Conservative Tendencies In Discourse

American political discourse is so deeply enmeshed with conservative theory that many do not realize their points come from it. Because online anglophone discourse is so tied to the United States, these tendencies end up constantly reiterated in internet discussions. Given the current political environment, I wish to explain how these preconceptions can limit our ability to identify the source of problems and conceive of true solutions. There are arguments you have already lost from the moment you choose to play under someone else's rules: sometimes the only way to move on is to realize you were trapped in such a fight. Thus I hope this will be of some use to others.

To start, let me spend a while describing what I view as the heart of the conservative worldview. I would say the actual core of conservative belief is the idea that anything considered normal and approved of by society is objectively correct. It is essentially "buying into" society, throwing your lot in with it and trying to adjust your feelings to agree with its norms. Simply taking the time to understand this principle can on its own explain a great deal of conservative anxieties and fears that you may find rather inexplicable when raised in media or in real conversation. They want to imagine that society is just and proper and that agreeing with it is doing the right thing, and they want this to such a degree that it overwhelms their ability to properly analyze the real world.

ANXIETY: What if I put my faith in the wrong thing?

Conservatives think faith in the system is good. They will vigorously defend what they put their faith in regardless of the circumstances, even if there is no evidence to support their claims. The goal is to avoid having to question their beliefs, and so they will view even being asked to question it as offensive. But they still fret over the possibility that it isn't true, and so, this anxiety appears.

When a cop shoots someone, conservatives will almost always take the cop's side, regardless of circumstance. No matter how you present the question or how exhaustively you raise evidence regarding the circumstances, their mind will be already made up. Because they want to believe that the system is just and functioning properly, they assign anyone shot by a cop the role of "deserving to be shot." They do not search for explanations of what happened in an attempt to find the truth, but rather seek excuses to justify how they feel about the situation. I knew kids who were sent to Christian private schools and had to take courses in Apologetics, the tradition of justifying a belief you already have. They already know what they want the answer to be, they argue mainly to convince themselves and others like them. Hence the tendency to go from flimsy defense to flimsy defense until the opposition gives up.

This brings us back to the anxiety about putting one's faith in the wrong thing. We've established that conservatives want to imagine the system as more or less perfect, and hate anything that makes them have to consider that it might not be. We've also established that there's an idea of people "deserving to be shot", there is some place in the system where punishment is not merely a possibility but actively good and proper. This is how we develop the idea of "good people" and "bad people", people who deserve to be the target of systemic violence and people who don't. This is how we construct the "criminal", someone who does not follow laws and so does not deserve respect. Conservatives are constantly afraid of bad actors and criminals, evil people that mean to harm or exploit them, and thus desire a system that protects "law-abiding citizens" from these bogeymen.

Despite their core fixation being on putting their faith in the system, conservatives do understand the idea that powerful members of society may be at fault. This is where the trick lies — the system itself is seen as inherently "pure" and correct, so it is the people executing it that may sometimes taint it with evil. In America, conservatives are obsessed with "the Constitution" and their own very specific readings of what the United States is. They view the government as having a divine form that reinforces their own beliefs, yet has been perverted by an ambiguous external evil force — some would say communists, others would say an ethnic group of choice, et cetera. Whatever specific target the individual has chosen to blame becomes a fifth column secretly conspiring to exploit them. This lets the conservative thinker turn every issue into a case of individual "moral responsibility" — the policing system can't be evil, it must be individual "bad apples" have broken in to corrupt the police and ruin their good name. The logic can become almost circular, no real policeman would ever do evil, so if a policeman turns out to abusing the law, that's not evidence against the inherent justness of policeman as a societal role, it's a specific case that's totally unrelated to policing as a whole.

This individual moral responsibility is very important to understand for the topic of discourse, because we phrase EVERYTHING in its terms. Seeing all the world's evil as going back to individual sin and temptation is an extremely poor methodology for analyzing and preventing harm in our society. Among other things, human social systems are extremely good at giving people a means to point fingers at one another and divert blame. The soldier who committed a war crime says they were just following orders, their commander says they had good reason for the order and the crime was never their intention, and so on up the chain. The harm itself is considered less important than the intent to commit it — a person who kills thousands and says they didn't mean to is seen as less sinful than someone who kills a single person to enrich themselves. Similarly, a person who has constantly caused harm but had justifications that align with society's perspective will often get off scot-free, while a person who has publicly stated that something society views negatively is good is seen as being more harmful than the actual harm. By fixating on how people feel about harm rather than whether they cause harm, this angle can become utterly out of line with reality.

