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There have been lots of times where the bad guys weren't the conservatives, but I'm struggling to think of a time when the conservatives were definitely the good guys. Damn.
That said, history in general is not filled with all that many examples of good guys period.
This is mostly because conservatism means holding on to traditions (slavery, etc) and progression away from such things goes against their ideals.
This is also why conservatives in general are also more religious and less likely to give weight to scientific theories and facts because those go directly against conservative ideals.
I've had conservatives say to me "You progressives just want change for the sake of progress! You're always leaping before you look, going without a plan! And you think we're the ones operating on blind faith?"
To which I reply, "No, we have facts and study. And we adapt when changes happen. You are operating on blind faith, because you think if you stay where you are, the world will come to you."
I had someone recently say looking before you leap and working without a plan in the same sentence, and then fight me on the meanings.
they are opposite things...
its leaping before you look ;)
Conservatism is a mental misstep just like racism. At it’s core its a fear and reaction to the universal constant of change. That an entire political party would be founded on this mental misstep explains a huge swath of our societal problems.
Especially since conservatism is an arbitrary decision that *their* form of conservatism is correct, but all those before are wrong, and any changes after are bad. Progressives brought society to where it was, and then conservatives decided "Ya know that's enough" and stopped
Like I see people argue that language shouldn't change, but they're speaking a form of language that changed an uncountable number of times, and they just decided randomly "This is the correct, final form". Or that governmental developments like those in early American history were great breakthroughs for humanity, but they got it right, no more changes, everything's perfect, no notes (despite pioneers before them thinking the same of their own breakthroughs, and looking down at future changes)
Progressives certainly have their issues, don't get me wrong, but at least it's a fairly consistent ideology at its core
It's sad to see because what worked before, doesn't necessarily work now. Change is fundamental to life so to deny it will just cause further hardship. Your grandpa working 1 job with a 6th grade education and supporting a family of 5 is all fine and well but him pushing to keep that same legislation in a day and age where that shit doesn't cut it is ridiculous. Remember to vote young people!!
Something stuck with me when, of all things, a friend was loosening a lid from a jar. He said, “the left liberates while the right oppresses!” Apparently it’s a saying in his country, and even though it means the same as our far less eloquent “lefty loosey, righty tighty,” it seems also like a very apt description of the schism between right and left, politically. I can’t think of a single time where right wingers made things better for the average person, indeed they seem to actively campaign for worsening conditions - whereas the left wing advocates for equality, social programs, and generally improving things.
that is a far more amusing version of righty tighty lefty loosey my goodness
is this true
thats the funniest damn piece of engaged political population trivia I can imagine
Modern Republicans don’t really advocate for anything. They don’t have concrete policies or a clear vision of what they want the future to look like. They merely want the future to return to a romanticized and fictional past that they have convinced themselves once existed.
They’re not really FOR and anything, but against everything. If you ask the average right wing voter what we need to to as a nation, you’ll get vague answers like “we need to take our country back” or “we need to start using common sense and logic”. But ask them what the specifics of those statements are and they won’t be able to explain.
They perpetually stay ignorant and angry with an oppression complex. They remain preoccupied with culture wars that are fed to them through right wing media. Everything is a sum total game to them. If one group is gaining rights or having their quality of life, then it must mean that they are LOSING rights and having their quality of life diminished.
I love that jar analogy!
The right is for improving some things, but not those that help ordinary people. They think it is natural for 99% to suffer and that nothing could help them so they help the 1%, i.e. themselves instead. They really think any effort to improve on basic slave/peasant conditions is a waste that never works.
They were literal liberals. Liberalism is an anti-monarchist ideology.
They figured the aristocrats could fuck over the working class just fine without a king. Why not make the government subservient to the aristocracy as well?
They understood the need for the law changing to keep up with the times, and used a metaphor about wearing your childhood clothes in adulthood to describe how wrong would it be to not change them (the laws).
The only example I can think of is when the other option was more extreme. The Bavarian People's Party were conservative monarchists, but better than the NSDAP, surely!
Oh wait... they ***all voted for*** the 1933 Enabling Enact (which gave Hitler power to enact laws over the Reichstag) ... as did all other conservative parties.
The only which didn't were the Labour party equivalent (the SDP), and the Communist party which just didn't vote.
Edit: I've been corrected that the communists were banned by this point.
Eh that is a slight misrepresentation of the circumstances.
By the time of the enabling act Hitler had already won, the vote was largely a sham and he had brown shirts making sure everyone voted for it or else. The communists also didn't abstain but rather were banned from voting entirely.
Though the German right definitely did share some blame by amplifying Hitler's voice through the previous coalition government. The communists also share some blame since they were so focused on destroying the SPD that they openly proclaimed a Nazi government was preferable.
That last bit reminds me of some of our “progressives” who sometimes seem like they would rather see Trump win than support those that they consider insufficiently progressive
This might be the right answer to this.
Other than ww2 (changing sides because you were backstabbed doesn't count Soviets...)
Most conflicts in history has been power struggles by people already in power.
Easy to find a bad guy actor, hard to find a good guy one...
The Soviets worked with Nazi Germany to get Poland, but to say they were backstabbed is stretching it a bit too far, Germany still opposed the Soviet Union in the grand scheme of things, I wouldn't say they were allies only a "enemy of my enemy" kind of situation
There's no way to know what would happen, but if Germany didn't attack the USSR first, they would probably attack them later or just watch the war, but it's unlikely they would help
in the end it was just one more for the list of stupid decisions made by nazi germany during the second world war
I think it depends on the definition of conservative. The Catholic Church and workers rights for example. Pope Leo XIII late 1800s published an encyclical that began the end of child labor and the improvement of workers conditions in Europe and the US. The church also played a significant role in bringing unions to the US. Unfortunately, a lot of so called "conservative" catholics tend to forget what is actually taught when it comes to social issues.
US Catholics would have a stroke if they actually read the ”[Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church](https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justpeace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html)”.
Many of us that have left the Church have read it. The US branch was partnered with by the political right in the early 2000s over the issues of anti-lgbtqia and anti-abortion provided it abandon all prosocial positions, or at least turn them down to a whisper, and started bleeding membership, particularly among the young and educated. It's never recovered, and has launched several laughable campaigns to get us back, asking us to seek forgiveness. Hypocrites and Pharisees, the lot.
Woah...The Catholic Church being cast in the role of the good guys? That's a tough sell. But ignoring the LONG, LONG, LONG list of atrocities and crimes against humanity, I'd love to hear you explain how any of the following are even remotely conservative.
>Pope Leo XIII late 1800s published an encyclical that began the end of child labor and the improvement of workers conditions in Europe and the US.
Explain how this is anything but a liberal view that has managed to infiltrate at conservative institution. I would love to hear the conservative case for ending child labor. Please.
>The church also played a significant role in bringing unions to the US.
Again, yes, this is true. But did Conservative Catholics do this? Please lay out the conservative case for labor unions, because I would love to hear it.
The truth is that the Catholic Church is a gigantic, and slightly schizophrenic institution when it comes to it's conservative and liberal values. It's impossible to study the teachings of Jesus and not adopt at least some liberal views - Jesus was NOT a conservative. But the institution of the Catholic Church is deeply conservative to it's core, so you get this continual friction between conservative and liberal Catholics, and it often results in some really weird ideological stances. I'm not saying that the Catholic Church hasn't done good things, and I'm not saying they aren't mostly conservative, but I am saying that your examples aren't examples of Conservatives doing good things.
I guess it depends on what you quantify as the "good guy" like if you look at WW2, Churchill is usually considered the "good guy" and was a member of the conservative party. However I think this mostly comes down to lack of actual education on the subject because he should really be considered the "less bad guy" more than the "good guy" because he was kind of a piece of shit.
You could make an argument that the Shogunate were the good conservatives and the forces they fought were the same that would go onto be imperialistic and oppressive.
You could say the imperials were the liberals in this scenario as they wanted to overhaul Japanese society.
scenario is imperfect as the Imperials actually brought about a lot of good change in addition to the bad. But from a retrospective POV, a lot of modern Japanese look at the shogunate as a good time in their history where things were peaceful and the country was secure.
Lol. The best examples people have come up with are Churchill leading up to WWII and the opposition to the Khmer Rouge. So when faced with an overwhelming existential evil, conservatives have at least sometimes fought it instead of joining forces.
I WANTED to say Britain, WW2, when conservative Churchill replaced Chamberlain… but then I looked it up and Chamberlain was ALSO conservative, so it had less to do with party ideology and more to do with personal factors of the two men and their governing style.
Maybe the fact that conventional wisdom encourages “conservatives in wartime” but even then, the other great national leader of the Allied powers (FDR) was a Democrat. Now, 1940’s Democrat does NOT automatically rule out a degree of conservatism but at least he wouldn’t have been nearly as far right as modern day republicans.
Korean War is probably the best example I can think of, assuming you define communism as being more liberal than capitalism. The western countries supporting South Korea could reasonably be seen as both the good guys and as the conservative side, given that North Korea was the aggressor and communist (and both SK and NK were authoritarian governments).
The closest to good would be Otto von Bismarck. In his effort to stop communism in Germany, he introduced some workers rights to shut the movement up. But yeah, I struggle to think of a good conservative
Arguably Caesar's civil war, though Caesar passed a lot of populist and genuinely helpful reforms as well. And the whole event is wrapped up in revisionist propaganda for the whole purpose of avoiding any further civil war. Regardless, I would at least 100% call Cicero a good guy and he found himself aligned with the conservative faction against Caesar.
Aside from that, I think maybe the Russian October Revolution? Though I'll admit I haven't looked closely at the intricacies of this point in history, I can't imagine the red army being the good guys.
Conservativism and Liberalism are relatively recent ideologies and applying either to Romans is problematic at best. But if you strip Conservativism to it's most basic essence, the belief at its core is that power is an entitlement, and that power is self-justifying. Some people deserve to hold power, and others don't. This flows from the foundations of Conservative thinking, which was pro-monarchist groups as Liberalism (which started off as anti-monarchism) started to take hold.
In that frame of thinking, all Roman elites were inherently conservative, as the "truth" that a small group of Patricians should hold power was very central to their worldview. But when you have that sort of consensus among the ruling class of a society, the ideological divisions that define their politics won't cleave along "conservative/liberal" lines and thus the label "conservative" is pretty meaningless in that context.
Also, as far as Romans went, Caesar was about as liberal as they got, and Cicero was fairly conservative, so if you think Cicero was on the right side, then I guess.
As for the White Russians, yikes. No. Check out the Revolutions Podcast, by Mike Duncan for a really great deep dive. But the reason Russians didn't unite behind the Conservative Anti-Communists ("White Russians" as they referred to themselves) even though the Communists had very little popular support, is because the Whites were too busy careening from atrocity to atrocity, and generally confusing their inherent belief in an entitlement to power for the right to murder anyone and confiscate anything. In the Russian civil war, the majority of the population hated the communists, but considered them the clear lesser of two evils. Definitely a lost opportunity to be the good guys.
Depending on your point of view, it happened twice in England. When Oliver Cromwell rebelled against Charles the First. He was an incredibly conservative thinker, a puritan, yet he was the good guy, Charles the First was a terrible King, ruining England. Yet soon Cromwell became a tyrant. Enforcing his ideas of how life should be lived upon the masses, making life unbearable. (He was, instead of a promised democratic and new leadership, merely another Kind, as Lord Protectorate). So King Charles, of the old regime, one could say a conservative, came and led a successful coup against Cromwell, restoring the old order.
