Comment by PaulDavisThe1st

5 days ago

I would tentatively suggest that it because the right lost the broader cultural "wars".

Our story-telling media is, if not actually "leftish", generally progressive in the broadest sense of that term. Struggles over gay marriage, contraception, divorce, interracial marriage, civil rights were all, as of 2010 or so, pretty much wrapped up in ways that broadly speaking reflected a progressive win.

So for quite a few decades, the conservative right have been "forced" into their own little culture bubble where you can still ask if a white person and black person should be able to marry, whether contraception violates the will of god, where evil is punished and not "understood", poverty reflects personal failure and moral flaws rather than systemic issues and so on and so forth.

That creates a strange distortion (ask any group that has been an outlier to the mainstream culture they live within), and in this particular case this has manifested as both endless outrage and conspiracy-mongering.

Of course, meanwhile, the same conservative right have won on most economic issues. Union membership and power are down, taxes on the wealthy are down, all attempts at socializing health care have been rebuffed, industries were successfully deregulated, capital gains taxes are low, the share of GDP flowing to labor is down, estate taxes barely exist, defense spending is way up, and more recently Roe has been overturned.

So there's this strange contradiction in which progressive ideas have come to dominate the cultural sphere (though this may be changing) while conservative ideas have been the most successful in the economic and political sphere. Progressives often don't recognize the success they've had, and the failure side just looks like more of the same. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to downplay their successes (because these things are actually not broadly popular) and are left facing their "losses" in the cultural sphere, which can no doubt (Dobbs not withstanding) seem pretty overwhelming.

I'll nitpick terminology here, taking a larger view : has the Chicago school brand of economics been around long enough now to be considered "conservative" now ?

And its rightward momentum seems to be much more liberal to me, considering how often it's about removing regulations...

  • The Chicago school was always "conservative" inasmuch its ideas, whether intending to or not, in practice produce results that maintain existing power relationships and economic distributions.