To my knowledge, the concept of “conservatism” is the will to conserve, preserve past values that are seen as superior. While I don’t agree with this either, this community has almost exclusively posts about fearing new things and trying to show them as evil. Evil migrants, evil new generations, evil new sexualities, whatever.
I do not see any “values” in it, only fear. Rejecting migrants is not based on morals or values that are rational, but on fear. Same for the rest. Which leads to the question, what is the point of this community? It does not lead to debate, people calling it out as fascism on one side (which is quite justified as the root ideas are seemingly identical) and the other side just saying that it’s wrong and that’s it. There’s no debate of values, as there are no values to debate about.
I do not agree with the concept of conservatism, and I couldn’t care less if this place is forever doomed to be downvoted in oblivion. But if you actually want to do something else than fear-mongering, even if you insist on talking about conservatism, then maybe it would be a good idea to refocus the community on actual ideas, and not the typical far-right speeches of hatred and fear that already flood a lot of media.
Of course I believe that it would be better to reconsider opinions that basically encourage the worst of humanity; but even aside from that, there is more to do than to replace every possibility of a conversation with the (stereo)typical “immigrants bad, jesus good, gays evil” speech.
I don’t think these things have gotten worse, but my perception is based on looking at immigrants in NYC, which isn’t a Republican area. With that said, I don’t disagree with you. A lot of current Republicans are willing and even eager to break things - the distinction between them and the most extreme Democrats seems to be which “utopian” vision they want to reach by burning down the current system, and IMO that willingness to destroy what we already have should be unacceptable to reasonable conservatives.
As an aside: I’m not captial-L Libertarian. I lean towards libertarianism because I really don’t like being told what to do and therefore I oppose both Democratic “nanny state” policies and Republican moral busybodies. However, I think that government is the best tool for providing a level of social services that almost everyone is willing to support out of basic human decency, and I also think that these social services make good economic sense from a purely selfish perspective too - I pay a lot more in taxes than I ever received in social services so the USA got a good deal on me.
I’m a republican and I do think the moral majority is too much involved in the party. Abortion is a perfect example. A small government republican would leave it up the woman to make her own decision. Instead we have people pushing Jesus as the answer.
Why? A huge amount of what we already have fucking sucks. Why should it be unacceptable to get rid of it?
Because it’s better to fix an existing system than to have none at all.
Why is more government always the answer?
Fix != more