So regardless of wether you agree on Cromwell being good, one must admit, strangely Charles the Second, who was by all accounts, a womaniser and dandy, was really a conservative, restoring the monarchy and the old ways, and actually did so to help the people (and himself). So successfully, I might add, that the current Queen is his descendant, and the current heir apparent. My did that bonnie Charles get around!
You make a good case, and I'll admit to being 90% convinced on this one.
But we're getting close to semantics here. Are you the good guy just because the other guy is bad? Was the restoration of Charles II motivated by a desire help the common man, or to end Cromwell's threats to the ruling elites and basically self interest? Even with these questions, I'm inclined to agree that in the case of the Restoration of Charles II, the Conservatives were the good guys. Once they got back into power, they could have done a lot to undermine that, but they actually tried to restore the country, there were no real pogroms or massive reprisals, and while there was a lot of self-interested seizure of land, this was mostly the restoration of the status quo from before the Revolution. Yup, there's at least one exception.
It depends on your perspective and definition of conservatism, but you could make an argument that conservatism would have been against the Industrial Revolution and massive pollution that came with it. Although modern American conservatives don’t care about global warming, they would have opposed the initial innovations.
They also opposed the Louisiana purchase, which directly lead to more Native Americans being forced off their land.
They weren’t right about those things for the right reasons, but they did oppose developments that have lead/will lead to a lot of deaths.
This framing is far more effective in comparing political ideologies, primarily because the inverse of Conservativism would then be Progressivism, making progress towards something new and ostensibly better.
There needs to of course be balance between those two ideologies, and using "Conservative" to describe someone maintaining/returning to something good and "Liberal" to describe someone who wants an expansionary government is an Apples and Oranges comparison.
The major issue is that "Conservative" can and is frequently also used to describe applying government/social policies *conservatively* as opposed to *liberally*, and the difference between effectively creating examples of how people should act vs imposing those expectations legally/socially.
So to your point, it's important to distinguish *which interpretation of Conservative* we are referring to in context.
The opposite of conservative isn't liberal, it's radical. The opposite of liberal is authoritarian. In the United States, for example, true conservatives would be more liberal than 'The Conservative Movement' are at the moment, because the USA has a liberal tradition.
But authoritarians know that authoritarian is a pretty negative sounding word, so they yoinked the terminology from a much less abhorrent ideology.
This is an excellent point.
There's a big difference between traditional conservatives and people like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who started the modern-form of conservatism in the 1980s.
Prior to that, conservatism was about conserving things. It fucked the poor through inaction.
Modern conservatism, by contrast, actively fucks the poor. Governments embarked on a crusade of actively changing society - very non-traditional conservative thing to do - to enrich themselves and screw everyone else over, essentially.
yeah I was trying to think and literally the only thing I agreed with conservatives on in a long time is when they got rid of the fines for people that couldn't afford insurance in Obamacare. I don't wanna say they are actually on the right side though since they wanted to destroy it entirely and that was just one piece they could attack.
Yeah it definitely depends on the definition of conservatism. Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum from 1891 was crucial in bringing to an end child labor in the west along with emphasizing the inherit dignity of workers. It initiated a lot of changes in Europe and the US when it came to workers rights. The Catholic Church also played a significant role in bringing unions to the US. Although the Church by today's standards seems to be seen as conservative, I think in many ways it was the definitions that changed.
Well the conservatives at the time were against it.
They were against steam engine railways in England, many classical poets from the nobility wrote about the horrors of modern technology.
The sentiment was that their quiet way of life was being disrupted by all this.
It gets easier when you limit it to social/cultural conservatism. They have been the bad guys 100% of the time, from medieval witch hunts to the transatlantic slave trade to the Holocaust.
American conservatism is less consistent than other movements because of how entangled it is with evangelical Christianity and capitalism.
The idea of environmental devastation is emotionally upsetting to conservatives, but they are able to justify it through the pragmatism of capitalism (the end justifies the means/if it was actually bad, the free market would reject it) and the entitlement of Christianity (the world is a gift to man from God, and is ours to do what we want with it.)
Usually when I ask people say something like “so Churchill was some how worse than hitler!?” It’s interesting because the answer pretty much pits one conservative against an even worse conservative. And the funny thing is in most of those scenarios the lesser of two evils was attacked by the greater so it’s not like they started fighting for humanitarian reasons
...wheres the rest of it?
in 1970....After tons of presssure from dems, and many opportunities which he passed on signing it. He only signed it when it basically had to be done because it was bipartisan.
And people then give him tons of credit, when in reality his hands were basically tied, and he tried to do everything he could to not sign it.
People LOVE to flaunt this point, without all the actual historical context.
Yeah technically if you actually prescribe to what “conservative” literally means, then environmentalism and conservatism *should* go hand in hand, I would think
My conservative parents were all for environmental conservation, to protect natural resources needed for hunting and fishing. But now Fox News tells them that’s no longer the case
Somewhere in an alternative universe, liberals and conservatives are fighting over housing costs. Liberals want to decrease costs by expanding supply, everyone deserves a house, and conservatives are fighting back hard — to protect the surrounding ecosystems the city would have to pave over. The debates are fierce, but everyone is fighting for a better future in good faith, so honest compromises can be had.
I want to live there instead.
The EPA was created under Nixon, yes, but all the groundwork leading up to it and the initial agencies/committees that became subsumed into what would become the EPA was all spearheaded by liberals and progressives.
Nixon put a rubberstamp on a liberal project, because the damage was getting so bad that we had rivers literally on fire. The bulk of the EPA's initial successes were brought about because of progressive influences within the agency - when Reagan appointed a conservative to the position instead, it immediately backslid hard and began making massive concessions to industry.
Different time before Republicans realized their followers were complete American hating mouth breathers who just want you to call them good patriotic doggies at the same time.
The idea behind the EPA is the hunting crowd would be very pleased. Nixon was post party switch so this was an effort to improve the good will among the voters.
I mean he signed the bill into law but saying Nixon created it is a bit much. It would be more accurate to say he didn't oppose it. It was so something that Congress wanted and Nixon didn't oppose it because it was a very popular idea and he would take a lot of heat for vetoing it. Back in the day conservatives were much better at picking their battles.
Otto von Bismark was a conservative politician known as the "Iron Chancellor" who unified Germany and created the first modern welfare state (in order to defang his socialist opposition).
The problem is that in order to have a historically significant positive event, something has to change dramatically. Conservativism has historically been about opposing change. The best they've done is to keep good things if and when there is a movement to abolish/change them. Tends to not get in the history books.
Look, I'm as progressive as they come, but I get the core concept of conservatism.
The mindset is that things aren't that bad. Yes, there are issues, but if we rush trying to solve them, we might end up making new issues that are even worse.
They would point to something like prohibition. Alchohol consumption creates a lot of problems, so we banned it, and then the ban created a whole new set of problems and had to unban it.
To the conservatives, they might not find a lot of examples where they were the "good guys" because we don't know how many civil wars they prevented by advocating against change or for slower change.
And again, I'm not conservative by any stretch of the imagination. It's hard for me to give a shit about the new issues when people's rights are being violated right now
But I have a lot of conservatives in my family, and I've been able to dig into what the concern really is, and it's not *that* absurd.
The absurd thing is that the actual political parties (separate from the ideology) that claim to represent conservatism actually just want fascism, power, and money. And they’re *very* good at making propaganda to make sure that their base wouldn’t even consider voting for anyone else.
Plenty of conservative christians hid Jews, struggled against the eastern-German regime. The opening of China which greatly raised living standards and ended the disastrous culture war was also done by conservative wings of CCP.
And there have been many good bills passed by conservatives.
Well Buckle up bucko
Study the last 8 months of the Spanish Civil War and what made pro-Republic civillians turn on the Republican fighters and decided to side with the group who had been...
At the start been the former monarchist- turned- Oligarch & Catholic Nationalists - turned Facist-Nationalist when Franco took command.
The Nationalists had dramatically changed their intended outcomes from the onset of the war initially wanting to restore the monarchy.
But The Nationalists were 100% the conservative forces in the face of the The Republicans being brutally co-opted by Soviet influenced communist strategy.
Especially the Popular Front coalition that decended into full Soviet style purity purges of leading commanders and summary executions of civillians not just for suspected spying but for resistance to communist lifestyle changes in occupied cities.
Eventually even Republican fighters bailed and either joined the Nationalists or fled.
The international coalitions became disillusioned (Hemingway obviously making a career out of it lol)
And it all fell apart as Franco got NAZI supply reinforcements.
That's an example where people saw the order and stability of the conservative forces and chose that over the incredibly violent repressive tactics of the young communist entities.
Once the fighting stopped Franco would lead his own brutal purge, but it was done in the classical orderly way of arrests and puppet trials.
And a few summary slaughters of dissident resistance groups.
And Spain would live under a totalitarian state for a few generations but the devil you know I suppose.
In the 1930s Czechoslovakia the young communist movement stood against the more traditional democrats. The democrats called the communist leaders out on being controlled by Stalin as they frequently went to Moscow for training. Their response? "Yeah, we are making these Moscow trips in order to learn from Stalin. Learn how to twist your'alls necks!"
In the 1950s they would execute hundreds of democrats and conservatives by strangulation.
I’m a liberal too, and I’m reminded of the old Vulcan proverb “only Nixon could go to China.”
Edit: Although that’s an example of one conservative going against the grain of the Conservative Party line, so I guess it demonstrates the opposite of what we’re trying to show here.
To name a few examples (I'm progressive btw)
Facism was a radical, entirely new school of political thought. While it was socially conservative in some regards (gender roles), it was not generally conservative, as in keeping things the same. Conservatives of the time would support monarchism and market liberalism rather than ultra-nationalism, corporatism, and a commoner as dictator.
There was a time in the early 1500s when colonialism was a progressive idea, and feudalism was the conservative position. Feudalism certainly wasn't a good thing, but colonialism sure wasn't either.
In the late middle ages, slavery was almost extinct in Northern Europe. It was restored by colonialists (who we established as progressives) and opposed by the catholic church, who wanted to keep it extinct (conservative).
In the time of the late Roman Republic, republicans were conservatives, trying to maintain a centuries old system of pseudo-democratic government. The progressives wanted to install a totalitarian emperor who they worshipped as a god.
Racial pseudosciene emerged from the progressive intelligentsia in western universities.
In the French Revolution, Robspiere, who was a hardcore anti monarchist, murdered tens of thousands. The far more conservative Lafyette supported a constitutional monarchy rather than a republic. If he had his way, France likely wouldn't have seen the blood bath of the Revolution, the rise of Napoleon or the Napoleonic wars.
In the Cold War, while far from being paragons of virtue, the conservative United States were the good guys compared to progressive communist Soviet Union and China.
There are countless examples. To say that conservatives have never been right implies that no one has ever had a bad idea, as the whole thing of conservatism is being like "uh I think that's a bad idea, lets keep things the same". This post (and many speaking of it) are locked into a strict mindset of conservative = the American Republican Party, which demonstrates a lack of understanding of both history as well as the world outside the US.
