Reply #8: It's important to help the defectors take the next step

[Oak2004]

Right now, they are explaining the utter failures of the last six years as "not really conservative" because they still hold onto the belief that conservativism works. People don't usually want to face their mistakes in all their ugliness straight away; they take it in stages, and the "not conservative" shtick is the first step for many of them in backing away from the Busheviks.

It's important to help those who are looking for the exit door to take the next step (lest they fall for an even more extreme right wing candidate next time around and make a greater hell for the rest of us).

That next step is to see that in fact the disasters they see around them are the inevitable consequence of modern American conservativism. Unfettered capitalism inevitably leads to monopoly, duopoly, and corporate slavery, not to a utopian world full of competing small businessmen, because the Invisible Hand presupposes that buyers have perfect knowledge, and that just isn't true in the real world. Capitalism in the real world can only work when it is properly regulated. Aggressive militarism inevitably ends with a country emptying its treasury and breaking its military upon the rocks of insurgency, and not to some bright world, adorned in patriotic bunting, where all the world defers to Father America. Intruding into the business of others, whether it concerns who they sleep with or what they watch or whether and how they worship, can only bitterly fragment and polarize a nation, not create a happy return to a homogeneous past that never was. For these and many other reasons, the failures they see around them are the true failures of conservativism, not the consequences of a leader who strays from conservativism.

But for many of the defectors it is possible to take it further: it's possible to show them that they have never been conservative. Polls time and time again, at least since the Reagan era, have shown that most Americans are liberal on the issues even as they have come to believe that they are conservative. We should be untying their blindfolds and loosening the mental bonds of right wing brainwashing, assuring them that they have never actually believed in the conservative agenda at all.