Is There ANYTHING Trump Could do that MAGA Voters Wouldn't Support or Tolerate?

No.

Case in point, his latest comment on opening up Alcatraz. Literally, the dumbest idea in the world, one that would cost millions and still not be as secure as the Max Facility in Colorado.

Cue dumbass rationalizations in 3. . . 2. . . 1. . . .

 

If you really wanted to have this discussion you could have left out the troll poll.

 

agreed. Cut the poll please

 

Start appointing liberal judges? Increase taxes? Do business regulations? Ban crypto and insider trading? I can think of lots of things. But as long as he remains the pure expression of the conservative id, the answer is obviously no.

 

No. They are with him no matter what. Should be obvious by now. #notacult

 

Why? Actually, No. 4 almost perfectly sums up MAGA's view of politics. . . and the world in general.

 

He's the farthest thing from a conservative. He can call himself a "conservative" all he wants, but there is literally NOTHING about MAGA that's conservative. Rabble Rouser? Yes. Absolutely.

Sorry, but tearing everything down with a baseball bat is the farthest thing from conservative.

 

He is the conservative in its purest form as Trilling proposed:

 

Whatever.

Conservatives = Bad

Dude, you're almost as myopic as "they" are.

 

Some I assume are good people, but their ideas, if you can call them such, are not. They are bad! I think what confuses to many people is that people have hijacked the word "liberal" to mean left-wing. If you subscribe to the liberal pluralism as a matter of principle, you are a liberal. Conservatives dont give a shit about that unless they can use it to defend hierarchies and privilege. They will abandon liberalism or any idea as soon as it can not be used to defend hierarchy, power and privilege. There's a reason these bozos call you a lib dude, thats how they see the world. Conservatives and reactionaries dont have any principles other than their own bigotries and selfishness. You are not gonna to shame them by calling them hypocritical, hypocrisy requires having principles to be violated.

 

Again, just as they misuse the word liberal to describe their enemies, they misuse conservative to describe themselves. That conservatism would seek to preserve hierarchies in the face of radicalism seeking to tear them down is just natural order of things. But again, these people aren't conservatives. Real conservatives would have them rounded up and shot them given their threat to the current order, hierarchies, etc.

And they can call me whatever their four brain cells want to call me. They're brain-dead stupid and I couldn't care less what they think about anything.

 

That's just it, a "meritocratic" society is a threat to hierarchies, so are autonomous women who can provide for themselves, or upwardly mobile black people, or workers with say at the workplace. Its no coincidence that the hierarchies that they say are natural are the ones that exist right now, that's the only permanence to their ideology. Like I said, they abandoned liberal pluralism the minute those things threatened their precious white supremacy and barefoot and pregnant woman. That's all there is to it. Whatever gloss they put on it was all to get the buy in of people with actual liberal values. They can get just as mad about targeted small business loans to minorities as they can burning down a police station, its a threat to what they believe either way.

 

I'm not buying the hyperbole and I don't think the people you are describing are conservative. If merit is truly the only thing that matters, then none of those factors about women and black people should matter. That it does is not "conservative" it's just stupid and oftentimes cynical and self serving.

 

There are different flavors of the same thing, you can only "conserve" the present, and the present is always changing, despite the best efforts of those people. The reactionaries want to bring back some old, lost order, so they become counter-revolutionaries. I would imagine a lot of conservatives would simply be content not to see black people and women get too powerful so their shitty sons get into good schools and dont care the slightest about recreating a 19th century manufacturing economy. Some are very interested in that, a little different sort of cat. But more or less aligned in common purpose, the 19th century economy kept women and black people down too!

 

I think we are again up against the issue of who gets to decide what is or isn’t a conservative. By the definition you’ve provided, Trump would likely fit, but I think as CHF has suggested, this can’t be the only option for what is a conservative.

I have recently read a few books from self-described conservatives, including David Brooks, Arthur Brooks, Jonah Goldberg and Yuval Levin. Each of these guys is pulling their hair out watching this Trumpian takeover.

David Brooks has been writing weekly columns regarding the dangers that Trump is posing, including this piece calling for a movement against him. Opinion | What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.

Arthur Brooks has written an entire book about why pluralism is the only way forward. Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt - Book - Faculty & Research - Harvard Business School

Goldberg, who once wrote a book called Liberal Fascism, said at the time he was convinced that fascism could not take hold within conservatism, and has now said he was wrong.

Levin has criticized Trump’s actions as lacking any ability to improve institutions, instead being blindly destructive of them.

This approach is characteristic of how the Trump administration has taken on its work so far in this new term. It is evident in controversies over USAID, civil-service reforms, and more. In each case, there is room for serious change, but the administration has chosen an approach that leaves no room for conciliation and adjustment, and so for durable improvement.
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Yuval Levin: The deeper question raised by the NIH grant overhaul


What are we supposed to do with people like these? Say they aren’t conservative? Or deny they have ideas? If you read a book of Levin’s, perhaps the nerdiest of this group, you may not agree with it, but I don’t think you could rightly say it lacks ideas. So we are left back at the beginning, wondering who gets to decide what is a conservative? And if has any ideas? And if they are any good?

 

I'd be content to have George HW Bush back. You know, someone who actually gives a shit and actually has the experience to know what the hell they're talking about. That New World Order stuff we mocked him about? He was seeing this shit in the future and trying to come up with some kind of a plan post-Cold War. . . . and we mocked him for it. So, you know, I guess we get what we deserve.

 

They’ve shown time and time again that don’t care what he does and will defend him, as long as he “owns da libbies”

 

I think people are conflating "conservatives" (a much longer tradition) with the conservative spectrum of the liberal tradition ... of course conservatives predate liberalism, and will postdate it too if it runs it course. I also think there are a lot of liberals who dont want to be known as liberals, kinda like how libertarians dont want to be known as conservatives. A guy like Klemens von Metternich who opposed liberal revolutions belongs to the conservative tradition just as much as your guy Hayek, perhaps more so, since Hayek was an advocate of 'liberal' economics. But I would concede that you could make the same case for the word "liberal" ... but I dont think there are any people calling themselves liberals that dont subscribe to the liberalism of the enlightenment. Even Marxism is part of the liberal tradition, and accepts the same general truths, like the idea of human progress, etc. I think conservatives have moved beyond liberalism, it has no use for them anymore. Perhaps they see the future more clearly, or maybe they are just delusional. But it seems pretty clear conservatives are a danger to anyone who holds liberal notions about humanity and the way states should be organized. I think it is foolish to consider them as temporarily under the spell of a madman, that the fever will break, and it will be back to normal.

 

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