Well that lasted a whole minute.
Lol.
I just think it's going to take more than talking nice about conservatism to bring people back.
Hey, I'm not sure that I claimed that this was a panacea, lol.
The wedge isn't going anywhere. I'm just questioning why one side should be the one to bridge the gap while the other drags us further into extremism in service of a demogague.
Because that's what people who are committed to healing do. It's a
personal responsibility - you can't just load it all on to the other side and stay in your own little aggrieved box, screaming 'it's all
their fault!'. The gap will be bridged by acts of mature leadership and courage on
both sides.
So are you just saying that centrism is where it's at? Because I would agree (I consider myself center-left). But so far, conservatism at least in the US has led us to this point. I have a lot of respect for those few conservatives who don't blindly support an authoritarian. But it's very rare. I don't know how we get back to that. You seem to think focusing on what was good about conservatism can achieve that. I don't know that it would be enough to bring them back from the brink. Because that is where the majority of conservatives in this country want to be, and right wing media outlets will continue to further alienate them from reality and radicalize them. You rehabilitate someone suffering consequences of their actions. I don't know that rehabilitation applies here.
No, not centrism as a political position exactly. I'm not advocating here for some kind of Clinton/Blair Third Wayism, I'm talking about a re-cultivating a deeper civic commitment to the centre space of compromise.
'The Centre' is
where we all live, but it's not where our opinions have to be. It just represents the shared space that we create through our political processes, and I think the difficulty of understanding this distinction speaks somewhat to the state we're in (at least in the US) - people have forgotten what a comittment to the social contract
feels like.
But no, not really. It is of course true that both forces are present in every person to varying degrees, and it is honest to acknowledge that, but never equally. Proudly declaring that to be the case would just be dishonest. If such a people would exist,they would be stuck, unable to make decisions. It wouldn't exist for very long.
It would also render the terms meaningless. Now I'm actually for that, cause I believe we should be discussing policies instead.
See above.
It wouldn't render the terms meaningless, because like you intimate it's true that we can be 'progressive' about some policies and 'conservative' about others, and if people weren't hoovered into one camp or another they'd be able to explore that more freely.
it's a ploy to maintain the status quo, and that always goes against the best interests of the society.
I'm not sure this makes much sense at all. 'Stability' or 'status quo' is often like good parenting - we establish a set of rules by which the child then learns to navigate the world, and changing these rules overmuch is a form of abuse; it becomes an arbitrary use of power.
In the same way, some form of 'status quo' is necessary for people to be able to make proper, informed decisions about their lives and plan accordingly.
Tradition, ritual, customs, culture, heritage, folklore, ghost stories, and folk music are all conservatism.
Christmas is conservatism.
Cooking a dish the way your mother did it, and the way her mother did it, is conservatism.
Meeting up with friends every Labor Day weekend to play tag football is conservatism.
Museums full of Renaissance paintings are conservatism.
Preserving the Pyramids in Egypt is conservatism.
Exactly.
Why?
You are correct of course that the term is semantically speaking quite tame and unremarkable. But you also know that people deal more in connotations than semantics. Because of that I believe that confronting that feeling inside either leads to time wasting endeavors like 'ban bossy' and 'reclaim the word slut', or to the creation of new terms... like your oikophilia. We could just sidestep it, and discuss policies.
The trouble is that the term conservatism has become so loaded with political overtones that it's impossible to have a discussion about it that isn't contaminated with unconditional value judgements.
OK, so here's the thing about this semantic/linguistic evolution argument...
There seems to be the belief that we're just subject to these 'natural' patterns of linguistic evolution, and that they can't be directed, guided, or otherwise influenced by our own choices. That we simply must 'accept' the new connotations and symbolic associations that words accrete over time. First of all, this isn't true, and second of all the 'connotations' are
precisely why a 'rehabilitative' effort like this has any measure of power to heal the rifts that divide us.
Polarisation is a process of categorisation, whereby symbols are progressively hoovered into one camp or another. In the 'social balance theory' of Fritz Heider
et al, the major principle of action here is essentially individuals attempting to avoid congnitive dissonances invoked by liking things that their enemies like, or disliking things their allies like, and it's worth noting that, very often, there's nothing 'essential' about why a symbol/thing should belong to one category or the other.
Take NASCAR, for example, or pick-up trucks... there's no reason why a 'pick-up truck' necessarily has to be symbolically associated with 'the right', and yet people will accept the polarisation and act accordingly to either adopt or avoid the symbol as to their taste... except in cases where people realise that it's just a useful kind of vehicle for particular tasks and so use it anyway.
In other words, we have a bunch of symbols here dividing us (and really pick-up trucks are an innocuous example) that have no reason to be.
Part of the 'work' of 'depolarisation' is in deconstructing these symbolic complexes and shearing them of their divisive power. 'Conservative' simply happens to be a particularly potent example, highly tribalised. When we bring this term into ourselves (or 'progressive', for the other side, however it might be), we simultaneously bring along all of its accreted symbolic associations. When this gap is bridged, and the symbol makes its transit from one side to the other, it is,
almost automatically, shorn of its false connotations, like passing through a sieve, and in doing that, you've managed to achieve some actual, real
depolarisation.
This is necessary because the problem is not just political, of course; the whole culture has been polarising for a while, and it doesn't need to be. The American tribes are entrenching and becoming increasingly dissimilar on a whole range of fronts.
Now thankfully, ironically, the very processes of polarisation itself as they occur in representative democracies presents us with a functional mechanism through which to achieve this very 'depolarisation': leadership.
Because the symbolic associations of the whole clique tend to attach to a central, symbolic figurehead (in the US, a president or presidential candidate for his or her party), that individual has enormous control and influence of the very sate of these symbolic associations themselves. He can entrench or retrench them at will (Trump), or detrench them with the same directiveness (McCain).
Biden is now, or will be, in this position to pass the symbols that divide us 'through the sieve'. Imagine a speech (by Biden) that goes something like this:
'
I am a proud conservative. [examples: church? family?]. I am also a proud progressive. [examples: race relations?]. I believe that there is no shame in either of these approaches to politics, and nor should we, as Americans. If you are a Democrat, you should be able to look over at your conservative neighbour and know that his conservatism is just as noble as your progressivism... [&c.]'
It's possible. It's been done. Nelson Mandela, upon achieving power, is one example, and in fact the poor leadership we've seen in South Africa recently is a counterexample of what happens when politicians invest in polarisation rather than trying to deconstruct it for the sake of the common good.
There is perhaps something Hegelian about what I'm saying here, but nonetheless it works, and has worked many times before. It simply takes mature leaders committed to more transcendent values... and for individuals to be committed to the same cause.
@Lady Jolanda I think this process might actually be similar if not the same as what you said about 'rendering the terms meaningless'.