One thing that I've learned from conservatives is the importance of taking the world as it is.
You'll often hear leftists postulate a world where we're all less selfish, we all do what we can to help the environment, we act to serve the collective good, etc. Conservatives understand that we are fallen sinners who are going to act in self-interested ways, so we should design policy with that in mind.
I think the middle path of “the world and human behavior are improvable with good institutions and incentives” is actually the correct one here; utopia isn’t going to happen in the near term and the people who sincerely think it can are being foolish, but the general conservative view that the present shape of social relations is just the natural order ignores the reality of profound changes in both material circumstances and typical behavior patterns over the past few hundred years. You can’t make the crooked timber of mankind entirely straight, but you can certainly sand off some of the edges.
If you described the society you live in to say, a person living in 16th century England, they’d consider it an impossible utopia. Technological change and the institutional design changes it facilitates will probably continue to push out the frontier of the possible.
Relative improvements can be made and if people after their 20's aged like mollusks, then MAYBE utopia could be possible. But there's always a new generation that needs to be properly educated on the past and it seems we as humans are not capable of having nice things and passing on wisdom from generation to generation. People seem to have to learn the hard lessons. Right now, our priorities and even facts are out of whack. Our kids are being taught to prioritize some things that are detrimental to the long-term health of a society. So no, technology certainly has improved the average person's life in terms of comfort and experience. But recent technology has overwhelmed us with noise, and we have lost our sense of value, logic, and perspective. We're led by self-righteous midgets standing on the shoulders of giants, thinking they're 50' tall despite the past not because of it. We need a recalibration of common sense, not bitter propaganda.
Except that there's a very potent tendency in American mass culture that you are the agent of your life. So, Conservatives as well as Liberals/Leftists share the same default optimism around the ability of individuals to change circumstances. Trumpist Conservatives, especially, aren't actually "conservative," in this sense. They're reactionaries. They want change. Radical change. And they're idealists. They believe that radical change is possible with enough belief and action. They're not at all taking the world as it is. They want the world "as it was." Or, rather, the idealized version that they vicariously remember.
And, at the individual level, they are also very influenced by the Protestant Work Ethic and the Evangelical Prosperity Gospel. Again, this is a very restive philosophy and theology. You must *work* for change and betterment. And your work will reap dividends. You don't accept the world as it is. You mould it!
I think that's a really important lens to understand hard Trump supporters. They don't actually think America is doomed, or else they'd be total nihilists and checked out of politics. In the same way that we'd call campus protestors idealists, both sides just have wrong headed beliefs both about the means of accomplishing change and the actual change in of itself.
The problem is that the media (and us an audience) focus on both sides to the point where they totally dominate the political debate. In actuality, most voters don't have an appetite for the radical change either side wants.
I have many Trump supporters in my big family. Most support him because he is a tool for their world view, a world view most hard-working people either would support or wouldn't complain about. I'd call them conscientious conservatives. (There are a few that are actually imbeciles or hate-filled, but if they were raised in a progressive enclave, they’d be the same but with hard-left superficial views.)
8 years ago I had one of the conscientious conservatives take the Isidewith survey, the long one with all the drop-downs. Afterward we talked about our results. The one vivid memory from that was the view expressed that "Global warming isn't real because humans can't change the environment." I responded that I can't speak to the motives of many in the Environmental Movement. Certainly there are those who seek to obtain power through co-opting movements where people cede agency due to fear and worry. BUT humans can wipe out all life with nukes in a few minutes. And for anyone who has been on a Parisan sewer tour (19th century streams of waste, typhoid fever, and massive cesspools) or heard Randy Newman's song about the Cuyahoga River ("Burn on big river burn on") and every other anecdote out there, people can change the environment pretty easily. That was all it took. Mind changed. All it took was not clubbing someone over the head with info. Rather I was curious about them and their views and let them talk. They talked. We agreed on stuff. I made that basic point and moved on without trying to make them feel stupid.
To your point, if you stuck the conscientious conservatives in a room (without cameras so as to allow for openness) with non-tribal humanist progressives, they'd hear each other. The division comes from the professionals who grift or benefit from on it.
That's really interesting. And it shows how little considered our "rules of thumb" are, especially when they're social beliefs.
An example of this that I see on the Left all the time is that "greedy landlords are driving housing inflation." That's a view that I hear ALL the time. It's emotionally rewarding. It's something that will attract weary assent from your comrades. It something that gets you piled on for even the mildest questioning of its premises or advocacy implications.
What I hardly ever hear is that we need to create more housing supply, because the fundamental problem is that housing supply has been 10-20% lower than demand for decades now. And that, historically, the only successful way to address that has been to have public housing subsidy to encourage supply. The only major city without unaffordable housing in Western Europe today anymore is Vienna. And, guess what, "Red Vienna" was the OG public housing superstar! And that's a very classically left-wing solution. But American progressives just don't go for it today. It's like you just hear something enough times that it becomes the truth. And, look, I'm not saying that greedy landlords aren't part of the problem. But I just want people to actually think about the problem.
I can think of tons of other examples on the Right and the Left where people just repeat talking points and don't discuss or even examine them.
This is core to how the Left/Right paradigm is so flawed. Actually trying to do coherence puts Trumpism way to the left of the three legged stool version of the republican party... and yet they're also more extremist. The reality is that Trumpism is extreme mostly on a non-left/right axis.
I sometimes think of "extremism" as its own axis in a multidimensional political space. Imagine points scattered in a sort of crescent shape, where being far to the left / right / other direction can correlate with being high on "extremism," but they are not inherently the same thing. The horseshoe shape is (a stylized representation of) what you get when you flatten it down to two axes, "left-right" and "extremism".
What is "extremism" in this model? My definition of it is kind of, "I know it when I see it," but central features are things like high emotional intensity / aggression, low willingness to compromise, high willingness to use "extreme" tactics that break social norms, etc. It is theoretically possible to have policy preferences that are, say, very far to the left (you'd prefer for all businesses to be seized from the capitalists and owned collectively), without being extreme in your style, or even in your preferred outcomes (you want the revolution only if it can be achieved peacefully by electing a far-left government, which will nationalize businesses in the most peaceful way it can be achieved).
Trump is "extreme" in this stylistic sense. He is not an extremely ideological conservative -- in fact, he doesn't have much of a coherent ideology. But he's loud and mean, he's good at stoking anger, he doesn't like being constrained by rules, etc. It's pure "extremism" where Trump represents a departure from an earlier generation of Republicans -- not being more ideologically extreme, but being more "extremist per se."
The more I look at Trump's media and policy record, the more I see a mix of Joseph McCarthy and Teddy Roosevelt. Was Roosevelt to the right of William Howard Taft? Was McCarthy to the right of his son and Senate GOP leader Robert Alphonso Taft? Hard to say. But both men were outrageously in the center of media coverage while doing a little trust regulating or cold war liberalism on the side.
I found it interesting to read that more university jobs have been lost in the last ten years of Progressive cancellation than were lost in the ten peak years of McCarthyIsm. The parallel of both requiring loyalty oaths to get a university position is fascinating. Such facts suggest that partisans with facially different agendas probably have the same base agenda - power over one’s neighbors’s thoughts and beliefs.
On some level, this is a long-running feature of American democracy. Tocqueville and Adorno made observations a century apart about the astounding conformity and demands for assimilation that pervade American behavior. Of course, these observations were at different scales; New England townships weren't exactly hearing the national results come in on radio. The larger scale of college censorship today regrettably makes sense; college got more important since the 1950s as more attend it, more speak to the public from it, and more money is poured into it.
The electoral effects of this disciplining are worth noting. McCarthyism stopped left-wing class populism from growing further in the Democratic party in the 50s. The political scientist John Gerring accordingly called Truman the last populist Democratic president. I suspect the recent decade of social progressivism or "wokeness" has stopped a pan-class white coalition from growing further in the Republican party (white/non-white polarization peaked in 2012.) These social waves have a disciplining component beyond just individuals. They force entire parties to abandon their current path for a new one.
Frankly your comment is over my head. I don’t understand it. I’m responding to only one sentence. I believe that it is generally agreed that race relations were worse at the end of the Obama years than at the start. The immediate assumption of racist ill-will prior to evidence made it worse. Ferguson is a prime example.
Sincere question, not trolling: How many of Trump's followers are "idealists," and how many are amoral cynics who like and admire him precisely because he takes what he wants and screws his enemies, morals and ethics be damned? "The cruelty is the point" and all that?
There's a decent amount of research on this, actually. We're talking about some mixture of authoritarian personality, social dominance orientation (SDO), and, finally, the "Dark Tetrad" personality traits including narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. A pretty good literature review (albeit from 2018) of that research is collected here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201812/complete-psychological-analysis-trumps-support
It seems to be the case that there's certainly a minority of voters who elicit these traits. And those voters certainly trend toward Trump. But they're not numerous enough to form a bloc large enough to actually win elections. Most Trump people are normal, in other words.
And, anecdotally, you see a lot of evidence of the idealistic side of the Trump supporter. How euphoric his rallies are. Also, wonder at how naively his supporters ascribe him almost mystical powers to improve the economy, cow enemies foreign and domestic, secure the border, etc. This euphoric optimism is really hard for progressives (like me) to understand, because we're so focused on how uniquely dangerous his obvious authoritarianism, White Supremacy/racism, corruption/fraudulence, and completely cynical and transactional approaches to law and national power are.
His supporters seem to mostly see something else: a flawed but potent champion who can deliver on promises by cutting through the muck using muscular and unconventional approaches. This is idealism. Dangerous idealism, but idealism nevertheless.
Before we laugh overmuch at this, let's look back to the Obama Era: Wasn't it the same thing? Hope and Change! Basically nonsense. We fell into magical thinking, too. Into seeing Obama as the Messiah who would rid the Fallen world of the many Sins of the Bush Era. It took a long time for that spell to be broken, and liberals were very defensive of their Champion even when he disappointed in some pretty striking ways. I won't say that the personality cult delusion was as deep or enduring as it has been on the Trump side, but similar fallacies were in play.
"you see a lot of evidence of the idealistic side of the Trump supporter. How euphoric his rallies are. Also, wonder at how naively his supporters ascribe him almost mystical powers"
Godwin's Law prevents me from naming a political leader who had super-duper-euphoric rallies and whose supporters ascribed almost mystical powers to him and his regime. Many words can be used to describe his followers, but "idealistic" is not usually one of them.
