Yeah, that's kind of what I'm saying. Conservatism in the pure sense doesn't really have principles by design, because its definition is relative to some culture or society, and is just the people who say "this is fine". It's not something that can ever really be principled.

The closest you could be is if you expressed an ideology about why being resistant to change is generally a good practice.

In other words, if someone believes in free markets and small government, they're really just economically liberal.

So basically the takeaway here is that, not only are conservatives unprincipled, but they’re also a bunch of whiny snowflake welfare queens.

I mean, it depends on who is speaking, right? I think many of the individuals who really are about free markets are principled, and they may be self-titled conservatives, but I don't think they're very conservative by the larger, more historical way to understand the term. Most have pretty radical ideas for how to change society.

Business conservatives tho? Biggest snowflake welfare queens around. Elon Musk, basically.

Take away right-aligned principled supporters of free markets (who we agree are actually ****ty liberals or right-libertarian, depending on IQ) and what’s left? Unprincipled opportunism, betrayal of Christian values, good-without-bad traditionalism that’s basically discriminatory socialism with extra steps?

I guess guns, gay marriage and abortion are about all they’ve got to take a principled stand on. That might explain why they care about it so much.

Part of this came from my friend questioning how fascism is right-wing when many definitions for fascism include "anti-conservative" in the definition. Well, it's because fascism involves a strong reactionary violence against leveling forces in society. You can't be about conserving the order if you want a stricter hierarchy, so yeah, it's anti-conservative.

And if you want to know why I think most self-titled Conservatives aren't really conservative, it's because most support Trump. Trump isn't very conservative, not even by their own definitions. Hell, Obama was far more genuinely, truly conservative in most respects than Trump is. Trump is the opposite of conservative, he basically hates the current order and is doing what he can in his limited scope to change America and the global situation.

So I agree with Wookie. Trump isn't a conservative. He's far, far worse. But I think most self-titled conservatives should understand which liberal ideas they actually embrace and work past the terrible language we use.

Interestingly, Trump represents having a bunch of **** without work, being a loudmouth ass all of the time, groping women and paying them off, getting to be immoral and **** porn stars. He represents all of the kinds of status and privilege that trashy rednecks want to have. He's almost, like, an icon of the kind of societal status those guys want to have.

But the Nazis banned guns! *


(* for Jewish people)

I don't understand why failure of conservatives to give themselves a coherent name means they get to avoid being named and shamed. If liberals think it's then their duty to define what a conservative really "is" (forget about the actual behavior of people who call themselves conservative), then they're just falling all too easily for the no true scotsman trick.

Because hey, who put these "untrue" conservatives into office? Again, do we just blame the voting system for the lack of accountability people calling themselves conservatives seem to have for the way their fellow conservatives seem to vote?

pssh. yeah. that makes them super liberal and anti-freedom. clearly there aren't better criteria than that.



I think I'm pretty on board with naming and shaming people when appropriate.

I think part of the issue is, liberals tend to read more, and tend to be more academic in their approaches to history. Like, genuinely.



The neo-nobility, the business elite. They want a party who will earn them privileges. They've done a pretty good job at muddying the waters about what people believe.

I think many conservatives and liberals desire many of the same end goals. I mean, I remember linking a study which showed that, when you ask the right questions, you get pretty strong bipartisan support on many key things that you wouldn't expect (like, if you ask if people want the government more involved in healthcare, you get massive partisan difference, if you ask if we should expand medicare, you get bipartisan support). Many of these opinions are highly influenced, you can't have a bunch of ridiculously contradictory stuff like this said unless there's some really wonky stuff going on. I think the business elite has done a good job corrupting the conversation about conservatism, making a weird faux-identity out of some disparate ideas that only sometimes is brought up to coherency by genuine people.

I knew it: despite conservative voters really wanting many of the same things that liberals do, they are either too dumb or too brainwashed to see it. Therefore, they have less agency than the rich people who brainwashed them, and so we accordingly hold them less accountable for their own voting preferences.

And people wonder why liberals have such a reputation for being condescending....

Also, how can one hope to have 'discourse' with people that have no agency?

Right? Sometimes this way of thinking -- attributing the fact that people find conservative ideas attractive is only a product of conservative media brainwashing -- seems like a really elaborate attempt to account for a truth that some on the left seem to really struggle to absorb: the fact that people disagree with them. Sometimes it's as if it's just too difficult to accept that people might see the world differently. (It's actually pretty difficult: I'm not saying it's not difficult for me.)