So, now that I've gone on a very long-winded explanation of the root of my take, I'd like to give some examples of this thinking in discourse.

CASE 1: ASSIGNING RESPECT OR DISRESPECT TO INDIVIDUALS BASED ON IDENTITY ALONE

One of the most common types of discourse. On Tumblr I remember endless discussions of who "counted" as being part of a just ingroup and who was an inherently evil outgroup that had to understand it was a second-class with the weight of the world's sins on its shoulders. It was generally well understood that cishet white men were inherently ontologically evil and should be treated with suspicion, arguing with this was almost pointless. Indeed, even the handwringing over whether their evil nature was truly complete had to be phrased in very silly ways like "but if we say they're inherently evil, we give them a free pass to not care!" — not fixated on the inherently bizarre premise itself, but rather on the fear that by assigning this class the role of an irredeemable outsider that can never hope to join the club, we have given up on our ability to blame them for not listening to us. Most notable to me, though, was the specific type of panicked argumentation you would find from people right at the edge of the classification. Consider asexuality discourse — people would constantly argue over whether asexuality let you count as "not cishet". This topic is sublimely pointless! It only makes any sense whatsoever if you look at the actual context and see that it's people fighting to be socially respected because if they called themselves a cishet they would be seen as an outsider! And this type of gatekeeping happened on so many levels, it's a core of TERFism to argue over who counts as a woman or not, it's a core of truscum to argue over who counts as trans, and that's not even getting into the fraught field of race. As a half-black half-white person, I am constantly irritated by people who are unable to handle when trolls bring up "what about transracialism" as an attack on transexuality. People cling dearly to the idea that core parts of your identity or your genes decide whether you deserve to be respected or not, even in spaces that supposedly reject the system and racism or patriarchy or whatever, because they cling to these conservative identity-based perspectives that have nothing to do with actions taken and everything to do with reinforcing people's prejudices and biases.

What's critical to understand here is that these arguments do nothing to change the status quo or the nature of the world. The only thing they DO is win arguments in social environments by reiterating the spoken moral norms of that environment. In other words, they are fundamentally conservative arguments, fixated on how to obtain more respect and power in the system by exploiting the feelings of the people within it rather than on trying to improve the world in any meaningful way. Hence, endless bullying and cults of personality.

CASE 2: CARING MORE ABOUT SYMBOLS OF HARM THAN HARM ITSELF

TW: Sexual abuse.

Conservatives spend huge amounts of time talking about how horrible crime is, yet despite their obsession with more cops and more chastisement and more browbeating, they never eradicate crime. Many times, the people most staunchly obsessed with lurid and horrifying acts, who constantly get up on their soap box to speak about how we need to make our society moral to prevent these acts from occurring again, are those who later turn out to have committed horrible actions. This is especially notable with sexual crimes, which are well understood to be generally exerted through all the means by which society allows people to hold power over one another — the most common means of all being the "sacred" institution of family. I would say that we have an incredibly detailed case study consisting of all human history indicating that all the focus on "expressing good virtues" and "castigating sin and vice" has achieved almost nothing insofar as preventing people from committing harmful acts. Nonetheless, we still reiterate these perspectives time and time again in spaces that are supposedly counterculture. We go back to this idea that the vice within us is a sign of our inherent evil, that there are these biases within that mark individuals as inherently dangerous.

The argument goes, more or less, like so — an individual who jacks off to the idea of nonconsensual sex is dangerous because they want to perform that act in real life, an individual who jacks off to racialized sex is evil because they are clearly racist on some level, deep down. Getting any sort of emotional response beyond disgust from an evil idea is seen as inherently saying it's unambiguously good on an undeniable core level. Thus if someone likes an "evil" fetish, they are inherently an "evil" person. This is, once again, a perspective integral to conservative thought. By conceptualizing the vice or sin or urge into some sort of terrifying uncontrollable force that is separate from the goodness within someone, you create this repeating cycle of guilt. But this guilt is pointless so far as society is concerned, it's really kind of a fetish in and of itself! As mentioned, conservatives project and talk all the time about actions they do. Anyone who has struggled with addiction understands that no matter how much you get angry at yourself for doing it, the cycle will keep on happening so long as you're in the environment that triggers that tendency. Guilt does not prevent evil! It cohabitates with it! It is a maladaptive coping mechanism!

Basically, many people find the power dynamics of various evil things interesting or appealing in theory. Those people may have some overlap with individuals that actually do those things in real life, but in general, I think many more people are totally harmless despite having an interest on some level. And yet, we still speak about bigotry and crime as though some people are inherently criminal and some people aren't, as though the degree to which you virtue signal on a regular basis is more important than what you actually do. And so we have endless discourse over how if you like X game you are evil because it virtue signals an evil thing, or if you say word Y you are evil because word Y represents sin.