No, I am not saying that he and Trump were in any way morally equivalent! I'm just saying that, if you were trying to reassure me that "Trump's supporters are not so bad actually," it did not land the way you intended.
I understand the distaste with crediting Nazism with idealism. But Nazism's appeal was essentially idealistic! There's copious evidence to that effect. There's a whole (great) book about this, based on interviews with regular Germans directly after the war: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928
In that book, you mostly hear people talking about how good the economy was, how regular workers got to take vacations for the first time ever, how the Everymen suddenly had a modicum of stability and security after decades of turmoil. And, over all, how Germany was "great" again, after the humiliations of World War I, crushing reparations, and the Great Depression.
And, yes, a lot of that largess came from appropriating the property of Jews before murdering them at an industrial scale. And, yes, the "greatness" was the same type that you saw with aggressive imperial powers before and since, and came at the expense of Germany's neighbors. But that wasn't the lived experience of the regular German at the time. That all happened offscreen and they conveniently ignored it, like Americans conveniently ignore all the tawdry stuff that enables our comfort today.
Good point..but as a conservative I can say conservatives aren't perfect here either. For example, how many times have we heard the argument that Social security is a rip off because a worker could invest his SS contributions in an index fund or something and retire with far more $$ that SS would provide .. which of course assumes
1. Worker would actually invest rather than spend excess (many would spend it)
2. Worker would invest wisely (few would)
3. Worker would experience no interruption in earnings due to injury, disability, illness or family situation (child care, talking care of sick relative) ...how many people does this describe
4. Worker would not experience loss of earning due to unemployment
5. Worker would feel no need to tap savings early
You get the idea.. conservative criticisms of the welfare state are base overwhelmingly on unrealistic views of life or human nature.
Healthcare same thing....so many conservatives will tell you how much they love their Christian health share account.... nevermind that such programs only work at all for people with stable income, no bad health habits and few expensive medical needs.
This is something that confuses me about American conservative ideology: You have, on the one hand, this essentially pessimistic view of human nature. People need Order and Authority because they are weak and/or ignorant and aren't capable of self-agency.
But then you have this naive belief on the ethical superiority of individual choice and the free market. Which, especially in its Neoclassical paradigm assumes that people are essentially rational actors.
But... they're not!
So, how can we trust people to make all the right choices if they're essentially incapable of making the right choices!? People make TERRIBLE choices when you let them. So, we very reasonably don't let them.
I don't even fully trust myself to make the right choices on stuff that I know my brain isn't optimized for. So I set up systems that force me to do the right thing. Especially when it comes to finances. My paycheck is automatically diverted into inaccessible savings vehicles. I need to "hack" my tendency to overvalue my present material desires over my future needs. Similarly, I just don't buy unhealthy food because I know I will eat it in moments of weakness. I don't put myself in compromising situations that could threaten my family and social life (we all made fun of the Vice President for his extreme rules about being alone with women who aren't his wife, but every monogamous married person has at least some milder version of the same self-imposed or agreed-upon rules). I'm essentially a Conservative when it comes to my understanding of even my own human nature. The flesh is weak!
So, I thank heaven for mandatory programs like Social Security and Medicare. And I'm even fine with various regulations that prevent me from indulging my own latent tendencies toward hedonism: alcohol consumption restrictions are fine by me! I don't like being bossed around by arbitrary authority, but I'm fine with customary, social, and legal restrictions that are legitimate, pro-social, and wise.
I think this is where American conservatives are different than other conservatives in the world. Conservatives everywhere have a dim moral view of humanity and see draconian law & order under an enlightened aristocracy as necessary to keep the sinful nature in check.
But American conservatives are different in that there is no enlightened aristocracy for us, because we successfully revolted against ours in 1776. Instead we have conservative-liberalism, which is essentially what American conservatism is. And beyond a few philosophical ideas like small government and whatnot, in practice this conservative-liberalism ends up being the exact thing as liberalism - only delayed a few decades.
This is why the Republican Party, aside from a few pet issues like guns and abortion, ends up being where the Democratic Party was 20-30 years earlier. It'll be no different 20-30 years from now.
Heck I even think that the effect of Dobbs in red states over time will be that every conservative will know some woman who either died or had her life or health messed up for want of abortion, and by 2050 pro-life (at least rhe current version) won't even be on the menu.
This would be a convenient way of capturing it, except that there's so much countervailing evidence of distinctly non-libertarian comfort with state control among Conservatives. Exhibit A: Florida. Not only are certain books prohibited from schools in Trump's home state. But the "free market" is prevented from providing meat alternatives to consumers now. Abortion is, of course, now illegal after only 6 weeks in the Sunshine State. All familiar contemporary developments to news junkies.
But there's all sorts of other stuff that's policy that sits uneasily with libertarianism, too: how about asset forfeiture laws? The police in many states (including and especially Red States) can literally stop you in traffic and steal your money. This is the kind of thing that offends many sacred Conservative principles, no?
Or, how about how comfortable Conservatives are with government surveillance? Nary a peep over the Patriot Act. Which had plenty of Conservative-backed antecedents during the Cold War and prior. Fourth Amendment? Never heard of it!
DeSantis' veggieburger ban isn't the newest Conservative intervention on what we're allowed to buy or eat, either. Conservatives enthusiastically back the Farm Bill, which has, for decades, imposed the largest state-driven intervention in agriculture in the world. It puts the EU's Common Agricultural Policy to shame! Sure, but that's subsidy. Well, I am also deafened by Conservative silence over various Big Government FDA restrictions on things like the longstanding prohibition on raw milk and unpasteurized cheeses. Both of which are among the most traditional foods on earth. My kid loves Kinder Surprise Eggs, but they've been banned in the US for eight decades because they have "non-nutritive ingredients" inside.
I can offer many other examples of things that are illegal in the supposedly freedom-loving US which elicit no complaint from Conservatives, but you get my point.
I get what you're saying and I'm certainly not an apologist for conservatives. But I see most of this culture-war stuff as temporary and unsustainable. It's very unpopular with voters. I actually live in FL and DeSantis' book banning and meat shennanigans is quite unpopular, but HE is still popular because he's anti-woke, etc.
The thing I've found is that very few conservative and conservative-leaning voters actually want conservative policies. They just want that conservative attitude. This is why they love Trump. He could care less about policy, and just relishes the "fight".
In the long run what this means is that liberals are still making the polices in the long term. But the danger is that faddish right-wing policies like Pro-Russia foreign policy might be adopted, but even then, conservatives would likely correct it over time. They are of course experts at adjusting their policies after a major fail and then pretending that they were never for that in the first place - even going as far to blame liberals in hindsight - like with the Iraq War, the 2008 Financial Crisis, the Afghanistan withdrawal, Gay Marriage, Jim Crow, Slavery, etc.
Conservativism is inconsistent and often incoherent because it is a "philosophy" based on a contrarian impulse, and a "movement" manufactued by an industrial media outrage machine. It is an empty suit.
Which is why conservatives ALWAYS mimic the liberalism of 20-30 years back. They have nothing else to do.
That's an excellent point. It's almost like the DeSantises of the GOP world didn't get the joke: "We're just riffing here, y'all. We weren't actually serious!"
But that happens enough that it has policy implications, especially when the policies are set by the judicial branch (a la an activist Arch-Conservative Supreme Court). Or when it's state or local policy that isn't well-reported due to the hollowing out of local journalism and the almost complete nationalization of politics.
So, it's not really just liberals making the policies in the long-term. The above tendencies aren't new and they create policy on the ground, too. For most of its history, the Supreme Court has been Conservative and supported right-wing interpretations. The latter half of the 20th Century was the aberration there, even though liberals living through that period began to assume that it was the norm.
And, similarly, state politics have usually been, on average, more conservative than national politics. Especially in the South, where egregious partisan gerrymandering, local elite state capture, and minority rule via all sorts of semi-legal shenanigans go WAY back.
To the extent that Republicans are opposed to the welfare state (note that Social Security is broadly popular), it's usually framed kind-of like you're describing: People are incapable of making good decisions, and what's best for most people is to work even though they don't see that, so we should force them to work instead of giving them the allegedly-bad option of not working.
This is a religious formula. “Sinners” implies the existence of a God who is being sinned against, and “fallen” implies that there was something for us to fall from, some state of primordial perfection and innocence that ended when Eve ate the fruit and f***d everything up.
No. We haven’t “fallen,” we have evolved out of nonhuman ancestors that were greedy and lustful and territorial and all the rest. On the contrary, we have risen; our capacity for reason, cooperation, and compassion for unrelated individuals is unmatched in any other animal.
If you’re going to be realistic, you might as well get the basic facts right!
Fellow atheist here, and while I agree with you that the supernatural trappings make no sense (that's a pretty core atheist thing, of course), I've found the biblical concept of original sin as I understand it to be useful, in the sense that all humans have biological wirings starting from birth that tempt us into self-interested actions, and we're always fighting against those instincts throughout our lives. That's at least how I read Allan's post, which I thought was good.
I am an atheist who will defend Christian civilization and needs grace. To say that I am a fallen sinner is just a poetic (and inclusive) way of saying natural selection doesn’t exactly select for righteousness or purity.
And I think a lot of this is really about core human behavior. For example, you see common themes with religions that have developed in isolation from each other where the common denominator is humans. And many of these same patterns are seen in non-religious contexts.
You mentioned sin, for example, and that is common all over the place, including original sin. Probably the most recent is "whiteness" in antiracism and similar theories that have come out of progressive academia. There are all kinds of non-religious contexts where the group requires individuals to "confess" misdeeds or the wrong thoughts to become "clean" and accepted by the group.
I would add that this Christian conception is sometimes leveraged for egalitarian ends, as well as prosocial perspective-taking with idioms like "walk a mile in another man's shoes".
I agree with City Of Trees (but as a non-atheist, whatever that means—I'm not sure myself.) The current rejection of all things "religious" means we're also throwing out our own culture's creation myth, which contains deep insights into human nature put forth in symbols and metaphors that have been pondered for thousands of years (and we have access to a good bit of those ponderings).
If our society shies away from the concept of "sin" , then how in the world do we form ethics? "All men are created equal" is not sufficient because of the limitations inherent in the essentially mathematical concept of "equality." (Another comment forthcoming.)
