I Am a Conservative
I am a conservative. I love my country, I like people who wave American flags, and yes, I do think America has done more good for the world than any other nation in history. That doesn’t mean we’re perfect, but it does mean we’re the primary reason the free world still exists after WW1, WW2, and the Cold War. We’ve also done the unpleasant, dirty work it took to keep the world free since then and all we’ve gotten in return is complaints, critics who never do anything saying they would have done it better, and billions of ungrateful people whining about us even as they enjoy our aid, protection and the security we provide at the cost of American blood and treasure.
I believe the Founding Fathers were ten times smarter than any politician we have today, and the Constitution was the greatest document created by humankind. If only everyone felt that way and insisted we stick to it, half the problems we have in our country wouldn’t exist, while most of the other ones would disappear if we shrunk our government and got our spending under control.
I don’t know everything, but I do know that if you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country, and if we ever lose our 2nd Amendment rights, bad guys sent by the government will show up soon after and force us to do things at gunpoint we’d shoot them for if we still had our weapons.
You always hear liberals accusing people like me of hating everybody under the sun. Supposedly, people like me hate black people, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Women, and gays. You name them and liberals say we hate them. The truth is that the last person I hated was Osama bin Laden, and he’s dead now, which I think is a good thing.
I don’t even hate liberals, but I do think it’s funny when they tell everyone to look out for tyranny and fascism because the only tyranny and fascism I see in America is them. People like me are tyrants? I’d like to get rid of half the government, balance the budget, and have DC leave us the hell alone. That isn’t tyranny. Tyranny is censorship, big government, high taxes, and a bunch of angry weirdos telling us men are women and that we don’t get to enforce the immigration laws on the books, even though we won the election.
I don’t think wanting an honest media, transparent elections, or requesting that people enter our country legally is a big ask. It also pisses me off to see people who weren’t even born in this country, coming here, getting citizenship, and then getting on welfare, waving foreign flags, or somehow being elected to office and explaining how we need to do things more like they did in the sh*tty countries they fled to come here. If our country is welcoming you as a citizen, the least you can do is show some respect to the country that took you in.
Speaking of respect, stop blocking the roads for your dumb protests, rioting in the streets, and calling it peaceful, or pretending like police and ICE agents that are just doing their jobs are the problem, instead of the people acting like lunatics around them. You don’t have the right to burn down cities, loot businesses, and attack people you don’t like. Peacefully protest all you like, but none of that is peacefully protesting, and a lot of us are disgusted by the people pretending that it is.
I like guns, pretty women, and I believe in God. I think soldiers, cops, and ICE agents do a hundred times more to make America work than political activists, protesters, and media personalities. While I also don’t have any beef with celebrities having political opinions just like everyone else, I’m not sure why I’m supposed to take their opinions seriously because they’re good at pretending to be other people on the big screen. That doesn’t give you any special insight into anything other than how to memorize scripts, whose ass to kiss in Hollywood, and the best places to hire illegal aliens to do your gardening.
Let me also add that whatever problems we have in America, very few of them are being caused by straight, white, law-abiding, tax-paying, Christian conservative men who just want to be left alone. If you’re blaming people like us for your problems, you should be looking in the mirror to find the real culprit. Along similar lines, I don’t want to hear what a victim you are, how oppressed you’ve been, or how hard you’ve got it if you live in America. If that’s you, you’re one of the luckiest people on earth, and despite all your whining, you know it because you’re not moving.
Last but not least, like a lot of conservatives, I’m tired. I’m tired of being lied about 24x7. I’m tired of the most hateful, vicious, nasty people in our society claiming that people like me secretly are just as horrible as they are openly. I’m tired of the endless, never-ending double standards that are applied to every situation, all day long, in politics in America. I’m tired of politicians with personal security releasing criminals, Democrats that have been mismanaging black communities for decades blaming us for problems we have nothing to do with, and I’m tired of being told we’re supposed to have endless compassion for perverted men who want to be in locker rooms with women, illegal aliens who willingly broke our laws knowing that the penalty was deportation, and disgusting Democrats who encourage violent nutcases to try to kill people like me and then pretend to not know exactly what they’re doing.
