So what’s new in DuhSantistan?

To be clear, I am not suggesting that all people who like DeSantis are evil. I am suggesting that many people who buy-in to the DeSantis narrative do so because they are misinformed or manipulated. For example, most people who support his War on the queer community do so because they want to protect their children from “indoctrination” and “manipulation”. Yet, I believe the entire narrative is a contrivance. Its origin was conceived by Christopher Rufo in a far-right wing Think Tank. I ask you and every one of you, how many of your children have been subject to “queer indoctrination.” I don’t know a single person. Nobody I know knows anyone. That tells me the laws were unnecessary, caused massive division, and were nothing more than fear porn shoved down a population’s throat. I find that to be disgraceful.

 

That would be incorrect. I disagree with DeSantis and his advisors. I don’t think people, like my friends, who follow DeSantis should be assaulted. Educated, perhaps, but not insulted or verbally assaulted.

 

Or 60s. Even then there were kids whose parents sent them to private or religious schools and opted them from health/sex education because of personal or religious beliefs and later sent them to one of the Academies that sprung up in response to integration.
My own kids went to school in the 90s and oughts in that liberal bastion of Alachua county and I was involved in their education (couldn’t help but be given all the phone calls from teachers that began with them asking me if I was their father). If they tried to indoctrinate them they missed badly. One works for one of the behemoths of capitalism, the other a trump supporting former Marine. I haven’t asked any of their former teachers how they are coping with their failure of indoctrination.

 

The salient feature of conservativism is maintaining existing power structures and social hierarchies. The strength of conservativism has always been its flexible approach to that in suppressing threats to that, it doesn't need an intellectual tradition to achieve those goals, but it can certainly make use of it when it needs it (usually as a tool of buy in from opponents or to demonstrate legitimacy when wielding power). Nice to have, but not really necessary or even important, because its tossed aside when convenient. Some people seem surprised that conservativism turned into "owning the libs" but that's pretty much what the George Wills & Krauthammers of the world were doing too, it was just more clever and appealing to the highly educated and well-heeled I guess. Their work was convincing people that "there was no such thing as society" in the Thatcherian sense, we had no collective duties to others and engaging in self-interest was in fact rational and the basis of civilization.

My basic point is this, you seem to think things are coming apart because we just arent nice to each other, we think of each other as enemies. I'm suggesting maybe if it seems like that is the case, it might be because when the basis of society, "reason," can be openly flaunted, it sort of convicts that idea, and perhaps society itself. So what are we supposed to do with that? How should people react when reason is tossed aside and power operates so nakedly, and 'reason' is powerless? If we've premised all of our national mythology on the idea that the best argument wins, people using power operate rationally, etc, what happens when raw power renders that mythology so obviously false? Even a decade ago certain arguments I viewed as suspect were at least more persuasive in that they could not be so openly contradicted by events.

 

Really seems off based on what Gatorade and I said to you. I think we are having a difficulty in understanding each other’s writing style.
No worries.

 

Great post and appreciate you sharing about your family.
But it seems it misses the mark on my point. Seems like a regular occurrence with a few in here.

 

hmmm, is that a me problem or a you problem?

 

Likely a little of both.

 

I'd go with happy.

 

Understood. To clarify, I'm not calling his supporters stupid or evil. But I will say that they're willing to overlook some really harmful shit.

 

I definitely sympathize with you. I still want to stop short of presuming that the other side must be under manipulation, as this requires that we ourselves must be in possession of the truth. In some cases, this is quite possible - eg did Trump mention Biden on the call to Zelensky? Yes he did, and we know this because they released the recording. But in other cases, the truth isn’t so obvious. Eg Is racism to blame for police deaths of black Americans?

As for your indoctrination example, I’ll admit I haven’t kept up on this topic, but I will humbly add a couple of (possibly meaningless)notes. John Stuart Mill suggested that education necessarily must be indoctrination. I agree with him here, as I don’t believe that there can be a view from nowhere, so the lessons must be crafted from some context. Now of course, Mill didn’t mean that this indoctrination would tilt left or right. This is an empirical question that would require an empirical analysis. For my part, my 6 year old daughter was taught at school that girls and marry girls and boys can marry boys. I don’t consider this a problem. I actually just consider this a fact.

Regardless of me, if we are going to have a single school curriculum, it must take some single stand on family issues. This is simply unlikely to ever to be the satisfaction of all. Interesting sidebar, this fact likely supports school choice. I am sympathetic to the idea that the problem isn’t so bad as the right has made it - if there were an objective view to be had. But I also think it is unlikely that this could be true in the same direction for every single issue of the day, including immigration, social security, inflation, racism, higher ed, etc. Somewhere along the line, the left also has to be wrongly valuing an issue, or even more radical, the two perspectives should be treated with equal respect.

