Although in given the likelihood of what would happen if Kavanaugh is pulled, it's a little odd that liberals want him out of the picture. If Kavanaugh's out, his most likely replacement is Barrett. When Kennedy stepped down, liberals started getting really nervous that it signified that the end of Roe v Wade is near and that it could become legal for states to prevent access to abortion. Barrett would be much more likely to vote for overturning Roe v Wade than Kavanaugh.

I suppose what you'd gain is you'd get rid of someone with problematic views about executive power. But when the **** hits the fan, is any Republican Trump appointee to SCOTUS really going to turn again him?

The Netherlands' political system is almost exactly like the Westminster system, except we don't have the first-past-the-post system, we have proportional representation. The motions of no confidence are very powerful instruments. It's especially effective because in a multi-party system, it's almost impossible to abuse. They only get carried when there's an absolute majority, which means there is true and general concern.

Woah, look out Brett. Ronan Farrow's on the case... https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/senate-democrats-investigate-a-new-allegation-of-sexual-misconduct-from-the-supreme-court-nominee-brett-kavanaughs-college-years-deborah-ramirez

Essentially what I was going to get into earlier was that there is no point. On this board or in American politics. Literally no point in seriously getting wrapped up in conservative ideology with two caveats.

Conservatives aren't seriously represented in virtually any level of government. Republicans aren't governing conservatively when they are in power and when they aren't they insult conservatives by pretending they champion them through their obstructionism. If you ever do manage to get a conservative in a legislative position they are universally obstructed by the Republican establishment and Democrats.

No amount of conservative dialogue on an obscure internet forum nor a national cable news outlet is going to change that situation so really to engage in serious thought provoking discussion and debate is about as good a use of time as any other hobby. Wait, back pedal. At least with a hobby you've hopefully got something to show for your time.

I've probably said this in the past but for me the turning points are the 2012 presidential election and the 2016 Republican primary election. Obama soundly beat Romney despite tremendous failures and scandals and Romney was about as good a Republican candidate as we'll probably see for a long time. Then stupid swung wide the other way and Trump picked up the nomination. That was two huge (yuge?) conservative losses in four years. So for me personally I'm really just not going to waste much time on politics in general. It really makes me wonder for those of you that do engage in these discussions so regularly, is there not something else more enjoyable you could be doing?

So my two caveats are, knowing they're unpopular here, Convention of States and Fair Tax. Fair Tax really has a snowballs chance in hell unless it manages to infiltrate the Convention of States movement. I have no idea if they are trying that route. If cos happens and "fails" then I'm completely done with politics. I probably won't even bother to vote at that point.

Oh boy, it seems that either Rosenstein is resigning, or is en route to the White House to be fired, depending on sources.

This isn't suspicious at all.

You have to wonder what took so long.

Rumor has it Republicans knew about the 2nd Kavanaugh allegation beforehand and were hoping to get the nomination through before word got out.

Ah ****, bad history is plaguing the UK now.

Should I do a serious write up on how the Nazis were not socialist and post it to Medium? This endless stream of bad history needs to end.

Rumor has it Democrats knew about the 1st Kavanaugh allegation beforehand and were hoping to derail the nomination after the hearings.

Rumour has it they were going to fire the deputy AG today, but delayed it until Thursday when Kavanaugh’s gang rape stuffs gonna get aired out.

Wookie06, this is a really big and new realization for you and I don’t intend to demean it, but this isn’t new. Conservatives have stood for one thing since the very beginning, since the French revolutionary right wing and the British Tories: protecting rich people from the poor. You just didn’t notice it.

I really wish we used the better terms for people's political allegiances.

You'd be called a liberal in Europe and I think that word makes more sense.

We used to be called liberals here, now it's sometimes referred to as classical liberal, and then further shoved off into the Libertarian camp. I don't consider myself a Libertarian but that doesn't mean I don't have some values in common. As Jon demonstrates with his definition of conservative, the interpretations of the word vary. I look at the people that I admire that consider themselves to be conservative or that define conservative in the manner I appreciate. Unfortunately, there is no strict definition. For example, if whatever Trump is met the strict definition of what a conservative is then I most certainly am not one. I could use Mitch McConnell in the same manner.

