No Stupid Questions

For starters, Liberals are less violent, desire stability and an uplifting progression in social values, and tend to be fairly comfortable in themselves.

Other than that - when Liberals go far enough left, they become Socialists, and start to hate Liberals for their Capitalist elements and "economic liberalism"/neoliberalism.

When conservatives go far right, they turn into fascist conservatives... Conservatives, just more staunch, violent, and unreasonable.

I think there's an equal amount of anger on both sides. Unfortunately.

There's no longer room for actual, mature debate. Just mud-slinging and slurs. The fact is that most people are somewhere in the center politically, but the extremists are louder and get the attention because it's entertaining and the media uses it to sell content. It sucks.

I hate racists and bigots, but there’s not much to be done about it. Stress and anger will take years off your own life - don’t let them harm you. On the other hand if you can troll them a bit, you may be sending some of them to an early grave, just with words. It’s not hard to do they’re triggered by anything gay, reparations, dominant women, intelligence and education, health foods, immigrants, solar power, and so on. So you don’t really have to send them any hate, you just need to be an example of the world you want to live in and they’ll rage about it.

ROFL!!! Spend another ten minutes on Lemmy before asking this question.

I mean I'd probably change my answer depending on the phrasing of the question here.

If you mean like, classical liberalism, which includes both laissez-faire capitalism and interventionism, you'd probably find quite a lot of conservatives at this point who would define their economic ideology (if they even have any) as belonging to that kind of realm of thought, at least with laissez-faire. That shit's pretty old, we've been through like multiple cycles of that, both globally, and domestically in america, and calling for a regression to a period when your specific breed of liberalism was in place is pretty possible. Which would be kind of lumped under conservative thought, despite the window dressing of like, wanting to just kind of, hedge your bets, maintain the status quo, and "conserve" things, and even the branding of "this is the way things really are, so we need to conserve the real reality", it's mostly actively regressive horseshit.

So, that's to say, you could both be a liberal and a conservative at the same time, if you're going based on the like, actual political definitions of things. I get the sense you're more trying to use the term "liberal" to mean "progressive", or probably more accurately "socially progressive". If you want a reason why I'm making this kind of stupid semantic distinction, it's because I think it's important to distinguish liberalism, and neoliberalism, right, which refer to economic freedom, from other more actually socially progressive ideologies. I'll get to that later. In any case, it's pretty much part of the intrinsic nature of the ideology that, being okay with gay people, at the least, is going to be more chill than not wanting gay people to exist. The same for trans people, the homeless, racial minorities, neurodivergent people, whatever.

Socially progressive values are also kind of default, I think, in a vacuum (which hardly anything is), whereas nutter conservative ideology is something you have to be more actively radicalized into. If you don't give a shit about gay people, you're probably also fine with them just like, going about life and existing. You might also be fine with their oppression, but you're not actively hindering things, necessarily. You have to be actively radicalized and convinced they're bad, though, in order to call for them to be like, killed, or barred from marriage, or whatever.

You would have to more actively want gay people to have rights, to care about them more in a positive way, and actively oppose their oppression more, in order to like, actually push for things. It's a more active position, basically, to be actually socially progressive, or actually progressive. It necessitates caring. I think despite it just being on the surface more nice as in ideology, which helps prevent people from being like, actively hateful, I think it's probably also sadly the case that a lot of people who would otherwise pretend to be socially progressive don't actually give two shits about what happens or doesn't happen, and are just mindlessly occupying what they see as kind of a default position at the time.

If you go back to like the 2000's, lots of people who are otherwise pretty "progressive" nowadays would've been pretty turbo homophobic and transphobic. That's not really a slight against their character, right, we're all products of our environment, but they're just occupying kind of whatever position they think is acceptable to the mainstream.