I'm currently reading Paradise Lost. The question that came up for me today is - what's the difference between "intelligence" and "knowledge," and does Milton think the tree is about "knowledge" in general" or only "knowledge of good and evil"? Were Adam and Eve intelligent but amoral or conscienceless? (What is "intelligent innocence"?) What exactly changed with those bites of fruit? We'll see what Milton has to say in Book V. The work in itself demonstrates that Milton had the genius and authority to merit our attention and pay heed to the challenges he raises.
You don't need to have a concept of sin to have ethics. While sin does encompass things like murder that hurt other people, it also in practice includes a lot of baggage on making people bad about activities with no victims (gay relationships, premarital sex, etc.) since sin is in many ways first a crime against a supernatural metaphysical deity, not living humans. You don't have to have a concept of sin to have an ethics based around not unnecessarily hurting other people.
One of the problems is that "sin" cannot be separated from the "baggage" of current culture, or a culture's specific ethical content. But what we also lose are the healthy ways humanity has dealt with sin in the past via religion, which includes forgiveness, redemption, and the concept that we're all flawed. I'm not sure what to do about the necessity of a deity. It's hard to come up with a better idea than humans as "imago Dei" for providing a basis of absolute respect for all human beings.
On the puritanical Left I see all these things missing: "canceling" is the opposite of forgiveness; there is no basis for respecting the humanity of people who fall into certain circumstantial categories like "white" or "privileged" or even "educated". The universality of the Fall means that no one can be entirely good or entirely evil, but I see the progressive left as Manichean. They have no bulwarks against hate: they are free to hate the racists, the homeless, the meth addicts, the MAGA voters, the TERFS, the police, or whomever our ideology designates, since they themselves are free of any impure thoughts or can only despair if any should occur.
The lack of such a balanced framework (in this case mature Christian theology, separate from the non-essential ethical rules by which it gets implemented in various cultures) means there are no culturally common brakes against hate, which inevitably leads to violence (people are evil because of their beliefs; a person's essence cannot be separated from their ideas; "good" people can and must be pure in thought, word and deed. If you're in the in-group you must hide your sins and feel eternally guilty; if you're in the out-group then you're a target for literal, perfectly justified dehumanization.
No doubt there are some sound, non-deistic philosophic foundations for establishing ultimate respect for all human beings, but these are still taking root in our culture and are being challenged by global circumstances. There's still something to be learned from the old ways, once presuppositions and prejudices are dealt with. At the very least, a well-founded theological ethic is useful for revealing the shortcomings of undeveloped, extreme ideologies.
(Actually, I'd prefer an ethic based on ultimate respect for all life, not just humans.)
How much actual religious forgiveness was there really in the past beyond some rhetorical flourishes, especially for those outside of the strictest parts of a religious communities? How much so-called forgiveness was there really for Jewish communities, gay people, etc. in Christian Europe? A lot of this just seems like rose-tinted lenses for a nostalgic simulacra that never really happened.
Plenty, from the psychological standpoint. A lot of religion is about how to feel good about yourself in society, which necessarily controls behavior and thought in order to maintain stability. You confess, repent, and sin no more until the next time, which allows you to love yourself enough for personal and intellectual growth. Atheists of course find ways to engage in these kinds of processes, but they're kind of on their own.
All societies utilize moral constraints for stability and survival, and these have often been implemented via religion. However, 1) such constraints are not always religious (see the Cultural Revolution) and 2) religions also come up with remedies and ameliorations for these constraints (see the abolitionist movement.) Ideologies/religions at least have the advantage of being systematized and talked about, with the result that they potentially balance themselves out, as we see in the great philosophical and theological conversations of the past.
Ultimately, religions are expressions of human culture and susceptible to the same extremes all other cultural institutions (marriage, family, education, work, government, economics etc.)
As Matt points out in this essay, there's advantage in accepting reality as it is. Just substitute "religion" for the references to America in this sentence: "It’s naive to view our sociocultural antecedents here in the United States as flawless, shining heroes, but it’s also naive to think the violence and brutality of American history is what’s unique about it" - in fact, my perspective about religion is similar to Matt's here. There's a lot of naiveté about religion in this secular century. For Matt's essay, the higher perspective is history. For religion, some higher perspectives are furnished by the social sciences that study human culture.
To bring this back to the original post, this is literally the entire point of original sin. (And to bring it back to Matt's point, it's not like ~anywhere is especially tolerant ~anytime pre-twentieth century.)
Just this weekend I was talking to my daughter about the complex implications of the creation myth in genesis if you don't treat it literally and understand it as a metaphoric way to discuss the nature of free will and what makes humanity unique.
There is definitely a reading of it in which the Eve who takes the bite of the apple isn't the Mitochondrial Eve 200,000 years ago who first evolved a human in human form but an Eve 60,000 years when humans through whatever mysterious process developed a capacity for language, art, and abstract thought. We don't currently know that process whereby we stopped being like other primates who "ethics" appear to be driven only by biological instinct and survival to a self-aware social actor capable of balancing even survival with other values.
I don't think that probably came as a result of eating an apple off a special tree (although there is some evidence that increased access to high quality fats in seafood may have played role in increased mental capacity.) But as a metaphoric exploration of the transformation, Genesis has a lot of interesting insight into the fact that this moment would have transformed and that one of the keys to that transformation was a capacity to know enough to know right from wrong and to make choices to either. Genesis says that God fears this because it would make men like God which suggests that this free will is what gives us our unique power while the punishment aspect indicates the pain and shame that this power would allow us to experience.
In a world that constantly begs the question of why people do bad things and why God doesn't stop them, the answer that it is because our free will has made us too powerful to be stopped and our capacity to do good or know truth is inexorably tied to our capacity for evil.
I think non-religious people (including Matt) often are overly willing to view religious myth as having been intended to be read literally and therefore, where it get the facts wrong, as inherently absurd. But there is a lot about the order in which Genesis develops creation that seems shocking astute if one doesn't see the time periods of the timeline as literal. And throwing it out means throwing out thousands of years of the results of folks wrestling sincerely with the questions of what it means to be human and be in community.
My daughter recently started to want to worship in a more traditionally Christian way and my mom was horrified that might mean she would start to believe in "ridiculous" things like the virgin birth that would require her to suspend her intelligence and ability to accurately understand the world. I am much less worried. I pointed out to my mom that it is my scientific understanding that she is just a mass of atoms that she perceives as solid and discrete but in which she was actually constantly swapping electrons with the chair she is sitting in and is separate from that chair primarily as a result of our perception of her as such and that her worries while she experienced them as narrative thoughts were as some level just the result of wordless electronic pulses moving from cell to cell in her brain. We don't experience life that way because we can't meaningfully. But that also means that we are all telling ourselves mythical stories to get us through the day without undue panic about where we start and chairs end. Some myths may be more scientifically rational that others but they are all myths and stories and there may be value in stories that are less rational but contain more elements of that incomprehensible underlying truth of our impermanence and undivisble connection to all things.
Plus there's a huge community in time and space that has this myth and all its symbols in common. These days stories and myths from video games movies and TV series are put through their paces to explore issues of existence, but these are pretty fragmented and more culture-specific than Genesis ("Live Long and Prosper" "May the Force be With You" etc.)
Agree. George Lucas apparently trying to model Star Wars on myth and relied upon some of Joseph Campbell's research on myths and hero stories. But one dude's story is bound to be less complex and include less truth and paradox than comes from generations of people making story together over time and circumstances in community. I think it is possible to interact with these stories and even create communities around meaning and values that can mirror church communities but we do lose something when we just throw out these traditions wholesale rather than mine them for their wisdom.
You're right, this is annoying, in part because it's cringe, and in part because it displays a basic misunderstanding of what "fallen" means in the context of Christian theology. To put it in secular terms, fallenness and original sin are concerned with philosophical anthropology, the fundamental nature of humans and humanity, not history.
Take the Genesis narrative. The fall happened to the first people who ever lived. It's not like there were a bunch of people before that that who never sinned. That's the point of it, and why the narrative works as a device to convey the theological concept.
I am a very religious person and I am going to be potentially annoying by saying that the idea that "original sin" is a core or universally agreed upon theological underpinning of all religions or even all forms of Christianity is less true that folks who view religion from the outside might think. To me that use of it in this context feels more like cherry-picking a religion whose focus is on how to be good to each other to find the one pit that suggests it probably isn't worth trying to be.
You’re right. You were annoying. Probably still are. Clearly you’re intelligent and self-aware, yet you choose to be creatively antagonistic, not necessarily against Christians but anyone trying to bridge the void and bring accord.
Come on! Use that noggin for the better. It feels better. I f’ing promise.
To be slightly less flip, sin isn’t real and “humans are going to act in self-interested ways” is far too vague to be useful. Which is why this line doesn’t really inform conservative policymaking (that depends on a bunch of other assumptions), and is rather used as a rebuttal to straw liberals who are supposedly basing their support of universal healthcare or whatever on the perfectibility of mankind
Sin is useful if you just consider it for what it is (or was): a metaphorical way of differentiating pro-social vs. anti-social behavior within a given social context, with a healthy dollop of supernatural justification to ensure buy-in and compliance even in the absence of enforcement.
The problem is that societies change and so do the material conditions in which they operate: It makes sense to create rules around sexual behavior. It doesn't make sense to slut-shame women or to make people feel guilty about sexual pleasure, in general. But, 2000-3000 years ago it did within certain societies, for various material reasons.
Today, we're not very comfortable with polyamory. Even when it's consensual. In other times and places, it was arguably a practical necessity. So ethics shift.
Other "sins" are more enduring: murdering people is wrong. Incest is wrong. Stealing is bad. Lying is bad. Etc.
Today, taboo still as utility. It's just that different things are taboo. And that's largely determined by what is pro-social now.
It's hard to square the circle of what you describe here (what Andrew Sullivan called the conservativism of doubt) with things like believing the US could easily democratize Iraq.
Yes neoconservatism failed because, frankly, it thought too highly of the middle east. Some places just don't have the moral and intellectual infrastructure to become Jeffersonian democracies.
Note that the US (and other Western powers) actually tried this in many circumstances during the Cold War and it backfired spectacularly. To list some very obvious examples from the Middle East: Egypt, Iraq, and Iran.
