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The ideal of (political) right


Knight Of Winter

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On 7/20/2020 at 11:19 AM, Knight Of Winter said:

Part of the reason I'm intrigued with such a question is my lack of personal experience with it. Where I'm from, what passes for moderate right is, objectively speaking, far right. And what passes for far right is even worse. I honestly feel that moderate right voters have nobody to represent them in my country's politics. 

Also for people that would like a moderate right party, but not a screwball extreme right wing party, there is  I think one other lesson from the US. Don't let your moderate right party get caught in a conservative purity spiral. In my opinion, that happened in the US with each conservative trying to out-conservative the other, until the whole Republican Party just became unhinged. Although the whole crazy episode had some moments of hilarity, it was ridiculous. Moderate center right people just got steamed rolled and it seems to me didn't find anyway to effectively fight back.

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58 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Also for people that would like a moderate right party, but not a screwball extreme right wing party, there is  I think one other lesson from the US. Don't let your moderate right party get caught in a conservative purity spiral. In my opinion, that happened in the US with each conservative trying to out-conservative the other, until the whole Republican just became unhinged. Although the whole crazy episode had some moments of hilarity, it was ridiculous. Moderate center right people just got steamed rolled and it seems to me didn't find anyway to effectively fight back.

I'm curious which force is stronger, the need to out conservative one another or the need to behave more cruelly towards your political opponents than your political rivals will. 

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16 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I'm curious which force is stronger, the need to out conservative one another or the need to behave more cruelly to towards your political opponents than your political rivals will. 

Seems to me, they are mutually reinforcing.

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your stance is that right is inherently violent and exclusionistic and nothing can be done about it?

close enough, yes.  purported moderates are liberals.  the initial question was about the ideal type of the right; that doesn't really signify in english--i took it to mean what is the essense, stripped of the variability of historically contingent appearance.

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30 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Seems to me, they are mutually reinforcing.

Sure I guess, but which is more important? Running to the right of your intraparty opponent has always been a thing. But trying to demonstrate more cruelty towards the opposing party may be more effective than simply running to the right during the primaries. 

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4 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Sure I guess, but which is more important? Running to the right of your intraparty opponent has always been a thing. But trying to demonstrate more cruelty towards the opposing party may be more effective than simply running to the right during the primaries. 

Well I guess its like this: Let's say you want to show your opponent is a squishy Rhino, aka a closet lib. Then be the one to shout the loudest how Obama is a secret socialist, muslim, Kenyan. Yell louder and faster than your opponent.

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16 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Well I guess its like this: Let's say you want to show your opponent is a squishy Rhino, aka a closet lib. Then be the one to shout the loudest how Obama is a secret socialist, muslim, Kenyan. Yell louder and faster than your opponent.

But that's my point. In this scenario your hypothetical candidate isn't necessarily going to the right of their primary opponent. They are demonstrating a willingness to be the meaner candidate towards the Democrat. Trump wasn't really to the right of many if any of his primary challengers. And his presidency has been far from conservative orthodoxy. Yet he maintains such high support from his party, why? His base enjoying him being a dick to Democrats matters more than any actual policy he supports, even the white nationalist ones.

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And that's what the right wing / conservative thing is indeed, it's about wielding nasty, mean, cruel as the numero uno strategy and weapon -- out-cannibalizing, as Newt Gingrich describes this very successful political stance.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-newt-gingrich-made-nastiness-a-virtue/2020/07/16/1cba30c8-8a28-11ea-9dfd-990f9dcc71fc_story.html

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[....]
Four decades later, the nastiness of the GOP — and therefore of much of our national life — can be seen as Gingrich’s most lasting achievement: nastiness as a virtue, a governing principle, an end in itself. We live today in the world Gingrich wrought, and the story of how he wrought it is the focus of “Burning Down the House” by Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton. Zelizer is not the first to suggest that Gingrich “broke politics,” as a recent article in the Atlantic put it, but his book provides an engaging, unsettling and, alas, timely look at the torch that Gingrich took to our system of self-government.

...“You’re fighting a war . . . for power,” he had told the College Republicans, and what he meant was a guerrilla war, contemptuous of the rules of combat. The goal, Zelizer explains, was “constant mayhem.”

...Zelizer writes, he had “a central insight: the transformational changes of the Watergate era . . . could be used to fundamentally destabilize the entire political establishment.”

...Frustrated by their many years in the minority, provoked by a rising class of radical conservatives and by the advent of right-wing talk radio, “the Republican leadership didn’t have to be dragged into Gingrich’s world kicking and screaming.” Neither did Presidents Ronald Reagan or George Bush, who looked the other way while Gingrich did the dirty business of maligning the opposition.

...Republicans learned not only to “speak like Newt,” as a 1990 pamphlet urged, but to act like Newt — even, it turned out, toward Newt himself.
[....]