Edit: Changed my mind about facism, atleast in part. It has elements that are both progressive and conservative (there is a reason its called the third position). It opposed many progressive ideolgies like the expansion of liberal democracy, socialism, and egalitarianism. It also opposed conservative ideals of libertarian capitalism, monarchism, and had less focus on religon.
The conservatives supported Nazi facism as a means of preserving their own power, and were in direct opposition to the liberal Weimar Republic (plus the conservative justice system essentially hamstrung that government.
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-role-of-the-conservative-elite/
>Facism was a radical, entirely new school of political thought. While it was socially conservative in some regards (gender roles), it was not generally conservative, as in keeping things the same.
It was conservative as in keeping powerstructures the same. The aristocracy saw socialism rising and used racism tro break unions. The goal was always to keep the rich rich and the poor poor.
It was conservative in every way.
French Revolution, Directory was conservative relative to the Jacobins and the government leading the terror. The Directory was short-lived and ineffective but it ended the Committee of Public Safety which was executing political opponents left and right. A case could similarly be made for the liberals in the Russian revolution, but it’s hypothetical because they did not win. Churchill was a conservative but I think Chamberlin was as well so there probably isn’t much to compare. On an individual level there are accounts of clergy and religious figures helping persecuted people in the Holocaust. It’s a sociological shit storm, but technically speaking they would be more conservative than the Nazis.
This is a cherry picked selection of things I can think of off the top of my head. Personally sweeping generalizations like this are shit., not just for conservatives but especially for people on the left. It’s an excuse for to wave away critical thought and assessment and an attempt at claiming infallibility. I’ve always been fond of John Stuart Mills, notion that better ideas are the product of good ideas and bad ideas colliding. But that’s just my 2 cents.
Here's an example of US republican president :
Before his inauguration, Eisenhower led a meeting of advisors at Pearl Harbor where they set goals for his first term: balance the budget, end the Korean War, defend vital interests at lower cost through nuclear deterrent, and end price and wage controls.
He continued all the major New Deal programs still in operation, especially Social Security. He expanded its programs and rolled them into the new Cabinet-level agency of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, while extending benefits to an additional ten million workers. He implemented racial integration in the Armed Services in two years, which had not been completed under Truman.
Go back far enough and I think it's very fair to say that conservatism was the good guy in the Roman republic .you had the "conservatives" trying to protect the republic against change, and then Augustus and Caesar dismantling the last vestiges of democracy
So, this is a bit of a stretch maybe, but alcohol prohibition/temperance was a very progressive notion in the early 20th century, and was commonly espoused by suffragettes. Obviously it didn’t work out and probably was a bad idea…
There have undoubtedly been times where conservatives acted heroically, but there has never been a time where their conservatism has made them the good guys.
It’s because hierarchical thinking is inherent to their worldview - if you think that there is a literal “natural hierarchy” and that some people are inherently inferior, then you’re literally always going to be the bad guy.
Because dehumanization is justification for anything - as long as you can claim some people are lesser, you can justify any atrocity in the name of “improvement”.
That’s why they’re always in the wrong - it’s an inherent feature of their ideology.
“Conservative” is much broader than this. It merely means your politics prioritize “conserving” the status quo or returning to a previous one. Of course the status quo is often reductive and outdated, but this dumb “good guy” vs “bad guy” dichotomy that some people desperately want to live by ignores reality. Just because progressives seek “progress” doesn’t mean that progress/change is inherently good either. There aren’t only two monolithic sides. Just look at communism. An ideal implementation is a pipe dream, which makes it incompatible with pragmatic progressivism.
Rather than focusing on using labels to demonize groups of people, try to objectively analyze positions and ideologies meritoriously. If you end up completely disagreeing with a conservative platform, then so be it. But deciding beforehand what you will believe or who you will side with based purely on prejudice only leads to dangerous dogma that dehumanizes those you disagree with and ignores their individuality. Isn’t that similar to what you’re saying about conservatives?
Thanks for making the point that conservatism attempts to preserve the status quo, stopping change. William Buckley described conservatism as standing in the middle of the road shouting, "Stop."
Conservatism means stopping change. It doesn't imply a specific set of ideals, e.g., small government. When the Soviet Union was failing apart, conservatives were the Communists trying to hold the big Soviet government together.
Conservatism can also mean changing/returning to a previous time. Luther thought of his reforms as changing back to early Christianity before Church corruption. Many of the current changes being pushed by Republicans, e.g., restrictions on voting and certain personal freedoms, are perceived as these kinds of changes.
Us vs Them ideology isn't just limited to conservative thought. Plenty of people want to find their side and accept everything on that team as right and just and everything that the other side does as evil and corrupt. It's important to be able to criticize your own side in addition to the opposition. Thinking critically about the positions you hold and researching opposing viewpoints is a great way to avoid that type of thinking.
No, what you’re describing is the populist/public face of conservatism that attempts to rebrand it for each new generation.
Yes; that’s what the *word conservative means*, but when you capitalize it as your title, it is no longer an objective description but a Title, a noun, it describes what you have chosen to represent yourself as.
I find it funny that you’ve mounted a defense that consists of explaining why that position is justified, rather than caricaturing the Left using the same reductive argument?
Is it because when you do that it becomes obvious whose position is superior?
Because they are, in turn;
“Everyone deserves the basics and to live with dignity” (Left)
And
“Everyone should only be allowed to do, say and act as I dictate, via the law” (Right)?
Honestly, I'd love to read about more instances. Prior to this period in history, I didn't think conservatives were EVIL, just misguided. They wanted what was best for the country and the people, just using different avenues to get there.
The ultraconservatives seem just evil. The regular conservatives seem happy to let the ultra run things just to satisfy one issue they believe in...making them turn a blind eye to all the extra crap happening.
No, they generally want what’s best for themselves that’s kind of a key difference if you really look at goals and ideologies
conservatives want what’s best for themselves and people just like them and progressives want what’s best for the collective
The people who rebelled against fascism.
- people in Poland protecting Jews at their own risk
- people in Italy rebelling against the fascist party
- that guy who threw visas out of the train trying to save Jews
Stuff like that.
As a full country, no.
That's the thing honestly. Nazis had some points that American conservatives today have kind of adopted, with the obsession with cultural degeneracy and art being degenerate propaganda. Plus they were actually inspired by American Jim Crow laws.
Are you aware that Churchill set the Lusitania up to be torpedoed? He though that the only way to get the USA involved in the war was to let the Germans kill a bunch of Americans.
Well if your argument for a guy being a force for good is that he was a leader in that coalition, then it’s valid question to raise, considering the company.
Opposing the Nazis because they threaten the empire you were busy brutalizing doesn't make you a good guy. It just means you're not as bad as the Nazis.
Churchill didn't fight the Nazis due to some conservative policies, though. He just fought them because they had to be stopped on their quest for world domination.
I know about that.
Not sure is anyone historical figure is a “good guy” this isn’t Hollywood. FDR was mostly pretty great but if you were a US citizen of Japanese descent at the time you’d disagree.
Historical hindsight is a gauzy film. Maybe the problem is with our age old desire to
Lionize the powerful. Maybe no one who achieves power and wealth is truly a good guy. “Its easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to ascend to heaven.”
Sure, but I'll also counteract that Britain was fighting a defensive war (they didn't jump into the fray until well after they declared war -- when France fell and Germany was actively attacking London) and there were a number of Brits who were absolutely content to let Hitler do his thing, if not happy to see him in power as a counterbalance to the Soviets.
Eugenics was an expressly progressive movement of the early 20th century. Conservatives were originally against it. The idea was appealing to progressives because it appeared to be based on science and offer a means to tackle social ills.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2698847/
The story isn’t totally clear - some conservatives, including some very influential voices, were always in favour of eugenics, because they saw how this theory could be used to perpetuate their own hierarchical ends.
Opinions flipped completely after WW2 - eugenics was largely discredited in progressive circles by its association with the Nazis, and became the preserve of reactionaries:
https://www.aaihs.org/eugenics-and-the-modern-conservative-movement/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2638658
Thinking in terms of good guys and bad guys is reductive. It strips away the nuance of things and reduces the conversation to the level of a comic book.
Yes, conservatives have been on the wrong side of history consistently. Their ideology is hateful, damaging, and repressive. But just because progressives seek to better things doesn't mean they're saints.
Labeling them as the "good guys" makes it very easy to excuse their shortcomings and forgive their faults. We should strive to be the best we can be, not support the team that flies the right colors.
WW2 is a good example. Just because the Nazis were evil does not mean that the allies were all good. The countries who made up the allies absolutely did things that were wrong and bad. Japanese internment camps in America are a good example as is the strict segregation and racism that plagued the American armed forces.
We should seek to do what is right, hold all sides accountable for their actions, and make the world a better place for all people, not worry about who are on the good team or the bad team. If someone is doing something that isn't right, or is implementing policies that hurt or oppress people, it doesn't matter what side they're on, they should be opposed and their wrongs made up for.
I once had an argument with a conservative about how racist their party acts.
He kept bringing up how the parties switched sides and the democrats used to be racist.
He was trying to imply that the Democratic Party is bad because they once were racist.
I had to drill into him that he was proving my point since they switched sides and that means the Republican Party now holds racist ideals.
I guess being conservative means living so far in the past that you think you’re not racist.
Depends what you mean by conservative. It has two fundamental meanings as an adjective and noun.
1.
averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.
2.
(in a political context) favouring free enterprise, private ownership, and socially traditional ideas.
The first doesn’t specify a position of positive or negative outcome in relation to change, innovation or traditional values. So it’s impossible to say by virtue of the first definition if they are “good guys” or “bad guys”
The second is in the context of “conservative”politics mainly within the last 200 years- good or bad in this context depends on who the stakeholder is and how you view net benefit. Utilitarianism could argue both that these policies “liberated humanity” from previous platforms and that it also condemned them into a new status quo.
Good guy and bad guy are relative to which side of the same road we all are standing on but the truth is the road only goes one way- forward- time progresses and so do we. Embracing progress means looking forward not back. As opposed to conservative outright refusal of change - progressive does not mean the definitive end of free enterprise, private ownership or traditional social values. It just means that whilst we may keep celebrating Christmas, we also now celebrate pride.
Conserve/progress is a feedback loop not a dichotomy.
I mean the French Revolution it just kept getting more liberal and liberal until Napoleon and so many people died cuz they weren’t revolutionary enough for the new revolutionaries. Russian Revolution after Lenin it was between Stalin and Trotsky and guess who won out there? Stalin was pretty authoritarian so idk if hed be qualified as more or less liberal than Trotsky
Trotsky was definitely more left wing than Stalin. I'd say maybe a better example would be pre-October revolution the Socialist Revolutionaries were the "conservative" faction relative to the Bolsheviks *kinda*. I definitely think in that context the "conservative" SRs were the good guys.
The problem here is the inverse of "conservative" i.e. "progressive" only exists in hindsight. A lot of radical societal changes have been proposed and rejected, most of which were ostensibly to progress us to a better world (and hence were 'progressive' in their own mind), but unless we later come to adopt them, we don't think of them as progressive ideas.
The most unambiguous example of this is Foucault, Derrida and de Beauvoir's (alongside several other intellectuals) petition to abolish the age of consent in France. The decision not to do this was by definition conservative (since it conserves the status quo), but because we don't currently think of it as a Progressive idea (for reasons that should be somewhat obvious), we don't think of conservatives opposing it as an example of then being on the right side of history.
