#ResistTrump by joining a local Indivisible group, maybe?

@WWTH, it’s different up here. We have conservatives who are fighting to build women’s shelters and provide better support for LGBT teens, stuff like that. Ain’t perfect for sure, plenty of awful conservatives too, but a good sight better. Much more of a mixed-bag.

And now, O @MAWG, this message is for thee. I am a white guy who used to listen obsessively to conservative talk radio, so I know whereof I speak, when I speak of conservatism. Trigger warning for explicit discussion and enumeration of xenophobia, transphobia, and generally abhorrent opinions.

The conservatism I speak of is that which the average American conservative will be familiar with from listening to conservative talk radio; the average American conservative is not considered to have thought his ideology through very deeply.

Fascism is anti-human. Fascism prioritizes borders, nationality, sovereignty, and power over humans. Conservatives (especially American conservatives) hate government spending, except on the military, where they can’t spend enough. American conservatives are fanatically obsessed with patriotism. They talk incessantly of “securing the border”. American conservatives are rather racist; when they speak of securing the border, they mean the Mexican border. They’re not quite as bothered about the Canadian border for whatever reason, despite the fact that it’s much, much longer and much, much less secure than the Mexican border. Fascistic racism is well-known and does not need reiteration here.

Another trait common to fascists and conservatives is the glorification of the past — in the case of Nazi Germany, Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck; in the case of the United States, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Ronald Reagan — and the casting of the same as a better time than the present.

I said earlier that humans are a low priority of fascism. I shall now explain how they are also a low priority of conservatism.

Conservatives in the United States, as has hitherto been said, are fanatical in their wish for a secure southern border. To drum up popular support for it, they will promulgate a stereotype of Mexican immigrants as poor (and therefore lazy and filthy), identity-thieving drug-dealers who want to enrich Mexico at America’s expense (this also plays into patriotism). They also claim that there are millions of these criminal “illegal aliens”, and they ought to be deported. There are definitely not millions of lazy, identity-thieving drug-dealers in the American South, so this is a Big Lie, used to foment xenophobia against millions of innocent Hispanic immigrants.

Their attitude toward all that are not straight white upper-class men is one of revulsion or contempt. They never acknowledge the trans-gendered, claiming that trans women and girls are just excessively effeminate men who weren’t raised correctly, or (as in the bathroom debate) they are perverts looking to molest (cis) women in the bathroom. Trans men are unthinkable to them, as are gender-fluidity and the non-binary.

They are invariably against reproductive rights: not abortion only, but contraception as well. They are against any sex education beyond “Hold off until marriage!” Being mostly Christians, they are also opposed to any sex that is not heterosexual; some even oppose sex that is not to reproductive ends. The consequence of all this is large families, which are expensive and hurt the poor the most. Conservatives are also opposed to most social safety nets, meaning that these large families are abjected, while the rich grow richer (which is entirely just, for to the conservative, all rich people became rich by hard work and not by inheritance or other means).

Conservatism, in light of all this, does appear to be a milder version of fascism. There are few differences between them. One difference is that in conservatism, the suffering of people not in the conservatives’ favoured category is barely considered, whereas in fascism (especially as practised by the Nazis), anyone not in their favoured category is thoroughly considered — considered a pest to be exterminated. Another is that conservatives affect a greater respect for civil liberties than do fascists. In light of all this, I conclude that @Dali is very justified in comparing conservatism to fascism.

Trigger warning for explicit discussion and enumeration of xenophobia, transphobia, and generally abhorrent opinions.

@EJ

Kinda figured I should kinda let things go, but you asked a direct question, so the only right thing is to answer.

“offensive” because my single greatest personal value is that each and every human being should be treated with compassion and respect, and not be prejudiced by any “group” affiliation.
“As” offensive because there aren’t shades to what I stated above. Shades to the words, the actions of course, are totally different.

