What more do conservatives want?
There’s very little of progressive America left to destroy
I ask this with 100% sincerity: can the US become more conservative than it already is? Aside from embracing outright fascism, I don’t think so. There’s a weird consensus among political observers that the US has moved left over the course of my lifetime (1989-present), but I would suggest any leftward shift has occurred along the cultural axis only. It’s true that Hollywood, the entertainment industry, and corporate culture (but, crucially, not corporate tax rates or labor practices) have nominally adopted progressive characteristics like pro-diversity multiculturalism and gender egalitarianism. Economically and politically, however, we have moved far to the right. In fact, I’m not really sure what else we can do to make things more politically and economically habitable to conservatives.
Consider the following: In this country, you can be a billionaire and pay literally zero dollars in federal taxes for decades of your career (and be elected president in spite of it); you are free to stockpile automatic, military-grade weapons without any kind of background check; If you’re a corporation, you pay the lowest tax rate in the developed world; if you own a business with a payroll, the US minimum wage is, adjusted for inflation, lower than it was more than 50 years ago; if you need medical attention, healthcare is only obtainable from a corporate-friendly free market of massive private entities with no public accountability that are only obligated to insure you if you meet certain employment requirements, which, by the way, allows your boss to leverage the fact of employer-sponsorship to lower your pay and provide abject working conditions; abortion is for all intents and purposes outlawed in a number of states that have only one clinic; banks are totally unregulated and can basically take your money to a casino and risk it all without your say and suffer no consequences; cannabis remains criminalized in a majority of states; the police are decked out with the same military gear as green berets and can murder you with impunity during routine traffic stops, especially if you’re a person of color; immigrants have essentially no legal recourse and can be deported without cause; if you’re homeless or addicted to drugs, your only “treatment” is incarceration, the record of which prevents you from getting a job or voting in the future…
What is it exactly that conservatives are fighting for, besides lowering rich people’s taxes to literally 0%? Which other parts of the social contract are even left for you all to eviscerate? There are two answers. The first is that they’re not so much fighting for anything as they are fighting to keep things this way, to conserve the status quo as it were. The second is that they’re fighting for the cultural dominance currently enjoyed by liberals. Think about that: conservatives are working to overturn decades old civil rights legislation in a deluded attempt to reverse engineer a culture in which the CBS nightly lineup consists of five hours of sitcoms about white families going to church and watching football on Sundays.
Because they have controlled this country’s legislative policies for so long yet remain cultural minorities conservatives have (incorrectly) concluded that politics must be downstream from culture rather than vice versa, and so that’s how they can look around and not see the reactionary laws we live by as such, and instead maniacally try to seize control of the culture in order to finally make this country even friendlier to them. The thing is, we already have an incredibly conservative culture! Sure, TV and Hollywood are diversifying, but neighborhoods remain deeply segregated, Americans feverishly surveil one another through Ring doorbells and the NextDoor app, public schools are crumbling, funding for public spaces like parks and transit are being slashed, any sense of “community” is gone–people sit in their house and watch Netflix and never interact with one another. That doesn’t sound like a liberal and socially-progressive culture, that sounds like a deeply paranoid and conservative one.
The real issue is that when conservatives say they want cultural representation, what they really want is cultural conformity. They not only want a country in which obtaining an abortion is illegal; they want a country where the culture is such that a woman even thinking about an abortion is inconceivable. They want women to be so trapped that they won’t even think of abortion as an option. I’m sorry, but you’ll never engineer a country like that, even if conservatives were somehow able to gain control of the culture. And this is ultimately the problem: conservatives claim to simply want cultural “representation” and liberals (pretend to) want legislative power but deep down neither actually wants what they profess.
And liberals aren’t off the hook here either. Remember, all the liberals who cheered on Hillary Clinton in 2016 when she said “America is already great”: Everything described in paragraph two applies to pre-Trump America as well.
