Jabin said:
Very good discussion. However, aren't you in fact doing the same thing that you criticize conservatives of doing? You say that they should have a vision but have failed to articulate that vision.
What, precisely, do you think that vision would look like? Please provide 3-5 bullet points of specifics, such as specific legislation.
That's a fair criticism, and I will commit to elaborating on a vision but in a new topic at another time. Don't want it buried in or to derail this thread. Plus I'm not done tearing down conservatives yet.
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And not all change is good. If I have worked to get my house exactly like I want it, changing it simply for the sake of change is not "visionary".
Conservatives have articulated visions, but the left has blocked or tried to block them each step of the way. For example, conservatives have said that welfare in principle is fine, but the way it is applied needs reform. Liberals have fought any change whatsoever to welfare, even running ads showing Ryan, of all people, pushing a grandmother in a wheelchair off a cliff.
Principles don't matter much if you don't have the agency to act upon them. And if an ideology does not produce enough power to have agency, it'll just die, deservedly.
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Finally, you say:Quote:
Liberals didn't gain control of every institution in the country without intelligence and vision.
You are either exaggerating or simply dead wrong. Liberals don't control every institution in the country. They don't control the Supreme Court, will not control the House after Jan. 5, only regained control of the White House 2 years ago, and control the Senate only by the thinnest of majorities.
A slight exaggeration maybe. Conservative justices on the Supreme Court are pretty centrist in my view. They wouldn't hear a word about any of the election challenges raised by Republicans in 2020. And was the right really in control of the White House during Trump's term? Seemed to be hamstrung and co-opted very quickly. And the Congressional leadership under McConnell and McCarthy is pathetic. They won't give us anything we actually want.
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The liberal "vision" that you seem to love is more correctly described as a pack of lies. And if they're not lies, they are simply promises to an uninformed electorate of free stuff, i.e., the "bread and circuses" that the elites promised the masses in Rome 2000 years ago.
True conservatives, by definition, are incapable of participating in a campaign of lies to gain political power.
In response to this, I'll just leave you with a quote for now that perhaps we could agree on:
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The terms 'Right' and 'Left' are relative and historically contingent. Because of this they often get used to mean contradictory things and this causes a lot of confusion in political discourse. So I will propose a simple re-definition of the binary for us to embrace from our perspective as the 'Dissident Right' or more aptly the 'Radical Right' - basically as people who identify with a sense that we are the real Right with the view that the conventional/nominal Right is really just diet Left.
This is my proposal - the Right is an organic concept of sociopolitical order, the Left is an artificial concept of sociological order.
For us the nation should define the state, for the Left the state defines the nation. For us the family's teleological end defines gender/sexual norms, for the Left the family should be redefined to accommodate sexual liberation. For us duties to the community's wellbeing define citizenship, for the Left citizenship is defined as a bundle of liberties.
People have played around with labels like 'Third Positionism' to distinguish ourselves from the conservative notion of the Right, but conservatism has degenerated so much that I believe it's rhetorically more powerful to deny them the label all together and claim it for ourselves.
