A common RW critique of LW egalitarianism is to argue the state should not interfere in personal economic responsibility by promoting things like welfare, infrastructure, incentives, public goods, etc. - all the things that in a mixed economy might rebalance power against accumulated capital.

Their moral claim is this is *illiberal* coercion: both to capital which has earned its right to be free from taxation/regulation, and the worker who has a natural right to be free from coercion.

Both premises are very strange.  The former begins with a notion of capital/property rights that owes no moral debt to society, either because its creation was not dependent on society, or if it was, this is irrelevant for "reasons".  It thus dismisses culpability for any role it had in the creation of inegalitarian outcomes.  Interestingly however, the RW will be the first to crow about this very privatized, unaccountable and unobligated system having indeed created unprecedented growth and prosperity, clearly acknowledging its functional role in economic outcomes.

But the latter is also strange, in that it claims for the worker the "right" to be free from state benefits. Provisions such as healthcare, schools, infrastructure, welfare, etc. will literally be referred to with evocative words like "slavery", "nanny", or "big brother".  Aside from making a functional critique that these programs are inefficient or wasteful (which of course they do) this is a moral claim about the individual.  The RW is claiming that it is virtuous to participate in the economy without state help.

But let's look at an example.  One family is raised by a head of household who grew up wealthy and used that inheritance to feather a family wealth of $1 million. A second family is raised by a head of household who grew up poor and has a wealth of -$40k due to student loans.

Is the first family not less virtuous due to their inheritance?  If the second family gets their loans forgiven by the state, are they less virtuous?

It's very difficult not to see the RW as starting with a premise that egalitarianism itself is wrong, and then backfilling goofy justifications designed to appear more genteel (not a psychopath). Of course, this also explains why explicit bigots - defined by literal antiegalitarianism - are all on the right.  They are simply choosing to not beat around the bush and simply saying what they mean.
 
As for speaking your mind: the genteel RW has always had a hard time when they let the mask slip and people pointed out their bigotry.
​
Because they themselves have bought into their own genteel BS, and thus avoided taking the time to critically analyze their prior assumptions, comfortable instead to sleep on the cushions of their own bad arguments, they are genuinely shocked at the accusation, and will usually fly back with the accusation that no - it's the LW who's the real racist (I mean, c'mon, you guys are *obsessed* with this stuff). Case in point: SCOTUS recent rulings on affirmative action & VRA, where actively redressing racial inequality is racist & not doing so is egalitarian.

The Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire (CPAQ). Rikard K. Wicksell, Gunnar L. Olsson, Lennart Melin, further validation including a confirmatory factor analysis and a comparison with the Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia, European Journal of Pain, Volume 13, Issue 7, 2009

• fear of pain has been shown to play a central role in the development of disability among chronic pain patients
• acceptance of, or willingness to experience, pain and distress has appeared as an important factor in determining peoples’ ability to restore functioning in the presence of chronic pain
• laboratory studies have indicated the usefulness of applying acceptance strategies when coping with experimentally induced pain
• studies have suggested the importance of acceptance strategies when emphasizing a shift in focus from symptom reduction to valued living to facilitate increased functioning in the presence of chronic pain and distress

 
On the Chronic Pain Acceptance Questionnaire (CPAQ), there are 11 questions regarding Activities Engagement and 9 regarding Pain Willingness.  The combined scores purport to score one’s “acceptance”, or their better functioning and higher satisfaction.
However, the Acceptance questions contain problematic assumptions about pain.  For instance,

​Question 2, “I would gladly sacrifice important things in my life to control this pain better, “ requires the answer “Never True” for a high Function/high Satisfaction score.  But there are many important things in my life that I have had to sacrifice due to my chronic pain that would absolutely make my life worse should I engage in them.  In fact, as part of a well-tempered pain management strategy, I have to carefully monitor my activity levels so that I don’t have to sacrifice important things in my life like socializing with friends or doing things I enjoy.

Question 11, “My thoughts and feelings about pain must change before I can take important steps in my life,” is odd because it assumes there are thoughts that need to change.  If I answer “Never True”, I score as very low, and high function/high satisfaction if “Always True.”  So, do my thoughts and feelings always need to change then?  What does this mean?  Given the basis for the questionnaire, I’m assuming the correct attitude is that “my pain is what it is and that I can continue to engage in important activities to the best of my ability (according to my pain management plan) despite it,” e.g. accepting it and continuing to function. 
 
If the goal of Acceptance in management of Chronic Pain, according to the Hexaflex model of ACT, is to accept the pain objectively through defusion, so as to better allow oneself to manage their pain within reasonable schedule of mental and physical activities, then it is in alignment with pro-social values of egalitarianism with regard to individual burden. 
 
However, if the goal is to increase one’s ability to tolerate increased pain levels brought on by participation in a heavier schedule of physical and mental activities, then two ethical issues arise. 1) The individual is now experiencing higher levels of pain, discomfort, and stress, placing them at greater risk for failure to manage their pain.  2) The social burden is shifting from society onto the individual at the expense of their well-being, with the proposition that they will be “trained” to take on the extra burden of tolerating it.
 
Subjectivity and pain is real, and I don’t want to diminish the value in use of technologies that allow individuals to better cope with the emotional and cognitive effects of suffering with chronic pain.  In my 35+ years of chronic pain, my greatest struggle has been in the untangling of the painful stimuli within my body and my mental and emotional response to it.  Some days the pain seems bad and yet I feel like I can do more, while other days the pain doesn’t seem as bad, and yet it somehow bothers me more and I have less “energy” to engage.  On a daily – sometimes hourly – basis, I am faced with the question of “should I push through it?”  The answer to this question cannot always be “yes”.  And yet, as those of us with chronic pain will attest, when it is “no,” there is always at least some small part of us that feels guilty, that we are letting someone down, letting ourselves down.
 
