# Better Conservatives? Where?! (A response to Coffeecat) **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [September 30, 2018, 8:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/better-conservatives-where-a-response-to-coffeecat/822208 "2018-09-30T08:43:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 66
**Author:** ![Measure\_for\_Measure](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/measure_for_measure/32/557_2.png) [@Measure\_for\_Measure](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Measure_for_Measure)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2018, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/better-conservatives-where-a-response-to-coffeecat/822208/66 "2018-09-30T18:37:54Z")
> [@Misogyny on the SDMB, Sept. 2018 edition](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/misogyny-on-the-sdmb-sept-2018-edition/821899/171): > > I wish we had more conservatives. There are a lot of them out there, and _they_ can’t all be brainwashed, either. I even enjoy seeing an occasional racist getting pwned, not by insults, but by overwhelming evidence. It makes it obvious they’re not brave iconoclasts, just wrong. coffeecat is presumably aware that conservatives were once more prevalent on this message board. In the early 2000s gun control opponents even had the upper hand. What happened is that conservatives had a policy and intellectual collapse and Trump moved into the vacuum. But recall that in the 2016 election, mainstream Republicans (eg Jeb!, Rubio, Kasich) consistently polled around 30% _combined_. That was a first. The GOP always had had outsider candidates, but together they never summed to a majority. And on the ground conservatives were in trouble. Bloomberg columnist and economist Noah Smith notes that the main conceptual pillars of the Reagan coalition have been smashed: [https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/936399704207667200](https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/936399704207667200) [INDENT] 3/The three pillars of ideological conservatism, dating back at least to the 70s, were: - laissez-faire economic policy, especially tax cuts and financial deregulation - Christian conservatism - muscular, proud nationalism in foreign policy 4/In the 00s, what happened to laissez-faire economic policy? - Bush tax cuts didn’t boost the economy - Financial deregulation caused a crisis - The middle and working class got screwed - The stock market didn’t even go up - People lost much of their wealth 5/In the 00s, what happened to Christian conservatism? - Gay marriage won popular acceptance - America started to become much more secular 6/In the 00s, what happened to muscular, proud, nationalistic foreign policy? - The pyrrhic victory of Iraq - Massive loss of American prestige - The quagmire of Afghanistan - Rising disgust with foreign entanglements on both the right and the left 7/In the 00s, all three pillars of American conservatism were smashed all at once. But the people who voted for conservatives didn’t go away. And the sentiments that had made them vote for conservatives didn’t go away. 8/The American right became like the forest spirit in Princess Mononoke, when its head was shot off - a rampaging, aimless monster. 9/The worst, most regressive elements of the right - the absolute dregs, the white supremacists and the nativists and the faux-populists - have risen to the top because there was just nothing else to take the helm. [/INDENT] Article length treatment: [Noahpinion: Trump happened because conservatism failed](http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/trump-happened-because-conservatism.html) ## Today, you can’t argue for foreign interventionism at work without looking like an idiot. Laissez faire economic policy is a joke. So what’s left is nativism and racialism, complaining about immigrants. It’s a toxic mix. At any rate if you define conservatives as “Change skeptics”, they have been fully absorbed into the center and left in general and the Democratic Party in particular. Who remains among self-described conservatives? If you define them as supporters of Donald Trump, one is reminded of Slavoj Zizek’s characterization of those who supported various puppet regimes in Soviet dominated Eastern Europe: [INDENT] The Trilemma: Of the three features—-personal honesty, sincere support of the regime, and intelligence—-it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive… [/INDENT] h/t Brad Delong who was discussing GWBush conservatism c. 2007, after failures in Iraq and the economy: [http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/06/a\_proposed\_peck.html](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/06/a_proposed_peck.html) To that we must add the toxicity outlined earlier. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/better-conservatives-where-a-response-to-coffeecat/822208)._