{"id":514,"date":"2015-08-12T20:04:17","date_gmt":"2015-08-12T11:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/?p=514"},"modified":"2017-07-06T19:42:04","modified_gmt":"2017-07-06T10:42:04","slug":"moralism-as-a-conservative-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/moralism-as-a-conservative-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Moralism as a conservative problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’re right, you should win–you deserve to win–if you’re not winning, there’s probably some treachery or conspiratorial stuff being done by whoever’s winning or at least on their behalf. Then a few steps further, it’s civil war, right after the end of the republic. & whoever disagrees is a sucker, being played by evil people whose powers might just be unlimited.<\/em><\/p>\n

Lotsa anger among conservatives, not enough for the right to cohere, but too much for the various factions to tolerate each other. What is there to do? I don’t know. How can we live with it? I have some ideas about this.<\/p>\n

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Moralism is the opinion that if you hold the right opinions, you’re a good man. That if you think clever thoughts, you’ve got prudence. That if you take care of yourself, the world owes it to you to be orderly & propitious…\u00a0Deserving to win & winning are not the same. Conservatism is\u00a0today\u00a0poisoned by our failures. We are beginning to believe that every previous defeat must have been a matter of betrayal. We are now able to sit in judgment of anyone doing any job while not doing anything comparable. This is the arrival of shamelessness. We are also coming around to the opinion that there no mistakes–every thing that goes wrong is evil. The opinion that we should contemplate the coming chaos weakens us–it takes our eyes off the prize. The prize is this: What do we want & who can we get along with to get it? If you want stuff the getting of which does not require alliances & friendships–then you do not need politics. Politics is in a way beyond the conservative horizon. We think of it as, we win, they lose!, forgetting that Reagan talked that way about the enemy–he did not think Americans are the enemy.<\/p>\n

Listen to the way we talk about the left, the progressives, about the establishment–there is never any way to work together. They have power, we do not. The solution, of course, is political revolution. We need to tyrannize. Well, I certainly feel that way, more than a little. But I am unendingly surprised that we start talking publicly this way, as though disagreement were a call to war, not a way for us to learn we should become better than we are–look up to some possible unity beyond partisanship. We’re coming around to the opinion that because we have the right principles we have to exterminate other people. Partisanship means, we do not have to persuade electoral majorities or concrete people-in-the-flesh. That’s wrong. Partisanship is supposed to unite the right; then you need something else, too, a principle & persuasion that can unite people.<\/p>\n

This is mostly wishful thinking. I really don’t know what the solution is or who will lead us. But I can tell when anger turns politics into a chasing after vengeance. We are losing sight of any possible good & any possible future where Americans are together. There is a special mix of affection & helplessness in those of us who were not lucky enough to be born Americans–not to say I do not count my blessings:\u00a0In my early childhood tyranny & the USSR collapsed, not too bloodily, so I know it could have been far worse for me…<\/p>\n

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If you’re right, you should win–you deserve to win–if you’re not winning, there’s probably some treachery or conspiratorial stuff being done by whoever’s winning or at least on their behalf. Then a few steps further, it’s civil war, right after the end of the republic. & whoever disagrees is a sucker, being played by evil people whose powers might just be unlimited.<\/em><\/p>\n

Lotsa anger among conservatives, not enough for the right to cohere, but too much for the various factions to tolerate each other. What is there to do? I don’t know. How can we live with it? I have some ideas about this.<\/p>\n

<\/i> <\/a> … Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2465,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2465"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":633,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions\/633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balldiamondball.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}