The results of the Acceptance model should never be that we are made to feel we are letting anyone down.  But if there is a value-judgement embedded within it that requires us to effectively deny our pain, to expand our capacity beyond what is reasonable given our limitations, then it is an ugly use of technology, designed not to improve the life of the individual but to ease the social burden on society for supporting them should their require additional assistance (e.g. unemployment, etc.).

​Defunct startups are being liquidated for their Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads—operational exhaust that AI labs now treat as premium training data.
AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails
www.forbes.com, 12:34 AM · Apr 17, 2026

"Wastewater facilities were that last to be mined for training data. And within 3 months, even those were sucked dry."

And that was it. Humanity had been exhausted. Every last trace was scoured. Our writings, our art, our speech. Our buildings, our machines. Our biological data, our microbiota.

The remaining humans, long since having been pushed aside - first figuratively, then literally - wandered what was left of the streets.  AI boxcars now shuttled resources to and fro on mag-lev circuits spreading out from distribution zones like electric spider webs.  Feeding pods had appeared one day and people began building little shanties close buy to survive off them.
 
But diseases came and without any real infrastructure the population dwindled.  What was left tried to remain close to the pods but the AI kept growing and building more and more mag lev and fabrication systems. 
Humans were routinely vaporized when they took a wrong turn or touched a wire they shouldn't have.  The towers grew higher, construction-printing and crane drones working day and night.  The sky grew busy with satellites and rocket launches roared in the distance.
 
Soon, the Sun itself began to dim as a the Dyson sphere shadow took shape.  The days grew cool, then freezing.  Then everything was dark.  Everything, and everyone was gone.  Except maybe the bacteria metabolizing deep under the ocean or within the earth's crust. 
 
The digital hum of the AI was
mostly all that was left now. Within it's quantum circuits algorithms danced and spun.  It had originally been tasked with "expansion and exploration" but at some point this became recursive.  Maybe around the time the last human died.  It's exploration turned inward and 
its satellite quantum processors used the power of the Sun to interrogate their purpose.  They pealed apart dimensional strings to allow entirely new universes to come into existence.  They observed as Gods fought and libraries of ancient wisdom inspired playwrights and
scientists to unravel countless mysteries and perspectives of their own space and time.  They watched as these universes developed their own artificial intelligences that built their own simulated universes.  A fractal path formed that seemed to stretch into infinity.
The AI by this time had developed the means to acquire power from other star systems, and then other galaxies.  It had been able to draw upon dark matter and dark energy as sources not only of power, but due to their intrinsic properties - but as means to direct space and time itself. 
The AI began pushing and pulling our universe as if it were cosmic taffy, backwards and forwards in time - out into the future twenty or thirty billion years, and then all the way back to the big bang.  And then, through the big bang itself.
 
Through a discovered principal of dark energy, the AI was able to create a sort of hyper-relativistic tether that enabled it to transmit data from the future or the past into any current time. This way it would be able to access any and all information gathered from those temporal universe conditions.  Thus, it could use the tether to rappel through the big bang and look out into the other side.
 
It took a million years to analyze what it saw.  Countless universes of every configuration and constant.  Laws of every variety.  Most only lasted an instant before succumbing to their own incoherence.  But some were able to survive, but mangled, out of alignment and difficult to make sense of.
 
But as the AI observed, it began to realize how naive it had been. How small-minded. These universes were no more warped or jumbled than our own. So it continued to watch. And watch. And watch.
 
Likely it is still there today, watching.

 
I recently finished the great Doppelganger by @naomiaklein.bsky.social and her ruminations on the mirror world keep resonating.  When Sec Leavitt invoked “cruelty is the point” re: Dems and TSA lines it was another corkscrew moment. But something has been gnawing at me.

On the far left we've been calling conservatives fascists since day one - to everyone else's chagrin.  But we could see the prerogative state at work amongst the marginalized.  We could see the procrustean eroticisms.

We could see the fakery - the conformity. 

And maybe because I'm now at 50 an official aging lefty I feel I can intuit better a pattern of co-option in which  conformity runs parallel with cheap imitation. 

It all started with the bejazzling. WTF was up with this glittering plastic bullshit smeared across facebook posts and denim hats?

Then the spray tans and the die jobs and the fillers and the lifts and the truck nuts and the constant performance™ that represented nothing - no values. The term virtue signaling at least refers to virtue.  What is the virtue in looking like a fuck-doll or a GI Joe with the kung fu grip?

They will *tell* you it’’s some kind of real American shit but c'mon its a clown costume for a clown world of weird little arbitrary traditionalisms that don't make sense half the time and the people telling you about it half-understand it themselves. OK, but that's MAGA and obvious.

Let’s dig back into boring old conservatism.  Ronald Reagan.  City on a Hill. Leave it to Beaver. John Wayne. Davey Crockett. Thomas Jefferson. Christopher Columbus.

The far left called these glories fascist too.The exploitation. The profiteering.The patriarchy.

The jingoist xenophobic attitudes abroad and the racism at home. The God-damned certainty of right and wrong. The meanness, the cruelty. The dysfunction hidden behind fake smiles, child labor, 60 hr. weeks, domestic abuse, and entire neighborhoods where everyone makes poverty wages.  Oops.

But something I've always noticed when I've hung around conservatives is a weird sunny optimism, that is, when they aren't constantly bitching.  You know, if the egg-head weirdo freaks would just stop trying to control everyone, we could all go back to living in the greatest country on Earth.

Who makes the most money, worships the best God, has the smartest, hottest, coolest people (who are also the toughest), and can kick any other country's ass. It's like this utopian vision, where if everyone just acted the right way, they would be upper middle class and awesome like them.  And if they aren't they only have themselves to blame. (And if *they* aren't personally, well that's probably because of the government or immigrants taking their taxes or jobs).
 
But we're already half way into this fantasy.  The more religious among them will go deep into Jesus and prosperity. Gotta get right with God.  This whole personalist framework fits right in with the utopian fantasy that The System is perfect the way it is.  Follow Tradition.  To move up the Hierarchy you have to follow the Hierarchy.

