​        ​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.
 
 

​One of the almost defining features of conservatism is a personality trait of toughness or indifference to the suffering of others.  We all fall somewhere on this spectrum of concern.  I might show my daughter “tough love” by not giving in when she cries for a cookie.  I might support giving the government money to provide aid to a foreign country.  There are complex reasons for any given attitude in a specific situation.  But overall, conservatives have a more callous sensibility about what is necessary to do for others. There are many caveats, one being how close they feel towards the person.  If they are kin, or of an affiliate class (culture, religion, etc.), they are more willing to extend grace. But in general, much in what they do and say (or do not say), and especially in contrast with more liberal responses.
There are many cliches, nicknames and stereotypes about this.  Conservatives literally made a push to brand something called “compassionate conservatism” in the early oughts.  When they sometimes refer to liberals as “bleeding hearts”, “pinkos”, or supporters of a “nanny state”, they are speaking to a general tendency on the left to want to do things for other people, and a tendency of those on the right to leave people to fend for themselves.  Of course, there could be very thoughtful arguments given the context.  There is a vague sense of behavioral conditioning often underlying attitudes about action in which a theory of learning is being applied.  If I give my daughter a cookie when she cries, it will reward her crying behavior.  If we give people food stamps, it will reward their behavior.  However, it is often used imprecisely (certainly from a behaviorist point of view, which I won’t go into here), showing a lack of understanding about how operant conditioning actually works.
It's difficult to tease out whether these attitudes are based on assumptions and ideas, or from some deeper, genetically programmed disposition.  Researchers have studied this and found general tendencies that appear detached from political leaning.  The classic example is the finding that conservatives seem to generally register disgust with more speed and intensity, while liberals tend to be more open minded and tolerant, when provided a variety of stimuli.  However, other research argues that while true for certain elicitors, political orientation is not biased toward elicitors in general.

​
But regardless of where it is coming from, it’s pretty clear that merely from what they say and do, conservatism is not known for its empathy and kindness towards others, and liberalism is not known for its hard-nosed emotional toughness. 
 
We might note here that gendering seems to be going on.  The traditional view of gender norms is of women, especially as mothers, being extra sensitive, empathetic, and nurturing, while men, especially as fathers, being less sensitive, empathetic and nurturing.  Mom holds you and kisses you while you cry.  Dad tells you to get up and try again.  Conservatives – obviously long supporting more patriarchal social systems – will explicitly argue for limited participation by woman in consequential roles because of assuming in them a femininity that is not “tough enough” to take charge of important matters.  Liberals do not argue for discrimination against men based on inherent characteristics. However, they will argue that specific traits of traditional masculinity are “toxic”, in the sense that they are ineffective and harmful for pro-social outcomes.  Conservatives may indeed see this as discrimination to the extent that they not only view these supposedly toxic traits as pro-social, but also as inherent traits.  For example, if speaking over others in a conversation, or otherwise engaging in behaviors that establish or seek to establish dominance, a liberal might argue this is learned behavior that reifies a patriarchy based not on inherent merit, but on arbitrary social control, and that it stifles productive participation from other members who would otherwise add to the conversation.  A conservative, on the other hand, might argue that men are inherently stronger, or more intelligent or wise, and that to ask a man to not talk over others is discriminating against him based on his sex.  They might also argue that talking over and dominating others is good because it benefits his group more, as well as a sort of sense that the behavior is justified because might makes right.
Now, zooming out a bit from the example of a conversation, you see how the basic shapes of conservatism and liberalism are coming into view.  On most issues, the conservative/right side is ultimately arguing in some way for traditional cultural hierarchies, while the liberal/left side is arguing against them.  This is a fundamental element of cultural propagation; as people interact, we develop behaviors and traditions that at any time are becoming more or less salient.  The right and left can in some sense be defined by nothing more than how much they want things to change and how much they want things to remain the same.
 
This can be difficult though, because depending on where cultural and social power lies at any given moment in history, current norms and traditions will be valued differently according to the right and left.  For instance, in 2025, the current mainstream tradition is that women and men, and people of any skin color, ought to be allowed to participate fully in society.  But some on the right explicitly want to take away the vote from women and limit minority immigration to the US, which would mark an extreme social change.  One could argue then that they are opposed to cultural tradition.  However, when you examine their own stated rationale, it is deeply rooted in a concept of a culture that is hyper-traditional, that of decades or centuries in the past.  Studies of fascism will point out that a “longing for ancient traditions” is one of its hallmarks.
It may be interesting here to examine the competing epistemologies of conservatism and liberalism.  When one seeks to make a case for their ideas, they must show that they are true, or real.  There is an evidentiary standard that must be met in order to convince others.  When a fact is not self-evident, it needs to be supported by some authority.  This could be the lived experience of a relevant subject, or trust in an expert opinion based in research or study, or the truth of a religious dogma taken on faith.  Or, it could simply be a sort of dogmatic righteousness based on an appeal to tradition.
 
