Very well written piece. I say this as someone who lives with two trump supporters tho, no one who still backs trump in June 2026 is thinking about politics this deeply or would ever click on an article like, let alone be in Substack. Since there isn’t a viable conservative movement that is distinct from trump, I’m tossing any and all American conservatives under the MAGA banner here.
Since they’re not thinking deeply, today’s MAGA supporters are just ignorant racists who know they don’t fully understand the picture and/or don’t care to understand more. They may also be pedophiles, the modern american conservative movement really seems to attract those. Anyone who actually thinks on the American right has already abandoned the trump ship. All that is left are just the xenophobic, racist, pedophile-protecting facists.
How am I not understanding conservatives if they can’t articulate their own ideas? Maybe you understand them better than they do, but no one in that movement deserves sympathy, understanding, or patience. I am not talking about people who voted for him and have become disillusioned since his second term. I am talking about the people who, after Renee and alex, after Iran, after his name being the Epstein files more than anyone else, after all the insider trading, after all the trump coins and grifts, still back this guy and see him as a champion. If you are still in that camp, idiot is the only word that can describe you and nothing can save you.
The “in-group out-group” thing in the context of our history is violent racism against the decedents of slaves, followed by an anti-democratic apartheid regime in the half the country for another 100 years. Not every political movement is some well thought out, principled thing, and I’m not gonna both-sides this issue. Modern conservatives stand for absolutely nothing and is just a means of extracting wealth for billionaires and venting pent up racism/social anxiety for the average rank and file.
TL;DR you’re being way too generous here with what inspires the contemporary American conservative. It has nothing to do with 17th century political theory. If you want to understand them, you’re better off watching UFC than reading Calhoun. If your entire political movement is built on the notion of a permanent underclass of people (the social hierarchy/in group not bound by law) it deserves to be obliterated and treated with contempt.
EDIT: this sounds like I hate your piece and it’s quite the opposite! It was very good and interesting, which is why I have such an opinion on it.
"Conservatives are evil because they believe in in-groups and out-groups. In unrelated news, enlightened Party Members like myself hold that no Trump-supporting barbarian deserves sympathy, understanding, or patience."
Bullshit. In fact, it's exactly the kind of bullshit the post was all about. Congratulations for demonstrating the accuracy of the author's suppositions.
Be assured not all liberals cheered Kirk's death, at least not human ones. That some liberals may have done so should not color the whole. BTW, here are a couple of Trump's golden comments regarding opponents' deaths: on Robt Mueller, "I'm glad he's dead"; and Rob Reiner's death was "reportedly due to the anger he caused others", he was "very bad for our country" and "deranged". Looks like we're 0 and 0!
Cheered? Relieved is more like it. When anyone calls for exclusion of or action against another group of people in their rhetoric about how the world we all live in should be ordered, there are a lot of anxious people hoping that person just disappears one way or another and their version of things doesn't come to fruition. For the disabled in the US, that's anyone in this administration and the people who support it. DEIA.is eugenics policy to murder the disabled and erase the veterans who know why the wars never end. Besides too many inconsistencies in his murder, and nothing to do with any leftist communist antifacists. I'm just saying, there's like 7 billion people who will without a doubt be popping champaign when 45 is gone, not necessarily celebrating how he went. I'm hoping it's self inflicted so there's to reprise martyr story holy roller second coming revivalist theatre afterwards but that might be too much to wish for at this point. I'd just like the firing squads and concentration camps and madness to stop. I have been asking how does this end since Reagan was elected. Its nothing to do with the party, it's the thirst for other people's suffering and callous disregard for other people's children, or their own, I don't like.
WOW. You create a Game of Thrones world and after a time begin to think it is Real. Get a grip Anne.
You don;t have children so you can't begin to speak for those that do.
Concentration Camps ? Illegal Immigrants already broke one law by their entrance, and the nastiest ones (rape/murder/child trafficking) who get caught are EXPORTED back to the shit-hole countries they formerly molested.
I wonder if you believe half of what you write ? TDS is strong in you.
At no point, ever, have cishet Christian males been an outgroup. The left has been trying to end outgroups. Cishet Christian males can’t stand it, had a multi-generational temper tantrum, and here we are.
"The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023."
Remember how the left reacted to Charlie Kirk's assassination? Did it seem like they were "trying to end outgroups"? Was it some sort of kumbaya moment? Give me a break, stop dreaming and look at reality. Many on the left are delusional and act very nasty while claiming to be tolerant.
Re: Charlie Kirk, the vast majority of people on the left said you shouldn’t be shot for your beliefs. Do we need to skim the surface of right wing comments after Melissa Horton was murdered? What about when Paul Pelosi was attacked in his home? What about, what about, etc.
And your example? Wtf are you talking about? Writer’s rooms? I am certain you have no idea what was happening in the broader world of the WGA or of the market for scripted work during that time, so maybe go talk to someone who does.
Conservatives love inventing grievance and a made-up past that they feel entitled to. It’s why they’re so skilled at dehumanizing everyone who doesn’t look, sound, act, think like them. Everyone else is to blame because some white guy was inconvenienced. Conservative thought has metastasized into a new strain of madness and you cannot blame other people for it.
So you think you should be exempt from well-deserved brutal criticism for embracing and promoting (the purveyors of) vile, abhorrent, and fundamentally anti-American ideology because you do so with suffocating politeness--as if that wasn't par for the course throughout American history?
You're not part of the out-group but every passing year also reveals your receding fair-weather in-group status. It only adds to the existing cognitive dissonance that's already overloading the system. It's almost enough to warrant a modicum of sympathy from me...almost.
As a fellow life-long, now older, white male, I do feel your pain so let's bring back the good(?) old days. BTW, I never heard of Charlie Kirk until the day he died. Not sure what that may indicate about me, but there you go.
Modern “Conservatives” don’t even know what the word they’ve c’opted means, let alone the happenings of history that created their arrogance and bigoted personalities.
And personally, I have no problem fighting and/or beating the shit out of a racist conservative. The problems I see most liberals having is the fact that being open-minded (liberal) usually means being smart enough to have some-sort of an emotional control and consideration, while also meaning being less-likely to bond into large cults - which comes in handy if wanting to eradicate other cults.
Yeah this is literally why y’all lost. All you got is name calling. Liberals have had bad policies that have lead people to vote elsewhere. It’s actually not rocket science. People of color voted for him and liberals still want to hold on too “every conservative is racist” even though they say “black people literally can’t be racist ever”. You lost cause your policies and ideas are just plain bad for the most part.
“All you got is name calling” while 50+ years of republican corruption, greed, and misleading propaganda continues to tank the country into boiling-over hatred.
Trust me, have a helluva lot more than just name callin’.
I could easily argue that liberals “lose” because the average “dominant” American is a greedy slob, too stupid and lazy to comprehend they only exist at the behest of systemic greed, racism and the most vile and harmful of the religions, Christianity. I could also argue that liberals “lose” because they live in a Republican-party authoritarianism. I could also argue that liberals “lose” because there are simply more gullible people than there are people who can successfully determine a Republican’s bullshit.
Pike calls Christianity the 'most vile' of all the religions, which leaves out all of the modern and historic cults, the ancient religions that engaged in human sacrifice, and the modern cancer that is Islam, a religion so awful that every country led by Islamic law murders gays, oppresses women, and murders or maims infidels.
The House has been controlled by Democrats for the majority of the last 50 years. A Republican has been President, however, for 30 of the last 50 years, and the Senate has largely been split fairly evenly over the last half century. Expanding back to the last 100 years, Democrats have actually controlled the legislature for the majority of the time, with the Executive being split basically down the middle. I think Rick gets an 'incomplete' with his comment.
He’s the #1 representative of the entire fucking country; the most professional-requirement position on this planet.
That you’re not offended by such displays of unprofessionally-childish bitch-talk goes far in suggesting the only skin you should be focused on are those semi-truck mudflaps covering your knees, what-with-all the Trump-loving dick sucking you happily pronounce every time you type out your shit-for-brain’d opinions.
Stand up, once in awhile, “Nija.” Give those puppies a fucking break.
Have you heard our effing president?! All he does is resort to name calling! And guess what HE STILL WON. If you think democrats lose bc they “resort to name calling” but ignore when republicans win in spite of it then you don’t actually believe what you’re saying. Lmao be so effing serious and get the f outta here with that sh*** 🤡
1) Smaller gummint is better gummint. Closer to the people affected by the policies.
2) Less taxes mean people make better decisions with their money.
3) Free Speech means FREE SPEECH. If you don't like what the Speaker is saying, walk away. BUT CENSORING that speech is Maoist/Stalinist....
4) Let people decide how to educate their children. The STATE only indoctrinates them to be good little slaves.
5) The right to bear arms (2nd Amendment) was designed to protect people from an Authoritarian gummint. The founders had experience with a tyrannical gummint (King George etc.) The worst Western Countries are also where gun control has stripped the people of a right to defend themselves.
NOW YOUR TURN.
Name 5 LEFTIST policies that people vote for (rather than are coerced to obey.)
1) The term “Smaller government” has absolutely no bearing on if it is closer to the people
2) “less taxes” again no relation whatsoever of how the money is spent
3) uh and who is censoring? Who is banning books? Are not books free speech?
4) yes public k-12 schools….are designed to teach the constitution, history etc…..to make those students aware of their rights….
5) the right to guns….as conservatives have insisted to interpret the second amendment is based on the location of a COMMA….as MLK said “an eye for an eye' leaves everybody blind”.
Good ideas….liberals support:
1) social security 2) Medicare 3) CHIP 4) majority rule for 5) protections of the individual
1. You have multiple red states taking power away from local governments-Texas is the one I’m most familiar with.
2. Do they though? The levels of personal credit card debt in this country are astounding. We lead the world in medical debt. And an amazingly large percentage of Americans don’t have enough savings to cover a $2000 emergency.
3. Remind me what happened to many people who criticized things Charlie Kirk had said. Not ones who said he “deserved” it, but ones who pointed out some of his clearly discriminatory language. There were plenty of conservatives who weren’t walking away from that exercise of free speech. And that is only one example.
4. Again, Texas and their newly passed “curriculum” standards. Not a lot of choice for many people as to how their kids will be educated!
5. Most liberals don’t want to take away everyone’s guns. They simply want some measures in place to ensure psychopaths don’t have access.
As for “leftist” policies….how about Social Security and Medicare? I’m relatively certain you won’t (haven’t) forgone taking advantage of both of those Democrat created programs. We can also thank Dems for the GI Bill that changed millions of Americans lives by providing education and facilitating home ownership Then there’s the Clean Water Act. It’s been so successful that it’s hard to remember rivers literally burning because they were so polluted. And let’s not forget the Civil Rights Act -again legislation that changed millions of lives. And, I know conservatives love to hate it, but the Affordable Care Act provided affordable healthcare to millions of Americans-many for the first time in their lives. Of course, it’s now been gutted. And bankruptcies due to medical debt have soared along with that gutting.
Sadly, most of what I mention was decades ago. But I would argue that NEITHER party has done much good for average Americans in the last 40+ years. The very wealthy have benefited, but working and middle class Americans? Not so much.
We have smaller government closer to the people it’s called state and local government. We also have a republican with a constitution which you clearly haven’t read carefully. Less taxes plus suspicion of good government is what has led to the disaster we have right now. I bet you think unfettered capitalism in the constitution. Let’s face it Maga is made of Neo confederates and NAR, a completely made up religion that has nothing whatsoever to do with the teaching of Jesus. Your ignorance a Neo feudalism fits right n wth diagnosis is this essay.
I don’t think any political ideology has five policies that have been universally successful for EVERYONE. A better question is which conservative policies have strong evidence of achieving the goals they were designed for, while acknowledging the tradeoffs.
Policies that hurt some people but don’t help and protect all of us are cruelly conservative under every definition I know.
Here in the South, racists hide behind the word “conservative” after they abandoned the old Democratic Party after the 1960’s and the Civil Rights laws. The Southern Strategy was all about giving diehard racists somewhere to go politically after Johnson, a fellow southern Democrat, pushed through the Civil Rights Law of 1965.
Your comment makes me think of someone who has lived too long with a lover who has let them down. Every reason for leaving is well thought out and realized. Then they make the break and fall right into the arms of another and fall in love before they know each other.
You don’t say your reason for joining the right. So I admit I am taking a leap.
In short
We should apply the same level of scrutiny to the system we are entering as we did to the one we are leaving.
You have a point. You can't have nothing but name-calling to offer as a liberal and expect to succeed. Republican winning strategies aren't all transferable across party lines.
In the current political environment, what liberal policies do you oppose ans what conservative policies do you uphold? Or rather, what are your core political beliefs? Let's get past the tribalism.
This is why the left is so useless and why the moderate center and center right elected Trump twice. You self-righteous assholes just can’t fathom a world that isn’t aligned with your gay race communism.
Pointing out that the left doesn't understand the right and those that do always make it about the left being better than the obviously evil right are smug assholes and they got Trump elected (TWICE) is Exhibit A in giving the left a chance to understand why they're so broadly unpopular.
Still Exhibit A. That you think you "win" doesn't mean that you win. The United States just lost a war badly. We got our asses handed to us. By "we" I mean you, because we, meaning me, would have never been so stupid. There is no other way to spin it unless you are delusional. Gas has doubled in price. The whole world thinks we are incompetent clowns. These are facts. If pointing them out to you makes you feel bad, so be it. Oh no, those mean liberals made me feel sad by pointing out how fucking stupid I am and I have to do something even stupider because they made me do it with their "smugness." . It doesn't change reality. If you want to live in a world where truth doesn't matter, so be it. But don't say that my living in reality is smugness. Every single thing that conservatives have touched in the past two years has turned to shit. That is simply the truth. I would love to hear a counter argument, but I'm sure you can't make one that I won't laugh at.
1) Last I checked there was still active hostilities and a large chunk of the IRGC was exploded into tiny pieces, so I'm not sure why you'd say that the war was over and that the US lost?
2) Gas prices are high because of the war, yes. And? Did you think there would be a war and prices not be effected? Prices are high but still not at their worst ever and, unlike when Democrats presided over previous wars, there is no rationing going on and we have sufficient supply for the country to keep on humming.
3) You say things have turned to shit but I see illegal immigration at the border essentially stopped, hundreds of violent aliens detained, and many thousands of people removed. The stock market is fine, the job market is fine, and inflation has settled. The Feds are now targeting racist DEI and abusive trans-identity practices. Not sure what is so bad.
Not the hundreds of thousands of children murdered in the womb, or the millions victimized by street crime and violence who are forced to watch illegal aliens and the worst American citizens be let off time and again because 'equity' or something. Certainly not the children in schools who are forced to deal with a never-ending drip of propaganda from activists in their classrooms.
No children are murdered in the womb, last time I checked police is still one the most funded agencies of any local government, illegal immigration is a civil offense and criminal, violent illegal aliens have always been prosecuted to the full extent of the law, often being extradited to their home countries where they receive a permanent re-entry ban. And sure, let's talk about the kids in classrooms, especially the reality that children being gunned down in their own schools by some alt-right lunatic is so prevalent that instead of placing common sense gun laws to protect these children, they now get to buy Kevlar backpacks, and that's all thanks to conservatives. This is what I'm talking about, you have all of the information available for you to learn and grow and instead you'd rather double down on being dumb.
2) police are underfunded and hamstrung by weak politicians, judges and prosecutors
3) illegal immigration requires immediate deportation and re-entry after deportation is a felony, learn the laws before making shit up
4) trans-identified and black shooters make up a disproportionate amount of school shootings and any attempt to better secure schools is met with claims of racism by liberals
That does not happen in classrooms, I was a teachers aide in elementary and junior and high school. Teachers are too busy trying to teach the fundamentals and getting kids to behave and pay attention.
Well now, speaking of the difference between presenting a thoughtful comment or obsessively jerking oneself off, you seem to know a lot about the latter. Others have broken down you statements one by one so let’s go back and take a look at your responses.
Spare as the faux outrage about niceties and politeness when the man who got elected is the most thin skinned little bitch who can’t answer a basic question 🤣🤣🤣 fuck outta here
For your friend: being anti- Israel is NOT the same as being antisemitic, although Israel is absolutely trying to make everyone believe they are one and the same so that they can get away with further atrocities and label any criticism as ' antisemitic '
I was in a fight once around age 8. I got punched a couple of times, but punched back and kicked , and Tommy hit the backyard fence and collapsed. I said “get the hell out of my yard.”
Empathy is not sympathy. He is promoting understanding in service of FIGHTING them. It appears the author is well aware that the average MAGA person is not reading anything more intellectual than the Saturday Morning funnies. When I think deeply about the piece, it strikes me as more cutting than you seem to be acknowledging. He is saying that their worldview is morally bankrupt, fundamentally racist and not having the done the research does not absolve the MAGA followers from being complicit in the pernicious ideology.
You are tragically correct. We all are. Truth is tragedy now.
I remember when it was comedy. Carlin painted it all so well. They all did. The absurdity of the American Republican/elitism was funny. Sure, they were in charge; un-interpreted in their scheming and corruption. But our laughter at pointing it out was good enough to trick us into delusion.
In that, life and society was a semi-arid landscape, comedy being the little rain that kept us sustained and distracted.
But now, we are in the desert of tragedy. What comedians, what comedy is today, is momentary respite at best, or simply a blunt reminder of the vast desert we occupy.
…personally, I’ve lived my life battling depressions and anxieties, all driven by an un-wanting to take part of the fraud that is the dominant American culture (bigotry, affluence, prejudice, slave-to-the-leeching elite, greed). Unwilling to compete.
But friend, I’ll tell you this. I ain’t doing that anymore. It’s all strong anger now. Anger with ambition.
Thanks Bart. I couldn’t agree more with your response. I have maga family too. After trump was elected I gave up trying to provide insight. Unfortunately, I believe my families relationship has been damaged beyond repair. They want nothing to do with me and I’m not going to spend my time trying to appeal to racists.
Check out Steve Hassan’s work on the Cult of Trump and Jonathan Metzl’s book Dying of Whiteness. There are cult followers and cult leaders. There are the “white trash” at the bottom of the hierarchy and the elite descendants of early industrialists and slave owners at the top.
One complication here is that there are really two different "brands" of "conservative", hence, two different "brands" of MAGAnuts. There are the "fiscal conservatives" who are mostly concerned with tax evasion/avoidance, and then there are the "cultural conservatives", who are the Christofascists obsessed with white, male Christian dominance.
The "fiscal conservatives" don't actually concern themselves with the cultural "issues", other than to exploit the "cultural conservatives" to gain political power. Tricky Dicky first exploited this with his "southern strategy", using racist dog whistles to whisper to the south that it's okay to vote Republican, as they were no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln except nominally.
They believed they could control the monster they created - until Trumpkopf came along and unleashed them. The "fiscal conservatives" weren't opposed to Trumpkopf's policies so much as his style. And more than a few of them shared his connections with Epstein.
Thus we arrive here with Trumpkopf's MAGA cult running feral, and the billionaire oligarchs continue to support it. Remember Mu卐kRat's Seig Heil salute? Yes, they're all in on it.
I’d add that modern apartheid still continues, daily. American Indians are living in apartheid — separate IDs, separate land, separate laws, etc. The reservations are held “in trust” by the USG, ensuring the cycle will never end.
Do explain. Are the reservations not held in Trust? Do American Indians not have separate IDs, live on separate land, and have separate laws? While you may not like it, these the definitions of apartheid. If you disagree, prove your ignorant comment, or don’t make one. Thanks.
I was specifically talking about cities, stay on topic Ivan. that’s absolutely not true to say ALL the most dangerous cities are in the south. That’s simply not true. You can’t just say things cause they sound good even when they’re not true that would be called lying Ivan
This is also spot because the modern day MAGA person is like its leader: dumb, dumb, and dumber. It’s the Mike Johnson’s and Gym Jordan’s and the 6 conservative judges we need to be watching like hawks. They love the hierarchy and will do anything to defend it.
Nothing burger of a reply. As if any of you would even try to do any introspection even if the liberal ideas were provided in the kindest way possible. It's all tribalism with conservatives.
We don’t need you to be kind, we need the ideas to sense. How are most democratic city’s dealing with the homeless issue? Good or bad? Tell me why black people die in Chicago everyday when they supposedly have some of the “strictest gun laws” in the country. Make it make sense
Thank you for this view of early American history. But what it's not discussed here is the Christian alt-right beliefs that is blended into the rhetoric. That one can use the Ying... aggression, vial language, bullying rhetoric.... To challenge and attain this position of power. While the opposite, Yang.... Love and compassion, being nice....to be used to tackle issues facing the whole body politic, not just white males.
Trump is certainly an imperfect Man, as are you and me and us all.
Most elections, people who are informed vote with their nose closed.
They choose Who they believe to be the least of the bad.
Kamela Harris and the Obama Team controllers, Clinton's Crew especially are an absolute crime syndicate.
The evidence is there (and forthcoming) while we finally have a DOJ willing to LOOK.