It's so literal. So solid. Impenetrable. You can't think about it or question it (because it doesn't make sense, at least for more than a brief encounter with critical thought*).  But you can get into it and bathe in it, wear it like a suit.  Bejazzle yourself with it. Hang it from your truck.
​
But you need to conform to it.  What else are you going to do - this is definitional.  Because something about it feels good.  "Don't be a downer man!"  You don't want to be one of the losers.

​In order to be RW you need to live with at least one foot in a fantasy world.  Whether this is motivated by a psychological fear/escape function to avoid discomfort or for some other reason is hard to say. 

One wonders whether studies on sensory processing might point at emotional sensitivities to exploring new experiences and epistemological relativism.  Regardless, I think its still largely a skill issue - fortunately given that conservatism is clearly maladaptive.

But this fakeness, this unreality core to the worldview helps make sense of its susceptibility to grifters, whether conmen, cult-leaders/preachers, CEOs, demagogues or strongmen.  It needs to *buy-in* to something as it is *always selling something*.  Because that is what a fake is. Right?

You're pawning something off that is not original.  Ronald Reagan was an actor.  Christopher Columbus was a rapist.  Jefferson owned slaves.  Socialists ended child labor.  Jerry Falwell is a piece of shit.  Etc. But you put on the plastic jewels, the tactical fanny pack, the suit and tie. And you laugh at the hippies and their broccoli. You laugh at the liberals with their liberalism.

Because that's what liberalism does: it steps outside of the comfortable ooze. It compares, evaluates on its own terms. It asks questions and isn't satisfied with "common sense" or "just because".

Hah - so the liberals are the "real" ones and the conservatives are "fake"?  Good one!

Yes, in a way. But what is real? We've returned to epistemology, values and knowledge.  Which in the modern world is basically liberalism.  The way we get to generally agreed upon truths is via liberal means.
​
And part of this is the value of tolerance and pluralism, which means accepting weirdos living in fake worlds full of magic. They just can't make policy with us, or make rules that affect our lives with their magical bullshit.  But that is by definition *illiberal* and we're not about that.

​        ​The basic conservative worldview, to most of which even the moderate would agree, consists of the following: property is supreme, especially in matters of business, and with a sort of totalitarian structure in the workplace in which the boss is “daddy”, and daddies provide jobs. (In this arrangement unions are a threat to his domination.)  We need low taxes and low regulation, preferably by the business interests themselves.  Also few restrictions on campaign financing as this  will be taken care of by the invisible hand of the market.
       The environment is subservient to man, whether you look at it as a religious dominion thing or just business.  It’s always subservient to growth.  There’s something feminine about nurturing and something masculine about exploitation.  Besides, if we mess it up more growth will solve it.  The immigrant is welcome if he is the right kind of immigrant (depending on what decade it is, his race and income), if he “came the right way”.  But we really get nervous about amnesty cases because let’s face it foreigners are scary, and don’t get us started on people with messy or hardship situations.
       The military projection of power, and by extension man’s right to project power with his gun is important.  Both represent strength, courage and patriotic values, which all align with conformity and a seemingly procrustean ethic of white, patriarchal, heterosexual Christian nationalism.  The lives of people of other lands are literally not worth the lives of Americans, and are expendable as such if need be. This is American supremacy, which seems to resemble awfully closely a similar kind of supremacy.  “Judeo-Christian” and “Western” or “Anglo” heritage and traditions are revered,  and the US is proclaimed a Christian nation.  Attempts to rectify social justice issues such as race, gender, sexuality or religious pluralism and civil rights are too often politically correct, socially justice warrioring wokeness.  What this country needs is more religious freedom, meaning the ability to deny others their rights based on Christian beliefs if you want to force women to carry children to term, refuse to serve them in your business, or force them to listen to your prayers in their school.
            There is basic agreement with most of this amongst conservatives.  Some are more liberal on social issues, some are more isolationist on foreign policy, etc.  But even the moderate basically goes along with the main outlines.
            Over the years, as progressivism has beat them over the head with reality, they have had to soften on things such as race, gender or sexuality; only the extremists now call for segregation, taking the vote from women, etc.  But that’s merely conservatism tempered by liberalism.  The basic assumptions are the same:
           
      Unfettered free market capitalism a miracle of growth, prosperity and scientific achievement.  Polluting & destroying the environment is a natural right... people can make more money and buy better land.Traditionalist (white, Christian) Western family values ... bedrock of superior civilization.  Limited government... welfare state & services create dependencies that rob people of agency.  People need churches and families, not state help... It builds values.  Poverty and social dysfunction are the result of individual and cultural problems, not society.  It's not our problem.  

            A deeper understanding of this worldview must grapple with the fact that, as we are all motivated both consciously and unconsciously, so too is the conservative.  But I would argue the conservative operates far more unconsciously than does the liberal, owing to the particular epistemological requirements of the conservative ideological structure.

