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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25595 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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If you had to devise a test to decide who counts as a conservative in the classical sense, what would you check? Politics must count, and religion, and respect for tradition, but almost no one has all three of those in a way that makes the label "conservative" apply.

Politically, most people who apply the term "conservative" to themselves or others actually mean "classical liberal": someone who prefers less economic control/intervention by government and all the market solutions that such a position implies, and also favors no government position on The Good Life, leaving people free to choose whichever life they choose, from pious monasticism to squalid meth addiction. This often means "Red Tribe,' but also covers weirdo libertarians. It rules out nearly all Christians, because they would never say "the true Good Life is not sufficiently knowable for the state to take a position on it," which is why there is so much rhetoric about Christians coming for abortion rights or whatever.

But many religious people don't count either. True Conservatives, in the Burkean sense (not in the literal sense of "this is what Edmund Burke wrote," but in the sense that people mean when they say "I'm a classical conservative") are not supposed to want to change anything in society or culture that was working serviceably. On this definition, though, no American counts, because the Revolution upended a system that was working ok. No protestant counts, because Luther upended a system that was working okay (of course Americans and protestants disagree about that serviceability, but does everyone get a C-pass for their particular complaint? Was Lenin a conservative too?). So this rules out most anglosphere "conservatives." But this leads to the absurdity of going back further and further and finding that no user of bronze tools counts because stone tools were working okay, etc.

In terms of respect for Tradition, there is no definitional problem, but there is the empirical problem of people having no sense of history or culture. Maybe in Europe things are different, but in North America very few people think about tradition at all, and many of those that do overestimate the age of most traditions. So there might be a respect for tradition, but it is uncoupled from ancestral traditions to a point where "I respect tradition" does not mean what anyone wants it to mean.

So my question is, does the term "conservative" mean anything at all anymore other than "red tribe" or "anti-woke"? If so, how would an alien zoologist classify someone as "conservative"? I suggest checking people's children (to check transmission of values) to see how many nursery rhymes they know or how many second-verses of Christmas carols they can sing, but I grant that this prioritizes traditional culture over religion and politics, and a relatively recent tradition at that. Nevertheless, I think that if you sorted people by how many of those things their kids could recite, you would be able to predict more about them than asking "should abortion be legal" or "what is the optimal income tax rate."

Conservatism, insofar as it is a political movement and not merely a feeling or disposition or psychology, was created as part of the fundamental disagreement at the heart of Enlightenment politics: Can man be made perfect through reason?

There is one half of the Enlightenment, godfathered by Hobbes, notably full of Scots like Hume and Smith, who decided to sit amongst itself in the right side of the French Assembly that one time. They say no. Man cannot perfect itself. And therefore not perfect society.

Out of this core tenet, arises essentially all of the political precepts of conservatism: transcendental humility, natural law, hierarchy, property, freedom, prudence, etc.

It seems therefore easy to me to make the test simply one of anti-utopianism:

Do you believe men (and therefore society) can be made perfect?

No conservative shall answer yes, and all Liberals that answer no will be conservatives.

Where does "No, but one can get arbitrarily close." fit in your schema?

(The road to wisdom?/Well, it's plain/and simple to express./Err, and err,/and err again,/but less, and less, and less.) --Piet Hein

It's conservatism.

Once we reach further than those people think is reasonable, they aren't so happy anymore and will say that their progress was fine but this new progress is insane. Mencheviks are not a new phenomenon.

When I say "all Liberals that answer no will be conservatives", it's acceptable to read it as prophecy.

I don’t think this remotely captures the contours of the actual arguments and beliefs taking place in 21st-century America. Firstly because almost nobody on either side reads 18th- and 19th-century philosophy. More importantly, though, because even among the people who do favor a more technocratic approach, almost nobody would claim that “man can be perfected (that’s not the point), and even the very few who would still believe that such an outcome is only possible far into a theoretical future. It’s just not a live issue, politically or otherwise. “Conservatives” and “liberals” are far more focused on object-level political and aesthetic concerns than they are about the nebulous world of utopian philosophy.

It may not be a clean one-for-one map but I do believe that @IGI-111's distinction accurately captures some key differences in how the two major US coalitions approach questions of politics and culture.

One of the most common criticisms that I see leveled against Republicans both here and in the wider world is that they are not sufficiently utopian, not sufficiently technocratic, and that they have no "positive vision" nor "will to power".

