Ok, I think we're mostly on the same page. I guess all I'm saying I'm sympathetic to the idea that there's a large social (religious/ethical/mythological) aspect to race and that I think it has to do with ideas of purity/impurity.

My wake-up moment with the whole classic self-flagellating white guilt thing was William T Vollman's Argall. It's the Pocahontas story told by an author who has no clear sympathies and seems to have read every source there is to read (it's a novel, but the book is littered with quotes from all sorts of contemporary texts, and the authorial voice is constantly changing.)

In it, both sides are violent and self-serving and dazed by their own myths, sometimes ( tho rarely ) noble, and both are consumed by in-fighting, often using the interracial conflict as leverage for their own intramural grabs for power.

To Vollman, the actions of the Europeans were neither noble nor deeply evil (well, there is a bit of cosmic pessimism to the book, but that's a broader evil.) They just had better technology, is all.

But the thing is the book just seemed super fucking respectful. To both sides. Like felt respectful. You can usually feel the bullshit, but I got none of that.

That sounds cool. I agree that respect comes from avoiding hagiographic lies about hero and victim races – the comparisons that have been cropping up lately that compare political figures to comic book villains is worrying. Studying a historical event deeply I think can put one in a state of appreciation for it that transcends moralizing and cheerleading. To the people who see all history and all prospects for social action as a battleground of such cheerleading, and who see sobriety as fighting for the oppressor and implicitly approving of genocide, that mindset is dangerous. But I think in the end, lies just can't help you, only the truth can, so even if the lies feel morally good, you have to face the fact that they aren't helping anyone. I think a lot of people are scared that if they don't pick a side in the virtual reality as the events are ongoing, they're bad. And it narrows their field of vision to see the only way of respecting other people as adopting the blue side of that virtual reality. I have no sympathies with liberalism whatsoever, and so I may differ with you there. But I think the important thing to emphasize is how being realistic about what actually happens in the world is a powerful way of respecting people, by showing them that you see them as adults, and not comic book characters. I don't think that's possible in any sort of liberal or leftist way of thinking, and so it has to be abandoned altogether. Liberalism and adulthood aren't compatible, so liberalism and respect aren't compatible.

liberalism — The Great Whatever

Could you briefly explain what you mean by "liberalism"? I'm putting you on the spot, but not uncharitably. You said "adulthood" and "liberalism" aren't compatible. How so? Why?

(A lot of people dislike liberals: radical leftists, conservatives, people who don't know what else to accuse somebody of being, and so on.

I suspect it has something to do with liberalism being seen as naively optimistic. But we'll see what tgw has to say.

I disagree. I've seen a lot of 'Bernie Sanders' in my generation -- for better or worse. They won't out Bernie Sanders Bernie Sanders because now we've seen the show, but they might even exceed him if the right doesn't do too much damage in the next few years.

OK, I will try to be clearer. 'Liberalism' is maybe not the best term, since it connotes a priority of personal liberties, perhaps to the exclusion of centralized power. What I really meant was something more like 'leftism,' and even leftists who 'hate liberals' or whatever would fall under the umbrella.

I see the basic impetus behind leftism roughly as a kind of hyper-rationalism. The leftist has an a priori idea of how the world ought to be, and is outraged that it is not that way. The leftist proposes that the world ought to be changed to be that way, preferably as swiftly and with as little compromise as possible. So leftism is a radicalism in that, insofar as the world is imperfect, it seeks to perfect it, and since it cannot be perfected, it will perpetually be calling for immediate radical change and the dismantling of deep institutions, in favor of new institutions with no historical roots that better match reality as it ought to be.

This means that leftism fundamentally privileges representation over reality in a certain systematic way. I read this cheesy fantasy story that had a great line, where the keeper of the observatory told a visitor that the model of the universe was not perfectly representative of the universe, and when the guest asked, 'so it is imperfect?' the observatory keeper responded 'the universe is imperfect. One day it will be remedied, to fit the observatory.' This is essentially what I see as the guiding impetus of leftism. It is representations that determine reality rather than vice-versa. In this it is fundamentally rationalist in the sense that it believes humanity imposes itself on the world, rather than the world imposing itself on humanity, which is the empiricist bent. The world is as people make it to be, and conforms, and will conform, to the categories constructed for it and placed upon it. This is of course the deep metaphysical source of social constructionism in its various forms, and of the perpetual leftist call to radical political action and revision.

