On Cosmopolitan Conservatism

[Nolidor]

Admittedly, I looked at the labels you guys have for political ideology here, and the Rockefeller Republican label seemed interesting.

I brought it up to a friend, and she said that it's nice on the surface, but that deep down, it's much more sinister. On one hand, it embraces socially liberal values and government regulation, but on the other, it has a fake appreciation of culture. It doesn't care for the everyday person relating with what they're doing, but rather institutionalizes people while celebrating celebrities and expects them to be happy or else there's just something psychologically wrong with them. If they're not happy enough with the institution to be willing to keep working, then Rockefeller Republicans are willing to just call them lazy. In other words, they've compromised on everything... except ruggedly individualist work ethic. Drugs, illegal immigration, abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, and even moral emotivism/relativism are fine by them... as long as they get to bully some minority around who's too difficult for justice to be bothered, and call that minority lazy and force it to do menial labor that nobody wants to do.

I told her in response that sounds rather cosmopolitan...

...and she said that I didn't know what I was talking about. After that, she linked me to this: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011 ... nservative

She told me that cosmopolitanism isn't what we typically believe it to be in the mass media sense of the word. In fact, Stalin even used "cosmopolitanism" as a way to discriminate subversive Jews versus "patriots", especially in light of the media. He was convinced that Jews used the media to indirectly impose their religious values on society even if they didn't directly preach them.

What's most interesting about this, however, is how many conservatives actually complain about the media themselves, and claim that it subverts society in the same "cosmopolitan" way in contrast to patriotism. These conservatives tend to not be Jews though. Heck, Zionist neocons often celebrate mass media consumerism as a venue of capitalism, especially in contrast to those artsy-puny liberals who aren't willing to endure the rugged individualist attitude of crazed consumption...

...so what does it really mean to be a cosmopolitan, and can conservatives actually relate with it or is it just a label they're using for their own self-interest?

[Spider]

Conservatism is too insular to be compatible with cosmopolitanism. Fundamentally opposed.

Conservatives from location A and location B probably want to kill each other to death...not embrace each other. At best its, "Stay on your side of the border, weirdo."

[Nolidor]

Given that so many conservatives believe in globalism through free trade and interventionist foreign policy to spread democracy around the world, I highly doubt that.

Heck, a lot of conservatives despise domestic localists as lazy. Conservatives tend to be elitists, and domestic localism is similar to native self-determination movements around the world. There's even an element of conservatives who support free labor since they like the work ethic of illegal immigrants.

For example, consider how Rockefeller Republicans look down upon southerners and country-folk. On the other hand, they also look down upon those who try to escape their circumstances by labeling them as hippies.

[eynon81]

you guys are throwing a metric f**k ton of buzz words around... and no one seems to be addressing the fact that conservative politics is a face, not an ideology... There hasn't ben a genuine conservative republican since Lee Atwater was named Chairman.

[The Dharma Bum]

That's what happens when you try to preserve a myth as if it were a fact

[Aaron]

what

[jimmyz]

Leftists opining what conservatism is or is not. pffff

[Aaron]

Ignoring Jimmy's brief menstrual period over who gets into his tree house...

Pertaining to the social vitality of a Rockefeller Republican.... it's more sinister because it's a capitalist bastardization of machiavellian belief systems. Vintage Rockefellerites actually did believe in something, unlike modern neocons, but what they believed in wasn't that much more healthy... they truly believed the 20th century human was capable of looking past money and power once they had both, and making healthy decisions for the world using that money and power. There are people capable of avoiding corruption, unfortunately those people don't usually get money or power because it basically requires a corruptible person to access money and power.

Same social ignorance as communism.... great on paper, except that humans are running it. So... fail.

[eynon81]

[Aaron]

Precisely.