this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Its Regression not conservatism. Quit calling it that. There is nothing wrong with a conservative outlook. The maga don't have a conservative outlook. They have a regressive one.
When you're living in comfort and you benefit from the status quo and you prize stability over the perceived benefits of change, there's an argument for a conservative outlook.
But I've been living under Conservative governance in my home state of Texas for forty years. The pattern of police enforced racial castes, privatization of public institutions, and ecologically unsustainable consumption has been ongoing for my entire life. This is what conservatives are fighting to defend. Misogyny. Supremacy. Homogeneity. A wild imbalance in economic opportunity. Its too late to try and rebrand this as "bad" conservatism.
Trump's policies are more extreme than what came before, but the impulses remain the same. It is the composition of American elites that has changed.
The Red Hats are the children of Goldwater/Reagan and they are shepherding Paleoconservative Libertarianism to its logical end game. They were raised to believe in Galt's Gulch and Friedman's free market fetishism. They were raised to believe in Evangelical Christianity and Christian Dominionism. They were raised to believe in winning the Cold War at all costs.
And what they're doing has plenty of historic parallels - from Nixon's War on Crime to Eisenhower's Operation Wetback to McKinley's Jim Crow. They're White Nationalists embracing White Nationalism, on the belief that the Peace Dividend they reaped in the 90s was a Heavenly Mandate to Do As Thou Wilt. If you carve off all the QAnon cultism and bigotry, what you've got are a bunch of Gen X and Y folks who are fighting to preserve the segregation and the implicit international hegemony they enjoyed when the Iron Curtain fell and America was the uncontested global superpower.
It is conservatism in root and branch. A philosophy flailing in the face of a diminished empire to preserve the icons of prosperity their elders once enjoyed.
They don't know they're the same picture
Real question, how can someone be conservative while still supporting progress? Doesn't the entire ideology hinge on things never changing?
Conservatism is as broad of a term as liberalism. That said, there is a brand of conservatism that do support progress, but wants to do so in an incrementalist way, which is basically the Democratic Party now that I think about it.
There's a continuum between nothing ever changes ever, and through away everything and start again from scratch. In practice, actual little-c conservatives are often called incrementalists, because no one is all the way to one end of the spectrum.
The point here is that Conversatism is not actually a conservative ideology. They actually want to change a lot. In fact, the current administration might be the least conservative one we've had. They are much more in the "move fast and break things" camp, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum.
I think what happened with conservative movements, is they tend to adopt genuinely conservative positions. But then as the world changes around them they are conservative in updateing their positions, so end up having a collection of regressive positions.
The actual conservatives in America's current political environment is the conservative wing of the Democratic party.
If someone becomes a conservative in 1995, they want to conserve the current state of society, no? Since society has progressed to a different state in those 30 years, does that not mean this person would want to regress back to the 1995 version? Conservativism is just delayed regressivism.