Wherever the leftist sees something that isn't perfect, where the empiricst of conservative impulse is to change oneself to match the world, the leftist impulse is to change the world to match oneself. Rather than meeting a pre-existent standard, like the conservative, the leftist protests that the standard is wrong, and ought to be place elsewhere. Hence the leftist generally does not seek to be beautiful, but to redefine the ugly as beautiful (and even to problematize and hate beauty if it proves too recalcitrant), because he believes, at bottom, that there is no substance to the world other than what he places on it (notice that nihilism of some sort is considered self-apparent to many leftists, or more softly the belief that 'the world has the meaning you give to it'), and so there is a kind of delusion or fantasy of power and control, reflected in the desire for central planning in government and statism generally. This further leads to a conflation between intentions and ends: the leftist thinks that because all reality is malleable to representations, what one needs to do in order to achieve some effect is simply to intend to change the world in a certain way and marshal enough money or power to do so. Hence why the leftist believes that if something is bad, the best thing to do is illegalize it, and so on. There is a kind of naive believe that intentions generate realities. This, in my opinion, is why leftism is grounded on a deep denial of reality, not just as an after-effect (all of us deny unpleasant truths), but as a matter of principle. There is a sense in which the leftist believes that he ultimately cannot be wrong, and where the world bumps against him, the world must move. It also may in turn mean that there are certain things that, while true, cannot or should not be believed, because that would cause one to represent reality in an evil way, making one evil, and so unpleasant truths have systematic reasons to be denied or at least suspended in various forms of doublethink.

This is the reason that the leftist critiques tertiary social phenomena in the media, because they think the media has the power to control thought and behavior rather than vice-versa, and why they put so much emphasis on 'representation' in media and how the media can be used as a tool to change the way people think. This is also why it is utterly obsessed with policing language – it thinks, in a way, you can speak truths into being. Leftism is a top-down ideology, while empiricism and conservatism are, if you like, bottom-up in believing that there are organic features of reality that naturally arise and that one has to accept and conform to if one wants to live. The leftist is in deep denial about the way representations interact with the world, and holds out a secret hope that he can control these representations, and so control all of reality. But this will never work, and so the moral hysteria surrounding trying to perpetually doctor these representations is ongoing and perpetually radical / destructive. Leftism in a way saps adulthood, which is why it makes sense for a university to provide Play-Doh to upset leftist students to calm them after a troubling experience, while doing such a thing is confusing or absurd for conservative students.

All of these, I believe, are features of childhood. The confusion of representation and reality (lack of object permanence), the belief in the malleability of the world to one's desires, the refusal to face unpleasant truths, the insistence that everything ultimately be molded to one's wishes. This creates a desire for childlike narratives and a liking for comic books, superheroes, and so on, along with simplistic moral axes of oppressor-oppressed that create a sort of identity-based template for knowing who is in the wrong when, to emphatically and uncompromisingly support the side that is being hurt by the ones in the wrong. This in turn leads to the basic oppressor/oppressed distinction, which has no fundamental way of being questioned, but only multiplied and complicated by infinitely expanding axes of oppression based on increasingly minutely defined representational categories. And the desire to use this distinction for political gain in enforcing the privilege of one's own representation (and hence reality, since representations determine reality) leads to a weaponization of the notion of oppression, and the glorification of victimhood, weakness, emotional instability, infantilization, and so on. It also leads to the co-opting of natural human emotions, such as grief and anger, into deliberately evoked stratagems employed for specific political reforms. All of this is an endless, destructive spiral that can never be satisfied (since reality will always defeat the representations, while the leftist insists on the opposite), and makes everyone miserable insofar as nothing works insofar as it systematically denies reality.