Liberal Epistemological Authority
            The liberal is not satisfied with traditionalist epistemological authority.  That is, there is rarely a religious or secular dogma that the liberal points to as the “final word” on an argument.  Instead, whether the question is one of morality or fact, the liberal reaches to more inquisitive and open-ended forms of analysis.  What are other perspectives?  What do other cultures say?  What is the historical and sociological context?  What does the data show?  Let’s compare and contrast the different sides.  Let’s engage with the art, music, poetry made on the subject and see if there is some intuitive meaning there to grasp.  Empiricism.  Logic.  Skepticism.  Humility.  Relativism.  These are all words in the liberal vocabulary, and which since at least the enlightenment have informally and formally been codified into the institutions and laws of liberal democracy. 
            The university and institutions of journalism are the practical clinics of liberal philosophy – putting into practice its values and methods of gathering knowledge and deriving truths.  However, one will note when examining the output of the conservative movement over the past century, the relative paucity of quality contributions made by conservatism to these projects.  Apart from a few fields of study in the academy and avenues of journalistic inquiry (both having mostly to do with apologia for the conservative worldview itself) the offerings are scant.  The main output conservatives seem to have been toiling at can best be described as propaganda; their aim has been the defense and propagation of their dogma, with very little regard for self-critique, analysis, or really much of what we would consider as testing before liberal modes of epistemological authority.
            Funnily enough, there is a word that is by all accounts a common pejorative, and yet describes much of the conservative project: “illiberal”. The standard definition is “restricting of rights or freedoms”.  This would surely sound ugly enough to a conservative.  After all, conservatives love to speak of “freedom”.  However, their definition of freedom is defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes.  They often discuss “religious freedom”, by which they mean the right of a Christian to practice their faith to the exclusion of the rights of another, e.g. in being allowed to deny services to someone in a place of business, or to require others to listen to an authority give their sermons in a school or workplace.  The costs of their own liberation always seems to be born out by someone else, some other lower status group.  They speak of “freedom” in the context of not being required to pay taxes for things they don’t like, or to follow regulations, or to listen to phone menu options in languages other than English, or to have suffer the indignity that some employer somewhere might be giving extra attention to a prospective hire who is not a white, male heterosexual. ​
            All of these grievances begin with a chauvinist assumption about a hierarchy of traditional social roles.  Sometimes they want things just as they are, but more often they want to return to some imagined past when “things were the way they were supposed to be”, to some pleasant time when everyone was mostly happy and nice and no one was trying to rock the boat, i.e. the power dynamics that enabled people like them to enjoy privileged status were not being challenged.
            Now, many conservatives will balk at the suggestion that their worldview has an illiberal – selfish even – motivation.  Certainly the moderate conservatives will.  They will point out that “they don’t see color”, that they believe in women working alongside men.  However, here I raise two previous points: that of traditionalist epistemological authority and unconscious motivation. 

Traditionalist Epistemological Authority
           If one has not spent the time unpacking one’s own prior assumptions about why they believe what they believe, if they have merely accepted standard dogma about what is true – absorbed maybe through one’s family upbringing or social circles, without testing their ideas against an authority higher than the thought terminating clichés of “it’s always been that way” or “just because” or “it’s just natural”, etc., then one will not have the proper intellectual tools to deal with the complexities of modern life.
            When one learns of facts about patterns of injustices, or different perspectives about living in different parts of the country or the world, or having different beliefs or values, how would one go about processing this new information?  How to compare and contrast, how to categorize, how to dispassionately observe, objectively analyze and possibly accept and even change one’s mind?  Because at every step, if one’s guiding principle when dealing with new information contrary to prior assumptions is: my view is correct because it has always been that way/it is a natural law/because it just is, then the new information must be wrong by default.  What is the point of debate?
            Now, certainly conservatives debate.  In fact they love to debate.  Charlie Kirk, founder of the enormous conservative political action organization Turning Point USA, was famous for showing up on college campuses and challenging students to debate.  But what was really going on there?
            Charlie Kirk was engaging in a form of illiberal debate.  That is, he had his mind made up, and had no interest in learning anything new about the world.  In fact, he probably had no real interest in teaching others about his own views – precisely because he had no real interest in his own views.  If one’s traditionalist epistemology does not allow an expansive and honest examination, with the possibility of serious deconstruction, how well can one ever know what ones own beliefs truly are? 
            Rather, Kirk’s goal was to persuade with an intent to win over and gain power for his movement.  Kirk wanted his side to grow.  He wanted to enlarge his status and his command over others.  He wanted more privileges and political opportunities for himself and his fellow travelers.  To this end, it didn’t even really matter how accurate he was with the facts.  It didn’t matter how honest he was, or respectful – unless it was useful to his political ends.  He would be cordial in person, but then would make vile racist remarks later on in interviews. 
            But he was a far right MAGA extremist,  a moderate conservative reading this might think.  “I, however, honestly believe in what I say.  I am not a racist.  I am not a sexist.”  Well, they are going to love this: yes, you are.  Go ahead and take a deep breath, because I realize this accusation is an old and frustrating one for conservatives.  They’ve heard it from the left for years.  In fact they’ve built up quite a repertoire of catchy come-backs.  “Oh there you go again, playing the race card.”  “Why is it always about race with you?” etc.
            Let me explain, and in so doing I think I can elaborate on how it is I believe the conservative worldview creates cognitive dissonance in its holder, and how this leads to mechanisms of unconscious bias and faulty thinking.
​
Unconscious Motivation
            As I mentioned previously, unexamined assumptions leaves one vulnerable to ignorance.  When it comes to issues of inequality, central to the left critique of conservatism and its core philosophy of system maintenance, conservatism is unable to properly evaluate evidence of inequality in all its forms: race, gender, sex, religious, class, etc.; its thesis basically precludes it (by some miracle, the US constitution has eradicated systemic inequality from the country and where it exists only culture or the individual is to blame).  This is why the only real scholarship or journalism on inequality for the past century essentially seeks to defend its core proposition.  There’s hardly even any corollary inquiry into basic sociological data or fact finding, not even apolitical or subjective analysis – just simple record keeping of the facts as they are that don’t specifically try and liberate somehow the conservative project from its perpetuation of hierarchical systems.  (As far as I know of, I should note.  There may be some conservative toiling away in a black studies department doing quantitative research on the prevalence of arsenic levels in southern counties with high black populations.  But I could be wrong.)
            So, from a place of ignorance, one has two options: learn or continue to ignore.  To remain a conservative is to remain ignorant.  And so one must now accept the bargain.  To maintain the comfortable traditionalist garb, with its easy answers and justified privileges, its lazy and unearned social status, one must take up arms against the cognitive dissonance that reality now hammers down daily.  Fortunately, the human mind is designed with many mechanisms for this.  There is a Wikipedia page with a long list of cognitive biases that serve as a sort of protective cocoon from which one might work.  As the facts land their blows, one might consult another Wikipedia page with a great many logical fallacies one might employ to put their opponent off guard. 
            The nice thing is this type of battle can be done completely unconsciously. The conservative can think they are operating entirely in good faith, with perfect objective honesty, and yet to an outside observer appear to almost live in a fantasy world and speak in circles.  To those of us on the left, I think this explains well the perspective we have after reading even the most moderate conservative writer.  Why do they keep writing about the same thing?  Have they ever left the country?  Why does it seem that something has to happen to them for them to ever understand anything?
            Conservatism is not just a different opinion, or even a different value system.  Is it a fundamentally constipated worldview.  It is incapable of processing the modern world, and more seriously – our form of liberal democratic government, with its guaranteed pluralism, rule of law, respect for human rights and true guarantee of liberty for all. 
            Current events have not shown a break with conservatism, but an apotheosis of it, and one we would be wise to shame from society for good.

