Leftist Question: Why Are Conservatives Proud They're Not Progressives?

What Opposites Share

Why are Conservatives proud they're not Progressives? For many of the same reasons that Progressives are proud not to be Conservatives. Contrary to many opinions, both sides share the same human frailties and motives. Since the questioner is, presumably, in the Progressive camp, he/she/? already knows most of the answer. All he/she/? needs to do is answer why Progressives feel the same pride and apply the same reason to Conservatives.

It is true that extreme Conservatives resist any change, but extreme Progressives will accept any change (except when things really need to be changed back; then, they become the reactionaries). Both extremes share mindless attitudes about change.

Domanance

Unfortunately, among Progressives, the extreme has become mainstream, dominating entertainment, news media, education, the Democrat Party, and new-media giants such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook. If your grasp of reason, facts, and history arm you to resist all of that, you have something to be proud of.

Intellectual Honesty

Another difference is that Conservatives are not really that inflexible. They are willing to be convinced when proposed changes are specific, effective, and efficient, and will cause minimal unintended consequences such as chipping away at God-given rights. I don’t see willingness to learn from Progressives. For example, in debate after debate, Progressives repeatedly confuse semi-automatic with assault and confuse scary style with military performance. If there’s a way to obfuscate, they will use it. Conservatives can get things wrong, but since they cling to “outdated” values such as thou shalt not bear false witness, they lack the ability to intentionally spin language that way. And that is another thing Conservatives can take pride in.

Reason Versus Hysteria

Perhaps the biggest difference is that Conservatives rhetoric trends toward deductive, left-brain thinking whereas Progressives rhetoric leans toward inductive, right-brain thinking. And right-brain thinking is the gateway to hysterical, lizard-brained, fight-or-flight thinking. Progressivism is home to unions and Antifa (fight), and to snowflakes (flight). Recent studies have supported this, showing that Conservatives consider a significantly wider range of values and perspectives when thinking about an issue. For example, a Conservative will balance the suffering and loss of life when a child is vivisected during gestation against a few months inconvenience and comfort if nobody will help a mother kill her child. All the Progressive can see is the mother. The person who balances more values and perspectives has good reason to take pride in Conservative thinking.

Consistency Versus Hypocrisy

Conservatives tend to be far more consistent than Progressives. For example, a Progressive holds the lives of murderers sacred, as well as the temporary convenience of a mother who has engaged in risky reproductive behavior, but disregards the life of a pre-born child. They rescue the guilty and help kill the innocent. Progressives condemn racism against Blacks and then institute racism against Whites. Hate speech is speech that Progressives hate. For example, a Twitter user created two accounts and sent out identical rants. One set ranted against “Whites” and the other against “Blacks,” both saying the same words. Twitter censored the anti-black account and left the anti-White account alone. When Conservatives build out applications from principles and balance different perspectives in a consistent manner, they have reason to be proud.

Religion Versus Magic

Conservatives are rooted in reality. Religious Conservatives also look to time-tested tenets of the social contract. Progressives also are rooted in religion, but they hide it behind Relativism. Relativism has led to magical thinking such as, a boy can think himself into a girl, a baby not yet seen is not yet a baby, and if irresponsible reproductive behavior is right for you, then it’s OK. At least the religious Conservatives are honest about the supernatural element behind some of what they think, and it does not conflict with physical reality. Conservatives, even religious Conservatives, can take pride in refuting the delusions of Progressives.

Reasons for Pride

There are fanatics, quislings, idiots, fools, and evildoers in any movement, so this is all painted with a broad brush. Conservatives are standing against powerful cultural influences. They are teachable, more reasonable, more balanced in weighing more principles and perspectives, more honest and consistent, and more rooted in reality. These are all reasons for them to take pride.

Honor, Therefore, Conservatism

But perhaps we are looking at this backwards. Perhaps Conservatism attracts people who have pride, people who have enough honor to take responsibility for themselves instead of blaming others for their place in life.

I started life in abject poverty. I worked my way through college, taking ten years to finish a five-year degree. My career plateaued because less-qualified, favored-class people received the training I needed and the promotions I had sacrificed for. My career collapsed because the Democrat-caused housing bubble trapped me in a 180-mile per day commute. My career died when Democrats decimated my industry, right at the worst possible time, the depths of the recession in 2009. I have gone full circle, back to my roots in poverty.

It is tempting to think the government owes me for what it did to the career I sacrificed to achieve. It would be nice if being a White, educated male did not disqualify me from the benefits that allow my neighbors to live far better than me. But I have not discarded reason and pride, so I remain Conservative (though moderately Liberal by the standards of my parents’ generation). And thus, I retain my honor, too.

