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There’s a feeling in the air: hope and change on the right — 27 Comments

1. Those of us who share conservative values, show up and vote are winning with the ballot box. That’s the way it is supposed to be done in these United States of America, whether we voted for Trump or voted against Hillary enough of us showed up and voted.

2. Well if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand
   I’ve seen your face before my friend, but I don’t know if you know who I am
   Well I was there and I saw what you did, I saw it with my own two eyes
   So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you’ve been
   It’s all been a pack of lies

   And I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
   Well I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lord
   I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord
   Well I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh Lord, oh Lord

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkADj0TPrJA

3. But the left always seems to have an ace up their sleeve. Now Susan Collins is stomping her foot that Roe v. Wade is settled law. Will she and McCain and/or others be willing to move heaven and earth to see that Roe is not touched?

   I don’t care that much about Roe one way or the other, and probably Collins and McCain don’t either. But it serves as a plausible excuse to throw a tantrum, and to make sure that the leftward spinning ratchet never slips its pawl.

4. Pingback:Neo: There's a feeling in the air: hope and change on the right - American Digest

5. And then there is this man…

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw8LagPx8oY

6. Gerard,

   The song is perfect.

   And the tears were real.

   Thank you.

7. Speaking of things looking up, have you been following the “walkaway” movement? The founder’s video is powerful, and he seems to be encouraging more and more long-term lefties who are disgusted with what’s happened to the Democratic Party to come out with their change stories. It’s like an enormous group therapy session, and the best part is finding out you are not alone.

8. When it comes to govenors and state legislatures red prevails over blue. No wonder the left throws a temper tantrum over the electoral college. Ain’t getting rid of the EC through a Constitutional amendment, but stamping their feet and screaming obviously makes them feel important.

   The gop is likely to gain 4 to 6 seats in the Senate come November, changing the federal courts will be a game changer that will be most welcome; and provide the left another opportunity to display their moonbat crazy emotional state.

9. How about this one? Did you know that we currently have a (likely) Hillary Clinton voter filling Thad Cochrane’s old MS Senate seat? I missed that completely.

   So McConnell says he will hold a confirmation vote in the fall. And newly elected senators aren’t seated until the new year. But if someone other than Sen. Hyde-Smith is elected in that special election, then her replacement is seated immediately (I think). I’m guessing that getting a conservative Kennedy SCOTUS replacement will be more difficult if the vote is held before the election.

   Sen. Hyde-Smith also tweeted that she is looking forward to casting her confirmation vote.

   We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility of a large disappointment.

10. Tommy Jay:

    Conservatives are ALWAYS prepared for disappointment.

11. Trump needs to nominate a young man as Justice.

    Ginsburg needs to retire, too.

    She’s not going to outlast Trump’s presidency.

    From here on out, her tenure is pointless.

12. The Senate has much more of its share of slippery-eel females with Hyde-Smith, Collins, Murkowski, plus the truly awful Democrat females.
    It has become a snake pit.
    The Senate does not constitute a memorial for better times, the electorate being majority female always concerned with its genital status, be it pre-menopausal with its PMS derangement, peri-menopausal with its associated derangements, or post-menopausal with the conflicts of maintaining femininity with estrogen vs. withering without in fear of breast cancer, which will occur anyway. And all -all- female Senators avow the female right to kill their own unborn children.
    The future is scary.
    I am a misogynist with some reasons!

13. True there is hope and change in the air, even amongst the sub online communities and sub cultures. Human hope, however…

14. “the judiciary may be restored to the neutral role it should play”

    Yes, with an emphasis on the word neutral. I don’t care if one is on the left or the right; twisting the original intent of the laws to suite their political ideology is what bugs me most.

    The idea of law is that we all live under the same law and if you don’t like it you work to get the law changed; not work to get the courts to change the meaning of the law.

15. Conservatism isn’t growing at the ballot box, Populism is, and it almost always has been the reigning sentiment of the American people.

    What do both Roosevelts, Reagan, Clinton, Obama and Trump have in common? All popular and all were/are Populists. Teddy, Reagan and Trump even fluctuated on party.