The right, invested in “traditional” (I’m adding quotes now per our note about the contextual nature of tradition) culture, tends to rely on either the argument from religious text or from tradition.  One should do X “because the bible says so” or “ because we have always done it that way”.  Neither of these arguments are logical because they are not based in any truth deeper than what one might feel in their gut, and cannot be proved or disproved.  The authority provides no evidence or reasoning, and cannot change by new information.  It is tautologically in that the premise is proved by acceptance of the premise.  If the bible says homosexuality is wrong, than it is true because the bible is true, and the bible is true because it says it is true.  If tradition holds heliocentrism, then it is true because tradition is true, and tradition is true because it says it is true.  And so on.
 
Liberalism, invested in reforming or changing culture, uses neither religious dogma or tradition to make its arguments.  Instead, it relies on what came to be known centuries ago as enlightenment ideals: reason, logic, empiricism and above all else inquiry.  Religion and tradition are not sufficient authorities, and must be at least tempered, if not subsumed by deeper critical analysis. 
 
The right will of course often engage in critical analysis, but it is weak and underdeveloped.  It may use evidence, but be cherry-picked.  It may use expert authority, but only that of those who are not representative of the consensus in their field.  It may engage in rhetorical techniques designed not to edify but to obfuscate or distract.  It is no wonder that the great institutions of fact finding – academia and journalism – have always tilted left.  This is because a competitive rigor exists in which arguments and evidence are currency.  One cannot do research, write a theoretical paper or journalism that is serious and truthful by quoting scripture or producing pictures and quotes only from proponents of traditional culture.  This explains why right wing universities or news outlets tend to be unserious and lack sophistication, lacking any real purpose other than to reify what its students and consumers already believe.
 
This epistemological schism can be tied directly to the gendered nature of the right and left paradigm.  For one to show the “feminine” trait of empathy, reflection, listening, etc., they must rely on a “slow” developing epistemology that embraces some degree of authority beyond religion or tradition.  It is an epistemology of practical objectivity that allows for an openness and trust that one does not have all the answers, that the answers aren’t always easy, and that perspective is always subjective.  This is a picture in which the ego is subservient to the environment, where new information is welcomed, and an egalitarian trust exists in which one must rely on and support others, even if the immediate benefit to the self is unclear and there are shades of gray.  It is about solidarity, community, and fellow man.
 
Alternatively, for one to show the “masculine” trait of stoicism, strength, individualism, toughness, etc., they must rely on a “fast” epistemology in which authority is immediately designated by religion or tradition.  It is an epistemology of hyper-subjectivity that is closed and distrusting in the answers of others that may conflict with one’s own understanding, that understanding is simple, and that subjectivity is irrelevant because one is already correct.  In contrast to the left/”feminine” epistemology, the environment is subservient to one’s ego, where new information is unnecessary, where one should not need to rely on others, especially when there is no benefit to the self and the truth is usually black and white.  It is about rugged individualism, establishing dominance, holding the line, defending the ego’s honor.
 
In a folding back on itself, our assumptions about gender and what associated traits we value in it can reinforce the very epistemological process by which we attempt to access truth. If we value traditional masculine traits as superior to feminine traits, we end up valuing a process that leads to a specific way of learning about truth in the world that reifies the very act of valuing those traits. Likewise, if we value a sort of gender-egalitarianism, we end up reifying those preferences.
 
There are many institutions and ideologies devoted to shoring up the ideologies of the right and left.  There may be some kernel of innate disposition to being on the right or left, however this is clearly overpowered by environmental learning, as demographic patterns of political belief show that one’s environment is far more determinative.  But it is important to understand how and why we come to the assumptions we do, and that move us either left or right politically.  

