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They are conservatives.
The label doesn’t mean right-wing. It’s reality as a team sport. Loyalty to the ingroup, followed by whatever excuses justify the necessary conclusions. They base their moral judgements on the predetermined morality of whoever did the thing.
Tankies are conservatives whose chosen ingroup is leftists. They are completely serious when they insist all leftists are like them, because they think everybody does this. They don’t know there’s any other way to be. We’re the idiots for not getting behind our guys every single time - like we forgot they’re our guys.
I’d actually argue that these people are right-wing, but not conservatives. This probably depends on your definitions of these terms though.
To me, a conservative is someone who fairly consistently holds the view that existing societal structures and norms are better than any proposed changes to them. But this is a very context-dependent definition—so western conservatives are largely capitalists, since that’s the dominant economic system here. Since MLism is not a predominant ideology in the West, it can’t really be conservative here, though it certainly can be in places like Cuba, Vietnam, or China. However, these people are all right-wing.
Right and left wing aren’t as well-defined but the best definition I’ve found is the rightists want to preserve or expand existing social hierarchies, while leftists want to dismantle them.
At first glance, MLism is confusing to classify under this system. Bolshevism did have some genuinely left-oriented politics in the beginning. They supported unions and workers’ councils over capitalist owners and the monarchy, they promoted gender equality, and they were even relatively tolerant of queer people for their time. However, MLs and related ideologies share an interest in an extremely strong and oppressive state, similar in its approach to fascism but usually without the focus on racism.
While you could argue that this strange combination makes them some form of radical centrists, it’s actually an outlook that many right-wing people share. They often pick the social hierarchy they think is the most righteous and argue it should destroy or dominate all other systems. This is the same reason many far-right Christians can be anti-government. It’s not oppression they are opposed to, rather it’s who is being oppressed—and whether they’re being subjected to enough oppression. But in most cases, these ideological differences evaporate once movements gain power. Consolidating control over society for the benefit of the rulers always wins out over the previous ideology. We’ve seen this quite clearly in the evolution of many initially socialist countries back towards capitalism, patriarchy, racism, imperialism, etc.
In contrast, real leftism should be opposed to all forms of oppression. That’s not to say every movement completely lived up to this standard—some failed to challenge certain aspects of it and might be more or less centrists as a result. But I think it’s fair to accept movements that are mostly liberatory as leftist even if they do fail to critically analyze some smaller oppressive elements within their society, as long as they have a clear and broad commitment to liberation. In these cases, we usually see an expansion of critiques of existing oppression into new areas as the harms of those systems become better understood over time.
That’s the lie conservatives tell.
The old-guard conservative is a fictional character. They demand transformative change. They’ve always been this way. Their reputation is bullshit they invent.
As if, at some recent point, they were fiscally responsible, socially constrained, cooperative, and fair. As if ‘getting back to how conservatives used to be’ would mean booting out the fascists and letting sober-minded institutions reign, instead of a return to obstructionist financial terrorists screeching about death panels, or neoconservative chickenhawks committing war crimes in secret prisons, or the conspiracy theorists who spent forty years hounding the Clinton family, or the banana-republic gun runners funded by drug dealers, or Richard fucking Nixon and his vice president who was somehow worse.
This is what conservatism has always been. They just lie. They make up their own past, and for some reason, we believe them. ‘We’ve always been the party of slow reasonable change… but now we need extreme action, and it’s the outgroup’s fault!’ Gun control versus Black Panthers, violence defending segregation, theocratic indoctrination over imaginary satanism, anti-gay bigotry, anti-Muslim bigotry, anti-trans bigotry-- same as it ever was. They’ve got one speed and this is it. All that’s changed is, their bullshit is too blatant to seriously brush off, and their figurehead is the dumbest motherfucker who’s ever taken over a country.
People can insist ‘conservatives want to conserve things,’ and the group they are describing doesn’t fucking exist.
Yeah, ingroup uber alles. The only consistent feature of conservative hierarchies.
To be clear, I’m trying to identify conservatism as a social and political current across history, not as it exists in our society today. But I largely agree that today’s so-called conservatives are nothing of the sort. True conservatives in our society would be moderate liberals.
I think this is an important thing to understand both because traditional conservatism is a recurring theme in many political contexts, but also because many people think of conservatism as a relatively moderate and common-sense position. People need to realize that the people today calling themselves conservatives do not have as their main goal a preservation of existing society. They are instead attempting a radical transformation to something that either never existed or at most existed in the distant past.
But it sounds like you are saying conservatism in the sense I mean has never existed and it’s always been merely a rhetorical shield for more revolutionary ends. I am not sure I see evidence to support this outside of modern times but perhaps I’m not fully informed on the topic.
“Traditional conservatism” is this tribalism. The tribalists are not “so-called conservatives.” They’re what the word has meant, since its very modern inception, circa the French revolution.
So yes, we are both describing people pushing a made-up golden era, which they will tear society apart to allegedly pursue… but that’s not distinct from people claiming they’re preserving the common-sense soul of et cetera. That’s what they’ve always said. They’re just plain lying. The unmistakable pattern of their behavior, independent of these claims, is the consolidation of power for the automatically righteous, over a permanent underclass who are lucky to fight over scraps.
When you find yourself writing things like ‘progressives are the real conservatives,’ step back and ask what the fuck you’re doing with words.
First, all humans are tribal, not merely conservatives, so I don’t think this observation is very astute or relevant. Secondly, I definitely didn’t say progressives are conservative, so I have no idea where you got that from.
Only some humans use tribalism to decide what’s real.
‘Everyone’s tribal’ is undermining the ability to say anything. Like I can’t be talking about people who denied there was a global plague, even as they gargled their own lungs - because I used words you insist apply to everyone.
This is an attack on meaning. You sound confused that anyone could possibly paraphrase what you explicitly wrote - like calling liberals conservatives makes perfect sense, but calling liberals progressives, well, you have no idea where that came from. What are you talking about?
I am trying to defend meaning from people who are willing to distort words to mean anything that matches their current political agenda.
If you had approached this conversation with more authentic curiosity I might have been willing to explain the widely understood difference between moderate liberals and progressives which is important to understand the point I was making. But at this point you don’t seem very genuinely interested in what I’m trying to explain. So I recommend using Google to understand the basic terms here before proceeding.
Ironically, your unquestioned assumption that liberals and conservatives are two mutually exclusive and opposing ideologies rather than adjacent and even overlapping ones is, itself, a product of the tribalist thinking you’ve criticized.
You’re pushing the myth of little-c conservatism, and you’re bad at it. If you genuinely wanted to explain a distinction then you presumably would have done so instead of scoffing that you don’t understand. Like the problem of saying ‘by conservatives I mean liberals!’ is an additional adjective.
You don’t get to condescend to me about argumentum ad webster when I keep specifying tribalists and loyalism and you pretend that’s the same as having an ingroup. You just toss out that “all humans are tribal,” as if that remotely resembles what I’m saying about a specific pattern of behavior, and then you dismiss your own wishy-washy assertion as irrelevant. Zero self-reflection. All attack, no defense.
Meanwhile:
There are clearly people who only view the world through loyalty to hierarchy. That’s overwhelmingly described as conservatism, even when people aren’t fully cognizant of why they’re calling it that. You must acknowledge that’s less of an ask than insisting tankies are right-wing. That one-dimensional horseshoe thinking completely misses how they’re never gonna get along with right-wing conservatives, because those pricks aren’t their ingroup. Nothing else matters, in their worldview.