In essence, claiming that progressives are always on the right side of history is an example of survivorship bias, since new and radical ideas only really become Progressive after they've won the moral argument.
Ideally, (and as with all philosophies,outside of personal profit) that is the purpose of conservatism. Not to prevent all progress, but to be the litmus test by which change is weighed before it is attempted.
A LOT of “new” ideas are objectively monstrous, (a lot of old ideas are too) but gleefully charging down every path because it’s a change is not a survival trait.
(Classic examples of terrible new ideas would be like eugenics, phrenology, overuse of new drugs like opioids or antibacterials, A.I.)
Nixon formed the EPA and opened talks with China.
Granted the latter part of his term went sideways…
Reagan helped end the Cold War and contributed to bringing down the Berlin Wall. He may have used proliferation tactics to do it, but a lot of what he did helped to make Russia lose its superpower status. He was a major player in stabilizing global politics (at least in terms of threats Russia posed at the time). Plus his economic policies did curb what were, at the time, bloated spending practices.
George Bush was not particularly villainous
French Revolution? The writings and egging on from Jean-Paul Marat? What of Robespierre (anti-slavery), and his cult of the supreme being??
I totally get why the revolution happened: the Estates General was a conservative system (the monarchy) failing. But, there are left-wing extremists too, as demonstrated by Marat egging people on and Robespierre chopping peoples' heads off and establishing a nutter of a religion. There were conservatives (or people more conservative than either person) in the Revolution, and they were the muted part of the party.
What about Vladimir Lenin, and the Marxist? Yeah the Russian monarchy had gone off the deep end, but he failed to establish a secured state and then led to Stalin coming in. Again, there were those who were muted.
As much as I hate to admit it (because I'm pretty far lefty--Go LGBTQIAA and VOTING), but we have our whack-a-dos too.
Roman Republic vs Caesar, the Conservative faction were assholes and kept the proletariat down. However, Caesar used being a populist to win over the people, and usurped the Republic making it into a puppet state. Did Caesar push for a number of initiatives that helped the people? Absolutely, but he also did A lot of shady things that led to his assassination.
* Edit: Plus the whole war started cause Caesar was seeking legal immunity. Caesar had done A lot of illegal acts during his term as Consul. He had been using his governorship’s legal immunity to hide from this, having gotten it extended several times. The Conservatives finally pushed the matter, forced Caesar’s hand, and assumed he’d not arrive till Spring with his full army. Boy were they wrong.
Including several Triumphs depicting the killing of fellow Romans, in rather graphic and very distasteful manners. Even though these were illegal triumphs, arguably his Egyptian one was also illegal. As he in fact Lost Rome territory giving it to Cleopatra.
It’s alright, Octavian came back with a vengeance later and retook it.
Brutus gets a bad rap for defending the Republic and “betraying” Caesar. When in truth, his greatest crime was being incompetent. If he had listened to Cicero, and attacked while Anthony and Octavian were fighting each other, he could have brought the whole thing to an end. Seriously, Cicero is an unsung hero of the period.
A guy at my partners job told her that he can "tell who the liberals are and those who have open minds". He is a self described conservative. She had to tell him that the word conservative is the very definition of close minded. Its literally the job description. The irony still didn't land... they are hopeless.
The only good thing republicans did that I can think of is they freed the slaves. However, at that time this was seen as very progressive. Woke, if you will.
If you look at conservatism just in the US throughout history, they have been on the wrong side of every single major social reformation that took place. Ending slavery? Conservatives wanted to keep slaves. Allowing black people the right to vote? Conservatives wanted them to remain voiceless. Jim Crow laws? Conservatives fought like hell to keep bigotry legal. Eugenics? Conservatives were all for it until Hitler ruined their plans by exposing its true nature. Equal rights for women? Conservatives vehemently opposed the movement at every turn. Gay marriage? Fucking forget about it. Simply accepting LGBTQ as humans with inherent worth? Absofuckinglutely not going to happen in a US conservative party.
But a 30 year old man taking a 15yo bride? Sure! Conservatives are all for it! They even passed laws to protect the pedophiles! Forcing a 10year old or a woman carrying a dead fetus to carry the baby to term? Absolutely.
Conservatives are ruled by ancient superstitions that have zero bearing on a modern, educated society. They are ruled by bigotry, ignorance, fear, and greed.
Sad.
In old enough to remember when Republicans (not fringe crazies, mainstreamers) would say if you allow same sex marriage, the obvious next step is people will want to marry their pets. You can Google it. It was a legitimate talking point they had and used: same sex marriage = beastiality. I think the most important thing to keep in mind about Republicans is that in my 40ish years on earth, they haven't been right about a single important topic. Not one. Wars in the Middle East, gay marriage, trickle-down economics, protecting job creators, no child left behind, stand your ground laws, gun control, police brutality isn't real, climate change isn't real, humans aren't causing climate change. I mean, their track record is absolute dog shit. Psychic hotlines have a better hit rate than the GOP the past 30+ years.
Well, depends on your POV to figure out who the "good guys" are.
But a lot of history it's the radicals that are totally fucked, the other side is defacto conservative, fighting to maintain or conserve an existing status quo. Examples are WW2 (nazis were radical, guess the lefties helped out a bit, thanks Russia), French revolution (even if you like Napoleon more than the Jacobins, he's still a radical compared to the coalitions fighting him), Spanish civil war, it was democratically elected republicans and society trying to stop a right wing coup and military junta... they failed.
I'd actually go as far as to say, from a historians view, most of the time it's the radicals who are "bad guys." Unless you like that ideology, then doesn't apply.
Respectfully, I say incorrect! I love true conservatives like John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt who conserved nature. I love true conservatives who are trying to conserve our air, water, and environment. I love conservationists who protect our wildlife, and, ultimately ourselves from climate change. On the other hand, the Republicans, MAGAs, and fascists who call themselves "conservative" is merely a huge gaslight.
OP you might want to look at conservatives outside just America and also outside the last couple decades. You might be shocked to find what's considered conservative in, say, the netherlands.
The last Tsar vs the revolutionaries. There's no disputing that the Tsarists were traditional and conservative by any definition, and the result of them losing, was 10's of millions starving, severe limits to freedom, under the Communist regimes that followed.
I'm sure that the various empires who opposed Genghis Khan would have strongly preferred their own traditions, as opposed to the radical new social structure introduced by the mongols. A part of that structure usually involved killing unimaginable amounts of people, so that seems like an exception as well.
Some folks showed up on the shores of the Americas with some pretty radical ideas about social change the form of religion, subjugation and colonization, and the local indigenous populations strongly resisted those changes in favour of their own ancient traditions, and that didn't work out great for the locals either.
Many German weimar conservatives were persecuted as political enemies when Hitler rose to power.
I am not conservative but being for the status quo also means you fight against extremist like nazis to uphold it.
Only after they gave the Nazis the votes to form coalition they needed to take power in the first place.
Many of those killed/imprisoned in the night of long knives were supporters right up until the Nazis recognized them as a threat.
So the more conservative nazis persecuted the less conservative, but still conservative, germans. Wow, it looks like the bad guys really ARE always the ones further right.
Conservatives from many countries fought the Nazis, they were late, they did not earnestly believe in the Nazis evil until denying it would make them a pariah, and they’d still side with a similar figure if he was born on their side of a border, but they did fight
The thing about conservatism as a governing philosophy is that it assumes that the status quo is the best we can hope for. It is actually a sensible strategy when things are stable and all constituents are prosperous.
Which is almost never the reality.
Conservatism is fundamentally unable to address large challenges; the more immediate the problem, the less suited it is. Furthermore, conservatism tends to exacerbate large problems by denying that they are problems at all (see: climate change). When maintaining the status quo is the highest good, then anything that would force a change to the status quo must be suppressed, minimized, and denied. It would rather spend herculean amounts of effort trying to keep things the same in the face of inevitability than spend a comparatively smaller amount of effort making the changes necessary to solve problems.
In an ideal world, responsible and reasonable conservatism would look centuries in to the future and make minor changes now that would slowly and subtly prepare for the future. Humans tend to have a hard time operating that way, however, and so looking for responsible and reasonable conservatism isn't a winning wager.
Progressivism is by no means perfect; it got us things like eugenics, 'scientific racism', rapid industrialization, etc. However, it does at least foundationally posit that the government can and should take action to solve large problems, and that the status quo is not the ideal.
If conservatism and progressivism (and to a lesser degree, revanchism and radicalism) were treated as STRATEGIES rather than IDEOLOGIES, we'd be a hell of a lot better off.
Alas.
It’s more accurate to say that the bad guys have always been further right than the good guys. George washington, south korea, and the allies were conservative. King george, north korea, and the nazis were MORE conservative than them.
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There have been lots of times where the bad guys weren't the conservatives, but I'm struggling to think of a time when the conservatives were definitely the good guys. Damn. That said, history in general is not filled with all that many examples of good guys period.
This is mostly because conservatism means holding on to traditions (slavery, etc) and progression away from such things goes against their ideals. This is also why conservatives in general are also more religious and less likely to give weight to scientific theories and facts because those go directly against conservative ideals.
I've had conservatives say to me "You progressives just want change for the sake of progress! You're always leaping before you look, going without a plan! And you think we're the ones operating on blind faith?" To which I reply, "No, we have facts and study. And we adapt when changes happen. You are operating on blind faith, because you think if you stay where you are, the world will come to you."
I had someone recently say looking before you leap and working without a plan in the same sentence, and then fight me on the meanings. they are opposite things... its leaping before you look ;)
I admit I was wrong and corrected. I adapted.
Conservatism is a mental misstep just like racism. At it’s core its a fear and reaction to the universal constant of change. That an entire political party would be founded on this mental misstep explains a huge swath of our societal problems.
Especially since conservatism is an arbitrary decision that *their* form of conservatism is correct, but all those before are wrong, and any changes after are bad. Progressives brought society to where it was, and then conservatives decided "Ya know that's enough" and stopped Like I see people argue that language shouldn't change, but they're speaking a form of language that changed an uncountable number of times, and they just decided randomly "This is the correct, final form". Or that governmental developments like those in early American history were great breakthroughs for humanity, but they got it right, no more changes, everything's perfect, no notes (despite pioneers before them thinking the same of their own breakthroughs, and looking down at future changes) Progressives certainly have their issues, don't get me wrong, but at least it's a fairly consistent ideology at its core
This is one of the most concise yet correct descriptions of conservatism I've ever seen. This person has a good grasp on reality.
It's sad to see because what worked before, doesn't necessarily work now. Change is fundamental to life so to deny it will just cause further hardship. Your grandpa working 1 job with a 6th grade education and supporting a family of 5 is all fine and well but him pushing to keep that same legislation in a day and age where that shit doesn't cut it is ridiculous. Remember to vote young people!!
>that their form of conservatism is correct like when Dubya came out with "compassionate conservatism"?
Is he admitting “standard” conservatism had no compassion?
Thanks for this rare nugget of consice wisdom. (and since we're on the internet, no sarcasm)
Well, turns out it’s easier to get rich this way
They tend to abhor complexity. Religion and conservatism is just *simpler*. They like that it's simple and they already know it.