    Pundits and Ideologues fixate on Party because they are party partisans, but the American voter is not. Sell a message of a strong America, hope and optimism and the policies barely matter.

16. Sorry to rain on Neo’s optimism parade. In general, I do think the Trump admin has worked out better than I even hoped for, at election time. Even though his admin has been predictably chaotic in many of its details; I just wish he would embrace the chaos and fire 93 people out of the DOJ like the Clintons did.

    Hyde-Smith is apparently the person that McConnell wanted in that seat & so he will want to hold the confirmation before the election, in case she loses. Trump could withhold his nomination until after, though time would be short & stalling tactics would be expected from the Dems. Trump has stated he will not support Hyde-Smith, but will he strongly support McDaniels in MS?

    My faint optimism is that the structure of the Senate election map favors the Republicans, even though party reversals in the White House suggest anti responses in congressional elections. Could the Republicans increase their majority in the Senate come 2019?
    _____

    Rufus makes as great point and states it well, but I only half believe it. A bare majority of US citizens are conservative in their everyday lives where pragmatism is something of a necessity. But it often doesn’t carry over to the ballot box, which tends to be more of a fashion/morality statement. People see short term cause and effect in politics, but not the long term.

    There is a Mark Twain quote I can’t find about how most intelligent and informed people start out on the left in their youth and end up conservative in old age.

    Reagan I think is an example of this. The other important thing about Reagan beyond his celebrity, is that his skill as an actor and at delivering his message was so valuable. He spent years delivering conservative lectures for the GE corp. before running for election. Generally, Republicans suck at delivering a message. Effective communication is similar to populism, but not the same.

    Based on no real facts, I believe Trump was always somewhat conservative. Can a very public businessman be successful in NY as a conservative?

17. * This touches on something that has bothered me for a long time, a bother that had subsided until Jordan Peterson exploded onto the scene, citing research I’d long been extremely skeptical about.

    I love Jordan Peterson; let’s get that out of the way.

    However, if you watch his recent Oxford speech, for example (which is excellent, per usual), he likes to appeal to the social science on “conservative” and “liberal” personalities, which, in his words, describes the former as one low in trait openness and therefore good at administering and maintaining already existing institutions, and the latter as the opposite.

    I can’t question the validity of the data, but it seems to me that no one has ever been able to plausibly interpret it.

    For what we see today – to take the relevant case – is a majority of people with clearly conservative personalities adopting the role of innovators, reformers, and, in general, people who think “outside the box.” The left, by contrast, find themselves in the supposedly “conservative” role.

    On the one hand, to say that somehow the left was always a bunch of (personality) conservatives and the right was always a bunch of (personality) liberals, and now we’re just seeing a proper revelation of the underlying traits, seems exceedingly ad hoc.

    Moreover, the literature describes a meaningful correlation between personality and express ideology and behavior anyway, so that wouldn’t make any sense.

    On the other hand, for conservatives to be adopting the role of “liberals” in innovating and creating new possibilities and institutions simply contravenes one obvious implication of the literature: that shouldn’t happen.

    * My conclusion has been that the literature 1) was ideologically motivated from the get-go and thus not supple enough to catch the finer-grained personality traits that correlate to political behavior, and thus 2) was useless for predictive purposes (unless of course you defined your outputs as something easy, like commitments on certain issues, affirmative action being a perennial favorite).

    I worry that Peterson is confusing things more than clarifying them by bringing up this literature. What really matters is the purposes people adopt in pursuing maintenance and innovation, as *both* left and right do. I see no serious way to maintain the proposition that (personality) liberals engage in innovative behavior more than their conservative counterparts over time; and vice versa for maintenance behavior.

    * And then we have to define our terms. Take innovation. Is inventing Google the only way to behave in an innovative fashion? What about an originalist Supreme Court maintaining the rules of free competition which have the effect of encouraging such innovation?

    Is being concerned with sustaining the framework and conditions of innovation any less innovative than actually innovating something? Maybe so, but it is far too simplistic, simplistic to the point of inaccuracy, to describe it as merely stodgy old maintenance for the sake of maintenance.

