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What are good, modern right-wing values anyways?
I'm in too much of a left-wing echo chamber, to the point where anything conservative or right wing appears to be 'evil' or not necessarily purely right-wing. For example, conservatives generally promote family values and the family as the foundational unit of a society. But this too often gets grouped together with same/opposite sex marriage arguments. Another point is small government, but that often manifests in deregulation in areas where regulation is now necessary (e.g. environment).
So, what does it mean to be an ethical right-winger today and in the next decade?
This question requires an answer through a multi-stage process.
First, I just want to mention that what principles and values we value as good is very subjective.
Secondly, this question requires associating values we find good with our view of politics.
Obviously a lot of people are going to disagree with the degree to which different values should be balanced, and where a principle that's good goes too far and swings back to being bad.
With that said, some of the right-wing values I find good are:
Again, many of these values can go too far and the conservative side of politics doesn't have a monopoly on these values, but I associate them strongly with right-wing conservatism of many varieties.
Are those really right-wing values? What you listed seem like general values that most people have, regardless of their political affiliation.
Principles have to be balanced against each other. I'm suggesting that folks on the right wing would tend towards those views when they make that balance.
And so on. I could make a similar list with positive values I associate with the left-wing politics, libertarianism, environmentalism, populism etc.
The idea is what one chooses when push comes to shove and one has to choose one's position on the continuum between two good principles: What does a conservative/liberal/environmentalist/etc. end up prioritizing then?
I would say that these are values which many conservatives tend to hold closest, once you boil down groups of individual stance and policy tendencies.
When looking at the same moral or value, there can still be disagreements on what ways the value should be upheld, or even what the implications of upholding a value must be. The way a conservative acts upon a value could be subtly or majorly distinct from similar values that a liberal might hold closest. Take, for instance,
A conservative might interpret this being owed the total sum of their hard work as determined by the market, and not owing anything to a government or other administrative overhead (e.g. unions), which had little to do with the production of value, and perhaps has no business interfering with their hard work.
A liberal might interpret this as being owed the total sum of their hard work as determined by the market, but instead opting to potentially sacrifice a portion of their direct income to one or a group of overhead bodies for the purpose of ensuring that the value created is most appropriately distributed.
In a population where each individual shares similar enough core values, disagreements might still arise from the conclusions each individual draws.
Sorry, completely off-topic, but did you write this comment directly into the textbox on Tildes, or are you using some kind of editor or browser extension or something?
The formatting came out very strange. The last 3 paragraphs aren't inside
<p>tags like they should be, and so they don't have a max width and go wider than they should.I'm just wondering how it happened and if there's something I need to try to fix.
Sorry for any inconvenience:
I did use the Tildes textbox for the formatting. I'm a new user, I was playing with the markup formatting, and I'm not very familiar with markup languages in general, so I probably made poor syntax choices.
My own guess would be that I was using line-break tags (
‹/br›) for text separation instead of paragraph tags (‹p›/‹/p›), which could be bad practice.It probably boils down to my poor knowledge of markup style, which means it's probably an edge case, but I can send you the plain text I submitted if you still want to look into it and think it would help.
Ah, ok. I did look at the text you wrote, but I was curious if something had generated that.
You shouldn't need to manually type the line break or paragraph tags at all. Just pushing enter to go to a new line should usually work, and twice for a new paragraph. There's a "Preview" tab above the post editor that you can use to check how a post will look, too.
So what's your take, then?
I agree with what nacho replied with.
When I wrote my previous comment, I was thinking that I value all of the things they listed yet am very much on the left.
<Anecdote>
This is a big one among many of the conservatives I know. Any time an idea like heavy taxes past $1mil income is introduced, a common counter point is that an alternative solution would be to better incentivize or otherwise encourage and grow a stronger cultural inclination towards voluntarism (volunteerism?).
</Anecdote>
A pair of ideas which I might add to the list is:
<Opinion>
I would say that our current system does not allow for the second idea to hold true. Businesses and other moneyed interests hold too much sway over the political climate, and are able to form political agendas which grant them more inertia. In a regulation-lax, laissez-faire environment, powerful groups will use their power to influence political decisions in their favor.
</Opinion>
If anything I loathe the right wing because I've lived under a Conservative government that has spent the last nine years screwing over the unemployed and disabled. This government has also pushed an agenda of online censorship and is currently working to drive us out of the EU without a trade deal.
I actually started volunteering with a housing non-profit two years ago because I had noticed a huge rise in homeless people sleeping on the streets. Here in Britain the eroding safety net and housing prices have turned into a national scandal.
For the most part I agree. But I do not agree on moral relativism. Which is why I included "modern" because I think that we can objectively justify many values/principles as "good" with e.g. data. For example, data suggests smoking causes suffering (which can be quantified by instances of e.g. cancer) hence smoking is bad. You could argue the same for importance of voluntarism (with the opposite direction; being good). Though some of them can be hazy, at least hypotheses can be made that can be better supported in the future.
Thanks for your list, though. I think those are good answers, something I'll think about. I'm looking for ammunition to strengthen my conservative side, and have something to argue for supporting the right side of the spectrum.
I think that's a persuasive argument too, with limits. Essentially this view boils down to subscribing to utilitarian ethics: maximizing well-being equates to the most moral actions.