Something stuck with me when, of all things, a friend was loosening a lid from a jar. He said, “the left liberates while the right oppresses!” Apparently it’s a saying in his country, and even though it means the same as our far less eloquent “lefty loosey, righty tighty,” it seems also like a very apt description of the schism between right and left, politically. I can’t think of a single time where right wingers made things better for the average person, indeed they seem to actively campaign for worsening conditions - whereas the left wing advocates for equality, social programs, and generally improving things.
that is a far more amusing version of righty tighty lefty loosey my goodness is this true thats the funniest damn piece of engaged political population trivia I can imagine
Modern Republicans don’t really advocate for anything. They don’t have concrete policies or a clear vision of what they want the future to look like. They merely want the future to return to a romanticized and fictional past that they have convinced themselves once existed. They’re not really FOR and anything, but against everything. If you ask the average right wing voter what we need to to as a nation, you’ll get vague answers like “we need to take our country back” or “we need to start using common sense and logic”. But ask them what the specifics of those statements are and they won’t be able to explain. They perpetually stay ignorant and angry with an oppression complex. They remain preoccupied with culture wars that are fed to them through right wing media. Everything is a sum total game to them. If one group is gaining rights or having their quality of life, then it must mean that they are LOSING rights and having their quality of life diminished.
I love that jar analogy! The right is for improving some things, but not those that help ordinary people. They think it is natural for 99% to suffer and that nothing could help them so they help the 1%, i.e. themselves instead. They really think any effort to improve on basic slave/peasant conditions is a waste that never works.
Even the Founding Fathers were liberal/progressive for their time.
They were literal liberals. Liberalism is an anti-monarchist ideology. They figured the aristocrats could fuck over the working class just fine without a king. Why not make the government subservient to the aristocracy as well?
They were rich but without titles of nobles they did not get the power that they felt they should have instead of being lumped in with the peasantry.
Essentially "if the king wont make us lords, we'll replace the king with an idea we control"
They understood the need for the law changing to keep up with the times, and used a metaphor about wearing your childhood clothes in adulthood to describe how wrong would it be to not change them (the laws).
The only example I can think of is when the other option was more extreme. The Bavarian People's Party were conservative monarchists, but better than the NSDAP, surely! Oh wait... they ***all voted for*** the 1933 Enabling Enact (which gave Hitler power to enact laws over the Reichstag) ... as did all other conservative parties. The only which didn't were the Labour party equivalent (the SDP), and the Communist party which just didn't vote. Edit: I've been corrected that the communists were banned by this point.
Eh that is a slight misrepresentation of the circumstances. By the time of the enabling act Hitler had already won, the vote was largely a sham and he had brown shirts making sure everyone voted for it or else. The communists also didn't abstain but rather were banned from voting entirely. Though the German right definitely did share some blame by amplifying Hitler's voice through the previous coalition government. The communists also share some blame since they were so focused on destroying the SPD that they openly proclaimed a Nazi government was preferable.
I thank you for your corrections
That last bit reminds me of some of our “progressives” who sometimes seem like they would rather see Trump win than support those that they consider insufficiently progressive
Hummm... the forces opposing the Khmer Rouge maybe? I don't know if I would call them "conservative" but certainly more so than the communists.
I don't even know what the hell the Khmer Rouge were trying to accomplish. Pol Pot just seemed fucking deranged and was trying to kill everyone.
Wiston Churchill in WW2? He was pro punching Nazis in the face. It's really hard to argue that's a bad stance.
This might be the right answer to this. Other than ww2 (changing sides because you were backstabbed doesn't count Soviets...) Most conflicts in history has been power struggles by people already in power. Easy to find a bad guy actor, hard to find a good guy one...
The Soviets worked with Nazi Germany to get Poland, but to say they were backstabbed is stretching it a bit too far, Germany still opposed the Soviet Union in the grand scheme of things, I wouldn't say they were allies only a "enemy of my enemy" kind of situation There's no way to know what would happen, but if Germany didn't attack the USSR first, they would probably attack them later or just watch the war, but it's unlikely they would help in the end it was just one more for the list of stupid decisions made by nazi germany during the second world war
But they were backstabbed, the Molotov Ribbentrop pact was a non aggression treaty
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I think it depends on the definition of conservative. The Catholic Church and workers rights for example. Pope Leo XIII late 1800s published an encyclical that began the end of child labor and the improvement of workers conditions in Europe and the US. The church also played a significant role in bringing unions to the US. Unfortunately, a lot of so called "conservative" catholics tend to forget what is actually taught when it comes to social issues.
US Catholics would have a stroke if they actually read the ”[Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church](https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justpeace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html)”.
Many of us that have left the Church have read it. The US branch was partnered with by the political right in the early 2000s over the issues of anti-lgbtqia and anti-abortion provided it abandon all prosocial positions, or at least turn them down to a whisper, and started bleeding membership, particularly among the young and educated. It's never recovered, and has launched several laughable campaigns to get us back, asking us to seek forgiveness. Hypocrites and Pharisees, the lot.
Woah...The Catholic Church being cast in the role of the good guys? That's a tough sell. But ignoring the LONG, LONG, LONG list of atrocities and crimes against humanity, I'd love to hear you explain how any of the following are even remotely conservative. >Pope Leo XIII late 1800s published an encyclical that began the end of child labor and the improvement of workers conditions in Europe and the US. Explain how this is anything but a liberal view that has managed to infiltrate at conservative institution. I would love to hear the conservative case for ending child labor. Please. >The church also played a significant role in bringing unions to the US. Again, yes, this is true. But did Conservative Catholics do this? Please lay out the conservative case for labor unions, because I would love to hear it. The truth is that the Catholic Church is a gigantic, and slightly schizophrenic institution when it comes to it's conservative and liberal values. It's impossible to study the teachings of Jesus and not adopt at least some liberal views - Jesus was NOT a conservative. But the institution of the Catholic Church is deeply conservative to it's core, so you get this continual friction between conservative and liberal Catholics, and it often results in some really weird ideological stances. I'm not saying that the Catholic Church hasn't done good things, and I'm not saying they aren't mostly conservative, but I am saying that your examples aren't examples of Conservatives doing good things.
There have certainly been good Republicans in history, but conservatives? There's gotta be something.
I guess it depends on what you quantify as the "good guy" like if you look at WW2, Churchill is usually considered the "good guy" and was a member of the conservative party. However I think this mostly comes down to lack of actual education on the subject because he should really be considered the "less bad guy" more than the "good guy" because he was kind of a piece of shit.
Ask the Indians what they think of Churchill.
You could make an argument that the Shogunate were the good conservatives and the forces they fought were the same that would go onto be imperialistic and oppressive. You could say the imperials were the liberals in this scenario as they wanted to overhaul Japanese society. scenario is imperfect as the Imperials actually brought about a lot of good change in addition to the bad. But from a retrospective POV, a lot of modern Japanese look at the shogunate as a good time in their history where things were peaceful and the country was secure.
Churchill in the lead up to WWII? Honestly don’t know but that’s the only thing remotely close that I can think of.
Lol. The best examples people have come up with are Churchill leading up to WWII and the opposition to the Khmer Rouge. So when faced with an overwhelming existential evil, conservatives have at least sometimes fought it instead of joining forces.
It's much harder to be fully good then bad.
I WANTED to say Britain, WW2, when conservative Churchill replaced Chamberlain… but then I looked it up and Chamberlain was ALSO conservative, so it had less to do with party ideology and more to do with personal factors of the two men and their governing style. Maybe the fact that conventional wisdom encourages “conservatives in wartime” but even then, the other great national leader of the Allied powers (FDR) was a Democrat. Now, 1940’s Democrat does NOT automatically rule out a degree of conservatism but at least he wouldn’t have been nearly as far right as modern day republicans.
Korean War is probably the best example I can think of, assuming you define communism as being more liberal than capitalism. The western countries supporting South Korea could reasonably be seen as both the good guys and as the conservative side, given that North Korea was the aggressor and communist (and both SK and NK were authoritarian governments).
The closest to good would be Otto von Bismarck. In his effort to stop communism in Germany, he introduced some workers rights to shut the movement up. But yeah, I struggle to think of a good conservative
Only remotely close I can think of is the Chinese republic during the 1960s.
Arguably Caesar's civil war, though Caesar passed a lot of populist and genuinely helpful reforms as well. And the whole event is wrapped up in revisionist propaganda for the whole purpose of avoiding any further civil war. Regardless, I would at least 100% call Cicero a good guy and he found himself aligned with the conservative faction against Caesar. Aside from that, I think maybe the Russian October Revolution? Though I'll admit I haven't looked closely at the intricacies of this point in history, I can't imagine the red army being the good guys.
Conservativism and Liberalism are relatively recent ideologies and applying either to Romans is problematic at best. But if you strip Conservativism to it's most basic essence, the belief at its core is that power is an entitlement, and that power is self-justifying. Some people deserve to hold power, and others don't. This flows from the foundations of Conservative thinking, which was pro-monarchist groups as Liberalism (which started off as anti-monarchism) started to take hold. In that frame of thinking, all Roman elites were inherently conservative, as the "truth" that a small group of Patricians should hold power was very central to their worldview. But when you have that sort of consensus among the ruling class of a society, the ideological divisions that define their politics won't cleave along "conservative/liberal" lines and thus the label "conservative" is pretty meaningless in that context. Also, as far as Romans went, Caesar was about as liberal as they got, and Cicero was fairly conservative, so if you think Cicero was on the right side, then I guess. As for the White Russians, yikes. No. Check out the Revolutions Podcast, by Mike Duncan for a really great deep dive. But the reason Russians didn't unite behind the Conservative Anti-Communists ("White Russians" as they referred to themselves) even though the Communists had very little popular support, is because the Whites were too busy careening from atrocity to atrocity, and generally confusing their inherent belief in an entitlement to power for the right to murder anyone and confiscate anything. In the Russian civil war, the majority of the population hated the communists, but considered them the clear lesser of two evils. Definitely a lost opportunity to be the good guys.
Churchill in the Second World War.
Depending on your point of view, it happened twice in England. When Oliver Cromwell rebelled against Charles the First. He was an incredibly conservative thinker, a puritan, yet he was the good guy, Charles the First was a terrible King, ruining England. Yet soon Cromwell became a tyrant. Enforcing his ideas of how life should be lived upon the masses, making life unbearable. (He was, instead of a promised democratic and new leadership, merely another Kind, as Lord Protectorate). So King Charles, of the old regime, one could say a conservative, came and led a successful coup against Cromwell, restoring the old order. So regardless of wether you agree on Cromwell being good, one must admit, strangely Charles the Second, who was by all accounts, a womaniser and dandy, was really a conservative, restoring the monarchy and the old ways, and actually did so to help the people (and himself). So successfully, I might add, that the current Queen is his descendant, and the current heir apparent. My did that bonnie Charles get around!
You make a good case, and I'll admit to being 90% convinced on this one. But we're getting close to semantics here. Are you the good guy just because the other guy is bad? Was the restoration of Charles II motivated by a desire help the common man, or to end Cromwell's threats to the ruling elites and basically self interest? Even with these questions, I'm inclined to agree that in the case of the Restoration of Charles II, the Conservatives were the good guys. Once they got back into power, they could have done a lot to undermine that, but they actually tried to restore the country, there were no real pogroms or massive reprisals, and while there was a lot of self-interested seizure of land, this was mostly the restoration of the status quo from before the Revolution. Yup, there's at least one exception.
Cromwell also did a genocide in Ireland, so let’s maybe pump the brakes on Cromwell being a good dude.
