New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 109
There are many ways we could conceive of Leftism, and one of the best is that it is a covetous relationship with power. It’s easy to understand how toxic and bad that is, if not evil. Yet here we are at a crossroads in world history, and we’re being led toward precisely that pit. There’s a popular line out there now that goes something like this: “the Left wants power, and conservatives don’t. That’s why conservatives always lose.” The implication is that conservatives should also desire (or covet) power. This line adopts the Left’s relationship to power and fails to articulate the healthier relationship to power embraced by conservatives: that of faithful service to others, which conservatives often gladly shoulder. In this important episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay covers this line and a healthier way to move forward into the responsibility we have to shoulder. Join him for the discussion, then chew on it.
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4 comments
Your argument is not valid. In relation to any status quo, progressives are faced with the task of changing it (because they reject it, it does not meet their demands). In this, progressives are the actors, they take ‘the first step’. Conservatives don’t have to take the first step, they only have to ‘react’ (that is why they are often called ‘reactionary’) and try to counter the progressive revolution from a position of resistance in order to ‘preserve’ what is valuable in their eyes. It is therefore very clearly the progressives who feel compelled, based on their ideology, to try to conquer power. Once they have it, they will surpress anyone who does not follow their lead. Just like islam.
You appear to be arguing against being ‘progressive’ in general there. So, would you say the Western world we currently inhabit and probably benefit from is the product of pursuing progressive policies or conservative and, to you, reactionary ones.
Both sides can be progressive and/or reactionary. If that wasn’t the case democracy would simply be a back and forth tug of war where nothing ultimately changes because whatever that might have been changing gets reversed in the next voting cycling.
So not much good.
About this:
“the Left wants power, and conservatives don’t. That’s why conservatives always lose.”
no, the reverse is true. Conservative desire to conserve and that requires power, you can’t fight potential erosion of the status quo from a position of zero influence. Conservatives are a small bunch of already rich and/or powerful people who want to keep it that way. The left wants to hit this small group of people with a disproportionately large amount of power and so it can be transferred to and shared between those who historically have not had power. This is obvious.
Of course there is that thing called corruption…
Anyway, in the history of America since the Republican party first gained power there have been 19 (soon to be 20) Republican (Conservative) presidents and 12 Democratic (presumably ‘Leftist’) ones. Now there are probably some caveats here but it hardly looks accurate to say the Conservatives always lose.
“The left wants to hit this small group of people with a disproportionately large amount of power and so it can be transferred to and shared between those who historically have not had power. This is obvious.”
It is obvious if you accept your claims at face value and fail to critique them. Heard of the Djilases New Class, also predicted by Bakunin? Or anything of the social structure of Communist societies? What about college administrators that write speech codes, decide that the term ‘field’ should be disused because it would supposedly remind people of slavery, or set curricula reflecting their own theories to be forced on all faculty? Just because someone says they are fighting against some power does not mean that they aren’t also coveting it themselves.