​A 2018 Pew research poll showed 73% of Republicans feel colleges are moving in the wrong direction, and 79% say professors bringing their political views into the classroom are a major reason for this[1].   This is nothing new; the political right has long disdained college education as being too liberal.  In the 1950’s Joseph McCarthy targeted liberal faculty members for supposed ties to communism[2], and The California Board of Regents began threatening to fire professors who didn’t sign loyalty oaths.[3]
 
It is true that today colleges are overwhelmingly liberal.  A 2016 study showed Democrats were represented in college faculty 11:1 over Republicans.[4]  A study in 2010 concluded that greater numbers of liberal than conservative professors was accounted for by career-path selection.[5]  However, while the right believes universities are indoctrinating students, a 2008 study, showed there was no evidence faculty ideology was associated with changed is student ideological orientation.[6]
 
But do conservatives value university education at all?  As long as it aligns with their worldview, yes.  Literature and the arts are acceptable as long as they privilege the Western Canon.  “Multiculturalism” – perspectives from non-European or non-white sources – has been derided for decades.  Art movements that do not express traditional realism are discounted.  History that strays into questioning narratives of western and US exceptionalism is deemed subversive.  The notion that traditionally dominant and powerful groups or ideas ought to be critically examined and not assumed as correct are to be avoided.  Sociology must not examine social hierarchies and systems that perpetuate inequality.  Entire fields of study such as ethnic or gender studies are dismissed as “activist” and illegitimate.  Economics, long a bastion of conservative thought, must assume that capitalism is the superior model and inquiries into its flaws or the exploration of alternative systems are inappropriate. 
 
Since its inception in the second half of the 20th century, one of the conservative movement’s founding causes has been to critique the leftward slant of the university.  Books like Buckley’s God and Man at Yale and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind have been popularizing, catalyzing forces in this line of thought.  Leo Strauss, a far right “founding father” of American conservatism, in his 1941 lecture on German Nihilism, argued that the rise of Nazism was due in no large part to the failures of a professoriate, caught up in liberal thought and attitudes, to teach the classics and thus provide disillusioned young German men a social vision that would inspire faith in social institutions so that they might have avoided the nihilism of Nazi rhetoric.
 
However, while Strauss explicitly rejected much of Nazi ideology, he was obviously sympathetic to many of its grievances about modern, progressive Germany.  He too, wanted to Make Germany Great Again, just not through war and racial cleansing so much as the privileging of traditional social hierarchies.
 
It is in conservative DNA to oppose what it views as the excesses of progress.  In its own telling, this doesn’t mean inquiry and reason per say, but rather the “right kind of” inquiry and reason.  As Buckley famously spoke of standing before history and yelling stop, shades of conservative thought range from complete rejection of modernity (a populist Retvrn to blood and soil, homogenous nationalism, with the salt-of-the earth farmer making everything by hand), to selective rejection of modernity with its “big government” social engineering programs and emphasis on the marginalized and oppressed.  Echoes of this instinct take us back at least as far as the French Revolution and its violent and messy guillotining of the monarchy.  (Modern far right figures such as Curtis Yarvin explicitly call for a return to Monarchy, albeit in a modern form with corporate boards and CEOs overseeing society through technocratic investments instead of an actual king, queen and their lords).  The French went too far, and wrought the unintended consequences of progressivism – a dismantling of traditional hierarchies that were central to the proper functioning of society. 
 
Post WWII, with the rise of the Soviet Union and its communist satellites around the globe, conservatism had a large and obvious foe in totalitarianism.  But while gulags, secret police and central planning were ripe targets for opposition, the underlying premise of communism - a Marxist critique of capitalism’s exploitative and oppressive nature - was more complex and nuanced, and likely a more difficult case to argue against.  Yet while Marxist or not (more often not), what was going on in universities was a project of deconstructing the very systems of power that communism had originally been designed to address.  By lashing the obvious critiques of 20th century communist totalitarianism to the critical analysis of traditional hierarchies and social structures going on in universities, conservatives were able to build a popular case against progressivism in all its forms. 
 
In the 21st century, with the ascendance of the far right in the US, it is not uncommon to hear the terms progressivism and even liberalism used interchangeably with communist or Marxist, despite multiple decades having passed since the fall of the Soviet Union.  However, even as old references are made to the realities of any communist state, only a dwindling percentage of the population will have any clear association with, the modern far right has been able to whip up new and generally fanciful fears and anxieties in the public. Cosmopolitan crime, border invasions, gay menaces and dark Democratic plots to take away American guns have become fruitful substitutions.
 
Yet beneath each of these political and social phantasms lies the same core impulse, that of weakening traditional hegemony.  The supremacy of the patriarchal, Christian, heterosexual and white ethnicity is under threat.  In this, conservatism is correct.  For more than two centuries, since at least the enlightenment, a vision of human rights has generally been ascendant.  From the overthrow of monarchism, to the abolition of slavery, to female suffrage, up through the civil rights era and gay liberation, traditional hierarchies have been under assault, and in the popular imagination, with generally favorable results.  The idea that an individual should have the right to an equal footing not determined by birth or body makes moral sense in a way that is hard to argue against when presented clearly and free from distractions and mendacious associations.
 