Put even more simply, they kind of, understand that one side is right and one is wrong, but since they don't really understand the underlying reasoning behind either side, they're just jumping onto whatever they get better vibes from. That used to be some more reactionary stuff, because we were kind of in both a more apathetic and callous cultural era where "not caring" was seen as cool and offering a better vibe, and we were seen as being kind of in a "post-history", "post-racial" world, where if you were offended by racism, that was your fault, because we ended racism, and now the only real racism is you thinking racism is real, man hits bong. Just sort of like, the idea of racism as existing in a purely cultural state, just as a remnant, a cultural artifact relic which we need to move past culturally, but doesn't affect the "real world" in any way. Those ideologies were kind of appealing to a mostly white mainstream cultural population, who could pretty easily just walk around, and make edgy jokes, and pretend still that everything's gonna be okay because they haven't encountered a housing market crash and the consolidation of all of the wealth in a fraction of the population and a once in a century pandemic partially accelerated by huge misinformation campaigns. Basically, because the mainstream cultural consciousness, mostly controlled by white people, was still insulated from the worst of the worst consequences, and because they were still getting treats.

We still had a white suburban middle class, basically. We still do, but we used to, too.

Now though, people see being socially progressive as having a better vibe. Probably this is because we're on the long end of the economy being shit, and everyone having realized that collectively burning your children's futures in order to further white supremacy isn't a sustainable thing long term and just fucks you over, probably it's also because the internet has made it easier for marginalized voices to occupy more space in the cultural consciousness, whereas before they would've been screened by industry gatekeepers. Probably it's also because conservative nutters collectively lost their fucking minds and kind of went mask off with trump and gamergate shit, partially as a reaction to obama just being like, black, but also those other factors I've named.

Probably it's because the middle class that you used to see in all those 90's movies, like fight club and office space, got automated away, outsourced, or otherwise traded for a bunch of IT and internet developers, which can mostly take their place as part of the managerial class. We go from cubicles in high rises, to open floor plan offices in mid-rises, to work-share rental spaces in low-rises, to work-from-home setups, and the amount of people allowed treats from their overlords narrows in total population because you simply don't need as many. The amount of people who are actively fooled by corporate propaganda and bootstraps mentalities also narrows with the proliferation of the internet and with the lack of people who are now "in" on this middle class lifestyle, so your immediate social group is more likely to have people who you know are chilling but are also struggling a lot financially.

yeah I think that's all I got as far as this one goes.

The opposite of woke is random shit boomers happened to grow up with. If your politics are based on some principle you can justify, then if you lose you try again later. If your politics are based on a random collection of historical accidents you can't justify, and you don't even like most of them except for a couple, but you think the only way to keep the couple you do like is to defend all of them, then losing is the end. You have to fight to the death, and once you do lose you can't cope by doing better next time, all you have is revenge.

Sometimes liberals also want to defend historical accidents that they think fit their idea of liberalism, and then they adopt the same kind of aggressive deterrence strategy, like pro-Israel liberals with college protests or the English with trans people.

Because conservatism is fundamentally based on fear.

I'm going to take a somewhat different tack to describing this.

There are many ways to motivate large groups of people. You've likely seen this a lot and not really noticed or paid attention to it. Some examples are tribalism ("Hey! They're not one of us!"), nationalism ("Those dirty foreign people!"), religion ("Do what I say and go to heaven!"), money ("Do this and I'll give you something valuable"), etc.

One of the best motivators is fear. ("Do this or I/they will do something you really don't like").

Political groups need something to motivate large groups of people. When done well, they appeal to the better sides of humanity. When done by the lazy, the dumb and the craven, they go with the simple one: fear.

That's what Conservatism has been hammering for a while now. They don't really have a way to appeal to people's better sides, primarily because their platform isn't to make humanity better off. They platform is to make a few people better off to the detriment of everyone else. So they try tribalism ("Those brown people are trying to take your money!"), nationalism ("Those foreigners are taking your jobs!"), religion ("Those non-Christians are trying to install sharia law!"), etc. The most effective one is still fear. So getting their followers scared and angry is the best way to motivate them, get them to stop thinking rationally and build moats that will isolate them from people that might talk them down.

This is used to motivate people to vote in certain ways, as well as motivate them to watch advertisements. In other words: power and money.

Conservative Politics is about giving their base something/someone to be angry at.

LBJ summed it up the best:

"If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

Back then it was the african american population. Today it's trans/lgbt/migrants/muslims/etc... Insert your group of choice here and that's the Conservative political machine.