Right-Wing Americans haven't been conservative at least since Gingrich. There was nothing conservative about shutting down the Clinton-era counterterrorism programs prior to 9/11, for instance. There was nothing conservative about invading Iraq, or trying to administer Iraq as a right-wing utopia under the Coalition Provisional Authority.
I continue to be astonished at how the Republican party transformed from libertarians into a personality cult overnight because some weirdo won an election.
Lindsey Graham was on TV being all "never Trump" one week and then fully supportive the next. c.c. almost everyone else in Washington.
I wonder what the tipping point is among Republican voters between those who genuinely support Trump vs those who think the Democratic candidates are so bad for foreign policy, DEI, etc. that they'll vote from Trump in protest.
Who would the Democrats have to nominate to get the libertarians who used to vote Republican to back them instead?
I think Sanders would have unified because my MAGA parents liked his working-class support. But if I mention that among my progressive friends I get glares and stern warnings that Hillary was "the best" candidate and any objection is sexist. It's kinda like being a conservative who doesn't believe in god or is gay, your party will shun you.
I know anecdote vs anecdote is pretty much meaningless and I’m channeling “No true Scotsman”, but I find it hard to believe an actual progressive telling you that - the complaints from the progressive wing about Sanders losing the primaries are evergreen.
No, Sanders would never be a unifying figure. Libertarians see him as being essentially equivalent to Trump: a demagogue who makes emotional appeals to build a cult of personality, deeply misunderstands economics, and seeks to use political power in an unbounded and illegitimate ways.
But there as many libertarians that matter as there are antifa that matter.
They are noise in the data.
Populism is a marketing tool (to quote Hank Green) and Sanders wielded it as well as trump, but to help people, not punish them. Both have decades of track records demonstrating this fact.
> But there as many libertarians that matter as there are antifa that matter.
Various surveys have indicated that 20-30% of the US population broadly align with libertarian principles, regardless of party affiliation or nominal identification. This aligns fairly well with the proportion of the electorate that had negative opinions of both Trump and Harris in the last election (even those who took a "lesser of evils" approach and voted for one of them).
> Present day conservatives are just awful people in general in my experience.
I don't think I've seen any conservatives involved in mainstream politics in the past 15 to 20 years. I see people using the word "conservatives" to describe something else entirely, but few actual conservatives.
I see it the other way around. This is real conservatism.
Conservatism as an actual movement was formed after the French Revolution when monarchists found that “deus vult” was no longer sufficient justification for wanting a king. The core principles are just rationalizations for the main idea: there should be a king.
American conservatives got swept away by democratic ideals and focused on the rationalizations, but now they’re getting back to their roots.
> I see it the other way around. This is real conservatism.
It's really not.
> Conservatism as an actual movement was formed after the French Revolution when monarchists found that “deus vult” was no longer sufficient justification for wanting a king.
In fact, conservatism in the Anglo-American world has no relationship whatsoever with the French revolution; the sort of reactionary monarchism that informed the royalist factions during the French revolution was already all but dead in the UK and America by the time of the French revolution -- it had already been driven to the fringes by the English civil war and the Glorious Revolution, and in the aftermath of the Whig ascendancy and the American revolution, was utterly gone by the 19th century.
Modern conservatism descends from the non-radical side of the Whig philosophy, as exemplified by Edmund Burke, and is characterized by preferring stability and continuity rather than forceful change, within a context of limited, balanced government, rule of law, and respect for the individual. Many of the people referring to themselves today as "conservatives" are collectivist, authoritarian radicals, and have much more in common with the extreme left than with traditional conservatism.