What are some values of liberalism that conservatives need to integrate or reintegrate into their core ideology?
Quote of the day "...the modern left has abandoned liberals who want to reform society to make it more inclusive to everyone.
Instead, they want to punish anyone on the "wrong side of history", and destroy the institutions necessary for our common prosperity as a means of balancing history's scales."
by Jon Davis, American Conservative
If people haven't been paying attention, modern conservatives, as in the new wave of younger conservatives, make up several distinct but complementary ideological groups. There are right leaning libertarians, more ancient paleoconservatives, and even classical liberals. One of the most popular speakers on the right currently are Dave Rubin, a gay liberal, as well as Jordan Peterson, a Canadian whose views would place him squarely in the realm of the Democratic party if he were an American (or at least where the Democrats were in 2008, RIP.)
At the same time, other more traditional conservatives are very apt to call out and identify extremists on the right, bringing about awareness within the movement even when the support of this extremist energy would greatly help gain the short term political victories conservatives would like. This is a quality that, frankly, is completely absent on the left today, as shown by the fact that this week Barack Obama criticized how far left and radical the new Democrats have become in the three years since his leaving office and received little more than an onslaught of sniping directed at this once messiah of the far left. Perhaps conservatives should return the favor we experienced by calling all those new left wing radicals racists for disagreeing with him about him about absolutely anything.
Conservatives have integrated the parts they need to. We fulfill the two key roles that are needed for a successful and evolving culture.
The first key role is the ability to identify successful institutions that must be maintained for a prosperous society to continue. These include institutions such as the family and marriage. These are necessary on a societal level as the traditional nuclear family is demonstrably the best means to convey to children positive culture (beneficial norms, values, and traditions), teach lessons of productivity useful to society, as well as promote the health and happiness of children.
While other family structures work, be they single parent households or kids raised by gay parents. Some kids out of those homes are monumentally successful, but anecdotes aside, statistically none come close to a child raised by their married biological mother and biological father living in the same household. I am saying this as someone raised outside of that happy life, but having grown with my own children, become very much aware of the reality of this conservative belief.
There is a reason that people don't just become more conservative as they grow older, but specifically the moment they have children. The importance of raising healthy, happy, productive children with a respect for others, themselves, and their culture is a vitally important role for every successive generation for the next to prosper. Raising children in this way is a passive means to ensuring that a society is able to produce what it needs and has the will and means to defend itself. It is the energy behind cultures that last. Societies that forget this, as well as the role that traditional marriage plays into it, will see collapse within only a few generations.
The second role is the ability to see changes in society which require reform of older institutions. An example of this is civil rights. As technology changed, it became clearer and clearer, that despite eons of slavery in all its various forms being the norm, as in literally all of recorded history, the time was coming when the necessity of slavery gave way to acceptance of its incongruity with our ideas of basic human liberty. While the modern "liberal" didn't exist at that time, this drive to acknowledge societal change was what drove the early abolitionists, such as religiously very conservative Quakers and other groups, to fight to free the slaves both in the United States and internationally. This drive had to continue on through post-Civil War Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era to ensure integration of blacks into American prosperity.
To see this dynamic through a more modern lens, gay rights is just the same. Conservatives are very correct to say that traditional marriage must be championed for all the reasons I mentioned. Liberals, however, aren't wrong that if the reasons for getting married are that it's what you do when you love someone, then that right and all the privileges conferred to it should also be granted to gays.
Politics should be the process of integrating social change with successful institutions to create a society that is both strong and adaptive. It should involve conservatives relenting when social change is both unavoidable and undeniable and that liberals should relent when some change made has caused far more harm to everyone than good done to a few.
Liberals used to be the necessary balance to conservatives in this. Did you notice that? I said that liberals and conservatives were necessary to each other. It wasn't always this sense of absolutely destroying the other. They were the yin and yang; the male and female, complimentary and providing balance.
Not anymore.
What seems to be the current trend, if candidates such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or any of "The Squad", are to be taken at their word, social change isn't necessary to be integrated into the institutions of culture, but that those institutions need to be demolished.
Rather then being the necessary fabric of culture, they are the cause of suffering as evidenced by the institutional bias present at the time of their founding and which will carry forward for all points from then on. Why this applies only the Republicans, America itself, the Church, and key corporations founded before 1960, but not the Democratic Party itself (where a far more obvious complaint of the effects of institutional bias could be levied) is beyond me. As they tear down these structures, they always seem to wish to replace them with something far more authoritarian and dictatorial than anything conservatives have ever dreamed.
That said, the modern left has abandoned liberals who want to reform society to make it more inclusive to everyone. Instead, they want to punish anyone on the "wrong side of history", and destroy the institutions necessary for our common prosperity as a means of balancing history's scales. Liberals better come along or they're next.
With that in mind, we on the right are seeing a growing swell of centrists and liberals at our events hearing us honestly for the first time in decades, and the conversations between them is pretty great. I don't know how better we could integrate them. On the contrary, I would pose this as asking how the new left can right its ship? How are they integrating the values of liberalism to prevent the mass exodus of actual liberals currently jumping ship any time the captain of the vessel turns his eyes to the battle only he wants?
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