As I have stated: We have endless evidence that guilt and public castigation does nothing to prevent societal harm, and most harm is done by societally approved individuals who are allowed to repeatedly commit it. Virtue signaling is a way to define allies and enemies and obtain approval, not to fix the world.

CASE 3: TRAUMA, FETISHES, GOOD AND BAD PEOPLE

This one kind of builds out of the previous case but is a slightly different element. As mentioned previously, people can like the idea of harmful acts without actually thinking they should occur. The inability to handle feeling anything positive about something you don't think should be real is linked to a more general "splitting" tendency regarding "good and evil". The conservative perspective is kind of like the "one drop of black blood" rule, you're either pure, or you're tainted. People with such a worldview generally desire to be "good". So they deny any elements of themselves they view to be negative and refuse to think earnestly about them. Alternatively, if they choose not to deny it, they can decide that they must 100% agree with it on every level and should change the entire world to agree with their low level urge.

Let's use a topic people are extremely hesitant to talk about across the spectrum: Racism, or bigotry in general. Say you have a bigoted thought on some internal level. It's very much like the comment about fetishes from last time, there is a lower level on which you react immediately in some emotional way. The guilt-based strategy is to view the bigoted thought as a representation of the "true you" indicating that you are an inherently evil person, for which the penance is to performatively reject it. If you view this thought as representative of yourself, you can deny it and pretend you never had the thought, or you can accept it. A conservative sees only the two binary cases, denying the thought they had immediately or accepting it 100% by acting on the thought. They do not see any room for someone to accept that they occasionally have knee-jerk responses that they don't believe are right. The ideal, in fact, is to imagine someone who has no such feelings at all and assume that if you aren't that then you aren't REALLY a good person. Which allows you to decide since you can't be a truly good person perhaps it's okay if you sometimes act on it, how can people judge you when you virtue signal so hard most of the time? Clearly you know you're a bad person, so what's the problem?

Where this gets really interesting is trauma. Trauma is often seen as a sort of unbeatable card to play in socmed discourse. Radfems bond from the shared trauma of being in a patriarchical system and if criticized for how they treat individuals will often go back to the argument that they can act how they wish because of traumatic past experiences. There is much discourse over when two individuals are walkings towards each other at night and one side chooses to cross the street to avoid passing by the other. Is it okay for a woman to cross the street to avoid having to walk past a man? What if the woman is white and the man is black? Does that became inherently racist and bad, whereas it'd be fine if they were both the same race because it's one's right under the patriarchy? If someone was menaced by a man they will sometimes say they have a traumatic response to all men, yet if you said this about someone's race, it would be seen as bigotry. Ultimately, trauma is a lot like fetishes — indeed, they are often directly linked — just because you have an immediate reaction to something doesn't mean that you need to make it your public personality and get the world's approval for your reaction being totally just in all cases. It's one thing to just cross the street because you're anxious, it's quite another to go on a rant about how much people need to justify you because otherwise you might have to consider whether it's a prejudiced act. The fixation is, one again, on fear of how one is being viewed. It is asking not whether something is meaningfully helping anyone but rather if you're a Good Person or not for doing it.

CASE 4: WORDS AS VIOLENCE

In the previous case, someone existing as a class another individual is scared of is seen as almost being an attack on them that must be made up for. That is to say, person A is made uncomfortable by the presence of person B, and so, person B is evil unless they address this. The ultimate extent of this is an escalation into the realm of violence. Consider the classic trope of a white person who sees a black person in their neighborhood and gets uncomfortable, so they call the cops. Here we do see a case of prejudice occurring. But the critical element isn't ACTUALLY that the person was uncomfortable, as bigoted as that is, it's that the person chose to escalate to taking action and calling on the system to deploy state violence against the individual that upset them. A non-violent situation was turned into a violent situation by someone to assuage their nervousness.

Side note: I treat calling the cops as inherently violent even if they are not asked to hurt anyone, because the very point of calling a police officer is that they can enforce system-approved violence. It is not really that different from walking out with a gun to ask someone what they're doing. Even if they aren't directly armed, the simple ability to arrest someone is extremely threatening in and of itself. I remember reading recently about a person with psychosis who had the cops called on them because they were talking to themselves and had to spend multiple days before they could get released from confinement. For the crime of being psychotic in public and having a cop called on them convinced they were a "druggie"!

