Movement Conservatism and Angering Liberals

[_Some Schmo]

I think you are onto something, EA. It would certainly explain this. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... ervillains

Jesus for the love of god Christ. It's unbelievable.

Sometimes I imagine the Koch brothers sitting around laughing that because of all the BS they spread and politicians they've purchased, and the resultant income inequality and climate disaster they're helping to foster, that when the ice caps finally do melt, they'll be the only ones who can afford a nice house boat.

[_Gunnar]

I think you are onto something, EA. It would certainly explain this. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... ervillains

Yes, it is as I already pointed out on a previous thread:

As if it wasn't already bad enough that GOP leaders were denying and obfuscating the realities of anthropogenic climate change, now they seem to be switching to actively and cynically embracing catastrophic climate change. According to the article, Senator McConnell seems to be determined to sabotage any international agreements about addressing climate change by convincing other nations that the USA would not comply anyway.

”McConnell’s actions end the pretense that the GOP leadership has any interest whatsoever in trying to globally address the gravest preventable threat America faces. As Chait notes, “The speed at which Republicans have changed from insisting other countries would never reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions to warning other countries not to do so — without a peep of protest from within the party or the conservative movement — says everything you need to know about the party’s stance on climate change.”

I’m not sure a major political leader has ever pursued a strategy that is so directly counter to the health and well-being of all Americans, their children, and the next 50 generations. The Pope ends his encyclical calling on God to “Enlighten those who possess power and money that they may avoid the sin of indifference, that they may love the common good, advance the weak, and care for this world in which we live. The poor and the earth are crying out.”
If indifference to the dangers of climate inaction by the rich and powerful is a sin, how immoral is it for the rich and powerful to actively try to block the entire world from acting?

One final note, especially for international readers. No matter what McConnell does, the truth is that the United States will meet the CO2 targets President Obama has made. Indeed, I am certain this nation will surpass them. Why? As morally and scientifically urgent as the EPA’s Clean Power Plan is now, that urgency is going to grow exponentially over the next few years, as global temperatures and extreme weather soar, and the dire nature of our situation becomes painfully obvious to more and more people.

(emphasis added).

In the meantime, China has already given the lie to the excuse for not taking action that China would take no action to reduce its own emissions

Last November, the Obama administration leveraged the Clean Power Plan (CPP), which cuts carbon pollution from the electric utility sector, to get Xi Jinping to announce China’s game-changing commitment last year to peak CO2 emissions in 2030, “and to make best efforts to peak early.

McConnell immediately complained he was “particularly distressed” by this deal because it supposedly “requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years.”
In fact, China had also pledged to double its carbon-free power capacity between 2015 to 2030, essentially building an entire new U.S. electrical grid, but one without CO2 emissions — which immediately gave the lie to the notion that the U.S. would some how suffer economically if we made the far smaller changes to our electrical grid needed to meet the EPA’s CPP targets.

As if to directly rebuke McConnell, two weeks later the the Chinese announced that they would peak in coal consumption by 2020! By the spring it was clear that the Chinese would beat their coal and CO2 targets by several years.

This was exactly what Republican Conservatives insisted that China would never do.

This is the most damning evidence yet of the moral bankruptcy of the foremost current Republican leadership. It is as if they would rather see the entire world go to hell in a hand basket than save it if there is any risk that their political opponents will get any credit for helping to save it.

[_Gunnar]

I think you are onto something, EA. It would certainly explain this. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... ervillains

Jesus for the love of god Christ. It's unbelievable.

Sometimes I imagine the Koch brothers sitting around laughing that because of all the b***s*** they spread and politicians they've purchased, and the resultant income inequality and climate disaster they're helping to foster, that when the ice caps finally do melt, they'll be the only ones who can afford a nice house boat.

I can easily imagine that too. I am convinced that the Koch Brothers don't give a tinker's damn about what happens to anyone else as long as they can continue to augment their own wealth, power and influence.