But this is the behavior of a child – the first thing a child learns to do with its emotions is to artificially invoke them for instant gain, to make its desires a reality. Along with resentment and strategies for revenge against reality when one's desires aren't fulfilled.

––––

OK, scattershot, but that about covers it.

Studying a historical event deeply I think can put one in a state of appreciation for it that transcends moralizing and cheerleading. To the people who see all history and all prospects for social action as a battleground of such cheerleading, and who see sobriety as fighting for the oppressor and implicitly approving of genocide, that mindset is dangerous. But I think in the end, lies just can't help you, only the truth can, so even if the lies feel morally good, you have to face the fact that they aren't helping anyone. I think a lot of people are scared that if they don't pick a side in the virtual reality as the events are ongoing, they're bad. And it narrows their field of vision to see the only way of respecting other people as adopting the blue side of that virtual reality.

This I agree with entirely, buut....

I don't think that's possible in any sort of liberal or leftist way of thinking, and so it has to be abandoned altogether. Liberalism and adulthood aren't compatible, so liberalism and respect aren't compatible.

I don't agree with this. I think both conservatives and liberals can take up the comic-book vision, and I think both conservatives and liberals can rise above it. This actually seems self-apparent to me, and I'd question how seriously you think that manichean good v evil narratives are more characteristic of liberal thought.

And then the resigned wisdom of the realistic, pessimistic conservative can very easily become the twisted humanism of the plantation owner who wishes the world wasn't structured like this, but that's how it is, and always has been, and there have always been slaves and always will be, so the best one can do is make slavery as humane as possible. A kind of Ecclesiastes argument.

Edit: posted this as you were posting your response to BC which may or may not have rendered this post moot. Reading it now.

I don't disagree that conservatism doesn't lack for comic books. I do think that leftism is unable to get out of comic books as a matter of principle, in a way not quite true of conservatism, or if you like, a more neutral 'non-leftism.' Leftism is in principle committed to deep reality denial, in my view, and generally demoralizes people by telling them to revel in being weak, ugly, victimized, self-abasing, and trapped in victimhood. It's a philosophy of resentment and isn't compatible with self-respect or maturity.

My wake-up moment with the whole classic self-flagellating white guilt thing was William T Vollman's Argall. — csalisbury

Haven't read the book so I can neither praise nor criticize it. But perhaps your source of knowledge about self-flagellating white guilt should come from experience and first hand observation rather than from Vollman's (or anybody else's) book.

In your life experiences, do you find white people who flagellate themselves about their white guilt? Have you witnessed ordinary white people engaging in behavior toward blacks, asians -- whoever -- that would merit self-flagellation?

Certainly white people spontaneously, reflexively view mixed white-black children as black. — csalisbury

Maine you say. I grew up in a rural 99.9% white county in Minnesota. I knew 1 black person by the time I graduated from high school, and he was from Uganda (exchange student). There weren't many blacks at the state college I graduated from, either. In 1968-69 I spent two years living and working in the black community of Boston. Shock immersion moving from Winona, MN to Roxbury, MA. I found that the black people I lived and worked among were not different than the white people I had grown up with. Oh sure, different food, different accent. Perhaps I was too stupid and naive to notice actual differences, but over the 40 years since then as I have worked with other black people, had black and white lovers, and so on, I haven't found significant cultural differences related to race.

Biased? Sure: my bias is that people are pretty much all alike. (in a 99.9% NW European descendent rural community, they would be.) Yes, trivial differences, especially comparing one individual to another. In the mass, no. The same things make people tick. Love, sex, desires, wishes, fears, the importance of their parents, and so on. People all seem nourished by the same thing: good work, enough income, decent environment, social connections, rich cultural life, all that. And people are starved by the same thing: bad jobs, poverty, crappy surroundings, isolation, impoverished cultural life, and so on.

The older I get, the more suspicious I am of other people's writings, whether it's books, NYT columnists, New Yorker authors, leftish magazine writers, etc. It isn't that I'm getting anti-intellectual in my old age, it's just that so many writers seem wrapped up in a package of such very narrow and specific ideas. They are tendentious, pretentious, etc.