You joke, but I've worked with officers from militaries in SW Asia and I have repeatedly heard them say things to the effect of "our societies do best with strong, competent kings."
People said this about Iraq but... it seems to have actually turned out ok? Not worth the money and bloodshed sure (certainly not on rationales that turned out to be flimsy) but the current regime is vastly better than the previous one, it may not be a liberal democracy but it's certainly more liberal and more democratic, and it has pretty solid economic growth
I don't think there's a significant difference between conservatives and liberals in the extent to which they take the world as it is or don't. There is, however, a difference in what they're willing to accept in the world. Conceptualizing the world as full of self-interested fallen sinners has some strengths for analysis, but also creates lots of blindspots and biases.
You know the funny thing is I share that view that we are all fallen and we should shape our policies accordingly which is one reason I like the nevertrumpers. The only problem is I get no sense right wingers care about policy anymore nor do I get the sense that right wingers feel like they’re fallen.
Interestingly, in looking up the exact definition of this, it appears to have been portrayed very differently by conservative Christians I've seen discuss it (it's the Calvinist T in TULIP). I don't think it really adds to your original points in that case, though I do think its interpretation by fairly mainstream Christians is concerning.
One other important area where conservatives are generally right is around the importance of family. While I don’t agree with their policy remedies or their moral judgements, healthy families do make for healthy societies. In the flip side, the left is also right that community matters as well. It takes a village and a family.
Agreed. It's unfortunate though that too often in history and to an extent today "family" in conservative circles is a synonym for traditional gender hierarchy.
This was a big part of Andrew Sullivan's push for marriage equality. As a conservative, he supported marriage and family, and as a gay man he couldn't see why that shouldn't be available to gays and lesbians.
The gay left at the time did not appreciate the conservative value of family and often opposed marriage equality as I guess part of the corrupt patriarchy.
But Sullivan was the exception, not the rule. For the most part conservatives who talk up marriage's virtues (and the disagreement is about marriage, not "family" writ large) were happy to exclude same-sex couples from it, and the many, many liberals who brought about marriage equality took a basically civil rights approach that didn't require opining on whether marriage is virtuous or not. I thought and continue to think that this is massively discrediting for the marriage promotion people.
Very true. It's also significant how once Massachusetts legalized gay marriage through the courts, Sullivan had very little actual effect on the successful marriage equality movement, which was largely led by gay liberal activists who often succeeded due to winning court cases, which was a method Sullivan disagreed with. While Sullivan gets credit for bringing the idea to the mainstream, it's amazing that the most important movement promoting marriage in the 21st century had very little to do with him or conservatives in general.
I would argue that, while not inaccurate, misses an important point. Namely, reducing conservative agitation against gay marriage probably helped solidify the victories won in court and prevent some of backlash we now see in other areas.
To support this I would point to point to surveys such as the Pew Center survey in around 2016 or so that found that as many conservatives support gay marriage as opposed it. A recent Gallup poll has Republican Support for gay marriage at 49%.
I would not underestimate the importance of reducing resistance. While courts can certainly make rulings, those rulings need to be implemented. The less resistance to implementation (which can include work around laws designed to reduce the impact of the court's ruling) the more successful the implementation will generally be.
On a personal level I have seen my conservative parents come around to first the idea of gay marriage, and now its at the point were my extremely conservative and religious mother thinks her churchs stance on the immorality of homosexuality is just flat out wrong (that is, she disagrees that it is even a sin). People like Sullivan presented a set of arugments that she could rationalize within her existing world view to come to the morally correct decision. I think she needed those arguments to overcome her upbringing and the continual messaging she received.
In cases like this, I think of Jonathan Haidt's "Can I believe it" and "Must I believe it" dichotomy. She probably knew on some level that the entire anti-gay thing was wrong, but she needed an argument framed to help overcome old, ingrained beliefs. This made it so she had to believe it. I do not think that just legal rulings or Democrats making the argument would have worked (or at least not worked as well).
Rhetorically, but not actually. I don't see any conservative coalition actually doing more to help working families. Even big families! Even the act of having children.
What conservatives have in abundance on this issue, is specific ideas about what a family should look like. But somehow that view prevents them from supporting actual families.
Conservatives don't like simple lightweight tax-cut policies that help working families either. They don't support public education or healthcare, whether that be private or public healthcare. They have no special regard for the health of pregnant women or the well-being of children. They don't care for local taxes to support local libraries or community parks.
Conservatives don't give more than liberals to national charitable organizations, religious or otherwise. Religious conservatives do give more to the local church than liberals, and therefore usually give more overall, but the connection to that and working families I find tenuous - revealed by the fact that it is an indirect way to help working families and that they don't support working families in any other context.
They support their church and their families.
But they simply don't support American families at large - there are a number of ways to do that, and Democrats champion all of them.
"Conservatives don't like simple lightweight tax-cut policies that help working families either. "
Have you never met a conservative? Conservatives have been championing tax cuts for decades. Look at the history of tax cuts conservatives push through and you will see that the tax burden on the lower half of the income scale has drastically decreased over time.
"They don't support public education " Wrong. Conservatives rightly observe that our current public education system isn't doing much educating for WAY to many kids. In particular the poor and minority kids that liberals claim to care about. And standard liberal reframe "more money" doesn't fix the problem. Per pupil inflation adjusted spending has greatly increased over the last couple of decades with no real increase in test scores.
The solution of course is competition. Competition is what keeps organizations sharp and makes them put out good products at competitive prices. Public education needs competition. Which is why conservatives support charter schools and school choice. Because education is too important. Because it's not ok to trap millions of kids in failing public schools.
"Conservatives don't give more than liberals to national charitable organizations, religious or otherwise." this if false
"Following scientific data collection and coding procedures, we identify 421 effect sizes from 31 empirical studies. Our meta-analysis results suggest that political conservatives are significantly more charitable than liberals at an overall level"
I'm not against a government safety net. But it's a poor tool that often has perverse incentives (see the destruction of the black family). Local charities don't run into that problem because there are individuals involved in their lives making sure they make good decisions.
The reverse of what happens with big government programs
Whenever there is a tax cut debate, the conservatives want regressive tax cuts and the liberals wants progressive tax structure. I don't think giving very wealthy individuals a major tax cut counts as "pro-working families", its the belief in a trickle down mechanism that might help the economy as a whole. But a laser focus on helping working families, looks a lot more like the Democrat tax policy than the Republican one. If you are thinking in harm mitigation terms, its very obvious that harms are concentrated in the poorest families.
I can dispute your characterization of the value of public education, but it seems we agree that conservatives don't support public education. You say conservatives support private education, but I don't see any evidence that they are willing to pay more to support the education of other people's kids whether private or public.
If you look I actually agree conservatives gave more overall and anticipated the objection - When you break it down, its devotion to local churches not a dedication to charitable organizations.
Everything goes back to my thesis, which is that conservatives aren't willing to pay - by any mechanism - for the benefit of families of people who don't go to the same church as they do.
No offense, but it is difficult to take your more accurate arguments seriously when you paint with a brush as broad as you are painting. Look at what George Bush pushed related to AIDs in Africa...that was very much based on his religion; look at what other churches have done in terms of disasters, famines, etc., over time. When I helped at a food bank Churches did as much to help as any other group, more if you included labor (major stores did more in terms of actually providing food, but in terms of taking the deliveries, repacking them for individuals and families, and then delivering them, the church goers were among the biggest helpers). This was not for their church but for needy in the city.
I am completely agnostic in terms of what for a god (if one exists) takes. Still, your posts come off as pretty biased...for instance, if I substituted any other group and dropped those kinds of bombs, i.e., "Everything goes back to my thesis, which is that conservatives aren't willing to pay - by any mechanism - for the benefit of families of people who don't go to the same church as they do." It would raise some questions. What if I said blacks, democrat, or gays instead of conservatives? I would sound like bigot...
And might I add that Democrats are also better at preventing abortion, what with their robust support of contraception, women's health and social safety nets.
I want to agree with this, but it seems really hard to tease out this relationship because abortion is affected by a lot of things that vary between states and women can travel for abortions.
I would say the big lever here is birth control. I think its fair to say that conservatives have ambivalent feelings about birth control, liberals support birth control robustly and in a wider variety. The connection between birth control and preventing abortion should also be uncontroversial.
The bigger question is how directly reducing poverty and providing support for single parents has an effect on reducing abortion. If you believe the pro-natalist literature on birth incentives, than I think that also goes to the point that someone is more likely to keep a pregnancy when they can afford it. But I think conservatives have all sorts of ideas about how social welfare is supposedly corrosive to family life and personal responsibility, so I am not sure they would be satisfied with merely showing a marginal effect of income on preventing abortion. Even here, the bigger lever is probably someone who has their life together more likely to engage in family planning.
Conservatives don't support public education because they don't want their children and tax dollars to be controlled by an institution that has been captured by their political enemies.
I think you find profligate wokeness more endemic to private educational institutions than public ones. But we are in agreement that conservatives basic distrust in public institutional prevents them from supporting services for children in need.
I genuinely get curious when I hear this but like what are atheist families in need supposed to do? Likewise for people who for one reason or another are just alienated from the church.
It really seems like conservative world has no place for certain kinds of people. And like maybe that’s a feature not a bug for them but it means even when I agree with conservatives about like 50% of issues it doesn’t matter.
One thing that I've learned from conservatives is the importance of taking the world as it is.
You'll often hear leftists postulate a world where we're all less selfish, we all do what we can to help the environment, we act to serve the collective good, etc. Conservatives understand that we are fallen sinners who are going to act in self-interested ways, so we should design policy with that in mind.
I think the middle path of “the world and human behavior are improvable with good institutions and incentives” is actually the correct one here; utopia isn’t going to happen in the near term and the people who sincerely think it can are being foolish, but the general conservative view that the present shape of social relations is just the natural order ignores the reality of profound changes in both material circumstances and typical behavior patterns over the past few hundred years. You can’t make the crooked timber of mankind entirely straight, but you can certainly sand off some of the edges.
+1000 especially for your last sentence!
Utopia isn't possible in the long term either
If you described the society you live in to say, a person living in 16th century England, they’d consider it an impossible utopia. Technological change and the institutional design changes it facilitates will probably continue to push out the frontier of the possible.