[_Gunnar]

I think you are onto something, EA. It would certainly explain this. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... ervillains

What is really outrageous and frightening is that some of them, like Marco Rubio, as reported by SALON:

But it turns out, Rubio is far less passive than I assumed. Not only does the presidential hopeful not want to address the causes of climate change, he’s determined to roll back everything President Obama’s done towards those ends thus far.

What an incredibly short-sighted dimwit! The Clean Power Plan Protects Our Environment, Health & Economy.

[_ludwigm]

Conversatism? Please... guys... think about...

Convervativism is the word. Think about it. Linguistic and such stupid sciences say what is it; the word fro:
- conservative
- conservatives
- people who follow conservative rules/defs/whatever
( could it be conism to more decrease the syllables to help analphabetics? )

In "The Space Merchants" of Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, they use the word consie. Two syllables, for morons.

The Consies, who have haunted the story from the beginning, are an underground terrorist organization that opposes the rampant corporate exploitation all around them. "Consie" is short for Conservationist, but by the way the term is used, it's obviously being used as a parallel to "Commie." Remember, this was written back in 1954 at the height of the McCarthy hysteria, so it was rather daring of them.

In Hungarian, they are translated in that book as as "conservists" ... A good translation, by the way.

[_honorentheos]

Thanks for sharing this, EA. It's an intriguing explanation.

Out of curiosity, to your knowledge do the proponents believe this counter-positioning results in proactive contradictory action or primarily static, entrenched opposition to liberal self-definition? Does the current attack on Planned Parenthood, as one example, best represent the older paradigm of furthering a conservative philosophy or a newer paradigm of being opposed to something that the broader conservative base identifies with liberalism? I could see it being a hybrid, at first glance, but since you've been following the trend for over a decade perhaps you have better view of how this is manifesting in our current political battles.

[_Gunnar]

EA, your OP tends to confirm the growing impression I have long had that current, hardcore Republican leaders have a perverse inclination to oppose and demonize whatever their Democrat counterparts support, even if it were otherwise supported by Republicans themselves. I like the way you put it: "...they are on a self-reinforcing feedback loop into insanity." I have long felt they are far more concerned about finding ways to blame Democrats for whatever is wrong than working with them to make things right, especially if (heaven forbid!) Democrats or liberals were perceived as deserving any of the credit for making things better or right.

[_honorentheos]

I was looking for something else in an old thread, saw the title of this one in the search results which seemed on topic so I decided to revisit it.

EA's OP deserves to be bumped and considered for what it says about our current political environment. The original observation EA encountered at the end of the Newt Gingrich era to the culmination of the inmates overrunning the asylum with the election of Donald Trump in 2016 is eons in political years, yet it's amazing to think that when EA wrote the OP in 2015 almost no one would imagine Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination let alone the Presidency by basically hitting every anti-liberal greatest hit and claiming his opponents in the GOP were soft on liberals so effectively pushing them further in that direction as well. Given this context, it also informs other aspects of the 2016 election. "Who is Hillary Clinton?" would be the consistent Jeopardy answer in the '90's, '00, and 2010's to the question, "The perfect personification of conservative animus towards liberals."

It brings to mind a bad sci-fi movie where the scientists and ambitious corporate types working for Evil Corps Bad I!deas are manipulating the genetics of some violent species to give them superior intelligence, strength, and size all while blowing off the movie's protagonist who spends the first act of the film raising alarms that this will inevitably turn out badly. Trump's base is the shark in Deep Blue Sea and the GOP is Samuel L. Jackson. Or think Westworld for a more recent example.

Anyway, the OP is worth the time.

[_EAllusion]

Since I wrote this three years ago, it's entered into conventional understanding of conservatism. It's become a matter of routine to observe that conservatives are doing something, especially something stupid, exclusively to "pwn the libs."

[_Maksutov]

Since I wrote this three years ago, it's entered into conventional understanding of conservatism. It's become a matter of routine to observe that conservatives are doing something, especially something stupid, exclusively to "pwn the libs."

The most consistent feature of T-Party/Trump Party "discourse" is the insulting of liberals. Ann Coulter has made a career out of it, along with her old classmates D'Souza and Ingraham. It's an industry now, besides an "ideology".