Brain Go Boom (What Do Conservatives Stand For?)

I as a liberal left leaning libertarian (shut up it is to a thing) have values that I use to determine what policies I feel my government should enact and generally judge politicians based on the likelyhood they will enact those policies and embody those values.

Right now the right, as personified by conflicts of media figures is trying to figure out what it stands for.

It's doing this during a contentious election the powers that be don't want to lose but all the same, it's something that needs to happen.

The right owns Trump.

They hate him but they own him.

Everything he is saying is stuff somebody down the line said before him, the questioning of birth citizenship,  disdain for critics of police brutality.  conflating religious extremism with Islam as a whole, general xenophobic and racist scapegoating and stereotyping (including that of the sitting, fairly elected president of the United States of America), dismissing claims about how gender, sexual identity, and race affect people's lives, military posturing towards the international community, using individual freedom as a shield from criticism for discrimination and structural racism, using free speech as a shield from criticism for bigoted statements.

The right owns all of that. You know what. I need to be blunt about it. There is no alt right. The distinction between the worst of the worst and the intelligentsia is one of degrees not kind.

But...

We need two parties damn it.

And if they can unfuck themselves they might actually have something meaningful to say.



You know what. The government IS run based on compulsion. Based on force. Based on the threat of violence or at least physical detention. That is inherent to government. ALL government.

And the question is how do we reconcile that with recognition of human rights. With the recognition that we know it is wrong to confiscate property, threaten, detain, or even kill.

For me the answers are political inclusiveness to allow everybody a say in when said force can be used and constitutionalism to guarantee basic human rights including access to that political inclusiveness. And by God those should be the bastions of the right who often call themselves constitutional conservatives.

But, the right has struggled to recognize a basic fact that most of the people in my life understand.



For the vast history of this country minorities and women could not participate in the political social or economic processes that governed their lives. They could not vote, hold office, sue for civil or criminal remediation, or hold property under the law.  Over time that silence has created a lot of built up infrastructure that has disenfranchised them. You can not argue against the statistics.

Now (for the most part) that they can participate in the process they very much want to walk back that societal infrastructure to make society just. They are not wrong to want to address things like the wage gaps, institutional funding disparities, voting protections, disproportionate prosecution, unfair hiring practices, gender roles, sexual harassment, discrimination, geographic segregation, police brutality, stereotyping, and cultural prejudice.

These are issues that they would  have been discussing all along if they had the political power of the ideal egalitarian system. If we truly lived in a representative democracy from the inception of this country.  If we truly respected majority rule and minority rights.

And it annoys the hell out of me that right-wing media has portrayed them as being in the wrong whenever they bring this stuff up and let's be honest a big part is if not racial animosity at least racial denial, indifference, and ignorance.


I've come to expect a certain amount of that. Never ascribe to malice what stupidity will explain and all, but Donald Trump is so racist that the stupidity is turning into actual evil.



A reckoning is coming. Is the right going own up to and purge the most racist parts of its ideology and coalition or become the party that's fine with racism.