Yglesias Award: No Non-Yglesiases Need Apply
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Unlike the Daily Dish, we don’t have an Yglesias Award here at Neuroworld. But maybe I’ll institute one and only give it to Matt Yglesias any time I quote him. So, here’s Neuroworld’s first only-Matt-Yglesias eligible Yglesias Award, for a great explanation of modern social conservatism:
Most of what “traditional values” asks of people is pretty hard. All the infidelity and divorce and premarital sex and bad parenting and whatnot take place because people actually want to do the things traditional values is telling them not to do. And the same goes for most of the rest of the Christian recipe. Acting in a charitable and forgiving manner all the time is hard. Loving your enemies is hard. Turning the other cheek is hard. Homosexuality is totally different. For a small minority of the population, of course, the injunction “don’t have sex with other men!” (or, as the case may be, other women) is painfully difficult to live up to. But for the vast majority of people this is really, really easy to do. Campaigns against gay rights, gay people, and gay sex thus have a lot of the structural elements of other forms of crusading against sexual excess or immorality, but they’re not really asking most people to do anything other than become self-righteous about their pre-existing preferences.
Exactly. It’s hard to abstain from sex until marriage (and, er, probably not such a great idea, IMHO). It’s hard to take responsibility for children you father (a better idea). It’s hard to stay married (for some people). It’s hard to be a good parent (for most people). What’s not hard? Holding up a sign that says “God hates fags” and parading around like a jackass.
Which one does the modern conservative movement emphasize?
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I’ve blogged about this before, and am reminded about a recent discussion about a family member who is born again. He’s also twice divorced, a recovering alcoholic, alienated from his children, and a survivalist who literally calls people ’sheeple.’ I really think that for him, and for many other people, ‘family values’ and all of the G-d talk is a way to restrict self-destructive personal behaviors. Whether or not it accomplishes that is another thing, but the motivation to believe in these things is a desire to have rules that apply to you in a world that’s turned out much more chaotically than you expected it to. Why that jumps the curb, however, into a belief that you need to save unwilling others has never made sense to me.
As always Yglesias is bang on target. But I don’t think this is unique to conservativism.
For example, most Democrats think abortion should be legal. But this is easy for them to think, because they are personally not averse to abortion, on an emotional level. In fact if abortion were made illegal, they would be outraged. If it stays legal they’re happy.
Republicans feel the exact opposite. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they are right to find it outrageous. But given that they do and, realistically, that’s not going to change any time soon, Democrats are asking quite a lot – they are asking Republicans to accept, as legal, something they find abhorrent.