I’m surprised by your self-identification as a socially conservative, at least as the term is understood in the US, unless it is tongue in cheek.
It was made in a humorous tone, I don’t self identify as socially conservative, but I do have traditionalist views on many subjects and have more in common with “paleoconservatives” than “liberals”. I do realize that I have little in interest in with what mainstream US social conservatives find worth spending their time on. But that’s just because US social conservatives are very religion centred and have pretty liberal assumptions, about things like the nature vs. nurture or the goodness of democracy.
My guess is that if you sat down to discuss politics with an average US social conservative, there would be precious little you would agree on.
Recall that to have a conservative world view, is to want to protect a particular set of values and institutions of a people at a particular time. I don’t claim I value the same institutions or the same people as US conservatives do. Surprisingly I have little in common with Muslim social conservatives in the Middle East or ancient Roman social conservatives as well. A thinking person with conservative opinions has a hard time not being a de facto cultural relativist. His is a local resistance in mindspace, requiring no more universal principles than self-defence (another case where people consistently use similar mental tools to defend something of ultimately arbitrary and relative value).
I do think I could find some common ground with a US conservative, we would agree Communism is bad, we would agree on the unacceptability of the well documented leftist bias in academia, we would agree family should be the basic unit of society and if the person was an older gentleman or a smarter conservative we could probably agree that the cultural changes in the 1960s where mostly for the worse.
It was made in a humorous tone, I don’t self identify as socially conservative, but I do have traditionalist views on many subjects and have more in common with “paleoconservatives” than “liberals”. I do realize that I have little in interest in with what mainstream US social conservatives find worth spending their time on. But that’s just because US social conservatives are very religion centred and have pretty liberal assumptions, about things like the nature vs. nurture or the goodness of democracy.
Recall that to have a conservative world view, is to want to protect a particular set of values and institutions of a people at a particular time. I don’t claim I value the same institutions or the same people as US conservatives do. Surprisingly I have little in common with Muslim social conservatives in the Middle East or ancient Roman social conservatives as well. A thinking person with conservative opinions has a hard time not being a de facto cultural relativist. His is a local resistance in mindspace, requiring no more universal principles than self-defence (another case where people consistently use similar mental tools to defend something of ultimately arbitrary and relative value).
I do think I could find some common ground with a US conservative, we would agree Communism is bad, we would agree on the unacceptability of the well documented leftist bias in academia, we would agree family should be the basic unit of society and if the person was an older gentleman or a smarter conservative we could probably agree that the cultural changes in the 1960s where mostly for the worse.