I find that books published quite a few years ago (like 40 or more) have better balance and reflect a clearer understanding. It isn't that people thought better 40 years ago; it's just that if the book survived, it was probably pretty good to start with. Though a current book that I think is quite good is Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (it's a good review for a lot of history that I have forgotten if I ever knew). White Trash: The 400 year Untold History of Class in America is good too.

How do your academic colleagues respond to your conservative deconstruction of liberalism?

I don't talk about it, because that would be an unwise career move. It's implicitly understood in academia that you get with the program.

Great post. Sincerely, though. I disagree with much of it, but you've argued your case persuasively. I kinda feel bad fisking it.

Wherever the leftist sees something that isn't perfect, where the empiricst of conservative impulse is to change oneself to match the world, the leftist impulse is to change the world to match oneself

Isn't this almost tautologically false? The conservative, by definition, does not change. After all, the world doesn't change - the sun rises and the sun sets. But while he doesn't believe anything essential changes, he does concede that the world is in flux. So he reacts, meeting this or that irruption with force, in order to restore things to the way they were. He may not try to change the world to serve the observatory, but he's endlessly vigilant against the weeds that threaten his well-manicured garden. The conservative changes, a bit, but he changes to stay the same.

Hence why the leftist believes that if something is bad, the best thing to do is illegalize it, and so on.

But what does the conservative do about stuff he believes is bad? He defends the laws already in place. Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. A resigned, even ironic, acceptance. But still acceptance.

It also may in turn mean that there are certain things that, while true, cannot or should not be believed, because that would cause one to represent reality in an evil way, making one evil, and so unpleasant truths have systematic reasons to be denied or at least suspended in various forms of doublethink.

Do you consider strict guidelines about how one may or may not depict God leftist by virtue of their focus on representation?

it will perpetually be calling for immediate radical change and the dismantling of deep institutions, in favor of new institutions with no historical roots that better match reality as it ought to be. — The Great Whatever

You said a lot of interesting things, some of which I would agree with or ring more or less true, but this part is troubling. Institutions do change over time, and the results on society can be large. If one were to take your critique of liberalism fully, then the various movements for equal rights in the US and elsewhere would be seen as a waste of time. But the result of those movements was more rights granted to those lacking and changes to various institutions, sooner or later.

A criticism of conservative views toward deep institutions is that it does not admit to progress. It doesn't allow for the possibility that old institutions can be flawed in ways that could be amended. It doesn't allow for the possibility that things may have been different prior to the setting up of such institutions, and they can be different after.

As if deep institutions reflect a kind of permanent social structure which can only be made worse by trying to change it. I don't think humans are like that. Human organizations vary a lot over time and place. Humans are adaptable, and our values vary. So things can be changed. Things have changed. Massively.

Compare the modern world in Europe today to what it was 500 years ago. It's night and day different.

I don't talk about it, because that would be an unwise career move. It's implicitly understood in academia that you get with the program. — The Great Whatever

That's most unfortunate. Different views need to be heard, especially ones challenging the official doctrine. That's what academia should be about. Or am I preferencing representation (my ideal academia) over how humans actually behave in academia?

I think the answer is to have a deeply rooted tradition of principled change. There is a country in this world (not saying it is the only one) that has done an incredible amount toward developing such institutions (Common Law), and its name is England, for which all of us, especially as Americans, should be eternally grateful.

Also, I'm skeptical generally of the notion of progress. I agree some situations are better than others, and you should try to better yourself. But 'progress' is politicized.

I don't see my view as different. I see it as an articulation of what most people believe, and that academia has to systematically beat out of people.

Haven't read the book so I can neither praise nor criticize it. But perhaps your source of knowledge about self-flagellating white guilt should come from experience and first hand observation rather than from Vollman's (or anybody else's) book.

In your life experiences, do you find white people who flagellate themselves about their white guilt? Have you witnessed ordinary white people engaging in behavior toward blacks, asians -- whoever -- that would merit self-flagellation?