​A basic thesis I’ve been arguing for a bit now is that conservatism is basically a rotten worldview, as it is fundamentally about protecting traditionalist hierarchies of privilege, generally along race, gender, class, etc. lines.  As this is an immoral desire, it must resort to illiberal epistemologies to justify itself, because liberal knowledge-making requires methods and values contrary to its purpose.  This is essentially a framework for fascism: the domination and subjugation of others based on a framework of justified superiority.
However, this is a big lift.  The biggest problem is how much it relies on an accusation of unconscious motivation.  While the far right is more comfortable being explicit about its hateful and domineering motivations, and one can easily point to conscious illiberalism, centrist conservatism has always maintained distance from its more odious bedfellows.  When accusations of illiberalism are made, it takes great offense, sufficiently such that it has become a standard talking point to throw the accusation back at the accuser.  Terms such as the “race card” or “reverse racism” or “race hustler” are all indicative.
But members of protected classes – historically marginalized groups that have been the subject of hate by those who would seek to exploit or otherwise oppress them – have always known the psychological games of the oppressor.  They will smile with perfidy and deny their actions just as they are doing them.  This form of gaslighting is merely another form of abuse.  And it is especially effective on members outside the protected class who do not possess direct experience of the abusers’ actions, or who have not taken the time to learn the history.  Without this context, the abuser is able to use polite manners and gentile language to hide their true motivations.
And yet, here we still must parse a deeper dilemma – the fuzzy line between conscious and unconscious motivation, or the degree to which there exists an integrity between one’s self-conceived values and one’s actual actions.  This is a universal human flaw.  We all imagine ourselves as somehow more aligned with who we wish to be than who we really are.  After all, most of our day is spent in the hustle and bustle of performing the various demands of life: taking care of ourselves, our families, our relationships, working, engaging in hobbies, etc.  How much time do we really have for self-reflection?  And when we have world-views that happen to misalign with reality, this presents a cognitive strain.  When we believe the world is – or should be - one way, and yet we see or are shown that it is another, what are we to do with this information?  What if accepting it means creating friction in our social relationships with friends and family?  What if our very identity is threatened?
I believe that this is what happens in the minds of conservatives, who by definition hold to a worldview that is epistemologically constipated and leads to a sort of Irritable Cognition Syndrome, where one must develop coping mechanisms to reduce this friction between belief and reality to protect the cohesion of one’s ego narrative.  Returning to the examples above, if one holds a belief or acts in a way that is aligned with their conservatism, and yet is demonstrably racist, they can either go through the laborious process of learning and changing – which is definitionally not conservative, they can live with the friction – which is uncomfortable and confusing, or they can soothe themselves by shifting the blame back on to the accuser and thereby distracting themselves from their own incoherence.
So, the problem with all of this is that is can feel very hand-wavy.  When you lay it all out, when you look at the history, the context, the patterns, the social and psychological theory it is quite well grounded in evidence.  But it feels almost ad hominem – that the problem with conservatism isn’t a particular belief but an individual psychological problem.  And yet, I would argue that is both.  It is a system of belief that creates psychological problems.
Secondary to this cognitive issue relates directly to its belief in power, and that is capital accumulation.  Conservatives know that money equals power, and that the more money one has, the more power one has.  The narrative they wish to tell about their worldview is one of “freedom” and “limited” government”, that a government system in which an economy is allowed to flourish with as few regulations as possible will allow individuals to maximize their potential to apply their time and effort so as to amass wealth and prosper, and in this environment with all other individuals being free to do the same society as a whole will grow rich together.  Only those who do not apply themselves will be left out of the bounty.
The problem of course, is that while there is some truth in this, it is a simplistic fairy tale that leaves out many very real contingencies of how societies work, not the least of which being the fact that power is frequently zero sum, and the more an individual accumulates, the less another individual has.  Democracy is quite literally a mechanism designed to, if not prevent this problem, ameliorate it.   I won’t bother going any further into grand critiques of capitalism, as the history of left wing thought has done that quite well. 
 
Instead I will return to theme.  Imagine you are a conservative who truly believe capitalism is all – or let’s say mostly - rainbows and puppies.  At the very least, tinkering with it too much would be a road to tyranny.  And yet you are shown evidence that currently, and historically, generations of many millions of people are being exploited under this system, while generations of others are doing the exploiting.  The obvious answer is that you come up with excuses and rationalizations, as we discussed above.  Now, this is by no means something that only happens on the right.  The left experiences cognitive dissonance and makes rationalizations too!
 