@ Middle Aged White Guy
The problem is that you’re giving too much neutral/facilitating ground to these fascists, who have already demonstrated that they aren’t interested in negotiating.

“offensive” because my single greatest personal value is that each and every human being should be treated with compassion and respect, and not be prejudiced by any “group” affiliation.

They are fascists whose sole desire is suffering at the cost of everything else. By your values since they only with do discriminate against every other human being, they should not be given respect and a well meaning gesture.

@ALW Thanks for sharing that story—to be honest, I’ve pretty much given up hope that the ‘MAWGs’ of the world will ever be able to see what happens right in front of them, but your story is making me rethink that. I currently work in a very toxic environment for women—in the year I’ve been with my current employer I’ve seen more straight-up Mad Men shit than in the previous 30-odd years of my career. Several people, for various reasons, have asked my opinion on how we can address this, and I really don’t have any original ideas, but one thing I wonder–and this is why I’m writing this comment–is why the ‘MAWGs’ should change their behaviour. I mean, what’s in it for them? Things are great for them as they are—they don’t have to compete with non-MAWGs for work, they can do what they want, they’re comfortable in their work environment. Any change for them would be for the worse. There are (alleged) collective answers—companies with diverse boards are more profitable, diverse groups make better decisions, and the ever-popular ‘we need to reach out to desperately needed and underused talent’—and, as we know, some individual men become fiercely feminist when they see how badly their daughters are treated (very rarely their wives, though I do know of one situation where a man suddenly understood how bad sexual harassment was when his wife was subjected to it)–but what, actually, is in it for them? If we’re completely honest with them, we might say ‘including previously unwelcome people is likely to have a negative effect on you personally, but it’s the right thing to do’, but instead we say ‘diversity benefits everyone’, and they can detect that this is a lie as regards them personally. How do we handle this?

Re heartless right-wingers—the examples youall have cited are appalling, but I think the kicker for me is the crazy rules about subsidised food (you can have these kinds of beans but not those kinds of beans wtf) and the fact that things like diapers, tampons and toilet paper are ‘luxuries’ that ‘we’ shouldn’t have to pay for ‘them’ to have (also I hate my computer because it apparently doesn’t know the word ‘tampon’).

And finally, let me talk a little here about the ‘invisible hand’. The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776—at that time corporations were rare, and only authorised individually by Parliament in specific cases for specific purposes to benefit the public (if you’re interested, Smith wrote that corporations should only be authorised for banking, insurance, municipal water supply and transport infrastructure). They were looked at suspiciously by Smith, Parliament, and everyone else because at the time business and economics was all about personal character, and corporations can hide personal character behind collective anonymous ownership. When Adam Smith argued that people acting selfishly are guided by an ‘invisible hand’ to promote the public good, what he meant was that because, in order to gain access to the marketplace, economic actors had to, I guess we would now say, ‘virtue signal’ to demonstrate their trustworthiness as business partners, the stock of actual virtue in society would increase. At the time Adam Smith was writing, to riff on Scildfreja’s point, the economic and the social were not and could not be separated—Adam Smith, whose other book is ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’, would have been puzzled at the idea that they could.

@MAWG

Are my comments pain in the ass, or disruptive, or whatever enough that it’d really be better if I went away? Like in “No, I really mean it, go away!”?

Yes.

Are my comments pain in the ass, or disruptive, or whatever enough that it’d really be better if I went away? Like in “No, I really mean it, go away!”?

Isn’t that what we told you after your first pearl-clutching WATM meltdown?

So much for “I’m totes listening, really.”

MAWG, if* you really feel you are learning things here, I strongly encourage you to keep reading here.
Just not commenting, until you have learnt enough to understand that the way you are currently behaving is not respectful, and many of the tactics you have used here are regularly used in the comments here by trolls.
*As you said regarding the word “if”

I wrote that “if” specifically to state that I DIDN’T assume to know your objectives or what you thought important…

Once you understand how disrespectful you have been, you may want to apologise. For, for example,

Uh, like that one? I’ll have to learn to filter the difference (if any) between you making a serious, literal point… or you kind of just letting off stream.

attempting to dismiss Dalillama’s position so rudely, as a minor example. Or comparing her to the KKK.