I say within limits because min-maxing happiness or well-being can have some really perverse outcomes. Like situations where it'd be better to kill someone who's done nothing wrong because that would make the world a happier place overall. (There are many much less extreme examples here; untempered utilitarianism is a really bad idea)
There are many times when principles and values simply boil down to being a matter of opinion.
I'm not suggesting that there aren't objectively bad policy that're demonstrated not to work as intended that major political movements want to implement/maintain.
Some will find the alternatives more morally objectionable. Or not recognize that other means will actually align more closely with their own personal values.
The right balance between self-determination and societal responsibility for its constituents is exactly one of these matters of opinion. The same goes for political preference.
honestly, i feel like you're coming at what i think you're going for here the wrong way, because there are a lot of dimensions that make the question you're posing a hard question to even answer on a local level. what the "right-wing" constitutes to begin with varies by country because the political right is not by any stretch of the word a monolithic thing. (the american republican party and its beliefs for example are generally an outlier relative to other traditionally right-wing parties in western democracies, and this has increasingly become so in the past decade or so. but also across state lines there can be big differences.) there's also the fact that values aren't--generally speaking, anyways--something that varies that much political belief to begin with; left-wingers and right-wingers might prioritize values quite differently in a given country, but for the most part they'll probably share common values at the end of the day and differ mainly in how they feel those values should be reflected and implemented in society, since values tend to be more of a societal (or religious) thing.
i think the question that probably better reflects what you're going for here is less "what are good modern right-wing values?", and more something along the lines of "what are values that you feel that the right-wing (in your country) prioritizes/reflects well?".
Perhaps, but I want to leave it open to the commenters to decide if they want to make a global or local claim. I'm being intentionally ambiguous/open-ended to allow the full gamut of thoughts.
So, I'll ask you then: what are values that you feel that the right-wing (in your country) prioritizes/reflects well?
not a lot, honestly! the american republican party is good on paper at prioritizing a lot of values, but in practice they are almost an entirely different party because their implementation of those values almost always ends up fucking people over while only delivering the value as you'd expect it to be to a few people (or nobody). a lot of the best examples of right-wingers pushing values and not fucking them up are probably libertarians at this point; right-libertarians in america are (usually) pretty good on "individual rights" even if they have an incredibly bad tendency to argue it in the worst possible directions for example.
Yeah, that's about how I view things, too. I looked at @nacho's list of values and thought to myself, "Does that describe the Republican party?" And I can only think that they sort of do, but in a very twisted way. If I put a handful of Republican voters in a room they would probably agree on the list, but the way the party's representatives act don't really tend to align with them very well. I see things like "The value of a strong moral compass" and wonder cynically if that's just something the party uses as a tool to manipulate voters - "Go ahead and tell everyone how I'm right no matter how many people tell you how bad these ideas really are".
TBH, the state of the Conservative/Republican parties in Canada/US is what lead me to posting this. I desperately want there to be a proper right-wing party in both those countries but I have no idea how it would look like at this point.
I don't think left vs right is inherently good vs evil but at this point it seems like it.
I'm not a right-winger so I don't want to speak for them in terms of what their values are, but I can give some examples of more positive (i.e. principled and non-hateful) conservatives. One columnist I admire, even if I don't always agree with him, is Andrew Coyne. He was an editor and columnist at Canada's main conservative newspaper but he resigned from the former position after they refused to print a column of his calling for people to vote against the Conservative party (which the paper had endorsed) in the federal election. Here's a recent column of his where he argues for a carbon tax (a current political issue opposed by some prominent conservative politicians) and puts down other conservatives for their implicit argument to do nothing about climate change.
Another good example is this interview with the now-premier of Alberta before their recent election. The interviewer is a conservative radio host but he really takes Kenney (leader of the United Conservative Party) to task on his unwillingness to remove hateful and bigoted elements from his party. More context here, and a good quote:
It's funny, because I think a carbon tax is an extremely solidly right wing solution to the issue of climate change. The environment is a common good, so taxing its use to pay for its rehabilitation is a free market way of paying for climate change. You drive on a road, you pay a toll, you dump Co2 in the sky, you pay a toll.
You gotta look in the past. Lincoln, Ted Roosevelt, FDR and Winston Churchill were great examples of right-wing politicians with a moral compass. Here in Brazil FHC and Itamar Franco where decent, even though I strongly disagreed with their policies. I don’t trust the current right. In the current context even the Bush’s can be considered bastions of the moral.
edit: just noticed you're asking for values, not politicians. I'll get back to you.
By all means suggested politicians are welcome! If you have any recommendations on biographies that would be great too. I say that because I found lots of insight in reading The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, you get an idea of who the person was, what they valued and how they lived by their values.
The documentary The Roosevelts: an Intimate History, by Ken Burns, is extraordinary.
Anything recommendations for other politicians? I know I can look it up but there are so many out there for those you mentioned and I think I rather trust a Tilder. Books or movies.
I'm afraid that was my entire knowledge on good right-wing politicians :P
In Europe sovereignty is something that the right portrays to promote, while some part of the left has abandoned or forgot the concept (popular sovereignty is a left-wing concept historically). The right however will often use "national sovereignty" instead of "popular sovereignty".
You mean a nation having total power over itself?
Kinda, although the left version basically means democracy (in a more direct sense that is most representative governments). This issue is very pressing in some country like Switzerland where direct democracy is under pressure from the EU. The left doesn't have a very good story or vision on sovereignty, while the far right has a much easier job with their nationalism.