Well, do you agree one is worse than the other, and that if a group of people move from the latter to the former, it’s a negative development?
If they move from the former to the latter then I don’t think they ever honestly held the position that racism is bad.
In this case it’s largely different people.
But even when it isn’t, people do change their minds. And they are often restrained by social stigma. That stigma weakening is a bad sign. Normalising racism is likely to make other people more racist too, right?
While I think I take your point, the two exemplars you present are not (AFAIK) contemporaneous. There is an argument to be made that the “edgy” ones are at least the spiritual descendants of the lynchers.
Yes, and that’s why conservatives should stop doing it.
The threat of: “Oh I’m going to become a real racist now because you won’t let me do racist things” rings a bit hollow.
Please don’t use the word conservative as a proxy for “right-winger.” It degrades the language.
People need to use actual common terms for things to communicate, not your made-up terms you try to force on everyone.
A word can have multiple meanings. Even “liberal” has multiple meanings that are contradictory.
No, I think the root cause was that so many conservatives got frustrated and resentful at being consistently wrong about so much, and losing so many “culture war” battles.
Looking back over the past hundred years or so, many US conservatives have been passionately invested in upholding the causes of racial segregation, white supremacism, nativism, male supremacism, homophobia, transphobia, and Christian nationalism, among others. Certainly, not all of the people who supported those causes were intrinsically bad people or consciously malevolent towards disprivileged groups: a lot of them simply supported that bigoted status quo because it was the familiar reality, “just the way things are”.
All of those causes have significantly decreased in popular support and acceptance over the last fifty-ish years. Consequently, even conservatives who have abandoned their former bigoted positions (or are too young to have developed such positions as part of an unquestioned social norm) have been feeling a bit sulky and sat-upon when considering overall social trends.
It’s not even necessarily that they actively want to restore Jim Crow segregation or disfranchisement of women or redlining blacks and Jews and Asians out of their communities or all the rest of that traditional entrenched-oppression stuff. It’s that they’re too fragile to have honest conversations among themselves about the fact that they were just wrong, factually and ethically wrong, about so much stuff that they reflexively valued because it was the traditional status quo.
So the more they don’t want to take a good hard look in the mirror about the track record of their own ideology, the more they cling to ressentiment fantasies of having been victimized by “the liberals” “destroying society”.
That right there is the “root cause” of the modern dominant conservative mindset IMHO, if it’s even possible to speak of it having a single “root cause”. And I think it would have happened, internet or no internet. (It was already happening in the pre-internet 1980s, with the rise of the “Moral Majority” movement burning with resentment over all the battles they lost in the 1970s.)
I mean, if you just ignore all the actual counterexamples I was talking about and a whole bunch more, I guess?
J.D. Vance is only 40. Pete Hegseth is 44. Mike Johnson and Kristi Noem are under 55. Christian nationalist senator Josh Hawley is 45. Etc., etc., etc.
All these young-middle-age conservatives are top-level national politicians with huge influence—they are not archaic elderly fossils surviving from an earlier era of US conservatism—and they are not irreligious.
If they happen to be purely selfish and care nothing about morality, you can’t validly blame that on a lack of religion.
How the fuck do you get defending neo-Nazis from that post?
By exercising that finely-honed ability that DavidNRockies was admiring back in post #354.
Yeah. I can pass as a Christian. I know this because sometime it’s helpful to be able to do this.
If you visit the US as a tourist, I can’t imagine it would come up, unless you somehow made a point of it. I’d be a lot more worried about being arrested at the border because someone needed to meet his quota than I would about being caught out as an atheist.
There’s no “versus”; they are the same people.
Love this post.
I guess I didn’t make it clear enough what kind of scumbags I was talking about. Really was not expecting anyone to respond with the ‘kids today’ meme when I wrote about the irreligious right!
My in-laws live in Connecticut; I really can’t imagine atheism being an issue in New England, and it’s hardly a common topic for casual conversation.
Crossing the boarder is something I genuinely am worried about, given stories like these:
Travelling to visit a naturalised citizen relative is something that would probably increase suspicion rather than reduce it. No hotel bookings to show, either. 
Or at least there’s a significant overlap right now in America.
Then why did you specifically refer to “younger” people?
No, you never identified which two people are defending the neo-Nazis in this thread.
I was comparing older, religious right-wingers with younger, non-religious ones and saying the latter are worse in my opinion. One person replied seemingly defending the young right-wingers, and another replied with a stupid meme.
It was a serious point: bigotry is actually increasing among some young people; things are going in the wrong direction. I think it’s very worrying. I don’t understand why people would mock that. 