Conservative America

To accompany last week’s previous post, I will be showcasing Conservatism in America. Republicans/conservative voters differ from progressive voters (besides policy itself) in quite a few ways. As a general rule, the Republican party is older, whiter, more Christian, and most importantly, fewer. This may sound surprising, but Republicans are actually fewer in number than Democrats. So why don’t Democrats win every presidential election ever? There are two simple answers. The first is that Democrats participate in voting less: people just don’t go out to vote/care less. This used to be the case quite obviously, but now progressive leaders have really emphasized voting to people who used to not care/want to vote, and it does not take a mastermind to conclude that this new emphasis on voting is derived from the Republicans winning both houses of Congress and the Presidency in 2016. Such a humiliating loss woke up a lot of people on the Left. Another reason why Republicans are able to win elections is because there is another category that is now larger than both Democrats and Republicans: Independents. Many voters, especially in recent times, have concluded that they side with neither party fully or at all. Whoever sways the independents can win elections.

Similar to progressiveness, conservatism has evolved quite a bit. After the Civil War, Republicans were the law of the land, and black voters voted for Republicans in droves. At this time, it was actually the Democrats that were more conservative, but since the North was the Republican side and the South was the Democratic side, the spoils went to the victor. Democrats would only win two presidencies (technically 3 separate terms, but this is because president Grover Cleveland won two separate 4-year terms, not two back-to-back) from the Civil War to World War I, about sixty years of Republican domination. I am sure many of you are familiar with this history in some way or another, as Republicans like to remind Democrats that it was their party that freed the slaves and was not racist, since that is an insult commonly hurled at Republicans. Democrats love reminding Republicans that their parties’ ideologies “flipped” in the sixties, which was when it was actually the Democrats that passed the Civil Rights Acts.

What many are not aware of, however, is that the real divide that shifted the parties was during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. FDR was elected during the Great Depression, and his opposition was incumbent Herbert Hoover. Hoover was in favor of “unfettered capitalism and private charity” to lift the country out of the worst economic crisis in the nation’s history. FDR was the opposite, and wished for government interference and regulation to save the nation. Hoover was a Republican, FDR was a Democrat, and both of their economic policies were (and still are to this day) adopted by their respective parties. The economic aid provided by a “Democratic” economic policy is when black Americans (who had been calling for this type of aid since the Civil War’s end) began siding with the party that was finally helping them (even though the aid was “white-biased”). Then, after the Second World War and the Red Scare in the 1940s and 1950s, Civil Rights became the new hot-button issue. Even though Republicans were actually the party most likely to pass acts like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was the Democrats (specifically president Lyndon B. Johnson) that were able to do it. Southern Democrats, who had been voting for the party since the Civil War, were so angry that they “flipped” parties as a result. Economic policy is what split the parties in the early 1900s, and Civil Rights is what caused conservatism (ideas like religion and reluctance towards civil rights/progressive) to fall onto the Republicans, and this is the general trend of today.

The platform/ideals of the Republicans (and conservatives as a whole) is reflected in these events. Economically, conservatives still want the government to have a smaller role (Medicare, welfare, and economic aid as a whole is opposed). Similarly, insurance should be privatized, not provided by the government. As a trend, Republicans are also more likely to support wars/foreign actions that uphold “American ideals,” such as toppling dictatorial regimes or invading a nation to find a high-level terrorist. Republicans are also more Christian (and influenced by the South), and support ideas like prayer in schools and were the party more opposed to legalizing gay marriage. Various issues in the “other” category include the opposition of legalizing marijuana, emphasis on independence (citizens should not look the the government for help), smaller government as a whole, an anti-abortion stance, lack of gun restrictions, and apathy toward climate change. Conservatism (though there are some “special cases”) is not a bigoted ideology, but instead less likely to meet change head-on and enthusiastically. While the popularity of Conservatism is less popular than in previous generations, the ideology is here to stay, but whether it will ever be as popular again remains to be seen.