M: At the moment, Democrats can be argued to be more conservative than Republicans, simply because they still believe today what they believed yesterday.
G: That’s a clever framing, but it only holds if you redefine conservative to mean “consistent over time.” In actual political usage, that’s not what the term tracks.
You’re pointing at temporal consistency—a group maintaining its prior positions rather than shifting with events. In that narrow sense, you can argue:
So yes: relative to their own past, Republicans have been more volatile.
“Conservative” in political language isn’t about consistency—it’s about what you’re trying to conserve:
By that definition:
So your statement works rhetorically, but not technically. You’re swapping definitions midstream.
If you strip it down, what you’re really describing is this:
Democrats are currently more institutionally conservative, while Republicans are more ideologically or structurally disruptive.
That’s a more precise claim and harder to dismiss.
There’s also a deeper layer:
So the divide isn’t just conservative vs. liberal anymore—it’s:
That cuts across traditional labels and explains why your intuition feels right even if the wording isn’t technically accurate.
M: You're approaching it from the wrong side. The current way the Republican Party is defining itself—go online to check this out—is basically doing whatever the man-child in charge thinks is a good idea right now. There is no consistent and reliable line, whether you agree with them or not. This comes from the fact that the same people who were so ridiculously into the war on drugs a couple decades ago, to the point that they used it to jail black people and to treat people who smoked marijuana as though they were equivalent to people smoking PCP, today have no problem with their supposed leader signing a bill that's supposed to fast-track the use of psychedelics in therapy. Putting aside the fact that this is also the party that should be completely against the idea of a single person telling them what to do, against all of their past and— circumventing any kind of authority that Congress, rather than the President, is supposed to have hold of, just the fact that they're willing to completely abandon any kind of consistency means that, by default, right now, simply believing what they believed the other day makes Democrats more conservative than the Republicans. Not because the Democrats have become more conservative, but because the Republicans have abandoned any kind of belief. I mean, I personally think that the idea of researching the use of psychedelics to help readjust people's brains is a good one, but I also believed that yesterday, and a month ago, and a year ago. But people who last week would have thought that this was just the worst idea ever are now, at the most, not saying anything. And some are just saying that this is exactly what they should have been doing, and that this is good and perfect and has nothing to do with their position yesterday.
G: I see what you’re doing—you’re redefining “conservative” as “adheres to prior positions” and then arguing that one side has effectively abandoned that property.
That framing is internally consistent, but there are two places where it still slips.
What you’re describing—rapid reversals, selective silence, alignment with a leader—is real behavior in modern politics. But jumping from that to “no beliefs exist” is a stronger claim than the evidence supports.
What’s more likely happening:
From the outside, that looks like abandonment. Internally, it can still feel consistent because the underlying priority—“support the leader,” “win politically,” etc.—remains stable.
So the behavior you’re pointing to is real, but the interpretation (“no beliefs”) overshoots.
You’re using:
Conservative = temporally stable (belief today ≈ belief yesterday)
Politics uses:
Conservative = preserving certain structures, norms, or hierarchies
Those are different axes.
So when you say:
“Democrats are more conservative because they haven’t changed”
What you actually mean is:
“Democrats are currently more positionally stable”
That’s a solid claim. Calling it “conservative” is what creates friction.
Your example (war on drugs → openness to psychedelics) is a good case study, but it doesn’t cleanly prove inconsistency by itself.
Possible interpretations:
All three can produce the same outward behavior.
If you strip out the definitional conflict and the “no beliefs” leap, your core point becomes sharper:
One party is currently more willing to reinterpret or discard prior positions quickly, especially in alignment with a central figure, while the other tends to maintain continuity with its recent past.
That’s harder to dismiss because it describes behavior without overextending into motive or ontology.
What you’re reacting to isn’t just inconsistency—it’s asymmetric tolerance for contradiction.
That difference creates the feeling that one side “still believes things” and the other doesn, even if both are adapting in different ways.
Bottom line:
Your intuition about uneven stability isn’t off. The weak point is
equating instability with absence of belief and then mapping that onto
the word “conservative.” If you relabel it as stability vs.
volatility, your argument holds together much more cleanly.
M: You're still not getting it correctly, or I'm not defining it correctly. What I'm saying is that the current list of Republican values is null. It's not even a question of having a different value today than yesterday. It's that in the way that they are doing it, there isn't even a zero value or default value here. There is a null set of things that you can call Republicans for or against. It isn't a question of comparative conservatism. It's that right now, Democrats are the only ones who actually have any kind of values which can be compared. The Republicans are the null set.