While tireless organizing and individual and community action have been instrumental in the success of this progress, academia has played a crucial role not only in providing the research, data and theory giving empirical support to moral consideration.  However, in a more abstracted yet maybe just as important way, the notion of academic inquiry itself has given us a posture in which we are able to objectively understand and communicate what it is we value in society.  Through countless hours of painstaking observation and analysis, universities have been the place where hundreds of thousands of humans have performed the work of holding up a mirror to society, allowing us to see more clearly not only what we do, but why we do it.  By rigorous examination, our systems of social organization are deconstructed, reconstructed and deconstructed again and again. 
 
And yet this process is the antithesis of the central conservative impulse to maintain tradition because it elevates authority to that which can be proven, not merely that which has existed.  In other words, there is no idea that is beyond critique, nothing is sacred but knowledge and truth.  This process is not linear, clean or obvious.  It requires patient debate and humility.  It requires an openness to having old ideas overturned.  It requires the courage to face the possibility that the truths we uncover may be ugly or uncomfortable, or require new moral obligations.  It is nothing so simple as opening a book and having the answers laid out in black and white.  It is fundamentally liberal and progressive, and while often conservative in practice, it is its opposite in spirit.


[1] The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of Higher Education, Pew, 8/19/2019

[2] "Sarah Lawrence Under Fire: The Attacks on Academic Freedom During the McCarthy Era". Sarah Lawrence College Archives

[3] Radin, Max. (1950). Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors (1915–1955)

[4] Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology, 2019, Econ Journal Watch

[5] "Five myths about liberal academia", Matthew Woessner, April Kelly-Woessner and Stanley Rothman Friday, February 25, 2011 Washington Post

[6] Yancey, George. "Recalibrating Academic Bias." Academic Questions 25, no. 2 (2012): 267–78.

In Leo Strauss’ 1941 lecture on German Nihilism, he argues Nazism arose from a nihilism he defines as ultimately in opposition to modern civilization.  This was provoked by progressive educators who, instead of taking seriously the worries about the immorality and debasement of tradition that progressivism wrought, and reminding their pupils of the strengths of the past, merely chided them for insufficient appreciation of modernity.  But this was counter-productive.  It only reinforced their anxiety over loss of moral rootedness and the spiritual comfort found in transcending the individual for the glory of the state.  Instead of turning to the modern, “open society”, they saw only two paths – either the “closed society” of communism, or nihilistic destruction and war against civilization.
 
For the Open Society meant a state of disintegration, a denial of human nature (covered over by sly fictions), and moral respectability only to the extent society remained closed.  Closed Society on the other hand meant a flag to whom one might pledge an oath, the constant awareness of sacrifice and self-denial, known facts about human nature, and connection to the sublime.  Yet since the only path to the latter form of society they could see ended in communism (which they despised) they felt their only option was destruction.
 
Strauss finds much to fault these young Nazis.  He views them as naïve and errant in their thinking, failing to see beyond their current provincial predicament.  Writing in 1941, he had yet to witness just how devastating their plan would come to be.  With historical hindsight, he delivers one of maybe the most absurdly wrong statements written in the 20th century.  Of Hitler, “He will soon be forgotten.”  A better scholar than I might know better what provoked this grave miscalculation.  A Jew born in 1899, who lived in Germany until 1932, he no doubt grasped their virulent antisemitism (although one wonders why he mentions it only in passing “Their anti-Jewish policy does seem to be taken seriously by the Nazis.”), and may have had good reason to avoid grappling with its enormity.
 
But a better explanation might instead be that Strauss himself has strong reactionary sympathies.  He spends a good deal of the lecture laying out just how right the Nazis were about the moral depravity of progressivism.  While it is not mentioned, one hardly need to imagine what Strauss has in mind when he cites approvingly the Nazi critiques of modern civilization.  He argues that civilization is defined by science and reason, and dismisses non-western cultures:
“The term civilization designates at once the process of making man a citizen, and not a slave; an inhabitant of cities, and not a rustic; a lover of peace, and not of war; a polite being, and not a ruffian. A tribal community may possess a culture, i.e. produce, and enjoy, hymns, songs, ornament of their clothes, of their weapons and pottery, dances, fairy tales and what not; it cannot however be civilized.”
Strauss seems to be in agreement that progressivism is decadent and immoral, with its “planetary societies” devoted only to production and consumption, and above all else, an almost narcissistic devotion to individual rights and personal satisfactions.  While not mentioned in the lecture, Weimar Germany was known for its liberalism.  While maybe not quite tolerant, it at least seemed to look the other way at expanding views of traditional hierarchies of race, gender and class.  This fact could not have been lost on Strauss.
 
