Thursday, March 17, 2022

The Conservative Tendency To Conflate Unrelated Issues With Communism

On social media and in conversations occuring in person, one of the most common conservative trends is to try to take any political, theological, or broader philosophical discussion to an emotionalism-fueled talk about communism or socialism.  An especially swift way to see them try this is bringing up anything having to do with "social justice," which, in itself, is just a part of justice--treating people as they deserve, which is the same regardless of happenstance factors like gender and race.  Almost anything having to do with true social justice, not even just the shallow and emotionalistic distortions of it pursued by many liberals, is automatically assumed to be dangerous by conservatives to the point that they will at least say that to support it is to invite the tyrrany of involuntary communism.

What does feminism--which is in truth a gender egalitarianism that opposes discrimination against women and men on the basis of their gender--or anti-racism have to do with North Korean tyranny or Chinese communism?  Absolutely nothing!  Communism as a general concept is not even represented solely by very particular modern applications of it by tyrants, much less by philosophically separate issues like gender equality or racism.  A conservative who misrepresents feminism as a destructive ideology (as opposed to the idiotic, sexist, hypocritical distortions of it endorsed by some) and then tries to blame its increasing mainstream popularity on "communism" has just broadcasted the irrationality of their worldview to every rationalist who hears or reads them.

Gender egalitarianism (feminism) is about rejecting the stereotypes of men and women and the other forms of discrimination that follow them, such as opposing the idea that women are incapable of leadership due to their supposed emotionalism and that men cannot be raped by women due to their supposedly constant desire for sex with almost any woman.  Nothing about this has to do with communal ownership of goods and property, as communism is a far broader, more economics-oriented political concept.  This is also true of anti-racism, which in itself is just about intellectually and socially ending discrimination based on skin color.  The selective, hypocritical application of this goal by some liberals and the cultural uproar around real or imagined racism does not mean that fighting racism is about paving the road for a communist regime.

Whether by sheer stupidity or intentional misrepresentation, conservatives almost always resort to calling any change away from the status quo part of some grand plan to plunge the United States into a North Korean or Chinese hellscape, but it might take only a few moments for any thorough rationalist to understand why something like gender egalitarianism is true [1] regardless of the motives of political elites and regardless of what a regime on another side of the world is reportedly like.  Conservatives, like the liberals they tend to rabidly despise, often rely on rhetorical red herrings to keep their fellow political party subscribers in fear of a conspiracy-like assumption about what the other party is trying to accomplish.  What else do they have to appeal to but assumptions or fictions when reason is not on their side?

Whether it is a satanic plot to introduce a communist dictatorship (though communism is morally neutral on its own) that conservatives might imagine around every corner or a fascist dictstorship where the disabled and minorities are gleefully killed that liberals might imagine around every corner, the conspiracies are utterly unprovable at best and slanderous, false, or improbable at worst.  It is conservatives that more regularly try to associate unrelated concepts for the sake of inspiring fear, though.  Very little actually has to do with communism, much less the form of communism that involves tyranny (the involuntary kind).  Almost everything conservatives desperately say is a sign of impending communist tyranny in America is totally unrelated on the level of core philosophical ideas.


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