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I'm not sure what your aim is here. Whether or not the word conservative is the right label for a certain set of values, IDK. But it has a generally specific

I'm not sure what your aim is here. Whether or not the word conservative is the right label for a certain set of values, IDK. But it has a generally specific set of values in US politics, and by that measure, the supreme court does not have a conservative majority.

jkaplowitz 2y ago
Yes, I was arguing that the word conservative is being dangerously misused by most of the political world in the US. This has the effect of camouflaging reactionary and regressive Christianist, corporatist, and plutocratic right-wing activism as somehow conserving the status quo, or even as returning to the recent rather than distant past. I know Hacker News is not primarily meant for arguing about politics, but hopefully we can agree that the hacker ethic wants to avoid linguistic confusion about the nature of the values one is describing, and the usual US jargon meaning of conservative is very confusing on this topic. Setting aside for a moment the question of whether or not conservatives actually want to conserve anything, I think conservative has at least five separate sets of values in US politics. These correspond to the following five subgroups of the overall group of "conservatives": 1) The plutocrats and corporatists who fund the Republican Party in the interest of big business. 2) The voters who vote for the Republican Party on the basis of economic distress, wanting things to be better or the way they supposedly once were, opposing immigration and affirmative action/DEI and what they're calling wokeness, or so on. 3) The voters in the religious right whom the Republican Party has long sought as an expanded electoral base, beyond the voters mentioned in subgroup 2. 4) The politicians who pander to each of the above subgroups. 5) The values of the ideologically driven legal academics and judges and think tank researchers/analysts who curry favor with each of the above subgroups and who drive the conservative movement forward. On many or even most issues, the Supreme Court has a conservative majority aligned with the interests or preferences of subgroups 1, 4, and 5, but sometimes not subgroup 3 (this misalignment is getting rarer over time), and often not subgroup 2. So basically, they are aligned with the conservative movement but not conservative voters. I should note that Barrett, Gorsuch, and Roberts (I'm not sure about Kavanaugh) each have issues where they deviate from conservative doctrine far more than do Alito and Thomas. Still, on issues where conservative subgroups 1, 4, and 5 share a specific consensus on how SCOTUS should act, the SCOTUS majority that's usually called conservative will usually make it so. This is more true with the current 6-3 majority than the previous 5-4 majority despite some occasional deviations on ideologically divisive issues, and if Trump wins a second term it will become vastly more true after one or two more of his SCOTUS appointments.

jkaplowitz 2y ago

Yes, I was arguing that the word conservative is being dangerously misused by most of the political world in the US. This has the effect of camouflaging reactionary and regressive Christianist, corporatist, and plutocratic right-wing activism as somehow conserving the status quo, or even as returning to the recent rather than distant past. I know Hacker News is not primarily meant for arguing about politics, but hopefully we can agree that the hacker ethic wants to avoid linguistic confusion about the nature of the values one is describing, and the usual US jargon meaning of conservative is very confusing on this topic. Setting aside for a moment the question of whether or not conservatives actually want to conserve anything, I think conservative has at least five separate sets of values in US politics. These correspond to the following five subgroups of the overall group of "conservatives": 1) The plutocrats and corporatists who fund the Republican Party in the interest of big business. 2) The voters who vote for the Republican Party on the basis of economic distress, wanting things to be better or the way they supposedly once were, opposing immigration and affirmative action/DEI and what they're calling wokeness, or so on. 3) The voters in the religious right whom the Republican Party has long sought as an expanded electoral base, beyond the voters mentioned in subgroup 2. 4) The politicians who pander to each of the above subgroups. 5) The values of the ideologically driven legal academics and judges and think tank researchers/analysts who curry favor with each of the above subgroups and who drive the conservative movement forward. On many or even most issues, the Supreme Court has a conservative majority aligned with the interests or preferences of subgroups 1, 4, and 5, but sometimes not subgroup 3 (this misalignment is getting rarer over time), and often not subgroup 2. So basically, they are aligned with the conservative movement but not conservative voters. I should note that Barrett, Gorsuch, and Roberts (I'm not sure about Kavanaugh) each have issues where they deviate from conservative doctrine far more than do Alito and Thomas. Still, on issues where conservative subgroups 1, 4, and 5 share a specific consensus on how SCOTUS should act, the SCOTUS majority that's usually called conservative will usually make it so. This is more true with the current 6-3 majority than the previous 5-4 majority despite some occasional deviations on ideologically divisive issues, and if Trump wins a second term it will become vastly more true after one or two more of his SCOTUS appointments.