The things that the left believe are so self-evidently true that you'd have to be deluded not to believe them, despite the fact that the left don't even agree with itself on the things that they (supposedly!) agree on.

This dude from Vox does a pretty good job at being the condescending liberal par excellence:

That's not what I said, at all. I don't think many liberals would be hard to convince of random **** if you put in the same effort.

Pretty amazing though that, in all I wrote, that's the only thing you guys can bring up tbh.

It didn't work on me!

\dodges punch to the face

Re: the above. While liberals and conservatives (and others) may superficially describe the ideal society using similar terms, no, I do not think that jump-starting the apocalypse is a liberal goal.

Liberals/progressives/social democrats/democratic socialists/etc. are not served by pretending conservatives are all well meaning imbeciles voting against their interests. Maybe what they’re getting today is exactly in their interests. Maybe the idea of a society built on addressing social and economic inequities and poverty of opportunity is actually a bad thing for them. So maybe the correct answer to this problem is to acknowledge that they’re **** people with ****ing gross ideas and that the best possible future can only happen by outvoting them and ignoring them when they whine about it.

True, there's always that. I mean, that's I guess what Eversor's post suggests, they really believe in what they vote for, and the results aren't pretty.

There's always this pretense of some kind of principled disagreement with Democrats that legitimates Republican voting behavior, but it's never made clear what that is. It's always superfluous things like tone.

Or Republican cultural identity, that includes things like: gun culture, skepticism towards climate change, overt patriotism, BBQ, self-reliance (as a desideratum if not in fact), anti-Washington, anti-federal government sentiment, rural identification, country music, Protestant Christianity, and a set of political commitments that spring from that cultural identity.

I'm still really confused how a publication that does such an excellent job making policy comprehensible to non-experts was founded by someone who seems to be convinced that policy doesn't really matter, because political commitments emanate from identity and the motivated reasoning that springs from it.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/7/30/17505406/trump-obama-race-politics-immigration

Perhaps because the character and merit of an organization is a product of all of its employees, and your surprise is because our culture prizes founders, and to a greater extent professional managers, far and wildly in excess of the contribution they have made.

If there's any one thing in that list that is unequivocally due to propaganda, it's climate change skepticism. In fact, I think that's so apparent that the belief it's not do to propaganda is the claim which needs defending.

I'm fine if you want to admit that Republicans don't really vote based on policy choices. What I'm not sure is why I should respect someone who votes on those criteria.

Here's a glimpse into what is happening. There are websites which track climate change propaganda, it just doesn't get nearly as much mainstream media attention because they have their heads up their asses ranting and raving about Trump.
This article in particular is worth reading. IRS 990 tax forms are public record. Therefore, any of the nonprofits publishing climate change denial have publicly accessible donor records. We know that these nonprofits receive millions in funding from the Koch brothers and the Mercers.

One of these nonprofits is Heartland Institute, the same nonprofit which worked in the 1990s to push cigarette health skepticism. Heartland Insitute holds conferences. At these conferences, they brag that, for instance, they convinced Trump that climate change isn't real and see that as a good thing. Also speaking at this event is Patrick J. Michaels, who runs the Cato Institute's Study of Science, a rabid climate change denier, basically a guy paid a bunch of money by the Koch brothers to work at their institute self-described to sway public opinion on these issues.

What you have is extremely wealthy climate change deniers spending a bunch of money creating institutions. These institutions push out a bunch of poor-quality research suggesting climate change denial, the vast majority of which is not considered valid by academic communities (one study I glanced at claims 90% of climate change denial books are not peer reviewed). They create a culture and safe space for climate change denial. They bring in sympathetic media figures, journalists and other people with an audience, such as Patrick J. Michaels or other journalists. They repeat to them these climate change denial studies without any culture of criticism or peer review. They go and then propagate these climate change denial ideas on various sites read by Republicans, for instance, we have it on Fox News:

http://video.foxnews.com/v/5795500444001/?#sp=show-clips

This man speaking to Tucker Carlson is Steven F. Hayward, treasurer and board member of the Donors Capital Fund, no doubt positions that earn him a nice salary. The DCF is a major donor to right-wing think tanks, in fact one of the largest, and pushes money from oil billionaires like the Kochs. Steven F. Hayward is also a common lecturer and speaker at conferences held by climate change denying nonprofits.