    Another tough case: what do you call it when a situation that no longer exists or is at least broken is cherished as something to be re-invigorated or fixed? Is that innovation? Does it not require creative thinking and adaptability? But at the same time, we say it is “conservative” because, in the last analysis, it is meant to conserve something.

    Is that innovation or maintenance? What kind of personality does that? Conservative or liberal?

    The problem is, whatever answer you give, I can describe a precisely analogous situation for the other team. Let’s take the SCOTUS. Even the left frames their current plight as a threat to stare decisis, and they evidently feel that liberal jurisprudence is as sacred and traditional as apple pie. So what do they want to do? Maintain it or fix it!

    * The constant theme here is that this descriptive language is too coarse and unrefined to deal with the realities it wants to capture (*the* fatal flaw of all social science, I might add).

    At the margins I’m sure there are pretty good relationships between extreme liberal or conservative personalities and certain types of behavior, but beyond that I find nothing enlightening in the literature. The fact is that most everyone likes both innovation and maintenance, but, subordinating them to different ends, understands and defines them differently.

    Hence, a conservative sees himself as promoting innovation when he defends or repairs or renews the “status quo” republican order. The liberal sees just the opposite, practically defining innovation as the undermining of the republican order.

    You can see this even with things like Google. It’s as though the left cannot view such things as real innovations until they’re weaponized against the “existing order” (by which they mean the republican constitutional structure of America).

    * Anyway, it was Jacobson’s “We are used to losing institutions” that sparked these thoughts. If we think all of this through, I don’t see any way the descriptive accuracy of the personality literature vis-a-vis political or economic behavior can be sustained.

    And hell, even on the artistic level – which Peterson often appeals to – I don’t see it at all. Was Dante, or Virgil, or Tasso, or Milton – were these transcendently great artists “conservative” or “liberal” personalities? Was their motivation to innovate or conserve? Was their art innovative? In many respects yes; in other respects, hardly. They certainly were not innovators in the current sense of the term (postmodernist).

    If anything, they were self-conscious inheritors of a tradition of art, religion, and philosophy that they loved dearly and sought to preserve through new-ish modes of expression. Frankly, it sounds more conservative than “liberal” to me.

    On the flip-side, and ironically, if you take supposedly arch-conservatives like Nietzsche and Heidegger and look at just how radical and destructive their intentions really were, you can make a very solid case that they were consummate “liberals” (which would explain the left’s obsession with them).

    * In short, it’s a mess and a fiasco, and I dearly wish we’d return to a more phenomenological way of talking about politics and personalities – the way of Dostoevsky, to appeal to a hero of Peterson’s. That way, we can make sense of clearly meaningful phrases like “hope and change on the right.”

18. The “left” IMHO is really socialist/communist and is a religion–the various offshoots such as feminists, enviornmentalists, etc in general are these things second and socialists first, and then are just useful idiots in these areas. They will not tolerate deviation from their god. And the “right” well–they are either left lite, or (in my arrogance) us true live free or die people. Then unfortunately there is the mushy middle that lives their life and notices something is wrong but doesn’t fully understand what. Most don’t know where to find information, or don’t really care. I just hope the Overton window is finally shifted and our views will become more disseminated.

19. kolnai:

    Very interesting. I’ve long wondered about that research myself. To me, it depends at least in part on how “openness” is defined, operationalized, and tested. My guess is that the trait does not necessarily correlate with all kinds of innovation, but perhaps more to tearing down existing social standards and values.

    I’m not sure whether the tests Peterson refers to are something like this, but if so it really doesn’t appear have very much to do with innovation in the real world, although perhaps it’s connected to artistic innovation these days.

    Not as much connection with artistic innovation in the past, however, depending on the era and the artist. Your thoughts made me recall that T.S. Eliot essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which I had to read somewhere along the line and in which he states that tradition is really important too in creating works of enduring art:

    Eliot presents his conception of tradition and the definition of the poet and poetry in relation to it. He wishes to correct the fact that, as he perceives it, “in English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence.” Eliot posits that, though the English tradition generally upholds the belief that art progresses through change – a separation from tradition, literary advancements are instead recognised only when they conform to the tradition. Eliot, a classicist, felt that the true incorporation of tradition into literature was unrecognised, that tradition, a word that “seldom… appear[s] except in a phrase of censure,” was actually a thus-far unrealised element of literary criticism.

