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Comment by dctoedt | Hacker News Reader

> Aside from a brief dip during 9/11, a majority of the country listed "big government" as the "biggest threat" since the late 1980s. ...

In part that's due to the incessant, implacable drumbeat from the you're-not-the-boss-of-me right wing (and their cheering sections in the wealthy and wannabe-wealthy) that government is always the problem and never part of the solution; that if we just leave people alone they'll act virtuously and civically, and so the invisible hand would supposedly take care of everything if we would just let it. Which of course is delusional.

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Isn't this a little like saying "in part that's due to the fact that conservatives are persuasive"?

Yes. But I think you can also attribute some of it to “the rich* have weaponized conservative politics.”

They have the most leverage so a minority opinion can show outsized results.

*apply all appropriate modifiers about not all rich etc

I think this misperceives the nature of the American polity. 20-35% support secession of their state from the union, depending on region. https://images.app.goo.gl/8fwmTm44Q55ReEV76. For comparison, the Basque region of Spain is at 17%. That’s certainly not a position advocated by “the rich.” Is it so hard to believe that a big chunk of the rest are skeptical of big government?

Distrust of the government is deeply baked into American culture. Blaming it on “the rich” effectively denies that culture can be a thing (or assumes it can be easily constructed given sufficient monetary resources).

A related example might be the prevalence of downstate Illinoisans who support "seceding" from Chicago, despite the fact that downstate Illinois gets something like $3 for every $1 it pays in taxes, and Chicago less than $1.

How many dollars is your freedom worth? I don't think they distrust big government because it is receiving too much money.

Where's their leverage? In media, which is dominated by liberals? Or in academia, which is dominated by them even more overwhelmingly? Where exactly are all these powerful conservative voices? Is Fox News and Breitbart so much better at getting their message across than almost everything else?

Fox and Breitbart tell their audiences what some (sadly, too many) want to hear about Those Wicked / Lazy / Stupid Others.

> Isn't this a little like saying "in part that's due to the fact that conservatives are persuasive"?

At the risk of the No True Scotsman fallacy: Today's right wingers are more ethno-nationalist than Burkean conservative; they're persuasive mainly to others who are predisposed to believe the ethno-nationalist message and in the supposed superiority of their own in-group, which in the U.S. of course is mainly white Christian males.

(For context: I was an old-fashioned conservative Republican for most of my life. But then I worked my way around to the view that a corollary to the First Commandment is: Face the facts — live in the world wrought by the Creator, not the one that you wish existed. Then there's the notion that we're all created co-creators, to borrow a term used by Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner [0], working in the service of what you might call the Great Project, the continuing creation of a universe through natural processes, with the Summary of the Law being the two key rules for our effective participation [1], not unlike Conway's Game of Life [2]. Finally, life's experiences persuaded me of the wisdom of John Rawls's veil of ignorance [3], which incidentally seems to tie in nicely with the Golden Rule. All those things moved me decidedly away from conservatism, and eventually out of today's GOP entirely.)

[0] https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/encyclopedias-almanac...

[1] https://www.questioningchristian.com/2007/02/another_way_to_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

[3] https://www.questioningchristian.com/2019/10/revisiting-rawl...

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