Vote fraud is real, IF you're willing to take a look.
Politicians make money off insider trading, IF you take a look.
COVID was a gain of function virus created by a lab in WUHAN, funded by US. Fauci lied to the Congress and the People.
IF you take a look.
The Legacy MEDIA has obfuscated, censored, and lied with their news coverage for decades.
And on and on.
Trump is an obstacle to ALL this bad stuff. Which is why they tried to assassinate him.
I suspect deep down you realize this, and that's why you are apparently eient and or tolerant with your family members who voted Trump.
In the next election cycle, Rubio or Vance both seem willing to continue the trajectory. You can expect the MEDIA/HOLLYWOOD/DEEP STATE to turn their venom on either/both of them.
The current day conservatives or MAGA cult rely and depend on uneducated followers. That is their base. So not sure the majority of their followers have the bandwidth to digest 17th century ideals. Trump’s objective is to market and sell grievance and fear.
But this article, which initially made me reluctant to read - I did - was very interesting and does shed light on many “true conservatives”.
Serious question, from someone who is trying to understand the right. Why do you think he's doing a better job than elected Dems would in his place? Not leftist nutjobs on bluesky, but Harris and her people. As far as I can tell, Trump has taken a pretty decent economy and made it worse, started and lost a war for no reason, and hasn't done anything to bring back manufacturing or help out the "forgotten man". His only wins as president seem to be culture war issues that most people aren't affected by, and closing the border (though Dems, i think, would have done that one too). I get that people stomach the corruption bc they believe in the right's mission, but I just don't see how Trump is succeeding at the idea of America first.
I will answer in the fewest words possible, and keep it restricted to major policy outcome differences that almost guaranteed would not be the case if Harris were president.
I count 3 huge pluses, 3 moderate size pluses, and one somewhere between large and moderate sized minus.
Positives:
1. Ended illegal immigration on southern border
2. Avoided major tax increase, made tax cuts permanent [likely avoiding a recession]
3. Degraded Iran’s military capabilities, hugely degraded their nuclear capabilities
Smaller significant positives:
4. Secured NATO’s commitment to spend 5% of their GDP on military/defense.
5. Restoration of sex-based federal policy, especially women’s sports.
6. Eliminated federal DEI and racial-preference machinery
And the one large-to-moderate Negative:
A) the tariffs imposed
I think your claim that the Dems would have done the border too is beyond far-fetched. They insisted for years that doing so required new legislation and a path to citizenship for those already in the country.
The other claim you make that I believe is a total fallacy is the idea that the economy is worse now than when he took over. All the data show that this is *not* the case; you are just citing leftist vibes when you make that claim. The negative of the tariffs has been fairly small and demonstrably has not been enough to bring the economy into recession.
Overall Trump 47 to me has *not* been as good as Trump 45 was on policy, but he is still very far ahead of what we would have now under a President Harris continuation of the Biden Administration.
First, I don’t know how you are able to function while living with maga - if you need an escape plan, i’m happy to help :) second, i wholeheartedly agree with you! We don’t have two political parties anymore because one party is a cult beholden to a megalomaniacal malignant narcissist con-man whose only aspirations revolve around self-aggrandizement. Full stop. The dems are treating the situation as if they are actually dealing with people who are acting in good faith. They keep clutching their pearls every time the magas do exactly what they said they were going to do. I feel like the dems are always about 10 steps behind b/c they are too busy trying to process the right’s shenanigans in a way that fits their long-past-extinct paradigm of government. At this point, its hard to believe that all these smart dems aren’t complicit. I don’t want to believe that…but…AIPAC…i mean 🤷🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️
Very well articulated. I thought of much the same, but you articulate it very well. Thanks for putting in the efforts.
Yes, it permeates their thinking. You see it also in how they believe a family must have a man as the superior. They do not see it as possible for man and woman to be in an equal relationship. To them there must always be a hierarchy. They cannot imagine anything else.
“To them there must always be a hierarchy. They cannot imagine anything else.”
Im not convinced that that’s a fault, though. The obvious fact that humans vary widely in their talents and temperaments means that hierarchies are inevitable, in pretty much every sphere of human endeavor where people actually manage to get things done, and conservatives are more likely to prefer to have those hierarchies openly acknowledged and respected.
That’s not to say that conservatives never end up supporting some cruel and pathological hierarchies, but the opposite mistake, to deny that hierarchy formation is an essential part of human nature, leads to a lot of dysfunction too.
Any hierarchy that permanently assigns positions based on race, sex, caste, etc., is NOT a hierarchy based on “talents and temperaments,” nor is it natural or unavoidable.
And this is the lie they try to sell us. Meanwhile we created the hierarchies and all the language and institutions to support them so that they seem “natural”, but really they are keeping people in their place and glorifying greed.
Hierarchies are far from inevitable. In most situations they aren't even optimal. The only situations in which a hierarchy is beneficial are crises because swift action is needed. Otherwise, hierarchies have profoundly negative effects on social cohesion and individual welfare.
It isn't about either-or but about what you aspire to. The left has over all history pushed for more egalitarian and democratic societies, while overall the right has sought to protect elites and established order and hierarchies.
Of course there are a lot of nuances to this picture as communists have run authoritarian regimes. But if we look at it in context it was originally a reaction to authoritarianism and deeply unequal societies. So while communist regimes were oppressive they were more egalitarian than the right-wing regimes they replaced. Then within those regimes you would get re-establishment of a left-right axis where the conservatives of the party naturally would fight a democratization process and progressives more likely would push it.
The left loves to portray themselves as fighting for equality. If you scrutinize their actions, it often tells a different story. Elites in communist countries certainly protected themselves. North Korea is one of the most hierarchical societies on Earth. Ordinary Cubans essentially regard Cuban leadership as akin to a mafia. You can see the same impulse today with the recent story about how Brussels elites shut down the A/C in the lower floors where the lower bureaucrats sit, but kept the A/C on for higher-ranking officials. In the United States, the same impulse is at work with student loan forgiveness: essentially a regressive money grab for college graduates, who already make more money on average. Since college graduates tend to be members of the liberal "elect", this policy essentially amounts to class warfare on working people. Of course, it's near cognitively impossible for self-interested liberals to realize this.
You yourself constantly brag about the superiority of life in your country, Norway. A county which, through luck of its geography, has per capita oil income [edit: should've said per capital oil production] comparable to that of Saudi Arabia. If you truly believed in equality, Norway's superior quality of life would be a grave problem and evidence of global inequality which needs to be eradicated. You would advocate giving away Norway's oil money until the quality of life in Norway was comparable to the quality of life in a developing country. I've never seen you advocate for that position, despite your supposed belief in equality. Your concerns about inequality mysteriously never intersect with your bragging about the superiority of Norwegian society. The lack of self-awareness is remarkable. I'd sooner check the policies you advocate for, not the pretty stories you tell about yourself.
I already addressed communist countries so that is a weird thing for you to bring up.
They were not elected, they were the outcomes of overthrowing existing right-wing dictatorships. Yes, communist regimes are bad, but you have to look at them in context. They were a more egalitarian version of what they replaced.
For us that live in democracies it is more relevant to look at what the left and right looks like there. And ever since there has been some level of democracy, it has generall been the left pushing to expand that democracy.
And if we look at places where democracy has ended, it has typically happened through right-wing coups. The left have been the ones repeatedly bringing democracy back.
Brussel AC has nothing to do with left and right wing politics. That is a completley ridiculous non-sequitor.
You got a weird cherry picking of things such as student loans. The point is that they are trying to to make education cheaper for all. Getting higher education today is pretty normal thing. That doesn't imply an elite. You are utterly ridiculous. This isn't the 1950s.
About 60% of students go to college, and if their parents were rich they wouldn't need to get student loans, so your argument makes zero sense.
And suggesting Democrat policies are anti workers is ridiculous given that they are the ones typically supporting unions while Republicans typically destroy unions. Not to mention Dems are the ones pushing for higher minimum wages. But like most right-wingers you love picking one disadvantages group to attack another. Take student struggling with student loans and pit them against workers. Never mind that the right is bad for both groups.
Bragging about the superiority of life in Norway? I have never done that. I am not letting you hijack this thread to turn it into personal attacks on me. You are going far outside the topic of this thread. If you take issue with anything I write, then I suggest you comment on relevant article.
Otherwise just go fuck youself. You don't know what you are talking about with respect oil industry, oil production, Norway and Saudi Arabia but I am not going to spend time here educating you because that isn't what this thread is about.
You sound like the endless number of right-wing Americans I have dealt with over so many years who get butthurt whenever America isn't number one and getting all the praise. God, it is so tiring with people like you.
>Brussel AC has nothing to do with left and right wing politics. That is a completley ridiculous non-sequitor.
Europeans are always telling me that Europe is left-wing relative to the US, so it seems like an interesting data point at the very least. Furthermore--isn't opposition to EU bureaucracy typically associated with the right in Europe, e.g. in the case of Brexit? Doesn't the EU bureaucracy work to regulate corporations and censor right-wing narratives in the EU? Why was this critique of the EU made from a right-wing perspective and not a left-wing perspective? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIjmUxT9FWI
>You got a weird cherry picking of things such as student loans. The point is that they are trying to to make education cheaper for all. Getting higher education today is pretty normal thing. That doesn't imply an elite. You are utterly ridiculous. This isn't the 1950s.
If you were intellectually honest, you would admit that it is a regressive policy. Matt Yglesias (US Democrat, well-known commentator) is honest and writes: "Debt relief benefits an affluent minority" https://www.slowboring.com/p/student-loan-forgiveness But as I predicted, "it's near cognitively impossible for self-interested liberals [like you] to realize this". You're left sputtering about "cherry-picking" and trying to argue definitions like a sophist. Perfect illustration of my points, really.
>And suggesting Democrat policies are anti workers is ridiculous given that they are the ones typically supporting unions while Republicans typically destroy unions. Not to mention Dems are the ones pushing for higher minimum wages. But like most right-wingers you love picking one disadvantages group to attack another. Take student struggling with student loans and pit them against workers. Never mind that the right is bad for both groups.
You're putting words in my mouth. I don't consider myself a right-winger. I'm a registered Democrat and I never voted for Trump. I didn't claim that Democratic policies are universally anti-worker.
You're not trying to pass the ideological turing test for why a person might oppose unions or minimum wage laws.
>Bragging about the superiority of life in Norway? I have never done that.
Literally 3 hours ago you made a post which said:
"But in America any amount of incompetence and corruption has no real consequences. At least not when Republicans are responsible for it.
Here in Norway things of just a tiny fraction of failure of DOGE would have collapsed government."
Your lack of self-awareness, and lack of intellectual honesty, is simply astonishing.
>You are going far outside the topic of this thread.
We're talking about the relative psychological proclivities of liberals and conservatives. So it's on topic. I'm using you as a data point to illustrate the fact that liberals are capable of self-serving rationalizations just like conservatives. It's a human tendency, not a conservative tendency.
>You don't know what you are talking about with respect oil industry, oil production, Norway and Saudi Arabia
You also have a $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund. Why isn't that money going towards the world's poorest? Why aren't you even able to answer that question? It's because you only believe in pretty words, and you have no intellectual honesty. Your commitment to inequality ends when it inconveniences you too much. As soon as I bring up facts or data which inconveniences your position like this, it is suddenly "off topic for the thread".
>You sound like the endless number of right-wing Americans I have dealt with over so many years who get butthurt whenever America isn't number one and getting all the praise. God, it is so tiring with people like you.
You wrote this right after getting butthurt (literal "go fuck youself") when I criticize Norway. Again: Spend some time working on your self-awareness, for God's sake. I suggest taking a deep breath before responding further, if you don't want to just keep making a fool of yourself. Try to think about the obvious counterarguments I will make. See if you can inhabit the mind of a person who disagrees with you even a little bit.
> Do you ever extend this "looking in context" to right-wing politicians?
Actually no, because the times the right has done similar to the left and taken power by force, we have dealt with Fascist regimes. And that transition has pretty much never been an improvement in any manner.
It has always been for the worse. Fascist regimes have nearly always reduced democracy or removed it entirely.
E.g. I cannot see how e.g. Nazi Germany was better than the Weimar Republic. But it is not hard to see that through all the years of its existence the Soviet Union was a lot better for Russians than Czar Russia.
Just as Communist China has been a lot better for Chinese people than Imperial China was.
But by all means offer me a case where you think Fascism was better for people than Democracy. Make the case and I'll see if I'll concede.
Again if you have a beef with me, don't hijack this thread to make it about me. Respond relevant posts I have posted. This isn't my article. I don't think the author appriciates this kind of veering off.
So I am not going to get into Norway or myself here. If you want to. Then please write your grievances under whatever post you think is relevant that I have made. I will address it there.
As for Cuba and North Korea. They are utterly meaningless to use as examples to talk about policy outcomes as Cuba has been embargoed to death all its life. North Korea was bombed more than any other country in history to pieces and is f*cked up beyond belief after that.
So whatever they ended up as is very hard to tease apart what follows from any particular ideology and what follows from extreme external influences.
The biggest example of a communist regime today is China, and they have pulled more people out of povery than any other country in history. The Soviet Union prior to that took what was a most illiterate agrarian society of serfs and turned that into a military and scientific powerhouse that sent people into space.
Russia was a country that under right-wing Czar rule has 400 years of zero economic growth. So while Stalin was a horrenous person, and Communism is not exactly a system anyone would want to replicate, it actually was a huge improvement over the right-wing regime that came before it.
Countries have to be evaluated in context. It makes no sense to compare with say something like the US whith hundreds of years of head start. Yes, I know Americans like to pretend US civilization started in 1776, but it was established by the most developed civilizations in Europe of the UK, Netherlands, France etc. It got the institutions, technology, economic system etc from the peak of Europe. In constrast Russia was a basket case hundreds of years behind Western Europe.
Funny you attack me for being a liberal, when you are the liberal. You said you vote democrat. I am not a liberal. You supposedly read all these posts I write so you should known by now that I am socialist. I am literally member of Norway's largest socialist party. I am not member of a liberal party, like you.
As for student loans. What Biden did isn't what I would have done, but I understand the context in the US where it is nearly impossible to do anything looking like reform. He was doing as you do in the US usually doing patching up because real reform is impossible. He was tackling the fact that earlier payment systems had made it really expensive for students.
We can argue about the specifics and whether there was different ways of doing it. But I completely reject your ridiculous notion that it is anti working class to have cheap accessible higher education. In Norway as in many other countries it was a big push by Labour governments. The working class itself to make education cheap and affordable. My parents generation mostly all came from the working class and took advantage of these opportunities, to advance.
I think you have a rather elitist attitude if you think children of the working class cannot master going to college.
Sure, the specific of the Biden plan was not ideal, but then again a Scandinavian style free college system was not on the table. Don't gaslight me into thinking it was.
As for oil. Again you have no idea what you are talking about. But I will make a post about oil explaining some of these things on my timeline. You can decide if you want to respond to that.
As for me telling you to fuck off. That has nothing to do with your arguments but the fact that you are hijacking someone else's comment section to air your petty grievances against me.
Got issues with anything I write, you are welcome to join my timeline and comment.
As long as you have a relevant point you are welcome to call me whatever the fuck you want. But if you cannot stay on topic and present relevant argument I will certatinly tell you to fuck off. You can bet on that.
"They were a more egalitarian version of what they replaced."
They absolutely weren't though! They replaced hereditary titles and rights, with people whose right to rule was completely based on their position within the Party. Which was ultimately dependent on their relationship to a couple apparatchiks. Communist society made people slaves of the State, as opposed to Serfs of a Lord.
"So while communist regimes were oppressive they were more egalitarian than the right-wing regimes they replaced"
Umm.. not really. Stalin was much more oppressive and on a far larger scale than any Russian czar, if only because of the technological apparatus which allowed this. Don't be blinded by titles. Few leaders have ever been as authoritarian in history as the left-wing authoritarians were. Maybe not even Hitler, although that's debatable.
I am not American so I don't know how you define progressive. Not a term used in Europe. So let me simplify. I would argue the left has historically fought against hierarchies and the right has typically tried to preserve them.
Examples would be conservatives supporting the monarchy and aristocrats while the left pushed for democracy. Later the conservatives would stand with the capitalist elites when the working class sought voting rights, right to unionize etc.
Then when women fought for their rights conservatives would again stand in the way.
And whatever the definition you use for progressives I am pretty sure they would have been on the side of the left and not the conservatives seeking to maintain hierarchies and privilege.
You think the difference between Norway and North Korea is only who is at the top?
Or do you think the degree to which hierarchies and egalitarianism exist varies profoundly between societies? The left is about creating less hierarchical societies. Not about complete elimination.
The right tends to defend hierarchies and oppose creating flatter structures and more democracy.
Ironically, Norway is a constitutional monarchy, while North Korea’s regime was the result of a revolution. Maybe some measured gradual progress works out better than rolling the dice with a violent revolution?
There is all the difference in the world between being a top of a hierarchy defined by a field of expertise because you have that expertise and thinking that being at the top of that hierarchy entitles you to control the bodies of anyone within that hierarchy.
Being high up in a hierarchy is usually the work of purely random selection. This is the fatal flaw in “conservative” ideology, which prescribes so much to “personal responsibility.” Ascribing meaning to randomness is a sure way to misinterpret reality.
"Being high up in a hierarchy is usually the work of purely random selection.". This is a very surprising claim - I'd be interested in a few examples of hierarchies that you think are purely the work of random selection.
In reality it seems pretty obvious that most hierarchies are the result of a _mix_ of randomness and genuine differences in ability. To get to the top of something, you've usually got to be genuinely good at the thing, _and_ get lucky. This even goes for literal aristocracies, which tend to form out of competition between rival contenders in military struggles for control of territory - sure, an unlucky arrow in the eye, or molehill that trips up your horse, can put an end to you, but to be able to be in the running in the first place, you've got to have what it takes to inspire people to join your army and to win some battles. Some of those qualities are going to be partly hereditary, so there is a good chance that your children will also have those traits (though of course, inbreeding and long periods of peace can erode those qualities down the generations, and you end up getting conquered by a new round of military elites).
And of course it goes for the disparities in wealth - the people that control lucrative businesses could often be swapped out for some other people that could run the business about as successfully, but people vary widely in their ability to run those companies in the first place. Probably a few people could, if they had been placed differently, do Elon Musk's or Jeff Bezos' job, but most people couldn't. Or in artistic endeavors. There are few fields as winner-take-all as the arts - a tiny handful of people earn a huge fraction of the wealth and prestige in, e.g. music, or acting etc., while vastly more languish in obscurity and have to have a day job to support themselves. But the people who make it to the top and stay there are, unless they have very powerful patrons, always genuinely talented to at least some degree. (I'll grant that in the field of visual arts at the elite end, that often seems less true these days, and that I could tape a banana to a wall about as well as anyone, but that's likely due to exactly the sort of market-distorting effects of patronage; for most of history, painters and sculptors who were successful in their lifetime tended to have obvious genuine talent).
If a tendency to underestimate the importance of randomness is the fatal flaw in conservative ideology, a tendency to underestimate the importance of real and mostly-intractable differences in ability is the corresponding fatal flaw in progressive ideology.
I think you made my point very well! There is a group of people (you may quibble about the size of that group) who could replace anyone high up in a hierarchy. Btw, there’s nothing “innate” about the biggest source of randomness at question here: the circumstances of your birth. Who your parents are, the color of your skin, your community, etc. Those things shape whatever skillset one develops.
"There is a group of people (you may quibble about the size of that group) who could replace anyone high up in a hierarchy." - sure, but my point is that, for any sufficiently complicated / high-stakes role, there is a far larger group of people who _couldn't_ replace someone at that level of a hierarchy. And of course "personal responsibility" is a trait that is itself partly susceptible to deliberate improvement, and partly genetically fixed, and, sure, some conservatives tend to overrate the degree to which people are capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
But I think you may be using "randomness" in a non-standard way when using it to refer to the circumstances of one's birth. We are not, so far as we can tell, free-floating souls that get randomly assigned to a genome at conception. For every one of us, the parents we were born to (and who therefore determine our genome) are the only parents we could possibly have been born to - no room for randomness at all, and it is of no more salience that person A was born to healthy, prosperous parents while person B was born to sickly, chaotic parents than that both Persons A and B were born to human parents while a third entity was born to parents who are horses, and therefore has to navigate life as a horse rather than as a human.
From a philosophical point of view we can indeed view us as free floating souls as you describe. You cannot decide what parent you get born to. That is totally random. You cannot decide how rich or educated they are or how good genes you get. That is outside your control.
Thus there ought to be some sensible balance in how much you reward an individual for being lucky being born to the right parents.
Naturally we cannot put a complete idiot in charge of say building a jet engine. We cannot ignore the circumstances someone got born into in terms of what jobs and roles they get.
But we can tweak how richly someone gets rewarded.
Conservatism tends to view far too much as the product of your own choices and labour when most of it is just dumb luck: a combination of good genes and great environment you got born into.
