Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Feb 18, 2023 3:30 pm
I have to say, I really don't meet these conservatives, and I can't find them in the media...except as rumours generated by the Left, claiming we're awash in "right-wingers," and "Nazis," or "racists," or "homophobes," or "nationalist terrorists," and so on. I do meet people who reject the Woke agenda, sometimes in vehement terms...but they're not what the Left wants us to think they are, and that much is obvious.
A few comments are in order. First, you do not *meet* such conservatives because genuine conservatism, I am afraid to say, has been successfully associated with various forms of backwardness, mean-spiritedness, racism, sexism, and also the catchall 'fascism'. Now I would suggest as well that you (I refer to 'people like you' and certainly many Christian Evangelicals) have fully absorbed and embraced the ideals of left-progressivism, and are essentially assistants and helpers in these ideological projects. To define real conservatism will today get one in all sort of hot water. It is highly unpopular and has been smeared to such a degree that most will shun its tenets because they cannot bear the label.
It is true that when you meet *conservatives* (i.e. when you look in the mirror!) you do not see a monstrous personage because, in fact, you are not a conservative but really a progressive. However, it is true that even those who are ever-so-slightly to the right of center do receive the label of 'ultra-right' and all the negative terms I just mentioned. And the reason is because such condemnatory rhetoric is extremely effective in alienating people from their own (perhaps naturally) conservative orientation. So as an example just a very few years ago it was 'generally agreed' by general society that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. It was an idea that arose naturally in people and did not require inculcation. But the attitude-engineers and social-engineers went to work on that backward stance and, lo and behold, succeeded in modifying it. Now, it is considered immoral and unethical (and uncouth) to have any view of homosexual marriage as anything but normal and good. And those who for some reason hold to the former ethics are seen and described as immoral! And
they feel themselves to be immoral.
Transvaluation of values is thus the topic to be discussed.
I do meet people who reject the Woke agenda, sometimes in vehement terms.
Yet I would suggest to you that if you went down a line of 'declared values' you would reveal yourself as essentially a 'woke' person. The real origin of 'wokeness' is to be found in different forms of Christianity. For example the New England abolitionists and the holy roller crowd. They give religious fervor to their progressive social projects and emotional fire to their campaigns and certainly in America this religious fervor is carried over into the larger Progressive movement.
One thing's clear: if such do exist, then have no real power in the public square -- no political parties representing their values and interests, no mainline media outlets, no serious publishing houses, no money, no great numbers, no cachet in the public mind, no ability to ban, no power in the educational system, no riots and demonstrations for their cause, and no slavering elites ginning them up and loading them with cash to get them to burn the inner city or foment revolution...
But that is not quite the point. And the point is therefore missed. All the Founders held to ideas that today are described as immoral and fascistic. The fact of the matter -- and this is not exaggeration -- is that the original country itself can only be seen and described, today, as immoral and 'fascistic'. I can cite one example: Abe Lincoln. In his case his expressed ideas on race cannot be published because they are so contrary to modern 'moral' views and ideas. He has a monument in Washington as if he was really a friend to the African race but he worked, diligently for years, to try to arrange for mass deportation and relocation back in Africa or in some other place.
If Abe Lincoln is an American hero he is a hero that must be toppled. This means turning against
everyone who created what we describe as 'America'. And the 'original population' as well.
So the actual thing to be considered is that with increasing intensity there is a new definition of what America is and what America should and must be. And what that amounts to is a direct turn away from any former *conservative* sense of rightness and goodness, and coming under the influence and into the current of none other than strict and direct Left-Progressivism. And frankly, always in the background, a modified form of Marxianism. These rule in our present. And to think in any other way will bring down on one two levels of condemnation: One that arises in 'cancel culture' (social condemnation, shunning, etc.) and the other, more insidious really, in an internal mechanism of self-condemnation should one discover in oneself a
non-politically correct vestige.
And you would expect that if they were so common as the Left claims, that there would be a ton of such things available, so we could all see these masses of dangerous "right-wingers." That would help the Left a lot. Why don't we? Because even the Left can't find enough of them to make their point. They would do it, if they could, of course: but they can't, it seems.
Again, you are not seeing the present and I suggest that you cannot *see* it because you are (I gather this from having read you for some years now)
essentially a progressive. The only thing that you seek to 'conserve' is a strict and standard Christian theology. True though that you will place emphasis on family and upstanding ethical behavior, but in the large you are a progressive Christian of the modern sort.