@Scildfreja It really does infuriate me that without exception interpreters of Adam Smith are entirely ahistorical. We’re still learning to appreciate the intricacies of what I refer to as the cryptocapitalist economy of Georgian England, but that’s no excuse not to recognise that the ‘capitalism’ Adam Smith writes about in no way resembles the ‘capitalism’ of today. Interpreters are ahistorical in terms of technology as well–his description of the ‘division of labour’ in a pin factory was actually a thought experiment, as nothing like assembly line manufacture existed in England until the early nineteenth century (the Venice Arsenal had developed the technique a few hundred years earlier, but I’d be surprised if Smith knew much about that as it was a military secret–and in fact the first use of the technique in England was also military). Anyway.

And yes, in the first half of the nineteenth century corporations were called ‘public’ businesses, as (as now) they were created by the state, while sole proprietors and family businesses were referred to as ‘private enterprise’. How corporations managed to sneak into the ‘private enterprise’ tent, and thus gain ‘government should leave us alone’ points, is a question I’m still trying to answer (James Taylor, who has done a lot of insightful work in this field, has one answer, I have another, both may be true).

Shutting up now!

@guest

Shutting up now!

Please don’t! I’m finding this fascinating! Especially since I’ve only ever encountered those ahistorical viewpoints you mentioned and never got around to doing any research of my own.

Shorter MAWG:

Me me me me me me me. Me me me me me me me me.

@Axe

You had him pegged from comment number 1.

@guest

I remember the old days, in the 90s, arguing with ‘libertarians’ about the same points. Good times :). They treated Adams as ‘wisdom of the ancients’ rather than ‘product of his time.’

@guest

You’re welcome! I should probably clarify that, for an event attended by over 1,000 people, only 7 guys approached me afterwards (although I hope that there were at least some others who just didn’t know me/feel the need to share). Of those 7, though, there were some common denominators: All of them were under 40 and all of them honestly appeared to have thought that we were past the sort of thing the speakers were talking about, and were genuinely horrified that it was still happening, on the basis that ‘it’s not right’. That, coupled with small examples I see around me every day, does give me some that at least some white men genuinely want to do what’s right and fair, even at some personal cost (one such example happened just today: I was having lunch and the ~11 year old boy at the next table looked up from his phone and asked his mother ‘what does toxic male corporate aggression mean?’. They had a calm discussion about it, with lots of ‘what do you think’ from the mother. The boy eventually came up with a pretty succinct explanation of the term, and concluded that it was not a good thing, for anyone. Just one incident and I live in a very liberal area, but nevertheless.)

The other thing I think we have to remember is that it’s not necessarily up to white men to give it up or not. Those of us non-white-men people are more and more willing to take it for ourselves, which I think is a big part of why we are now seeing the backlash in MRAs/Trump. From what I can see, progress tends to be two steps forward, one step back, which is painful and frustrating and not fair, but ultimately we *are* moving forward. For example, a couple of years into my corporate career, my aunt, who was in her 60’s at the time, took me aside and very seriously told me to never, ever be afraid to go for that promotion. I was perplexed because to me it was such a ‘duh’ thing. It wasn’t until my mother chimed in and said ‘they don’t even think about that anymore’ that I realised that, for their generation, it had not been a duh thing, it had been something they really needed to overcome, both in the world and in themselves. Their generation was fighting to be allowed to speak in meetings at all, my generation is building on that to make sure that, when we do speak, we get the same space as everyone else to do so, and this is analogous to the progress of most movements of marginalised peoples I can think of. Again, it completely sucks that it is that way, but I do honestly believe that we’ll get there in the end and that everyone will be the happier for it.

(Yes I am wilfully optimistic and naive.)