I don't think you can reasonably deny that any of these events happen. They're really a matter of public record, and I think any reasonable person would conclude that these donations do happen and these conferences do happen. I think it's plain that they influence how these right-wing media sources report on the topic of climate change. I also think you can't reasonably deny that many Republicans read these websites, and these articles. Again, this is a matter of public record. If you doubt it, I'd encourage you to go down the rabbit hole and review all of the relevant data yourself.

I suppose you could argue that, even without these articles, most Republicans would be climate change skeptics anyway. I find that implausible. For once, there's an old study which did a survey of climate change skeptic literature and concluded that 92% of the literature was coming from right-wing think tanks. In other words, the mechanism I just presented above represents far and above the biggest source of climate change denial research. What other place would they thus learn information about climate change skepticism? It seems right-wing think tanks have cornered this market, so it would take a pretty convincing argument to explain the origins of these beliefs from another source. There's also no shortage of other research documenting the role conservative think tanks have in creating climate change denial. Here's an example which gives a thorough abstract explaining it, and there are many others you can find in academic journals.

My interpretation of all of this is that Republicans believe in climate change primarily as a result of this machine. When I say that many Republicans beliefs are because of propaganda, this is exactly what I'm referring to. You can get huffy about the accusation, that doesn't bother me. But I ask of you one thing and one thing only: is this interpretation correct? If it's not correct, I would like a response. Not just one which pokes holes in my reasoning, but one which also advances your own alternate view on why Republicans believe in climate change denial. I think this latter part is more important. You're right to be upset that I would say this about Republicans. It sounds outrageous. But in the face of what I consider these plain and straightforward facts, I believe I'm forced to this conclusion and this conclusion only.

Moreover, since I believe the facts add up to this, and I believe Republicans are being lied to, is it not the moral choice from me to tell this to Republicans? Since I think they're being perpetually deceived by these efforts, to not say I think this is to let Orgon be deceived by Tartuffe. Permitting someone to be lied to seems like an obvious moral wrong, so it's immoral for me not to say this.

I don't disagree that climate change disinformation exists or even that its a factor in why climate change denial is as prevalent as it is. I haven't looked closely at the articles you've cited -- you cited a lot of pages, too many for me to read -- but judging from the abstracts and your own summaries of them, these articles purport to show that the production of climate change material is supported by right-wing organizations. It doesn't purport to show that there's a causal connection between this material and climate denial as a belief that widely held amongst the public.

I don't deny that right-wing organizations are the source of a lot of this material. But the mere fact that it's out there, that it exists, isn't a sufficient explanation for why people find it persuasive. After all, you've seen this material -- and, in fact, I'm sure you've seen quite a lot of it -- but it doesn't mean that you find it persuasive, right? It doesn't change your opinion. So there must be some reason why some people it convincing and others don't.

I don't know that my knowledge that Ezra Klein is a founder of Vox makes me admire him more; I brought up the fact that he's a founder of Vox merely to highlight that he obviously must care about informing the public about policy if he started an organization that's dedicated to doing it. I don't think he's a better journalist than other people at Vox, just because he's a founder -- although he is also himself good at explaining policy.

But this tension in his thought -- writing about the minute details of policy despite believing that it doesn't persuade -- isn't anything new. In fact, famously, it was the central idea of his first major piece at Vox -- his inaugural essay --, which was about motivated reasoning, and about how acquiring more knowledge only sharpens the ideological convictions that one already possesses.

So, what's the reason why some find this stuff more convincing, and others don't? Consider, for example, this:



The number of people who were aware of a fact related to climate change decreased, after a multi-year trend (incidentally or not, lasting for about as long as Obama was president) where awareness of that fact had been increasing. Is it likely that people somehow became less aware of that fact? Is that possible? That people suddenly forgot it en masse, just because Donald Trump became president? Or do you think that the distribution of climate change denial material suddenly became more prevalent in 2017, and that that somehow removed the information from people's minds? Do you think Fox News became more committed to climate change denial in 2017 than it was in 2015, when Obama was trying to implement the Paris Agreement, and there was greater incentive for conservative news outlets to galvanize the GOP base around climate change denial to protest of the agreement?