Why should you get rewarded extraordinarily for the dumb luck of having great parents? This isn't my argument for everyone getting rewarded the same because we have the practical consideration of needing to reward in specific ways to get talent into the right positions.
But the scale can vary a lot. E.g. in my native Norway the premium for high education and talent is much smaller than say the US. Yet it doesn't hurt recruitment to important skilled professions in a way that is noticeable.
I might quibble here and there with your first paragraph, but I agree in general.
As to your second, a thought experiment: if we were to take 10,000 babies born at random throughout the country during a given month, knowing nothing at all about them, we could predict the outcomes of their "achievement" by, say, age 25. We'd probably just use the distribution of outcomes for the population at large. While the result might be a normal distribution, any prediction about a specific baby would be wholly random given we know nothing about them. Then we took a group of 10,000 babies born in the same month, these selected by parent pedigree/wealth/social status/etc, average zip code income, skin color, likelihood the parents stay together, and have a robust network of support around them, choosing only those values which likely indicate "achievement."
Do you think the average and median values between the two groups would differ? How about their respective standard deviations? Think of it from the baby's point of view: Does any individual baby have control over any of the circumstances of their birth (the factors selected for in group 2) at any point over the 25 year observation period? Or are those factors randomly imposed by forces outside their control?
You mean hierarchies like capitalism. Sorry but we have choices about economic systems. We don’t have to valorize money accumulation and associated power. Hierarchy without attending ethics and limits on power leads to domination of the few. It always has. And democracy which is about diffusion of power is contradicted by the consolidation of power under the unrestrained accumulation engendered by an unfettered capitalist system. Adam Smith and John Locke knew this. And many of the founders knew this. Prehistory is dominated by society’s that lived in a relatively egalitarian mode as did the early Christians. That the hierarchy fetish is historically natural or necessarily successful is flatly untrue . And our iteration of it is particularly unhealthy valorizing efficiency over quality and propagating the myth of meritocracy over the constitutionally embraced welfare of all.
Yeah a constitutional monarchy is a democracy too.
The only one silly here is you ignorant of something you can lookup in any encyclopedia. Instead if looking at a proper source you rely on Fox News and right-wing bloggers. Read an actual authoritative source on the matter.
Oh I am not very worried about you think about anything Rick. I think most people who have done a modicum of reading on this topic will find it rather amusing how over-confident you are.
Anyone can lookup in an encyclopedia to see how wrong you are. Just for fun I am giving people 3 different sources that all say you are wrong. Of course you won't read any of them.
But others can read them and amuse themselves by your rather arrogant and ignorant replies here.
Rick - rather than waste my time untangling your deceptive statement, here is a nice concise summary from a frontier AI model:
“When someone states that the United States is "a constitutional republic, not a democracy," they are typically making a distinction based on the mechanisms of governance and the protection of minority rights. Their assertion generally centers on two primary points:
* Rejection of Direct Democracy: They are pointing out that the U.S. is not a pure or direct democracy, where laws are determined by a direct, unfiltered majority vote of the entire citizenry (a system historically critiqued by the Founders as vulnerable to majority tyranny or "mob rule").
* Emphasis on the Rule of Law: They are highlighting that the U.S. operates under a written Constitution that serves as the supreme law of the land. This framework establishes checks and balances, separates powers, and explicitly protects individual and minority rights from being overridden by a simple majority vote.
This argument frequently draws on the language of the American Revolutionary era. For instance, in Federalist No. 10, James Madison differentiated between a "pure democracy" (which he defined as a small society citizens assemble and administer the government in person) and a "republic" (a government administered by representatives).
Is the Assertion Valid?
The assertion is conceptually valid in its description of U.S. mechanics, but semanticly flawed in its premise that the two terms are mutually exclusive. In modern political science, legal terminology, and official U.S. government definitions, the United States is both a democracy and a republic.
The confusion stems from a false dichotomy. The terms describe different characteristics of the same government system:
* Democracy describes the source of political power. If the supreme power of a government rests with the people, it is a democracy. Because U.S. citizens exercise this power by electing officials rather than voting on every law directly, the U.S. is a representative democracy.
* Republic describes the structure of the government. A republic is a state where power is exercised through elected representatives and the head of state is not a monarch.
* Constitutional means that the government's power is strictly limited by an institutional framework (the Constitution) to ensure the rule of law.
Summary: Asserting that the U.S. is a republic and not a democracy is a semantic misunderstanding. A representative democracy is simply a specific type of democracy.
The most precise definition of the United States system is a constitutional federal representative democracy.
I believe they're referring to democratic ideals. I'm so tired of that " we live in a republic not a democracy " bit trotted out at any mention of democracy. You have the gall to criticize other's supposed stupidity when you're willfully obtuse?
We did some work looking at a different model of the political spectrum that was based on group boundary definition. The result, seeing the right as aiming to tighten group boundaries to exclude and the left as looking to expand them towards inclusion, appeared more accurate than any model of policy preference. It also gave a view of how going too far - on both left and right lead to authoritarian ouputs. Happy to share if interested.
That sounds accurate. The assumption here (especially from everyone who liked this comment) is that tightening boundaries is wrong and inclusivity is right. What happens when it’s a murderer you’re keeping out or letting in? What happens when it’s a bigot you’re keeping out or letting in? What happens when it’s a child molester you’re keeping out or bringing in?
The left loves playing the righteous card. It’s just the most vanilla position
Key conclusion was that there is a maximal point of openness after which it is dysfunctional — i.e. the base position is of defined group boundaries. So over expansion comes at a real cost, in the same way over constriction does. You just arrive there (dysfunction) by different means.
Not so much. More that people have an innate preference to belong to a group and share resources among it, and if you open boundaries too much - the group becomes hard to define and this makes people uncomfortable.
So it's less about tolerance and more about the bounds of what people will accept sustainably.
That was the context of the work we were doing. But the instinct is socially orientatwd - group belonging is layered and typically prioritized based on proximity, starting with kin.
You've clearly never seriously read anything by Edmund Burke, James Madison, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, William F. Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, Robert George, Friedrich Hayek, Alexander Solzhenitzyn, Milton Friedman, or Thomas Sowell. If you had, you couldn't make this argument with a straight face. American Conservatism is not built upon pre-liberal, anti-democratic ideas. It's built upon the very liberal ideas that America was founded on. Today it's liberalism that has changed by way of progressivism into something unrecognizable. Conservatism rightly reacts against many of these so-called "progressive" changes because they cut off the branch they pretend to sit on.
The entire essay is rather odd in that respect. It also seems to ignore the illiberal parts of the Democratic coalition. I understand why; the Trump administration is rather corrupt and incompetent, albeit not truly lawless. That said, I have little doubt that in a future where the left in this country feels as marginalized as the right, say in the face of a genuine rollback of the cultural shifts of the last 20 years (not 50, just 25) they would rally around a Trump figure.
The attempt to look for some sort of deep root in a rejection of political small-l liberalism might make the author feel good, but won't contribute much to our understanding of the political shifts of the early 21st century.
Rick, if you had read anything I have written, you would realize how silly it is to accuse me of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Heck, you don't even seem to have read the single short two-paragraph post that I wrote. That saddens me.
I think we’re just not stupid enough to think any of that stuff has anything to do with US conservatism as it’s existed in living memory. It’s just a bunch of famous (mostly) dead people whose names you can list off to pretend you’re smart.
It’s not a list of famous dead men, its a list of the most influential conservative writers from the past 200 years who have shaped and defined the political philosophy of American Conservatism. Just because the Republican party has turned more towards populism under Trump’s influence in recent years doesn’t mean these ideas are irrelevant. They are still core to the thinking and motivation of most people who call themselves conservatives (myself included). The author of this article has no understanding of this and therefore has only a shallow, if not downright dishonest, conception of American conservatism while pretending to offer fresh insights about it.
Sure. But if you're ever curious about why we do what we do, these are the authors that could explain it. Political policy is always downstream of philosophy, as I'm sure you know.
I took a graduate seminar on conservative political thought. It’s fine, but honestly a lot weaker intellectually than mainstream liberal political theory. But in any case, it very obviously has nothing to do with anything that’s been called conservative politics in the US for the last three decades.
Hayek was not conservative. I know because he blatantly said he was not, on multiple occasions, in both his writing and in response to being flat out asked. He rejected it flatly and really took the entire ideology to task. Stating, ironically, the near exact sentiment this author stated about conservatives. I’m not even going to pretend I’m some fancy intellectual, any literate person can just look it up on his Wikipedia page. It’s nuanced but he does plainly reject conservatism
He was a "classical liberal" from Vienna, but he had an outsized influence on American Conservatism because of his economic work, "Road to Serfdom", which is a critique of socialist economics and a defence of free-market capitalism (an argument that any American Conservative today would endorse).
I understand. I know conservatives as individuals or a voting bloc support Austrian economics and likely agree with the views of classic liberalism, but conservative admins have not governed based on these views and outside a small minority, most conservative republicans in congress have voting records that are anti free market. But I also see the amazing rejection of liberal policies by supposed liberal democrats, the biggest being anti BDS laws and globalization that requires exploitation of others (mainly the global south) for profit at the expense of American workers. I have a more Marxist-Leninist, materialist perspective personally but that is based on the fact that a piece of legislation is significantly more likely to be passed if corporations and lobbyists support it even in smaller numbers than when the overwhelming majority of individuals and/or representative’s voter base support a piece of legislation. Basically once in office, representatives are less responsible to their constituents than corporations and their donors so it doesn’t all that much matter if you agree with classical liberal principles or you’re a staunch conservative with openly hierarchical beliefs when it’s not reflected policy or practice.
The Reagan admin. was classically liberal and pro free-market. The Bush administrations were (for the most part) classically liberal and pro free-market. Even the current senior conservative leadership in congress are largely considered classically liberal and pro free-market. The only group in the conservative camp that has swayed from these ideals is (sadly) the Trump administration. Even then, the infamous "Project 2025" policy proposals made to the Trump admin. were classically liberal and pro free-market.
Everyone commenting here so far thinks your piece is the cat’s meow, the tip of the top. I beg to differ.
For movement conservatives, whether highbrow like William F Buckley, lower like Rush Limbaugh, or somewhere in between like Ronald Reagan, very much believe in the Truths of the Declaration, as do principled liberals, although the latter are a bit thin on the ground at present.
But just as there are those on the Right who are NOT movement conservatives, so too are there those on the Left who are not principled liberals, or indeed liberals at all. These “progressive” Leftists quite specifically deny that our rights, first of all the Right to Life, are “unalienable” endowments of our Creator, preferring instead to view human rights as a polite fiction, as just a social construct, holding that our rights are indeed quite alienable, conditional, granted by the State. This , sadly, is the meaning of the Democrats’ “Our Democracy,” it is the democracy of straight majoritarianism, of two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Meanwhile yes, there are anti-American voices on the Right, people who similarly reject natural rights in favor of arbitrary standards based upon tradition and custom, people who must be opposed.
The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist was explicit on this point, informing us that in his debased view, Constitutional rights “assume a general social acceptance neither because of any intrinsic worth nor because of any unique origins in someone's idea of natural justice but instead simply because they have been incorporated in a constitution by a people."
In other words, arbitrary law based upon arbitrary “values” — not the Truths of the Declaration, based on “Nature and Nature’s God”
Do we, in fact disagree? Disagree at the level of principle? Based solely upon what you wrote I do not think so.
I’m simply offering that you might be applying your principles, which I share, to the wrong groups of people (and again, as I intimated, these are definitely wrong groups of people) 😉
Sometime around 2010, the GOP began to go off the rails, as a reaction grew against some radical cultural shifts that most mainstream liberals were unable to recognize. The result was a populist reaction around a deeply flawed figure that many nonetheless believed would cut through the shibboleths and taboos that had accrued since 1970 or so. Unfortunately, the reaction on the left was to indulge their own version of Tea Party -- shouting down Bernie Sanders was a rather big canary -- and look the other way as a large part of their own coalition proceeded to jettison liberalism.
I would agree with someone who argued that a big part of the Republican coalition consists of people who hold other values above liberal ones, but that's a far cry from saying that they -- ok, we -- want to "defend 1680." That's just silly.
I believe that was the year the author of the post referenced as conservatives' touchstone.
"Until the left understands that the right is not failing to live up to 1776, but is actively fighting for the hierarchy of 1680 and responds to it appropriately, conservatives will continue to consolidate power."
Also: "America’s conservatives and their ideology are descended from Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha or The Natural Power of Kings from 1680."
The point is quite silly, I think. It's also a bit disturbing, because it's trying to blow up the differences between mainstream Americans into something more like, say, the differences between French radicals and reactionaries in the 1790s. And we just really don't disagree that much!
When our differences came close, in recent history (re segregation), demonization served nobody. Wheeler is demonizing his opponents in the guise of pretending to understand them.
There are, though, illiberal elements in the broader Right we can point to. But I’d rather live under a Traditionalist Conservative regime than a Stalinist one seven days out of seven
Abortion is healthcare Dan. Legislating away access to healthcare alienates my right to life. But please explain to me how ICE killing people in the streets or local PD shooting babies in parking lots does not. Choosing to hone in on one issue you fundamentally disagree with while looking away at people being murdered by this administration does not make you right or superior.
> it is the democracy of straight majoritarianism, of two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
This has always been a stupid analogy for at least three reasons, if not more.
1. I did a quick google search to check the actual population numbers, and as I expected, it turns out there are way more sheep in the world than there are wolves. Currently there are over a billion sheep in the world and there are only like 250,000 wolves or so*. This is not particularly surprising, since food chains tend to work that way - a lot of herbivorous prey at the bottom, and only a few carnivorous predators at the top. This means that the analogy is kind of a strange one; setting it up as involving 2 wolves and 1 sheep seems kind of contrived. If we wanted to make the analogy more accurate to the real world, it would state 1 wolf and about 4000 sheep.
- I might go even further and say that the analogy was probably set up in such an unrepresentative way for an intentional reason, specifically, to confuse people about who the real predators in our society are and how the dynamics of economic exploitation work (hint: exploiters are always much fewer in number than their exploitees). After all, in the reality of American politics, concentrated minority interests (such as wealthy donors) tend to be comparably powerful to democratic processes anyway, if not even *more* powerful.
2. The analogy proves too much - it's invoked as just an argument against democracy**, but really it's an argument against any form of collective decision-making that includes the possibility of some participants not getting what they want. But humans are social creatures that do best living in organized societies***, and in any organized society, there is inevitably going to be some amount of collective decision-making; the relevant question is how to make these decisions fairly, not whether to make them at all, and the "two wolves one sheep" analogy isn't really suggesting any better alternative.
3. The threat posed to minority rights by majoritarian processes isn't actually as bad as the analogy makes it sound, because everyone is a minority in some respect (religion, profession, lifestyle, personality type, age, artistic tastes, physical appearance/attractiveness, etc) and this gives everyone a natural, rational incentive to have some respect for difference and variation even when they are in the majority on some particular issue; after all, while they might be in the majority today, they could be the minority tomorrow. It creates a kind of mutual insurance logic embedded in democratic culture.
- Additionally, real citizens tend to have cross-cutting interests. A nurse, a teacher, a farmer, a truck driver, and an electrical engineer probably have shared interests on some issues and divergent issues on others.
*(caveat - prior to the modern industrial era, and its associated factory farming and habitat destruction, there were more wolves and fewer sheep in the world. There were probably between 1-5 million wolves and 300-800 million sheep globally. So maybe the most appropriate analogy is 1 wolf to 200 sheep, rather than 1 wolf to 4000 sheep. I still think my point here stands.)
**(sometimes only against direct democracy specifically, other times against all forms of democracy more broadly, representative democracy included)
***(the phrasing of "do best" here is probably an understatement, actually; from looking at the history of homo sapiens, it probably would be accurate enough to say "have no other option than living in organized societies")
The democratic “tyranny of the majority” (sic) that the “founders” feared was the violation of the privileged status of the “well-bred” (sic) in-group plutocratic minority to which they belonged (unbound but protected) by the outgroup (bound but not protected). Ie, the OP used a lot of words attempting to sound smart disputing the author, only to end up proving the author's exact point with a belabored reactionary defense of “natural” (sic) hierarchy.
Of course I was not defending natural hierarchy but rather natural rights, the Truths of the Declaration, seeing movement conservatism based thereon as a species of classical liberalism. Mr. Wheeler acknowledges this conservatism exists or existed but seems to regard it merely as a pose rather than a thought out position. Whereas I think if he reads Charles Kesler (to say nothing of Frank Meyer!) whom Buckley found and platformed, or Declarationist Harry Jaffa, mentor not only to Kesler but to people like Larry Arnn and Ambassador Alan Keyes, he will indeed find a genuine position rooted in liberty, in human nature rather than tradition and a supposed hierarchy.
See Kesler’s takedown of trsditionalist conservatism, the school of thought represented in modern times by Russell Kirk here, writing that
“Tradition can be a great and a good thing, of course, but it is never so merely because it is traditional; slaveholders had their ancestral ways, too. To tell right from wrong within a tradition, or among traditions, requires a moral standard that has a validity or goodness independent of the tradition: it requires an abstract principle….”
And I’m not saying you’re one of them, but plenty of people “like” the Bill of Rights without holding those rights to be in accord with the unalterable truths about human nature that Declaration insists upon
How do you ground a political covenant in something more durable than simple agreement? If American-style pragmatism does not actually go far enough, then what does one do? I think Rehnquist was just being honest about our limits here. Stanley Fish's excellent "Why we can't all just get along?" makes this point as well.
Short of time here today, apologies, but quickly, the key question would seem to be, what is it, precisely, that the body politic, the electorate, comes to “simple agreement” ON?
If four out of five of your contemporaries are agreed that you should be fed into a wood chipper, does “democracy” mean their will should legally prevail?
No, we want _liberal_ democracy, in which your basic rights and mine are “secured,” kept off the political table, not subject to a legislative, judicial, or popular “veto.”
Nathan Sheely:
“As [Dr Harry] Jaffa explains [John C.] Calhoun's position, whatever the various interest groups can agree upon unanimously is presumed to be a rational or just outcome. What is decisive, according to [Calhoun as understood by] Jaffa, is the form-everyone agreeing—and not the content of the will. [Jaffa] contrasts this with the Founders' view. The Declaration of Independence does not simply say that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed; rather, it limits that consent to the derivation of "just powers": [Jaffa:] “Unless the governed are enlightened such that they understand a priori the distinction between just and unjust powers, consent alone will not make government legitimate."In other words, there are powers that no consent can render just.”
Much of what you have written is spot on, even given my own convictions. But we do have that lack of shared definitions. About those, multitudes on the Right, and not merely movement conservatives, would have us simply “follow the science,” and accept established biological facts regarding either our unborn sisters and brothers, or the claims of transgender activists, who insist that a man is a woman if he says he is. As my friends in Secular Pro-Life like to say, “For the embryology textbook tells me so,” it is not religious dogma but rather reality that tells us that every other baby shredded in the womb is one of the “living, breathing women” you care about.
So at least in principle, practically nobody wants to “punish the Left,” instead what we want is for the Left to accept basic biology and raise its moral consciousness about the most helpless vulnerable humans in our midst.
And about that moral consciousness: aren’t you something of an outlier in your own political circles for accepting, believing in natural rights, in human dignity? Leftists I speak with tend to regard human rights and morality itself as convenient, polite fictions, as social constructs.
As for the rule of law being optional, do you not recall innocent Catholic nuns being repeatedly threatened with fines and jail by President Obama and his AG Eric Holder, simply for politely declining to be complicit in artificial contraception and abortion?
Movement conservatism going back to Frank Meyer has always trended libertarian, and so has a lot in common with many liberals. That Iran throws gays to their deaths from car parks is seen as a bug, illiberal and thuggish, in conservative media, and certainly not as a feature.
But Leftists specifically repudiate an ethic of live-and-let-live, shouting down or rioting against free speech on campus and elsewhere. Their utopia is Marxist, and not at all about securing rights to life, liberty or property
While I appreciate your attempt to rescue movement conservatism from the authoritarian scrapheap by wrapping it in the sacred cloth of the Declaration, your argument suffers from a fatal flaw: it is a beautiful, nostalgic theory completely divorced from the grim realities of the current administration.
You argue that principled conservatives believe in objective, God-given "unalienable" rights, while accusing the progressive Left of treating rights as a "polite fiction" subject to the whims of the State. But look closely at what is happening under the banner of the current administration right now in 2026. Who is actually acting out the terrifying reality of "two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch"? It isn't the Left.
We are currently watching an administrative state systematically strip American citizens of their most fundamental human rights under the guise of executive mandates and a weaponized judiciary. When the state dictates what medical procedures a person can access, strips away bodily autonomy, and restricts the freedom of movement or expression for marginalized groups, it is not "conserving" the permanent truths of the American Founding. It is exercising the exact same raw, majoritarian tyranny you claim to despise.
