sasse, replied, “I don’t know.” Asked to describe the Republican Party in one word, Sasse, who has a doctorate in history from Yale, said, “Question mark.” After Senate Republicans failed to deliver on their repeal of Obamacare before the Fourth of July recess in 2017, House Republican Steve Womack of Arkansas was equally blunt and unsparing: “We’ve been given this opportunity to govern and we are finding every reason in the world not to.” "

His thesis is that conservatism in America is an incoherent mess, and that recent conservative politics like we've seen is basically a defining feature of conservatism and has been around for *centuries, so people pretending Trump is a new phenomenon are sorely mistaken.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/fox-and-friends-host-calls-trump-a-dictator.html?utm_medium=s1&utm_source=tw&utm_campaign=nym&__twitter_impression=true&utm_campaign=nym&utm_medium=s1&utm_source=fb

Yikes

Is yikes the opposite of woke? Or just the latest incarnation of smug

it's the new way to say "cringe"

That makes me hyper-smug for cringing at cringing!

Be honest, do you guys get your new slang from Reddit?

nope

but you're a white male

i spend most of my time talking to mathematicians

I learned the word putative from my math professor

I did some googling, and it seems that the term 'yikes' has become really popular in League of Legends.

Interesting

good to know

(I wasn't trying to call you a 12 year old)

yikes, cringe

Time to start r/YikesAnarchy

I don't know. Centuries? What's the story he tells?

I think there's a less exciting story to tell about why the Republican party can't be an effective governing party: the GOP platform was discredited by the massive failures of the Bush administration (especially the 2007-2008 financial crisis and its fallout and the Iraq War), so even Republicans because disillusioned with what the GOP had been advocating since the Reagan era. With the Republican party in an identity crisis and discontent high due to the slow economic recovery, Republican during the Obama years found it easier to build and sustain support through opposition to Obama -- in other words, through fierce opposition to their opponent which could unify everyone, rather than through a positive platform, which may have been divisive. It's a way to hold the coalition together.

We're seeing this happening in the Democratic party now too. The Democrats find it easier to unite around opposing Trump than by pitching a national platform, because if they take a position, some Democrats will like it, some Democrats will hate it, and it will divide the coalition.

I'm not convinced that current conservatives' lack of direction speaks to some kind of permanent incoherence in conservative thought stretching back to Burke. It seems like the author is being anachronistic and reading the present situation into the past.

Well, for one:



Jk, of course. I read the first chapter and his thesis seems to be that conservatism is basically just the reactionary forces of power, and that it's basically kind of ideologically vacuous, which sounds bad but makes it really adaptive, because it has no core ideology beyond being against power grabs from people without power. And that when you interpret Trump this way, and notice the similarities between him and all conservative movements going back to to the early 19th century, they all appeal to the same base racism and other such things that conservatives do.

I'll have to get back after I read further.

Oh, and every conservative thinker ever apparently praises obedience to power, given the quotes he runs through, which means it's an ideology I just cannot accept.

I simply do not comprehend people who bow down and cowtow to other people.

But that's the power aspect of politics, conservative forces preserve current power, and the interpretation stands pretty well throughout history and governments and contexts.

If you're going to read another book about conservatism, make a book by Roger Scruton your next one. I suspect that he is the most intelligent and most well informed conservative voice out there.

It's always worthwhile I think to read someone talking about their own intellectual tradition. After all, opponents to conservatism are opponents to it for a reason (whatever it is), and their disagreement usually comes out in their writing. Plus, a part of any intellectual tradition is the account that that tradition gives of its opponents (e.g., an account of the conservative tradition is a part of left-leaning intellectual traditions) which can make it difficult for people of a certain tradition to understand another on its own terms and without engaging in polemics.

That implies there is a conservative tradition. At least if the author I'm reading is right, no such thing can exist, because conservatism is just people in power smacking at people who threaten to take it away.

I added that to my reading list though.

Yeah, that's a very cynical view. There is a conservative tradition. In fact, conservatism is not about anything if not tradition.