No: the implication here, I think, is that Trump's ascendency has made certain opinions more socially acceptable. It has less to do with what the propagandists are pumping out, and more to do with interpersonal relationships, self-identification and other intangibles, such as the how widespread conceptions of what America is change depending on who the president is.

Incidentally, despite the fact that I don't agree with him on some of the specifics, I think some of the things that Ezra Klein has to say about motivated reasoning is probably correct. I just don't think that race is nearly as salient as he makes it out to be. But partisan identification and the social elements associated with it probably does play some role in shaping what a person believes at any moment.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-cook-trump-gop-global-warming_us_5ac240efe4b0a47437ac9a74

Coincidentally, I stumbled on something that addresses this point directly. I was watching that video I posted with David Roberts. At one point (somewhere between 15:00 and 20:00), he mentions a book by a scholar named David Grossman. Roberts talks about the book in the video, but he completely misrepresents its argument. But what the book actually says dovetails with what Reid said here.

Roberts claims that what Grossman is getting at is that is that the Democratic and the Republican parties are fundamentally different ideologically, and their ideological differences can be traced to their demographic composition: the Democratic party is a big tent party composed of a diverse coalition of racial and ethnic groups, while the Republican party is defined by its homogeneity. The altruism and pluralism of the Democratic party, Roberts says (attributing the argument to Grossman), stems from the fact that having a big tent requires, by definition, compromise and consideration for others, while the Republican party is self-serving cares only about the parochial interests of white people, because the nature of the Republican coalition doesn't make Republican membership require empathy towards others in the same way that being a Democrat does.

Grossman's book (it's called Asymmetric Politics, and, importantly, it was published in 2016, before the election concluded) doesn't actually argue that. What it argues is that the Democratic and the Republican parties are organized around two completely different notions of party. According to Grossman, the Democratic party is organized around a coalition of diverse social groups. That's something that Roberts gets right (although I doubt his inference about pluralism are in Grossman's book). But the Republican party is organized around adherence to a philosophical, ideological platform -- a set of ideas. Subsequently, the parties deliver in different ways, and entail different promises: the Democratic party makes promises to individual social groups that its going to deliver x- social program, while the Republican party's appeal resides not in what it delivers but in a gestalt worldview.

Grossman goes on to argue that conservatism is actually popular as an ideology and as a worldview, and, in fact, it's so appealing that more Americans identify as conservatives than as liberals (or at least they did in 2014). But more Americans also like the social policies that Democrats offer, and more people identify as Democrats than as Republicans. So that dovetails with what Reid cited: there's bipartisan disagreement on philosophical issues like whether government should be involved in healthcare, because conservatism is actually popular as a political philosophy, but there's bipartisan support for medicare, because people actually like the services carte blanche.

I think there's a real debate to be had about whether the 2016 election changed everything: maybe Trump's primary victory gives real credence to the idea that conservative ideas no longer have purchase on the American public. But if 2016 did change everything, it entailed a massive, massive change. Even in 2014, it seemed not to be the case that ideological conservatism was massively unpopular, or that in fact race was the lowest common denominator of Republican affiliation. Even according to Ezra Klein, who at that time managed to talk about differences between Democrats and Republicans at that time without mentioning race at all.

Apparent evidence that not only do there exist Trump supporters who can be brainwashed, but also made insane:



https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/08/01/we-are-q-a-deranged-conspiracy-cult-leaps-from-the-internet-to-the-crowd-at-trumps-maga-tour/

I think this is a massive understatement. They and other similar studies don't show climate change denial is "supported" by right-wing think tanks, they basically show right-wing think tanks are the sole mass producer of climate change denial.



Not at all, I never read climate change denial research. If I'm reading about scientific topics, I try to read only peer-reviewed material, or material published by academics. Since climate change skepticism is not any of this, I haven't looked seriously at any of the arguments in a long time. I let the scientific method filter it out, basically.

The thing is, if I were to read website which frequently posted bold headlines skeptical of climate change, I would probably start being more doubtful myself. Nobody is immune to that kind of conditioning, and people don't make these beliefs by rationally considering the argument. That's why it's effective. People pick sources they trust and accept the conclusions. I know I do it from time to time, when I'm busy and don't have time to critically analyze an article, if it's by a source/author I trust I might accept it without thought.



I can't purport to sage out why any specific trend in data exists. It could be the case that specific fact was trotted out regularly for a period but fell out of style, so people forgot.