If rights are truly "endowments of our Creator," then they are inherent to every human being by virtue of their existence. They do not evaporate because a specific political faction captures 51% of the vote and decides that certain citizens’ lifestyles, identities, or healthcare needs are incompatible with "tradition and custom."
By cheering on or excusing an administration that uses state power to dismantle the human rights of its political opponents, modern movement conservatives have abandoned the Declaration entirely. They have proven the original essay's point: when the chips are down, the desire to enforce a rigid, traditional social hierarchy will always override a stated fealty to Natural Law.
You cannot claim to believe in unalienable rights while supporting an apparatus that treats the rights of your fellow citizens as entirely alienable, conditional, and subject to the permission of the state. The tragedy of 2026 is that while you are chasing the high-minded ghost of William F. Buckley, the politicians you elect are operating purely in the realm of raw, unvarnished power.
• You didn’t offer specifics, tell us precisely which “most fundamental human rights” are being stripped from American citizens (and of course the Declaration insists real rights cannot be stripped, only violated), didn’t tell us what medical procedures you had in mind, but based upon your statement as written, I’m not sure where you and I disagree.
I didn’t say that the current Administration was composed of principled movement conservatives out to secure our unalienable rights.
While their program, agenda overlaps at certain points with movement conservatism, President Trump and VP Vance embody strains from elsewhere in the broader Right.
Marco Rubio might be an example of a movement conservative in the Trump Administration, and sure enough he takes a different line on things, and is no doubt frequently frustrated.
As for movement conservatives supportive or excusing the Administration, certainly we’re grateful for genuine accomplishments and do still think that Trump was and is preferable to four years of Harris-Walz.
But even this last is a matter of prudential judgment, in which people of good will, arguing in good faith might legitimately disagree.
I appreciate your precision, and you are entirely right to pull me back to the exact text of the Declaration: rights cannot be truly "stripped" by the state; they can only be violated.
To answer your question directly about specifics: I am talking about the violation of the right to bodily autonomy and self-determination—specifically through state-level abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest, and the weaponization of the state apparatus to restrict gender-affirming healthcare. To me, the right to control one's own physical body is the absolute bedrock of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." When the state steps into the exam room, it is violating a natural right, not a social construct.
But your response brings us to the real heart of the matter, and it’s where I think the tragedy of modern conservatism lies. You admit that President Trump and Vice President Vance do not represent "principled movement conservatism," but rather "strains from elsewhere in the broader Right"—which, let's be frank, is a polite way of describing a populist, post-constitutional right that views the state as a weapon to reward friends and punish enemies.
You mention Marco Rubio as the lonely, frustrated avatar of the old guard inside the cabinet. But that proves my point. If the principled movement conservatives have been relegated to the sidelines, "frequently frustrated" while a different strain of the Right holds the actual levers of power, then movement conservatism has effectively surrendered.
When you say that supporting this administration is ultimately a matter of "prudential judgment"—a calculation that Trump is simply preferable to Harris-Walz—you are making a classic utilitarian argument. You are saying that to protect some values, you are willing to look the other way while this "other strain" of the Right violates the natural rights of others.
And that brings us right back to the original essay. Whether you call it "prudential judgment" or "protecting the in-group," the end result is exactly the same: the high-minded principles of 1776 are being sacrificed on the altar of political survival. You may still believe in the Truths of the Declaration in your heart, but the movement you belong to is currently funding and voting for the hierarchy of 1680.
As a movement conservative, I’m going to differ with your specific application of the Declaration to defend what I think can easily be shown to be maiming and killing.
But we can actually hold off on having the conversation about your specifics for now to address your overarching indictment of movement conservatives and Trump as such:
Is it that they have “surrendered,” or are simply outnumbered?
Reagan, the movement conservative candidate, was able to substantially consolidate right-wing voters, but not entirely, just ask Pat Buchanan supporters!
And movement conservatism was the new kid in the 1950s. Frank Meyer’s free-market, socially conservative Fusionism had to fight its way to its place of honor past the Old Right, Paleocons who were often racist and anti-Semitic, conspiratorial cranks at times.
My point is that there is a larger Right, which always (see the Nixon Administration and its Silent Majority) also encompassed left of center concerns as well. You can here think of unionized “hard-hats” who hung on every word uttered by Lou Dobbs on CNN and were only too happy to throw Wisconsin to Trump when he promised protectionism as policy.
You don’t share the convictions of pro-life folk, I get that, but pretend you did for a moment. Wouldn’t your electoral calculation be to have the fewest violations of natural rights of others, and mightn’t that steer you more toward Trump, if he had already appointed Constitutionalist judges, who had in turn gotten Roe overturned, than to Kamala Harris?
This is a fair challenge. You are forcing me to step out of my own ideological shoes and look at the board from your perspective, and I respect that. So let me take your invitation and genuinely look at this through the lens of your convictions.
If I adopt your premise—that a fetus possesses an unalienable right to life from conception—then your calculation completely changes. Under that framework, *Roe v. Wade* wasn't a guarantee of liberty; it was a state-sanctioned violation of the most fundamental natural right of all on a massive scale. If I believed that, then voting for Donald Trump wouldn't be a betrayal of the Declaration; it would be a desperate, necessary shield to protect millions of lives from what you view as an ongoing catastrophe under a Harris-Walz administration.
From that viewpoint, it isn’t a "surrender" of principles at all. It is a grim, transactional necessity.
But this brings us right to the terrifying core of why our modern politics feels so broken, and it actually validates the deepest warning of that original essay. We aren't just arguing about policy anymore; we are experiencing a total system failure of shared definitions.
When you look at the political landscape, you see a battle to protect the most vulnerable, unborn life from being killed. When I look at the exact same landscape, I see a battle to protect living, breathing women from having their bodies conscripted by state force, or marginalized groups from being subjugated by a populist movement.
Both of us are claiming the mantle of "Natural Rights." Both of us believe we are defending the core tenets of human dignity against a tyrannical state.
And this is where your point about movement conservatives being "outnumbered" rather than "surrendered" becomes so critical. You are entirely right historically—the American Right has always been a messy, turbulent coalition. From the Paleocons to the Nixonian "Silent Majority" to the protectionist Lou Dobbs union workers, Fusionism was always a fragile alliance.
But look at who is driving the bus right now in 2026. The faction that currently commands the energy, the rhetoric, and the raw power of the Right is not the high-minded constitutionalists. It is a populist, post-constitutional movement that doesn't share your intellectual agonizing over the Declaration. They aren't looking to limit the state to protect God-given rights; they are looking to capture the state to punish the Left.
So while I completely understand your electoral calculation to vote for Trump to secure specific, monumental goals like overturning *Roe*, we have to face the broader reality of that bargain. In choosing to align with a populist movement because you are outnumbered, principled conservatives have unleashed a political force that treats the rule of law as entirely optional.
You may be making a deeply reasoned, prudential judgment to minimize what you see as violations of natural rights. But the tragedy is that the vehicle you are riding in to get there is running over the rest of the republic to do it.
But if you’d instead like to make a case for your position, marshal facts, offer evidence, assemble an argument that abortion is healthcare, and thus somehow violently taking the life of a complete, distinct, living, growing human being, you are welcome to do so.
Not even reading past the first few paragraphs. This is just honestly crap. You make not the slightest effort to understand the various strains that comprise conservative thinking. Anyone reading this will emerge more ignorant about conservatism than when they began.
I have tried talking to so-called "conservatives." Most of them come off as narrow minded selfish delusional fox propaganda watching maga cult members.
No, they're receiving equally inaccurate information from their preferred news sources, but don't understand that fact because these sources reflect their own biases.
It goes back to LBJ’s purported statement about convincing the lowest white man that he is better than the highest black man. Working class white conservatives are part of the in-group racially but part of the out-group economically. They clearly put more importance on the former, while the left has spent decades wondering why they vote against their own economic best interests (the latter). This article does a great job showing why that has been a futile question.
Well, the Democratic Party's Neoliberal turn definitely alienated plenty of these people. The climate crisis, has horrible as it is creates an opportunity to address this problem, as we could have robust public jobs programs in rural, mostly-White areas. President Biden did a little bit of this, but he mostly undermined it with his horrible fealty to Monetarism.
An excellent and very well-written post. I especially appreciate the intellectual history of conservatism going all the way back to Filmer. The only thing where I might disagree is that I don’t believe that conservatives with this mindset can be won back if Liberals just understand how they think and view politics. I think what this post highlights is that there is a sizable portion of people who cannot and will not be won over. The right approach isn’t to try to figure out how to talk to them but rather to understand that they represent a faction that must always be outvoted. Thinking that they can be won over is a category error.
"I don’t believe that conservatives with this mindset can be won back if Liberals just understand how they think and view politics."
I don't think that whether they can be won back if liberals understand how they think is the point so much as it's a certainty that we *won't* win them back if we *don't* know how they think is.
Terrific analysis! ♥️ Have you read journalist Tina Nguyen’s memoir, The MAGA Diaries? The other thing Democrats and liberals HAVE NO CLUE about is the overabundance of rightwing think tanks full of intellectuals who ARE combing through Ancient, 17th century anti-Enlightenment, 19th century pro-slavery, and early 20th century thought*. These are the people writing 900-page policy documents that Congress passes without reading.
*originality and creativity are not their strengths
Meanwhile as a Dem Party secretary I kept being told “nobody wants to read” even a paragraph. Could I “make it a meme or a sound bite?”? Are you kidding me?
The side we call “ignorant” can read 17th century legal arguments—some law clerk of Sam Alito’s dug up witch-burning marital rape enthusiast Matthew Hale for Alito to use as precedent in overturning Roe v Wade. They have incredible BOREDOM TOLERANCE. Meanwhile so-called leftists and progressives can’t endure the boredom of a monthly 2 hour meeting.
Just because someone is in a cult doesn’t mean they’re stupid. I haven’t finished writing about my experiences homeschooling my sick kids in Florida. But let me say that those deluded cult member (yes they are) Christian homeschool moms know a heck of a lot more about how American democracy works than most progressives. They write, call, email, lobby, and show up at state capitols with binders full of data.
Too many “leftists” otoh ironically think democracy is a business that responds to boycotts and/or a perpetual motion machine that you stick a coin in once every 4 years and them kick when it spits out the wrong bag of chips. I can’t count the number of times I shared Monty Python’s peasants scene and said “real anarcho-syndicalist communists join committees and go to meetings run by Robert’s Rules of Order!” 🤷🏼♀️
Berkeley professor George Lakoff has lamented for decades about Democrats’ failure to invest in an equivalent brain trust.
“Boredom tolerance” is a really insightful metric! I trained as an historian, and I know there are many good liberal academics out there. Many are older, though, and I think you're spot on about conservatives’ collective ability to dig and dig until they find the intellectual argument that works for them.
We talk about anti-intellectualism on the Right, but it’s just as prevalent on the Left, particularly among voters. I suspect that a lot of the most extreme, disaffected voters on both sides may have had learning challenges that weren’t supported in schools. I mostly interact with people who call themselves progressives and leftists, and many of them are neurodivergent—ADHD, reading challenges, etc. A lot of them have school trauma. There are many, many systemic, complex concepts and ideas that can’t be explained in a meme or 3 minute videos. I find it ironic that conservatives—especially the type who most like to be outdoors, hunting, off-roading, etc.—are among those that want more-punitive schooling rather than more “DEI” and accommodations. You’d think they’d be the ones WANTING Scandinavian-style forest schools instead of Christian schools with corporal punishment….
Anyway, my point is that there are anti-intellectual leftists (think of the people who knee-jerk responded to “messaging” and didn’t take the time to vet Graham Platner) and highly intellectual rightwingers. It’s not just studying history that requires boredom tolerance—it’s the process of democracy itself. The committees, the agendas. The debates and voting. It’s more than just playing Kahoot on your phone! And the political polling just reinforces the problem: “What’s your opinion on XXX” and they don’t say what XXX is or provide data to analyze to draw a CONCLUSION (not an opinion!) on XXX! That’s the main problem: opnion =/= conclusion!
Simon Schama's book on the French Revolution shows how the reactionary French aristocrats who blocked reforms before the revolution referred to their privileges as "liberties" and sounded very much like Confederates or modern conservatives. This is how I came to understand that Hayek was not a hypocrite, he was just an enemy of the enlightenment.
“Masked men grabbing people off the street”. This is like calling police responding to a bank robbery “a swarm of armed and aggressive thugs threatening the lives of people trying to survive by liberating a tiny sliver of billionaire wealth”.
That is not correct. You might think that in the former case the amount of force being used is unjustified, or believe that due process is not being used sufficiently. But it is simply false to claim that no crime is involved.
I am defining "crime" as "breaking the law." I think that is reasonable, no?
Well, ICE isn't pulling people randomly off the street. On the other hand, the tactics are unnecessarily harsh and politically counterproductive.
We are not running for elective office and truly need not employ inflammatory language that will only serve to shut down communication. If you're running for office on a base-mobilization strategy and I'm unaware of that, then I apologize; carry on!
The key difference is that robbing a bank is an immediately dangerous threat to everyone else inside that bank. Immigrants that are to be deported, going to work, are not a threat, and don't need to be attacked. Also, if it's legal, why don't they identify themselves like police officers do? That's pretty different
Sorry, but you lost me when you claimed there were “attempts by the government to strip LGBTQ+ Americans of their guns.” Pam Bondi proposed this for transgender people specifically, not LGBQ+ people, and her proposal went nowhere. And she’s gone now.
Facts matter. Distortions don’t help. The Trump administration constantly shows incompetence, and we don’t need to make stuff up — this just makes problems worse by making people dig in even deeper.
I bet this essay goes hard if you are fundamentally incapable of understanding the difference between criminals and productive, law-abiding, contributing members of society
I probably should be more polite but it’s honestly tiring hearing people on the left invent increasingly bizarre explanations for conservative thought that exactly zero conservatives would actually recognize as conservative thought.
The explanation for the phenomenon that the author of this essay is confused about is that conservatives, unlike the left, think that crime is bad. That’s it! That’s the entire explanation!
“Don’t tread on me” means “I strive to live a productive life where I contribute positively to society and I deserve to be left alone to do that.”
“Back the blue” means “People who contribute negatively to society absolutely do not deserve to be left alone.”
Anyone who sees a contradiction here, or who needs to invent some convoluted story about “hierarchy” to explain it, is broken in the head.
I think you are spot on. Thank you for an interesting and well written explanation. Since liberals and Democrats have taken the wrong approach, I wonder what the right approach is? I ask because in my view the conservative mindset as you have outlined it is inconsistent with the values in our founding documents.
The correct approach would begin by educating people on the history of social hierarchies and societies that operated without permanent social hierarchies to establish a baseline understanding that hierarchy isn't necessary or inevitable. We need a new Enlightenment to spread the truth of human equality. Otherwise we'll just be rearranging the pyramid.
Very well written piece. I say this as someone who lives with two trump supporters tho, no one who still backs trump in June 2026 is thinking about politics this deeply or would ever click on an article like, let alone be in Substack. Since there isn’t a viable conservative movement that is distinct from trump, I’m tossing any and all American conservatives under the MAGA banner here.
Since they’re not thinking deeply, today’s MAGA supporters are just ignorant racists who know they don’t fully understand the picture and/or don’t care to understand more. They may also be pedophiles, the modern american conservative movement really seems to attract those. Anyone who actually thinks on the American right has already abandoned the trump ship. All that is left are just the xenophobic, racist, pedophile-protecting facists.
How am I not understanding conservatives if they can’t articulate their own ideas? Maybe you understand them better than they do, but no one in that movement deserves sympathy, understanding, or patience. I am not talking about people who voted for him and have become disillusioned since his second term. I am talking about the people who, after Renee and alex, after Iran, after his name being the Epstein files more than anyone else, after all the insider trading, after all the trump coins and grifts, still back this guy and see him as a champion. If you are still in that camp, idiot is the only word that can describe you and nothing can save you.
The “in-group out-group” thing in the context of our history is violent racism against the decedents of slaves, followed by an anti-democratic apartheid regime in the half the country for another 100 years. Not every political movement is some well thought out, principled thing, and I’m not gonna both-sides this issue. Modern conservatives stand for absolutely nothing and is just a means of extracting wealth for billionaires and venting pent up racism/social anxiety for the average rank and file.
TL;DR you’re being way too generous here with what inspires the contemporary American conservative. It has nothing to do with 17th century political theory. If you want to understand them, you’re better off watching UFC than reading Calhoun. If your entire political movement is built on the notion of a permanent underclass of people (the social hierarchy/in group not bound by law) it deserves to be obliterated and treated with contempt.
EDIT: this sounds like I hate your piece and it’s quite the opposite! It was very good and interesting, which is why I have such an opinion on it.
"Conservatives are evil because they believe in in-groups and out-groups. In unrelated news, enlightened Party Members like myself hold that no Trump-supporting barbarian deserves sympathy, understanding, or patience."
See also https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-The-Outgroup
Yeah, well. Since conservatives made everyone the out group, they can go first with the olive branches.
They won't. They want to restart the civil war.
It was liberals who cheered for Charlie Kirk's killing.
Bullshit. In fact, it's exactly the kind of bullshit the post was all about. Congratulations for demonstrating the accuracy of the author's suppositions.
https://nypost.com/2025/09/11/us-news/bluesky-posters-threaten-trump-elon-musk-ben-shapiro-immediately-after-charlie-kirks-assassination-sick-images-show/
Be assured not all liberals cheered Kirk's death, at least not human ones. That some liberals may have done so should not color the whole. BTW, here are a couple of Trump's golden comments regarding opponents' deaths: on Robt Mueller, "I'm glad he's dead"; and Rob Reiner's death was "reportedly due to the anger he caused others", he was "very bad for our country" and "deranged". Looks like we're 0 and 0!
Please refrain from calling these ugly minded people "liberals"
Call them LEFTIES or COMMIES.
They are certainly NOT liberal in any classical sense.
Cheered? Relieved is more like it. When anyone calls for exclusion of or action against another group of people in their rhetoric about how the world we all live in should be ordered, there are a lot of anxious people hoping that person just disappears one way or another and their version of things doesn't come to fruition. For the disabled in the US, that's anyone in this administration and the people who support it. DEIA.is eugenics policy to murder the disabled and erase the veterans who know why the wars never end. Besides too many inconsistencies in his murder, and nothing to do with any leftist communist antifacists. I'm just saying, there's like 7 billion people who will without a doubt be popping champaign when 45 is gone, not necessarily celebrating how he went. I'm hoping it's self inflicted so there's to reprise martyr story holy roller second coming revivalist theatre afterwards but that might be too much to wish for at this point. I'd just like the firing squads and concentration camps and madness to stop. I have been asking how does this end since Reagan was elected. Its nothing to do with the party, it's the thirst for other people's suffering and callous disregard for other people's children, or their own, I don't like.
WOW. You create a Game of Thrones world and after a time begin to think it is Real. Get a grip Anne.
You don;t have children so you can't begin to speak for those that do.
Concentration Camps ? Illegal Immigrants already broke one law by their entrance, and the nastiest ones (rape/murder/child trafficking) who get caught are EXPORTED back to the shit-hole countries they formerly molested.
I wonder if you believe half of what you write ? TDS is strong in you.
Before Trump, the left was making cishet christian white males the outgroup. Trump was elected in response to that.
At no point, ever, have cishet Christian males been an outgroup. The left has been trying to end outgroups. Cishet Christian males can’t stand it, had a multi-generational temper tantrum, and here we are.
"The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023."
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
See also https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G8KK_3aaoAASWn6?format=jpg&name=900x900
Remember how the left reacted to Charlie Kirk's assassination? Did it seem like they were "trying to end outgroups"? Was it some sort of kumbaya moment? Give me a break, stop dreaming and look at reality. Many on the left are delusional and act very nasty while claiming to be tolerant.
Maybe YOU are delusional, and all those white men lost jobs because they had to honestly compete for them.
Re: Charlie Kirk, the vast majority of people on the left said you shouldn’t be shot for your beliefs. Do we need to skim the surface of right wing comments after Melissa Horton was murdered? What about when Paul Pelosi was attacked in his home? What about, what about, etc.
And your example? Wtf are you talking about? Writer’s rooms? I am certain you have no idea what was happening in the broader world of the WGA or of the market for scripted work during that time, so maybe go talk to someone who does.
Conservatives love inventing grievance and a made-up past that they feel entitled to. It’s why they’re so skilled at dehumanizing everyone who doesn’t look, sound, act, think like them. Everyone else is to blame because some white guy was inconvenienced. Conservative thought has metastasized into a new strain of madness and you cannot blame other people for it.
So you think you should be exempt from well-deserved brutal criticism for embracing and promoting (the purveyors of) vile, abhorrent, and fundamentally anti-American ideology because you do so with suffocating politeness--as if that wasn't par for the course throughout American history?
You're not part of the out-group but every passing year also reveals your receding fair-weather in-group status. It only adds to the existing cognitive dissonance that's already overloading the system. It's almost enough to warrant a modicum of sympathy from me...almost.
