# What "Conservative Values" aren't based on bigotry?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-conservative-values-arent-based-on-bigotry/837176>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [July 16, 2019, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-conservative-values-arent-based-on-bigotry/837176 "2019-07-16T16:36:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 201

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**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\
**Post date:** [July 18, 2019, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-conservative-values-arent-based-on-bigotry/837176/201 "2019-07-18T15:11:37Z")

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I will assume permission and copy this excellent perception from **Defensive Indifference** :

> [@Our country is a laughing stock that is going to hell.](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/our-country-is-a-laughing-stock-that-is-going-to-hell/837244/19):
>
> I disagree. Trump is the pure distilled essence of Republicanism. Anti-Trump Republicans aren’t pissed at what he’s doing or saying. They’re just pissed that he doesn’t pretty it all up for the OpEd page of the WSJ. His supporters are **pure Republicans**.
> 
> Believing that the media and academics are biased? Started with Goldwater, continues right through to “fake news!”
> 
> Regressive taxation? Laffer sketched a curve on the back of a napkin; Trump enacts tariffs that are tantamount to a national sales tax.
> 
> Racism? It’s a short step from the Southern Strategy to Trump. Ronald Reagan argued in the 60s that landlords should be able to discriminate against blacks; Trump actually did.
> 
> Belligerent jingoism? Every Republican president since Reagan has had a hard on for killing brown people in the Middle East.
> 
> Anti-intellectualism? Reagan -\> Palin -\> Trump
> 
> Catastrophic deregulation? We went from “the government is the problem” to gutting every agency and moving the USDA and BLM out of DC and refusing to fill key positions.
> 
> Human rights abuses? GWB ran his gulags in secret; Trump does it in the open.
> 
> Trump is the Platonic ideal of Republican. The “good Republicans” are the ones who finally realized the truth about their team.

Trump is not an aberration from conservativism, but the culmination of it. All he’s done is strip away the genteel veneer that let them avoid the real human consequences of their views. That includes a deflective insistence on their own definitions of “politeness” and how it is lacking in criticisms of them rather than on the actual content of those views and their effects. They can’t credibly disavow Trump, because they \*are \*Trump and have been so for quite some time.

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