This is a fundamentally "Democrat" coded complaint because Democrats don't see the collective power of the state/society as some dangerous beast to be restrained distracted or appeased, but more as a benevolent god who answers prayers and smites enemies.

If you are of a sort, you will have some sense deep in your gut that "power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely", and that sense is to lead you to view anyone who would make such critiques a jaundiced eye. You say that nobody on either side is reading 17th 18th or 19th-century philosophy. My response to you is that they don't have to. The philosophy is already "in the water". An axiom need not have been read from a book (or debated on the internet) for it to shape a person's beliefs, or sway how they vote.

The populist coded version I like re: Will to Power is

“Please stop fighting for the car keys and then happily tossing them out the window when you get them. It doesn't protect us from the powerful, all that happens is that then they get picked up by the other side anyway.”

More importantly, though, because even among the people who do favor a more technocratic approach, almost nobody would claim that “man can be perfected (that’s not the point), and even the very few who would still believe that such an outcome is only possible far into a theoretical future.

...And yet, we very clearly have a large, cohesive population of people enthralled to vast, superhuman "processes" that were instituted for nakedly utopian goals, continue to operate in the same way they have since their foundation, and at no point changed goals. These processes observably square the circle by continuously adding epicycles between where they are and the goal, rather than admitting the original goal was unachievable and abandoning the effort. See the war on poverty and blank slate education for two notorious examples.

A commenter here once argued to me that affirmative action and other forms of anti-racist government intervention should be implemented for at least three centuries before we could really draw conclusions on whether they worked or not. How does that sort of mindset differ from Utopianism specifically in the actions it produces?

See the war on poverty

The percentage of the American population living in poverty has in fact decreased considerably from where it was at in the late 1950’s (roughly 22%) to where it is in the 2020’s; in 2019 the number hit a record low of 10.5%. We can argue all day about whether this has any causative relationship with LBJ’s specific policies, but can you at least understand why a good-faith political operator could look at that and not see the War on Poverty as a failure? Do you think that anything less than a full elimination of poverty means that the effort was not worth trying and that we should scrap every program that’s even trying to move the needle? Can you see how somebody who is t a “utopian” could have a reasonable disagreement with you about the answer?

Many of the people you’re identifying as “utopian or as “wanting to perfect humanity” would actually describe what they’re doing as an attempt to incrementally improve the human condition through sustained effort. And I think there are concrete observable examples all around us which can at least plausibly be interpreted as a demonstration of their successes!

Obviously I agree with you that human beings are not blank slates, and I do agree with you that, for example, racial gaps in educational attainment have not closed nor even significantly narrowed as a result of progressive theories of education. I think that progressives are wrong about some pretty important bedrock facts about humanity. However, I think they’re wrong in a different way than what OP described, and I think that there have been some landmark successes in progressive government (for example, the massive reduction in rural poverty and illiteracy in the South under the FDR and LBJ administrations) which make it difficult to credibly accuse progressivism of just being a totally manifestly failed project which only utopians stubbornly denying reality would have any interest in continuing.

I think that there have been some landmark successes in progressive government (for example, the massive reduction in rural poverty and illiteracy in the South under the FDR and LBJ administrations) which make it difficult to credibly accuse progressivism of just being a totally manifestly failed project which only utopians stubbornly denying reality would have any interest in continuing.

I'm not sure how to communicate this without sounding snarky, but you sound exactly like a Stalinist to me. Modernity has killed more people than any other event in the history of mankind, and immiserated Man in ways hitherto unimaginable, yet we ought to be grateful because technical advances whose causes are only tenuously related should see full credit attributed to the policy of the Party and nothing else.

Yet we see regimes that do not actually hold to such ideas benefit from industry without necessarily encountering the same cultural issues. Could it be that improving the human condition and reducing everything to reason and commerce aren't actually joined at the hip?

I think the Enlightenment is a failure, because it did not reach its own goals. I don't think it's an total failure because we did create useful institutions and discover useful truths along the way, but I don't regard the Soviet Union as a total failure either for the same reasons.

Still, Managerial Totalitarianism is a cruel farce and must be destroyed for the welfare of mankind.