The basic claim of the piece is not that the Nazis were nihilist reactionaries, but that they were the wrong kind of reactionaries.  He suggests at the end that the British, being of a different temperament than the French who gave in to their progressive passions, and the Germans, who clung to a fanciful pre-modern ideal, were able to weather this predicament of modern civilization and its discontentedness.  He ends with the line, “it is the English, and not the Germans, who deserve to be, and to remain, an imperial nation.”  In evoking imperialism as something to be deserved, Strauss reminds us just where his real allegiances lie. 

​Listening to a never-Trump podcast is always a gamble.  It’s mostly going after how awful Trump is, and maybe interesting enough insight into center-right concerns.  There seems to have been more self-interrogation earlier on in the MAGA takeover of the GOP, but lately it feels rare. 
 
On a recent episode discussing possible Kamala Harris VP picks, a brief list of policy preferences was presented.  Shapiro, the centrist Democratic Governor of PA, seems a favorite.  His antagonism of teachers’ unions, and support for school vouchers, fracking, and Israel loom large.
 
But taking apart any of those issues unpacks the fundamental racism of conservatism, and not only why it has given us MAGA, but why even the most moderate conservative positions cannot be extricated from racism.
 
None of this is going to be explicit racism.  But if when seeing inequality, pain and the mistreatment of people of color, one turns away and ignores it, or worse - creates fictions to explain it way, or make excuses for why immediate and intensive intervention is not only not require but too dangerous to try, one is preferencing the advancement of white supremacy.
 
Let’s look at these issues in order.  Antipathy for teachers’ unions and support for school vouchers are based on the same premise.  School reform is needed because schools are failing minorities.  Minorities are both poor because they don’t get quality educations because unions are protecting lousy teachers, and since they are poor, they can’t afford to live near good schools.  Vouchers can be used by the poor to go to non-union schools, get quality educations and rise out of poverty.  The “soft bigotry of low expectations” does the old right-wing triple-Lindsy of turning the critique around to say it is the left, actually, who are the racists because they don’t care about black poverty.
 
It’s a rickety story built on multiple failings both of logic and fact.  Poor kids start out without school-ready skills.  Their parents have little education themselves, and work for low pay that breaks families and introduces high levels of stress.  Housing markets force families into neighborhoods where generations of burden nurture the portion of people with anti-social behaviors.  Schools in these neighborhoods do their best, but making up for large scale social failures would require hard-to-imagine levels of academic intervention.  Yet the simplest intervention - in theory if not policy, would be not into schools but into a labor market that seems to require poverty in the first place.  For every poverty wage job, you definitionally get a poor household.  If all labor paid non-poverty wages, poverty would practically cease to exist. 
 
Yet for conservatives, supporting unions and fair wages is a non-starter.  From trickle-down, to growth theory, to (misapplied) ideas about operant conditioning and the reinforcing/punishing contingencies of “bettering oneself” through acquiring new skills and or hard work to achieve success, conservatism tells a story seemingly designed to avoid collectivism and the abstraction of capital from individual production to social production.  Deeper social theory here might productively lead to various strains of democratic monarchism (accumulation of wealth as a social good) and a conception of libertarian free will (pull yourself up by your bootstraps).  This story looks at persistent American racial inequality and is fine with a permanent underclass of low wage workers who historically have been disproportionately minority and there is no reason to think they won’t always be.
 
Fracking support seems a blend of pragmatic political maneuvering and avoidance of carbon regulation and government job creation.  The right has soft spot for blue collar workers who have become dependent on gas extraction. This is likely rooted in deeper racial affinities (fellow whites in the working class) and a story about the labor market providing good jobs without government involvement. 
 
No case needs to be made for how devastating climate change is, particularly for the global south and its largely non-white populations.  Fracking, responsible for a relatively small portion of total CO2 emissions, is a significant contributor nonetheless.  If people need jobs the government can create them in various ways, including incentivizing businesses to invest in these communities.
 
Yet this requires an acknowledgement both of the serious harm caused by climate change, as well as a belief that the government should fund interventions.  Yet a government of this sort would require increased taxes, and thus violate conservative notions about wealth and will such as mentioned above.  It would also require valuing the lives of poor Americans whites vastly more than the brown peoples who will bear the overwhelming brunt of climate death.
 