All I want to do is pay my own way, be left alone, and enjoy living in the greatest country that has ever existed in human history without having the government tax me into oblivion, censor me, or steal my freedoms. That shouldn’t be considered a lot to ask for.
Well, here’s what I believe.
I’m not a conservative, but I believe a lot of things that overlap with conservatism. Certain things have always been true about human beings, are still true, and will always be true, till the Second Coming. Here are a few of them.
I believe that deep down, talkin’ genetically hard-coded here, every man wants to be Genghis Khan and every woman wants to be Genghis Khan’s favorite concubine.
I believe that it will be left to America’s successor nation to have an honest conversation about race in America. We’re too close to it and it’s a raw, bleeding wound for us anyway.
I believe that society is an illusion and the best we can hope for is that we don’t slaughter each other en masse over something TRIVIAL.
I believe that the malapropism "The price of liberty is eternal vigilantism" is closer to the truth than many of us are comfortable with.
I believe that hatred and anger are more respectable emotions than sadness and despair, because they provide the energy necessary to fix the problem. Or at least to not let it get away scot-free.
I believe that if the automobile had predated John Locke, driving might be a civil right today.
I believe that national economies are superior to globalism, which enriches those at the very top and impoverishes everyone else.
I believe that if the old ways don’t work, or don’t work anymore, fuck ‘em.
I believe that conservatives are fools for wading into the no-holds-barred bloodsport of politics with visions of civility and the moral high ground dancing in their heads, because Marquess of Queensbury rules don’t work on an opponent determined to win using MMA.
I believe that having a fiduciary duty to your stockholders doesn’t give you the right to send 30,000 of your countrymen's jobs to India & China, nuking the economies of a dozen counties in three states in the process.
I believe that protesting and advocacy are not honorable occupations.
Agree. Yes, you are conservative. So am I. Being conservative means being a libertarian. My tilt is libertarian paternalism. I think that is exactly what the founders meant to leave us all with. What we have done instead is drifted to collectivist matriarchism. I also do not hate liberals, but we cannot talk to them. We cannot negotiate with them. They are not people that we can every have a good faith relationship with. We can only tolerate them while we keep making sure, they never rise up to positions of power and influence.
Frankly, I see liberal vs conservative and to some degree Democrat vs Republican as a great personality-type filtering where the left is more individual dysfunctional and thus more in need of care services and the right has a great inventory of personality traits that enable their greater self-sufficiency and self-determination. I think is as simple as that.
For example, with the Meyer Briggs Type Indicator - a common personality categorization tool,
https://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/the-16-mbti-personality-types/
Intuition (N) vs. Sensing (S): The strongest predictor. Intuitive types are nearly four times more likely to be Democrats (79%) than Republicans (21%). They focus on abstract, progressive ideas, whereas Sensing types focus on facts and traditional, established methods.
Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F): Thinking types may align with conservative fiscal policies, while Feeling types often align with liberal social policies focusing on harmony and fairness.
Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P): High conscientiousness (linked to Judging) is associated with a preference for order and, consequently, conservative values.
Females: ISFJ is often cited as the most common female type, followed by other types with a strong "Feeling" component, such as ESFJ and ENFP.
Males: ISTJ and ESTJ are frequently reported as common, with a higher prevalence of Thinking (T) types overall.
I think the old Democrat vs Republican was more labor vs business and crossed personality type lines. But over time, especially as females advanced to dominate socio economic positions and females tend to fit into the personality type that more often identifies as liberal or Democrat.
We are actually from Mars and Venus. We will never see eye to eye. We will never connect with the same values because liberals rely on feelings, intuition and perception (even though they claim all the expert basis for their views, they are experts that have their same malady) and that isn't something that conservatives can ever accept.
Haidt pointed out that conservatives have a broad moral diet to work with, while liberals fixate exclusively on care/harm. Liberals are also more apt to participate in egoism... and thus the primary care and harm filter, despite their virtue signaling about victims' groups, is for themselves.
Liberals are just more selfish and greedier and are prone to emotional dysregulation. I don't hate them; I just want them to get the hell out of the way of real progress and get some cognitive behavior therapy.