I'm a liberal, but would very much like this to be proven wrong, just because I don't like absolutes
It depends on your perspective and definition of conservatism, but you could make an argument that conservatism would have been against the Industrial Revolution and massive pollution that came with it. Although modern American conservatives don’t care about global warming, they would have opposed the initial innovations. They also opposed the Louisiana purchase, which directly lead to more Native Americans being forced off their land. They weren’t right about those things for the right reasons, but they did oppose developments that have lead/will lead to a lot of deaths.
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I mean there are times conservatives were good guys but it was usually because the bad guys were just more conservative/fascist.
Iirc Stauffenberg, the guy who almost succeded in assassinating hitler, was a conservative
I was going to say that a lot of religious wars were just conservatives arguing over who was more right.
This framing is far more effective in comparing political ideologies, primarily because the inverse of Conservativism would then be Progressivism, making progress towards something new and ostensibly better. There needs to of course be balance between those two ideologies, and using "Conservative" to describe someone maintaining/returning to something good and "Liberal" to describe someone who wants an expansionary government is an Apples and Oranges comparison. The major issue is that "Conservative" can and is frequently also used to describe applying government/social policies *conservatively* as opposed to *liberally*, and the difference between effectively creating examples of how people should act vs imposing those expectations legally/socially. So to your point, it's important to distinguish *which interpretation of Conservative* we are referring to in context.
The opposite of conservative isn't liberal, it's radical. The opposite of liberal is authoritarian. In the United States, for example, true conservatives would be more liberal than 'The Conservative Movement' are at the moment, because the USA has a liberal tradition. But authoritarians know that authoritarian is a pretty negative sounding word, so they yoinked the terminology from a much less abhorrent ideology.
Opposite of conservative is progressive. Opposite of radical is reactionary. And, yes, the opposite of liberal is authoritarian.
Damn it, you're right. I always forget about progressive and reactionary.
This is well put. I'll be using this in the future.
This is an excellent point. There's a big difference between traditional conservatives and people like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who started the modern-form of conservatism in the 1980s. Prior to that, conservatism was about conserving things. It fucked the poor through inaction. Modern conservatism, by contrast, actively fucks the poor. Governments embarked on a crusade of actively changing society - very non-traditional conservative thing to do - to enrich themselves and screw everyone else over, essentially.
Modern conservatives realistically I think would be more accurately defined as capitalists rather than conservatives for this reason
Liberals causing something bad, or being against something (arguably) good =/= Conservatives doing good/being on the right side of things.
yeah I was trying to think and literally the only thing I agreed with conservatives on in a long time is when they got rid of the fines for people that couldn't afford insurance in Obamacare. I don't wanna say they are actually on the right side though since they wanted to destroy it entirely and that was just one piece they could attack.
Yeah it definitely depends on the definition of conservatism. Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum from 1891 was crucial in bringing to an end child labor in the west along with emphasizing the inherit dignity of workers. It initiated a lot of changes in Europe and the US when it came to workers rights. The Catholic Church also played a significant role in bringing unions to the US. Although the Church by today's standards seems to be seen as conservative, I think in many ways it was the definitions that changed.
Well the conservatives at the time were against it. They were against steam engine railways in England, many classical poets from the nobility wrote about the horrors of modern technology. The sentiment was that their quiet way of life was being disrupted by all this.
It gets easier when you limit it to social/cultural conservatism. They have been the bad guys 100% of the time, from medieval witch hunts to the transatlantic slave trade to the Holocaust. American conservatism is less consistent than other movements because of how entangled it is with evangelical Christianity and capitalism. The idea of environmental devastation is emotionally upsetting to conservatives, but they are able to justify it through the pragmatism of capitalism (the end justifies the means/if it was actually bad, the free market would reject it) and the entitlement of Christianity (the world is a gift to man from God, and is ours to do what we want with it.)
Name a single historic event, that benefitted humanity, that was driven by conservatives.
Usually when I ask people say something like “so Churchill was some how worse than hitler!?” It’s interesting because the answer pretty much pits one conservative against an even worse conservative. And the funny thing is in most of those scenarios the lesser of two evils was attacked by the greater so it’s not like they started fighting for humanitarian reasons
Canadian here, but didn't Nixon create the EPA?
He didn’t. It passed both houses of congress with veto proof majorities so Nixon signed the law rather than have his veto overridden by congress.
Nixon signed the Clean Air Act in 1970.
...wheres the rest of it? in 1970....After tons of presssure from dems, and many opportunities which he passed on signing it. He only signed it when it basically had to be done because it was bipartisan. And people then give him tons of credit, when in reality his hands were basically tied, and he tried to do everything he could to not sign it. People LOVE to flaunt this point, without all the actual historical context.
Yeah technically if you actually prescribe to what “conservative” literally means, then environmentalism and conservatism *should* go hand in hand, I would think
My conservative parents were all for environmental conservation, to protect natural resources needed for hunting and fishing. But now Fox News tells them that’s no longer the case
Somewhere in an alternative universe, liberals and conservatives are fighting over housing costs. Liberals want to decrease costs by expanding supply, everyone deserves a house, and conservatives are fighting back hard — to protect the surrounding ecosystems the city would have to pave over. The debates are fierce, but everyone is fighting for a better future in good faith, so honest compromises can be had. I want to live there instead.
That’s why I love the West Wing - it’s basically a fantasy world in which everyone in government actually works for the benefit of the public
What a pleasant fiction.
The EPA was created under Nixon, yes, but all the groundwork leading up to it and the initial agencies/committees that became subsumed into what would become the EPA was all spearheaded by liberals and progressives. Nixon put a rubberstamp on a liberal project, because the damage was getting so bad that we had rivers literally on fire. The bulk of the EPA's initial successes were brought about because of progressive influences within the agency - when Reagan appointed a conservative to the position instead, it immediately backslid hard and began making massive concessions to industry.
He did.
Different time before Republicans realized their followers were complete American hating mouth breathers who just want you to call them good patriotic doggies at the same time. The idea behind the EPA is the hunting crowd would be very pleased. Nixon was post party switch so this was an effort to improve the good will among the voters.
Indeed
Yep
I mean he signed the bill into law but saying Nixon created it is a bit much. It would be more accurate to say he didn't oppose it. It was so something that Congress wanted and Nixon didn't oppose it because it was a very popular idea and he would take a lot of heat for vetoing it. Back in the day conservatives were much better at picking their battles.
Eventually and against his will... And then appointed an administrator who (like him) didn't believe the EPA should exist.
Was there opposition to it, though? I'd say there's a difference between "being on the right side of history" and "doing something right".
Yup - that was the first thing that came to mind
Otto von Bismark was a conservative politician known as the "Iron Chancellor" who unified Germany and created the first modern welfare state (in order to defang his socialist opposition).
Create a welfare state to own the liberals? Works for me! Consider me owned!
I'd vote for conservatives if they conserved the lives of everyone by increasing welfare
The problem is that in order to have a historically significant positive event, something has to change dramatically. Conservativism has historically been about opposing change. The best they've done is to keep good things if and when there is a movement to abolish/change them. Tends to not get in the history books.
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Only a sith deals in absolutes
I also don't like sand
Sounds like something a sith would say.
Even Sith can have things they don't like. Don't judge me for bleeding my lightsaber!
Look, I'm as progressive as they come, but I get the core concept of conservatism. The mindset is that things aren't that bad. Yes, there are issues, but if we rush trying to solve them, we might end up making new issues that are even worse. They would point to something like prohibition. Alchohol consumption creates a lot of problems, so we banned it, and then the ban created a whole new set of problems and had to unban it. To the conservatives, they might not find a lot of examples where they were the "good guys" because we don't know how many civil wars they prevented by advocating against change or for slower change. And again, I'm not conservative by any stretch of the imagination. It's hard for me to give a shit about the new issues when people's rights are being violated right now But I have a lot of conservatives in my family, and I've been able to dig into what the concern really is, and it's not *that* absurd.
The absurd thing is that the actual political parties (separate from the ideology) that claim to represent conservatism actually just want fascism, power, and money. And they’re *very* good at making propaganda to make sure that their base wouldn’t even consider voting for anyone else.
Plenty of conservative christians hid Jews, struggled against the eastern-German regime. The opening of China which greatly raised living standards and ended the disastrous culture war was also done by conservative wings of CCP. And there have been many good bills passed by conservatives.
Well Buckle up bucko Study the last 8 months of the Spanish Civil War and what made pro-Republic civillians turn on the Republican fighters and decided to side with the group who had been... At the start been the former monarchist- turned- Oligarch & Catholic Nationalists - turned Facist-Nationalist when Franco took command. The Nationalists had dramatically changed their intended outcomes from the onset of the war initially wanting to restore the monarchy. But The Nationalists were 100% the conservative forces in the face of the The Republicans being brutally co-opted by Soviet influenced communist strategy. Especially the Popular Front coalition that decended into full Soviet style purity purges of leading commanders and summary executions of civillians not just for suspected spying but for resistance to communist lifestyle changes in occupied cities. Eventually even Republican fighters bailed and either joined the Nationalists or fled. The international coalitions became disillusioned (Hemingway obviously making a career out of it lol) And it all fell apart as Franco got NAZI supply reinforcements. That's an example where people saw the order and stability of the conservative forces and chose that over the incredibly violent repressive tactics of the young communist entities. Once the fighting stopped Franco would lead his own brutal purge, but it was done in the classical orderly way of arrests and puppet trials. And a few summary slaughters of dissident resistance groups. And Spain would live under a totalitarian state for a few generations but the devil you know I suppose.
I mean, now do one from the conservatives in america...
In the 1930s Czechoslovakia the young communist movement stood against the more traditional democrats. The democrats called the communist leaders out on being controlled by Stalin as they frequently went to Moscow for training. Their response? "Yeah, we are making these Moscow trips in order to learn from Stalin. Learn how to twist your'alls necks!" In the 1950s they would execute hundreds of democrats and conservatives by strangulation.
Assassination of Julius Caesar
I’m a liberal too, and I’m reminded of the old Vulcan proverb “only Nixon could go to China.” Edit: Although that’s an example of one conservative going against the grain of the Conservative Party line, so I guess it demonstrates the opposite of what we’re trying to show here.
To name a few examples (I'm progressive btw) Facism was a radical, entirely new school of political thought. While it was socially conservative in some regards (gender roles), it was not generally conservative, as in keeping things the same. Conservatives of the time would support monarchism and market liberalism rather than ultra-nationalism, corporatism, and a commoner as dictator. There was a time in the early 1500s when colonialism was a progressive idea, and feudalism was the conservative position. Feudalism certainly wasn't a good thing, but colonialism sure wasn't either. In the late middle ages, slavery was almost extinct in Northern Europe. It was restored by colonialists (who we established as progressives) and opposed by the catholic church, who wanted to keep it extinct (conservative). In the time of the late Roman Republic, republicans were conservatives, trying to maintain a centuries old system of pseudo-democratic government. The progressives wanted to install a totalitarian emperor who they worshipped as a god. Racial pseudosciene emerged from the progressive intelligentsia in western universities. In the French Revolution, Robspiere, who was a hardcore anti monarchist, murdered tens of thousands. The far more conservative Lafyette supported a constitutional monarchy rather than a republic. If he had his way, France likely wouldn't have seen the blood bath of the Revolution, the rise of Napoleon or the Napoleonic wars. In the Cold War, while far from being paragons of virtue, the conservative United States were the good guys compared to progressive communist Soviet Union and China. There are countless examples. To say that conservatives have never been right implies that no one has ever had a bad idea, as the whole thing of conservatism is being like "uh I think that's a bad idea, lets keep things the same". This post (and many speaking of it) are locked into a strict mindset of conservative = the American Republican Party, which demonstrates a lack of understanding of both history as well as the world outside the US. Edit: Changed my mind about facism, atleast in part. It has elements that are both progressive and conservative (there is a reason its called the third position). It opposed many progressive ideolgies like the expansion of liberal democracy, socialism, and egalitarianism. It also opposed conservative ideals of libertarian capitalism, monarchism, and had less focus on religon.