Can society get better sure. Our current standard of living is a miracle compared to all of history.
But people quickly get used to it. And always want better.
Anyway, my point is that society can never be perfect. Because it's inhabited by imperfect human beings
Relative improvements can be made and if people after their 20's aged like mollusks, then MAYBE utopia could be possible. But there's always a new generation that needs to be properly educated on the past and it seems we as humans are not capable of having nice things and passing on wisdom from generation to generation. People seem to have to learn the hard lessons. Right now, our priorities and even facts are out of whack. Our kids are being taught to prioritize some things that are detrimental to the long-term health of a society. So no, technology certainly has improved the average person's life in terms of comfort and experience. But recent technology has overwhelmed us with noise, and we have lost our sense of value, logic, and perspective. We're led by self-righteous midgets standing on the shoulders of giants, thinking they're 50' tall despite the past not because of it. We need a recalibration of common sense, not bitter propaganda.
Except that there's a very potent tendency in American mass culture that you are the agent of your life. So, Conservatives as well as Liberals/Leftists share the same default optimism around the ability of individuals to change circumstances. Trumpist Conservatives, especially, aren't actually "conservative," in this sense. They're reactionaries. They want change. Radical change. And they're idealists. They believe that radical change is possible with enough belief and action. They're not at all taking the world as it is. They want the world "as it was." Or, rather, the idealized version that they vicariously remember.
And, at the individual level, they are also very influenced by the Protestant Work Ethic and the Evangelical Prosperity Gospel. Again, this is a very restive philosophy and theology. You must *work* for change and betterment. And your work will reap dividends. You don't accept the world as it is. You mould it!
I think that's a really important lens to understand hard Trump supporters. They don't actually think America is doomed, or else they'd be total nihilists and checked out of politics. In the same way that we'd call campus protestors idealists, both sides just have wrong headed beliefs both about the means of accomplishing change and the actual change in of itself.
The problem is that the media (and us an audience) focus on both sides to the point where they totally dominate the political debate. In actuality, most voters don't have an appetite for the radical change either side wants.
I have many Trump supporters in my big family. Most support him because he is a tool for their world view, a world view most hard-working people either would support or wouldn't complain about. I'd call them conscientious conservatives. (There are a few that are actually imbeciles or hate-filled, but if they were raised in a progressive enclave, they’d be the same but with hard-left superficial views.)
8 years ago I had one of the conscientious conservatives take the Isidewith survey, the long one with all the drop-downs. Afterward we talked about our results. The one vivid memory from that was the view expressed that "Global warming isn't real because humans can't change the environment." I responded that I can't speak to the motives of many in the Environmental Movement. Certainly there are those who seek to obtain power through co-opting movements where people cede agency due to fear and worry. BUT humans can wipe out all life with nukes in a few minutes. And for anyone who has been on a Parisan sewer tour (19th century streams of waste, typhoid fever, and massive cesspools) or heard Randy Newman's song about the Cuyahoga River ("Burn on big river burn on") and every other anecdote out there, people can change the environment pretty easily. That was all it took. Mind changed. All it took was not clubbing someone over the head with info. Rather I was curious about them and their views and let them talk. They talked. We agreed on stuff. I made that basic point and moved on without trying to make them feel stupid.
To your point, if you stuck the conscientious conservatives in a room (without cameras so as to allow for openness) with non-tribal humanist progressives, they'd hear each other. The division comes from the professionals who grift or benefit from on it.
That's really interesting. And it shows how little considered our "rules of thumb" are, especially when they're social beliefs.
An example of this that I see on the Left all the time is that "greedy landlords are driving housing inflation." That's a view that I hear ALL the time. It's emotionally rewarding. It's something that will attract weary assent from your comrades. It something that gets you piled on for even the mildest questioning of its premises or advocacy implications.
What I hardly ever hear is that we need to create more housing supply, because the fundamental problem is that housing supply has been 10-20% lower than demand for decades now. And that, historically, the only successful way to address that has been to have public housing subsidy to encourage supply. The only major city without unaffordable housing in Western Europe today anymore is Vienna. And, guess what, "Red Vienna" was the OG public housing superstar! And that's a very classically left-wing solution. But American progressives just don't go for it today. It's like you just hear something enough times that it becomes the truth. And, look, I'm not saying that greedy landlords aren't part of the problem. But I just want people to actually think about the problem.
I can think of tons of other examples on the Right and the Left where people just repeat talking points and don't discuss or even examine them.
This is core to how the Left/Right paradigm is so flawed. Actually trying to do coherence puts Trumpism way to the left of the three legged stool version of the republican party... and yet they're also more extremist. The reality is that Trumpism is extreme mostly on a non-left/right axis.
I sometimes think of "extremism" as its own axis in a multidimensional political space. Imagine points scattered in a sort of crescent shape, where being far to the left / right / other direction can correlate with being high on "extremism," but they are not inherently the same thing. The horseshoe shape is (a stylized representation of) what you get when you flatten it down to two axes, "left-right" and "extremism".
What is "extremism" in this model? My definition of it is kind of, "I know it when I see it," but central features are things like high emotional intensity / aggression, low willingness to compromise, high willingness to use "extreme" tactics that break social norms, etc. It is theoretically possible to have policy preferences that are, say, very far to the left (you'd prefer for all businesses to be seized from the capitalists and owned collectively), without being extreme in your style, or even in your preferred outcomes (you want the revolution only if it can be achieved peacefully by electing a far-left government, which will nationalize businesses in the most peaceful way it can be achieved).
Trump is "extreme" in this stylistic sense. He is not an extremely ideological conservative -- in fact, he doesn't have much of a coherent ideology. But he's loud and mean, he's good at stoking anger, he doesn't like being constrained by rules, etc. It's pure "extremism" where Trump represents a departure from an earlier generation of Republicans -- not being more ideologically extreme, but being more "extremist per se."
Extremists and radicals want to destroy things for the sake of destruction.
The more I look at Trump's media and policy record, the more I see a mix of Joseph McCarthy and Teddy Roosevelt. Was Roosevelt to the right of William Howard Taft? Was McCarthy to the right of his son and Senate GOP leader Robert Alphonso Taft? Hard to say. But both men were outrageously in the center of media coverage while doing a little trust regulating or cold war liberalism on the side.
I found it interesting to read that more university jobs have been lost in the last ten years of Progressive cancellation than were lost in the ten peak years of McCarthyIsm. The parallel of both requiring loyalty oaths to get a university position is fascinating. Such facts suggest that partisans with facially different agendas probably have the same base agenda - power over one’s neighbors’s thoughts and beliefs.
On some level, this is a long-running feature of American democracy. Tocqueville and Adorno made observations a century apart about the astounding conformity and demands for assimilation that pervade American behavior. Of course, these observations were at different scales; New England townships weren't exactly hearing the national results come in on radio. The larger scale of college censorship today regrettably makes sense; college got more important since the 1950s as more attend it, more speak to the public from it, and more money is poured into it.
The electoral effects of this disciplining are worth noting. McCarthyism stopped left-wing class populism from growing further in the Democratic party in the 50s. The political scientist John Gerring accordingly called Truman the last populist Democratic president. I suspect the recent decade of social progressivism or "wokeness" has stopped a pan-class white coalition from growing further in the Republican party (white/non-white polarization peaked in 2012.) These social waves have a disciplining component beyond just individuals. They force entire parties to abandon their current path for a new one.
Frankly your comment is over my head. I don’t understand it. I’m responding to only one sentence. I believe that it is generally agreed that race relations were worse at the end of the Obama years than at the start. The immediate assumption of racist ill-will prior to evidence made it worse. Ferguson is a prime example.
Trump changes his mind constantly, so Trumpism is not coherent.
Trump conservatives are not "conservative" in the traditional meaning of the word, they are more accurately called right-wing populists in my view.
Sincere question, not trolling: How many of Trump's followers are "idealists," and how many are amoral cynics who like and admire him precisely because he takes what he wants and screws his enemies, morals and ethics be damned? "The cruelty is the point" and all that?
There's a decent amount of research on this, actually. We're talking about some mixture of authoritarian personality, social dominance orientation (SDO), and, finally, the "Dark Tetrad" personality traits including narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. A pretty good literature review (albeit from 2018) of that research is collected here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201812/complete-psychological-analysis-trumps-support
It seems to be the case that there's certainly a minority of voters who elicit these traits. And those voters certainly trend toward Trump. But they're not numerous enough to form a bloc large enough to actually win elections. Most Trump people are normal, in other words.
And, anecdotally, you see a lot of evidence of the idealistic side of the Trump supporter. How euphoric his rallies are. Also, wonder at how naively his supporters ascribe him almost mystical powers to improve the economy, cow enemies foreign and domestic, secure the border, etc. This euphoric optimism is really hard for progressives (like me) to understand, because we're so focused on how uniquely dangerous his obvious authoritarianism, White Supremacy/racism, corruption/fraudulence, and completely cynical and transactional approaches to law and national power are.
His supporters seem to mostly see something else: a flawed but potent champion who can deliver on promises by cutting through the muck using muscular and unconventional approaches. This is idealism. Dangerous idealism, but idealism nevertheless.
Before we laugh overmuch at this, let's look back to the Obama Era: Wasn't it the same thing? Hope and Change! Basically nonsense. We fell into magical thinking, too. Into seeing Obama as the Messiah who would rid the Fallen world of the many Sins of the Bush Era. It took a long time for that spell to be broken, and liberals were very defensive of their Champion even when he disappointed in some pretty striking ways. I won't say that the personality cult delusion was as deep or enduring as it has been on the Trump side, but similar fallacies were in play.
"you see a lot of evidence of the idealistic side of the Trump supporter. How euphoric his rallies are. Also, wonder at how naively his supporters ascribe him almost mystical powers"
Godwin's Law prevents me from naming a political leader who had super-duper-euphoric rallies and whose supporters ascribed almost mystical powers to him and his regime. Many words can be used to describe his followers, but "idealistic" is not usually one of them.
No, I am not saying that he and Trump were in any way morally equivalent! I'm just saying that, if you were trying to reassure me that "Trump's supporters are not so bad actually," it did not land the way you intended.
