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I disagree with you, but respectfully. Conservatism is basically just people who, for a variety of reasons (not all of them bad), generally vote for the status quo. This is human nature. Progressives are willing to push forward but also sometimes without regard to some of the consequences. Also human nature. Some people are bold and some people are timid. Having both around in a balanced way helps us all move forward with careful thought. That system is good overall.
The problem is that conservatives are really moderate democrats now. The modern Republicans are not conservatives. They are fascist cultist morons. I believe I explained myself fairly well in my first post. You might want to read the whole thing next time :)
I disagree that it is "good" overall. Conservative policies have always stood in the way of any movement to treat all people equally because the status quo benefits a sections of the population. Slavery. Racism. Sexism. Etc. None of these needed to be "conserved" and we would be a better society if we had been able to address them sooner. Also, conservative power structures when threatened by progress default to authoritarian in brutal fashion. The Holocaust. The Civil War. The Inquisition. Etc. And this is just in the West.
The modern Republican is not an aberration. It is the final form of Conservatism.
I have seen no proof that the consequences of rampant Progressivism are in any way equal to the horrors of rampant Conservatism. The idea that we need to validate Conservativism to "balance out" Progressivism seems to me to be a dangerous myth that is paid for with the blood of oppressed people.
There have been many cases in history where the forces in society seeking positive change have caused untold damage to their societies. The French Revolution started out with the oppressed peasantry seeking liberation from a decadent and constrictive nobility, but ended in hundreds of people getting their heads cut off before the pendulum swung back and Napoleon took control, and briefly created one of the biggest empires in European history. Napoleon was less conservative than the Ancien Regime but he certainly wasn't a revolutionary.
Another example is the Bolsheviks, who started out as oppressed workers in Russia who wanted liberation from an exploitative and authoritarian tsar, but as soon as they actually gained power, were usurped by a complete megalomaniac who sent thousands of people to labor camps, destroyed most of Russia's social institutions in order to subsume them into the state, committed numerous genocides (some more direct than others), and destroyed Russia's demographics and long-term economic prosperity with a breakneck-pace industrialization. Joseph Stalin's ideological offshoot, Mao Zedong, also did similarly horrible things in China, like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, despite starting out as the leader of a peasant rebellion seeking liberation from literal feudalism.
Apart from the Nazis, who can only debatably be considered "conservative" considering they didn't really wanna conserve much of anything about society, conservative insanity doesn't tend to be anywhere near as destructive to society in the short term as progressive insanity is. Instead, conservative insanity causes society to completely stagnate, remaining behind socially and technologically while other societies rush ahead, as happened to Tsarist Russia.
Seeing all this, you'd have to be either biased or stupid to deny the necessity of conservativism in society. Progress is often necessary, today included in many areas, but society must have a conservative wing to prevent the progressives from changing things which are better off left alone.
An apple is a fruit but not all fruits are apples. So stupid.
What did the Nazis want to conserve, exactly? They hated Christianity, they hated free-market capitalism, they wanted to wipe out half the continent and settle it with Germans, and they wanted to completely reshape every aspect of society around the state. They didn't wanna conserve shit, except maybe the Junkers' economic dominance.
Also I can tell you have absolutely nothing of value to add since you defaulted to calling me a Nazi because I made a pretty clear observation. Nah, don't bother explaining shit on the political discussion sub, just say everyone you don't like is evil. It's like I'm back on Reddit
Dude, word roots are often far from their eventual meanings because language evolves. No one with a clue thinks of conserving when they say conservatism. If you want an argument over semantics, maybe there’s a linguistics sub? If you want to talk politics, you don’t just get to decide a word must only literally reflect its etymological root, rather than taking into account the actual actions of people and parties who have called themselves conservatives for the past 50+ years.
The fact of the matter is that "conservative" means that one tends to be resistant to change, and that most self-proclaimed conservatives run on platforms of resisting change. The Nazis, meanwhile, changed nearly everything about their society. Also, words have meanings.
You’re right, but every reputable linguist in 2023 recognizes that over time, the meanings of those words change because of how they’re used by the population speaking the language. You’re right, words have meanings, but those meanings change. Sorry you haven’t kept up.