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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.
Not sure about that. David Stove was a socially conservative philosopher. Many of the sharper defenders of social conservativism, e.g. Fitzgerald-Stephen and de Maistre, did so using arguments that weren't religious; Fitzgerald-Stephen's criticism of Mill's social liberalism was brilliant exactly because they were both utilitarians. One of the most successful books in the US culture war, The Closing of the American Mind, was written by Allan Bloom, a secular Jew, and the book's critique of liberal academia does not rely on a single religious premise. (You might say that Bloom was not conservative in his own life, but he'd probably joke that he was so reactionary that he'd gone past Christianity and all the way to Classical Athenian homosexuality.)
You've come across one of the many weak spots in my knowledge. I've read "The Closing of the American Mind" though I have read Fitzgerald-Stephen and de Maistre. I've always dismissed non-religious proponents of social conservativism as head-in-the-clouds idealists.
That said, what I meant by the above is that I don't think attempts to completely separate them succeed. They seem to want people to behave according to rules that only makes sense if there is a God so that society can reap the benefits of a pious populace. They run into a similar problem as did 20th century communists -- they ignored the inherent selfishness in the heart of every man. Traditional morality has to be underwritten by God to be taken seriously, or at least by a God-Like totalitarian state, in the Bolshevik case. They were part the laughing, jeering crowd confronted by Nietzsche's Madman, and are now having second thoughts and are frantically trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong if there are particular works that address the paragraph above. I'd be very interested in reading them since as I mentioned I am not terribly familiar with the work around this perspective.
I don't follow. Are you saying that social liberalism/progessivism is more successful with secular people because it is better at appealing to their selfishness? I.e. that it lacks a "pie in the sky when you die" incentive to be socially conservative?
Because it's not clear to me that social liberalism/progressivism have success by appealing to people's selfish wants. If they only appeal to gay people, drug dealers, or psychopaths, then sure, but they don't. The average straight white American male liberal does not stand to benefit from DEI, gay marriage, drug liberalisation etc. (Maybe a little from the latter.) You could argue that it appeals to people based on the idea that societies that are socially liberal/progressive are happier, but I doubt that you think that this is true, so the issue would be people's ignorance rather than their selfishness.
If anything, the success of social liberalism/progressivism often seems to come from (a) appealing to people's benevolence and (b) elevating benevolence to the status of the sole moral virtue. It's a kind of moral appeal, albeit one to a monomaniacal system in which universal compassion is the sole moral criterion.
I suppose that that's one way to put it. But I don't think there's much of an active appeal to selfish, it's more that very few demands are made of people at all. You can live the life of a pig and demand the same respect given to a Socrates, because who are you to judge? Ad aren't we all owed a certain level of dignity simply by being born human?
Subscribing to the dominant creed has always brought advantages. You will not be harassed by the ruling class or their lackeys, you will be allowed into polite society, you will potentially have access to good jobs, you will be thought of as an upright and morally good person. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the power and status that you stand to receive are valued highly by certain personalities.
Partially, but also a lot of fear and control of the narrative. I remember hearing people openly discussing how homosexuality was immoral and how gay marriage was an unconscionable oxymoron in the 90s and early 2000s. Now those conversations rarely ever happen, not because the anti-gay marriage side was discredited, but because the war for the feelings of America was won by the pro-gay marriage side through propaganda and shaming. Many of the people who opposed gay marriage 20 years ago still oppose it, only they now no longer dare express their opinion to anyone other than close confidants because it's unfashionable and it carries the risk of social ostracization or worse. And so, the younger generations grow up not knowing that an anti-gay marriage position exists and simply believes that the way things are now is "normal," and Social Progressivism wins another victory.
So you think that modern liberalism/progressivism isn't demanding and judgemental? It seems the opposite to me.
So even selfish people can follow moral constraints out of fear, a desire for social approval, and social incentives?
It "coerces to freedom" as Ryzard Legutko put it. You can live how you like, as long as it's not "discriminatory" and doesn't imply that some ways of living are better than others. You can choose any color of Model T you want, as long as it's black. You will not be judged for your choice of indulgence, but you will be judged harshly for questioning whether it is right to indulge.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Why would not be possible to simultaneously be selfish and do something out of fear? Can you speak more plainly?
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