why i could never be a conservative, redux
May. 1st, 2013 04:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormsewerSo the last entry was a response to someone explaining why they could never be a liberal, and I titled it, as above, "Why I Could Never be a Conservative." I thought I might discuss more directly why that is.
First off, it's not even true. If we take general definitions of "conservative" versus "liberal" as wanting things to stay more like they were versus wanting things to be different, just who is which is context dependent. Conservatives can play a valuable role in society of putting on the brakes, and preventing too much change happening too fast and going too far. That's a good thing. If I was in France in 1790, or Russia in 1920, or China in 1950, I'd probably qualify as a conservative.
But I'm not, and in America in 2013 I'm definitely not a conservative. There are aspects of the conservative platform I can get behind. Fiscal responsibility is good (though I can't say Reagan or either Bush put their money where their mouths were, so to speak, where that was concerned). With caveats, I think capitalism is a good thing, and that market solutions are often good ones. So what's the problem?
There are a variety of ways to say it. One is that I am a scientist, and US conservatives are pretty virulently anti-science. Whether it's attacking evolution, or climate change, or the NSF, conservatives seem to place little importance on scientific findings or the scientific method. But life has gotten a lot better for most of humanity in the last several hundred years, and I think there's a strong case to be made that scientific advances are the reason why. If a political party discounts that, it's pretty much a deal-breaker for me. Certainly there is scientific denial on the left, as well (irrational fear of genetically modified organisms and vaccines come to mind), but these are not central to the Democratic Party's ideology like denying evolution and climate change are for the Republican Party.
Related to that, I'm a strong believer that the countdown has started toward fossil fuels no longer being a reasonable choice for powering our society, and that we need to start ramping up alternatives, fast. For reasons related to their issues with climate change, the Republican Party generally gives little sign of appreciating this reality. I'm a bit skeptical of the market's ability to solve this problem, at least not without a great deal of suffering along the way, because the market is short-sighted. If the ramp-down of fossil-fuel availability is gradual, giving the market time to adjust, we'll probably muddle through. But it might not be, and the market is then likely to respond with panic. We need to be hedging our bets much more carefully than we have been, but conservatives just don't seem to have any interest in getting on board with that.
In general, conservatives tend to promote an authoritarian, faith-based approach to the world that just doesn't jive with my way of thinking. Their continued insistence on, say, abstinence-only education or the War on Drugs, despite abundant evidence that they don't work at all, combined with all the things mentioned previously just makes it appear that conservatives don't care about evidence about the way things are so much as they care about their gut feelings about how things should be. I think that's counterproductive and dangerous.
And I don't understand what the big deal about gay marriage is. What do you care what they do? It isn't stopping you doing what you want. (Why do you hate freedom? Ha.) Somehow racists, chauvinists, xenophobes, and bigots generally seem to be very much over-represented on the conservative side, and I've little interest in fraternizing with them.
And this continued conservative insistence on giving huge tax breaks to the ultra-rich while letting the poor and middle class struggle is a big head-scratcher for me, at least as far as why middle-class and poor people would vote for it.
A subset of these issues would be enough to be deal-breakers for me, but all together they amount to a giant "hell no." I can respect Ron/Rand Paul to a certain degree, but other than that I just can't conceive of voting for a Republican.
You could point out many things that liberals do that are annoying, and in many cases I might agree with you. It's less that I like the Democrats than that I just cannot fathom voting for the Republicans. But in many cases I just can't understand what's so horrific about some of the things Republicans hate in the Democratic platform. I mean, I wish they'd stop spending so much money, because I think the debt is going to be a major problem for us in coming decades (though given past behavior I don't believe for a second that Republicans really want to spend less; they just want to spend it on different things, like the military and its adventures). But really, worse things could happen than that we turn into Sweden.
So that's why. Okay, I'm going to try to tone down the political talk for a while.
First off, it's not even true. If we take general definitions of "conservative" versus "liberal" as wanting things to stay more like they were versus wanting things to be different, just who is which is context dependent. Conservatives can play a valuable role in society of putting on the brakes, and preventing too much change happening too fast and going too far. That's a good thing. If I was in France in 1790, or Russia in 1920, or China in 1950, I'd probably qualify as a conservative.
But I'm not, and in America in 2013 I'm definitely not a conservative. There are aspects of the conservative platform I can get behind. Fiscal responsibility is good (though I can't say Reagan or either Bush put their money where their mouths were, so to speak, where that was concerned). With caveats, I think capitalism is a good thing, and that market solutions are often good ones. So what's the problem?
There are a variety of ways to say it. One is that I am a scientist, and US conservatives are pretty virulently anti-science. Whether it's attacking evolution, or climate change, or the NSF, conservatives seem to place little importance on scientific findings or the scientific method. But life has gotten a lot better for most of humanity in the last several hundred years, and I think there's a strong case to be made that scientific advances are the reason why. If a political party discounts that, it's pretty much a deal-breaker for me. Certainly there is scientific denial on the left, as well (irrational fear of genetically modified organisms and vaccines come to mind), but these are not central to the Democratic Party's ideology like denying evolution and climate change are for the Republican Party.
Related to that, I'm a strong believer that the countdown has started toward fossil fuels no longer being a reasonable choice for powering our society, and that we need to start ramping up alternatives, fast. For reasons related to their issues with climate change, the Republican Party generally gives little sign of appreciating this reality. I'm a bit skeptical of the market's ability to solve this problem, at least not without a great deal of suffering along the way, because the market is short-sighted. If the ramp-down of fossil-fuel availability is gradual, giving the market time to adjust, we'll probably muddle through. But it might not be, and the market is then likely to respond with panic. We need to be hedging our bets much more carefully than we have been, but conservatives just don't seem to have any interest in getting on board with that.
In general, conservatives tend to promote an authoritarian, faith-based approach to the world that just doesn't jive with my way of thinking. Their continued insistence on, say, abstinence-only education or the War on Drugs, despite abundant evidence that they don't work at all, combined with all the things mentioned previously just makes it appear that conservatives don't care about evidence about the way things are so much as they care about their gut feelings about how things should be. I think that's counterproductive and dangerous.
And I don't understand what the big deal about gay marriage is. What do you care what they do? It isn't stopping you doing what you want. (Why do you hate freedom? Ha.) Somehow racists, chauvinists, xenophobes, and bigots generally seem to be very much over-represented on the conservative side, and I've little interest in fraternizing with them.
And this continued conservative insistence on giving huge tax breaks to the ultra-rich while letting the poor and middle class struggle is a big head-scratcher for me, at least as far as why middle-class and poor people would vote for it.
A subset of these issues would be enough to be deal-breakers for me, but all together they amount to a giant "hell no." I can respect Ron/Rand Paul to a certain degree, but other than that I just can't conceive of voting for a Republican.
You could point out many things that liberals do that are annoying, and in many cases I might agree with you. It's less that I like the Democrats than that I just cannot fathom voting for the Republicans. But in many cases I just can't understand what's so horrific about some of the things Republicans hate in the Democratic platform. I mean, I wish they'd stop spending so much money, because I think the debt is going to be a major problem for us in coming decades (though given past behavior I don't believe for a second that Republicans really want to spend less; they just want to spend it on different things, like the military and its adventures). But really, worse things could happen than that we turn into Sweden.
So that's why. Okay, I'm going to try to tone down the political talk for a while.