 

They are not moving here due to Florida's educational system. It's going to very sad to see UF's ranking start to take a tumble, currently it's something to be immensely proud of.

 

Breaking: Ron DeSantis being a Viktor Orban knockoff is actually a good thing, says right-wing outlet.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/floridas-orban-renewal-project/

 

Exactly. Purely from an educational standpoint, Illinois destroys Florida in every way imaginable, which is what my original post pertained to. Of course, in typical fashion, 95 flips the conversation to something completely unrelated.

 

I am not sure either you or I, or any single person really, should be entrusted to define the core of something like conservatism, but I agree conservatives are less likely than liberals to subvert power structures.

As for your basic point, I want to make sure I understand it. What I am reading is that many current mainstream conservative claims are very easily contradicted by demonstrable events, and it is this disregard for reality that is causing the culture of contempt between the members of the two parties. Is this correct?

 

LOL. So this is what happens when you've already lost the argument. You make a dumb outlandish statement about trying to rationalize why Florida is gaining people and IL is losing people. Too funny.

 

I don't think what I'm saying about conservativism is the idea of a single person (myself), that's a weird response, these are ideas I've formed in part by reading what other people have written and studied. I get that people might have other takes or views that can be debated, but its also not a novel or controversial idea I put forward either.

As for the second part, its more like claims about the US government or how America in general is "supposed" to operate are easily contradicted by events in general, but some of those events are definitely the actions or claims of conservatives in power (or in response to losing power), whether the be courts, election deniers, Jan 6 rioters or politicians like DeSantis. Basically when the exercise of power is stripped of all pretense and need for persuasion or precedent, I think it can be pretty jarring, particularly since its usually used to punish disfavored constituencies & political enemies.

 

He’s not wrong. Hell almost every “social warrior” issue pushed by the far right is based on laughable false pretense and grievance based politics, or just straight up bigotry. It’s also an obvious attempt to distract their voters from real issues and also keep “the left” fixated on these issues.

Look at the abortion issue where so much false language is thrown around to appeal to emotions (baby killers, infanticide, hell we had a poster here comparing women’s reproductive rights to… the holocaust).

Look at CRT and the accusations of “indoctrination”. They invent a problem, then use big gov to “fix” the nonexistent problem… or worse, to try and unravel civil rights era equality gains for minorities. Ugly southern strategy politics part deux.

Look at the bathroom laws some states proposed/passed. They wanted to criminalize using the incorrect bathroom. Obviously unenforceable unless we have a government agent groping people at every bathroom point of entry, but potentially usable to harass or even criminalize against transgender folks, which was the obvious point of the laws. They suggested Target, making their own business decision to have gender neutral bathrooms would result in huge increases in bathroom rapes from men disguising themselves as women. Did that happen? Of course not. Target had more issues with freakshow conservatives protesting the company or even trying to “demonstrate” what would happen by dressing up as women and entering the “wrong” bathroom themselves.

Then we have all the lies about the “stolen” election. Obviously the attack on the Capitol on 1/6 was a direct result of these lies. But it didn’t end with that shock event, they carried on, with some GOP state legislatures passing laws to restrict voters. Many of these people participate in the lie, then pass actual law to “fix” the problem. Do you trust their good faith based on their propensity to lie? Hell no I don’t. I view the GOP as a straight up criminal entity at this point. That it appeals to folks like George Santos is about the least surprising thing ever.

 

All I meant to say about the definition of conservatism is that we should recognize that it isn’t objective and act accordingly. To my lights, the definition you provided doesn’t really seem to be the most popular. The top five links for conservatism seem to focus more on tradition, so Im just not sure why we should accept the power structure reading as definitive.

Wiki
Britannica
Stanford
Miriam-Webster
Heritage


To your central point, let me try to summarize again. You are saying that contempt is pervading our political culture because conservatives aren’t even accepting the most obvious empirical failures of their doctrine and just using their power to force the rest of us to accept their ideas?

If so, I worry that this idea allows too much rationality to be ascribed to one side. Let’s use the ban on price gouging as an example. In the last 100 storms, local stores have never once seemed to be able to keep in stock propane, plywood, or ice, etc. Yet, you’ve never been persuaded by the very predictable empirical failures of the tradition of gouging bans. I believe this is because you have a more complex and nuanced model of the system in your head. I don’t think it is obviously wrong for you to have such a model, but I can understand why someone might get frustrated with what seems to be your lack of recognition of reality. And shortages during emergencies is a much simpler system than, say, the impact of racism on outcomes or minorities.