So, I spend most of my time dunking on liberals on this blog. I mean, it's more entertaining and keeps me more intellectually stimulated. The right is just too easy to attack, and almost everything they do ever, is wrong. To me, liberals are the actual smart conservatives, while actual "conservatives", just have nothing. That said, I want to go over why no one these days should be a conservative.
On social issues (religion/sexuality)
In the modern alignment, the rise of social conservatism arose in the 1970s and 1980s in large part due to the religious right. Conservatives became intermingled with the religious right over issues like abortion and homosexuality, and the moral majority became an important part of Reagan's coalition. This is actually where I got my start to politics in the 2000s, being highly religious at the time.
However, religion should not mix with government at all, and we have a strong tradition of separation of church and state that this coalition has spent decades attempting to erode. This is for good reason. Religion often does not have any objective reasons to be accepted by society as a whole, and while I don't begrudge people for personal beliefs (even I have spiritual beliefs these days, although I would never force them on others), these beliefs have no place informing public policy. The correct perspective to have in terms of governance is secularism, and if religious beliefs cannot be justified secularly, they have no place in government.
The problem is many religious conservatives are zealots who don't care about these rules and believe "God's law" supercedes our laws. They want to remake America in their image, and don't care. There are very few secular reasons to be against homosexuality or transgenderism, for example, but these guys insist this stuff is bad because it violates their religious values. Same with abortion. While I understand the argument that abortion might be morally questionable to some, given the overwhelming majority of abortions happen before there is significant brain development that implies sentience, and the fetus is often not even mature enough to live on its own outside of the body, there's no reason to be against this stuff.
Often religious conservatives can't even put up an argument for their beliefs on secular grounds. The best we get are vague appeals to "society will collapse if we allow this" which is total nonsense. The right just has no arguments, and there's no reason to be a social conservative. At best you're arguing for structural functionalism of a society that doesn't have to be that way. If women want to join the military and get jobs, let them. If men don't, well, let them too (this one is unpopular even among feminists in my experience, ironically enough).
This religious fixation is also why the republicans are so anti intellectual. Often times conservatives reject global warming because they think that God wouldn't make a world we could destroy or something. They also want to teach literal young earth creationism in schools. There is no limit to the amount of stupidity the GOP has when it comes to intellectual issues, in part due to their religious fixation blurring the lines between reality and fiction. It's scary.
On social issues (race/social justice)
However, conservatism being wrong extends beyond their religious delusions being imposed on the rest of us. A major component of modern conservatism is based on race. Due to the dixiecrats' exodus of the democratic party, and democrats like Nixon and Reagan bringing these people into the republicans, republicans have become the fairly "racist" party of the two.
Now, that's not to say all conservatives are racists. I know a lot of my fellow lefties like to paint them as such, but they're not. Hardcore racists almost always vote for republicans, but outside of Trump, they were never pandered to explicitly. Dog whistle politics operates in a way to build a coalition between racists and more bona fide conservatives. Still, a lot of racial undercurrents exist in conservative viewpoints.
Many conservatives are very anti immigrant. While I can understand not being an orthodox far left SJW on immigration issues (I'm not), a lot of conservatives have this weird idea of immigration threatening their culture, despite the fact that this argument has been made for the past 200 years against various groups of immigrants and despite the fact it never panned out. At most you get an awkward generation where many of them don't know english and then they assimilate over time. Conservatives also believe immigrants cause crime en masse, despite them causing less crime than the average citizen. We hear claims of them gaming the welfare system despite not collecting welfare much. Trump exacerbated a lot of these stereotypes, and honestly, they're mostly not true.
Look, I can understand being somewhat nationalistic economically. Given my desire for these large universal benefits with high taxes, I am too. But my concern with nationalist politics begins and ends with my economic policy. Many conservatives are legit racists.
