A lot of people are talking about the Trump candidacy “realigning” or “reshaping” the American political landscape and things like that. Like why would traditionally blue-state voters in places like NY vote for a guy who’s also carrying traditionally red-states like Kentucky? Is the whole Albion’s seed-style ethno/political makeup of the nation breaking down after nearly 400 years?
Nah.
Look, when it comes to politics, conservatives are basically just reactive. There are some smart conservatives, of course–I’d wager they do well in fields like economics, finance, sports broadcasting, and military strategy–but conservatives overall do not dominate the production of new social ideas. It’s the liberals, somewhat by nature, who keep coming up with ideas like, “What if we let women have abortions?” “What if we all took LSD?” “What if we didn’t eat animals?” or “What if we let gay people get married?”
So the conservatives devote themselves to opposing whatever the hell cockamamie scheme the liberals have come up with this time.
During the Cold War, I’m pretty sure the conservative opposed the liberals on the grounds that the liberals were commie peaceniks who weren’t doing enough to ensure that we would win the nuclear war against the USSR.
By the ’80s, conservatives were visibly concerned about shifting national attitudes toward religion, especially as it impacted things like abortion, divorce, the teaching of evolution in schools, whether local governments could make religious displays, etc. “Talk radio” became an important bastion in the “Religious Right,” which by the mid-90s had won a sweeping victory in Congress.
When people talk about how no president has ever been so hated as Obama, I wonder if they remember just how much the right hated Clinton.
And what did they hate him for?
Because he represented degenerate, godless atheism. (Never mind that Bill Clinton is probably actually Christian; that doesn’t really matter.)
Reagan and Bush I may have been religious conservatives, but religious conservatism was not a big part of their campaigns. By contrast, Bob Dole, Bush II, and mildly, Mitt Romney, all ran on the religious right platform, with strong planks based on ideas like “ban abortion” and “make sure gay marriage stays illegal.” Bush II even managed to establish an “Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.”
Meanwhile, though, liberals were changing. The big liberal push of the past 8 years has not been atheism; atheism has largely won already and atheists have wandered off to fight other battles, taking to the streets to protest racism. Thus the campus protests, the Black Lives Matter campaigns, the increasing push for open borders. Today, Germany; tomorrow, the US. Today’s liberals are, first and foremost, anti-racists.
The Republican establishment–folks like Ted Cruz and Ben Carson–fell so flat with voters precisely because most of them were still harping on religious issues like abortion and war with the Russians that were a concern with Reagan’s and Bob Dole’s voters, not today’s.
Today’s conservatives do not exactly want to come out and declare themselves racist bigots–in fact, the vast majority of them don’t see themselves as racists, and many are quite vehemently opposed to racism. This makes people reluctant to say anything negative about blacks, which gets instantly called out as racist. But you can still say things about immigrants, especially illegal immigrants. There’s just enough plausible deniability (both for others and yourself) to claim that you are not opposed to Mexicans, per se, you are just opposed to people breaking the law and think that if the law exists, then it ought to be enforced or else it is unfair to the people who did obey it. And for that matter, many of them really aren’t opposed to Mexicans; they are just broke and unable to find work and have enough brains in their heads to figure out what a massive flood of low-wage workers does to their chances of finding a well-paying job.
Of course, in the backs of people’s minds, it is not just about immigrants; it is also about BLM protestors, the November terrorist attacks in Paris, and the conviction that if elected, Hillary Clinton will follow in Angela Merkel’s footsteps and invite a million Muslims to the US.
This is why they say, “I don’t hate blacks; I don’t hate Mexicans. I just hate liberals.”
evolutionistx 
[…] Source: Evolutionist X […]
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It would be interesting to take a time machine and gather up the people who invented the steel plow, the sailing ship, the cannon, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, the telephone, and the computer, and transport them to 2016. Once they arrived here, they’d discover that, because they don’t support homosexual marriage and the hordes of Muhammad gang-raping women in London, they are “conservatives,” and therefore, incapable of inventing new things.
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I am not sure whether you are responding directly to me, or to the current milieu in general. Certainly I recognize that attitudes change over time, and that a person who was considered “liberal” in their own time (or “conservative”) might hold beliefs that at another point in time would be considered “conservative” (or “liberal.”) (It is probably better to consider attitudes rather than beliefs, as beliefs are more circumstantial due to the evidence at hand, whereas attitudes suggest a basic way of approaching the world.)
As for the production of novelty itself, I think it a fair critique that people who produce new things are not necessarily the same as folks who produce new ideas. My anecdotal observation is that people who invent things tend to be more conservative (though they often do not think of themselves that way and sometimes get offended at my characterization of them as such,) than the folks who come up with radical new social ideas.
My given examples were from the realm of social ideas, not inventions. I did not mean to imply that conservatives could not come up with new ideas at all.
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The distinction between “new things” and “new ideas” is interesting. Consider the following juxtapositions, and if you would, please answer which of any given pair is a “newer” idea than the other:
1) Establishing socially enforced mating pair bonds to ensure focused genetic investment, versus expanding the institution of such bonds to encompass non-reproductive homosexual pairings. (E.g., marriage versus gay marriage.)
2) Constructing a device which enables humans to speak to one another almost instantaneously across great distances, versus sending government soldiers to seize assets from a laborer in order to purchase communication devices for an idler. (E.g., the Edison phone versus the Obamaphone.)
3) Forming an association of skilled laborers and tools to produce useful items more efficiently than otherwise, versus writing laws requiring an association to admit new members of whom its old members disapprove. (E.g., the factory versus feminism.)
I’m probably missing lots of examples, but where are the cases where the ideas that are today considered “liberal” are not merely using government power to rob pre-existing ideas? Perhaps you can come up with some.
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Vegetarianism?
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Touché.
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