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I want to share a "view from the inside" as I think that I'm unusual here -- theist, practicing Catholic, married, a gaggle of young children, wife is SAHM, went to an unremarkable college, went to an unremarkable flyover state college, household income in the U.S. middle 50% band, work a middle management job at a mid sized corporation. Though I work in tech, I don't have any connections to Ivy League people, I've never worked at a startup or lived in NYC or SFO, and there is little to no wokeness in my workplace . In other words, a profile of what people would probably reflexively imagine as a "normal" traditional American family (although I suppose being an Evangelical would be still more stereotypical).
At least in my circles, the biggest problems are fear and demoralization. Fear of "having your grill taken away," of no longer being allowed to live a normal life because you've become a target of elite outrage, is very real. I feel like a broken record saying this again on the Motte, but it's so, so different when you have children. I think I would make a decent small-time politician (I'm probably to agreeable to make it big time), but I have small children and a sensitive wife, and I wouldn't want them to be subjected to the kind of insane harassment that would result from some Twitter rando or news outlet signal boosting something I say or believe in. My ideal senatorial or presidential candidate would hold beliefs that would be considered so anathema by the elite that he would have to be independently wealthy and have an iron stomach and brass balls to even stand a chance.
As for demoralization, there's a sense that I share with some of my peers that American institutions are just thoroughly rotten, that we've become dhimmis without realizing it, and that trying to organize politically to build institutional power as unabashed practicing Catholics would go over now about as well as it would under a Caliphate.
To get to the point, I don't think that the Right is starved for intellectuals because it can't produce any. Rather, the foolish ones who stick their neck out get sidelined or destroyed, while the wise ones hide and bide their time. If Michael Anton's Red Caesar suddenly landed on the Atlantic coast, captured Washington D.C., and declared a new republic, I have no doubt at all that these people would come out of the woodwork and that Caesar would be able to quickly assemble a mighty cabinet. But until then, what sense is there in outing yourself as a counterrevolutionary?
What do you not understand? Do you want me to type of a list of bog standard socialcon talking points? Or are you asking about how we would change things given political power?
If it's the former, my beliefs don't deviate much from what the Catholic church teaches so you there's no mystery. If you ask more specific questions I can try to answer those.
If it's the latter: one of the points I was trying to make in my post is that a lot of us have given up on the current system since all peaceful forms of dissent seem to have been soft-criminalized or co-opted. We are waiting for an Alexander to come along and cut the Gordian knot. There is still action we can take today, though. Some of us are quietly moving to intentional communities and trying to rebuild the community life that was dissolved in the atomization of society so that we will better be able to organize and respond when that day comes, plus it gives our children antibodies to the globohomo zeitgeist (before folks start shrieking about repression -- there's a right way and a wrong way to do it -- my siblings and I are proof that the right way works).
I don't understand the appeal of social conservatism. To me it seems boring and limiting. The men I've known who grew up in socially conservative households and never rebelled tend to be meek, intellectually stagnant personalities who have daddy issues. And the ones who did rebel seem damaged by their upbringings. What is the draw? To be fair, I have a very small sample size for the above!
I mean, I don't like progressives either, but one of the main reasons why I don't like progressives is that psychologically speaking to me they seem much the same as conservatives. Repressive, intellectually stagnant personalities who want to impose their limited worldviews on other people.
"Social conservativism" isn't something that IMO can reasonably be separated from its religious roots. What you said is like saying "I don't understand the appeal of Zen meditation, it's boring and pointless, you just stare in silence at a spot on a blank wall without thinking about anything." If you don't hold any of the metaphysical and supernatural beliefs associated with Zen Buddhism, then yes, staring at a wall doesn't seem like a very fun or useful way to spend your time. If you believe that, as C. S. lewis put it,
then sure, any limitation on behavior is just needlessly robbing someone of pleasure and would have no appeal at all.
I think you need to try harder to put yourself into the shoes of people who have different beliefs than you. If you don't get the appeal of social conservativism in a world where there exist good and evil, where the Holy Family is the role model for behavior, where sex is treated as humanity's participation in divine creation, awful and sacred and ineffably beautiful, then I'm not sure what I could say to help you get into the headspace and imagine what it would be like. Maybe I'm being too harsh, and you've never been exposed to these ideas.
Re. people from socially conservative families being weird and maladjusted, I think that's probably very overstated. The evil, abusive, hypocritical Christian family is a trope in American culture. I think a good analogy would be "American southerners are dumb, loud, toothless rednecks." If you grow up outside the South, your impression of Southerners will be informed by jokes, stock characters, and Hollywood media, and will thus be very negative. If you travel to the South as a tourist, you might be surprised at how similar to the rest of the country it is, how everyone knows how to read and wears shoes outside and is more or less polite and amiable. And then you might pull up at a gas station and see a two guys in a beat up pickup truck, blasting country, one with a half empty beer can in his hand, arm lazily hanging out the window, while his buddy, sporting a confederate flag jacket, loudly carries on a conversation with him that would make any NPR anchor spit out their coffee. And your subconscious would think "Aha! So they're like that after all" and you'd return to where your from with a ready-at-hand story about how this one time at a gas station in Alabama, you saw living proof of how They Really Are Like That and your mind would conveniently blot out all the perfectly normal people you'd met up to that point.
You've probably met a lot of social conservatives, and an even greater number of people who were raised in socially conservative households. But you wouldn't know it, because most of us are normal ordinary people. The weirdos stand out, but they're not just weird to you, they're weird to us, too.
Nice zinger. If you're here to vent your feelings about conservatives, that's fine, but I don't think there's much I can contribute.
This account has been posting here less than a week, and didn't make it that long before calling randos fascists.
Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
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