I understand the distaste with crediting Nazism with idealism. But Nazism's appeal was essentially idealistic! There's copious evidence to that effect. There's a whole (great) book about this, based on interviews with regular Germans directly after the war: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928
In that book, you mostly hear people talking about how good the economy was, how regular workers got to take vacations for the first time ever, how the Everymen suddenly had a modicum of stability and security after decades of turmoil. And, over all, how Germany was "great" again, after the humiliations of World War I, crushing reparations, and the Great Depression.
And, yes, a lot of that largess came from appropriating the property of Jews before murdering them at an industrial scale. And, yes, the "greatness" was the same type that you saw with aggressive imperial powers before and since, and came at the expense of Germany's neighbors. But that wasn't the lived experience of the regular German at the time. That all happened offscreen and they conveniently ignored it, like Americans conveniently ignore all the tawdry stuff that enables our comfort today.
I've really appreciated your points in this thread, food for thought.
Good point..but as a conservative I can say conservatives aren't perfect here either. For example, how many times have we heard the argument that Social security is a rip off because a worker could invest his SS contributions in an index fund or something and retire with far more $$ that SS would provide .. which of course assumes
1. Worker would actually invest rather than spend excess (many would spend it)
2. Worker would invest wisely (few would)
3. Worker would experience no interruption in earnings due to injury, disability, illness or family situation (child care, talking care of sick relative) ...how many people does this describe
4. Worker would not experience loss of earning due to unemployment
5. Worker would feel no need to tap savings early
You get the idea.. conservative criticisms of the welfare state are base overwhelmingly on unrealistic views of life or human nature.
Healthcare same thing....so many conservatives will tell you how much they love their Christian health share account.... nevermind that such programs only work at all for people with stable income, no bad health habits and few expensive medical needs.
This is something that confuses me about American conservative ideology: You have, on the one hand, this essentially pessimistic view of human nature. People need Order and Authority because they are weak and/or ignorant and aren't capable of self-agency.
But then you have this naive belief on the ethical superiority of individual choice and the free market. Which, especially in its Neoclassical paradigm assumes that people are essentially rational actors.
But... they're not!
So, how can we trust people to make all the right choices if they're essentially incapable of making the right choices!? People make TERRIBLE choices when you let them. So, we very reasonably don't let them.
I don't even fully trust myself to make the right choices on stuff that I know my brain isn't optimized for. So I set up systems that force me to do the right thing. Especially when it comes to finances. My paycheck is automatically diverted into inaccessible savings vehicles. I need to "hack" my tendency to overvalue my present material desires over my future needs. Similarly, I just don't buy unhealthy food because I know I will eat it in moments of weakness. I don't put myself in compromising situations that could threaten my family and social life (we all made fun of the Vice President for his extreme rules about being alone with women who aren't his wife, but every monogamous married person has at least some milder version of the same self-imposed or agreed-upon rules). I'm essentially a Conservative when it comes to my understanding of even my own human nature. The flesh is weak!
So, I thank heaven for mandatory programs like Social Security and Medicare. And I'm even fine with various regulations that prevent me from indulging my own latent tendencies toward hedonism: alcohol consumption restrictions are fine by me! I don't like being bossed around by arbitrary authority, but I'm fine with customary, social, and legal restrictions that are legitimate, pro-social, and wise.
Short answer is the free market fundamentalism you see on right is really not conservative at all but classical liberalism.
A real conservative like Burke would say role of govt is to prevent or at least mitigate foreseeable evils.
Old age poverty through bad luck or lack of savings is about as predictable as it gets.
Regardless of what market fundamentalists say half of the population will have below average luck or savings discipline no matter what!
I think this is where American conservatives are different than other conservatives in the world. Conservatives everywhere have a dim moral view of humanity and see draconian law & order under an enlightened aristocracy as necessary to keep the sinful nature in check.
But American conservatives are different in that there is no enlightened aristocracy for us, because we successfully revolted against ours in 1776. Instead we have conservative-liberalism, which is essentially what American conservatism is. And beyond a few philosophical ideas like small government and whatnot, in practice this conservative-liberalism ends up being the exact thing as liberalism - only delayed a few decades.
This is why the Republican Party, aside from a few pet issues like guns and abortion, ends up being where the Democratic Party was 20-30 years earlier. It'll be no different 20-30 years from now.
Heck I even think that the effect of Dobbs in red states over time will be that every conservative will know some woman who either died or had her life or health messed up for want of abortion, and by 2050 pro-life (at least rhe current version) won't even be on the menu.
This would be a convenient way of capturing it, except that there's so much countervailing evidence of distinctly non-libertarian comfort with state control among Conservatives. Exhibit A: Florida. Not only are certain books prohibited from schools in Trump's home state. But the "free market" is prevented from providing meat alternatives to consumers now. Abortion is, of course, now illegal after only 6 weeks in the Sunshine State. All familiar contemporary developments to news junkies.
But there's all sorts of other stuff that's policy that sits uneasily with libertarianism, too: how about asset forfeiture laws? The police in many states (including and especially Red States) can literally stop you in traffic and steal your money. This is the kind of thing that offends many sacred Conservative principles, no?
Or, how about how comfortable Conservatives are with government surveillance? Nary a peep over the Patriot Act. Which had plenty of Conservative-backed antecedents during the Cold War and prior. Fourth Amendment? Never heard of it!
DeSantis' veggieburger ban isn't the newest Conservative intervention on what we're allowed to buy or eat, either. Conservatives enthusiastically back the Farm Bill, which has, for decades, imposed the largest state-driven intervention in agriculture in the world. It puts the EU's Common Agricultural Policy to shame! Sure, but that's subsidy. Well, I am also deafened by Conservative silence over various Big Government FDA restrictions on things like the longstanding prohibition on raw milk and unpasteurized cheeses. Both of which are among the most traditional foods on earth. My kid loves Kinder Surprise Eggs, but they've been banned in the US for eight decades because they have "non-nutritive ingredients" inside.
I can offer many other examples of things that are illegal in the supposedly freedom-loving US which elicit no complaint from Conservatives, but you get my point.
I get what you're saying and I'm certainly not an apologist for conservatives. But I see most of this culture-war stuff as temporary and unsustainable. It's very unpopular with voters. I actually live in FL and DeSantis' book banning and meat shennanigans is quite unpopular, but HE is still popular because he's anti-woke, etc.
The thing I've found is that very few conservative and conservative-leaning voters actually want conservative policies. They just want that conservative attitude. This is why they love Trump. He could care less about policy, and just relishes the "fight".
In the long run what this means is that liberals are still making the polices in the long term. But the danger is that faddish right-wing policies like Pro-Russia foreign policy might be adopted, but even then, conservatives would likely correct it over time. They are of course experts at adjusting their policies after a major fail and then pretending that they were never for that in the first place - even going as far to blame liberals in hindsight - like with the Iraq War, the 2008 Financial Crisis, the Afghanistan withdrawal, Gay Marriage, Jim Crow, Slavery, etc.
Conservativism is inconsistent and often incoherent because it is a "philosophy" based on a contrarian impulse, and a "movement" manufactued by an industrial media outrage machine. It is an empty suit.
Which is why conservatives ALWAYS mimic the liberalism of 20-30 years back. They have nothing else to do.
That's an excellent point. It's almost like the DeSantises of the GOP world didn't get the joke: "We're just riffing here, y'all. We weren't actually serious!"
But that happens enough that it has policy implications, especially when the policies are set by the judicial branch (a la an activist Arch-Conservative Supreme Court). Or when it's state or local policy that isn't well-reported due to the hollowing out of local journalism and the almost complete nationalization of politics.
So, it's not really just liberals making the policies in the long-term. The above tendencies aren't new and they create policy on the ground, too. For most of its history, the Supreme Court has been Conservative and supported right-wing interpretations. The latter half of the 20th Century was the aberration there, even though liberals living through that period began to assume that it was the norm.
And, similarly, state politics have usually been, on average, more conservative than national politics. Especially in the South, where egregious partisan gerrymandering, local elite state capture, and minority rule via all sorts of semi-legal shenanigans go WAY back.
To the extent that Republicans are opposed to the welfare state (note that Social Security is broadly popular), it's usually framed kind-of like you're describing: People are incapable of making good decisions, and what's best for most people is to work even though they don't see that, so we should force them to work instead of giving them the allegedly-bad option of not working.
“We are fallen sinners”
Hi, I’m an atheist, and I’m going to be annoying!
This is a religious formula. “Sinners” implies the existence of a God who is being sinned against, and “fallen” implies that there was something for us to fall from, some state of primordial perfection and innocence that ended when Eve ate the fruit and f***d everything up.
No. We haven’t “fallen,” we have evolved out of nonhuman ancestors that were greedy and lustful and territorial and all the rest. On the contrary, we have risen; our capacity for reason, cooperation, and compassion for unrelated individuals is unmatched in any other animal.
If you’re going to be realistic, you might as well get the basic facts right!
Fellow atheist here, and while I agree with you that the supernatural trappings make no sense (that's a pretty core atheist thing, of course), I've found the biblical concept of original sin as I understand it to be useful, in the sense that all humans have biological wirings starting from birth that tempt us into self-interested actions, and we're always fighting against those instincts throughout our lives. That's at least how I read Allan's post, which I thought was good.
I am an atheist who will defend Christian civilization and needs grace. To say that I am a fallen sinner is just a poetic (and inclusive) way of saying natural selection doesn’t exactly select for righteousness or purity.
Sometimes it selects for just the opposite ...
And I think a lot of this is really about core human behavior. For example, you see common themes with religions that have developed in isolation from each other where the common denominator is humans. And many of these same patterns are seen in non-religious contexts.
You mentioned sin, for example, and that is common all over the place, including original sin. Probably the most recent is "whiteness" in antiracism and similar theories that have come out of progressive academia. There are all kinds of non-religious contexts where the group requires individuals to "confess" misdeeds or the wrong thoughts to become "clean" and accepted by the group.
I would add that this Christian conception is sometimes leveraged for egalitarian ends, as well as prosocial perspective-taking with idioms like "walk a mile in another man's shoes".
"What Would Jesus Do" is literally an attempt to establish more Jesus-like priors and behaviors in believers.
I agree with City Of Trees (but as a non-atheist, whatever that means—I'm not sure myself.) The current rejection of all things "religious" means we're also throwing out our own culture's creation myth, which contains deep insights into human nature put forth in symbols and metaphors that have been pondered for thousands of years (and we have access to a good bit of those ponderings).
