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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17420 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 24, 2026

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because "conservatism" is kind of the definition of not doing things

I don't agree. Conservatism doesn't mean "don't do anything" but "don't do anything new".

To speak to this, in the middle of historic flooding, red town Carmel, Indiana "built a makeshift dam out of Sycamore trees and concrete." That's the kind of thing Red places just do, without worry for environmental studies or which contractor will get the kickback. And building levys and dams is something humans have done for millennia. Blue areas in Indiana did not fair as well.

Gary Indiana isn’t controlled by the blue tribe, is it? It’s a majority black city- culturally very different.

Gary is at least a tributary of the blue tribe, and Blacks have allied themselves with the Blue Tribe. The mayor of Gary is a Democrat, his predecessor was a Democrat, his predecessor was a Democrat, her predeccesor was a Democrat, his predecessor was... a Democrat and convicted of fraud. You'd have to go back to 1943 to find a Republican mayor. I know Democrat is not the same thing as Blue Tribe, but I didn't say Blue Tribe, just Blue.

Indianapolis is pretty Blue Tribe and they have all kinds of complaints that their government did not do enough to warn people of the flood dangers. Which itself is kind of amusing, the idea that some more up-to--date facebook posts are the fix to massive flooding.

It does seem under this definition like the parties aren't really as conservative/progressive aligned as the messaging would have you think. Under "don't do anything new", California is arguably a conservative state when it clamps down on building housing, sets strong environmental laws discouraging industry, and blocking data center construction. Alternatively, Texas's libertine rules encouraging solar build out, natural gas, and encouraging industry are progressive. Don't tell Gavin and Greg.

But that seems part of both party's ongoing civil wars: blue team seems to have inherited a lot of conservative (lacking a better term) seniors for whom that means "hands off my Medicare" and a general preference for maintaining late 20th century neoliberalism, which clashes with the DSA types wanting radical changes. Red team has a similar clash between traditionally-labelled conservatives and "you can just build things", although I'm not sure if that fight is still ongoing these days.

The confusing thing about America's constant change and upheaval is that, although dispositional/Burkean/"small-c" conservatism still makes some sense here, and it's still true that traditions which have stood the test of time are less risky than new ideas that haven't, "for many lifetimes this fact of constantly changing traditions has been a longstanding tradition". California didn't get to be California by clamping down that hard on housing and industry; that's a new idea that makes Burkean conservatives shriek, even if the alternative of endless new construction is also worrying. Riding the tiger of modernity is scary, but we're already on it, and jumping right off is scarier.

Yes, I agree that these labels are confusing and outmoded. A long time ago, I pointed out that white nationalists who want to transform the US into a white ethnostate are habitually characterised as "conservative". But to conserve things means to keep things the way they are. The US isn't a white ethnostate, so by definition anyone who wants to turn it into one can't be a conservative. Rather, white nationalists are reactionaries.

Yes. The most sensible definitions are, in my view, that conservatives are the ones keeping the ship running, which includes a lot of doing, just no changing. They are overly pragmatic and have difficulty improving anything substantively. Progressives are the ones who want us to change for the better, which is laudable, but who have a tendency to be impractical and insufficiently concerned with function, often making things outright worse.

This definition also has the advantage of making clear why we need both. The problem is, taking this definition seriously, we'd have conservatives and progressives all over the place along the political landscape. Arguably, the center left is the primary contemporary conservative element.

"Conservatives are ballast, progressives are the sails" is a phrase I've seen a few times, with a number of variations (brakes vs. engine on a car, for instance)

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