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Comment by DrewRWx | Hacker News Reader

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A witticism that falls flat when it is pointed out that conservatives are the ones in favor of rule of law and universal constitutional law.

Leftists also support rule of law and universal constitutional law.

The distinction is is in the derivative: progressives ("leftist" is less well defined) support the expansion of universal constitution law (which, right or wrong, is a change to the existing law), whereas conservatives except in the case of compelling evidence default to making no changes. Hence, being "conservative" about making changes.

This reasoning implies the current President and his party are not conservative, which is an interesting conclusion.

Yes, that's correct. Why is that an interesting conclusion? Trump is a neo-nationalist (with or without the appended socialist, take your pick), not a conservative. It's notable that the only remaining resistance against Trump in the Republican Party (represented by, e.g. Nikki Haley) are a coalition of conservatives.

Nikki Haley strongly endorsed Trump at the RNC in 2024.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/16/politics/nikki-haley-trump-rn...

So we can agree that there is no remaining resistance to Trump in the Republican Party and that conservatives are indeed Trumpers.

Did we forget the vicious campaign she waged in the primaries?

Little is left of what (real) Conservatives were trying to conserve. Now they have to become radicals to shift things back.

Depends on what your "real' conservatives are keen on preserving. Taking the torch to things one professes to love - things like liberty, human decency and the core tenets of Christianity, that is the opposite of conserving these things.

People can delude themselves that defending their own narrow interpretation of what these concepts are supposed to mean is the noble end that justifies a lot. But in the end, it's very simple: what we are and what we bring into the world, is a result of what we do, and not of what we intend. Sowing hate and chaos is just that, and which radical end of the spectrum your justification comes from just does not matter very much.

If they're going backwards, and a conservative is someone who wants things to stay the same, then they are not conservatives.

Right right.

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