Index

Real Former Conservatives?

Back in September of 2022, Tom Nichols interviewed Tim Miller, author of Why We Did It, for his Atlantic Magazine Peacefield column . The book is famous (or infamous) because it mercilessly takes apart the insanity of the orange cult brainwash and those that created and implemented it.

In the interview, they discuss their own versions of the cult’s insanity and why they got off the crazy train. They both imply a sort of conservative “good old days” before the insanity really kicked in. That left me wondering - I never saw a day when “conservative” didn’t mean anything but reality-denying attempts to turn back the clock.

Conservatives have always claimed a non-existent but supposedly halcyon past of some sort that they want to return to, or “conserve.” In the process of this fake conserving, they end up denying that the current changes around them are in fact actually occurring, e. g. climate-change deniers. The changes always outlast the deniers, because reality doesn’t run backwards.

My question for the fellows is what were the “gold old days” and what did I miss? I never saw a single day that “conservatism” made any sense, and all of the politics and politicians supposedly based in it were obvious, failing dreck. The loudest and most obvious example from Nixon was the War on Drugs, a massive failure that has never done anything about drugs’ availability but has killed and is still killing millions. Reagan’s insanity (besides making the War on Drugs worse) was “Trickle-Down Economics,” a laughably false economic “theory.” It was even tried once, and failed so miserably that a certain Sam Brownback was almost drummed out of politics by his own state GOP for it.

So what was it back in their younger days that brought these two men into the so-called conservatives? As an engineer. I always needed at least a bit of reality and truth before I would buy into anything. So-called conservatism had none of that. Conservative “morals” were always obvious lies given nothing more than lip service by their adherents. Their social theories were and are nothing but laughable attempts to prevent the inevitable. So why how and would two men who now appear intelligent and reasonable get sucked into the whirlpool of idiocy?

The answers to this question may also be answers to a lot of the social problems the United States is facing. Without the idiocy of conservatism, the huge-and-growing wealth gap would be a lot less popular, because the rich and their purchased politicians wouldn’t have had such an obvious and willing audience for their lies. The side effects o f this growing gap are details like starving children and senior citizens, and Joe Biden has proven that this is an artifact of the government policy that allows the rich to get richer with no benefit to anyone else, a policy that has always been the intent of every GOP politician on every level.

The fact that two conservatives have finally become conscious of how stupid their former attitudes were says that maybe there is hope for the rest, but these two gentlemen are obviously more intelligent and aware than the great majority of their former comrades. As such, they only prove the possibility of fixing the problem. They really do not give us any way forward with the rest of the idiots. It seems like all they are is the exceptions that prove the rule.