Troll. Go away.
As a fellow life-long, now older, white male, I do feel your pain so let's bring back the good(?) old days. BTW, I never heard of Charlie Kirk until the day he died. Not sure what that may indicate about me, but there you go.
If you are trying to virtue signal, let it go.
Inclusivity that guided by no moral compass is simply an out of control mixed up tribe.
Just hope the bad boys you "included" don;t kill or rape you first, eh ?
No difference ? Different Cultures are just as Good as the rest ? Kumbaya ?
Well yes! Good boy, you got it!
Please show me where conservatives show sympathy, understanding or patience. Until then, conservatives deserve exactly the contempt they show others.
The courts of law decide what people deserve, not me.
Fuckin’ Bingo.
Modern “Conservatives” don’t even know what the word they’ve c’opted means, let alone the happenings of history that created their arrogance and bigoted personalities.
And personally, I have no problem fighting and/or beating the shit out of a racist conservative. The problems I see most liberals having is the fact that being open-minded (liberal) usually means being smart enough to have some-sort of an emotional control and consideration, while also meaning being less-likely to bond into large cults - which comes in handy if wanting to eradicate other cults.
Yeah this is literally why y’all lost. All you got is name calling. Liberals have had bad policies that have lead people to vote elsewhere. It’s actually not rocket science. People of color voted for him and liberals still want to hold on too “every conservative is racist” even though they say “black people literally can’t be racist ever”. You lost cause your policies and ideas are just plain bad for the most part.
“All you got is name calling” while 50+ years of republican corruption, greed, and misleading propaganda continues to tank the country into boiling-over hatred.
Trust me, have a helluva lot more than just name callin’.
I could easily argue that liberals “lose” because the average “dominant” American is a greedy slob, too stupid and lazy to comprehend they only exist at the behest of systemic greed, racism and the most vile and harmful of the religions, Christianity. I could also argue that liberals “lose” because they live in a Republican-party authoritarianism. I could also argue that liberals “lose” because there are simply more gullible people than there are people who can successfully determine a Republican’s bullshit.
Listen to yourself, you sound like a lunatic.
And you're the actual lunatic. That's the difference, numbnuts.
Pike calls Christianity the 'most vile' of all the religions, which leaves out all of the modern and historic cults, the ancient religions that engaged in human sacrifice, and the modern cancer that is Islam, a religion so awful that every country led by Islamic law murders gays, oppresses women, and murders or maims infidels.
So, yeah, the'yre a lunatic.
Democrats have had most of the control for the past 50 years. Jimminy crickets.. you are dumb.
LOL, they did? Aren't you a fucking idiot?
The House has been controlled by Democrats for the majority of the last 50 years. A Republican has been President, however, for 30 of the last 50 years, and the Senate has largely been split fairly evenly over the last half century. Expanding back to the last 100 years, Democrats have actually controlled the legislature for the majority of the time, with the Executive being split basically down the middle. I think Rick gets an 'incomplete' with his comment.
I honestly don’t think you do mate
Wow, look at you. You went full Re-Tard
Boy, when you explain it so charmingly, I can't fathom how you lost the popular vote!
A Harris voter, for the record ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A troll, you mean.
“Quiet piggy”—Donald J Trump to a reporter bc he’s a thin skinned little b. Spare us the fake outrage over name calling ;)
Not as thin skinned as your boy Trump 😉
This comment does nothing for me.
He’s the #1 representative of the entire fucking country; the most professional-requirement position on this planet.
That you’re not offended by such displays of unprofessionally-childish bitch-talk goes far in suggesting the only skin you should be focused on are those semi-truck mudflaps covering your knees, what-with-all the Trump-loving dick sucking you happily pronounce every time you type out your shit-for-brain’d opinions.
Stand up, once in awhile, “Nija.” Give those puppies a fucking break.
Have you heard our effing president?! All he does is resort to name calling! And guess what HE STILL WON. If you think democrats lose bc they “resort to name calling” but ignore when republicans win in spite of it then you don’t actually believe what you’re saying. Lmao be so effing serious and get the f outta here with that sh*** 🤡
So liberals lose bc they name call but trump name calls and wins? Make that make sense you fool 🤡
precisely, were you just born yesterday? Yes that is exactly what happened.
Dear, dear Nija. Thank you for letting me know who to block and silence today.
Can you name five explicitly conservative policies that have been universally successful and summarize how that success has benefitted everyone?
1) Smaller gummint is better gummint. Closer to the people affected by the policies.
2) Less taxes mean people make better decisions with their money.
3) Free Speech means FREE SPEECH. If you don't like what the Speaker is saying, walk away. BUT CENSORING that speech is Maoist/Stalinist....
4) Let people decide how to educate their children. The STATE only indoctrinates them to be good little slaves.
5) The right to bear arms (2nd Amendment) was designed to protect people from an Authoritarian gummint. The founders had experience with a tyrannical gummint (King George etc.) The worst Western Countries are also where gun control has stripped the people of a right to defend themselves.
NOW YOUR TURN.
Name 5 LEFTIST policies that people vote for (rather than are coerced to obey.)
1) The term “Smaller government” has absolutely no bearing on if it is closer to the people
2) “less taxes” again no relation whatsoever of how the money is spent
3) uh and who is censoring? Who is banning books? Are not books free speech?
4) yes public k-12 schools….are designed to teach the constitution, history etc…..to make those students aware of their rights….
5) the right to guns….as conservatives have insisted to interpret the second amendment is based on the location of a COMMA….as MLK said “an eye for an eye' leaves everybody blind”.
Good ideas….liberals support:
1) social security 2) Medicare 3) CHIP 4) majority rule for 5) protections of the individual
1. You have multiple red states taking power away from local governments-Texas is the one I’m most familiar with.
2. Do they though? The levels of personal credit card debt in this country are astounding. We lead the world in medical debt. And an amazingly large percentage of Americans don’t have enough savings to cover a $2000 emergency.
3. Remind me what happened to many people who criticized things Charlie Kirk had said. Not ones who said he “deserved” it, but ones who pointed out some of his clearly discriminatory language. There were plenty of conservatives who weren’t walking away from that exercise of free speech. And that is only one example.
4. Again, Texas and their newly passed “curriculum” standards. Not a lot of choice for many people as to how their kids will be educated!
5. Most liberals don’t want to take away everyone’s guns. They simply want some measures in place to ensure psychopaths don’t have access.
As for “leftist” policies….how about Social Security and Medicare? I’m relatively certain you won’t (haven’t) forgone taking advantage of both of those Democrat created programs. We can also thank Dems for the GI Bill that changed millions of Americans lives by providing education and facilitating home ownership Then there’s the Clean Water Act. It’s been so successful that it’s hard to remember rivers literally burning because they were so polluted. And let’s not forget the Civil Rights Act -again legislation that changed millions of lives. And, I know conservatives love to hate it, but the Affordable Care Act provided affordable healthcare to millions of Americans-many for the first time in their lives. Of course, it’s now been gutted. And bankruptcies due to medical debt have soared along with that gutting.
Sadly, most of what I mention was decades ago. But I would argue that NEITHER party has done much good for average Americans in the last 40+ years. The very wealthy have benefited, but working and middle class Americans? Not so much.
We have smaller government closer to the people it’s called state and local government. We also have a republican with a constitution which you clearly haven’t read carefully. Less taxes plus suspicion of good government is what has led to the disaster we have right now. I bet you think unfettered capitalism in the constitution. Let’s face it Maga is made of Neo confederates and NAR, a completely made up religion that has nothing whatsoever to do with the teaching of Jesus. Your ignorance a Neo feudalism fits right n wth diagnosis is this essay.
You provided plenty of opinions on how you think these policies have benefitted everyone, but you offered no proof.
Thanks for trying.
I don’t think any political ideology has five policies that have been universally successful for EVERYONE. A better question is which conservative policies have strong evidence of achieving the goals they were designed for, while acknowledging the tradeoffs.
Right on point. And their ideas are getting worse.
Policies that hurt some people but don’t help and protect all of us are cruelly conservative under every definition I know.
Here in the South, racists hide behind the word “conservative” after they abandoned the old Democratic Party after the 1960’s and the Civil Rights laws. The Southern Strategy was all about giving diehard racists somewhere to go politically after Johnson, a fellow southern Democrat, pushed through the Civil Rights Law of 1965.
Spoken like Jeffrey Epstein hisself!
Your comment makes me think of someone who has lived too long with a lover who has let them down. Every reason for leaving is well thought out and realized. Then they make the break and fall right into the arms of another and fall in love before they know each other.
You don’t say your reason for joining the right. So I admit I am taking a leap.
In short
We should apply the same level of scrutiny to the system we are entering as we did to the one we are leaving.
Cheers and good luck.
You have a point. You can't have nothing but name-calling to offer as a liberal and expect to succeed. Republican winning strategies aren't all transferable across party lines.
In the current political environment, what liberal policies do you oppose ans what conservative policies do you uphold? Or rather, what are your core political beliefs? Let's get past the tribalism.
This is why the left is so useless and why the moderate center and center right elected Trump twice. You self-righteous assholes just can’t fathom a world that isn’t aligned with your gay race communism.
Exhibit A folks
Pointing out that the left doesn't understand the right and those that do always make it about the left being better than the obviously evil right are smug assholes and they got Trump elected (TWICE) is Exhibit A in giving the left a chance to understand why they're so broadly unpopular.
Still Exhibit A. That you think you "win" doesn't mean that you win. The United States just lost a war badly. We got our asses handed to us. By "we" I mean you, because we, meaning me, would have never been so stupid. There is no other way to spin it unless you are delusional. Gas has doubled in price. The whole world thinks we are incompetent clowns. These are facts. If pointing them out to you makes you feel bad, so be it. Oh no, those mean liberals made me feel sad by pointing out how fucking stupid I am and I have to do something even stupider because they made me do it with their "smugness." . It doesn't change reality. If you want to live in a world where truth doesn't matter, so be it. But don't say that my living in reality is smugness. Every single thing that conservatives have touched in the past two years has turned to shit. That is simply the truth. I would love to hear a counter argument, but I'm sure you can't make one that I won't laugh at.
1) Last I checked there was still active hostilities and a large chunk of the IRGC was exploded into tiny pieces, so I'm not sure why you'd say that the war was over and that the US lost?
2) Gas prices are high because of the war, yes. And? Did you think there would be a war and prices not be effected? Prices are high but still not at their worst ever and, unlike when Democrats presided over previous wars, there is no rationing going on and we have sufficient supply for the country to keep on humming.
3) You say things have turned to shit but I see illegal immigration at the border essentially stopped, hundreds of violent aliens detained, and many thousands of people removed. The stock market is fine, the job market is fine, and inflation has settled. The Feds are now targeting racist DEI and abusive trans-identity practices. Not sure what is so bad.
You should move to IRAN or CANADA or ENGLAND. Those are places where you might find kindred spirits.
You are part of the reason they lost, you come off as insufferable. Nobody wants to associate with that.
Perhaps, but the inflammatory language doesn't help anyone.
I guess I'd also talk as though there have been no elections since 2024 if everything since then has NOT reinforced the narrative I'm trying to push.
Not true, but keep believing that if you want.
Tell me why Hillary spent 20x what Trump did and he still won.
Pretty sure liberals just want people to live their lives peacefully, not sure what your lot's problem is with that.
They can’t stand that we don’t need to be led by a hierarchy
Of course you do, all people fit into a hierarchy.
If you include brainwashed maga cult members as part of this imaginary hierarchy of yours, then yes, I agree people fit into a hierarchy."
Against their will mostly.
Not the hundreds of thousands of children murdered in the womb, or the millions victimized by street crime and violence who are forced to watch illegal aliens and the worst American citizens be let off time and again because 'equity' or something. Certainly not the children in schools who are forced to deal with a never-ending drip of propaganda from activists in their classrooms.
No children are murdered in the womb, last time I checked police is still one the most funded agencies of any local government, illegal immigration is a civil offense and criminal, violent illegal aliens have always been prosecuted to the full extent of the law, often being extradited to their home countries where they receive a permanent re-entry ban. And sure, let's talk about the kids in classrooms, especially the reality that children being gunned down in their own schools by some alt-right lunatic is so prevalent that instead of placing common sense gun laws to protect these children, they now get to buy Kevlar backpacks, and that's all thanks to conservatives. This is what I'm talking about, you have all of the information available for you to learn and grow and instead you'd rather double down on being dumb.
Pythia - I sympathize with your valiant efforts but suspect they are wasted. A fellow traveler.
1) abortion is murder
2) police are underfunded and hamstrung by weak politicians, judges and prosecutors
3) illegal immigration requires immediate deportation and re-entry after deportation is a felony, learn the laws before making shit up
4) trans-identified and black shooters make up a disproportionate amount of school shootings and any attempt to better secure schools is met with claims of racism by liberals
That does not happen in classrooms, I was a teachers aide in elementary and junior and high school. Teachers are too busy trying to teach the fundamentals and getting kids to behave and pay attention.
Delusion, hate, and ignorance writ large
Ignorant comments like this are why many people think MAGA followers have completely abandoned learning and critical thinking.
Was there a specific argument here Robin or are you just jerking yourself off?
Anyone can read what you write and see Robin is correct.
It does seem easily apparent 🌷
Well now, speaking of the difference between presenting a thoughtful comment or obsessively jerking oneself off, you seem to know a lot about the latter. Others have broken down you statements one by one so let’s go back and take a look at your responses.
Nobody has broken down anything, abortion is murder, immigration law does demand that people here illegally leave and calls for their deportation.
Boy, you really are a genuine WCN, aren’t you?
Y’all just love to play dumb…or maybe you’re not playing 🤡
You seem to think abortion is a good thing, so I already know all I need to about you.
I do and you can go cry about it 😘
It's a shame that so many women are so easily fooled into thinking that murdering their child is something to brag about.
Spare as the faux outrage about niceties and politeness when the man who got elected is the most thin skinned little bitch who can’t answer a basic question 🤣🤣🤣 fuck outta here
100%
Your screed is so NAZI like, I can't begin to describe how pathetic you are.
"....fighting/beating the shit out of a racist conservative...."
In fact YOU are the racist. And lefties do NOT have emotional control at all.
Your No Kings rallies and PUSSY PINK HAT rallies and ANTIFA BURNINGS are entirely cult-like.
You are a sad excuse for a rational being.
Why, bless your little pea picking heart.
Open minded and liberal parted ways more than a decade ago. If you’re looking for it, try the libertarians.
And would you be as willing to punch a rascist liberal? Or are we pretending that doesn’t exist. Asking for a Jewish friend.
For your friend: being anti- Israel is NOT the same as being antisemitic, although Israel is absolutely trying to make everyone believe they are one and the same so that they can get away with further atrocities and label any criticism as ' antisemitic '
Come on Wendy, there are a few antisemites out there on the left. Jewish students on college campuses would back me up.
“Nija,” you’ve already proven you and your handler know about as much as a rotting, dead egg.
And anyone can fight. Anyone. Especially when the opponent is a misinformed, self-righteous cunt.
I was in a fight once around age 8. I got punched a couple of times, but punched back and kicked , and Tommy hit the backyard fence and collapsed. I said “get the hell out of my yard.”
And with some help from my witness dad did.
I’m guessing The only thing you ever happily punched is between your legs… a bit above your arse….
Empathy is not sympathy. He is promoting understanding in service of FIGHTING them. It appears the author is well aware that the average MAGA person is not reading anything more intellectual than the Saturday Morning funnies. When I think deeply about the piece, it strikes me as more cutting than you seem to be acknowledging. He is saying that their worldview is morally bankrupt, fundamentally racist and not having the done the research does not absolve the MAGA followers from being complicit in the pernicious ideology.
You are tragically correct. We all are. Truth is tragedy now.
I remember when it was comedy. Carlin painted it all so well. They all did. The absurdity of the American Republican/elitism was funny. Sure, they were in charge; un-interpreted in their scheming and corruption. But our laughter at pointing it out was good enough to trick us into delusion.
In that, life and society was a semi-arid landscape, comedy being the little rain that kept us sustained and distracted.
But now, we are in the desert of tragedy. What comedians, what comedy is today, is momentary respite at best, or simply a blunt reminder of the vast desert we occupy.
…personally, I’ve lived my life battling depressions and anxieties, all driven by an un-wanting to take part of the fraud that is the dominant American culture (bigotry, affluence, prejudice, slave-to-the-leeching elite, greed). Unwilling to compete.
But friend, I’ll tell you this. I ain’t doing that anymore. It’s all strong anger now. Anger with ambition.
I want to compete now. My way. How about you?
Your comment could have been written by me: I have battled the same depression and disillusionment with this country
Thanks Bart. I couldn’t agree more with your response. I have maga family too. After trump was elected I gave up trying to provide insight. Unfortunately, I believe my families relationship has been damaged beyond repair. They want nothing to do with me and I’m not going to spend my time trying to appeal to racists.
Ah the ubiquitous reply “ they are racists”
Such deep thinking marks you as an unemployable leftist college useless degreed basement gamer.
Get a grip (sorry that’s likely the only happy in your miserable day.)
Check out Steve Hassan’s work on the Cult of Trump and Jonathan Metzl’s book Dying of Whiteness. There are cult followers and cult leaders. There are the “white trash” at the bottom of the hierarchy and the elite descendants of early industrialists and slave owners at the top.
One complication here is that there are really two different "brands" of "conservative", hence, two different "brands" of MAGAnuts. There are the "fiscal conservatives" who are mostly concerned with tax evasion/avoidance, and then there are the "cultural conservatives", who are the Christofascists obsessed with white, male Christian dominance.
The "fiscal conservatives" don't actually concern themselves with the cultural "issues", other than to exploit the "cultural conservatives" to gain political power. Tricky Dicky first exploited this with his "southern strategy", using racist dog whistles to whisper to the south that it's okay to vote Republican, as they were no longer the party of Abraham Lincoln except nominally.
They believed they could control the monster they created - until Trumpkopf came along and unleashed them. The "fiscal conservatives" weren't opposed to Trumpkopf's policies so much as his style. And more than a few of them shared his connections with Epstein.
Thus we arrive here with Trumpkopf's MAGA cult running feral, and the billionaire oligarchs continue to support it. Remember Mu卐kRat's Seig Heil salute? Yes, they're all in on it.
I’d add that modern apartheid still continues, daily. American Indians are living in apartheid — separate IDs, separate land, separate laws, etc. The reservations are held “in trust” by the USG, ensuring the cycle will never end.
Fake virtue signal
Do explain. Are the reservations not held in Trust? Do American Indians not have separate IDs, live on separate land, and have separate laws? While you may not like it, these the definitions of apartheid. If you disagree, prove your ignorant comment, or don’t make one. Thanks.
I was specifically talking about cities, stay on topic Ivan. that’s absolutely not true to say ALL the most dangerous cities are in the south. That’s simply not true. You can’t just say things cause they sound good even when they’re not true that would be called lying Ivan
This is also spot because the modern day MAGA person is like its leader: dumb, dumb, and dumber. It’s the Mike Johnson’s and Gym Jordan’s and the 6 conservative judges we need to be watching like hawks. They love the hierarchy and will do anything to defend it.
Argue with the ideas, calling people names doesn’t help you win.
It would be great if it worked
It's not insulting if it's true.
Says the one who gets mad when sluts get called sluts.
LOL what?
Still waiting on those of trans mass shooters btw chief...
* Audrey Hale (Nashville, 2023)
* Alec McKinney (STEM School Highlands Ranch, 2019, with a co-perpetrator)
* Snochia Moseley (2018)
* Anderson Lee Aldrich (Club Q, 2022), where a nonbinary identity was asserted by defense counsel but remains dispute
Nothing burger of a reply. As if any of you would even try to do any introspection even if the liberal ideas were provided in the kindest way possible. It's all tribalism with conservatives.
We don’t need you to be kind, we need the ideas to sense. How are most democratic city’s dealing with the homeless issue? Good or bad? Tell me why black people die in Chicago everyday when they supposedly have some of the “strictest gun laws” in the country. Make it make sense
Too bad, dumbass.
Thank you for this view of early American history. But what it's not discussed here is the Christian alt-right beliefs that is blended into the rhetoric. That one can use the Ying... aggression, vial language, bullying rhetoric.... To challenge and attain this position of power. While the opposite, Yang.... Love and compassion, being nice....to be used to tackle issues facing the whole body politic, not just white males.
Thanks for your thoughts, Mr. Fuchs. I appreciate your insight from this essay. Take care.
Trump is certainly an imperfect Man, as are you and me and us all.
Most elections, people who are informed vote with their nose closed.
They choose Who they believe to be the least of the bad.
Kamela Harris and the Obama Team controllers, Clinton's Crew especially are an absolute crime syndicate.
The evidence is there (and forthcoming) while we finally have a DOJ willing to LOOK.
Vote fraud is real, IF you're willing to take a look.