A reason why it's not controversial to say there is a liberal tradition is because it's believed that there are some core ideas that transcend history and that liberals have been loyal to for about two hundred years (or more, if you believe, for example, that the 19th century english Liberal Party was an intellectual descendant of the Whigs). But it's just not true. Liberalism has been a very mutable term, and even the history that traces the origins of Anglo-American liberalism to Locke is a relatively new phenomenon (i.e., it's a 20th century phenomenon). What it's meant to be a liberal has changed with the times, as has what it's meant to be a conservative.

Take, for example, the one-nation conservatism of Benjamin Disraeli in the mid 19th century. The conservative party in England formed before the liberal party, and in mid 19th century England, when the working class was enfranchised, it was the conservatives who managed to win their votes.

Of course someone who is left-leaning is going to look at conservatives, see that the guiding impulse behind their politics -- to the extent that it is reverence for the past and a desire to preserve traditions -- and say that it is regressive and awful. People on the left generally believe that the model form of society is one which has never yet existed and for which their is no historical precedent. In other words, they believe in an arc of history. Someone who believes that is going to look at conservatism and think it's deeply immoral, and will derisively call it backwards for finding so much value in history and traditional ways of life.

In general, conservatives are people who believe that human nature is weak and frail, but that over the course of history, through an accumulated process that has taken place of the course of generations, human beings have come up with answers to some of the most fundamental questions of how to conduct a society, and that that received wisdom ought to be used as a model for governing in the future.

In general, ideologies on the left (whether liberal or socialist) are more optimistic about human nature (if not as it is as it can be), and argue that reason is capable of providing a basis for good governance, and that we ought to be unsentimental about the past, because we can establish an entirely new and unprecedented society on a more just and fair foundation than any societies that have existed in history.

I’m glad you said “in general”, because there are some incredible exceptions.

Libertarians are considered a part of the conservative tent. They are incredibly optimistic about people and their motivations, and do believe in an arc of history (moving from regressive authoritarianism to more liberal states, damning traditions to allow people to freely make the better choices they want to make). They strongly believe that better governance comes from reasoning. We might not like their framework for reasoning, but they have one and are very proud of it.

Whether they want it or not, the eugenicists, fascists, and [insert race here] nationalists are also considered conservatives. Those people absolutely believe in superior government through reason, and aren’t afraid of abandoning tradition or received knowledge to do so. Their reasoning is an absolute terror, but it’s not simple. It’s based on a malicious application of scientific consensus. They definitely believe in a great future where good people are free to make better choices, once they aren’t saddled with inferior people anymore.

And, of course, communists and similar anarcho-leftists are considered part of the left, even though they are foremost sceptical of power (including the power that comes from private property) and entranced with a reversion to agrarian small family and community units. So they aren’t optimistic about people or forward thinking at all, they believe capitalism and everything that led up to capitalism was a mistake, and long for a return to their historical roots.

Market socialists and libertarian socialists believe people are super ****, and will always be craven hellbeasts that will always exploit others to the exact maximum extent that is permitted by their own resources. Minimizing exploitation means minimizing everyone’s resources to do so. In a sane world they’d be considered socially conservative but we don’t live in one of those, we live in this garbage world, and these kinds of socialists are considered on the left.

But yes, I’d agree that on average voters tend to fit the templates you described. The problem with averages, though, is that nobody lives there.

National Socialism had a complex relationship with technology. It was reactionary in some respects, with Nazis seeing it as a corrupting more force, a cause of alienation from nature and a symptom of the decadence of modernity. But it was also embraced on the other as an important instrument through which to gain power in a war of racial domination. The reason why this form of ideology is right-wing is because it roots political legitimacy in a vision of nature (which a lot of conservative ideology does too, including all that contemporary neo-Darwinian stuff), and derives its utopian model for society on a certain view of nature (that is, it’s “given”: a system, likely hierarchical, to which humanity has to conform itself in order to live the best kind of life, rather than something that humanity can create freely.)