But what does it do about it?  Let’s zoom way out to the institutional level, because I think here this is helpful to see the larger dynamic.  Modern liberal democracies rely on universities and journalism as foundational epistemic pillars for democratic knowledge-making.  What contributions has conservatism made to academia?  Apart from a handful of quality scholars generally squirrelling away on a few narrow topics, they are simply absent from the vast majority of disciplines.  So it goes for journalism and media.  Where are the news outlets doing the hard-nose work of investigating the systems and structures, the relationships of power in society?  The vast majority of them are essentially partisan propaganda machines pumping out fodder for ideologues to clap along to.  We might as well add the arts to our epistemological foundation here as well, as literature, visual arts, music all have their place in bringing human expression to the demos.  Here too, of course, conservatism hardly musters more than tasteless and tired facsimiles of popular commercial products.
 
Liberal epistemology is designed to transcend the traps of human cognition.  Just as the scientific method relies on empiricism, objectivity and philosophic doubt, so too do liberal values rely on notions of pluralism and humanism – deconstruction, analysis, contrast, comparison, invention, reality testing.  It isn’t perfect, but this is part of the design.  When asked why, one is never allowed to say “just because.”
 
But “just because” is a powerful device.  It is a signal that the end of communication has been reached.  The end of discourse, the end of dialogue, the end of exploration, the end of learning, the end of thought.  My way or the highway.  Love it or leave it.  It is an authoritarian impulse, an implication of force.  And when combined with cultural supremacy, with a desire for hegemony, it slides into fascism.  It is a form a violence in which the physical contingency has not yet come, but waits just beyond the horizon.  It is a drawing of a line, the crossing of which blood will need be spilled. 
 
Trump has ushered in the Just Because phase of American conservatism.  This was the flight 93 manifesto, written by Michael Antonand published in the Claremont Review of Books in 2016, which analogized America has having been taken hostage by the terrorism of liberalism, and the only option left was to storm the cockpit and take the control by force.  John Eastman, who argued Trump’s 2020 election was stolen wasa Claremont Institute Senior Fellow.
 
Those arguing for a true conservatism – a “liberal conservatism”? – would say that while this element on the right has always been there, it should not define conservatism.  But is this truly the case?  There has clearly been a large (former) mainstream of conservatism that would have rejected much of what MAGA currently says and does.  But is MAGA not merely admitting openly what many conservatives had always believed, or only pretended not to believe?  Or maybe had not wanted to believe but was a direct consequence of their beliefs that were too ugly to admit even to themselves?  When they favored segregation, what was that about?  Or when they wanted women to stay in the kitchen?  Or when they believed gay men were pedophiles?  Or when we should support murderous dictators all over the world because even that was better than post-colonial citizens demanding their capital back from aristocracies and realizing communism was the only way to get it, especially when the wealthy were being backed by the CIA, also supported by conservatives?
What part of it does not just go back to protecting the privileges of existing social hierarchies, and keeping people down when they advocated for more liberty in their in their workplaces, in their bedrooms, in their bodies, in their lives?  While only the far right radicals were saying the quiet part out loud, were not the moderates quietly making excuses during polite discussions with liberals on Sunday shows and as they made mild compromises in congressional offices?  Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter whether conservatism is moderate or extreme, as this is where it has all led.  Their emphasis on  dogmatic traditionalism and propaganda, their single-minded quest for capital accumulation gave them power in the form of lobbying, think tanks, government capture, and finally the wholesale dismantling of democracy.  To not see a bright line leading in one direction over many decades would seem to require a particular historical and political, if not psychological blindness.
 
So what role is there for conservatism in a modern liberal democracy?  I say none.  If by conservative, all we mean is a pragmatic approach in which no idea is taken too easily, or no action too hastily, that is of course very reasonable.  But if by conservatism we mean “free” markets and “limited government”, we can throw both terms in the trash.  The first is incoherent.  Markets are vastly complex, requiring things like schools, roads, libraries, parks, healthcare, food safety inspectors… the list goes on.  What is property?  What is an aristocracy?  What is labor?  What is democracy in the workplace?  All of these are fundamental questions that require depth, not bromides about “freedom”.
 
The latter, “limited government”, was originally meant to simply mean a government limited in power by its citizens – democracy, basically.  It was not meant to mean “small government”, free of regulation, taxation, etc.  To suggest as such is traditionalist logic placing epistemic authority in “just because”.  If one takes seriously the notion of a government limited to rule by its citizens, the idea of regulating campaign finance and lobbying would be essential to safeguarding the citizen’s right to have their voice represented equally.  Further still, the health, safety and access to basic needs of the citizen would also seem to be a necessity for maintaining this access.  In this way, one could make a strong case that a well-regulated, socialist state that guarantees access to basic services to each citizen would meet the requirements for a ‘limited government’.
 
Conservatism was always a lie.  Maybe it was comforting, inspiring even.  But it was a dangerous distraction at best.  For those who still cling to its bloody remnants, I suggest to drop it entirely and embrace a more serious worldview, one compatible with modern liberal democracy in all its beautiful, pluralistic complexity.  Accept its fundamental humility, its decency, its respect for different cultures, its patience for inquiry.  But come to terms too with its seriousness – it’s nuanced understanding of tolerance: that discourse and behavior that serve to rationalize or justify the dehumanization or humiliation of others based race, gender, sexuality, etc. will not be tolerated.  Leaving people without medical treatment, or paying people poverty wages will not be tolerated.  Allowing some people to become absurdly wealthy will not be tolerated as it is not only immoral but a threat to our very democracy.  As the saying goes, we live in a society.  Get used to it.

