The U.S. Congress is navigating yet another government funding deadline — the eighth in less than six months — and are at an impasse over sending aid to key allies in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Divisions among Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives spent close to a month without a speaker last year due to infighting between moderate and hard right factions of the Republican party.
When U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, begged his colleagues in November to “give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did,” he was articulating what many lawmakers and observers were feeling: Congress isn’t working.
The simplest expression of this is the number of bills passed by Congress. Just twenty-seven bills were passed last year — a record low — but even before that, the number of bills signed into law by the president has been falling.
Conservatism is about maintaining the status quo … they don’t want change because keeping the systems of power the same means that they get to keep their power as long as they are in or near the center of power.
They have no incentive to make things more productive, efficient or even make sense … their only motivation is to keep the world as it is because they have a share of the power … and the more dysfunctional they can make the world, the more power they can achieve.
Why don’t they conserve people’s rights to abortion and equality that have existed for decades? Why are they constantly cutting taxes on the rich instead of conserving the funding rates for the government? Why are they regressing to raciskband sexism of the the 50’s when they are trying to “keep things from changing”?
Because they are not trying to prevent change. They are trying to prevent, and also undo, progress. They are regressives, not conservatives.
In the long history of western civilization … the periods of abortion rights, equality, taxing of the rich, dealing with racism and sexism were all just modern changes that happened really quickly and suddenly (relatively speaking).
There were thousands of years of history before where the world was set up as the wealthy and powerful on top and the slaves and poor at the bottom serving their masters.
That is what conservatism is … wanting to return to the model of a wealthy class owning everything and to be served by the poor they control and own below them.
To them, our modern beliefs and fight for equality and fairness are just mere blips in the history of civilization that has only ever known the powerful standing over the weak.
Conservatism is about preferring hierarchical power. It is merely correlated to maintaining the status quo to the extent that the status quo is very often strongly hierarchical. Make no mistake, however: conservatives in an egalitarian context would have no hesitation in jettisoning the status quo in order to create hierarchy where it didn’t already exist.