Regarding Israel, it will not be surprising to find a messy set of assumptions and values.  Israel was founded as a safe place for Jews.  The Greatest Generation fought against fascism for democracy, and Israel was a sort of prize at the end.  Arab neighbors are ungrateful at best and fascist or simply pathological at worst.  Israel must defend itself from the barbarians, even if it has to bend the rules to do so.
 
Where to begin?  Jews have come to be coded white, and among religious conservatives members in good standing of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  A bit of noble savage gilding takes place over the ones who started of good with the Old Testament but kind of lost their way when they failed to recognize Jesus as the Son of God.  This gets dark fast with the more fundamentalist types who have their own wicked fantasies about the final end for Jews.  But even leaving that aside, to see the settlements, the segregation, the vicious campaigns that target journalists and civilians, and to not feel horror, one can only but value the life of Jews and Arabs quite differently.
 
None of this is explicit, conscious, overt racism.  Yet the policy preferences and assumptions require a privileging of white people over people of color.  When you look at the toxic bigotry that has always lived in the corners of conservatism, seeing its bloom grow at varying rates of the decades, and that has now burst its seams to take control of the conservative American party, it is no surprise that what feeds the toxic element is not extrinsic to conservatism but rather intrinsic to its notions of government, capital, and apparently race.

Under a neoliberal framework, the criminogenic and anti-social effects of poverty must be denied and/or re-conceptualized as failures of institutions such as schools, criminal justice, corporate polluters, or government.
 
While corruption at various levels in each of these institutions is clear, they are the mere band-aids of a capitalism that refuses to reckon with poverty.  What’s more, this capitalism has strong levers over each of these institutions via lobbying and other forms of political capture, making even their attempts at triage ineffective at best.
 
But the neat trick neoliberalism does, in vainly trying to reconcile itself with free market conservatism, is allow for basic assumptions about property and employment.
 
Conservatism: poverty is caused by choice

• no need for institutions to begin with.

Neoliberalism: poverty is caused by institutional failures

• If we had good institutions, poverty would be erased.

 
Each assumes that our underlying economic system is either good or good enough, with varying degrees of quality institutions.
 
Yet even in this perfect world, we still have massive wage inequality and poverty.  Good schools, quality policing, racial, religious and gender harmony, strict environmental regulations will still not impede the fact that our economy runs on poverty level wages.  The experience of poverty might be a little better - healthcare, small class sizes with social supports, humane policing, environmental hygiene.  But capital will be so limited for so many that their housing will still be restricted to certain neighborhoods.  Spending will be limited and therefore stress high due to precarity.  Expendability will be high as low specialization/skills means their labor will be easily replaceable.  Political advocacy will be low due to social ostracism intrinsic to the economic devaluation of their work. 
 
All of this raises stress and promotes indignation towards those born to more capital who live as if their worth is greater due to all the privileges life has subtly afforded them. 
 
Wealth provides exponential access to agency.  Paying rent, investing, taking vacations, sending your happy kids to college, having nice things, not worrying about pollution or crime.  And if your wealth comes from your own labor, a great sense of pride reinforces one’s sense of worth, or social praise within one’s skin.  And should you require any additional help in reinforcing pro-social instead of anti-social behaviors, all these added reinforcing stimuli are available as well.
 
If human freedom can be limitedly defined as access to reinforcement, a certain level of relative  capital is by far the determining factor in this phylogenic growth across the lifetime.
 
From William Baum’s Understanding Behaviorism:
 
A group's culture consists of operant behavior shared by the group members, acquired as a result of membership in the group, and transmitted from one group member to another. Evolution of culture occurs in a manner parallel to shaping of operant behavior and biological evolution—by variation coupled with selective transmission. In cultural evolution, the pool of cultural practices possessed by a society, analogous to a gene pool, is the culture pool. The traits that produce culture are behavioral specializations, imitation, and social reinforcers and punishers. The replicators of culture (practices) are the activities of group members passed along by imitation and instruction. They include nonverbal practices like dietary selection and manufacturing, and also verbal practices like stories, sayings, and rules. Practices of social reinforcement and punishment are fundamental replicators of human culture. Group selection and cultural group selection resulted in evolution of cooperative breeding and other cooperative activities
 
This basic process is fundamental to our phenotype and so will exist in every social system.  But a social system that radically reduces wealth inequality so as to maximize access to reinforcers to the most number of people is the most just according to a moral principle of a human right to freedom and dignity.  To the extent that any system devalues this access, it is consequently immoral.