I find a term that makes me extremely uncomfortable is when words are described as violence. As a black person, I have been called slurs in the past by people who truly meant to make me feel inferior by doing so. And indeed, being called them does make me very upset and often causes an immediate reaction. But I think it is extremely dangerous to call the slur itself violence, because violence is an attack or coercion that exists beyond the realm of words. The reason this terminology makes me so uncomfortable is that violence, in general, indicates something has escalated to the point where the only thing that can respond to it is some form of force (even if that force is simple restraint or defense meant to allow the situation to deescalate back into non-violence.) When we start referring to words as violence we are saying it is a casus belli, a direct indication of personal danger to our person that justifies self-defense.

This is another conservative tactic. False flag operations happen because people feel that they are already under attack, they just need an excuse to do what people wish to do. They feel that an enemy is committing violence against them and so seek justification to exert violence back, to mobilize the existing tools the system holds to destroy its enemies. I think that firing first using your emotional state and fear as justification is a bad tendency and one that should be examined as much as possible. Police officers always argue that in the heat of the moment they felt like they were under attack and so responded through violence, this presupposes that the feeling of being under attack is justification enough for actually attacking. And I don't think that's true on any level. It is all of our jobs to keep our emotions under control and just because someone made us feel bad doesn't necessarily mean we can do whatever we want to them as payback. Otherwise you might as well start arguing that it's okay to hit people because they made you mad, that it's crazy to imagine someone having self control over their own fists, and we all know how that goes, right? I wonder who's most likely to be listened to when they make that argument on a societal level?

CASE 5: CENSORSHIP

This will be a shorter one while I wrap this up. As mentioned, people try to signal their virtue as an individual who isn't tainted by evil. An interesting example of this is a tendency you might see exemplified by the Tumblr copypasta of being a "gold star lesbian", an individual pure of the "sin" of having ever had sex with a man. Essentially, it is seen as somehow commendable if someone has never wavered or examined something outside of their current identity and worldview. This is, to put it bluntly, a stupid and unhealthy perspective that only exists to make people feel superior for championing whatever identity they've chosen to champion. It is exactly like christians who think they're principled and commendable for refusing to listen to anything about evolution because they know it's evil and so even looking at it will corrupt them forever. It is literally rewarding myopia.

Conservatives are terrified of the idea that if their kids see something "impure", like a moral opinion they don't like, then they will uncritically be seduced by it and become evil. Sex, drugs, rock & roll, demons, being gay, rap music, criminality, etc, they obsess over totally controlling the lives of their children and putting in restrictions across society to make it hard for anyone to see their enemy of choice. They say this is for everyone's own good, because they think bad things happen when people see an idea and become corrupted by it. But it is blatantly obvious that refusal to examine or understand something they don't like isn't a way to actually stop these things from existing. It is not the symbls of these things that create them. As we all know, abstinence only sex-ed stops teens from having unsafe sex, yeah?

I bring this up because the way we talk about fascism and other such perspectives is often quite similar. We hear on a routine basis that political views like fascism arise from people being allowed to say the wrong things online, and that if only we had more control over what people were allowed to say, we could simply stop all these dangerous views from gaining traction. This strikes me as a total misunderstanding of how such perspectives arise. We can spend all the time we want trying to "control misinformation", but people will keep on producing misinformation, because the actual veracity of it is irrelevant. Again, conservatives care about validating their pre-existing beliefs, they will misunderstand the truth or directly misrepresent it to defend their views to themselves and gain respect from others. By refusing to examine the justifications conservatives use or the ways they actually function, we limit our ability to see the very same principles at work in our own discourse.

In fact, the more we fixate on the idea that even looking into and studying fascism can turn someone into a fascist, the more we turn it into this Fruit of Knowledge esque bogeyman that can mind control you into becoming an evil person. Ignorance is bliss, the saying goes, and so we encourage an active sort of anti-intellectualism exactly like the Christians proudly announcing they've never once listened to anyone other than who their parents told them to listen to as a child. I don't have a good answer for how to respond to and stop the spread of fascist opinions and policy, but I do strongly believe that blinding ourselves is not a good way to do so. It is important to understand, without simply denying what we don't like, that these policies are being born from the systems of power in our society and are not some fifth column force of external agitators seeking to take control of it. Stop thinking in terms of conspiracies and start thinking in terms of societal incentives!

I'm out of time for now, so I'll have to continue these thoughts at another time. But I really wanted to get this written out somewhere aside from a social media rant because it's been bubbling around in my head a lot recently and comes as culmination of years of watching people get into fights online to achieve questionable results. Thanks for reading.