    For Eliot, the term “tradition” is imbued with a special and complex character. It represents a “simultaneous order,” by which Eliot means a historical timelessness – a fusion of past and present – and, at the same time, a sense of present temporality. A poet must embody “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer,” while, simultaneously, expressing their contemporary environment. Eliot challenges the common perception that a poet’s greatness and individuality lie in their departure from their predecessors; he argues that “the most individual parts of his [the poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Eliot claims that this “historical sense” is not only a resemblance to traditional works but an awareness and understanding of their relation to his poetry.

    This fidelity to tradition, however, does not require the great poet to forfeit novelty in an act of surrender to repetition. Rather, Eliot has a much more dynamic and progressive conception of the poetic process: novelty is possible only through tapping into tradition…

20. neo – Yes, and you’d think Eliot’s understanding of tradition wouldn’t be some kind of revelatory or novel concept (ironically enough, it feels that way to some people).

    But here we are. My main gripe is that the chain of causation is supposed to go from personality to ideology and from ideology to behavior. This chain, simply in the abstract, has feedback loops and chicken-and-egg circles that defy linear statistical analysis. For instance, it was far from obvious to Aristotle that personality shaped behavior more than behavior shaped personality. That is, culture and tradition themselves have a very large if not decisive say in what kind of personalities emerge within them.

    And is that such a radical idea? I imagine myself born and bred in Saudi Arabia, and I have no idea who I would be. Peterson himself often emphasizes the precipice of evil we all dangle over so tenuously.

    I don’t mean to sound like some cultural determinist and I do believe that there are such things an native personality traits. But that is a far cry from saying I’m able to specify 1) what the traits really are (as opposed to what they operationally are), 2) what the relevant traits are, 3) how they interact with culture and tradition, 4) how that interaction causally relates to patterns in ideological self-identification, and finally, 5) how all of that translates into behavior.

    The big issue I have with Peterson – and I have to stress that I admire no public intellectual more than the good doctor, who I consider, on the whole, to be damn near *wise* – is that he sometimes presents an image of being a biological reductionist in the worst “traditional” fashion of the social sciences. This at the same time as he says unusually wise and enlightening things about the human spirit.

    Nonetheless, I don’t think he has a cogent metaphysics of either the world or the person behind it all; on which you might check his understanding of truth, which is biological through and through. “Truth,” in the full sense, is for him an emergent property ascribed to iterated successful patterns of behavior and belief in human interactions with each other and the world, wherein “success” is understood as satisfying the survival instinct.

    The personality literature he appeals to is in that vein and premised on kindred assumptions. The traits themselves are supposed to have evolved as survival strategies – sometime spoken of in shorthand as k/r selection – giving us a straight line from Darwin to your friendly neighborhood socialist.

    But, to reiterate, it is inane (and I don’t care what the operationalized definitions say) to suggest that a representative conservative is more hostile to innovation or less innovative in all senses of the term than a representative liberal. How would Stalin and Mao have come out on a personality profile? How about Reagan and Churchill? Or in addition to Eliot, let’s take one of your favorites (and mine): Gerard Manley Hopkins; perhaps a homosexual, definitely innovative in his poetic diction, perhaps innovative in the religious context of his time, going from high church Anglican to outright Catholic, but in the plain sense of the terms as we use them, definitely a conservative.

    Wordsworth went from flabby lefty to conservative (a changer). Arguably Coleridge did as well. And in philosophy, how about Kant, or Kierkeggard? Kant was a radical innovator in service of – what? Preserving as much of the traditional stock of logic, morality, religion, and law as he felt could be salvaged from the new Newtonian order.

    People are so much more complicated than these simplistic social science models are able to recognize, and while I realize it lands well with the Scientistically-minded sophisticates on college campuses and elsewhere, I wish Peterson would tone it down a bit. It doesn’t help us understand conservative and liberal people (as opposed to statistical abstractions), and it doesn’t help us see what’s really going on in the Western world today.

