"Everybody I disagree with is a dumbass." Thankfully, the world is more complex than that.

I’m a leftie, but I’ve found my beliefs challenged, altered and enriched by debating right wing intellectuals.

It’s possible for two ideas to be equally right and incompatible

One thing to understand is that our ability to reason comes down to how we weigh our knowledge of the material in question. Someone can be extremely knowledgeable (and through that knowledge, intellectual) about one topic; and dumb as rocks in another. One of the culture shocks for me when I started working in the medical field was not just the existence, but the prevalence of stupid doctors. You'd think that someone who could become a doctor would be an all around curious and open-minded person... and when they're talking about their area of expertise, it 100% seems that way; but once they deviate into other areas, it starts to show that they're just as much a joe-dipshit as the rest of us.

So, you could have someone who's intellectual as fuck in the context of like orthopedic surgery; but even in other parts of the field of medicine, their brain hits a brick wall and suddenly your ortho doc drinking the covid conspiracy theory koolaid; or conned by some talkshow host into paying money for NFTs; or swallowing the lies about dragshows somehow being about grooming children.

There is absolutely such a thing as a conservative intellectual: just means they're really smart in some unrelated area; and really stupid with politics. There are also plenty of folks who buy into the hatred spewed by the political rightwing. Tricking rednecks into voting against their own interests is one thing - a bigger problem is that for a lot of voters, the cruelty is the point. They don't give a fuck about children: they just want to hurt trans people. They don't give a fuck about fetuses: they just want to hurt women. Assuming that conservatives are just politically stupid is actually giving them the benefit of the doubt - cuz the alternative is that they're just evil.... and evil paired with intellect is both real and incredibly dangerous.

What a horrendous take

hopefully lemmy will not become gab for the left...but it's a free world!

There absolutely are conservative intellectuals, they just don't tend to endorse MAGA.

Here's a great example: https://scholars-stage.org/ Knocks it out of the park all the time. Then again, he rarely spends his time talking directly about culture war topics.

This is the most progressive type article ive read in a while.

Rabbits

A lot of you people haven't read this, and it shows.

https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/conservatism.html

Ps. You can literally just ask yourself what it is conservatives want to conserve...

I know plenty of conservative intellectuals, they are not Republicans though. Look up topics on individual freedom, limited government, or the rule of law to find thousands of examples.

Most would call themselves moderates as conservative is a poisoned title, but they exist.

So ask yourself, what perspective have conservatives been groomed view the United States? Roger Kimball describes it as, “A damsel (America) is locked in a dark castle, which was once a glorious palace in years gone by.” But now “liberal elites, the bureaucracy, academia” have sapped “her vitality,” turning her “weak and infirm” due to a dastardly belief system in “left-wing ideology, political correctness, egalitarianism. Using this metaphorical trope, Kimball continued to describe citizens as having turned into weaklings who secretly long for a return to national greatness. This view of decline and decadence, so core to the conservative intellectual tradition, is prone to eventual faith in a strong, authoritarian leader. And thus, Donald Trump becomes, for Kimball, the only one ready to rescue the country from its demise.

Their perspective is so vastly different due to indoctrination from years of talk radio, right wing news, and sites like facebook, reddit and 4chan where echo chambers reinforced the indoctrination.

The aspect free minds are missing us that, to quote Kimball again, "Trumpism represent[s] conservatism at its essential core, a kind of return to its roots in monarchism". This “monarchism” is now being nurtured by a populist faith—a combined belief in the supposed goodness of the masses, led by the sort of paternalistic authoritarian leader that conservative intellectuals can get behind.

A free mind can obviously see through the deception has it is full of holes. If you don't believe Steve Bannon is the next Pluto than you've already come to the conclusion that these buffoons are actually fascists attempting to strip American citizens of their rights and to gain power through the courts, through the power of the mob, and to gain power through forced religion, just as the Nazis did in the 1930s. The difference is they have absolute imbeciles in charge who have mucked up the process and exposed what they are doing. The mirror was broken for the vast majority of the American people to see. Thus this movement stalled, but it isn't dead yet.

"People that don't agree with me are dummyheads! Wah!!!!"