Trump would be considered more reactionary/conservative on trade than most Republicans. Believing in low tariffs is an economically liberal idea.

https://twitter.com/israelipm/status/1034849460344573952?lang=en

jfc israel

This second allegation seems a little more flimsy than the previous one, in my opinion. Ronan Farrow now has a reputation for breaking big game-changing stories that lead to bringing down powerful people, but here his reputation seems to have gotten ahead of the story. There's so much doubt cast on the story in the article itself, and so many examples of people trying to corroborate the story and failing, that this allegation really should be taken with a grain of salt. I think a lot of anti-Kavanaugh people want to jump on it, because it's rare for a person to commit this sort of act only once, and so finding multiple instances of it make the first set of allegations more believable. But it doesn't really seem warranted, to my mind, as most attempts to produce evidence have produced information that casts further doubt on the story, if the New Yorker story can be believed.

All that being said, I wish the guy would resign.

This tweet's old but it's valence sounds a little different when considered in light of 20th century Jewish history than the history of fascism.

“his definition”

It’s reasonable to describe someone who prizes traditional national values as conservative, but that isn’t how conservatives have ever governed. It’s always been as I said, protecting the rich from the poor. Protecting royalty from democratic reform.

The confusion isn’t even intentional. At least not entirely. Politicians and wealthy inheritors live in different worlds from us. To them, traditional values are spending thanksgiving in the hamptons and sending their kids to an elite boarding school. Killing girlfriends and labor activists and not even having a negative story printed about you. A world run by the Kochs, Rockefellers and the Du Ponts.

To them, they are the real conservatives. And the Republican Party is the true, dyed in the wool Conservative party. You’re the weird one.

The Democrats were more protectionist in the 80s and 90s, making Trump views on trade another thing that makes him seem like a Democrat stuck in a time warp who opportunistically changed parties without changing his ideas.

Never forget that the civil war happened because conservatives became factionalized. Conservatives in the south wanted to protect the traditional values of slave ownership and commodity export; echoes of this survive today with the idyllic antebelllum plantation house ****. Conservatives in the north wanted to protect their traditional values of industrialism and entrepreneurship.

Of course, this is really just to say that rich factory owners wanted a leg up on rich slave owners.

But this kind of social conflict - between conservatives - is endemic to conflicts of this type.

So if you really believe that American conservative politics have ever been about preserving the traditional values of the American people, and not just the industrial elites, you have a hard question to answer. Traditional values don’t have one meaning to all Americans. How can one party or political movement encapsulate all of them?

I support the traditional American values of socialist newspapers, anarchism, and unionism.

Yeah, back in the era when unions had some real voice in the party, they pushed for stuff like that.

That time was long ago, though.

Now that you mention it, though, treating Trump like a man with dementia who keeps reliving 1985 is interesting.

I think this reflects the damage Ayn Rand has done to American discourse. Most of the world (rightly) recognizes various stripes of liberalism, with conservatives as literally conservative. America doesn't have conservatives, it has Conservatives. Which is to say, economically liberal people.

What Ayn Rand did though was she wrote a fantasy novel wherein among human beings lives a superhuman class of man that performs better than everyone else, and succeeds based on that. Basically, aristocracy through natural ability rather than aristocracy through entitlement. And it worked, people today basically believe billionaires are actually more naturally able and not that we have a ****ed-up, anti-liberal economic situation.

The economically liberal ideas are just cover by this point, because Ayn Rand only used them as set dressing for her real point: the proles are parasites and the strong need to be protected from the weak. And that's exactly how American Conservatism is in practice today: no commitment to the set dressing, all commitment to purging the parasites.

Yeah, dementia adds a nice poetic flourish. Makes it vivid. But another way to put it is that he's been stubbornly consistent when it comes to certain things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

It's also interesting that this is a point where, oddly, a conventional conservative analysis dovetails with the "Trump as fascist" analysis. Like when Ted Cruz complained about Trump's "New York values", or any other conservative complains that Trump isn't an authentic conservative. Some doubt that Trump's views on certain hot button issues (especially abortion and gun control) are actually more in line with the Democratic party than the GOP. (Some liberals, by the way, get this wrong, and think that conservatives are trying to distance themselves from Trump, and argue that they're not as morally bankrupt as he is, or something like that -- effectively, a No True Scotsman argument. In some cases, that may be what they're doing, but not always. Sometimes they're saying he's not conservative enough on some boilerplate GOP issues).