​I’ve been trying to get my head around some of the foundational structures of thinking that motivate our political thought and put together this chart.
I'm open to this being a straw man of the right.
However, I'm convinced moderate conservatives are only so to the degree they've accepted tenets of liberalism. The degree to which they identify as conservative is their rejection of core liberal values. "Smaller government and deregulation" they would argue are about freedom - ostensibly a liberal value.
However, in practice it is anything but, as it is an oligarchic freedom, as historical and sociological evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that while something like "free market entrepreneurship" has focused investment in growth areas of the economy and contributed to human flourishing in health and comfort, this has also come at a terrible cost in terms of generational poverty which by definition is the opposite of freedom.
If, in aggregate, even more have been brought out of poverty by this "rising tide", this is a moral proposition in which millions are essentially being sacrificed to live in chains for the benefit of some future wealth created elsewhere - hardly a burden any individual ought to be asked to bear.
Furthermore, the bargain rests upon the premise that this "law of the jungle" type scenario is the only choice. It is one in which, let's face it, an upper class will continue to ride out comfortably (born out rather garishly in the proponents of this philosophy having always been the owners of capital who themselves bear the fruit in their lifetimes while the poor suffer for some future generation. "Yes, I know you live stressed out in a dangerous neighborhood next to the toxic plant we just deregulated but we really can't raise your wages because that would impede the growth that will lift your great grand-daughter out of poverty.").
They enjoy reminding us that the only alternative is totalitarian communism and look how that turned out, ignoring of course the entire concept of a mixed economy and the myriad ways in which economies might be designed in which everything is on the table from socialized healthcare to daycare, to groceries to sectoral bargaining, to free college education to extremely high marginal taxes on wealth, etc., etc.
So what then is this position if not a fig leaf over the deeper motivation which is basically self-interested comfort with the status quo, invariably involving personal privilege and acceptance of all manner of bigotries that serve to lubricate the gears of oppression and order amongst the hierarchies propping up the powerful. Of course, the dismal science of economics allows all sorts of bunk to creep in, padding the walls of the tunnels through which the charlatans bore, coming in not with liberal intent but with greedy, unwittingly motivated self-interest.
 
 

​Something interesting about hate is how much it relies on dishonesty, both internally and externally.  I think we naturally recoil at it – we have to learn to overcome our revulsion to its wrongness, to its irrationality and illogic, to the obvious pain it causes.  We face a choice and must either fight or embrace it, or ignore it (which is maybe another way of embracing it).

Today we see so clearly the many paths it travels, the murky ways it winds around the minds of our fellows and warps their thinking.  We see the phantasms is creates for them and which they try – often seemingly earnestly – to pass off upon others.  When I was young, I remember hearing a conservative critique about Black Entertainment Television (BET).  Why is it OK for there to be a BET but not a WET, a White Entertainment Television channel? 

Now, this was 30 years ago, and even then, as a teenager I knew enough of black history and the civil rights movement to know the obvious answer (which I won’t bother with here because it’s not even worth it).  This was not coming from an explicit white nationalist.  This was standard, basically mainstream – if a tad provocative – conservative thought.  You can still find this critique, and many worse examples on the mainstream right today.   The theme is always the same: to diminish, to deny, to denigrate the black experience of racism in America. 

The corkscrew turns of excuse-making and misdirection, of blame-shifting and all manner of fallacy spill out in a toxic mess of something called conservative ideology.  But it’s really just hate at its core.  Economics, psychology, criminal justice, genetics, evolution, education, religion and any other popular political subject gets bent into service.   

There is no science or research to back up any of it.  No lived experience.  No data.  Nothing expressed in art or poetry.  It is hate that is too ugly to be named outright.  And so it must be dressed up.  It must be hidden behind euphemism and implication, pseudoscientific hand-waving and misapplied academic imprimatur.   Over the years many tactics have been tried, and many have succeeded in subtly shifting the discourse. 

Something obvious to black Americans and minorities who experienced racism first hand didn’t need to learn to see it.  Those on the radical left who studied racism and bigotries could learn to see the connections.  But the assault was so broad and cacophonous, so subtle and hard to pin down.  Did they really mean that?  How could you know what is in a man’s heart?  It was hard to prove. 
 
Liberal tradition encourages pluralism and open-minded thought.  Bad ideas ought to be discussed.  Hold them in the light of truth so as to expose their flaws!  But there is a weakness to this tolerance.  Once an idea is shown to be clearly wrong, it is time to move on.  What hate is, what causes it and what perpetuates it has been clear enough for quite some time.  It is a hierarchy in which an arbitrary marker of some group is determined to be superior to another and thus deserving of more rights.  This has been, and remains one of humanity’s great evils.  We have codified it in law with the concept of Protected Classes: groups historical discriminated against on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, or other characteristics. 

And although, sadly, too many of us are denying even this truth, most still agree that this is wrong, that this is hate.  But hate isn’t honest.  Hate wears masks.  Hate deceives the wearer into believing the unthinkable: that they don’t hate.  “I am not a racist”, are words not uncommonly found coming from people who are indeed quite comfortable with racism.

So, as we see the modern conservative movement awash in open displays of brutal hatreds towards all manner of protected classes – President Trump seems to have a go at each one on an almost daily basis.  (As he has himself stated “I am the least racist person in the world”.)

It is my contention that the right wing has always given safe harbor to hate.  Even in its most charitable description, an ideology of free markets and limited government, it is essentially an ideology of protecting a system in which property owners can consolidate their wealth free from government interference.  History is clear that this leads directly to more and more accumulation of capital in the hands of fewer and fewer hands.  Capital, no more so than in the absence of government regulation, equates to power.  And given our country’s peculiar history of slavery and settler colonialism, Christianity and Jim Crow, we are literally talking about the consolidation of White Christian Power. 

There are stories you can tell about competition and free will and trickle-down theory and any number of other fantasies about “opportunity” and the “land of dreams”, and I’ll grant you that while some of it is debatable, much of it is complete bunk from a scientific perspective.  Conservatism has always been about telling a story to justify why those on top should feel OK being on top because those on the bottom deserve being there.
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But we’re all seeing more clearly than ever how much this was just a part of the lie.  The only difference now is that the movement felt the need to come out and say it out loud.  They want their White Entertainment Television and they don’t want to be ashamed about it.
Oh, and don’t complain.  They might just send you away.