I do know climate change skepticism correlates between parties:

http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/the-politics-of-climate/ps_2016-10-04_politics-of-climate_1-15/

Notice, though, that while there's an obvious correlation in the data, the overall trend is widening between Democrat and Republican opinion, increasing from a 25% delta to a 45% delta. I think this is due to the increasing polarization in public opinion over the media. I would suspect that, 15 years ago, Republicans and Democrats read cross-platform more often. I'd suspect that people recently are sticking more to the websites they're familiar with.



I think Trump's ascendancy absolutely works for this. Trump polarizes opinion heavily, and people on the pro-Trump side are sticking hard to their in-group beliefs. Meaning they're going to expose themselves more often to these sorts of articles.

In any case, remember the study which claimed 92% of climate change skeptic books come from conservative think tanks. If you think that other 8% is more influential than the other 92%, or if you doubt the basic fact, then I think that needs defending. As I see it the evidence is compelling. Climate change denial is almost entirely a conservative think tank invention.

I don't have any reason to think that's not an accurate reporting of facts, but I also don't think that it really constitutes the fault line of where we disagree. I'm not saying that conservative think tanks don't create, well, alternative facts. I'm saying that the fact that conservative think tanks spend money on misinformation can't by itself explain why people believe it.

Like, Qatar spends enormous amounts of money in the United States trying to malign Saudi Arabia in the eyes of the American public. You expressed reservations (to put it mildly) about Saudi Arabia in this thread (pages and pages ago). Do you think your suspicions about Saudi Arabia should be attributed to Qatari influence, just because they're spending the money to persuade you?

McDonalds spends a lot of money trying to manipulate you into buying Big Macs. When's the last time you had a Big Mac? Do you think, whenever it was, it was because McDonalds efforts to translate its expenditure of money into you making a decision was successful? Were McDonalds ads the "cause" of your belief that a McDonalds burger would be tasty?

It's not as if our minds are naturally conditioned to believe what is true, and it's only if some devious actor comes in to try to persuade us otherwise that we slip into error. The process of being persuaded of something is the same, whether it's true or not. In most cases, when it comes to the news, there's nothing about our day to day lives that would confirm or deny the information we accumulate about the world. It's not as patently untrue political ideas wouldn't square with "the facts" of our day to day lives.

That's the beauty of its rhetoric. "Government being involved in healthcare" is the kind of meaningless, ambiguous phrase that's easy to disagree with. There's actually not much bipartisan disagreement on actual policy. That's what's pernicious in my mind about "conservatism", if you phrase things ambiguously and fail to describe how any of that will dictate policy, its popular. Once you actually turn that into policy, all of that support crumbles.

It's hard to tell if the reason they still support Republicans is actually by some principle, or because they have a sense of identity and commitment, like a cult member to a cult leader, a Facebook mom to an MLM, or a poor sick person to a televangelist. You'll notice these commitments have lofty, philosophical-sounding commitments, too, but when you ask if they'd like to be conned into giving away their money, these people would say no.

Now, that was a crass comparison, I'm not intending to say Republicans are cult members so don't take that literally. The point is, just because someone does something against their own interest doesn't mean they're necessarily doing it because of some principled commitment. If you think such a commitment exists, you need to prove its existence, and prove that it is the primary motivator, i.e. argue against the idea that it's ad hoc justification.

I also don't think it's at all true that the Democrats appeal is in delivering social programs. What you mentioned above feeds directly into conservative propaganda: that Democrats are just selfish and materialistic, whereas conservatives are ideological - makes them sound like more principled, honorable beings, right? I personally think being liberal takes more serious ideological commitments than being conservative. You have to have considered and thought about the value of people, and decided people are equal. You have to have ideologies about human rights and freedom. This requires dedication and some thought. Being conservative, you just have to not want things to change.



It's hard to know what to make of these comments. If you're saying Trump is not an ideological conservative, but his opponents were, then it seems that ideological conservatism really is very empty.

Well, I find that argument more persuasive than, say, whatever Ezra Klein has to say about polarization these days. Ockham's razor and all that.

