There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual — only apologists for right-wing power

L4sBot@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 261 points – There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual — only apologists for right-wing power
salon.com

Commentary: Longtime former Republican on Patrick Deneen and the demise of the conservative intellectual

103

You are viewing a single comment
View all commentsShow the parent comment

Name one conservative policy that has furthered mankind.

Richard Nixon was at the helm when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded. I believe he also was responsible for protecting national parks, but I didn't bother fact-checking that one.

https://www.epa.gov/history#:~:text=EPA%20was%20created%20on%20December,human%20health%20and%20the%20environment.

Now, granted, modern conservative politics are garbage-culture war bullshit, but we need to be cautious of forgetting history. Rewriting history is their game.

Progressive policies implemented during a conservative presidency don’t seem like conservative policies.

If you can just hijack any and all "good" policies as inherently progressive then you're just a self-fuelling fire who wants to hate conservatives no matter what.

I wouldn’t be crediting them with enacting good policy if it wasn’t progressive.

If you can show an example of opposing progress that is good I’m all in on that conservative policy.

The ESA was not good because it maintained the status quo. It was good because it was progressive. The fact that it was implemented during a conservative presidency is irrelevant.

May I also just add, that for his example he had to go, 60 years into the past....

My entire lifetime, the GOP has simply don't nothing that has helped the average Joe. It's always hate based culture wars, tax cuts and protect guns. That's it.

They provide zero solutions for anything. And if you do try to provide a solution, which inevitably will have painful parts to it because fixing things is hard, they blast propaganda how you're anti American. They are just not interesting in governing.

You're buying in too much to the branding of big-P Progressive. The EPA, and environmental protections, are inherently little-c conservative positions.

Not everything that is good is Progressive, and not everything Progressives want is good, or even intelligent. Rent control, as one very basic example, doesn't work, and yet Progressives across America push it.

What doesn't work about it? (I honestly know nothing about it, but I know there are things that sound great on paper and propaganda but in practice it's bull)