What is Reddit's opinion of Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics)?

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In theory, the purpose of the Republican Party is to present voters a conservative choice in electoral politics. Anyone who pretends that the Democrats are 100% on all topics in all areas is either lying or a fool. Diversity of opinions is essential for a functioning democracy. The book <em>Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy</em> explores the historical value of European conservative parties in producing functional democratic institutions. Conservatives, whether they be social conservatives or fiscal conservatives or some combination, deserve to have their voices heard in a democratic forum and play an important role in moderating the revolutionary impulses of the left.

Unfortunately, the current Republican Party is a vehicle for religious extremism and a dumpster fire of racism and opposition for the sake of opposition.

>I've read up on the American Civil War, mostly by over simplified and the Republicans sound like a bunch of dicks. They got off really lightly.

I'm not sure what you read/watched, but the Republican Party of the American Civil War era is not the Republican Party of today. Contrary to their claims as the "Party of Lincoln", the Republican Party of then and now bear only limited resemblence to one another. It sounds like you're mixing up the roles of the Republicans and the Democrats during the 1860s and after.

The Republicans were a very new party on the eve of the Civil War, coming about after the collapse of the Whig Party over the question of slavery. Republicans had a range of views on the future of slavery up to and including total equality between Black and white Americans, but all Republicans want to at least prevent the expansion of slavery outside where it already existed. In many ways, the Republicans were the liberal party of mid-19th century American politics, while the Democrats were the conservatives.

Reconstruction ended in 1877, when Democrats agreed to surrender a close, contested election to the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for an end to Reconstruction. Federal troops were pulled out of the former Confederacy, leading to mass disenfranchisement of Black Americans throughout the South that would last until the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

Around 1900, the political alignments began to shift. By 1932, Franklin Roosevelt led the national Democratic Party to being increasingly inclusive of racial minorities as part of his New Deal programs. By the 1960s, Republicans began to recognize large numbers of disaffected Southern Democrats who were upset by this increasingly inclusive national party and began appealing to them using (often overt) racial messaging. This was known as the "Southern Strategy" and it cemented the transition of the former Confederacy from solidly D to solidly R.

Today, we have a mostly liberal Democratic Party and a mostly conservative Republican Party.

I encourage you to check out the FAQ over on r/AskHistorians, which has a section discussing this switch in greater detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/us_history#wiki_changing_role_of_republicans_and_democrats

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>But the main point here is that any culture that is dependant upon stagnancy that is remaining exactly the same for generations is doomed to failure.

Conservatism does not automatically mean stagnation, just like progressivism does not automatically mean endless revolution. Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard Unvirsity argues for the importance of conservative parties in the formation of healthy democracies. Conservatism advocates for stability and continuity, which are not inherently bad traits.

Of course, that can be taken too far, and the Republican Party today is definitely not arguing for some kind of reasoned conservativism, but I think it's important to point out that conservatisim does have value.

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>As history has shown, an advanced nation will try to conquer far weaker ones.

What does this have to do with anything?

So you remember that one mega-viral tweet from (good Lord) all of two months ago that argued in favor of a second impeachment, mostly on the basis of the post-presidency benefits that Trump would lose? The one that got >700k likes and has 162k upvotes on r/WhitePeopleTwitter?

Yeah, turns out that was total bullshit. In fact, the guy who posted it explicitly said that he didn’t fact check any of it and just put it out there because it made him feel good. Same deal for everyone who engaged with that tweet. We viscerally hate(d) Trump, we don’t want to live in an unjust world where he continues to be rewarded for the damage he’s wrought, and so we spread around some bullshit because it let us believe that he would get at least some of what he’s due.

Now, is this a consistent feature of the left, and of left institutions? Do we have a media ecosystem explicitly dedicated to pumping out unending, unrepentant conspiracy theories, the crazier the better? No. We screw it up sometimes, and on some issues more often than others, but for the most part we still act as though objective truth matters - hence why a liberal MSM, with an audience largely emotionally predisposed to accept that tweet, still fact-checked it into the ground. Compare that to the conservative media ecosystem, which only started walking back wholecloth-fabricated rantings about Dominion voting machines when they started getting sued for defamation.

The difference between us and them is not that they “had cell phones and the Internet and chose objectively false information to believe because it justifies their hatred and insecurities.” If that’s the standard, then everyone’s guilty for some reason or another. Not even in the most venerated halls of science will you find perfect refuge from that.

So what is the problem?

In a nutshell - trust.

How do you know we landed on the moon? You didn’t land there, and you probably haven’t done the laser pulse test with that reflector we left up there. You were taught it in school, probably, but how did your teachers and your textbook authors know? They didn’t do that stuff themselves either.

You know we went to the moon because you trust the people and organizations who say we did, and you distrust the people and organizations who say we didn’t. If you were a sufficiently vocal skeptic, you’d be put in your place by people with as little firsthand experience as you, but whom you nevertheless trust to correct you - or at least, whose opinion of you is important enough to you that you can rationalize your way into believing what you need to believe to continue getting along with them.

But what if you had fallen into a social circle of people who happened to be conspiracy theorists? Then the social pressure would work in the other direction. You’d trust and want the approval of people who believed the wrong thing, and so you’d start to believe the wrong thing too. “Having cell phones and the Internet” doesn’t matter if you are socially incentivized to seek out bad data.

To deceive yourself is human. To stop deceiving yourself requires systematic pressure from trusted people and institutions, who themselves must align truth-seeking incentives with human social incentives as best they can. Undermine those systems, and you too would ultimately start to drift.

The conservative political bubble, uniquely, has spent the better part of four decades hunting those truth-seeking incentives to near-extinction. Now the social incentives are all that remains, and there is so little trust of truth-seekers left that the very act of speaking something uncomfortable is seen as de facto reason to distrust the speaker. There is no one left who could right the ship, no one who is trusted enough within the conservative social sphere to correct anyone else stuck in there with them.

And so their trust is given over to those who correct bad feelings rather than bad facts. There is nothing left but to drown in lies, to believe anything at all that will make them the heroes of their own stories, to turn to nihilistic authoritarianism to act out their personal narratives, and quite likely to take the rest of us down with them.

Wheeeeeee.

This book may have some answers for you:

Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy

https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Democracy-Cambridge-Comparative-Politics/dp/0521172993 Enjoy the end of democracy.