There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual — only apologists for right-wing power

https://lemmy.world/post/1143619

There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual — only apologists for right-wing power - Lemmy.world

Commentary: Longtime former Republican on Patrick Deneen and the demise of the conservative intellectual

This is incorrect.

There is a such thing as a “conservative intellectual”. It’s just that they’ve been long since drowned out by the rest of the party, and the right-wing voting base has no appetite for actual, sensible conservative policies right now.

Name one conservative policy that has furthered mankind. Prohibition, voting rights, sexuality, drug war, terrorism; time after time they’ve been wrong. Even fiscally they run up the deficit. Their only role is to preserve hierarchy and maintain power

Name one conservative policy that has furthered mankind.

Richard Nixon was at the helm when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was founded. I believe he also was responsible for protecting national parks, but I didn’t bother fact-checking that one.

www.epa.gov/history#:~:text=EPA was created on De….

Now, granted, modern conservative politics are garbage-culture war bullshit, but we need to be cautious of forgetting history. Rewriting history is their game.

EPA History | US EPA

Information on the origins of EPA, historical environmental topics, origins of environmental statutes, environmental disasters like Love Canal and Times Beach, and EPA administrators.

US EPA
Progressive policies implemented during a conservative presidency don’t seem like conservative policies.
If you can just hijack any and all “good” policies as inherently progressive then you’re just a self-fuelling fire who wants to hate conservatives no matter what.

I wouldn’t be crediting them with enacting good policy if it wasn’t progressive.

If you can show an example of opposing progress that is good I’m all in on that conservative policy.

You’re buying in too much to the branding of big-P Progressive. The EPA, and environmental protections, are inherently little-c conservative positions.

Not everything that is good is Progressive, and not everything Progressives want is good, or even intelligent. Rent control, as one very basic example, doesn’t work, and yet Progressives across America push it.

What doesn’t work about it? (I honestly know nothing about it, but I know there are things that sound great on paper and propaganda but in practice it’s bull)

Rent control disincentives building new apartments, because there is little financial incentive in doing so in an area choked by supply shortages, thus it exacerbates supply shortages over time.

See here: www.nmhc.org/…/the-high-cost-of-rent-control/

Note that this is not theoretical - we’ve seen rent control attempted to poor effect worldwide

The High Cost of Rent Control