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Tbh young people are *bad* at being trad conservatives. You can’t be a good trad conservative until your 30s/40s and can only pull it off if you do a tour of duty on the progressive frontier in your 20s. If you try the opposite sequence you’ll basically be a moron at all ages.
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We’re just seeing the age-old young = liberal/old = conservative heuristic manifest through the funhouse mirrors of internet weaponry, though the story is more complex
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Never trust a young conservative or an aging progressive
One is trying to skip youth, the other is refusing to age, and there is always a streak of either deep stupidity or deep insincerity at work.
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You can trust the sincerity and intelligence of young progressives or old conservatives, but not their conclusions unless they exhibit signs of having learned a lot from life experiences very different from their own.
The basic failure mode is simply not having varied friends.
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“Civil debate” centrists mistakenly harp on listening and arguing with people who disagree with you. This is bullshit and almost entirely useless. You want opposed viewpoints read a book.
The important thing is to be *friends* with people who disagree with you.
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I barely ever argue politics with anyone, friends or strangers. I just get on a twitter soapbox sometimes and make annoying speeches. But I do have friends I talk about other random shit with, who violently disagree with me politically.
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Being friends = discussing tv shows, playing tennis, going on hikes with. It’s actually kinda stimulating to engage with people in “solar eclipse” mode. Block out the blinding disc of politics, talk about everything else shaped by different life experiences.
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In fact I find it really hard to be friends with people with very similar life experiences to mine, regardless of politics. It’s too boring.
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This might actually be the systematic age-agnostic “tell” of leaning conservative or progressive… your innate friend preferences. Do you want friends who share your history (conservative) or don’t (progressive). “Liberal” is imo not a psychologically fundamental posture.
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Replying to
If you are rich and only feel pity/guilt towards the poor, that can turn to apathy/contempt in a minute if your own fortunes change.
If you’re an “ally” for marginalized groups , you can easily turn into an oppressor/exploiter when you acquire even a bit of unaccountable power.
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This is why hypocrisy is a particular hazard for progressives. It’s cheap to maintain the appearance of an old idealistic posture when your circumstances and incentives change. But if progressive tendencies manifest mainly via friendships-across-differences, it is much costlier.
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Natural conservatives in my experience are rarely hypocritical. They’re more likely to be straight-up deceitful because it’s basically okay, even admirable, in their moral logic, to lie to people who are not like you (and therefore not your friends). It’s just a contest.
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Testable hypothesis: the most common "horseshoe effect" switch is far left to far right. I bet it's mostly those who can't be friends-with-disagreements.
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The reverse horseshoe shift, from right to left, usually happens when you're thrown into a less homogeneous milieu and the choice is between having fewer friends or having different-from-you friends. The prototype is migrating from a homogeneous small town to a diverse big city
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The single most natural-progressive thing I've done in my life is to move out of indian-grad-student ghetto and start living with a diverse bunch in 1998 (in a vegan coop... doesn't get more cliche than that).
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This pattern is so common, it's practically a cliche. An important subtype is post-military-service walkabouts reliably turning vets progressive, despite all militaries being strongly conservative at intake.
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Replying to @vgr
I suppose I'd be a strong example of the Reverse Horseshoe. I was an intern for GWB when I was 19-20 years old, but now consider myself on the left. A big part of the change was getting out of my evangelical fundamentalist bubble and going to a secular university + int'l travel.
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In fact, if I were a sneaky progressive billionaire wanting high leverage "conversions," I'd fund scholarships/fellowships for ex-military people to live in big cities, or go on global backpacking trips, after their service/tours of duty.
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The military is a particularly harsh experience, especially combat experience. From limited anecdotal accounts, it seems equally likely to harden conservatism and dehumanize-others attitudes OR forge the most humanistic people ever.
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