Beyond that, conservatives are no better with race issues in general involving, say, blacks. Many conservatives will repeat stereotypes that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime, and despite there being some validity to that, they ignore the root causes of poverty and other forms of social dysfunction that contribute to that. Heck, that's a big problem that conservatives have with their views in general, and this blends into economics. They tend to not believe in social science and see it as liberal indoctrination or some BS, so they tend to have very ignorant views on the role of the system being biased against blacks and other minorities in the first place. They blame the extra crime on them having a violent nature or something, they blame their poverty on their culture and personal failings, and they just seem to think everything is their fault and that they're responsible for their own condition. They don't understand how, say, racial profiling or policing leads to increased deaths, they'll just say that they shouldn't have committed crimes or something.
I mean, there are real issues out there. A lot of racial profiling problems began with Nixon, when he used his war on drugs as a pretext to go after black people. Reagan's welfare queen lines were often used against black people who were on welfare. A complex network of problems leading to systemic racism were ignored in favor of thinking that black people were violent and lazy.
I mean, again, if you want to hate on the SJWs for pushing these issues too hard, and overemphasizing them to the point they displace focus on other, more important issues, and for demonizing anyone who doesn't toe their extreme line as racists and the like, go for it. But the right tends to be morally bankrupt on these issues. Outside of attacks against the left for sometimes going too far, they don't have anything and their viewpoints are often ignorant, if not full on offensive.
Economics
Modern conservative economics arose with Reagan too. After the stagflation of the 1970s broke the phillips curve, the right decided to throw out an entire ideology that helped people for almost 50 years in favor of small government conservatism. The 80s were prosperous, as are many time periods after the worst of recessions are over, and everyone swooned over Reagan returning the country to prosperity by...attacking unions, lowering taxes on the rich, and deregulating the economy. But, with that sense of prosperity came the great decoupling of income and productivity, leading to insane amounts of income inequality over the coming decades. They promised that the wealth would trickle down, it never did. The rich hoarded it. They promised it would lead to economic growth outpacing the tax cuts, and instead the national debt grew. I mean, year after year, these ideas have just led to a failure. Maybe it appeared there was that one moment in the early 80s where Reagan swooped in and saved the day, but even that has been greatly exaggerated.
The fact is, 2008 should've killed the GOP for good. It demonstrated to the world that yes, sometimes government is necessary. But their response? Wanting to cut taxes and spending in the middle of a recession to give tax cuts to the rich, when the rich have record profits and are still paying people off. 2008-2014ish should've been a stern rebuke of the GOP's ideology, yet people still flocked to them. I guess they were disappointed in the democrats' lack of efforts to try to do anything radical either, leading to a lack of morale, but I don't get it. The GOP went insane after Bush left office, but they still managed to get enough support to win various elections. Outside of lack of confidence in the democrats, it makes no sense to me. All the GOP had was obstruction. They literally sabotaged what little the democrats tried to do, and that was their entire strategy. That's the thing about the GOP, they are so ideologically bankrupt that their only strategy to win was to sabotage the other side. And then the other side just went along with it and internalized this box that the GOP put them in. Which is why I hate the democrats too. But this article isn't about this, it's about the GOP.
Even Trump's accomplishments are nonexistent, all he did was explode the national debt again like Reagan and Bush between excessive military spending and tax cuts for the rich. And honestly, his record on the economy was literally just a continuation of what Obama was doing. It didn't matter who was in office, the economy would grow either way.
I will blame Trump somewhat for his poor handling of COVID. Prompt action to stabilize the economy through large amounts of stimulus and maybe a UBI would've gone a long way to making the economy work through this period of forced joblessness. But, that involves the government doing things, and the republican philosophy is minimal government. Oops. And that's the big problem with republican philosophy. They think by minimizing the government's involvement in terms of taxes and regulations and doing stuff it leads to optimal economic growth. Not true at all. Busted.
Foreign policy
Conservative foreign policy is just as awful as the rest. Basically, unlike Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy of "speak softly and carry a big stick", it's "scream loudly and hit everyone with big stick." The appeal to conservative foreign policy is strength and military superiority. It's hitting America's enemies any time they step out of line to teach them whose boss.