What I mean was that it was a wake-up-call about how narcissistic and useless white self-flagellation is for understanding and interacting with non-white people. I more or less agree with TGW that this kind of self-flagellation is the default in middle class, liberal circles. Flagellation is a way of keeping the focus on oneself, often at the expense of reducing other people to mere occasions for one's pious penitence.

But yes, in my experience I do find white people flagellating themselves. And I have certainly witnessed atrocious behaviors by whites toward non-whites. We're mostly white, up here, but there are quite a few Somalian refugees in Portland.

Regarding the rest of what you've written, I agree that people are mostly the same. But I don't think that means they're mostly good.

What I meant was simply that white people literally see a half-white half-black person as black. That's the reflexive reaction. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that they don't see them as devoid of desires and fears.

The conservative would have a much more persuasive case to be made in ancient China, or Egypt, or the Roman Empire, during the periods of stability. But in the modern world, with the amount of ongoing change that we experience, it's harder to see how the conservative is right. Compare the Americas in the 1700s to now. It's a very different continent. Most people alive today would probably expect the world to be a very different place in a 100 years than it is today. Many of the institutions that exist now won't exist or well undergo big changes over the next century. This need have nothing to do with liberalism. Technology and the problems we will be facing almost assure that. So do the changing demographics, and the rapid spread of ideas and trade thanks to globalism, which can't be reversed short of modern civilization collapsing.

Do you consider strict guidelines about how one may or may not depict God leftist by virtue of their focus on representation? — csalisbury

I see the hatred of representation of the divine to be an affirmation that reality is above representation, God being held to be reality par excellence. A distrust of idolatry is a call to never mistake the image for the real thing, or love it more. A leftist dismantles the possibility of idolatry in a principled way by disavowing that there are any realities.

The conservative, by definition, does not change. After all, the world doesn't change - the sun rises and the sun sets. But while he doesn't believe anything essential changes, he does concede that the world is in flux. So he reacts, meeting this or that irruption with force, in order to restore things to the way they were. He may not try to change the world to serve the observatory, but he's endlessly vigilant against the weeds that threaten his well-manicured garden. The conservative changes, a bit, but he changes to stay the same. — csalisbury

Maybe so, but reactive law is incredible. Again, it's what built England. You wait for a problem to arise, then judge when you have to on what ought to be done. Over the years an intricate, deeply woven house of natural institutions is built. The leftist by contrast is Cartesian, and demands (notice, the leftist always demands) that an entire constitution be written up from scratch, on the spot, and immediately enshrined, not in response to the organic problems the world rises and solving them, but from an a priori conception of the way the world ought to be.

A brief note to the conversation on race:

There's a difference between ethnicity and race. An ethnicity can contain multiple races. And a race can contain multiple ethnicities.

For the former: Hispanic is an ethnicity. It includes people who are brown, black, mestizo.

For the latter: White is a race. It includes people of Jewish, Scottish, and Scandinavian ethnicities.


Ethnicities have to do with culture, heritage, country, origins. Race is a mark which designates certain character traits which then assign you a relative position within a social group.

Obviously both of these definitions aren't accepted by everyone, and I wouldn't even say they are the best on offer. But there's certainly a difference between the two.

Dear God.

Ok, you have a liberal/leftist picnic basket full of sour tomatoes, bitter melon, rancid olives, spoiled meat, and other delicacies. Some of it I recognize, some of it is a bit too chewed up to identify with.

I won't, but my liberal/leftist picnic basket would have some unappetizing items in it too.

The leftism I was first exposed to was, merciful god, old-fashioned. It focused on Marx and some early 19th/20th century American socialists like DeLeon. It was not flavored by the University marxism of the 1980s-present which frankly doesn't smell at all like the Marxism I like.

This means that leftism fundamentally privileges representation over reality in a certain systematic way. — The Great Whatever

This strikes me as the phony marxism of POMO.