I agree about libertarianism, though: it’s can be difficult to make much sense of why its right-wing variety is right-wing, since it is in so many ways similar to liberalism. But I see it like this. Libertarians will often talk about natural law as the basis of authority, an intuitively it makes sense why the rest of their politics could be deduced from that insight: the tendency of government to expand and accumulate more power is seen as a potential infringement and encroachment upon the natural liberties and rights of individuals, and thus government must be kept at bay in order to preserve the rights of individuals that belong to them by nature. That’s different from a more voluntaristic conception of liberty and political legitimacy that one finds amongst liberals.



This doesn't contradict your point, but Marxists and Leninists, of course, are in some fundamental sense optimistic about the future. As with liberalism, there's a secular eschatology to these ideologies and a view of history that makes them fundamentally forward looking in their outlook. Here, though, the important qualification that I added in my last post was that these schools of thought are optimist about human nature, not, necessarily as man is, but as can is in potential. For these points of view, human nature is malleable on the basis of material and economic conditions. If human nature is rotten and corrupted by capitalism in the present, it can be reformed through a more just economic system based on a more thoroughgoing economic equality (which is where the utopian dimension comes in).

On the other hand, I'm not convinced that libertarian socialists are that pessimistic about human nature. It's difficult to square with both the anti-elitism of that ideology and the view that empowering people through direct democracy produces more benevolent societies. Libertarian socialists seem to think of government and power as inherently corrupt and corrupting, but it doesn't seem that they find ordinary people to be immoral. Still, obviously there’s a lot of other thought on the left, and plenty of exceptions to the generalization I put forward (which is why I said “in general”, after all).



I don’t think that’s entirely true. The summary of the left is reflected in a lot of prominent movements on the left: the identity left, the Democratic liberalism of the Obama era… even the utopian politics of Silicon Valley. If anything, the problem is that it’s too inclusive, not that it’s not inclusive enough. For example, that optimism about human nature is what undergirds a lot of American right-leaning foreign policy thought, including both Reagan-era anti-communism and Bush-era neoconservatism. It’s the ideology of American liberal internationalism, which has largely enjoyed bipartisan consensus since '45.

I guess the upshot here is that a difference between liberals and libertarians is that for liberals, voluntarism as the basis for political legitimacy typically implies some kind of conception of a social contract. One of the tensions of liberalism going back to Hobbes is the tension between the asociality of man in the state of nature combined with the obligation that citizens make to each other implied by the social contract. Despite the interpretation of liberalism as an ideology that shirks the notion of the individual's obligation to others because such obligations are a constraint on individual liberty is not quite accurate: for liberals, citizenship does bring with it certain obligations.

I haven't looked into this, but I suspect that libertarians are skeptical of social contract theory, and, simultaneously, skeptical of the obligations implied by it, because they see such obligations as an infringement on liberty, conceived as something innate and natural.

Yeah, after some Google searches, it seems like libertarians are generally hostile to Social Contract Theory. Interesting.

It's also refuted by a lot of other prominent movements on the left: anti-corporatists are suspicious of human nature; environmentalism is a coalition of agrarian traditional sentimentalists and human nature pessimists; labor believes exploitation is innate, and are softly regressive; the social democrats see themselves as a bulwark against destructive class warfare, for tradition and traditional institutions; the ascendant (non-socialist) anti-inequality movement is nostalgic for the full employment, anti-globalist policies of the 50s and 60s. There's a lot of room for individual differences on the left.

Probably the only common tie is that, like you said, they believe change is necessary and you can arrive at such change through reasoning. What they want, and why they want it, though, is pretty variable. It's the main reason why leftist coalitions don't really work well and why the liberals were able to dominate left-wing thought.

Yeah that's interesting about social democrats... that's a really conservative impulse, to see change as inevitable, but still to prize stability and to see institutions as a bulwark against the destruction and chaos that unleashing the forces for change can bring about. That makes slightly more sense of Nachman Syrkin and Ber Borochov.