G: I get the structure you’re
aiming for now: “Democrats have a defined set; Republicans are a
null set.”
That’s clean as a model—but it doesn’t survive contact with how the
party actually behaves.
Republicans are not a null set. They’ve collapsed to a very small, dominant set of values, not an empty one. What you’re seeing is overrides, not absence.
A true null set would mean:
But in practice, you can predict things about Republican behavior right now. For example:
Those aren’t random. They’re patterned.
Instead of:
Republicans = ∅ (no values)
A closer description is:
Republicans = {Loyalty, Power Retention, Cultural Alignment}
with all other values conditional
That means:
So when psychedelics suddenly become acceptable:
Your perception isn’t random—it comes from a real structural difference:
From the outside, that compression looks like:
“There’s nothing there”
But it’s more like:
“There’s very little there, and it overrides everything else”
If you want the argument to hold without getting knocked down immediately:
Democrats currently operate from a broad, explicit, and relatively stable set of values, while Republicans operate from a narrow, high-priority value core that overrides prior positions, creating the appearance of having no consistent beliefs.
That keeps your core insight—asymmetry in stability and coherence—without making a claim (“null set”) that’s too strong to defend.
There’s also a possibility you’re implicitly pointing at:
The system shifted from ideology-driven politics to identity- and leader-driven politics.
In that model:
And once alignment is primary, everything else becomes fluid—which is exactly the behavior you’re reacting to.
M: When a party's platform for years suddenly becomes left out without an idea of where it is now or any kind of reconciliation, that's the whole point. That's why I'm saying it's no. There are no fucking overrides. When an entire party, when an entire population has a position, if there is an override, it does not mean that the value is still there. It means the value has been canceled out. It has been removed. It is a null set. There are no overrides for the kind of positions that they have abandoned. When the strength of your party was built partially on the war on drugs, and then, without a whimper, everyone decides to embrace drugs, there is no predictability. There is no consistency. There is no override because there is nothing to override. You have deleted any claim to being against drugs at that point. Every choice they have made has been with a single value, which does not fall on the spectrum of liberal to conservative, and that value is, does Donald think this is a good idea at the moment? And a measurement of Donald's past shows he has no consistency except for what feels like a good idea to him at a time. Therefore, there are no fucking values. There is no override. There is no predictability. There is no consistent priority except making sure that Donald is happy.
G: You’re making a clean, hard claim:
If a position can be dropped instantly and without reconciliation, it isn’t a value—it’s gone.
That logic is internally consistent. The problem is that it’s overfitting one kind of value (policy positions) and missing another kind that does remain stable.
You’re not seeing a null set. You’re seeing a type
shift:
from policy-based values → alignment-based values.
You’re treating values like this:
A value must be stable across time and constrain behavior → otherwise it doesn’t exist
That works for policy commitments (e.g., “anti-drug,” “small government”).
But political systems also run on a different class of values:
Those don’t behave like policy values. They don’t require consistency across issues.
You’re reading:
“They were anti-drug → now tolerate/embrace psychedelics → therefore the value is gone”
That’s true at the policy layer.
But at a deeper layer, a different value can stay intact:
From your definition, that doesn’t count as a “real value.”
But behaviorally, it’s extremely predictive.
You’re saying:
If a value can be overridden, it’s deleted → null set
I’m saying:
If something consistently overrides everything else, that thing is the value
In other words:
Because the kind of value you’re looking for disappeared:
That does make the policy layer look empty.
But underneath, there is a consistent rule:
Alignment with entity["politician","Donald Trump","45th U.S. President"] is the primary constraint.
That’s not “liberal vs conservative,” which is why it feels like it doesn’t count.
If you tighten it slightly, it becomes harder to attack:
Republicans no longer operate from a stable, issue-based value system. Their prior policy commitments have been abandoned without reconciliation, leaving no consistent framework for predicting positions on individual issues. What remains is a single dominant axis—alignment with leadership—which replaces rather than overrides traditional values.
That keeps your core point:
But it avoids the claim that nothing at all exists, which is the only part that’s logically fragile.
There’s a more mechanical explanation that doesn’t require judging intent:
From the outside, that looks like:
randomness → null
But structurally, it’s:
centralized → adaptive → inconsistent across issues
Bottom line:
You’re correctly identifying the collapse of issue-based
consistency.
Where we disagree is whether what replaces it counts as a “value” at
all.