Commies and Fascists, Sitting In a Tree

Why do conservatives consider communism and fascism to be close cousins and the opposite of conservatism?

More Like Siblings

Quora has a page with some wonderful answers that describe common characteristics of Communism and Fascism and that contrast them with Conservatism. However, common characteristics merely makes for similarity. “Close cousins” implies common heritage and genetic commonality that cause the commonalities. The metaphor bears truth.

Just as Vladimir Lenin and built Mao Zedong built their bloody Communist regimes upon a foundation of Marxism, so did Giovanni Gentile built his philosophy of Fascism upon Marxism. (Is Fascism Right or Left?) Thus, Communism and Fascism derive from a common philosophy. They are more like half-sibling rivals than like cousins. (Progressivism shares those roots, and Communist governments had a hand in establishing it in American politics.)

Children of Marxism

The children of Marxism are rooted in the idea that the collective (that is, in practice, the State) is a higher organism than man. They require acceptance of a Utopian notion of citizens submitting their interests to the common good.

That is a fine idea, as long as the system is filled with hypothetical, ideal humans. However, in practice, it has two fatal flaws. First, humans are a competitive, self-interested species. Someone will always claw his or her way to the top, and bolder citizens will fight for freedom.

Second, the State will always have to use indoctrination, intimidation, and force to cause everybody to submit to the collective’s will or to preserve the top dog’s rule, crushing freedom and removing incentive to excel. Thus, Marxism’s children, Communism and Fascism, always lead to totalitarianism.

Conservatism

American Conservatism is rooted in the idea that the individual is the ultimate earthly organism. That is why the Founders established a government with the People at the top, a Constitution expressing their will, and Government at the bottom. Whereas the People subjected under Marxism exist to serve the government, in Conservatism, the government exists to serve the people. That is why Marxist governments claim for themselves all capital, or at least control of capital, whereas Capitalist governments remove as little capital as possible from the People.

Conservatism also recognizes what happens when you introduce flawed, self-interested humans into any system. Freedom and retaining the fruit of one’s labors give people incentive to excel, raising metrics for the whole society. Moreover, Conservatism recognizes the need for balancing powers within politics and government, a major tenet of the US Constitution, so that competing interests keep each other in check. This contrasts against rule one-party rule and dictatorship that always develop in Marxist governments.

Another contrast is that Marxist “Social Justice” dictates equality of outcome that places heavier burdens on disfavored classes, such as forced redistribution of wealth to less successful classes, whereas Conservatism emphasizes equality of rights, individual responsibility for outcome, and voluntary charity. Thus, Conservatism champions personal charity and individual justice whereas Social Justice depersonalizes charity and undermines equal justice.

I have specified American Conservatism because the word Conservatism is defined by its context. It generally indicates a philosophy of preserving the current system. American Conservatives who want to restore lost values are insultingly called "paleo conservatives," when in fact, many of them would have been considered moderate-to-liberal just a generation ago.

American Conservatism is known in the rest of the world as liberalism because it champions conditions that allow liberty, unlike monarchy and Marxism. More importantly, American Conservatism could be better described as Americanism because it promotes the foundational values of American society and government, in resistance to Marxist values that now dominate the Left.

However, we stick with the label Conservatism because we can’t stomach the screams of “How dare you call me un-American” from un-American Leftists.

What's So Bad about Being a Liberal?

First, not all that presents itself as conservative is actually conservative.

The Republican Party poorly represents conservatism. In fact, the GOP vacillates between moderately conservative on some issues and liberal economics and internationalism. I would guess that a third of the GOP is actually liberal, a third sticks a wet finger in the air, and a minority is actually conservative. For example, George W. Bush got tax cuts passed early in his administration, but cooperated with Democrat-led bail-outs of banks and GM.

So, let's not use Republicans to define the opposite of liberalism.

Second, being liberal is a good thing; and progress is good when the goal is good and the means are just. Being a liberal or a progressive, however, has a very peculiar meaning that does not necessarily connect to the root words, liberal and progress.

In my definitions (not necessarily standard, but offered for the sake of communication), conservatism seeks to preserve traditional values of liberty, self-reliance, and justice that does not respect persons.

Liberalism, or as the codeword is used today, progressivism, on the other hand, redefines a neutral term. Progress is good, right? Doesn't everybody love progress?

When you say change (as in hope and change) or progress, you have to pick a direction. You have to pick an origination and a destination. Depending on your definition of progress, it may or may not mean something good. The compass has only one North, but it has 359 degree-markers that point away from North.