The leftist has an a priori idea of how the world ought to be, and is outraged that it is not that way. — The Great Whatever

The leftist has an a priori idea of how the world ought to be, and is outraged that it is not that way. The leftist proposes that the world ought to be changed to be that way, preferably as swiftly and with as little compromise as possible. — The Great Whatever

It seems to me that Marx (who I use as the anchor of "leftist") was pretty well historically informed and viewed history as a process involving contending forces and interests. Yes, in the end he saw a world in which Man came into his own, no longer a wage slave, no longer a master, but in a classless society (a nice big thick hunk of shining glittering idealism for you). My belief is that Marx and Engels can not be the source of quick-perfection schemes. Historical processes take their time, and their time is not our time. Sure, I'd like to see a socialist approach to health care, to full employment, to basic income, to the diet farm for the 1%, and so on, but being in a hurry is a recipe for leftist despair.

Wherever the leftist sees something that isn't perfect, where the empiricst of conservative impulse is to change oneself to match the world, the leftist impulse is to change the world to match oneself. Rather than meeting a pre-existent standard, like the conservative, the leftist protests that the standard is wrong, and ought to be place elsewhere. Hence the leftist generally does not seek to be beautiful, but to redefine the ugly as beautiful, because he believes, at bottom, that there is no substance to the world other than what he places on it, and so there is a kind of delusion or fantasy of power and control, reflected in the desire for central planning in government and statism generally. — The Great Whatever

Don't get carried away here; it's not good for your blood pressure.

The currently victorious conservatives are finding plenty that isn't "perfect" and do not seem poised to fit into the world they see. Rather, they seem poised to do some major league changing.

there is no substance to the world other than what he places on it Right. Well people who think there is no substance other than what they place on it, whatever their political views, are chock full of shit. If they are leftists, then they need to be taken away and drummed out of the leftist movement.

All of these, I believe, are features of childhood. The confusion of representation and reality (lack of object permanence), the belief in the malleability of the world to one's desires, the refusal to face unpleasant truths, the insistence that everything ultimately be molded to one's wishes. This creates a desire for childlike narratives and a liking for comic books, superheroes, and so on, along with simplistic moral axes of oppressor-oppressed that create a sort of identity-based template for knowing who is in the wrong when, to emphatically and uncompromisingly support the side that is being hurt by the ones in the wrong. This in turn leads to the basic oppressor/oppressed distinction, which has no fundamental way of being questioned, but only multiplied and complicated by infinitely expanding axes of oppression based on increasingly minutely defined representational categories... — The Great Whatever

I agree that these are characteristics of childhood persisting into adulthood (sometimes into senescence, even). I don't think this has anything to do with left-center-conservative politics; it has to do with delayed personal intellectual and social maturation. You know, a lot of the stuff you are talking about is spouted by college students. If neuroscience is correct, and the brain isn't fully developed until around 25, that means even graduate students are still spouting immature texts. In the case of severe developmental delays one may find some tenured professors babbling this way. (In fact, one does.)

I get where you are coming from. Thank you for the thorough response. I appreciate it. Reading is hard work, and I don't want to tire anyone's brains out too much here, so... that's that.

I think this is totally fair, and I haven't even read Marx and am not that familiar with dialectical materialism, which may have a more 'bottom up' impetus than I characterized here. I'm only going off of my personal experience, what I've seen and heard from self-identified leftists in my lifetime, and whatever trends I've seen that relate to this spanning the writers from way back when. Although my impression from hearing Marxists speak generally is that they're very much in favor of 'get-perfetion-quick' schemes, as you put it (a radical communist group has been marching around town lately over here, demanding the immediate disbanding of the American government), and insofar as Marx prophesied anything like the rising of a classless society within a couple centuries at most, he would be too – history is long, very long, and a pendulum sweep into an imagined perfection very much counts as such a scheme by my lights.

What I meant was simply that white people literally see a half-white half-black person as black. That's the reflexive reaction. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that they don't see them as devoid of desires and fears. — csalisbury

If one faces a forced choice, then I suppose--yes, a half & half black-white person would be sorted into the black group. But people are not always in forced choice situations. The people that I grew up among were concerned about a lot less than 50% black, even though there weren't any actual blacks around for them to worry about -- mostly just television screens.