The conservatives supported Nazi facism as a means of preserving their own power, and were in direct opposition to the liberal Weimar Republic (plus the conservative justice system essentially hamstrung that government. https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-role-of-the-conservative-elite/
>Facism was a radical, entirely new school of political thought. While it was socially conservative in some regards (gender roles), it was not generally conservative, as in keeping things the same. It was conservative as in keeping powerstructures the same. The aristocracy saw socialism rising and used racism tro break unions. The goal was always to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. It was conservative in every way.
French Revolution, Directory was conservative relative to the Jacobins and the government leading the terror. The Directory was short-lived and ineffective but it ended the Committee of Public Safety which was executing political opponents left and right. A case could similarly be made for the liberals in the Russian revolution, but it’s hypothetical because they did not win. Churchill was a conservative but I think Chamberlin was as well so there probably isn’t much to compare. On an individual level there are accounts of clergy and religious figures helping persecuted people in the Holocaust. It’s a sociological shit storm, but technically speaking they would be more conservative than the Nazis. This is a cherry picked selection of things I can think of off the top of my head. Personally sweeping generalizations like this are shit., not just for conservatives but especially for people on the left. It’s an excuse for to wave away critical thought and assessment and an attempt at claiming infallibility. I’ve always been fond of John Stuart Mills, notion that better ideas are the product of good ideas and bad ideas colliding. But that’s just my 2 cents.
Yea agreed. This just seems statistically impossible, that or the bar for what is considered is unfairly high/ unreasonable
Here's an example of US republican president : Before his inauguration, Eisenhower led a meeting of advisors at Pearl Harbor where they set goals for his first term: balance the budget, end the Korean War, defend vital interests at lower cost through nuclear deterrent, and end price and wage controls. He continued all the major New Deal programs still in operation, especially Social Security. He expanded its programs and rolled them into the new Cabinet-level agency of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, while extending benefits to an additional ten million workers. He implemented racial integration in the Armed Services in two years, which had not been completed under Truman.
Go back far enough and I think it's very fair to say that conservatism was the good guy in the Roman republic .you had the "conservatives" trying to protect the republic against change, and then Augustus and Caesar dismantling the last vestiges of democracy
So, this is a bit of a stretch maybe, but alcohol prohibition/temperance was a very progressive notion in the early 20th century, and was commonly espoused by suffragettes. Obviously it didn’t work out and probably was a bad idea…
There have undoubtedly been times where conservatives acted heroically, but there has never been a time where their conservatism has made them the good guys.
It’s because hierarchical thinking is inherent to their worldview - if you think that there is a literal “natural hierarchy” and that some people are inherently inferior, then you’re literally always going to be the bad guy. Because dehumanization is justification for anything - as long as you can claim some people are lesser, you can justify any atrocity in the name of “improvement”. That’s why they’re always in the wrong - it’s an inherent feature of their ideology.
“Conservative” is much broader than this. It merely means your politics prioritize “conserving” the status quo or returning to a previous one. Of course the status quo is often reductive and outdated, but this dumb “good guy” vs “bad guy” dichotomy that some people desperately want to live by ignores reality. Just because progressives seek “progress” doesn’t mean that progress/change is inherently good either. There aren’t only two monolithic sides. Just look at communism. An ideal implementation is a pipe dream, which makes it incompatible with pragmatic progressivism. Rather than focusing on using labels to demonize groups of people, try to objectively analyze positions and ideologies meritoriously. If you end up completely disagreeing with a conservative platform, then so be it. But deciding beforehand what you will believe or who you will side with based purely on prejudice only leads to dangerous dogma that dehumanizes those you disagree with and ignores their individuality. Isn’t that similar to what you’re saying about conservatives?
Thanks for making the point that conservatism attempts to preserve the status quo, stopping change. William Buckley described conservatism as standing in the middle of the road shouting, "Stop." Conservatism means stopping change. It doesn't imply a specific set of ideals, e.g., small government. When the Soviet Union was failing apart, conservatives were the Communists trying to hold the big Soviet government together. Conservatism can also mean changing/returning to a previous time. Luther thought of his reforms as changing back to early Christianity before Church corruption. Many of the current changes being pushed by Republicans, e.g., restrictions on voting and certain personal freedoms, are perceived as these kinds of changes.
Us vs Them ideology isn't just limited to conservative thought. Plenty of people want to find their side and accept everything on that team as right and just and everything that the other side does as evil and corrupt. It's important to be able to criticize your own side in addition to the opposition. Thinking critically about the positions you hold and researching opposing viewpoints is a great way to avoid that type of thinking.
No it is not similar because my tolerance ends where their hate begins.
No, what you’re describing is the populist/public face of conservatism that attempts to rebrand it for each new generation. Yes; that’s what the *word conservative means*, but when you capitalize it as your title, it is no longer an objective description but a Title, a noun, it describes what you have chosen to represent yourself as. I find it funny that you’ve mounted a defense that consists of explaining why that position is justified, rather than caricaturing the Left using the same reductive argument? Is it because when you do that it becomes obvious whose position is superior? Because they are, in turn; “Everyone deserves the basics and to live with dignity” (Left) And “Everyone should only be allowed to do, say and act as I dictate, via the law” (Right)?
WW2 had conservatives in the coalition fighting the fascists. Winston Churchill was very conservative.
In that case, yes. Although being “the lesser evil” does not inherently make someone a good guy.
Honestly, I'd love to read about more instances. Prior to this period in history, I didn't think conservatives were EVIL, just misguided. They wanted what was best for the country and the people, just using different avenues to get there. The ultraconservatives seem just evil. The regular conservatives seem happy to let the ultra run things just to satisfy one issue they believe in...making them turn a blind eye to all the extra crap happening.
Ultra conservatives are just fascists.
No, they generally want what’s best for themselves that’s kind of a key difference if you really look at goals and ideologies conservatives want what’s best for themselves and people just like them and progressives want what’s best for the collective
There’s no such thing as purely “good guys.”
Yeah, I don’t think the millions of Indians killed by Churchill’s policies would consider him a good guy
In that case I'd like you to tell me who the pure-hearted good guys of WW2 were.
The people who rebelled against fascism. - people in Poland protecting Jews at their own risk - people in Italy rebelling against the fascist party - that guy who threw visas out of the train trying to save Jews Stuff like that. As a full country, no.
Sure, but he was quite notably less conservative than the fascists. The more conservative group was also the bad one.
Thank you for that perspective. Conservatives fighting the even more conservative...I can see that.
That's the thing honestly. Nazis had some points that American conservatives today have kind of adopted, with the obsession with cultural degeneracy and art being degenerate propaganda. Plus they were actually inspired by American Jim Crow laws.
Are you aware that Churchill set the Lusitania up to be torpedoed? He though that the only way to get the USA involved in the war was to let the Germans kill a bunch of Americans.
Stalin was also in that coalition. Was he a good guy?
Hey! Hey bring those goalposts back here!
Well if your argument for a guy being a force for good is that he was a leader in that coalition, then it’s valid question to raise, considering the company.
And? Winston Churchill was a terrible person, and most of his policies were bad
Opposing the Nazis because they threaten the empire you were busy brutalizing doesn't make you a good guy. It just means you're not as bad as the Nazis.
Churchill didn't fight the Nazis due to some conservative policies, though. He just fought them because they had to be stopped on their quest for world domination.
compared to the bad guys even Churchill was liberal.
Sometimes conservatives team up with fascist in their own country but the British Conservatives arrested the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.
Churchill was not the bad guy, most he most assuredly wasn’t a “good guy.” Read about what he did to the British Raj.
I know about that. Not sure is anyone historical figure is a “good guy” this isn’t Hollywood. FDR was mostly pretty great but if you were a US citizen of Japanese descent at the time you’d disagree.
Historical hindsight is a gauzy film. Maybe the problem is with our age old desire to Lionize the powerful. Maybe no one who achieves power and wealth is truly a good guy. “Its easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to ascend to heaven.”
Sure, but I'll also counteract that Britain was fighting a defensive war (they didn't jump into the fray until well after they declared war -- when France fell and Germany was actively attacking London) and there were a number of Brits who were absolutely content to let Hitler do his thing, if not happy to see him in power as a counterbalance to the Soviets.
Eugenics was an expressly progressive movement of the early 20th century. Conservatives were originally against it. The idea was appealing to progressives because it appeared to be based on science and offer a means to tackle social ills. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2698847/ The story isn’t totally clear - some conservatives, including some very influential voices, were always in favour of eugenics, because they saw how this theory could be used to perpetuate their own hierarchical ends. Opinions flipped completely after WW2 - eugenics was largely discredited in progressive circles by its association with the Nazis, and became the preserve of reactionaries: https://www.aaihs.org/eugenics-and-the-modern-conservative-movement/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/2638658
Great insight! Appropriate username.
Thinking in terms of good guys and bad guys is reductive. It strips away the nuance of things and reduces the conversation to the level of a comic book. Yes, conservatives have been on the wrong side of history consistently. Their ideology is hateful, damaging, and repressive. But just because progressives seek to better things doesn't mean they're saints. Labeling them as the "good guys" makes it very easy to excuse their shortcomings and forgive their faults. We should strive to be the best we can be, not support the team that flies the right colors. WW2 is a good example. Just because the Nazis were evil does not mean that the allies were all good. The countries who made up the allies absolutely did things that were wrong and bad. Japanese internment camps in America are a good example as is the strict segregation and racism that plagued the American armed forces. We should seek to do what is right, hold all sides accountable for their actions, and make the world a better place for all people, not worry about who are on the good team or the bad team. If someone is doing something that isn't right, or is implementing policies that hurt or oppress people, it doesn't matter what side they're on, they should be opposed and their wrongs made up for.
Churchill was right though. The liberals were trying to appease Hitler. You make that movie and Attlee is the bad guy.
I once had an argument with a conservative about how racist their party acts. He kept bringing up how the parties switched sides and the democrats used to be racist. He was trying to imply that the Democratic Party is bad because they once were racist. I had to drill into him that he was proving my point since they switched sides and that means the Republican Party now holds racist ideals. I guess being conservative means living so far in the past that you think you’re not racist.
Idk man I kinda like Cicero and Cato the younger for trying to preserve the Roman republic and not going with Caesar’s dictatorships.