If our society shies away from the concept of "sin" , then how in the world do we form ethics? "All men are created equal" is not sufficient because of the limitations inherent in the essentially mathematical concept of "equality." (Another comment forthcoming.)
I'm currently reading Paradise Lost. The question that came up for me today is - what's the difference between "intelligence" and "knowledge," and does Milton think the tree is about "knowledge" in general" or only "knowledge of good and evil"? Were Adam and Eve intelligent but amoral or conscienceless? (What is "intelligent innocence"?) What exactly changed with those bites of fruit? We'll see what Milton has to say in Book V. The work in itself demonstrates that Milton had the genius and authority to merit our attention and pay heed to the challenges he raises.
You don't need to have a concept of sin to have ethics. While sin does encompass things like murder that hurt other people, it also in practice includes a lot of baggage on making people bad about activities with no victims (gay relationships, premarital sex, etc.) since sin is in many ways first a crime against a supernatural metaphysical deity, not living humans. You don't have to have a concept of sin to have an ethics based around not unnecessarily hurting other people.
One of the problems is that "sin" cannot be separated from the "baggage" of current culture, or a culture's specific ethical content. But what we also lose are the healthy ways humanity has dealt with sin in the past via religion, which includes forgiveness, redemption, and the concept that we're all flawed. I'm not sure what to do about the necessity of a deity. It's hard to come up with a better idea than humans as "imago Dei" for providing a basis of absolute respect for all human beings.
On the puritanical Left I see all these things missing: "canceling" is the opposite of forgiveness; there is no basis for respecting the humanity of people who fall into certain circumstantial categories like "white" or "privileged" or even "educated". The universality of the Fall means that no one can be entirely good or entirely evil, but I see the progressive left as Manichean. They have no bulwarks against hate: they are free to hate the racists, the homeless, the meth addicts, the MAGA voters, the TERFS, the police, or whomever our ideology designates, since they themselves are free of any impure thoughts or can only despair if any should occur.
The lack of such a balanced framework (in this case mature Christian theology, separate from the non-essential ethical rules by which it gets implemented in various cultures) means there are no culturally common brakes against hate, which inevitably leads to violence (people are evil because of their beliefs; a person's essence cannot be separated from their ideas; "good" people can and must be pure in thought, word and deed. If you're in the in-group you must hide your sins and feel eternally guilty; if you're in the out-group then you're a target for literal, perfectly justified dehumanization.
No doubt there are some sound, non-deistic philosophic foundations for establishing ultimate respect for all human beings, but these are still taking root in our culture and are being challenged by global circumstances. There's still something to be learned from the old ways, once presuppositions and prejudices are dealt with. At the very least, a well-founded theological ethic is useful for revealing the shortcomings of undeveloped, extreme ideologies.
(Actually, I'd prefer an ethic based on ultimate respect for all life, not just humans.)
How much actual religious forgiveness was there really in the past beyond some rhetorical flourishes, especially for those outside of the strictest parts of a religious communities? How much so-called forgiveness was there really for Jewish communities, gay people, etc. in Christian Europe? A lot of this just seems like rose-tinted lenses for a nostalgic simulacra that never really happened.
Plenty, from the psychological standpoint. A lot of religion is about how to feel good about yourself in society, which necessarily controls behavior and thought in order to maintain stability. You confess, repent, and sin no more until the next time, which allows you to love yourself enough for personal and intellectual growth. Atheists of course find ways to engage in these kinds of processes, but they're kind of on their own.
All societies utilize moral constraints for stability and survival, and these have often been implemented via religion. However, 1) such constraints are not always religious (see the Cultural Revolution) and 2) religions also come up with remedies and ameliorations for these constraints (see the abolitionist movement.) Ideologies/religions at least have the advantage of being systematized and talked about, with the result that they potentially balance themselves out, as we see in the great philosophical and theological conversations of the past.
Ultimately, religions are expressions of human culture and susceptible to the same extremes all other cultural institutions (marriage, family, education, work, government, economics etc.)
As Matt points out in this essay, there's advantage in accepting reality as it is. Just substitute "religion" for the references to America in this sentence: "It’s naive to view our sociocultural antecedents here in the United States as flawless, shining heroes, but it’s also naive to think the violence and brutality of American history is what’s unique about it" - in fact, my perspective about religion is similar to Matt's here. There's a lot of naiveté about religion in this secular century. For Matt's essay, the higher perspective is history. For religion, some higher perspectives are furnished by the social sciences that study human culture.
To bring this back to the original post, this is literally the entire point of original sin. (And to bring it back to Matt's point, it's not like ~anywhere is especially tolerant ~anytime pre-twentieth century.)
Just this weekend I was talking to my daughter about the complex implications of the creation myth in genesis if you don't treat it literally and understand it as a metaphoric way to discuss the nature of free will and what makes humanity unique.
There is definitely a reading of it in which the Eve who takes the bite of the apple isn't the Mitochondrial Eve 200,000 years ago who first evolved a human in human form but an Eve 60,000 years when humans through whatever mysterious process developed a capacity for language, art, and abstract thought. We don't currently know that process whereby we stopped being like other primates who "ethics" appear to be driven only by biological instinct and survival to a self-aware social actor capable of balancing even survival with other values.
I don't think that probably came as a result of eating an apple off a special tree (although there is some evidence that increased access to high quality fats in seafood may have played role in increased mental capacity.) But as a metaphoric exploration of the transformation, Genesis has a lot of interesting insight into the fact that this moment would have transformed and that one of the keys to that transformation was a capacity to know enough to know right from wrong and to make choices to either. Genesis says that God fears this because it would make men like God which suggests that this free will is what gives us our unique power while the punishment aspect indicates the pain and shame that this power would allow us to experience.
In a world that constantly begs the question of why people do bad things and why God doesn't stop them, the answer that it is because our free will has made us too powerful to be stopped and our capacity to do good or know truth is inexorably tied to our capacity for evil.
I think non-religious people (including Matt) often are overly willing to view religious myth as having been intended to be read literally and therefore, where it get the facts wrong, as inherently absurd. But there is a lot about the order in which Genesis develops creation that seems shocking astute if one doesn't see the time periods of the timeline as literal. And throwing it out means throwing out thousands of years of the results of folks wrestling sincerely with the questions of what it means to be human and be in community.
My daughter recently started to want to worship in a more traditionally Christian way and my mom was horrified that might mean she would start to believe in "ridiculous" things like the virgin birth that would require her to suspend her intelligence and ability to accurately understand the world. I am much less worried. I pointed out to my mom that it is my scientific understanding that she is just a mass of atoms that she perceives as solid and discrete but in which she was actually constantly swapping electrons with the chair she is sitting in and is separate from that chair primarily as a result of our perception of her as such and that her worries while she experienced them as narrative thoughts were as some level just the result of wordless electronic pulses moving from cell to cell in her brain. We don't experience life that way because we can't meaningfully. But that also means that we are all telling ourselves mythical stories to get us through the day without undue panic about where we start and chairs end. Some myths may be more scientifically rational that others but they are all myths and stories and there may be value in stories that are less rational but contain more elements of that incomprehensible underlying truth of our impermanence and undivisble connection to all things.
Plus there's a huge community in time and space that has this myth and all its symbols in common. These days stories and myths from video games movies and TV series are put through their paces to explore issues of existence, but these are pretty fragmented and more culture-specific than Genesis ("Live Long and Prosper" "May the Force be With You" etc.)
Agree. George Lucas apparently trying to model Star Wars on myth and relied upon some of Joseph Campbell's research on myths and hero stories. But one dude's story is bound to be less complex and include less truth and paradox than comes from generations of people making story together over time and circumstances in community. I think it is possible to interact with these stories and even create communities around meaning and values that can mirror church communities but we do lose something when we just throw out these traditions wholesale rather than mine them for their wisdom.
It was more of a linguistic flourish than a statement on religion.
You're right, this is annoying, in part because it's cringe, and in part because it displays a basic misunderstanding of what "fallen" means in the context of Christian theology. To put it in secular terms, fallenness and original sin are concerned with philosophical anthropology, the fundamental nature of humans and humanity, not history.
Take the Genesis narrative. The fall happened to the first people who ever lived. It's not like there were a bunch of people before that that who never sinned. That's the point of it, and why the narrative works as a device to convey the theological concept.
I am a very religious person and I am going to be potentially annoying by saying that the idea that "original sin" is a core or universally agreed upon theological underpinning of all religions or even all forms of Christianity is less true that folks who view religion from the outside might think. To me that use of it in this context feels more like cherry-picking a religion whose focus is on how to be good to each other to find the one pit that suggests it probably isn't worth trying to be.
You’re right. You were annoying. Probably still are. Clearly you’re intelligent and self-aware, yet you choose to be creatively antagonistic, not necessarily against Christians but anyone trying to bridge the void and bring accord.
Come on! Use that noggin for the better. It feels better. I f’ing promise.
It was a metaphor, sheesh.
I feel like a necessary first step to “taking the world as it is” is trying to say things that are actually true though
To be slightly less flip, sin isn’t real and “humans are going to act in self-interested ways” is far too vague to be useful. Which is why this line doesn’t really inform conservative policymaking (that depends on a bunch of other assumptions), and is rather used as a rebuttal to straw liberals who are supposedly basing their support of universal healthcare or whatever on the perfectibility of mankind
Sin is useful if you just consider it for what it is (or was): a metaphorical way of differentiating pro-social vs. anti-social behavior within a given social context, with a healthy dollop of supernatural justification to ensure buy-in and compliance even in the absence of enforcement.
The problem is that societies change and so do the material conditions in which they operate: It makes sense to create rules around sexual behavior. It doesn't make sense to slut-shame women or to make people feel guilty about sexual pleasure, in general. But, 2000-3000 years ago it did within certain societies, for various material reasons.
Today, we're not very comfortable with polyamory. Even when it's consensual. In other times and places, it was arguably a practical necessity. So ethics shift.
Other "sins" are more enduring: murdering people is wrong. Incest is wrong. Stealing is bad. Lying is bad. Etc.
Today, taboo still as utility. It's just that different things are taboo. And that's largely determined by what is pro-social now.
It's hard to square the circle of what you describe here (what Andrew Sullivan called the conservativism of doubt) with things like believing the US could easily democratize Iraq.