But the times are changing. White working class and middle class people (whatever the terms mean) are becoming much more accepting of mixed-race couples and mixed-race children, right here in 83% white Minnesota, even. "More accepting" isn't color blind, of course, nor (IMHO) should people be color blind. That's a kind of erasure of one of one's and others' real characteristics.

The times are changing, but progress isn't as swift, sure, and final as we would like. Patience, patience. We'll get there.

Maybe so, but reactive law is incredible. Again, it's what built England. You wait for a problem to arise, then judge when you have to on what ought to be done. Over the years an intricate, deeply woven house of natural institutions is built. The leftist by contrast is Cartesian, and demands that an entire constitution be written up from scratch, on the spot, and immediately enshrined, not in response to the organic problems the world rises and solving them, but from an a priori conception of the way the world ought to be.

But there's one really big problem with this view. The conservative is wise enough to confront the problems that arise as they are and then determine what ought to be done. The leftist on the other hand demands that things be built from scratch based on ideals. But so how does one confront the leftist? Because one problem that arises, among many, is a bunch of people demanding that things be built from scratch and based on ideals ( this is not new, or particularly cartesian - it goes back to the prophets, and further)

By which I mean: it's utopian to dream of a world without utopian thinkers. Dreaming is baked into being, for better or for worse.

he conservative is wise enough to confront the problems that arise as they are and then determine what ought to be done. The leftist on the other hand demands that things be built from scratch based on ideals. — csalisbury

And which one would consider abolishing slavery? Would that occur to the conservative? Or would the conservative just argue that is the way God intended institutions to be set up? What problem would the conservative confront to convince them to abolish slavery?

I'm not sure. I think that leftism isn't sustainable and collapses societies, often with a high toll in human suffering. So you have good reason to want to stop it – but it's been wildly successful and sowing misery across the world and shows no signs of stopping.

As I've said, I think it can't survive without academia, and there's a sense in which academia is a sick place, that often harbors people whose ideas in society at large would be otherwise unrespectable, and leftism and apologia for totalitarianism of various sorts often go hand in hand. Cf. Thorongil's comments on the professor who would prefer Islamic theocracy to living in America: I take it he's telling the truth about that, anyway!

But how do you stop academia from breeding this sort of stuff? I don't know. Academia is in a sense inherently divorced from reality, and so there are no real checks on it from developing fantasies.

I can't consistently advocate for sweeping changes that eliminate the rise of leftism as a possibility, nor would I want to. The most you can do is take responsibility for yourself – to be tired of what leftism offers you as a person, and to be frank with other people about this, and not to let them feel ashamed for disagreeing with obviously false things.

I agree with you, which is why I think it's too easy to reject leftism flat out. But I also think many of TGW's points are spot-on.

The abolition of slavery was also a human atrocity in the form of the Civil War.

How would a conservative end slavery, if not with the death of hundreds of thousands of people? Well, I'm not a miracle-worker, but here is a suggestion: buy out the slave owners' trade and release the slaves. It'd be a lot less expensive than a war, too. Then destroy the infrastructure that makes holding slaves economically viable, and once the whole institution has atrophied, sneak legislation in that outlaws it.

I think that leftism isn't sustainable and collapses societies, often with a high toll in human suffering.

Another way to look at this is that societies aren't sustainable and inevitably collapse themselves. I guess this is my view. And I guess I'm not a firm leftist. Maybe a meta-conservative with a tragic outlook? I think plugging the dam is as doomed as revolution, so I don't see any especial merit in either. Or I do see the virtues in both. They're both necessary (inevitable?) so I can't really come down one way or the other. I think Marchesky is right that we'd still have slavery without leftists. But then we wouldn't have the civil war (and but also there's the conservatism of northern factory owners, and it's very complicated.)

Would we better off with ancien regime France and no revolution? idk.

But again, this has been going on since the beginning of time and will probably never stop. Many of the OT prophets fit your leftist diagnosis to a T.

EDIT: posted this before I saw you'd already posted on the civil war.