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

But that's my point. In this scenario your hypothetical candidate isn't necessarily going to the right of their primary opponent. They are demonstrating a willingness to be the meaner candidate towards the Democrat. Trump wasn't really to the right of many if any of his primary challengers. And his presidency has been far from conservative orthodoxy. Yet he maintains such high support from his party, why? His base enjoying him being a dick to Democrats matters more than any actual policy he supports, even the white nationalist ones.

Well the average conservative probably doesn't really give a fuck about the pro/cons of tax policy or free trade. But, Trump was willing to trot out birth certificate conspiracy theories and feed the base the red meat it so craves. 

And I do not think Trump just happened out of the blue. I think the situation was primed for him.

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28 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Well the average conservative probably doesn't really give a fuck about the pro/cons of tax policy or free trade. But, Trump was willing to trot out birth certificate conspiracy theories and feed the base the red meat it so craves. 

And I do not think Trump just happened out of the blue. I think the situation was primed for him.

To the latter we can agree, and this may be a case of nitpicking, but again, I don't think running to the right necessarily matters. Being as close to 100% of Regina George as one can be is probably more important than any policy stance. 

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Again, a lot of this goes away if you have multiple party support and you don't have the kind of primary system or winner-take-all system that the US has, or you don't have districts that sway heavily one way or another. Going super far-right is a consequence of being voted in by about 5-7% of the population, and those people largely being VERY left or right. 

If you change that you'll get more moderation and more interesting flavors. You still might get some far-right! Italy, for instance, seems to really enjoy authoritarian demagogues even in multiparty systems. But they won't be the entire party, and even they'll have to make deals with other groups in order to establish something.

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Well, the US would almost certainly have a far-right party under a PR/multiparty system, and probably a fairly substantial one at that.  The difference is they would be very unlikely to be the dominant party in order to achieve a majority coalition.  So it's a better way at mitigating the extremist tendencies of the constituents that compose the right (and certainly far right).

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Most hunters I have known were very big conservationists.  Of those hunters, none were hunting to eat though some claimed they were because they did eat some of the meat.  Also...something is wrong with you if you kill animals for fun.

A healthy right wing?  Bring it left.  The further left it comes the healthier it gets.   

 

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I also think that it is very hard to answer the question in a two-party system like the US.  They will always have factions within such parties, some of which might more closely correspond to real parties in other countries (with 4-10 or so parties in parliaments) but it will still be very different. Even with a moderate number of parties like Germany there will usually be a quick marginalization of some small parties so the spectrum will in practice be far narrower than on paper. (E.g. there is or used to be a conservative ecological party in Germany but it's tiny and never played a role vs. the leftist Greens (who in turn are not quite as leftist as they used to be.)

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8 hours ago, Knight Of Winter said:

I had Germany's CDU in mind while writing the opening post, but alas - knew way too little about them to have a concrete opinion. Few pieces of information which I heard suggested that they had no problems with gay marriage and were among more open wealthy European countries with regards to immigration: both of which you wouldn't normally associate with right-wing politics.

You have to go back a little in time. In the last ca. 30 years almost all major parties in wealthy western countries have moved to the left on "soft issues", i.e. have become far less socially conservative. (Interestingly, in the same timeframe most have moved to the "right" in economical issues, i.e. favoring globalist neoliberalism, cutting back the welfare state etc. They fit together quite well in many respects.) The CDU was strongly against gay marriage until they thought it would hurt them more than support it. As an example: In the mid/late 1980s when AIDS became an issue there were politicians of the slightly more right leaning sister party, the Bavaria-based CSU who seriously suggested that HIV positive persons (who were mostly male homosexuals back then) should be collected into camps because they would otherwise be a danger to the public by spreading the virus. That's right: Politicians could less than 50 years after gays got branded with the pink triangle in Nazi concentration camps suggest something quite similar without ending their careers. So obviously, 35 years ago gay marriage was literally unthinkable for almost everyone, most certainly everyone in conservative parties (and it wasn't even a major point on the gay liberation agenda).

I think a rightwing party that was a real alternative would have to be rather different from the 1970s-80s European mainstream conservatives. It would have to be anti-globalist, anti-corporatist, anti-migration, culturally moderately conservative (because the shifts have been so tremendous in the last decades that really reactionary cultural stances would never work). It would very strongly favor subsidiarity, local, communal structures, especially in big countries the "central government" would lose power and influence (so it might not apply to Croatia but certainly to Germany or Spain), small businesses, big corporations would have to be split up or collectivized. It would be more regionalist than nationalist, certainly more isolationist than pro international interventions.

But generally, I think that "good conservatism" should not work via parties. For me, conservatism implies that far more things should work according to customs, mores and informal social pressures than by being an element of politics or laws. If one has to enforce tradition or what is considered good behavior by law, it's usually already too late. (If you need to patrol parks and give hefty fines for littering, people have already turned into lazy disgusting bastards. By subsidiarity law and police should not have the primary task to correct what was done wrong in kindergarten.) Of course, it actually is too late (which is also what many conservatives/traditionalists believe anyway).

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4 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

To the latter we can agree, and this may be a case of nitpicking, but again, I don't think running to the right necessarily matters. Being as close to 100% of Regina George as one can be is probably more important than any policy stance. 