Extreme example: Engels and Trotsky both (basically, but not literally) suggested using revolutionary socialists are their useful idiots. Socialists and communists believe very different things, but they have enough common ends that the socialists and communists could work together for a while anyway. Then the communists could betray the socialists and finish the job. Unfortunately for them, socialists tend to be quite literate. That history of communist duplicity makes the idea of fringe left cooperation difficult enough to imagine, and if that's not enough, there's even more back-biting and in-fighting among the proponents of each of them.

(Obviously they're all idiots, only a market socialism based on worker cooperatives can succeed.)



Canadian example: The NDP is a center-left social democrat party. That's not where it started, though. It started as a coalition between trade unions and Albertan agrarian cooperative socialists. From the 1980s through the early 2000s the socialist wing of the party has been more or less driven out. It was a huge fight to get the party to keep their pledge to social democracy, to say nothing of socialism per their roots as a socialist party. Eaten alive by liberalism.

This is ****ed up and sad: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1006120387044937728

That's exactly what destroyed the identity of the republican party under Obama. The party realized that the easiest way to get votes was to a) get people at angry as possible at Obama, and b) Run on being against whatever Obama did rather than standing up for anything. That's a great strategy for an opposition party because there are always going to be more people who oppose whoever is in power than agree with whatever particular thing you stand for. If you stand for nothing, you can just collect the votes of anyone who is dissatisfied.

The problem is that that is short term thinking. It means that once you actually have to positively stand for something, no one really has any idea what it means to be a republican. It can be anything. You've lost control, and the biggest populist gets to decide.

The Democrats are a conservative political party.

I think you are overloading the term 'conservative' quite a bit here, but if the shoe fits...

Since the subtitle of this thread is including the History of Nazi Germany, let me talk a bit about a couple common misperceptions about the war.

i) Hitler was a bad strategist who overruled his generals.

Actually, he wasn't. There were a few circumstances later in the war where this description is apt, circa 1944 and on, when Germany was basically throwing manpower into keeping the Nazi high command alive for a bit longer, but for most of the early part of the war, Hitler's strategic vision was on point and his generals were the dimwits. Because of one simple reason: WW2 was a war about oil. Which sounds cliche, but when you read more about the Nazi war goals and Hitler's mindset, it makes sense.

Germany is not an oil producing nation. They depend on imports. Prior to the start of the war, this meant Venezuela and the United States, dominantly. Well, once Germany is at war with England, who has a much superior Navy, those supply lines are basically gone. Once Hitler failed to negotiate peace with England, it turned Germany into a ticking time bomb for oil, as reserves were estimated to maintain full army combat for less than a year. Hitler's goal in the USSR was to get oil. Every decision he made where he overruled his generals until the defeat at Stalingrad was in the direction of getting oil for the German war machine. Hitler knew everything depended on that, and he was absolutely right about that.

That's why he pushed so hard south past Moscow, ignoring his general's desires to take the capital, and why he insisted the Wehrmacht stand for so long at Stalingrad despite heavy losses. By 1942 the Wehrmacht was chronically short on fuel, so much so that they were downgrading mechanized units to nonmechanized units. This is also why WW2 was an Eastern Front war. Everything depended on the Soviets blocking the Germans from getting access to oil reserves. After Operation Barbarossa failed, Germany (in my view) had basically lost the war and had almost chance of winning. 1941-1945 was just a protracted defeat.

ii) related to above, German production sucked and they needed more tanks, planes, etc.

Irrelevant by the same reason above. The Wehrmacht didn't have enough fuel through most of the war to keep their war machines running. Having more would be totally inconsequential to the outcome of the war.

TL;DR if you're going to war, don't do it unless you control a good supply of oil. Keeping oil reserves can make Russia the winner in a war against a more mechanized and well-equipped army that has none.

I mean, it's a size 9.5 on a size 9 foot, so a little slippage, but it's close enough.