The Democrats Are Now America’s Conservative Party
The Democrats Are Now America’s Conservative Party
Liberals find themselves in the strange position of having won most of their major battles of this century.
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This article has a very weird definition of the word "conservative."
It argues that Democrats working to restore reproductive rights to women is a conservative value, because it's trying to return to the Roe v. Wade detente that existed prior to this Supreme Court. But that ignores the entire history of the conflict, which is that conservatives, traditionalists, and the Religious Right fought long and hard to undo women's access to reproductive rights... against liberals. Now that they've succeeded, they're not suddenly liberals and Democrats are not suddenly conservatives. These words mean something other than pro-status-quo and anti-status-quo, which this author seems to ... not know I guess?
And even if you were somehow to say "Republicans are anti-status-quo and Democrats are pro-status-quo," in what sense are Democrats protecting the current abortion status quo? Improving women's access to reproductive healthcare is an explicit Democrat goal.
You can use exactly the same framing to claim that Democrats are conservative about LGBTQ+ rights because they fight hard to protect and expand existing LGBTQ+ protections. But that's not politically conservative; that's still a liberal goal.
Anyway, strange framing, Atlantic!
The missing nut graf was "The GOP is nostalgic for the antebellum South; Democrats are nostalgic for 2016."
The point stands that both parties are focused on the rear view, which is pretty much textbook "conservative," regardless of how the term has been intentionally co-opted.
Even that definition is myopic. The Dems only want to return to 2016 in the same way I want to return to 1933 when minimum wage was actually valuable. It's not a focus on the past when your actions wouldn't change even if the past wasn't there.
I've been thinking about the difference between conservatism in general and what is Conservatism in the United States with a capital C. The ethos of conservatism in general is to depend on established systems and to be risk averse, and this is a great summary of the behavior of the Democratic party for the last few years. Capital C American Conservatism as it exists in the US is a radical right wing movement which opposes liberalism fundamentally, which is composed of democracy and capitalism. Although Capitalists prefer what is to the right of them than to the left of them, Fascism and Feudalism are to the right of capitalism which will allow anything in the interest of profit good and bad. Fascism and Feudalism are much more restrictive than capitalists, and will oppose "woke business" whenever it opposes traditional right wing values. The contemporary capital C Conservative movement in the United States opposes even the Enlightenment values of the Founding Fathers (who were themselves slave-holding capitalists) in favor of a more traditional feudal structure which is venerated by Fascism. DeSantis is the leading figure of the far right in the US, and does not wish to revert the US to a prior state, but to revert the US to a system which existed prior to the United States in the interest of traditional values which are centuries old. One of the key components of fascism is to mythologize the past and contend to "return" to the ideal which never actually existed. This is the ethos of the capital C Conservative movement which does not seek to conserve but to enact a far-right system similar to what existed pre-enlightenement.
Liberalism is a conservative, pro-capitalist ideology
Even if that's true, that is totally not what the article is saying.
You mean you read the article before replying about it???
Sorry, I know that's not Internet etiquette!