Do I condemn you? No, not exactly. My endeavor here (on this forum) is arriving at clear, fair and realistic definitions. And that measn seeing things as they really are.
What I detect, instead, is that increasing numbers of people at the low level -- workers, ordinary folks, lower-middle class types, rural folks and such, but now also some at higher levels, too -- are expressing a kind of low-level rumble of discontentment with the Woke posturing, and are turning away from it in disgust. They've just had enough of the Leftists' nonsense, and their propaganda has become to wild and stupid to believe any longer. A kind of Ricky Gervais contempt for Progressivism and its theatrics has begun to take hold more generally. We'll have to see what it comes to.
This is true, but that is because the ultra-dedicated progressives, the revolutionary progressives who are operating in our present so successfully, push so hard and so quickly against ingrained attitude that they arouse some resistance. And then -- as we all know -- there are media campaigns against 'wokeness' which is never sufficiently defined nor understood. And what is the result? To hunker down in previously established progressive outlooks that are merely the American status quo. Every encounter with a revolutionary progressive can only result, and always seems to result, in giving over more ground to the progressive mission and cause. Every negotiation with Marxist-inspired Left-Progressivism always results in a dilution of sound, intellectual conservative ideas. And the more that a given people become emotionalized and sentimentalized, and the less that they have an intellectual base, the more emotional fervor blends with a perverse *religious fervor* of the sort that we clearly notice in evangelical worship-sessions. They literally go out of their minds and get possessed by a strange spirit.
But "intolerance"? Is that always a vice?
What you mean is that you subscribe to every core Progressive tenet! There is no idea or value that can be described as 'originally American' that you now support. Your allegiance is, I'd wager, to the value-set of those New England zealots I referred to earlier.
How odd it is then that you profess to be a conservative. Here I refer, as an illustration, to James Lindsay who is, if we are to be fair but exact, an American Progressive who in the face of extreme forms of radical progressiveness (of an overtly Marxist variety and intensity) attempts only to reground himself in post-Sixties political attitude and to resist an even more radical onslaught.
In my view one has to see all these people as working in a sort of unison. But to actually think in genuine conservative terms -- to actually be involved in conserving something! -- only outlaws and outcasts hold to such positions.
The current of the times carried all forward with it. One need only examine each and every person -- each and every one! -- writing on this forum.
The Woke want us to "tolerate" the genital mutilation of children. They want us to "tolerate" the murder of infants, in fact. They want us to "tolerate" the total destruction of women's sports, and ultimately, of womanhood itself. They want us to "tolerate" censorship and silencing of the opposition. They want us to "tolerate" corrupt and mentally incompetent leaders. They want us to "tolerate" hugely expensive foreign wars. They want us to "tolerate" the corruption of the electoral process. They want us to "tolerate" drag queens in kindergartens, and a complete lack of academic standards in many subjects in universities. They want us to "tolerate" drugs. They want us to "tolerate" unrestricted global migration and the end of nations in favour of globalist utopian dreams that are guaranteed to end in disaster. They want us to "tolerate" absurd gas prices, and the destruction of our own food supply, in the name of a "climate change" strategy that's not even scientific or demonstrable...
Here, you create a list of
genuine progressive radicalism. When the radicalism that has also influenced you, and in which you are ensconced, is confronted by a more intense variety of itself.
In this paragraph you *merely repeat* what many of those Fox News commentators (and James Lindsay in more intellectual detail) have been saying. It is a
safe area for you.
I do notice that you seem to move, ever-so-slightly, toward a position that could be described as 'genuinely conservative' but I suspect that if confronted you'd shy away from the enunciation of the conservative principles that stand behind some of your declarations.
I certainly do agree with you that the Progressive Radicals have these programs or that their activism results in the breakdown of traditional ethical structures, but our own agreed-upon post-Sixties progressivism was just as radical when it appeared. We have absorbed it -- we absorbed it then -- because we could not oppose it. We did not have the intellectual base to do so. We came under the influence of religious emotionalism. (The *we* I use here is deliberately general).
So is such "tolerance" a virtue? Or is it a vice? There are clearly some things we ought not to be tolerating at all, and it's worse than a shame if we do.
And if you developed the latent ideas here expressed you would reveal, in a moment or two, your own essentially progressive (and accepted) social values.
To define Conservatism, today -- and I do mean a 'true' or 'genuine' conservatism is a radical project in a present that has turned radically against everything that went before.