I think what elite Republicans cared about, ie taxes and regulations and so forth, wasn't exactly wasn't what regular Republicans cared about, which was "cultural issues".  But, elite Republicans understood how to fire up the base by playing up cultural grievances. And playing up one's conservatism was signalling that they were going to own the libs. Trump just came in, and didn't care what elite Republicans wanted, or acted like he didn't care, and went straight for what the base really liked - the cultural grievances. But, by the time Trump came in, the Republican Party had the base pretty much frothing at the mouth.

@DMC may have better insights to this, as I don't study this stuff as deeply and analytically as he does, but I really think after the disastrous George W. Bush presidency, elite conservatives and Republicans were really scared. The whole sorry ass legacy of his presidency was about to destroy 30-40 years of the conservative movement. In their view, they just couldn't allow a center left president be successful. 

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Ahem

Quote

This is not a book about how Donald J. Trump hijacked the Republican Party and changed it into something else. Stevens shows how Trump is in fact the natural outcome of five decades of hypocrisy and self-delusion, dating all the way back to the civil rights legislation of the early 1960s. Stevens shows how racism has always lurked in the modern GOP’s DNA, from Goldwater’s opposition to desegregation to Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens and states’ rights rhetoric. He gives an insider’s account of the rank hypocrisy of the party’s claims to embody “family values,” and shows how the party’s vaunted commitment to fiscal responsibility has been a charade since the 1980s. When a party stands for nothing, he argues, it is only natural that it will be taken over by the loudest and angriest voices in the room.

It Was All a Lie is not just an indictment of the Republican Party, but a candid and often lacerating mea culpa. Stevens is not asking for pity or forgiveness; he is simply telling us what he has seen firsthand. He helped to create the modern party that kneels before a morally bankrupt con man and now he wants nothing more than to see what it has become burned to the ground.

 

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34 minutes ago, Inkdaub said:

Most hunters I have known were very big conservationists.

Right, most hunters are conservationists - it's just in the case of Roosevelt and the type of conservation he and his allies advocated, it is decidedly not a precept I'd describe as "environmentalist," which was my original point.  Kal mentioned cattle ranchers being worse than sports hunters.  Well, according to the National Park Service, Roosevelt was both and simply failed at the former:  

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With Roosevelt's interest sparked, he entered into business with his guide's brother, Sylvane Ferris, and Bill Merrifield, another Dakota cattleman. Roosevelt put down an initial investment of $14,000 - significantly more than his annual salary. Roosevelt returned to New York with instructions for Ferris and Merrifield to build the Maltese Cross Cabin. His investment was not purely for business; Roosevelt saw it as a chance to immerse himself in a western lifestyle he had long romanticized. As biographer Edmund Morris noted, “Fourteen thousand dollars was a small price to pay for so much freedom.” [...]

Despite the remoteness of the territory, Roosevelt found his Maltese Cross Ranch to be on a common route south out of Medora (the cabin was originally 7 miles south of the town). Seeking greater solitude, Roosevelt rode north down the Little Missouri River. He established a second ranch he named Elkhorn, about 35 miles north of Medora. [...]

Roosevelt had been abroad during the devastating winter with his new wife, Edith, and was unaware of the horrors until he returned to the U.S. in late March of 1887. Upon his return to Medora, Roosevelt found he had lost over half his herd. Where he once thought to see a return on his many investments, Roosevelt now sought to minimize his losses. He wrote his sister Bamie, "I am planning to get out of [the ranching business]."

Roosevelt's - and most that were aligned with him - impetus for conservation was to preserve the romanticized 19th century "frontiersman" lifestyle.  Not only does that not make him an environmentalist in my book, in many ways it's quite the opposite.  Further, to circle back to why I replied in the first place, conservationism among the GOP essentially started and ended with his tenure as president.  Once Teddy abandoned the GOP Taft put the kibosh on any appeal or agenda among them that was interested in conservation.  There are later examples, sure, but they never really made much headway among the party leadership.

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52 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

@DMC may have better insights to this, as I don't study this stuff as deeply and analytically as he does, but I really think after the disastrous George W. Bush presidency, elite conservatives and Republicans were really scared. The whole sorry ass legacy of his presidency was about to destroy 30-40 years of the conservative movement. In their view, they just couldn't allow a center left president be successful.

Sorry, forgot to respond.  Of course you're right, I don't think it needs to be cited with any studies or anything beyond recent history.  You got McConnell's infamous statement, the Tea Party, plus so much else I don't wish to recount.  Further you have after Romney lost in 2012 where there was a push - within the RNC - to redirect the party's message towards appealing to Hispanics.  Obviously that's not how it shook out.

ETA:  This is something I often forget because I conversed with a lot more right-wingers then than I do now, but during Dubya's tenure there was clear resentment among the right that the left did not view his presidency as legitimate - for obvious reasons.  So they returned that in kind with Obama, even though the only questions of his legitimacy were flagrantly racist.  I think that's an important tipping point, and oddities of history.

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