This line originated, like everything else, in the 1980s, with Reagan replacing Carter. Carter was "weak", so Reagan had to be "strong." Carter did nothing when Iran took American hostages, but Reagan was so scary the Iranians released them the day Reagan got elected out of fear (or maybe it was a back room deal). Reagan outspent the soviets so much he bankrupted them, showing America's hegemonic superiority (admittedly this may have been somewhat valid, although this philosophy quickly lost its relevance since). That said, either way, its grossly exaggerated, and just because Reagan did some good things in the specific context of the 1980s does not mean it's valid past that.
As the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, America found itself with a lot of military spending it arguably didn't need. And admittedly, the conservatives of the 1990s made some good points. They wanted to be a lot less involved in things, sometimes pathologically so, like the idea that we should pull out of the UN. In the 1990s they were very hostile toward Clinton's humanitarian efforts in places like Somalia (where Americans died, see the Black Hawk Down movie), Rwanda, and what was formerly Yugoslavia. I can see a point here. I mean, that's kind of how I am, in response to conservative ideology since then, but again, they were kind of pathologically extreme with it. Which brings us to the Bush administration.
One of Bush's first moves was to remove us from an anti ballistic missile treaty, which seems like a terrible idea. And then after 9/11 he had this idea that he wanted to go it alone. He was very unilateral and hostile to the UN with his interventions in Iraq in particular, and damaged relations with many countries and the UN itself because he wouldn't follow their procedures. But that's conservatism. Shoot from the hip, ask questions later. America, **** yeah! And let's not forget what a disaster Iraq was, no WMDs, we toppled Saddam for nothing and got stuck in their for a decade. We lost 3000 people and all we got out of it was ISIS. We've been Afghanistan for 20, we're only pulling out this year. We killed Bin Laden 10 years ago. We were told we were saving the world invading people like this, but as it turns out breaking things is easy, but fixing things again is hard. If not impossible. We thought we were gonna westernize these countries and give them capitalism and democracy and that just didn't turn out well.
Then Obama fixed things somewhat, and then Trump happened. And Trump just went back to this insane isolationist pitch the GOP has. Again, not against anti interventionism, but Trump acted like he wanted to pull out of NATO. He increased our military budget for no reason, despite us already having an insanely bloated military. He constantly fought with his advisors and many quit on him according to Bolton's book. Trump was a loose cannon who just couldn't govern, and much like Bush, he alienated many of our allies. Except Bush did it for ideological reasons, Trump just did it because he was a jerk with extreme personality issues. But he basically is what happens when your racist conservative uncle becomes president, so I'm not really sure that we can separate Trump from conservatism here.
Conclusion
Conservatism, over the past 40 years, has been an abject failure. Socially, economically, on foreign policy, it doesn't matter. What the republican party has touched, it has destroyed. It has no valid argument in the 21st century. The democratic party a la the centrist wing like Biden does a far better job championing actual conservative ideas than conservatives do. That's sad. But that's how messed up our politics are. The right is just insane, out of touch, full of dysfunctional ideas, and I really don't understand why half the country still supports them. I abandoned them years ago, and every time they govern they should be hemmoraging supporters. Yet in 2020, Trump just barely lost. Are the democrats really that impotent they can't beat a party of literal idiots and crazy people? Apparently so. That's why, in 2016, I bet 2020 would be a bloodbath for republicans. Sadly, they just barely lost.
Seriously, if you read this, stop being a republican. There's no reason to be one in the 21st century. Democrats are the new conservatives now. Outside of maybe their fixation on social justice issues. Even then the party proper does a horrid job on those issues compared to the base, much like everything else.
I really have to wonder why the democrats don't just roll the republicans. Again, I think it has to do with the fact that they suck so hard at campaigning that they turn people away. On substance they have almost everything the republicans want. Maybe they're not culturally conservative, but that seems to be the only thing drawing people to republicans. Cultural bullcrap that doesn't matter.
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