Yes neoconservatism failed because, frankly, it thought too highly of the middle east. Some places just don't have the moral and intellectual infrastructure to become Jeffersonian democracies.
Bush should have re-installed the monarchy in Afghanistan.
Note that the US (and other Western powers) actually tried this in many circumstances during the Cold War and it backfired spectacularly. To list some very obvious examples from the Middle East: Egypt, Iraq, and Iran.
You joke, but I've worked with officers from militaries in SW Asia and I have repeatedly heard them say things to the effect of "our societies do best with strong, competent kings."
I'm not joking. The old king would have been better than Karzai.
People said this about Iraq but... it seems to have actually turned out ok? Not worth the money and bloodshed sure (certainly not on rationales that turned out to be flimsy) but the current regime is vastly better than the previous one, it may not be a liberal democracy but it's certainly more liberal and more democratic, and it has pretty solid economic growth
I don't think there's a significant difference between conservatives and liberals in the extent to which they take the world as it is or don't. There is, however, a difference in what they're willing to accept in the world. Conceptualizing the world as full of self-interested fallen sinners has some strengths for analysis, but also creates lots of blindspots and biases.
You know the funny thing is I share that view that we are all fallen and we should shape our policies accordingly which is one reason I like the nevertrumpers. The only problem is I get no sense right wingers care about policy anymore nor do I get the sense that right wingers feel like they’re fallen.
I'm curious how you think a concept like total depravity affects this?
can you explain what that means
Interestingly, in looking up the exact definition of this, it appears to have been portrayed very differently by conservative Christians I've seen discuss it (it's the Calvinist T in TULIP). I don't think it really adds to your original points in that case, though I do think its interpretation by fairly mainstream Christians is concerning.
One other important area where conservatives are generally right is around the importance of family. While I don’t agree with their policy remedies or their moral judgements, healthy families do make for healthy societies. In the flip side, the left is also right that community matters as well. It takes a village and a family.
Agreed. It's unfortunate though that too often in history and to an extent today "family" in conservative circles is a synonym for traditional gender hierarchy.
This was a big part of Andrew Sullivan's push for marriage equality. As a conservative, he supported marriage and family, and as a gay man he couldn't see why that shouldn't be available to gays and lesbians.
The gay left at the time did not appreciate the conservative value of family and often opposed marriage equality as I guess part of the corrupt patriarchy.
But Sullivan was the exception, not the rule. For the most part conservatives who talk up marriage's virtues (and the disagreement is about marriage, not "family" writ large) were happy to exclude same-sex couples from it, and the many, many liberals who brought about marriage equality took a basically civil rights approach that didn't require opining on whether marriage is virtuous or not. I thought and continue to think that this is massively discrediting for the marriage promotion people.
Very true. It's also significant how once Massachusetts legalized gay marriage through the courts, Sullivan had very little actual effect on the successful marriage equality movement, which was largely led by gay liberal activists who often succeeded due to winning court cases, which was a method Sullivan disagreed with. While Sullivan gets credit for bringing the idea to the mainstream, it's amazing that the most important movement promoting marriage in the 21st century had very little to do with him or conservatives in general.
I would argue that, while not inaccurate, misses an important point. Namely, reducing conservative agitation against gay marriage probably helped solidify the victories won in court and prevent some of backlash we now see in other areas.
To support this I would point to point to surveys such as the Pew Center survey in around 2016 or so that found that as many conservatives support gay marriage as opposed it. A recent Gallup poll has Republican Support for gay marriage at 49%.
I would not underestimate the importance of reducing resistance. While courts can certainly make rulings, those rulings need to be implemented. The less resistance to implementation (which can include work around laws designed to reduce the impact of the court's ruling) the more successful the implementation will generally be.
On a personal level I have seen my conservative parents come around to first the idea of gay marriage, and now its at the point were my extremely conservative and religious mother thinks her churchs stance on the immorality of homosexuality is just flat out wrong (that is, she disagrees that it is even a sin). People like Sullivan presented a set of arugments that she could rationalize within her existing world view to come to the morally correct decision. I think she needed those arguments to overcome her upbringing and the continual messaging she received.
In cases like this, I think of Jonathan Haidt's "Can I believe it" and "Must I believe it" dichotomy. She probably knew on some level that the entire anti-gay thing was wrong, but she needed an argument framed to help overcome old, ingrained beliefs. This made it so she had to believe it. I do not think that just legal rulings or Democrats making the argument would have worked (or at least not worked as well).
Rhetorically, but not actually. I don't see any conservative coalition actually doing more to help working families. Even big families! Even the act of having children.
What conservatives have in abundance on this issue, is specific ideas about what a family should look like. But somehow that view prevents them from supporting actual families.
It's possible to support families but not necessarily favor big government policy X
Usually the best way to support families is the strong local social institutions. In particular, a local church with good charity policies
Conservatives don't like simple lightweight tax-cut policies that help working families either. They don't support public education or healthcare, whether that be private or public healthcare. They have no special regard for the health of pregnant women or the well-being of children. They don't care for local taxes to support local libraries or community parks.
Conservatives don't give more than liberals to national charitable organizations, religious or otherwise. Religious conservatives do give more to the local church than liberals, and therefore usually give more overall, but the connection to that and working families I find tenuous - revealed by the fact that it is an indirect way to help working families and that they don't support working families in any other context.
They support their church and their families.
But they simply don't support American families at large - there are a number of ways to do that, and Democrats champion all of them.
"Conservatives don't like simple lightweight tax-cut policies that help working families either. "
Have you never met a conservative? Conservatives have been championing tax cuts for decades. Look at the history of tax cuts conservatives push through and you will see that the tax burden on the lower half of the income scale has drastically decreased over time.
"They don't support public education " Wrong. Conservatives rightly observe that our current public education system isn't doing much educating for WAY to many kids. In particular the poor and minority kids that liberals claim to care about. And standard liberal reframe "more money" doesn't fix the problem. Per pupil inflation adjusted spending has greatly increased over the last couple of decades with no real increase in test scores.
The solution of course is competition. Competition is what keeps organizations sharp and makes them put out good products at competitive prices. Public education needs competition. Which is why conservatives support charter schools and school choice. Because education is too important. Because it's not ok to trap millions of kids in failing public schools.
"Conservatives don't give more than liberals to national charitable organizations, religious or otherwise." this if false
"Following scientific data collection and coding procedures, we identify 421 effect sizes from 31 empirical studies. Our meta-analysis results suggest that political conservatives are significantly more charitable than liberals at an overall level"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X21000752
I'm not against a government safety net. But it's a poor tool that often has perverse incentives (see the destruction of the black family). Local charities don't run into that problem because there are individuals involved in their lives making sure they make good decisions.
The reverse of what happens with big government programs
Whenever there is a tax cut debate, the conservatives want regressive tax cuts and the liberals wants progressive tax structure. I don't think giving very wealthy individuals a major tax cut counts as "pro-working families", its the belief in a trickle down mechanism that might help the economy as a whole. But a laser focus on helping working families, looks a lot more like the Democrat tax policy than the Republican one. If you are thinking in harm mitigation terms, its very obvious that harms are concentrated in the poorest families.
I can dispute your characterization of the value of public education, but it seems we agree that conservatives don't support public education. You say conservatives support private education, but I don't see any evidence that they are willing to pay more to support the education of other people's kids whether private or public.
If you look I actually agree conservatives gave more overall and anticipated the objection - When you break it down, its devotion to local churches not a dedication to charitable organizations.
Everything goes back to my thesis, which is that conservatives aren't willing to pay - by any mechanism - for the benefit of families of people who don't go to the same church as they do.
No offense, but it is difficult to take your more accurate arguments seriously when you paint with a brush as broad as you are painting. Look at what George Bush pushed related to AIDs in Africa...that was very much based on his religion; look at what other churches have done in terms of disasters, famines, etc., over time. When I helped at a food bank Churches did as much to help as any other group, more if you included labor (major stores did more in terms of actually providing food, but in terms of taking the deliveries, repacking them for individuals and families, and then delivering them, the church goers were among the biggest helpers). This was not for their church but for needy in the city.
I am completely agnostic in terms of what for a god (if one exists) takes. Still, your posts come off as pretty biased...for instance, if I substituted any other group and dropped those kinds of bombs, i.e., "Everything goes back to my thesis, which is that conservatives aren't willing to pay - by any mechanism - for the benefit of families of people who don't go to the same church as they do." It would raise some questions. What if I said blacks, democrat, or gays instead of conservatives? I would sound like bigot...
This is the same nut-picking that plenty of people do to people espousing fringe liberal theories.
If I’m not mistaken Conservatives give significantly more to charities (including non religious ones) than liberals
And might I add that Democrats are also better at preventing abortion, what with their robust support of contraception, women's health and social safety nets.
Do you have a source?
I want to agree with this, but it seems really hard to tease out this relationship because abortion is affected by a lot of things that vary between states and women can travel for abortions.
I would say the big lever here is birth control. I think its fair to say that conservatives have ambivalent feelings about birth control, liberals support birth control robustly and in a wider variety. The connection between birth control and preventing abortion should also be uncontroversial.
But here is a detailed analysis from Guttmacher
https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2003/10/contraceptive-use-key-reducing-abortion-worldwide
The bigger question is how directly reducing poverty and providing support for single parents has an effect on reducing abortion. If you believe the pro-natalist literature on birth incentives, than I think that also goes to the point that someone is more likely to keep a pregnancy when they can afford it. But I think conservatives have all sorts of ideas about how social welfare is supposedly corrosive to family life and personal responsibility, so I am not sure they would be satisfied with merely showing a marginal effect of income on preventing abortion. Even here, the bigger lever is probably someone who has their life together more likely to engage in family planning.
Conservatives don't support public education because they don't want their children and tax dollars to be controlled by an institution that has been captured by their political enemies.
I think you find profligate wokeness more endemic to private educational institutions than public ones. But we are in agreement that conservatives basic distrust in public institutional prevents them from supporting services for children in need.
I genuinely get curious when I hear this but like what are atheist families in need supposed to do? Likewise for people who for one reason or another are just alienated from the church.
It really seems like conservative world has no place for certain kinds of people. And like maybe that’s a feature not a bug for them but it means even when I agree with conservatives about like 50% of issues it doesn’t matter.