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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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They are perfectly happy to do nothing, so long as nobody else gets to do anything either.

This isn't really true. First, for plenty of conservatives there are a lot of progressive measures which they believe are harmful and they would like to roll back. That alone means that conservatives would like to do something, and they would only accept "everybody does nothing" as a compromise solution to stop further progressive measures they think would be harmful.

Second, as @aqouta recently put it (with respect to conservative views on finances): the conservative vision is that things are pretty good right now, and that they don't want to ruin a good thing by messing with it too much. However, that does not preclude careful improvements. Conservatives don't believe that the world has ever been literally perfect, and they are in fact open to making changes. They simply want reforms to be of the incremental variety, not the "reshape large swathes of society all at once" variety.

I mostly agree with this but I'll slightly quibble with word choice. It's less that things are pretty good now, although they are, and more that the conservatives view the motive force of progress as private action that depend only partially if at all on what the government does; mostly in the form of upholding private property rights, fixing rare tragedy of the commons/multi-polar trap situations and more than anything staying out of the way. As things stand the government not changing anything at all accomplishes 1 and 3 pretty well and neglecting 2 as a compromise is probably worth it.

The progressive formulation however views collective/government action as the main thrust of progress citing things like the civil rights act and legislation enshrining minority rights. In it's proper place this isn't wrong or anything and has some positive trade offs but it's going to lead to pretty different perspectives on how tragic a government that does nothing is.

You've presented a conservative libertarianism, @SubstantialFrivolity a Burkean conservativism. Both are at odds with progressivism, which is going to use state action to drag you kicking and screaming into the future whether you like it or not, and a more harsh traditional conservatism which would use state action to force you into your proper role or into prison (or exile in times when that was an option). They are also at odds with each other but less so. But this doesn't mean they don't have a vision.