​I recently had to mute a thread that had followed on me making the observation that there were a lot of good things about conservatism.
 
My main point was thinking of conservatism as an impulse of caution, but read more specifically as principled positions, to which I must have been arguing the existence of which were good.
 
My intent was to take a deeper view, as conservative positions (as have those of progressives) have always changed, and so the best-faith position would be to think of the almost psychological political disposition, and principles that follow most immediately as such.
 
Specific positions such as low taxes, deregulation, pro-life, anti-LGBTQ, etc. are easy for a progressive to identify as wrong.  But if the impulse is caution, and then critiques of progressive over-reach, one can easily find positions that progressives would stop short of, and thus might be thought of as conservative.  Cautious, yes, but in practicality following a logic that I think could be described as conservative.  To illustrate, from a hard left position, the liberal position would be "more conservative", even if not exactly a conservative position per-say.  For instance, the ACA is a liberal approach to health care policy, but quite conservative compared to single payer.  Indeed, it was a position that had previously been advocated a conservative position in the past.  The same could be said for carbon taxes, or 3rd trimester abortion.
 
Many conservative principles, such as limited government, tradition, or free markets, are generally the basis for downstream policies.  However, it may be difficult to determine whether policies are in fact downstream from principles, as policy outcomes may be primary preferences that in turn lead to larger principles.  This is exemplified in historical examples of conservatives arguing for policies in bad faith, citing higher principles as a way of hiding social outcomes that they are otherwise loath to honestly advocate.  One thinks of States' Rights: a preference for segregation was morally difficult to support publicly, and so an appeal to States' Rights was a way of determining such outcomes by an appeal to republicanism and limited government.  Progressives have learned to be skeptical of supposed conservative principles for just this reason, as true policy outcome preferences seem to have a history of being hidden by broader appeals to principles that seem offered up post hoc.  Another example, a progressive might say, is pro-life conservatives advocating state-enforced pregnancy, which would seem antithetical to the notion of limited government.  Of course, the pro-life view of the fetal personhood would be argued as a superior ethic consideration of individual freedom (that of the unborn) that trumps limits on state power.
 
Thinking back - and I'm out of my depth here - but to the origins I believe of modern conservatism versus progressivism falling along the split over how best to deal with European aristocracy.  Conservatives felt the French Revolution went too far too fast, and as such were more comfortable or sympathetic to the status quo and favored a measured winding down towards something like egalitarianism.  They professed a belief in human rights and individual freedom, but stopped somewhere short - in the progressive view - of truly challenging structures of power and wealth that would continue to be the source of debate ever since.
 
The question then becomes one of principal versus pleasure - how much does a measured approach actually signify a preference for social outcomes that preserve hierarchies in which one's own position is more secure?  The rights of the traditionally marginalized, by definition on the oppressed rung of hierarchy, must be sacrificed to gradualism.

 ​  The left and right have different motivations, clearly.  In our current moment, with science, journalism and academia showing a generally liberal ideological bent, the mainstream right has all but forsaken these pillars of institutional democracy.  The twin right wing bases of Christian Nationalism and Elite Capital have their reasons for doubt.  Religious skepticism of any authority outside their fundamentalist biblical interpretation has long put them at odds with evolutionary theory, and in the 20th century the social sciences challenged their beliefs about sexuality, the family structure, and a tacit view of White cultural supremacy.  As they adopted a hardline anti-abortion position in the 1970's, this deepened a sense that biblical purity was directly contradicted by scientific authority to the degree that it took a nuanced view of fetal personhood.  Elite Capital, from the 1% to small business owners, mainly interested in avoiding progressive taxation and government regulations, emphasized private property protections and the maintenance of existing economic structures in which labor power was reduced and resources were freely accessible so as to be more easily exploitable.  Thus, the two essential pillars of social power and order - economic and cultural hegemony - were felt to be under threat by the basic processes of science, journalism and the academy.  

   The tension at the heart of democracy is the historical tendency for power to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands.  To avoid despotism and plutocracy, democratic institutions are required to act as a check on power and to level the playing field such that each citizen is born with an opportunity to live as an equal with his fellow man.

   Journalism has long lived by the maxim "comfort the afflicted and afflict the powerful".  This follows from the press' role as the "Fourth State" in providing to the public a means for preserving an egalitarian, pluralistic democracy.  In 1897, the owner of the New York Times declared his paper's purpose in the line "all the news fit to print".  Implicit in this declaration was the duty of the press to make decisions as what is and is not important for the public to know; it would be absurd to report on events with no consideration to importance.  But what then becomes important?  If a free press is essential to a democracy, then importance becomes lifting up the voices of the powerless and applying scrutiny to the powerful. 