    Thankfully, Peterson has another angle of attack that goes after postmodernism and Marxism on more common sensical and philosophical grounds – that’s where the rubber hits the road.

    Well, I seem to have derailed the thread, but I do think in a roundabout way these issues are germane to the topic at hand, namely, “hope and change on the right” – a phrase which seems like “square and triangle on a circle” to most people. My lament is that Peterson kind of encourages that simplistic mode of thought – simplistic and wrong. We won’t be brought together by statistical abstractions buttressed by Darwinism; the only thing that works is learning to see each other as full-fledged persons.

    I’m not saying it will happen. But that’s how it happens in a liberal and humane way (i.e., not the tyrannical imposition of what Spinoza called the “Turkish” solution).

21. It has been pressing upon me so strongly this past week that the most successful example of a conservative reverse Gramscian “long march through the institutions” has been the Federalist Society. A small minority of the academic legal community, by superior argumentation, superior organizing, superior promotion, superior management of the levers of power have instituted a legal counterrevolution. They put that (judges) list in Donald’s hands and, because of it, he is a more effective Constitutionalist that most of the rest of the post-war Republican presidents put together. The Federalist Society should emulated and studied closely.

22. Conservative Americans do not think outside the box. What they do is think outside the Left’s boxes.

    When it comes to people’s personal pet theories, such as quantum mechanics or religion or spirituality, the moment they encounter a differing opinion, they start circling the wagons and looking for a posse to lynch the status quo offender of the Orthodox Consensus.

    It’s not a problem people can avoid by switching political policies and philosophies.

23. Neo re kolnai:
    Your citation of “tradition….a(s) historical timelessness” comes very close to saying there is a Divine Order, of which tradition is a derivative, since timelessness is infinite. Natural Law, a gift from God, is also timeless, as is God himself.

24. Re: kolnai, neo.

    I’ve never looked up the more recent literature, such as it is, but I did browse Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality,” which struck me as a basic hit job on conservatives from the the far left Frankfurt School, eager to characterize their opponents as “fascist” or “pre-fascist.”

    The basic problem seems to be that “conservativism” is in important respects time-bound.

    What era is a conservative conserving? I look at a lot of the left today and I see the same yahoo mentality which motivated sixties racists. Things had changed, they hadn’t got the memo, and their response was blind, self-righteous violence.

    I would argue that today’s left is every bit as bigoted and benighted as those sixties racists. It was supposed to stay 1968 forever. That’s a kind of conservatism.

25. Then there’s my personal stake. I was raised by beatniks. I turned on, tuned in and dropped out with Tim Leary and the hippies. Yet after 9-11 I flipped 180 degrees to conservative.

    BTW, I’m far from the only ex-hippie who did so, though it’s mostly male ex-hippies.

    As I would self-report, I made that change out of my “openness” trait, that is, if such a trait exists and I have one.

    Am I conservative or liberal?

    Are my former comrades conservative or liberal?

    When I changed, a former friend and lover was baffled that I had turned against my convictions as a 25 year-old.

    To me it was natural I might change thirty years later rather than remain wedded to the positions I had imprinted as a teenager. I wondered why she hadn’t changed.

26. Gothamite Says:
    June 29th, 2018 at 6:53 pm
    Speaking of things looking up, have you been following the “walkaway” movement?
    * * *
    Just read this Twitter thread part-way down (way too many now to read them all).

    https://twitter.com/reddlenses

    Picked up some nice graphics, but this one was particularly interesting — wonder if it is true?

    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DhBPzTsUYAAsQyM.jpg

27. huxley Says:
    July 1st, 2018 at 7:35 pm
    Re: kolnai, neo.

    I’ve never looked up the more recent literature, such as it is, but I did browse Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality,” which struck me as a basic hit job on conservatives from the the far left Frankfurt School, eager to characterize their opponents as “fascist” or “pre-fascist.”

    The basic problem seems to be that “conservativism” is in important respects time-bound.

    What era is a conservative conserving?
    * * *
    I agree and had thought much the same thing when I read the book.
    Conservatives always conserve the era the Left doesn’t like.

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