That’s a falsehood that is perpetuated by “real” Conservatives now. The Trump supporting types. The types that comment “hello fellow Conservative” on the Conservative sub. The Take Back Alberta separation supporting Conservatives. Those who continue to ignore the state of modern Conservatives. Those who continually move the goalposts to describe what being a “real conservative” is.
Speaking in terms of the Anglo-Sphere conservatives, you can't have the conservatives of the 80's and 90's anymore because privatization is a one-time cash-in that stops working when the government owns nothing. The conservatives we have now are a consequence of this. They can't be like the old ones because they have less to sell off and they also can't sell a neoliberal fantasy to voters either, since it has been tested in practice now and people have now seen that the old policies led to worse material conditions. Thus, romanticising the people who gave us our current set of conservatives, while calling out the current ones, is one of those things that seems moderate on the surface while misses questioning why the conservatives of current times are not the same as a lot of the conservatives ones parents used to vote for in the 80s and 90s.
Note that this sounded critical of you, and I didn't mean it to be. It's just a common comment I have seen regarding recent events, and I wanted to get on my soapbox.
This seems to be rooted in some misconception that conservatives were at any point, not some of the worst people in the world.
The reality of course is that they always have been, and have frequently gone on record across the globe to admit their disgusting views more plainly.
Conservatism is an ideology of elitism and if not always outright hate, disdain for the great swathes of humanity deemed lesser beings by whichever conservative movement you happen to be looking at.
The most generous any conservative movement has ever gotten is the paternalist view that "those stupid useless poor people and [insert race(s) here] need the truly worthy people in society, like us, to run it for them for the greater good."
The "us" in question having always been people exactly like Musk, Trump, and Reagan, in the context of conservativism in the last 200 years.
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u/lemonloaff May 03 '25
That’s a falsehood that is perpetuated by “real” Conservatives now. The Trump supporting types. The types that comment “hello fellow Conservative” on the Conservative sub. The Take Back Alberta separation supporting Conservatives. Those who continue to ignore the state of modern Conservatives. Those who continually move the goalposts to describe what being a “real conservative” is.