But I think that dovetails with the "Trump is a fascist" argument that leftists often make, that a central element of Trump's fascism is non-ideological pursuit of maximizing power for its own sake. Effectively, conservative who think Trump is really a liberal/Democrat are pointing out that he isn't a genuine Republican, and that he only ran as one because he thought it was politically advantageous, and would help him accumulate power.

The sad thing is, some of what Ayn Rand wrote resonates with me. The government seizing an important innovation and giving it to parasite incumbent capitalists is exactly the kind of thing they would do, for example. Except she didn’t write it that way. She meant it as giving it to the parasite masses, not to a parasite elite.

The problem with hair splitting about whether Trump is a Republican, a conservative, or a fascist is the assumption that those things are meaningfully different.

Wookie, I don't mean to dismiss your frustrations here, but I can't help but recognize their similarity to those of the left. It sounds to me like you are really lamenting that the two party system drowns out all political ideologies except a corrupt form of centrism.

Furthermore, it seems to me that the more scathing critique here of strict "constitutional" conservativism is that it is this very ideology which advocates so adamantly for a rigid interpretation of the constitution, whereas you yourself are lamenting how badly that has worked out in practice. If the constitution is so vulnerable to being subverted by a two party system that denies representation to "true" conservative and liberals alike (so that corrupt centrists fill the power vacuum), doesn't that make "constitutional" conservativism kind of futile and contradictory?

Closed wontfix

Reading this again, what's striking to me is how anti-democratic the tone is here. Wookie is assuming that "true conservatvism" is basically victimized by the fact that pluralism is even possible in a democracy. And then the shortcomings of conservative political movements in practice that Wookie has recognized seem to me to stem from no more than their own anti-democratic nature: that is to say, the political gridlock that is pissing off Wookie is actually a feature rather than a bug, and conservativism is, in practice, working pretty well for the capitalist class because of it.

I mean, let me put it this way: if "conservatives" successfully stop black people from voting, who's really complaining? One can only ask for so much.

Conservatives are anti-democracy by definition. What happens if people vote for change? You can’t allow that to happen. It doesn’t matter what kind of conservative you are. And if democracy is one of those traditional values that you should conserve, it must be the first value that you compromise to conserve the rest.

tbf, conservatives (and even moreso conservative libertarians) have a different definition of democracy... to them, voting means doing so with your feet (or alternatively, with your wallet)!

"Since you liberals don't love America, then you can geeeet out!"

"If you really don't like fascism, then you are welcome to abstain from buying it at K-mart."

(That said, I'd certainly vote with my feet if a reconstruction-era confederate threatened to kill me in retaliation for trying to vote)

Well, I suppose there's a lot I could respond to but I'm confused as to why the subject has changed to democracy or, rather, why anything I posted is being related to it.

Murray McClipbard:
[INDENT]It looks like you're trying to prevent fascism.

Would you like help?
[/INDENT]

• Would you like to privatize it?
• Create more fascism to create competition?
• Use praxeology to prove that stopping it is impossible?

Yo dawg, I heard you didn't like fascism, so I put fascists in your fascism!

Because from the sound of your post, it sounded like you were frustrated with what is clearly a lack of political representation. You might be happy with a multi-party system (like in many parliamentary systems of government), where you could form a minority party of "true conservatives"; or is it simply that you will only settle for one party rule?

I still don't get the democracy reference but I suppose you could say that if the senate and house established new rules that would be more parliamentary in nature that might be an improvement. That's not really my problem though. Semantics about the word conservative aside, my idea of it is that we support federalism as defined in the constitution, especially prior to the seventeenth amendment. We are very far from that now so consider that view in leading to the caveats I pointed out previously and you might understand more my position which you can call anti-democratic only because democratic is anti-federalism and unconstitutional at the federal level. Democratic principles in house and senate rules is another matter altogether.