This is similar to questions about what it means to be 'woke', or really what it means to hold any ideology that doesn't have a strictly defined orthodoxy like perhaps Catholicism. Ultimately 'conservative' is just a label we apply to a whole cloud of beliefs that share certain elements or vibes in common. Probably no particular strain of conservatism fully embodies every one of those common elements, but that is fine. It becomes a probabilistic thing, if you embody more than X% of common conservative beliefs/themes it is fair to call you a conservative. I think that is the way that most things work. How would you define a chair? Similar problem.

There are real, actual differences between how self described liberals and conservatives, but not republicans and democrats, raise their children. Corporal punishment in the home, censorship, etc are all more common among one than the other. Likewise there’s differences in rates of visiting elderly (grand)parents, in rates of religious change(both conversion and apostasy), in length of courtship before marriage, etc. I don’t think I need to spell out how they run.

Now, notably that isn’t a Republican/democrat difference, or even really a red tribe/blue tribe difference- thé red tribe is better modeled as ‘the set of people who think conservatism is high status’ than as ‘the set of people who are conservative’, and republicans are just ‘people who prefer Trump to the optimates’. But ‘conservatives’ are a real thing.

To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices…. In short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss. It will appear more naturally in the old than in the young, not because the old are more sensitive to loss but because they are apt to be more fully aware of the resources of their world and therefore less likely to find them inadequate. In some people this disposition is weak merely because they are ignorant of what their world has to offer them: the present appears to them only as a residue of inopportunities.

To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise.

Michael Oakeshott, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays

Conservative is a disposition of being, not a coherent philosophy. There are many different philosophies which people of a conservative disposition can ascribe to coherently.

"Do you get along with your father, and do you think he is proud of who you are?"

I guess that excludes Rod Dreher.

A conservative is someone who wants to conserve what is both existing and good.

Dreher, at his recent worst, is a reactionary, who wants to turn the clock back and destroy what exists.

Conserving what is both existing and good implies destroying some of what exists, unless you take the pollyannapill and say that everything that exists is good.

Pruning and uprooting are quite different tasks and philosophies.

Yes and yes.

Perhaps necessary, but certainly not sufficient.

Look within yourself, there's a conservative inside you.

Weird, I thought conservatives were generally against that kind of thing.

It's all in the context, Conservatives under Julian the Apostate were probably all about the importance of sodomy as part of growing up the way the great fathers of Rome did.

I think I’d separate things out a bit, simply because of the conservative political “team” of different parties (in America basically the parties represent groups that in a multi-party system would be separate parties who would join forces for a political advantage).

So what we really have are probably 3-4 conservative leaning blocs: libertarians, nationalists, traditionalists, imperialists, etc. each agreeing to an uneasy alliance to get things done, but believing different things. Liberals tend to have similar blocs: socialists, hippies, race activists, internationalists, etc. working together to get things done even if they disagree on most things. We form the parties before the election via conventions and primary elections. Europe has the elections then forms the alliances. So I see liberal and conservative as more umbrella terms where a better way to think about it is as an alliance. Traditionalists can generally faithfully transmit values and ideas and story and songs. Libertarians or imperialists or business conservatives probably care about the economics than anything else and might not care at all about singing Silent Night in the original German the way a traditionalist might. Race activists probably care about the traditions of their own people and they probably transmit that. Socialists don’t care.

A conservative is a liberal ten years on. A far-right person is a liberal twenty years on. A nazi has turned forty.

Look at what "conservatives" are desperately trying to conserve these days: the feminist purity of women's sports which men must subsidize and watch or else we're all misogynists. The fertility of gay kids. A border.

Real conservative stuff guys. There are no conservatives in the US, just liberals who haven't kept up with the moral fashions of the freshman dorms at Barnard.

Fair, but the road travels both ways. For example progressives can't hold that gay marriage is good without holding that marriage itself is good.

No.

I've met queer theorists who held this position which is very much internally consistent: marriage is an oppressive institution that must be dismantled, and the best vector to dismantle oppressive systems is to accelerate their contradictions to render them meaningless, thus making marriage as detached from heteropatriarchal norms by any means is necessary and positive.

The only thing that dismantles is the hetero norm that marriage is for a man and a woman. Any other factor remains unaffected at best or reinforced at worst (legitimacy as determined by the state or church, etc).

It's like putting on a dress and gagging on your wife's strap-on to dismantle queer theory. "Checkmate, homos! Your degeneracy has no place in this vision of society".