   Science can be defined broadly as a search for truth via empirical means.  The veracity of a claim must be born our by rigorous testing, and subsequent argument and counterargument.  Multiple levels of confirmation have been designed to attempt to produce high levels of confidence, ranging from empiricism, parsimony, philosophical doubt, skepticism, accuracy in testing, controlling of variables, peer review, publication standards, and institutional reputation.  Given the almost limitless boundaries of the natural world, the scientific method remains one of the clearest paths to truth as humanity has developed.  From particle physics to molecular chemistry, cell biology to geology, medicine to behaviorism, and countless other fields of research, the scientific ideal is to operate with no other goal than to expand human knowledge.  As such, it is fundamental to the democratic ideal, in that nothing is more critical to decision making than to have all the facts about a particular issue.

   Similarly, the broader academy - the humanities, the arts, mathematics, history, economics, political science, engineering, social sciences and philosophy - seek to add in their own way to humanity's greater understanding of itself and the larger world.  Though often dealing with an array of variables vastly larger and more nuanced than the hard sciences, as well as methods that approach inquiry not via randomized trials but forms more subjective, poetic, theoretical, and experiential, these disciplines more than pull their weight in answering questions that cannot be resolved merely through experimental analysis.  They inform not only the facts about the world, but also moral, political and economic questions in a complex pluralistic democracy.  While some more or less have explicitly egalitarian aims, others provide essential context for what egalitarianism might mean, what is has looked like in the past, and what it may in the future.  The academy serves a metaphysical role for society to better understand itself, its wants and needs.

   To Christian nationalists who seek cultural hegemony for their particular religious ethnicity - historically dominant in the US over every other group - the fundamental role of these three institutions present a grave threat to their project.  Journalism, science and academic analysis that scrutinizes the unfair results of their dominance serve to promote in the public sentiments that would weaken their grip on cultural power.

   To Elite Capital, these institutions present a threat to their economic power to the degree that they inform egalitarianism.  Externalized costs of deregulation that pollutes the commons, harms workers, or solidifies plutocracy serve to weaken those who would seek to maintain unfair capitalized positions.  Progressive taxation that seeks to redistribute profits more equally amongst the public through the power of government law diminishes their strength.  To the degree that science provides evidence, journalism exposes, and the academy scrutinizes these harms and inequalities, Elite Capital is threatened.

   These institutions are the first things to go under authoritarianism and autocracy.  With mendacious claims, dictatorships realize that, as threats to their legitimate authority, public trust in them must be weakened so as to distract and obfuscate any pushback that might arise from honest inquiry.  Poets are imprisoned, science budgets are slashed or channeled into regime-friendly projects (often with puppets installed to ensure only certain results are confirmed), and media is either nationalized or placed under strict laws that ban what types of stories may be published.

   Liberalism and conservatism are not inherently good or bad.  Thought of as a push and pull between progress and tradition, experiment and experience, both political impulses are necessary in a healthy society.  But the modern right - which in many ways is more progressive in its own twisted way than classically conservative - is more interested in maintaining power and supremacy than anything else.  A proper conservatism is in dialogue with liberalism.  Think of what an honest conservatism would be in journalism, science and the academy: stories on the marginalized would be complemented with scrutiny of over-reach in proposed left wing policy proposals, science on gender or behavior would be studied, as well as the positive effects of traditional family structures or testing of pro-growth pollution remediation, histories of left-wing totalitarianism and musical compositions that present consonance and modern art that elevates traditional technique.

   Of course, these conservative dispositions do exist in these institutions.  However, as human knowledge and inquiry flourishes, they require a deftness of thought and a humility in the face of an ever-changing intellectual and social landscape.  They must be willing to acknowledge new truths, and when it conflicts with their received and well-worn notions, to adapt and adopt.  

   Sadly, the over-representation of liberal thought in these institutions represents not corruptive discounting or marginalizing of conservative views so much as conservative views not being able to compete.  Instead of holding forth with their own steady inquiry, modern conservatism has been a project of leaving the battlefield and encamping to the fringes.  Instead of honest, good-faith argument, they have retreated to stubborn refusal and conspiracy.  And yet from this position, having ceded multiple essential pillars of democracy, egalitarianism and pluralism, they have found themselves on an unfortunate path that has historically come in the form of fascism and mass violence.  Because when one gives up on honest debate and intellectual co-determinism, all that is left to maintain power is brute force.