The older I get the more I despise Nazis and the political right. I thought I was supposed to become more conservative as I got older, but now I’m a hippie (almost against my choice) and the only thing I can’t stand the kids doing is bigotry in their dumbass social media.
You’re only “supposed to get more conservative as you get older” cause that was the Boomer experience and Boomers can’t imagine anyone else experiencing life differently, so they railed their experiences into everyone’s heads as “fact” when it wasnt.
“Conservative” means… to conserve. You (and everyone) gets more conservative as they age because you kinda want to conserve the status quo you, personally are used to.
Here’s the thing: with social progress, what you want to conserve is different from what the generation before the progress wants to preserve.
You are a conservative, as in conserving, of the progress that we have achieved. The “conservatives” you refer to, the “political right”, are not conservative. They are regressives, the opposite of progressives (though they might not like the connotation of that label, and will denounce it). These people would like to regress society to a time when these members of society had more consolidation of power (feudalism, fascism, racist/sexist segregation). Nothing “conservative” about that in terms of a human lifetime. In fact none of those people were around to experience what feudalism, fascism, segregation etc. was actually like. Many of these people may have been sold a lie by the 1% for the exclusive benefit of the 1%.
I’m a conservative, but I’m getting disillusioned by the movement. Barely any of them seem to care about actually limiting the scope of the government, which is one of my biggest political values, and many seem to be either dumb or grifters. Even worse, we’ve got alt-right Christian nationalists calling for a theocratic fascist state. This isn’t how either Christians nor conservatives are supposed to behave, but I don’t think there’s a political home for me anywhere else. I’d be more at home with the centrists if I wasn’t still right wing to some degree.
It’s a nonsense framework anyway. I have conservative leanings in 2A aspects and hard left leanings in such social aspects as gender and sexuality. Everyone just has to find their best fit, and the American duopoly I live under is a godawful system for that. Proportional representation would be better, but only to a degree.
If your main value is small government, have you looked into classical anarchism?
I support small government, but not no government. I respect anarchism and libertarianism, but I don’t think that type of society would work well enough for my liking.
limiting the scope of the government, which is one of my biggest political values
Why?
Smaller government = bigger corporations. And corporate control = everything goes to shit. We’ve reached maximum shareholder primacy.
And it’s not like we can “vote with our dollar” anymore, with how consolidated everything is. For example, consider the attempts at boycotting Nestle…
Big government usually has more power to do more harm than big government, as the state has a monopoly on violence to a degree.