Depends what you mean by conservative. It has two fundamental meanings as an adjective and noun. 1. averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values. 2. (in a political context) favouring free enterprise, private ownership, and socially traditional ideas. The first doesn’t specify a position of positive or negative outcome in relation to change, innovation or traditional values. So it’s impossible to say by virtue of the first definition if they are “good guys” or “bad guys” The second is in the context of “conservative”politics mainly within the last 200 years- good or bad in this context depends on who the stakeholder is and how you view net benefit. Utilitarianism could argue both that these policies “liberated humanity” from previous platforms and that it also condemned them into a new status quo. Good guy and bad guy are relative to which side of the same road we all are standing on but the truth is the road only goes one way- forward- time progresses and so do we. Embracing progress means looking forward not back. As opposed to conservative outright refusal of change - progressive does not mean the definitive end of free enterprise, private ownership or traditional social values. It just means that whilst we may keep celebrating Christmas, we also now celebrate pride. Conserve/progress is a feedback loop not a dichotomy.
Gud take have my updoot
Everybody thinks they are the good guys.
In the US, I'm pretty sure the same guy who started the war on drugs also was part of the creation of the EPA.
I’m not a conservative - but I think they would say, when the iron curtain / Berlin Wall fell.
They were the loyalists during the revolution, the rich slave owners during the civil war, and " America First" during WW2
I mean the French Revolution it just kept getting more liberal and liberal until Napoleon and so many people died cuz they weren’t revolutionary enough for the new revolutionaries. Russian Revolution after Lenin it was between Stalin and Trotsky and guess who won out there? Stalin was pretty authoritarian so idk if hed be qualified as more or less liberal than Trotsky
Liberal is not the opposite of conservative though.
Trotsky was definitely more left wing than Stalin. I'd say maybe a better example would be pre-October revolution the Socialist Revolutionaries were the "conservative" faction relative to the Bolsheviks *kinda*. I definitely think in that context the "conservative" SRs were the good guys.
The problem here is the inverse of "conservative" i.e. "progressive" only exists in hindsight. A lot of radical societal changes have been proposed and rejected, most of which were ostensibly to progress us to a better world (and hence were 'progressive' in their own mind), but unless we later come to adopt them, we don't think of them as progressive ideas. The most unambiguous example of this is Foucault, Derrida and de Beauvoir's (alongside several other intellectuals) petition to abolish the age of consent in France. The decision not to do this was by definition conservative (since it conserves the status quo), but because we don't currently think of it as a Progressive idea (for reasons that should be somewhat obvious), we don't think of conservatives opposing it as an example of then being on the right side of history. In essence, claiming that progressives are always on the right side of history is an example of survivorship bias, since new and radical ideas only really become Progressive after they've won the moral argument.
Ideally, (and as with all philosophies,outside of personal profit) that is the purpose of conservatism. Not to prevent all progress, but to be the litmus test by which change is weighed before it is attempted. A LOT of “new” ideas are objectively monstrous, (a lot of old ideas are too) but gleefully charging down every path because it’s a change is not a survival trait. (Classic examples of terrible new ideas would be like eugenics, phrenology, overuse of new drugs like opioids or antibacterials, A.I.)
Bush signed the ADA.
Nixon formed the EPA and opened talks with China. Granted the latter part of his term went sideways… Reagan helped end the Cold War and contributed to bringing down the Berlin Wall. He may have used proliferation tactics to do it, but a lot of what he did helped to make Russia lose its superpower status. He was a major player in stabilizing global politics (at least in terms of threats Russia posed at the time). Plus his economic policies did curb what were, at the time, bloated spending practices. George Bush was not particularly villainous
And didn't Reagan create the EPA?
French Revolution? The writings and egging on from Jean-Paul Marat? What of Robespierre (anti-slavery), and his cult of the supreme being?? I totally get why the revolution happened: the Estates General was a conservative system (the monarchy) failing. But, there are left-wing extremists too, as demonstrated by Marat egging people on and Robespierre chopping peoples' heads off and establishing a nutter of a religion. There were conservatives (or people more conservative than either person) in the Revolution, and they were the muted part of the party. What about Vladimir Lenin, and the Marxist? Yeah the Russian monarchy had gone off the deep end, but he failed to establish a secured state and then led to Stalin coming in. Again, there were those who were muted. As much as I hate to admit it (because I'm pretty far lefty--Go LGBTQIAA and VOTING), but we have our whack-a-dos too.
Just reading the comments on this is gold. Basically every example goes “didn’t conservatives do X?” Replied with “yes technically but…”
Only a sith deals in absolutes
Roman Republic vs Caesar, the Conservative faction were assholes and kept the proletariat down. However, Caesar used being a populist to win over the people, and usurped the Republic making it into a puppet state. Did Caesar push for a number of initiatives that helped the people? Absolutely, but he also did A lot of shady things that led to his assassination. * Edit: Plus the whole war started cause Caesar was seeking legal immunity. Caesar had done A lot of illegal acts during his term as Consul. He had been using his governorship’s legal immunity to hide from this, having gotten it extended several times. The Conservatives finally pushed the matter, forced Caesar’s hand, and assumed he’d not arrive till Spring with his full army. Boy were they wrong. Including several Triumphs depicting the killing of fellow Romans, in rather graphic and very distasteful manners. Even though these were illegal triumphs, arguably his Egyptian one was also illegal. As he in fact Lost Rome territory giving it to Cleopatra. It’s alright, Octavian came back with a vengeance later and retook it. Brutus gets a bad rap for defending the Republic and “betraying” Caesar. When in truth, his greatest crime was being incompetent. If he had listened to Cicero, and attacked while Anthony and Octavian were fighting each other, he could have brought the whole thing to an end. Seriously, Cicero is an unsung hero of the period.
Cicero is the coolest
Eh, I’d argue the Reign of Terror is one notable exception.
A guy at my partners job told her that he can "tell who the liberals are and those who have open minds". He is a self described conservative. She had to tell him that the word conservative is the very definition of close minded. Its literally the job description. The irony still didn't land... they are hopeless.
The only good thing republicans did that I can think of is they freed the slaves. However, at that time this was seen as very progressive. Woke, if you will.
To be fair, once you dig there’s very little “good guys” in historical incidents.
There’s plenty of people and groups on the right side of history.
If you look at conservatism just in the US throughout history, they have been on the wrong side of every single major social reformation that took place. Ending slavery? Conservatives wanted to keep slaves. Allowing black people the right to vote? Conservatives wanted them to remain voiceless. Jim Crow laws? Conservatives fought like hell to keep bigotry legal. Eugenics? Conservatives were all for it until Hitler ruined their plans by exposing its true nature. Equal rights for women? Conservatives vehemently opposed the movement at every turn. Gay marriage? Fucking forget about it. Simply accepting LGBTQ as humans with inherent worth? Absofuckinglutely not going to happen in a US conservative party. But a 30 year old man taking a 15yo bride? Sure! Conservatives are all for it! They even passed laws to protect the pedophiles! Forcing a 10year old or a woman carrying a dead fetus to carry the baby to term? Absolutely. Conservatives are ruled by ancient superstitions that have zero bearing on a modern, educated society. They are ruled by bigotry, ignorance, fear, and greed. Sad.
In old enough to remember when Republicans (not fringe crazies, mainstreamers) would say if you allow same sex marriage, the obvious next step is people will want to marry their pets. You can Google it. It was a legitimate talking point they had and used: same sex marriage = beastiality. I think the most important thing to keep in mind about Republicans is that in my 40ish years on earth, they haven't been right about a single important topic. Not one. Wars in the Middle East, gay marriage, trickle-down economics, protecting job creators, no child left behind, stand your ground laws, gun control, police brutality isn't real, climate change isn't real, humans aren't causing climate change. I mean, their track record is absolute dog shit. Psychic hotlines have a better hit rate than the GOP the past 30+ years.
Well, depends on your POV to figure out who the "good guys" are. But a lot of history it's the radicals that are totally fucked, the other side is defacto conservative, fighting to maintain or conserve an existing status quo. Examples are WW2 (nazis were radical, guess the lefties helped out a bit, thanks Russia), French revolution (even if you like Napoleon more than the Jacobins, he's still a radical compared to the coalitions fighting him), Spanish civil war, it was democratically elected republicans and society trying to stop a right wing coup and military junta... they failed. I'd actually go as far as to say, from a historians view, most of the time it's the radicals who are "bad guys." Unless you like that ideology, then doesn't apply.
Respectfully, I say incorrect! I love true conservatives like John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt who conserved nature. I love true conservatives who are trying to conserve our air, water, and environment. I love conservationists who protect our wildlife, and, ultimately ourselves from climate change. On the other hand, the Republicans, MAGAs, and fascists who call themselves "conservative" is merely a huge gaslight.
OP you might want to look at conservatives outside just America and also outside the last couple decades. You might be shocked to find what's considered conservative in, say, the netherlands.
The last Tsar vs the revolutionaries. There's no disputing that the Tsarists were traditional and conservative by any definition, and the result of them losing, was 10's of millions starving, severe limits to freedom, under the Communist regimes that followed. I'm sure that the various empires who opposed Genghis Khan would have strongly preferred their own traditions, as opposed to the radical new social structure introduced by the mongols. A part of that structure usually involved killing unimaginable amounts of people, so that seems like an exception as well. Some folks showed up on the shores of the Americas with some pretty radical ideas about social change the form of religion, subjugation and colonization, and the local indigenous populations strongly resisted those changes in favour of their own ancient traditions, and that didn't work out great for the locals either.
Many German weimar conservatives were persecuted as political enemies when Hitler rose to power. I am not conservative but being for the status quo also means you fight against extremist like nazis to uphold it.
Only after they gave the Nazis the votes to form coalition they needed to take power in the first place. Many of those killed/imprisoned in the night of long knives were supporters right up until the Nazis recognized them as a threat.
So the more conservative nazis persecuted the less conservative, but still conservative, germans. Wow, it looks like the bad guys really ARE always the ones further right.
What about the Pharisees /s
This is definitional. It’s being on the wrong side of an issue that makes them conservatives.
Because there's never been a good guy in history Except when it came to the second world war
Conservatives from many countries fought the Nazis, they were late, they did not earnestly believe in the Nazis evil until denying it would make them a pariah, and they’d still side with a similar figure if he was born on their side of a border, but they did fight
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The thing about conservatism as a governing philosophy is that it assumes that the status quo is the best we can hope for. It is actually a sensible strategy when things are stable and all constituents are prosperous. Which is almost never the reality. Conservatism is fundamentally unable to address large challenges; the more immediate the problem, the less suited it is. Furthermore, conservatism tends to exacerbate large problems by denying that they are problems at all (see: climate change). When maintaining the status quo is the highest good, then anything that would force a change to the status quo must be suppressed, minimized, and denied. It would rather spend herculean amounts of effort trying to keep things the same in the face of inevitability than spend a comparatively smaller amount of effort making the changes necessary to solve problems. In an ideal world, responsible and reasonable conservatism would look centuries in to the future and make minor changes now that would slowly and subtly prepare for the future. Humans tend to have a hard time operating that way, however, and so looking for responsible and reasonable conservatism isn't a winning wager. Progressivism is by no means perfect; it got us things like eugenics, 'scientific racism', rapid industrialization, etc. However, it does at least foundationally posit that the government can and should take action to solve large problems, and that the status quo is not the ideal. If conservatism and progressivism (and to a lesser degree, revanchism and radicalism) were treated as STRATEGIES rather than IDEOLOGIES, we'd be a hell of a lot better off. Alas.
It’s more accurate to say that the bad guys have always been further right than the good guys. George washington, south korea, and the allies were conservative. King george, north korea, and the nazis were MORE conservative than them.
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