[kergonath]

> Who you have described are reactionaries, not conservatives.

Indeed, that’s exactly what they are. But they prefer calling themselves conservatives. It’s better from a marketing perspective.

To be fair, there are not many politicians that could be called old-fashioned conservatives in the US. Most of them are a subset of the republican establishment and they were mostly wiped out in the last couple of years.

> to consider them conservative because of that is like considering the Democratic People's Republic of Korea democratic.

Definitely! Unfortunately, that’s how the semantics went, though. In the same way as what most people call “liberals” now are very different from who liberals used to be (they used to be all about capitalism and free enterprise, for example).