Politicians make money off insider trading, IF you take a look.
COVID was a gain of function virus created by a lab in WUHAN, funded by US. Fauci lied to the Congress and the People.
IF you take a look.
The Legacy MEDIA has obfuscated, censored, and lied with their news coverage for decades.
And on and on.
Trump is an obstacle to ALL this bad stuff. Which is why they tried to assassinate him.
I suspect deep down you realize this, and that's why you are apparently eient and or tolerant with your family members who voted Trump.
In the next election cycle, Rubio or Vance both seem willing to continue the trajectory. You can expect the MEDIA/HOLLYWOOD/DEEP STATE to turn their venom on either/both of them.
The current day conservatives or MAGA cult rely and depend on uneducated followers. That is their base. So not sure the majority of their followers have the bandwidth to digest 17th century ideals. Trump’s objective is to market and sell grievance and fear.
But this article, which initially made me reluctant to read - I did - was very interesting and does shed light on many “true conservatives”.
Thank you. What a life we are living.
You appear confused. Perhaps Canadian?
“… no one who still backs trump in June 2026 is thinking about politics this deeply or would ever click on an article like, let alone be in Substack”
So untrue, but no doubt it makes you feel better to think this way.
There is plenty I dislike about Trump 47. Plenty.
But he is still so much less worse than the illiberal current Dem party that it ain’t even close.
So I get that your Orange Man Bad mantra makes you feel better than thinking about actual policies implemented and espoused.
But perhaps you should reconsider.
Even as I know you are quite unlikely to.
Serious question, from someone who is trying to understand the right. Why do you think he's doing a better job than elected Dems would in his place? Not leftist nutjobs on bluesky, but Harris and her people. As far as I can tell, Trump has taken a pretty decent economy and made it worse, started and lost a war for no reason, and hasn't done anything to bring back manufacturing or help out the "forgotten man". His only wins as president seem to be culture war issues that most people aren't affected by, and closing the border (though Dems, i think, would have done that one too). I get that people stomach the corruption bc they believe in the right's mission, but I just don't see how Trump is succeeding at the idea of America first.
I will take your question at face value.
I will answer in the fewest words possible, and keep it restricted to major policy outcome differences that almost guaranteed would not be the case if Harris were president.
I count 3 huge pluses, 3 moderate size pluses, and one somewhere between large and moderate sized minus.
Positives:
1. Ended illegal immigration on southern border
2. Avoided major tax increase, made tax cuts permanent [likely avoiding a recession]
3. Degraded Iran’s military capabilities, hugely degraded their nuclear capabilities
Smaller significant positives:
4. Secured NATO’s commitment to spend 5% of their GDP on military/defense.
5. Restoration of sex-based federal policy, especially women’s sports.
6. Eliminated federal DEI and racial-preference machinery
And the one large-to-moderate Negative:
A) the tariffs imposed
I think your claim that the Dems would have done the border too is beyond far-fetched. They insisted for years that doing so required new legislation and a path to citizenship for those already in the country.
The other claim you make that I believe is a total fallacy is the idea that the economy is worse now than when he took over. All the data show that this is *not* the case; you are just citing leftist vibes when you make that claim. The negative of the tariffs has been fairly small and demonstrably has not been enough to bring the economy into recession.
Overall Trump 47 to me has *not* been as good as Trump 45 was on policy, but he is still very far ahead of what we would have now under a President Harris continuation of the Biden Administration.
Hope that helps.
You articulated the plus side well.
The fellow you
Responded to wasn’t serious . So he wasted a small bit of time of your life.
It’s what the left does.
First, I don’t know how you are able to function while living with maga - if you need an escape plan, i’m happy to help :) second, i wholeheartedly agree with you! We don’t have two political parties anymore because one party is a cult beholden to a megalomaniacal malignant narcissist con-man whose only aspirations revolve around self-aggrandizement. Full stop. The dems are treating the situation as if they are actually dealing with people who are acting in good faith. They keep clutching their pearls every time the magas do exactly what they said they were going to do. I feel like the dems are always about 10 steps behind b/c they are too busy trying to process the right’s shenanigans in a way that fits their long-past-extinct paradigm of government. At this point, its hard to believe that all these smart dems aren’t complicit. I don’t want to believe that…but…AIPAC…i mean 🤷🏼♀️🤦🏼♀️
You are a great name calling dullard ( dullardess?)
I’m genuinely surprised you didn’t say racist or pederast 3 times.
Please identify policies you don’t like. Then recommend better policies.
Simple.
Even for a dullardess.
Name-calling a person you don’t know makes you…smart? Witty? Wise? I think not.
Means you have no better ideas.
Very well articulated. I thought of much the same, but you articulate it very well. Thanks for putting in the efforts.
Yes, it permeates their thinking. You see it also in how they believe a family must have a man as the superior. They do not see it as possible for man and woman to be in an equal relationship. To them there must always be a hierarchy. They cannot imagine anything else.
“To them there must always be a hierarchy. They cannot imagine anything else.”
Im not convinced that that’s a fault, though. The obvious fact that humans vary widely in their talents and temperaments means that hierarchies are inevitable, in pretty much every sphere of human endeavor where people actually manage to get things done, and conservatives are more likely to prefer to have those hierarchies openly acknowledged and respected.
That’s not to say that conservatives never end up supporting some cruel and pathological hierarchies, but the opposite mistake, to deny that hierarchy formation is an essential part of human nature, leads to a lot of dysfunction too.
Any hierarchy that permanently assigns positions based on race, sex, caste, etc., is NOT a hierarchy based on “talents and temperaments,” nor is it natural or unavoidable.
And this is the lie they try to sell us. Meanwhile we created the hierarchies and all the language and institutions to support them so that they seem “natural”, but really they are keeping people in their place and glorifying greed.
Hierarchies are far from inevitable. In most situations they aren't even optimal. The only situations in which a hierarchy is beneficial are crises because swift action is needed. Otherwise, hierarchies have profoundly negative effects on social cohesion and individual welfare.
Thanks Hannah. Great points I should have made ;-)
Can you point to a human society in history in which 'hierarchy' did not exist?
Silly. Anyone who can , does.
Those who can’t, complain.
You appear to be a complainer.
Does what? Try to use full sentences in replies.
Wow. Such a concrete thinker. What job do you do ? Barista?
It isn't about either-or but about what you aspire to. The left has over all history pushed for more egalitarian and democratic societies, while overall the right has sought to protect elites and established order and hierarchies.
Of course there are a lot of nuances to this picture as communists have run authoritarian regimes. But if we look at it in context it was originally a reaction to authoritarianism and deeply unequal societies. So while communist regimes were oppressive they were more egalitarian than the right-wing regimes they replaced. Then within those regimes you would get re-establishment of a left-right axis where the conservatives of the party naturally would fight a democratization process and progressives more likely would push it.
The left loves to portray themselves as fighting for equality. If you scrutinize their actions, it often tells a different story. Elites in communist countries certainly protected themselves. North Korea is one of the most hierarchical societies on Earth. Ordinary Cubans essentially regard Cuban leadership as akin to a mafia. You can see the same impulse today with the recent story about how Brussels elites shut down the A/C in the lower floors where the lower bureaucrats sit, but kept the A/C on for higher-ranking officials. In the United States, the same impulse is at work with student loan forgiveness: essentially a regressive money grab for college graduates, who already make more money on average. Since college graduates tend to be members of the liberal "elect", this policy essentially amounts to class warfare on working people. Of course, it's near cognitively impossible for self-interested liberals to realize this.
You yourself constantly brag about the superiority of life in your country, Norway. A county which, through luck of its geography, has per capita oil income [edit: should've said per capital oil production] comparable to that of Saudi Arabia. If you truly believed in equality, Norway's superior quality of life would be a grave problem and evidence of global inequality which needs to be eradicated. You would advocate giving away Norway's oil money until the quality of life in Norway was comparable to the quality of life in a developing country. I've never seen you advocate for that position, despite your supposed belief in equality. Your concerns about inequality mysteriously never intersect with your bragging about the superiority of Norwegian society. The lack of self-awareness is remarkable. I'd sooner check the policies you advocate for, not the pretty stories you tell about yourself.
I already addressed communist countries so that is a weird thing for you to bring up.
They were not elected, they were the outcomes of overthrowing existing right-wing dictatorships. Yes, communist regimes are bad, but you have to look at them in context. They were a more egalitarian version of what they replaced.
For us that live in democracies it is more relevant to look at what the left and right looks like there. And ever since there has been some level of democracy, it has generall been the left pushing to expand that democracy.
And if we look at places where democracy has ended, it has typically happened through right-wing coups. The left have been the ones repeatedly bringing democracy back.
Brussel AC has nothing to do with left and right wing politics. That is a completley ridiculous non-sequitor.
You got a weird cherry picking of things such as student loans. The point is that they are trying to to make education cheaper for all. Getting higher education today is pretty normal thing. That doesn't imply an elite. You are utterly ridiculous. This isn't the 1950s.
About 60% of students go to college, and if their parents were rich they wouldn't need to get student loans, so your argument makes zero sense.
And suggesting Democrat policies are anti workers is ridiculous given that they are the ones typically supporting unions while Republicans typically destroy unions. Not to mention Dems are the ones pushing for higher minimum wages. But like most right-wingers you love picking one disadvantages group to attack another. Take student struggling with student loans and pit them against workers. Never mind that the right is bad for both groups.
Bragging about the superiority of life in Norway? I have never done that. I am not letting you hijack this thread to turn it into personal attacks on me. You are going far outside the topic of this thread. If you take issue with anything I write, then I suggest you comment on relevant article.
Otherwise just go fuck youself. You don't know what you are talking about with respect oil industry, oil production, Norway and Saudi Arabia but I am not going to spend time here educating you because that isn't what this thread is about.
You sound like the endless number of right-wing Americans I have dealt with over so many years who get butthurt whenever America isn't number one and getting all the praise. God, it is so tiring with people like you.
>communist regimes are bad, but you have to look at them in context.
Do you ever extend this "looking in context" to right-wing politicians?
>They were a more egalitarian version of what they replaced.
Is there actual data to support this, for e.g. Cuba or North Korea? In any case, even if it's true, widespread economic devastation is a good way to achieve a relatively egalitarian outcome: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/inequality-civilization
>Brussel AC has nothing to do with left and right wing politics. That is a completley ridiculous non-sequitor.
Europeans are always telling me that Europe is left-wing relative to the US, so it seems like an interesting data point at the very least. Furthermore--isn't opposition to EU bureaucracy typically associated with the right in Europe, e.g. in the case of Brexit? Doesn't the EU bureaucracy work to regulate corporations and censor right-wing narratives in the EU? Why was this critique of the EU made from a right-wing perspective and not a left-wing perspective? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIjmUxT9FWI
>You got a weird cherry picking of things such as student loans. The point is that they are trying to to make education cheaper for all. Getting higher education today is pretty normal thing. That doesn't imply an elite. You are utterly ridiculous. This isn't the 1950s.
If you were intellectually honest, you would admit that it is a regressive policy. Matt Yglesias (US Democrat, well-known commentator) is honest and writes: "Debt relief benefits an affluent minority" https://www.slowboring.com/p/student-loan-forgiveness But as I predicted, "it's near cognitively impossible for self-interested liberals [like you] to realize this". You're left sputtering about "cherry-picking" and trying to argue definitions like a sophist. Perfect illustration of my points, really.
>And suggesting Democrat policies are anti workers is ridiculous given that they are the ones typically supporting unions while Republicans typically destroy unions. Not to mention Dems are the ones pushing for higher minimum wages. But like most right-wingers you love picking one disadvantages group to attack another. Take student struggling with student loans and pit them against workers. Never mind that the right is bad for both groups.
You're putting words in my mouth. I don't consider myself a right-winger. I'm a registered Democrat and I never voted for Trump. I didn't claim that Democratic policies are universally anti-worker.
You're not trying to pass the ideological turing test for why a person might oppose unions or minimum wage laws.
>Bragging about the superiority of life in Norway? I have never done that.
Literally 3 hours ago you made a post which said:
"But in America any amount of incompetence and corruption has no real consequences. At least not when Republicans are responsible for it.
Here in Norway things of just a tiny fraction of failure of DOGE would have collapsed government."
https://substack.com/@erikexamines/note/c-284060820
Your lack of self-awareness, and lack of intellectual honesty, is simply astonishing.
>You are going far outside the topic of this thread.
We're talking about the relative psychological proclivities of liberals and conservatives. So it's on topic. I'm using you as a data point to illustrate the fact that liberals are capable of self-serving rationalizations just like conservatives. It's a human tendency, not a conservative tendency.
>You don't know what you are talking about with respect oil industry, oil production, Norway and Saudi Arabia
The data is right here bud. See for yourself, Norway produces more per capita than Saudi: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-prod-per-capita?country=USA~SAU~KWT~CAN~RUS~ARE~NOR
You also have a $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund. Why isn't that money going towards the world's poorest? Why aren't you even able to answer that question? It's because you only believe in pretty words, and you have no intellectual honesty. Your commitment to inequality ends when it inconveniences you too much. As soon as I bring up facts or data which inconveniences your position like this, it is suddenly "off topic for the thread".
>You sound like the endless number of right-wing Americans I have dealt with over so many years who get butthurt whenever America isn't number one and getting all the praise. God, it is so tiring with people like you.
You wrote this right after getting butthurt (literal "go fuck youself") when I criticize Norway. Again: Spend some time working on your self-awareness, for God's sake. I suggest taking a deep breath before responding further, if you don't want to just keep making a fool of yourself. Try to think about the obvious counterarguments I will make. See if you can inhabit the mind of a person who disagrees with you even a little bit.
Edit... I wrote another response to Erik here, probably won't bother responding further as I don't consider him to be intellectually honest: https://substack.com/profile/225414582-ebenezer/note/c-284166000
Forgot this question of yours:
> Do you ever extend this "looking in context" to right-wing politicians?
Actually no, because the times the right has done similar to the left and taken power by force, we have dealt with Fascist regimes. And that transition has pretty much never been an improvement in any manner.
It has always been for the worse. Fascist regimes have nearly always reduced democracy or removed it entirely.
E.g. I cannot see how e.g. Nazi Germany was better than the Weimar Republic. But it is not hard to see that through all the years of its existence the Soviet Union was a lot better for Russians than Czar Russia.
Just as Communist China has been a lot better for Chinese people than Imperial China was.
But by all means offer me a case where you think Fascism was better for people than Democracy. Make the case and I'll see if I'll concede.
Again if you have a beef with me, don't hijack this thread to make it about me. Respond relevant posts I have posted. This isn't my article. I don't think the author appriciates this kind of veering off.
So I am not going to get into Norway or myself here. If you want to. Then please write your grievances under whatever post you think is relevant that I have made. I will address it there.
As for Cuba and North Korea. They are utterly meaningless to use as examples to talk about policy outcomes as Cuba has been embargoed to death all its life. North Korea was bombed more than any other country in history to pieces and is f*cked up beyond belief after that.
So whatever they ended up as is very hard to tease apart what follows from any particular ideology and what follows from extreme external influences.
The biggest example of a communist regime today is China, and they have pulled more people out of povery than any other country in history. The Soviet Union prior to that took what was a most illiterate agrarian society of serfs and turned that into a military and scientific powerhouse that sent people into space.
Russia was a country that under right-wing Czar rule has 400 years of zero economic growth. So while Stalin was a horrenous person, and Communism is not exactly a system anyone would want to replicate, it actually was a huge improvement over the right-wing regime that came before it.
Countries have to be evaluated in context. It makes no sense to compare with say something like the US whith hundreds of years of head start. Yes, I know Americans like to pretend US civilization started in 1776, but it was established by the most developed civilizations in Europe of the UK, Netherlands, France etc. It got the institutions, technology, economic system etc from the peak of Europe. In constrast Russia was a basket case hundreds of years behind Western Europe.
Funny you attack me for being a liberal, when you are the liberal. You said you vote democrat. I am not a liberal. You supposedly read all these posts I write so you should known by now that I am socialist. I am literally member of Norway's largest socialist party. I am not member of a liberal party, like you.
As for student loans. What Biden did isn't what I would have done, but I understand the context in the US where it is nearly impossible to do anything looking like reform. He was doing as you do in the US usually doing patching up because real reform is impossible. He was tackling the fact that earlier payment systems had made it really expensive for students.
We can argue about the specifics and whether there was different ways of doing it. But I completely reject your ridiculous notion that it is anti working class to have cheap accessible higher education. In Norway as in many other countries it was a big push by Labour governments. The working class itself to make education cheap and affordable. My parents generation mostly all came from the working class and took advantage of these opportunities, to advance.
I think you have a rather elitist attitude if you think children of the working class cannot master going to college.
Sure, the specific of the Biden plan was not ideal, but then again a Scandinavian style free college system was not on the table. Don't gaslight me into thinking it was.
As for oil. Again you have no idea what you are talking about. But I will make a post about oil explaining some of these things on my timeline. You can decide if you want to respond to that.
As for me telling you to fuck off. That has nothing to do with your arguments but the fact that you are hijacking someone else's comment section to air your petty grievances against me.
Got issues with anything I write, you are welcome to join my timeline and comment.
As long as you have a relevant point you are welcome to call me whatever the fuck you want. But if you cannot stay on topic and present relevant argument I will certatinly tell you to fuck off. You can bet on that.
"They were a more egalitarian version of what they replaced."
They absolutely weren't though! They replaced hereditary titles and rights, with people whose right to rule was completely based on their position within the Party. Which was ultimately dependent on their relationship to a couple apparatchiks. Communist society made people slaves of the State, as opposed to Serfs of a Lord.
"So while communist regimes were oppressive they were more egalitarian than the right-wing regimes they replaced"
Umm.. not really. Stalin was much more oppressive and on a far larger scale than any Russian czar, if only because of the technological apparatus which allowed this. Don't be blinded by titles. Few leaders have ever been as authoritarian in history as the left-wing authoritarians were. Maybe not even Hitler, although that's debatable.
Progressive believe in a hierarchy too one that they’re in charge of.
I am not American so I don't know how you define progressive. Not a term used in Europe. So let me simplify. I would argue the left has historically fought against hierarchies and the right has typically tried to preserve them.
Examples would be conservatives supporting the monarchy and aristocrats while the left pushed for democracy. Later the conservatives would stand with the capitalist elites when the working class sought voting rights, right to unionize etc.
Then when women fought for their rights conservatives would again stand in the way.
And whatever the definition you use for progressives I am pretty sure they would have been on the side of the left and not the conservatives seeking to maintain hierarchies and privilege.
There will always be a hierarchy - you can change who is on top of them, but there will always be some people who are more equal than others.
You think the difference between Norway and North Korea is only who is at the top?
Or do you think the degree to which hierarchies and egalitarianism exist varies profoundly between societies? The left is about creating less hierarchical societies. Not about complete elimination.
The right tends to defend hierarchies and oppose creating flatter structures and more democracy.
Ironically, Norway is a constitutional monarchy, while North Korea’s regime was the result of a revolution. Maybe some measured gradual progress works out better than rolling the dice with a violent revolution?
There is all the difference in the world between being a top of a hierarchy defined by a field of expertise because you have that expertise and thinking that being at the top of that hierarchy entitles you to control the bodies of anyone within that hierarchy.
Being high up in a hierarchy is usually the work of purely random selection. This is the fatal flaw in “conservative” ideology, which prescribes so much to “personal responsibility.” Ascribing meaning to randomness is a sure way to misinterpret reality.
"Being high up in a hierarchy is usually the work of purely random selection.". This is a very surprising claim - I'd be interested in a few examples of hierarchies that you think are purely the work of random selection.
In reality it seems pretty obvious that most hierarchies are the result of a _mix_ of randomness and genuine differences in ability. To get to the top of something, you've usually got to be genuinely good at the thing, _and_ get lucky. This even goes for literal aristocracies, which tend to form out of competition between rival contenders in military struggles for control of territory - sure, an unlucky arrow in the eye, or molehill that trips up your horse, can put an end to you, but to be able to be in the running in the first place, you've got to have what it takes to inspire people to join your army and to win some battles. Some of those qualities are going to be partly hereditary, so there is a good chance that your children will also have those traits (though of course, inbreeding and long periods of peace can erode those qualities down the generations, and you end up getting conquered by a new round of military elites).
And of course it goes for the disparities in wealth - the people that control lucrative businesses could often be swapped out for some other people that could run the business about as successfully, but people vary widely in their ability to run those companies in the first place. Probably a few people could, if they had been placed differently, do Elon Musk's or Jeff Bezos' job, but most people couldn't. Or in artistic endeavors. There are few fields as winner-take-all as the arts - a tiny handful of people earn a huge fraction of the wealth and prestige in, e.g. music, or acting etc., while vastly more languish in obscurity and have to have a day job to support themselves. But the people who make it to the top and stay there are, unless they have very powerful patrons, always genuinely talented to at least some degree. (I'll grant that in the field of visual arts at the elite end, that often seems less true these days, and that I could tape a banana to a wall about as well as anyone, but that's likely due to exactly the sort of market-distorting effects of patronage; for most of history, painters and sculptors who were successful in their lifetime tended to have obvious genuine talent).