The state and the church can be made revolutionary, and the internal contents of an agreement mediated by revolutionary institutions can be changed.

Read Rousseau for more details.

It's not just the state and church, those are just one aspect of marriage. The Queer Theory interpretation is asking us to believe in revolutionary conformity.

The changed element is the institutional homophobia that disallowed gay marriage. That's a change, granted. But it can be described as an expansion, not a reduction. Marriage becomes an option for more people. The various and diverse structures that support the established norms that make up the cultural institution called marriage have gained additional clients, while Queer Theorists and their non-conformist norms have lost clients, hence why they have to contort themselves to present it as a good thing for their cause. I don't doubt that they can offer complicated and counterintuitive explanations for how it aids their cause, I just don't find those explanations convincing.

You can say they're wrong, I think they are too, but that has no bearing on the internal coherence of their belief system or its existence.

That isn't particularly difficult for progressives to square. It's simple to say that marriage itself isn't good, but that our oppressive capitalist heteronormative patriarchy deems it as good* and, as such, confers many advantages to married couples. And, for as long as these advantages exist, gay couples should have just as much access to them as straight couples.

* This is merely one specific form of the fully general argument that anything that is considered "good" by conservatives/traditionalists/people I don't like is actually something that has been arbitrarily declared "good" by the fully uncoordinated emergent conspiracy-like behavior by people in power, and we could just as easily declare it "bad" and the reverse "good" and run society just as well, as long as everyone agreed to play along. Other examples include fat acceptance/health-at-any-size and also the denigration of logic and rationality in themselves (distinct from and antithetical to the common criticisms against rationalists and their ilk for failing to live up to their title of rationality).

You can't rally against injustice by expanding the advantages of an injustice to include your own group. Consider slavery.

By? Correct, one can't. While? Why not?

Because it's by turns rank hypocrisy and plainly counterproductive.

Title IX dates to at least 50 years ago. Admittedly, the Civil Rights Act they're leaning on to push ending affirmative action is even older.

I think there is an element of truth to this, but it also doesn't apply to every progressive value, only those that have become widely-adopted and successful. Most conservatives aren't strongly in favor of organized labor, or the century-ago progressivism of eugenics and temperance, but probably are okay with the Pure Food and Drug Act and the CCC/TVA/adjacent infrastructure (some progressives would advocate for removing dams these days). And I'd be skeptical of the conservativism of anyone who embraced "indigo children" and such in the current era.

I don’t think conservative means you get to quit thinking and just follow the past. The world changes and you can update your beliefs.

My preference for society is a lot of classical liberalism within a traditional culture. But I also believe you need to update your political philosophy for the environment you find yourself in.

I think it makes sense that Russians have historical no matter what form of government they were under were more military authoritarian. It’s a reality of their geography and being easy to invade. If I were Russian I would adopt political ideologies that were more Russian.

Today I find myself adopting more Latin American Right-Wing political philosophies because I feel like America has demographically become more like Brazil than 1960’s America.

If I am living in a country that is 90% Anglo without military threats (traditional America or England) then I think I like classical liberalism the best. I could possibly see some kind of Nordic politics being a possibility.

I like the saying that fascism is an immune response to communism. I think I would be a fascists in a lot of countries in the 1930’s though without the murdering a lot of Jews part.

I could see myself becoming a communists in some potential all knowing AI tech worlds where jobs don’t exists. And the AIs can internalize something like the price system that makes capitalism work.

Basically I have come to conclude that different ideologies work better depending on tech level, culture, demographics, political adversaries, and geography.

a relatively recent tradition at that

All traditions were recent once....

Rather, all traditions are eternal, or they are not traditions.

You need transcendental notions to make a custom into a tradition, properly speaking.

This is why all cults look similar modulo their trappings, and why the trappings are not actually that important beyond their existence.

but there is the empirical problem of people having no sense of history or culture.

Speak for yourself, If anything I feel like this here might actually be the test or at least a critical component of it

I don't think there is any set of necessary or sufficient political beliefs such that everyone who uses the term "conservative" would agree that an individual with such beliefs is properly classified as such. Especially if you intend this definition to stretch backwards into the past and possibly forwards into the future.

I think a prudent beginning to this line of inquiry is to ask: why care what "conservative" means? Did X call Y a conservative and one is unsure what X intended to convey thereby? Does one imagine one's self as possibly positioned in an intellectual tradition described as "conservative" (by whom?) but are unsure what that entails?