Suppose your objective were to see far with an unobstructed view, so you climb the highest mountain. Progress would be pretty stupid if it meant trekking off that cliff to the West, wouldn't it? What else could you do? You could build a tower where you are, on your existing foundation. But would you leave the spot just because change is good?

The progressive compass points hard left, to 270 degrees, toward freedom for immorality and toward repression of traditional morality, toward collectivist statism, and toward "social justice" that bases rights on class, skin color, and sexual orientation.

American conservatives see progressive, liberal, socialist, and Marxist, as variations of a single philosophy. That philosophy derives from secular, materialist existentialism, in which interpretation is reality, objective truth is a myth, and the ultimate organism is the state.

Whereas Americanism states that authority flows from God through the People to the government, the progressive spectrum worships the Collective as the ultimate organism, whose people live at its pleasure. Americanism secures rights to the people and assigns responsibilities to the government, but progressivism gives the government rights and the people privileges. Conservative liberalism means personal tolerance and personal giving (to which the restaurant help will attest after any political convention), but Progressive liberalism forces promotion of the tolerable and gives at the expense of others.

If you believe black is white and right is wrong, then, I suppose, being a liberal is great.

Obama: You Didn't Build That

People think that Me-me-me-my-my-my-I-I-I-bama's speech makes sense only because his speechwriters sugarcoat false reasoning. His error stems from the hidden socialist dogma that the business is not responsible for the roads, utilities, regulators, delivered in tones of fake outrage. Rather, he implies, the contributions of employees, utility workers, bureaucrats, etc, add significant value to the business. This assumption deceives for two reasons.

First, the business pays, through taxes to the government, wages to employees, interest and fees to lenders, and dividends to stockholders, for all those things Ibama says contributed to building the business. A new business may pay afterwards instead of before, but it still pays. It says that if you pay somebody to do make something you thought of, they get all the credit, as though you had nothing to do with it.

This couldn't be more wrong. If you buy a painting, you own it. If you buy a pizza, you have the right to eat it. Likewise, if you pay for all those ancillary contributions, then you get the credit for building the business.

Second, all those external factors would exist whether you build the business or don't. The contribution is mutual because, without the business, unused roads and utilities would be failures due to lack of use and would be failures due to lack of sponsorship. The electric company, the construction companies, employees, and bureaucrats profit from the presence of the business.

By Ibama's reasoning, when you build that business, you get to take credit for all those other things, too. But Ibama is a committed Marxist, so he loses his sense of reality amid all the big words and false intellectualism. "You didn't build that" is sophistic: It sounds brilliant, but when you slow down and think, you hear the foolishness.

Liberals Misunderstand America's Melting Pot

The melting pot is just an implement. It brings to mind a stew, since it has been contrasted with a salad bowl. However, I think the correct image comes from metallurgy, where various ingredients should blend to form an alloy such as steel.

Staying with the stew pot (I think more people can relate to cooking than to metallurgy), we have three cooks brewing a terrible mess. 

One cook, the conservative, wants to maintain the stew's distinctive balance of flavors, the recipe that made the stew a distinctively American stew.

The second cook, the newcomer, comes in numbers that upsets the balance of flavors and, in fact, refuses to abandon the flavor that he left behind. He sees only the rich nutrient content of the American stew and fails to value the recipe that made it great. That is, he brings the values that caused the conditions from which he fled and clashes with values that made America great. While conservative cooks welcome newcomers, an excess of newcomers can turn the stew into a completely different dish.

The third cook, the liberal, rejects the Judeo-Christian broth on which the soup was based. He waters down and neutralizes the distinct American flavor. He tries every other continent's distinctive dish; after all "change is good." Doing so, he leaves a hole into which the newcomers add the flavors of their impoverished, oppressed, corrupt, fan-ruled countries of origin.

We don't have a situation where we neutrally teach children about other cultures' recipes. Liberals rule the State Church (the education system). They use their power to belittle and suppress the conservative flavor. In its place, they teach the recipes of materialistic humanism and even the recipes of the newcomers. Thus, we see generations of agnostics, pictures of schoolchildren bowing in Muslim prayer, and children becoming "gay" before it is even developmentally appropriate for them to know about sex.

By suppressing the conservative values that redirected rights from the state toward the individual and by encouraging those whose native cultures produce totalitarianism, liberalism -- both political and religious -- threatens to destroy American and that for which she stands -- or used to stand.

The analogy holds up for the metallurgical melting pot, too. With the right ingredients, the product can resist oxidation, spring back into shape, or separate a nucleus from its cell's membrane. With careless formulation, it can be easily dulled, can oxidize overnight, or can even be toxic -- but that's assuming you're willing to separate it from all the unmelted dross. And liberals aren't willing.