Yeah, that's what I was saying. It seems as if there's a very reasonable argument to be made that Trump's victory in the 2016 GOP primaries does show that conservatism didn't have ideological appeal, which would put into question Grossman's conclusion that the conservatism as a philosophical worldview is widely admired. It seems as if the fact that Trump won by running against all the GOP's sacred cows disproves the idea that conservatism has crossover appeal, since it doesn't even seem to appeal that many to Republicans, if Trump was able to win.

Then again, more Republicans in the primaries voted for not-Trump than Trump, despite the fact that primary voters are generally less moderate than general election GOP voters/independents who voted Republican.

I mean, there's another way of looking at this which doesn't make me side with conservative propaganda/talking points. For example, the way Democrats would put it is that they believe that government should be used as an instrument to improve people's lives -- or that Democrats are policy focused, and actually pass legislation, while Republicans do nothing but sit on their hands when they win political power, because their views on limited government come at the expense of giving any real thought to policy (effectively the argument Klein makes in the article from 2014).

They might be in part, but the difference is, there's also a ton of stuff written about Saudi Arabia that's not influenced by Qatari money. Human rights groups, feminists, atheists, progressive groups have all independently agreed that Saudi Arabia is a problem. You can actually find and point to multiple independent opinions on this, moreover, you can often find information to corroborate and back up that data. Such is not the case with climate change denial. If 92% of all of the information about Saudi Arabia was attributable directly to Qatari spending, then yes, there would be room for pause.



I've definitely seen advertisements for food, and then purchased food from that place.



Certainly. There used to be an ideology, a 20th century one, that science was the epitome of human progress, and that what scientists say and do is important, and the scientific method was the key tool to determine fact and fiction. Interestingly, we have internal memos from some of these oil companies circa 1970/1980. Exxon used to equip its ships with meterological tools to collect data, and pay scientists to track basic data. They knew even from the internal memos then that climate change was occurring.

However, policies to end climate change are an existential threat to oil companies. So they actively decided to resist the scientific method.

So, yes, we're not naturally inclined to believe what's true. It took humans a long time to create the cultural institution of science, and to convince people generally that this institution is the best place to derive your beliefs about the world.

Until a devious actor comes in to try to persuade us otherwise and we slip into error.

I see. I think the way you have to interpret this is that ideological conservatism previously served as a dog whistle for many of the same emotions that Trump brought to the forefront.

For instance, if you have strong conservative appeal for limited government - just how many people understand limited government by the works of Charles Murray, arguing that ideological conservatism means we must cut off welfare to "stupid people"? It can't be just nobody, and if someone consistently feels attracted to limited government based on those racist urges: well what then?



I never took the "limited government" argument seriously; how can you when you consider how Republican politicians vote? They vote to support all kinds of glut government programs (ICE being a good example), so long as the program is in their ideological interest (making brown people miserable). They'll even dig out tons of additional debt for tax cuts. It seems limited government only applies when they're resisting social programs. This means it's not actually a principle, because the application isn't principled. Principles must be principled, else they're just excuses.

I don't think it's meaningless. If we follow Grossman on this, I think it speaks to the fact that Republican affiliation is based more on cultural identification, and with a vision of what constitutes Americanness than a program of governance, as it is for Democrats. Americans like to think of themselves and like to think of their dignity as being associated with self-reliance, hard work, etc. Evidently, a person can believe that they achieve dignity through hard work and self-reliance even though they receive health insurance through a federal program such as medicare.

I think very often Democrats/the left argue that the fact that a person would vote Republican yet rely on a service like medicare as hypocrisy. But Grossman's argument about the asymmetry of the parties make possible a more benign understanding of what's happening when someone votes Republican: they're voting for a gesalt vision of America rather than a program of governance. I think Grossman's argument is actually quite elegant, and actually gives an explanation for why Republicans -- as liberals put it -- "vote against their self-interest", without attributing it to Republicans being ignoramuses or moral cretins.

I don't deny that entirely. See this, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reagan%27s_Neshoba_County_Fair_%22states%27_rights%22_speech

Reagan was explicitly trying to court Dixiecrats in the south with a racially charged speech, using a symbolic gesture that conjured up Jim Crow and white supremacy. He knew what he was doing. There's definitely an element of Trump making subtext into text that seems to be a throwback to that speech of Reagan's -- and, incidentally, Trumps numbers have held up the strongest in the south (although the 538 guys don't think attribute that to Trump's racism/dog whistling). I nonetheless don't believe that conservatism (as a cultural outlook) is reducible to white parochialism.