If a tendency to underestimate the importance of randomness is the fatal flaw in conservative ideology, a tendency to underestimate the importance of real and mostly-intractable differences in ability is the corresponding fatal flaw in progressive ideology.
I think you made my point very well! There is a group of people (you may quibble about the size of that group) who could replace anyone high up in a hierarchy. Btw, there’s nothing “innate” about the biggest source of randomness at question here: the circumstances of your birth. Who your parents are, the color of your skin, your community, etc. Those things shape whatever skillset one develops.
"There is a group of people (you may quibble about the size of that group) who could replace anyone high up in a hierarchy." - sure, but my point is that, for any sufficiently complicated / high-stakes role, there is a far larger group of people who _couldn't_ replace someone at that level of a hierarchy. And of course "personal responsibility" is a trait that is itself partly susceptible to deliberate improvement, and partly genetically fixed, and, sure, some conservatives tend to overrate the degree to which people are capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
But I think you may be using "randomness" in a non-standard way when using it to refer to the circumstances of one's birth. We are not, so far as we can tell, free-floating souls that get randomly assigned to a genome at conception. For every one of us, the parents we were born to (and who therefore determine our genome) are the only parents we could possibly have been born to - no room for randomness at all, and it is of no more salience that person A was born to healthy, prosperous parents while person B was born to sickly, chaotic parents than that both Persons A and B were born to human parents while a third entity was born to parents who are horses, and therefore has to navigate life as a horse rather than as a human.
From a philosophical point of view we can indeed view us as free floating souls as you describe. You cannot decide what parent you get born to. That is totally random. You cannot decide how rich or educated they are or how good genes you get. That is outside your control.
Thus there ought to be some sensible balance in how much you reward an individual for being lucky being born to the right parents.
Naturally we cannot put a complete idiot in charge of say building a jet engine. We cannot ignore the circumstances someone got born into in terms of what jobs and roles they get.
But we can tweak how richly someone gets rewarded.
Conservatism tends to view far too much as the product of your own choices and labour when most of it is just dumb luck: a combination of good genes and great environment you got born into.
Why should you get rewarded extraordinarily for the dumb luck of having great parents? This isn't my argument for everyone getting rewarded the same because we have the practical consideration of needing to reward in specific ways to get talent into the right positions.
But the scale can vary a lot. E.g. in my native Norway the premium for high education and talent is much smaller than say the US. Yet it doesn't hurt recruitment to important skilled professions in a way that is noticeable.
I might quibble here and there with your first paragraph, but I agree in general.
As to your second, a thought experiment: if we were to take 10,000 babies born at random throughout the country during a given month, knowing nothing at all about them, we could predict the outcomes of their "achievement" by, say, age 25. We'd probably just use the distribution of outcomes for the population at large. While the result might be a normal distribution, any prediction about a specific baby would be wholly random given we know nothing about them. Then we took a group of 10,000 babies born in the same month, these selected by parent pedigree/wealth/social status/etc, average zip code income, skin color, likelihood the parents stay together, and have a robust network of support around them, choosing only those values which likely indicate "achievement."
Do you think the average and median values between the two groups would differ? How about their respective standard deviations? Think of it from the baby's point of view: Does any individual baby have control over any of the circumstances of their birth (the factors selected for in group 2) at any point over the 25 year observation period? Or are those factors randomly imposed by forces outside their control?
You mean hierarchies like capitalism. Sorry but we have choices about economic systems. We don’t have to valorize money accumulation and associated power. Hierarchy without attending ethics and limits on power leads to domination of the few. It always has. And democracy which is about diffusion of power is contradicted by the consolidation of power under the unrestrained accumulation engendered by an unfettered capitalist system. Adam Smith and John Locke knew this. And many of the founders knew this. Prehistory is dominated by society’s that lived in a relatively egalitarian mode as did the early Christians. That the hierarchy fetish is historically natural or necessarily successful is flatly untrue . And our iteration of it is particularly unhealthy valorizing efficiency over quality and propagating the myth of meritocracy over the constitutionally embraced welfare of all.
Hardly concise. Do You always use AI when you don’t know how to respond to inconvenient facts?
Here is the conscience answer: you are wrong. A constitutional republic is a democracy.
Silly man. Silly post. And don’t you have a King or maybe Queen?
Yeah a constitutional monarchy is a democracy too.
The only one silly here is you ignorant of something you can lookup in any encyclopedia. Instead if looking at a proper source you rely on Fox News and right-wing bloggers. Read an actual authoritative source on the matter.
Rage , rage against the insight .
You are in line for dumbest post of the day.
Oh I am not very worried about you think about anything Rick. I think most people who have done a modicum of reading on this topic will find it rather amusing how over-confident you are.
Anyone can lookup in an encyclopedia to see how wrong you are. Just for fun I am giving people 3 different sources that all say you are wrong. Of course you won't read any of them.
But others can read them and amuse themselves by your rather arrogant and ignorant replies here.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_republic
https://www.britannica.com/topic/republic-government
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/republic
Erik, a Marriage is not a Hierarchy, although there are situations in which one of the partners takes the Lead.
You probably wish to ignore 40,000 years of Human History.
You probably believe men can get pregnant.
We live in a Constitutional Republic. Not a Democracy.
Thanks for demonstrating your stupidity.
Rick - rather than waste my time untangling your deceptive statement, here is a nice concise summary from a frontier AI model:
“When someone states that the United States is "a constitutional republic, not a democracy," they are typically making a distinction based on the mechanisms of governance and the protection of minority rights. Their assertion generally centers on two primary points:
* Rejection of Direct Democracy: They are pointing out that the U.S. is not a pure or direct democracy, where laws are determined by a direct, unfiltered majority vote of the entire citizenry (a system historically critiqued by the Founders as vulnerable to majority tyranny or "mob rule").
* Emphasis on the Rule of Law: They are highlighting that the U.S. operates under a written Constitution that serves as the supreme law of the land. This framework establishes checks and balances, separates powers, and explicitly protects individual and minority rights from being overridden by a simple majority vote.
This argument frequently draws on the language of the American Revolutionary era. For instance, in Federalist No. 10, James Madison differentiated between a "pure democracy" (which he defined as a small society citizens assemble and administer the government in person) and a "republic" (a government administered by representatives).
Is the Assertion Valid?
The assertion is conceptually valid in its description of U.S. mechanics, but semanticly flawed in its premise that the two terms are mutually exclusive. In modern political science, legal terminology, and official U.S. government definitions, the United States is both a democracy and a republic.
The confusion stems from a false dichotomy. The terms describe different characteristics of the same government system:
* Democracy describes the source of political power. If the supreme power of a government rests with the people, it is a democracy. Because U.S. citizens exercise this power by electing officials rather than voting on every law directly, the U.S. is a representative democracy.
* Republic describes the structure of the government. A republic is a state where power is exercised through elected representatives and the head of state is not a monarch.
* Constitutional means that the government's power is strictly limited by an institutional framework (the Constitution) to ensure the rule of law.
Summary: Asserting that the U.S. is a republic and not a democracy is a semantic misunderstanding. A representative democracy is simply a specific type of democracy.
The most precise definition of the United States system is a constitutional federal representative democracy.
I believe they're referring to democratic ideals. I'm so tired of that " we live in a republic not a democracy " bit trotted out at any mention of democracy. You have the gall to criticize other's supposed stupidity when you're willfully obtuse?
We did some work looking at a different model of the political spectrum that was based on group boundary definition. The result, seeing the right as aiming to tighten group boundaries to exclude and the left as looking to expand them towards inclusion, appeared more accurate than any model of policy preference. It also gave a view of how going too far - on both left and right lead to authoritarian ouputs. Happy to share if interested.
Would love to see it!
I will send via DM
Nathan please send to me also - sounds very accurate.
Considering the interest, I will tidy it and publish it as a Substack post (once I am through the woods on a current project).
Thank you!
Do you have anything published/written on your model? Thank you.
We parked that particular bit of work but maybe I will substack it when the current manic phase is over.
The broad behavioral view which covers it in tangent - critical of both left and right over extension is in Liberalism That Wins (2025)
Thanks!
That sounds accurate. The assumption here (especially from everyone who liked this comment) is that tightening boundaries is wrong and inclusivity is right. What happens when it’s a murderer you’re keeping out or letting in? What happens when it’s a bigot you’re keeping out or letting in? What happens when it’s a child molester you’re keeping out or bringing in?
The left loves playing the righteous card. It’s just the most vanilla position
Key conclusion was that there is a maximal point of openness after which it is dysfunctional — i.e. the base position is of defined group boundaries. So over expansion comes at a real cost, in the same way over constriction does. You just arrive there (dysfunction) by different means.
Popper’s paradox?
Not so much. More that people have an innate preference to belong to a group and share resources among it, and if you open boundaries too much - the group becomes hard to define and this makes people uncomfortable.
So it's less about tolerance and more about the bounds of what people will accept sustainably.
In a purely political context?
That was the context of the work we were doing. But the instinct is socially orientatwd - group belonging is layered and typically prioritized based on proximity, starting with kin.
Too much academia bs .
Thoughtful.
You've clearly never seriously read anything by Edmund Burke, James Madison, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, William F. Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, Robert George, Friedrich Hayek, Alexander Solzhenitzyn, Milton Friedman, or Thomas Sowell. If you had, you couldn't make this argument with a straight face. American Conservatism is not built upon pre-liberal, anti-democratic ideas. It's built upon the very liberal ideas that America was founded on. Today it's liberalism that has changed by way of progressivism into something unrecognizable. Conservatism rightly reacts against many of these so-called "progressive" changes because they cut off the branch they pretend to sit on.
The entire essay is rather odd in that respect. It also seems to ignore the illiberal parts of the Democratic coalition. I understand why; the Trump administration is rather corrupt and incompetent, albeit not truly lawless. That said, I have little doubt that in a future where the left in this country feels as marginalized as the right, say in the face of a genuine rollback of the cultural shifts of the last 20 years (not 50, just 25) they would rally around a Trump figure.
The attempt to look for some sort of deep root in a rejection of political small-l liberalism might make the author feel good, but won't contribute much to our understanding of the political shifts of the early 21st century.
The World now is infinitely better than it might have been.
You are simply infected with TDS.
Hey, here’s an idea. Go get boosted with another COVID jab ! Or 2. Go ahead, walk your talk.
Rick, if you had read anything I have written, you would realize how silly it is to accuse me of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Heck, you don't even seem to have read the single short two-paragraph post that I wrote. That saddens me.
I think we’re just not stupid enough to think any of that stuff has anything to do with US conservatism as it’s existed in living memory. It’s just a bunch of famous (mostly) dead people whose names you can list off to pretend you’re smart.
It’s not a list of famous dead men, its a list of the most influential conservative writers from the past 200 years who have shaped and defined the political philosophy of American Conservatism. Just because the Republican party has turned more towards populism under Trump’s influence in recent years doesn’t mean these ideas are irrelevant. They are still core to the thinking and motivation of most people who call themselves conservatives (myself included). The author of this article has no understanding of this and therefore has only a shallow, if not downright dishonest, conception of American conservatism while pretending to offer fresh insights about it.
No one cares who your famous thinkers supposedly are. They are going to judge you on the basis of the things you actually do.
Sure. But if you're ever curious about why we do what we do, these are the authors that could explain it. Political policy is always downstream of philosophy, as I'm sure you know.
Your schooling never invited you to read any of it.
So you and the many like you are simply ignorant.
But ignorance is bliss yes ?
I took a graduate seminar on conservative political thought. It’s fine, but honestly a lot weaker intellectually than mainstream liberal political theory. But in any case, it very obviously has nothing to do with anything that’s been called conservative politics in the US for the last three decades.
Hayek was not conservative. I know because he blatantly said he was not, on multiple occasions, in both his writing and in response to being flat out asked. He rejected it flatly and really took the entire ideology to task. Stating, ironically, the near exact sentiment this author stated about conservatives. I’m not even going to pretend I’m some fancy intellectual, any literate person can just look it up on his Wikipedia page. It’s nuanced but he does plainly reject conservatism
He was a "classical liberal" from Vienna, but he had an outsized influence on American Conservatism because of his economic work, "Road to Serfdom", which is a critique of socialist economics and a defence of free-market capitalism (an argument that any American Conservative today would endorse).
I understand. I know conservatives as individuals or a voting bloc support Austrian economics and likely agree with the views of classic liberalism, but conservative admins have not governed based on these views and outside a small minority, most conservative republicans in congress have voting records that are anti free market. But I also see the amazing rejection of liberal policies by supposed liberal democrats, the biggest being anti BDS laws and globalization that requires exploitation of others (mainly the global south) for profit at the expense of American workers. I have a more Marxist-Leninist, materialist perspective personally but that is based on the fact that a piece of legislation is significantly more likely to be passed if corporations and lobbyists support it even in smaller numbers than when the overwhelming majority of individuals and/or representative’s voter base support a piece of legislation. Basically once in office, representatives are less responsible to their constituents than corporations and their donors so it doesn’t all that much matter if you agree with classical liberal principles or you’re a staunch conservative with openly hierarchical beliefs when it’s not reflected policy or practice.
The Reagan admin. was classically liberal and pro free-market. The Bush administrations were (for the most part) classically liberal and pro free-market. Even the current senior conservative leadership in congress are largely considered classically liberal and pro free-market. The only group in the conservative camp that has swayed from these ideals is (sadly) the Trump administration. Even then, the infamous "Project 2025" policy proposals made to the Trump admin. were classically liberal and pro free-market.
Everyone commenting here so far thinks your piece is the cat’s meow, the tip of the top. I beg to differ.
For movement conservatives, whether highbrow like William F Buckley, lower like Rush Limbaugh, or somewhere in between like Ronald Reagan, very much believe in the Truths of the Declaration, as do principled liberals, although the latter are a bit thin on the ground at present.
But just as there are those on the Right who are NOT movement conservatives, so too are there those on the Left who are not principled liberals, or indeed liberals at all. These “progressive” Leftists quite specifically deny that our rights, first of all the Right to Life, are “unalienable” endowments of our Creator, preferring instead to view human rights as a polite fiction, as just a social construct, holding that our rights are indeed quite alienable, conditional, granted by the State. This , sadly, is the meaning of the Democrats’ “Our Democracy,” it is the democracy of straight majoritarianism, of two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
Meanwhile yes, there are anti-American voices on the Right, people who similarly reject natural rights in favor of arbitrary standards based upon tradition and custom, people who must be opposed.
The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist was explicit on this point, informing us that in his debased view, Constitutional rights “assume a general social acceptance neither because of any intrinsic worth nor because of any unique origins in someone's idea of natural justice but instead simply because they have been incorporated in a constitution by a people."
In other words, arbitrary law based upon arbitrary “values” — not the Truths of the Declaration, based on “Nature and Nature’s God”
Blest wishes
Even if we disagree, I appreciate you reading & engaging with my thoughts!
Do we, in fact disagree? Disagree at the level of principle? Based solely upon what you wrote I do not think so.
I’m simply offering that you might be applying your principles, which I share, to the wrong groups of people (and again, as I intimated, these are definitely wrong groups of people) 😉
I would be a bit stronger, sir.
Sometime around 2010, the GOP began to go off the rails, as a reaction grew against some radical cultural shifts that most mainstream liberals were unable to recognize. The result was a populist reaction around a deeply flawed figure that many nonetheless believed would cut through the shibboleths and taboos that had accrued since 1970 or so. Unfortunately, the reaction on the left was to indulge their own version of Tea Party -- shouting down Bernie Sanders was a rather big canary -- and look the other way as a large part of their own coalition proceeded to jettison liberalism.
I would agree with someone who argued that a big part of the Republican coalition consists of people who hold other values above liberal ones, but that's a far cry from saying that they -- ok, we -- want to "defend 1680." That's just silly.
1680?
I believe that was the year the author of the post referenced as conservatives' touchstone.
"Until the left understands that the right is not failing to live up to 1776, but is actively fighting for the hierarchy of 1680 and responds to it appropriately, conservatives will continue to consolidate power."
Also: "America’s conservatives and their ideology are descended from Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha or The Natural Power of Kings from 1680."
The point is quite silly, I think. It's also a bit disturbing, because it's trying to blow up the differences between mainstream Americans into something more like, say, the differences between French radicals and reactionaries in the 1790s. And we just really don't disagree that much!
When our differences came close, in recent history (re segregation), demonization served nobody. Wheeler is demonizing his opponents in the guise of pretending to understand them.
Oh, right (so to speak).
There are, though, illiberal elements in the broader Right we can point to. But I’d rather live under a Traditionalist Conservative regime than a Stalinist one seven days out of seven
Demons should be demonized. Racism should be called out for what it is.
Old saying - “inside every progressive is an authoritarian waiting to come out”
Abortion is healthcare Dan. Legislating away access to healthcare alienates my right to life. But please explain to me how ICE killing people in the streets or local PD shooting babies in parking lots does not. Choosing to hone in on one issue you fundamentally disagree with while looking away at people being murdered by this administration does not make you right or superior.
Ice shooting babies is way worse than mothers murdering babies, yes
Natural Rights are Final, as President Coolidge eloquently said.
The Left tries to create unnatural rights and place them in the same category.
It might work in your perverted academia, but not in the Real World.
> it is the democracy of straight majoritarianism, of two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.
This has always been a stupid analogy for at least three reasons, if not more.
1. I did a quick google search to check the actual population numbers, and as I expected, it turns out there are way more sheep in the world than there are wolves. Currently there are over a billion sheep in the world and there are only like 250,000 wolves or so*. This is not particularly surprising, since food chains tend to work that way - a lot of herbivorous prey at the bottom, and only a few carnivorous predators at the top. This means that the analogy is kind of a strange one; setting it up as involving 2 wolves and 1 sheep seems kind of contrived. If we wanted to make the analogy more accurate to the real world, it would state 1 wolf and about 4000 sheep.
- I might go even further and say that the analogy was probably set up in such an unrepresentative way for an intentional reason, specifically, to confuse people about who the real predators in our society are and how the dynamics of economic exploitation work (hint: exploiters are always much fewer in number than their exploitees). After all, in the reality of American politics, concentrated minority interests (such as wealthy donors) tend to be comparably powerful to democratic processes anyway, if not even *more* powerful.
2. The analogy proves too much - it's invoked as just an argument against democracy**, but really it's an argument against any form of collective decision-making that includes the possibility of some participants not getting what they want. But humans are social creatures that do best living in organized societies***, and in any organized society, there is inevitably going to be some amount of collective decision-making; the relevant question is how to make these decisions fairly, not whether to make them at all, and the "two wolves one sheep" analogy isn't really suggesting any better alternative.
3. The threat posed to minority rights by majoritarian processes isn't actually as bad as the analogy makes it sound, because everyone is a minority in some respect (religion, profession, lifestyle, personality type, age, artistic tastes, physical appearance/attractiveness, etc) and this gives everyone a natural, rational incentive to have some respect for difference and variation even when they are in the majority on some particular issue; after all, while they might be in the majority today, they could be the minority tomorrow. It creates a kind of mutual insurance logic embedded in democratic culture.
- Additionally, real citizens tend to have cross-cutting interests. A nurse, a teacher, a farmer, a truck driver, and an electrical engineer probably have shared interests on some issues and divergent issues on others.
*(caveat - prior to the modern industrial era, and its associated factory farming and habitat destruction, there were more wolves and fewer sheep in the world. There were probably between 1-5 million wolves and 300-800 million sheep globally. So maybe the most appropriate analogy is 1 wolf to 200 sheep, rather than 1 wolf to 4000 sheep. I still think my point here stands.)
**(sometimes only against direct democracy specifically, other times against all forms of democracy more broadly, representative democracy included)
***(the phrasing of "do best" here is probably an understatement, actually; from looking at the history of homo sapiens, it probably would be accurate enough to say "have no other option than living in organized societies")
The democratic “tyranny of the majority” (sic) that the “founders” feared was the violation of the privileged status of the “well-bred” (sic) in-group plutocratic minority to which they belonged (unbound but protected) by the outgroup (bound but not protected). Ie, the OP used a lot of words attempting to sound smart disputing the author, only to end up proving the author's exact point with a belabored reactionary defense of “natural” (sic) hierarchy.
Of course I was not defending natural hierarchy but rather natural rights, the Truths of the Declaration, seeing movement conservatism based thereon as a species of classical liberalism. Mr. Wheeler acknowledges this conservatism exists or existed but seems to regard it merely as a pose rather than a thought out position. Whereas I think if he reads Charles Kesler (to say nothing of Frank Meyer!) whom Buckley found and platformed, or Declarationist Harry Jaffa, mentor not only to Kesler but to people like Larry Arnn and Ambassador Alan Keyes, he will indeed find a genuine position rooted in liberty, in human nature rather than tradition and a supposed hierarchy.