Once we understand what use we intend to put the term "conservative" the path to a meaning becomes clearer.

At its core, I would say, it's just political low openness, that is, the belief that for the polity, things that are new or different from what it is accustomed to are a priori bad. Low/high openness in individual humans is understood well enough, and likewise does not care for the particular provenance or authenticity of a habit: an adult could discover chicken tenders at age 30, gradually slide into eating them exclusively and decide at 40 that trying new foods over the tried and reliable tendies is just not enjoyable or worth it. It doesn't have to be this extreme: a tendiemaxxer friend of mine can be convinced to try most things, but you have to spend half a day making the case why it's a good idea, eat some of it in front of him and show that you are not experiencing any side effects you hid from him, and then he'll start with tiny bites and wait for a bit to meditate on how he feels about it (and then in the end complain that you should have just let him stick with his usual diet).

Contra this, liberalism in essence is "did you see that Chinese bull penis hangover soup on youtube shorts too? We should try that some day, aren't you curious", applied to society. A baseline attitude of "this is different, how exciting" vs. "this is different, I feel uncomfortable".

I would agree with this definition, and would also note that “conservative” is a trait that manifests in context dependent ways and increasingly maps less and less into the political right at all nowadays. As the left becomes more entrenched in institutions, the party differences in openness to experience has shrunk considerably, such that the relationship has now become very small. Progressivism becomes “conservative” once sufficiently mainstream; these terms were forged in a cultural context that no longer applies today, and were always to some extent incoherent groupings.

Increasingly you’re finding people whose constellations of beliefs mostly fit onto the US political right, and yet would also be the type to try out the Chinese bull penis hangover soup (I would). A huge portion of political conservatives today would actually be attitudinally liberal and have more in common with 1970s radicals than they would like to admit, whereas the opposite is true for progressives, some of whom would likely be part of the Moral Majority had they been born in the right time period. Anecdotally, in my family and all my friend groups, I’m most likely to swing highly right on issues, but am also most likely to go “this is different, how exciting” when encountering new experiences or ideas, to an extent that most people around me seem to find a bit intimidating, and am fairly certain that this general tendency towards taking nonstandard ideas seriously informs my political takes a lot.

Progressivism becomes “conservative” once sufficiently mainstream

Hence the reason some political parties actively named themselves "progressive-conservative", or PC for short. They were just ahead of the curve.

And yes, it always feels weird that, technically speaking/currently, conservatism and [classical] liberalism are the same thing, and when progressives call themselves "liberals" it stinks of stolen valor.

What is the classical sense?

I suppose my feeling is that all political labels are inevitably somewhat vague, and refer to clusters of people who associate together for particular causes, and therefore whose borders tend to be blurry and mutable. This means that definitions tend to be provisional and mutable. I can point to, say, Kirk's ten principles and say "a conservative is someone who agrees with most of these" - maybe to preserve a little wiggle room, you need to hold at least seven out of ten to formally count as 'a conservative'? But it's always going to be a bit wobbly.

I think you also need to clearly distinguish between American and other conservatives here. In the United States, conservatism generally means some sort of adherence to the principles of the founding, or the American Revolution, and because the American foundation is paradigmatically liberal, that means that American conservatism is a form of liberalism. This is not necessarily the case in other countries.

For me, I find it most useful to define conservatism in terms of an overall disposition or posture. In general, I think, that somebody whose overall politics are marked by a sense of deference to tradition or obligation to the past, and a preference for organically evolved systems over top-down plans, and who is moderately opposed to change (that is, small incremental changes, or changes to respond to specific identifiable problems, may be good; large-scale reforms are usually bad), would qualify as a conservative in the broad sense.

But this does mean that, for instance, there are people whose names loom large in the right-wing political canon that I would not consider conservative. Re-litigating Trump is boring, so let me take another example - I don't think Ronald Reagan was a conservative. I don't think Margaret Thatcher was a conservative. They were both, in a sense, progressive leaders, in that what they had was an organised theory for how society ought to work that they tried to impose via top-down reform, and for which they claimed a popular mandate. That is how progressivism works. Reagan and Thatcher both clearly belonged to the right-wing coalition in their countries, but it seems odd, to me, to call them 'conservatives'.

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