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[FearfulJesuit]

Conservative ideas can make sense. "Let's not go changing things willy-nilly, it could end up even worse." Just that it ends up being "Don't damn well change a thing!" And then you get things like basic human rights and climate change which need change and soon, and it's obvious to nearly everyone that it needs change.

There was another point I wanted to make but I've forgotten. Oh well.

Point being that modern "conservatives" are in fact reactionaries. They're not trying to preserve status quo, they're looking to undo decades of progress as quickly and haphazardly as possible.

Those who actually are conservatives are called "moderates" and seen by the new GOP as Quislings, as worse than Democrats.

I think- do hear me out here- I think the Tea Party does see something that nobody else sees, even if it's through smoke and mirrors.

America's in an age of decline. We can't get anything done. Our growth is hollow, our upper class is useless as an aristocracy, the middle class is shrinking and the lower class is stuck in the mud. Our infrastructure is decaying and everybody is disillusioned. There have been some victories in the last few years, but they've mostly affected small segments of society who weren't all that different to begin with (gay marriage especially), so the bar for required political and cultural will is lower. Could the space race happen today? Or the Eisenhower interstate system?

That's an age of decline! The Tea Party feels this, but they're totally wrong as to why (it's not because we need to put the Bible back in schools or some such twaddle) and even more wrong as to what to do about it- cutting taxes on the rich and removing the social safety net isn't going to reverse America's decline and it certainly isn't going to turn the clock back to the childhood you thought you had (I'll just invite the interested to google postwar tax rates).

Sure, we live longer, a few more sectors of society have been brought into the mainstream fold, and we're a bit richer, if more unequal. But is America, the society, as vibrant as it was in, say, 1965? Does it have as much potential? I'm not so sure. There's a case for liberal reactionism to be made here. The Tea Party is bad, really bad, but all that right-wing rage didn't come from a vacuum.

[smjjames]

I pretty much blame the republicans for the decline.

Okay, okay, the democrats certainly have had their hand in it, but in the last two decades, it's been mostly the republicans.

Any historians here want to analyze the causes behind the decline?

[Fniff]

I wouldn't know about a decline. Everyone in any time believes they are in a state of decline.
I'd prefer hard evidence for it.

[FearfulJesuit]

Well, I do think it's true that the cut-off point for America's Silver Age, if you want to call it that, was the rise of Reagan- an initial rebirth ("Morning in America") which proved hollow and has led, thirty years later, to the modern political landscape.

I think people have become increasingly atomized, which is why I don't trust modern liberals to reverse the decline. People have become individualized to the point of isolation- there's no sense of collective operation anymore. Extended (and nuclear) families, trade unions, community organizations, pretty much every sort of social organization except the corporation- weaker than they were 50 years ago. (I think the New Leftist focus on identity politics means the modern liberal coalition doesn't know how or why this should be reversed.) The GOP distrusts collectives except those grounded in evangelical Christianity, for obvious reasons.

This sort of atomization is something new. America's had other ages of huge social and economic turmoil, but the isolation we're seeing today wasn't there. I've heard people talk about a new Gilded Age, and we do live in a new Gilded Age, of a sort...but the Gilded age birthed all sorts of social movements; people were engaged with society (the record for voter turnout was in 1876, at 82%). Again, I don't think modern liberal ideology can see this very well...when your main focus is on people's individual identities it becomes difficult to talk about collective sacrifice.

[mainiac]

Everyone and their grandmother says there is a decline. That is not unique.

Show me a polician who can say that what happened was a supply shock, shift in the composition of labor and change in preferences for housing that diverted investment from reinvestment to real estate bidding wars.

[smjjames]

Hm, is there anything comparable to the isolation (or atomization, as you say) going on now that has happened in other places in history?

please don't say Rome in it's waning days

[mainiac]

1872 is present guilded age.

[smjjames]

I dunno, different circumstances, the Civil War ended not all that long ago (in 1872), reconstruction was still going on....

[SirQuiamus]

*clip*

How would any brand of conservatism, liberal or non-liberal, help the society out of the slump?
I'm no historian, but I've been told that the post-war Wirtschaftswunder was mainly fueled by the leftover capacity of the war industry, which was immense enough to create such by-products as the Apollo program. Now that the factory jobs have been permanently lost to cheap overseas labor and robots, what good would a conservative stars-and-stripes ideology do? Will "Cold War II" restart the arms race?     

[FearfulJesuit]

I don't know. I'm merely pointing out the problem; I don't know what you'd do about it. As I've stated, I distrust modern liberalism to do much more than make the decline slower and more comfortable; but I don't see much of a way out.

[Helgoland]

*clip*

Fuck, I just saw the avatar and wondered why I suddenly agreed with MSH that enthusiastically...

But yeah, don't forget globalization and the rise of China. I'd even argue that these economic changes were the reason for what you call the atomization of formerly powerful collective entities.

[Reelya]

The decline in "traditional values" is almost entirely due to economic changes. Family and community used to be economically important, it's not so much now. Conservatives like to blame progressivism, but it's actually caused by excessive capitalism and atomisation of modern life. Cultures that are closer to their agrarian roots (e.g. greeks) have less family-social fracturing than cultures which have been industrialized for longer.

[SirQuiamus]

I don't know. I'm merely pointing out the problem; I don't know what you'd do about it. As I've stated, I distrust modern liberalism to do much more than make the decline slower and more comfortable; but I don't see much of a way out.

I take it that you consider New Leftism a part of the problem, rather than a solution? Perhaps the American version of radical democracy leans too much toward individual freedom and atomizing liberalism, as you suggested above, but I personally think it's (theoretically) possible to create a "balanced" democratic society where liberty and equality are allowed to counteract and regulate each other. As soon as we get rid of capitalism and the democratic deficit, that is. 

[FearfulJesuit]

The rise of China and the loss of secure blue-collar work is a problem, too. Again, it's one that I don't think the modern American liberal coalition is well-poised to handle...socially liberal upper-middle-class people call the shots in the modern Democratic party, and their disdain for the working class (especially working-class social conservatism, which drives them up the wall) is well-known, even if they pretend to hide it.

(Do I have disdain for the America working class? To an extent, yeah. But I'm an old-school Northeastern elitist, and paternalism is not a dirty word for what's left of us.)

@Reelya: Absolutely, but modern progressive rhetoric isn't necessarily helping. Nineteenth-century America wasn't exactly economically secure, either- the panic of 1837, the panic of 1857, the Long Depression from the 1870s to the 1890s (nobody remembers any of those, but that's par for the course for 19th-century American history, except for the Civil War.)

(Second edit: Although, as you point out, industralization is also relevant. I'll have to chew on that for a while, I hadn't thought about it.)

[Reelya]

I don't think it's really about economic stability at all, if the modes of production are the same before and after the period of instability, you wouldn't get change. The 19th century had ups and downs but there were social institutions which survived that, but fell in the post-WWII era. The ~2008 global financial crisis was bad, sure, but did it really redefine peoples basic lifestyles? Probably less than something silly like the invention of the iPhone.

What I was talking about is how the changing modes of production lead to different social structures. When this happens, you end up with obselete social structures and institutions. This leads to disonnance as obselete structures attempt to stay afloat, often by trying to turn the clock back. But they're misdiagnosing why they are obselete.