See Kesler’s takedown of trsditionalist conservatism, the school of thought represented in modern times by Russell Kirk here, writing that
“Tradition can be a great and a good thing, of course, but it is never so merely because it is traditional; slaveholders had their ancestral ways, too. To tell right from wrong within a tradition, or among traditions, requires a moral standard that has a validity or goodness independent of the tradition: it requires an abstract principle….”
What’s Wrong With Conservatism
https://www.aei.org/research-products/speech/whats-wrong-with-conservatism/
I guess that would depend on which god we’re talking about. There are so many!
The Founders and Framers were not all Christians, some of them were Deists, but I don’t know that any were polytheistic
Dan, you like tossing dog doo into an ice cream mixer?
You probably can’t even define DEIST
Just a thing you read once upon a time….
deist ˈdē-ist ˈdā- noun
Person or persons in any social context who are most ardently in favor of DEI policies
“She was the deist person I’ve ever met.”
See: Woke
Per
I like Zeus. No, maybe Poseidon. Oh, dear, so hard to choose.
I and the First Amendment leave that up to you
Very kind of you. I too like the the Bill of Rights.
That’s fine.
And I’m not saying you’re one of them, but plenty of people “like” the Bill of Rights without holding those rights to be in accord with the unalterable truths about human nature that Declaration insists upon
How do you ground a political covenant in something more durable than simple agreement? If American-style pragmatism does not actually go far enough, then what does one do? I think Rehnquist was just being honest about our limits here. Stanley Fish's excellent "Why we can't all just get along?" makes this point as well.
Short of time here today, apologies, but quickly, the key question would seem to be, what is it, precisely, that the body politic, the electorate, comes to “simple agreement” ON?
If four out of five of your contemporaries are agreed that you should be fed into a wood chipper, does “democracy” mean their will should legally prevail?
No, we want _liberal_ democracy, in which your basic rights and mine are “secured,” kept off the political table, not subject to a legislative, judicial, or popular “veto.”
Nathan Sheely:
“As [Dr Harry] Jaffa explains [John C.] Calhoun's position, whatever the various interest groups can agree upon unanimously is presumed to be a rational or just outcome. What is decisive, according to [Calhoun as understood by] Jaffa, is the form-everyone agreeing—and not the content of the will. [Jaffa] contrasts this with the Founders' view. The Declaration of Independence does not simply say that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed; rather, it limits that consent to the derivation of "just powers": [Jaffa:] “Unless the governed are enlightened such that they understand a priori the distinction between just and unjust powers, consent alone will not make government legitimate."In other words, there are powers that no consent can render just.”
Much of what you have written is spot on, even given my own convictions. But we do have that lack of shared definitions. About those, multitudes on the Right, and not merely movement conservatives, would have us simply “follow the science,” and accept established biological facts regarding either our unborn sisters and brothers, or the claims of transgender activists, who insist that a man is a woman if he says he is. As my friends in Secular Pro-Life like to say, “For the embryology textbook tells me so,” it is not religious dogma but rather reality that tells us that every other baby shredded in the womb is one of the “living, breathing women” you care about.
So at least in principle, practically nobody wants to “punish the Left,” instead what we want is for the Left to accept basic biology and raise its moral consciousness about the most helpless vulnerable humans in our midst.
And about that moral consciousness: aren’t you something of an outlier in your own political circles for accepting, believing in natural rights, in human dignity? Leftists I speak with tend to regard human rights and morality itself as convenient, polite fictions, as social constructs.
As for the rule of law being optional, do you not recall innocent Catholic nuns being repeatedly threatened with fines and jail by President Obama and his AG Eric Holder, simply for politely declining to be complicit in artificial contraception and abortion?
Movement conservatism going back to Frank Meyer has always trended libertarian, and so has a lot in common with many liberals. That Iran throws gays to their deaths from car parks is seen as a bug, illiberal and thuggish, in conservative media, and certainly not as a feature.
But Leftists specifically repudiate an ethic of live-and-let-live, shouting down or rioting against free speech on campus and elsewhere. Their utopia is Marxist, and not at all about securing rights to life, liberty or property
While I appreciate your attempt to rescue movement conservatism from the authoritarian scrapheap by wrapping it in the sacred cloth of the Declaration, your argument suffers from a fatal flaw: it is a beautiful, nostalgic theory completely divorced from the grim realities of the current administration.
You argue that principled conservatives believe in objective, God-given "unalienable" rights, while accusing the progressive Left of treating rights as a "polite fiction" subject to the whims of the State. But look closely at what is happening under the banner of the current administration right now in 2026. Who is actually acting out the terrifying reality of "two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch"? It isn't the Left.
We are currently watching an administrative state systematically strip American citizens of their most fundamental human rights under the guise of executive mandates and a weaponized judiciary. When the state dictates what medical procedures a person can access, strips away bodily autonomy, and restricts the freedom of movement or expression for marginalized groups, it is not "conserving" the permanent truths of the American Founding. It is exercising the exact same raw, majoritarian tyranny you claim to despise.
If rights are truly "endowments of our Creator," then they are inherent to every human being by virtue of their existence. They do not evaporate because a specific political faction captures 51% of the vote and decides that certain citizens’ lifestyles, identities, or healthcare needs are incompatible with "tradition and custom."
By cheering on or excusing an administration that uses state power to dismantle the human rights of its political opponents, modern movement conservatives have abandoned the Declaration entirely. They have proven the original essay's point: when the chips are down, the desire to enforce a rigid, traditional social hierarchy will always override a stated fealty to Natural Law.
You cannot claim to believe in unalienable rights while supporting an apparatus that treats the rights of your fellow citizens as entirely alienable, conditional, and subject to the permission of the state. The tragedy of 2026 is that while you are chasing the high-minded ghost of William F. Buckley, the politicians you elect are operating purely in the realm of raw, unvarnished power.
Good morning!
Just have a minute here, but quickly:
• Thank you for your eloquent reply!
• You didn’t offer specifics, tell us precisely which “most fundamental human rights” are being stripped from American citizens (and of course the Declaration insists real rights cannot be stripped, only violated), didn’t tell us what medical procedures you had in mind, but based upon your statement as written, I’m not sure where you and I disagree.
I didn’t say that the current Administration was composed of principled movement conservatives out to secure our unalienable rights.
While their program, agenda overlaps at certain points with movement conservatism, President Trump and VP Vance embody strains from elsewhere in the broader Right.
Marco Rubio might be an example of a movement conservative in the Trump Administration, and sure enough he takes a different line on things, and is no doubt frequently frustrated.
As for movement conservatives supportive or excusing the Administration, certainly we’re grateful for genuine accomplishments and do still think that Trump was and is preferable to four years of Harris-Walz.
But even this last is a matter of prudential judgment, in which people of good will, arguing in good faith might legitimately disagree.
I appreciate your precision, and you are entirely right to pull me back to the exact text of the Declaration: rights cannot be truly "stripped" by the state; they can only be violated.
To answer your question directly about specifics: I am talking about the violation of the right to bodily autonomy and self-determination—specifically through state-level abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest, and the weaponization of the state apparatus to restrict gender-affirming healthcare. To me, the right to control one's own physical body is the absolute bedrock of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." When the state steps into the exam room, it is violating a natural right, not a social construct.
But your response brings us to the real heart of the matter, and it’s where I think the tragedy of modern conservatism lies. You admit that President Trump and Vice President Vance do not represent "principled movement conservatism," but rather "strains from elsewhere in the broader Right"—which, let's be frank, is a polite way of describing a populist, post-constitutional right that views the state as a weapon to reward friends and punish enemies.
You mention Marco Rubio as the lonely, frustrated avatar of the old guard inside the cabinet. But that proves my point. If the principled movement conservatives have been relegated to the sidelines, "frequently frustrated" while a different strain of the Right holds the actual levers of power, then movement conservatism has effectively surrendered.
When you say that supporting this administration is ultimately a matter of "prudential judgment"—a calculation that Trump is simply preferable to Harris-Walz—you are making a classic utilitarian argument. You are saying that to protect some values, you are willing to look the other way while this "other strain" of the Right violates the natural rights of others.
And that brings us right back to the original essay. Whether you call it "prudential judgment" or "protecting the in-group," the end result is exactly the same: the high-minded principles of 1776 are being sacrificed on the altar of political survival. You may still believe in the Truths of the Declaration in your heart, but the movement you belong to is currently funding and voting for the hierarchy of 1680.
Hello again!
As a movement conservative, I’m going to differ with your specific application of the Declaration to defend what I think can easily be shown to be maiming and killing.
But we can actually hold off on having the conversation about your specifics for now to address your overarching indictment of movement conservatives and Trump as such:
Is it that they have “surrendered,” or are simply outnumbered?
Reagan, the movement conservative candidate, was able to substantially consolidate right-wing voters, but not entirely, just ask Pat Buchanan supporters!
And movement conservatism was the new kid in the 1950s. Frank Meyer’s free-market, socially conservative Fusionism had to fight its way to its place of honor past the Old Right, Paleocons who were often racist and anti-Semitic, conspiratorial cranks at times.
My point is that there is a larger Right, which always (see the Nixon Administration and its Silent Majority) also encompassed left of center concerns as well. You can here think of unionized “hard-hats” who hung on every word uttered by Lou Dobbs on CNN and were only too happy to throw Wisconsin to Trump when he promised protectionism as policy.
You don’t share the convictions of pro-life folk, I get that, but pretend you did for a moment. Wouldn’t your electoral calculation be to have the fewest violations of natural rights of others, and mightn’t that steer you more toward Trump, if he had already appointed Constitutionalist judges, who had in turn gotten Roe overturned, than to Kamala Harris?
This is a fair challenge. You are forcing me to step out of my own ideological shoes and look at the board from your perspective, and I respect that. So let me take your invitation and genuinely look at this through the lens of your convictions.
If I adopt your premise—that a fetus possesses an unalienable right to life from conception—then your calculation completely changes. Under that framework, *Roe v. Wade* wasn't a guarantee of liberty; it was a state-sanctioned violation of the most fundamental natural right of all on a massive scale. If I believed that, then voting for Donald Trump wouldn't be a betrayal of the Declaration; it would be a desperate, necessary shield to protect millions of lives from what you view as an ongoing catastrophe under a Harris-Walz administration.
From that viewpoint, it isn’t a "surrender" of principles at all. It is a grim, transactional necessity.
But this brings us right to the terrifying core of why our modern politics feels so broken, and it actually validates the deepest warning of that original essay. We aren't just arguing about policy anymore; we are experiencing a total system failure of shared definitions.
When you look at the political landscape, you see a battle to protect the most vulnerable, unborn life from being killed. When I look at the exact same landscape, I see a battle to protect living, breathing women from having their bodies conscripted by state force, or marginalized groups from being subjugated by a populist movement.
Both of us are claiming the mantle of "Natural Rights." Both of us believe we are defending the core tenets of human dignity against a tyrannical state.
And this is where your point about movement conservatives being "outnumbered" rather than "surrendered" becomes so critical. You are entirely right historically—the American Right has always been a messy, turbulent coalition. From the Paleocons to the Nixonian "Silent Majority" to the protectionist Lou Dobbs union workers, Fusionism was always a fragile alliance.
But look at who is driving the bus right now in 2026. The faction that currently commands the energy, the rhetoric, and the raw power of the Right is not the high-minded constitutionalists. It is a populist, post-constitutional movement that doesn't share your intellectual agonizing over the Declaration. They aren't looking to limit the state to protect God-given rights; they are looking to capture the state to punish the Left.
So while I completely understand your electoral calculation to vote for Trump to secure specific, monumental goals like overturning *Roe*, we have to face the broader reality of that bargain. In choosing to align with a populist movement because you are outnumbered, principled conservatives have unleashed a political force that treats the rule of law as entirely optional.
You may be making a deeply reasoned, prudential judgment to minimize what you see as violations of natural rights. But the tragedy is that the vehicle you are riding in to get there is running over the rest of the republic to do it.
Of course you can simply assert anything.
But if you’d instead like to make a case for your position, marshal facts, offer evidence, assemble an argument that abortion is healthcare, and thus somehow violently taking the life of a complete, distinct, living, growing human being, you are welcome to do so.
But I do not think this can be done
Not even reading past the first few paragraphs. This is just honestly crap. You make not the slightest effort to understand the various strains that comprise conservative thinking. Anyone reading this will emerge more ignorant about conservatism than when they began.
I’ve believed for years now that “conservative” has become code for racist bigot.
Just read David Corn’s book American Psychosis. A historical account of how the Republican Party went crazy.
It is a quite bad book, sir. I would recommend talking to conservatives instead.
I have tried talking to so-called "conservatives." Most of them come off as narrow minded selfish delusional fox propaganda watching maga cult members.
You could always read the ones here on Substack.
My experience with progressives, too. Most people are not so hardcore to either side. Just online
I have never met a progressive who consumed fascist maga Fox propaganda.
No, they're receiving equally inaccurate information from their preferred news sources, but don't understand that fact because these sources reflect their own biases.
Totally
(waves hi)
It goes back to LBJ’s purported statement about convincing the lowest white man that he is better than the highest black man. Working class white conservatives are part of the in-group racially but part of the out-group economically. They clearly put more importance on the former, while the left has spent decades wondering why they vote against their own economic best interests (the latter). This article does a great job showing why that has been a futile question.
LBJ was a racist and yet, his policies continue by support of the uneducated (but indoctrinated) left.
Lmao indoctrinated by who? You don’t know what the word means you idiot. You’re indoctrinated by faux news propaganda and can’t even see it 🤡
Well, the Democratic Party's Neoliberal turn definitely alienated plenty of these people. The climate crisis, has horrible as it is creates an opportunity to address this problem, as we could have robust public jobs programs in rural, mostly-White areas. President Biden did a little bit of this, but he mostly undermined it with his horrible fealty to Monetarism.
An excellent and very well-written post. I especially appreciate the intellectual history of conservatism going all the way back to Filmer. The only thing where I might disagree is that I don’t believe that conservatives with this mindset can be won back if Liberals just understand how they think and view politics. I think what this post highlights is that there is a sizable portion of people who cannot and will not be won over. The right approach isn’t to try to figure out how to talk to them but rather to understand that they represent a faction that must always be outvoted. Thinking that they can be won over is a category error.
"I don’t believe that conservatives with this mindset can be won back if Liberals just understand how they think and view politics."
I don't think that whether they can be won back if liberals understand how they think is the point so much as it's a certainty that we *won't* win them back if we *don't* know how they think is.
Terrific analysis! ♥️ Have you read journalist Tina Nguyen’s memoir, The MAGA Diaries? The other thing Democrats and liberals HAVE NO CLUE about is the overabundance of rightwing think tanks full of intellectuals who ARE combing through Ancient, 17th century anti-Enlightenment, 19th century pro-slavery, and early 20th century thought*. These are the people writing 900-page policy documents that Congress passes without reading.
*originality and creativity are not their strengths
Meanwhile as a Dem Party secretary I kept being told “nobody wants to read” even a paragraph. Could I “make it a meme or a sound bite?”? Are you kidding me?
The side we call “ignorant” can read 17th century legal arguments—some law clerk of Sam Alito’s dug up witch-burning marital rape enthusiast Matthew Hale for Alito to use as precedent in overturning Roe v Wade. They have incredible BOREDOM TOLERANCE. Meanwhile so-called leftists and progressives can’t endure the boredom of a monthly 2 hour meeting.
Just because someone is in a cult doesn’t mean they’re stupid. I haven’t finished writing about my experiences homeschooling my sick kids in Florida. But let me say that those deluded cult member (yes they are) Christian homeschool moms know a heck of a lot more about how American democracy works than most progressives. They write, call, email, lobby, and show up at state capitols with binders full of data.
Too many “leftists” otoh ironically think democracy is a business that responds to boycotts and/or a perpetual motion machine that you stick a coin in once every 4 years and them kick when it spits out the wrong bag of chips. I can’t count the number of times I shared Monty Python’s peasants scene and said “real anarcho-syndicalist communists join committees and go to meetings run by Robert’s Rules of Order!” 🤷🏼♀️
Berkeley professor George Lakoff has lamented for decades about Democrats’ failure to invest in an equivalent brain trust.
“Boredom tolerance” is a really insightful metric! I trained as an historian, and I know there are many good liberal academics out there. Many are older, though, and I think you're spot on about conservatives’ collective ability to dig and dig until they find the intellectual argument that works for them.
We talk about anti-intellectualism on the Right, but it’s just as prevalent on the Left, particularly among voters. I suspect that a lot of the most extreme, disaffected voters on both sides may have had learning challenges that weren’t supported in schools. I mostly interact with people who call themselves progressives and leftists, and many of them are neurodivergent—ADHD, reading challenges, etc. A lot of them have school trauma. There are many, many systemic, complex concepts and ideas that can’t be explained in a meme or 3 minute videos. I find it ironic that conservatives—especially the type who most like to be outdoors, hunting, off-roading, etc.—are among those that want more-punitive schooling rather than more “DEI” and accommodations. You’d think they’d be the ones WANTING Scandinavian-style forest schools instead of Christian schools with corporal punishment….
Anyway, my point is that there are anti-intellectual leftists (think of the people who knee-jerk responded to “messaging” and didn’t take the time to vet Graham Platner) and highly intellectual rightwingers. It’s not just studying history that requires boredom tolerance—it’s the process of democracy itself. The committees, the agendas. The debates and voting. It’s more than just playing Kahoot on your phone! And the political polling just reinforces the problem: “What’s your opinion on XXX” and they don’t say what XXX is or provide data to analyze to draw a CONCLUSION (not an opinion!) on XXX! That’s the main problem: opnion =/= conclusion!
Simon Schama's book on the French Revolution shows how the reactionary French aristocrats who blocked reforms before the revolution referred to their privileges as "liberties" and sounded very much like Confederates or modern conservatives. This is how I came to understand that Hayek was not a hypocrite, he was just an enemy of the enlightenment.
“Masked men grabbing people off the street”. This is like calling police responding to a bank robbery “a swarm of armed and aggressive thugs threatening the lives of people trying to survive by liberating a tiny sliver of billionaire wealth”.
But there is no crime being committed in the former case
That is not correct. You might think that in the former case the amount of force being used is unjustified, or believe that due process is not being used sufficiently. But it is simply false to claim that no crime is involved.
I am defining "crime" as "breaking the law." I think that is reasonable, no?
There is no reason to suspect a crime when pulling random people off the street. No law is being broken.
Well, ICE isn't pulling people randomly off the street. On the other hand, the tactics are unnecessarily harsh and politically counterproductive.
We are not running for elective office and truly need not employ inflammatory language that will only serve to shut down communication. If you're running for office on a base-mobilization strategy and I'm unaware of that, then I apologize; carry on!
The key difference is that robbing a bank is an immediately dangerous threat to everyone else inside that bank. Immigrants that are to be deported, going to work, are not a threat, and don't need to be attacked. Also, if it's legal, why don't they identify themselves like police officers do? That's pretty different
Great analysis and historical connection. I think you’re spot on.
Thank you! It’s been on my mind for awhile
Sorry, but you lost me when you claimed there were “attempts by the government to strip LGBTQ+ Americans of their guns.” Pam Bondi proposed this for transgender people specifically, not LGBQ+ people, and her proposal went nowhere. And she’s gone now.
Facts matter. Distortions don’t help. The Trump administration constantly shows incompetence, and we don’t need to make stuff up — this just makes problems worse by making people dig in even deeper.
holy fucking shit. this is the most clear-sighted analysis of the problem i have ever seen.
Really? I am surprised.
I bet this essay goes hard if you are fundamentally incapable of understanding the difference between criminals and productive, law-abiding, contributing members of society
I would be more generous to the author, but your trenchant comment there did in fact make me chuckle. I can't honestly disagree.
I probably should be more polite but it’s honestly tiring hearing people on the left invent increasingly bizarre explanations for conservative thought that exactly zero conservatives would actually recognize as conservative thought.
The explanation for the phenomenon that the author of this essay is confused about is that conservatives, unlike the left, think that crime is bad. That’s it! That’s the entire explanation!
“Don’t tread on me” means “I strive to live a productive life where I contribute positively to society and I deserve to be left alone to do that.”
“Back the blue” means “People who contribute negatively to society absolutely do not deserve to be left alone.”
Anyone who sees a contradiction here, or who needs to invent some convoluted story about “hierarchy” to explain it, is broken in the head.
Well said.
I think you are spot on. Thank you for an interesting and well written explanation. Since liberals and Democrats have taken the wrong approach, I wonder what the right approach is? I ask because in my view the conservative mindset as you have outlined it is inconsistent with the values in our founding documents.
The correct approach would begin by educating people on the history of social hierarchies and societies that operated without permanent social hierarchies to establish a baseline understanding that hierarchy isn't necessary or inevitable. We need a new Enlightenment to spread the truth of human equality. Otherwise we'll just be rearranging the pyramid.