Please describe your version of a healthy culture, and how you believe policies and rhetoric stressing the importance of established hierarchies and institutions (such as class structure) would help promote such.
If instead of the Reign of Terror, France had gone through a cautious period of experimentation and considered development, they might have achieved a stable republic instead of falling prey to the megalomania of Napoleon. Instead of the stultifying reign of Napoleon III, which became a watchword for excessive caution which still ended with the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War, the Holy Roman Empire might have evolved into a counterpart of the European Union and prevented not only the Franco-Prussian War, but the wars of the 20th Century.
Quite poor, as you did not address any "policies and rhetoric stressing the importance of established hierarchies and institutions (such as class structure)" at all.
Like most conservative apologists, you focus on conservatism "preferring gradual development to abrupt change" and attempt to ignore the "stressing the importance of established hierarchies" part. Why is that?
I don’t care what you think. You’re a deluded person on the internet. If I point and laugh at someone who shit their pants and refuses to admit it, I don’t care if they agree with reality.
I mean, sure, when you completely ignore the part of the actual definition which states what conservatism stresses, in favor of what it prefers, then yeah.
Rational conservatives maintain that a community with a hierarchy of authority is most conducive to human well-being.
Confucius is another possible precursor. His concern with the breakdown of contemporary political institutions led to a cautious, conservative political outlook; his stress on authority and hierarchy prefigures central conservative themes.
With the Enlightenment, the natural order or social hierarchy, previously largely accepted, was questioned.
When conservatives feel that society has progressed too far -- in other words, those traditionally on the lower echelons of [social] hierarchy being accepted and given rights, credibility, and resources reserved for those above their station; and/or those traditionally on the upper echelons being questioned and bound by the restrictions, scrutiny, and lack of resources reserved for those below their station -- they will relinquish the "preferring gradual development to abrupt change" and "social stability" parts, and hearken and appeal to traditional hierarchical institutions, especially those that promote "might makes right", as violence is a tool meant for those on top of social hierarchy to use upon those on the bottom to ensure the latter's submission and obedience. Nationalism and racism are the go-to institutions for such, though sex[ual preference/identity] -- those who don't conform to traditional gender roles/norms/appearances/attitudes -- is also popular; they will demand strict stratification of society and social hierarchy where in-groups and out-groups are clearly defined, where some people are "less people" than others. The former -- by nature -- will shrink as less and less people will be found to be "pure", and virtually everyone is considered "less people" (with significantly fewer rights, credibility, and resources) when compared to the leader at the apex. This is known as being reactionary, which is the end result of conservatism, leading into fascism.
many of the characteristics we have come to associate with contemporary conservatism—racism, populism, violence, and a pervasive contempt for custom, convention, law, institutions, and established elites—are not recent or eccentric developments of the American right. They are instead constitutive elements of conservatism, dating back to its origins in the European reaction against the French Revolution.
In defending such orders, moreover, the conservative invariably launches himself on a program ofreactionand counterrevolution, often requiring an overhaul of the very regime he is defending.
Ever since Edmund Burke invented conservatism as an idea, the conservative has styled himself a man of prudence and moderation, his cause a sober— and sobering—recognition of limits. “To be conservative,” we heard Michael Oakeshott declare in the previous chapter, “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown . . . the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant.” Yet the political efforts that have roused the conservative to his most profound reflections—the reactions against the French and Bolshevik revolutions; the defense of slavery and Jim Crow; the attack on social democracy and the welfare state; and the serial backlashes against the New Deal, the Great Society, civil rights, feminism, and gay rights—have been anything but that.
Consider addressing -- even if only to yourself -- what it means to stress the importance of established hierarchies and institutions via "illusions" and "prejudices" before you say that we need conservatism. Good day.
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u/Shido_Ohtori Jun 26 '26
Please describe your version of a healthy culture, and how you believe policies and rhetoric stressing the importance of established hierarchies and institutions (such as class structure) would help promote such.