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> In reality, however, there is not a single ideology connecting all those things. I don't claim there was a single ideology underpinning the reasons for the c
by pron 6y ago
> In reality, however, there is not a single ideology connecting all those things.
I don't claim there was a single ideology underpinning the reasons for the calls for social change. I'm saying that there are usually people (radicals, progressives) calling for social change, and others (conservatives) warning against it, and the rhetoric employed is similar throughout history (e.g. "if you only asked for a little less", or "the previous demands were reasonable, but the new ones are excessive"). That's understandable, as conservatives throughout history sometimes don't like to appear -- possibly even to themselves -- as the enemies of progress so they claim to be in favour of "reasonable progress," but whatever it is that the progressives currently call for is unreasonable; of course, a generation later, the story repeats. Ideas like women's suffrage were deemed outright preposterous, risible, and too silly to seriously consider; in fact, it took actual acts of terror by feminist activists and a world war to get them the vote.
So if you want to compare current demands to previous ones in order to explain the reaction to them, I'm saying that you should also compare current reactions to previous ones. "Previous demands were reasonable, but now they've really crossed a line," has been pretty much the conservative refrain going back millenia to the patricians and plebeians of ancient Rome. All of this is why I reject talk of "excess." It's just how conservatives speak of social change for millenia. You can say that you agree or disagree with some policy, but the "this is too much" line is just a cliché.
- rayiner 6y agoAt any given instant in time, progressives and radicals are calling for lots of different things. Some of those are good ideas, and some of those are bad ideas. It's the job of conservatives to filter out those bad ideas. The fact that they oppose the good ideas too doesn't mean they're wrong when they push back on the bad ones. It's like the old trope: they laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown: https://wiki.c2.com/?TheyLaughedAtEinstein https://wiki.c2.com/?TheyLaughedAtEinstein. Criticizing "defund the police" (as in, actually defunding the police) or normalizing the use of "whiteness" as a pejorative is not a bad thing just because conservatives do it. In fact, conservatives are doing society a valuable service by pushing back on those things. I'm quite sure in the retrospect of history, those will be proven to be "bad ideas progressives tried at one point" rather than examples of real advancement.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pron 6y agoI'm not saying that everything conservatives say is wrong nor that everything progressives want is a good idea, just that speaking of "excesses" does not actually make them so, because that's how conservatives have always talked about demands for change. Having said that, I'm fairly certain that in the retrospect of history, conservative pushback on the change in our understanding of race would look like another incarnation of white supremacy, and would appear as horrendously wrong to the people in the future as segregation appears to us to day, so much so that the conservatives of the future will use them as an example of something that is obviously right, unlike whatever social change people call for then.