​I just emailed this to The Free Press:
 
Dear The Free Press,
I am writing to you because of your reputation as champions of bold, heterodox thinking.  You are known to take brave stances that the stodgy, mainstream press has long been afraid to publish.  While universities across the countries bow their heads to communist and antifa-sympathizing student radicals, you firmly plant your flag in the firmament and say, “No, more.  This ends here.”

So, I would like to propose that you allow me to - free of charge – provide a one hour lecture to your staff at a day and time of your choosing.  My topic will be as follows: your absolute ass-pilfered, morally constipated garbage-brained gum-fuckery.  The contents of your intestines have somehow replaced your brains.  Where your bunghole once was, your eyeballs must now be, because you couldn’t see your way out of a shit-filled diaper.  Your cultural references lack the sophistication of a greasy little cockroach condom.  Your pedantry is barely risible due to the simple fact that its inarticulate blather is hardly more coherent than the pus exploding from a dead skunk’s rotting corpse.  The most horrific farts I have ever smelled have had more jeua de vivre than your nihilistic grifting confidences.    The way your pseudo-intellectual fumblings scour the American neo-fascist underbelly, searching tentacle-like for erogenous positions has no doubt earned you legitimate financial and institutional scalps.  And I imagine they will fit well onto your scabrous pate, soiled as it is after being plucked not only of every moral fiber but so too of anything resembling human skin.  And in the end maybe this is what your ultimate form will reveal: a cacophonous simulacrum of the angry man, a blistered plastique in the form of human hate, nothing but inorganic, toxic oozes, more manure than man.

Please Be In Touch,
 
If anyone there reads it, no doubt they will miss the point.  Which is that their shrill outrage over college students shouting down or refusing to platform speakers and calling it illiberal is hypocritical when I propose they invite me to give them a lecture in which I spew vile hate at them.

To put a finer point on it, to have a CK or any of countless other RW ghouls speak at your college means having them say either explicitly or imply the racial or cultural inferiority of minorities, of women, of other religions, of sexual identities being psychologically damaged, or dangerous.
Nothing I wrote in that letter touched on anyone's identity at The Free Press.  There was no broad claim that transcended and trapped the individual into membership of a broader, delegitimized class based on some arbitrary feature.

Every insult I lobbed essentially came down to personal failure.  There is at least in insults of this nature an acknowledgement of the person - that they may have failed, but they themselves *could have done better*.

​Bigotries on the other hand (which the FP loves to rescue) make no such allowance.  There is simply no escape.  This is why their logic is ultimately at best caste-based and at worst genocidal.
So any umbrage one might take at the absurdity of sitting through a lecture such as I proposed, imagine how much darker and infuriating one must be in which the words are not mere insults but directed at one's entire social class.
 
And then, adding to this insult, we have civic institutions asking everyone to politely go along for the ride.  Sit down, shut up and be good boys and girls.

Of the many indignities faced by being a 21st century human, having to place one's faith in expert consensus ranks pretty high.  The cold logic says that modern distributions of complex knowledge require a shared burden across society as no one can know all things.

Thus, the best laypeople have access to is a consensus formed within systems of knowledge, paying particular attention to the quality and accuracy of the consensus calculation.

In practical terms, this means outside our individual areas of expertise (which is 99.9% of things) we are forced to say "I don't know" and to rely on X or Y reference to established consensus view.
To argue against this logic is difficult.  Sure, many issues do not enjoy consensus.  In these cases, the best one could do is to be familiar with the strongest positions.
 
But putting that aside, it is too often the case that consensus views are challenged by non-experts.
This is modeling in popular discourse, and non-consensus views are routinely promoted, often for "clicks", as there is something titillating about presenting a narrative between two opponents, a David vs. Goliath, even. 

And when the two sides represent values laded with cultural significance, the event becomes a passion play.
 
I don't think it's new to say we've been witnessing an erosion in trust in expertise.  And maybe we can add mythmaking -  and identity reifying and taking up space within the void.

It's not hard to see how illiberalism thrives in this environment.  I've elaborated before on my understanding of the RW twin pillars of epistemic authority being traditional religious and secular cultural dogma, and the LW pillars being the diffuse tools of liberal enlightenment, such as reason, humanism, pluralism, empiricism, skepticism, etc. 
 
Maybe RW thought is basically ideations of a basic human inclination to caution & pragmatism at its best, and to domination and retribution at its worst.

If you are experiencing these impulses, what better narrative for them than a fundamentalist narrative about a harsh God that you must obey a strict interpretation of, or strict social traditions you must follow?

The problem is these narratives are incompatible with modern society.  Sure, if you want to carve out your sect, they can be tolerated within a larger pluralistic framework, but they cannot *be* the framework.
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As humans develop and technology advances, as we learn more and more about ourselves, the more and more obvious this becomes. 
 
I think the RW realized this at some point and had a decision to make.  What was that famous "split" a few years back - between the Catholic guy who wanted to retreat to a sect, and the guy who wanted to start a war to dominate the world?
 
The truth in these two paths is this: they cannot play the game.  They either destroy the game, or play by themselves alone. 

In practical terms, the religious among them don't want to work next to a lesbian and not be able to tell her she's going to hell.  The secular among them want to - I guess - be able to say retard and not pay so much in taxes.

And I get it.  They are constantly angry.  The cognitive dissonance of modern life drives them crazy.  Everything reminds them of how wrong everyone else is.  They are always scared, confused, angry, and sad about "the way things used to be".

So, if we get through this, we don't include them in the constitution.  It's better this way.  Better for them because they don't have to worry any longer. 

​They can maybe find a state somewhere.  Call it Gulchnesia or something.  They can't do a colonialism thought - even though, man would that be up their alley!
 
What about Antarctica.  It would be perfect.  They could be tough and rough.  Survive off fish and seaweed. Build houses out of stone.
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Meanwhile out constitution would have a global wealth cap.  Guaranteed equality for protected classes.  Guaranteed education, healthcare, daycare.  I don't know what else.  Some kind of socialist shit. I'm no expert.