this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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When you're living in comfort and you benefit from the status quo and you prize stability over the perceived benefits of change, there's an argument for a conservative outlook.
But I've been living under Conservative governance in my home state of Texas for forty years. The pattern of police enforced racial castes, privatization of public institutions, and ecologically unsustainable consumption has been ongoing for my entire life. This is what conservatives are fighting to defend. Misogyny. Supremacy. Homogeneity. A wild imbalance in economic opportunity. Its too late to try and rebrand this as "bad" conservatism.
Trump's policies are more extreme than what came before, but the impulses remain the same. It is the composition of American elites that has changed.
The Red Hats are the children of Goldwater/Reagan and they are shepherding Paleoconservative Libertarianism to its logical end game. They were raised to believe in Galt's Gulch and Friedman's free market fetishism. They were raised to believe in Evangelical Christianity and Christian Dominionism. They were raised to believe in winning the Cold War at all costs.
And what they're doing has plenty of historic parallels - from Nixon's War on Crime to Eisenhower's Operation Wetback to McKinley's Jim Crow. They're White Nationalists embracing White Nationalism, on the belief that the Peace Dividend they reaped in the 90s was a Heavenly Mandate to Do As Thou Wilt. If you carve off all the QAnon cultism and bigotry, what you've got are a bunch of Gen X and Y folks who are fighting to preserve the segregation and the implicit international hegemony they enjoyed when the Iron Curtain fell and America was the uncontested global superpower.
It is conservatism in root and branch. A philosophy flailing in the face of a diminished empire to preserve the icons of prosperity their elders once enjoyed.