re: #87 Rightwingconspirator

The answer to the use of the terms is stop confusing/tarnishing the modern extremist GOP with ordinary moderate conservatives and their thoughts. If you are a progressive and want to tarnish one with the other for rhetorical gain, okay er, well played as they say.

If you want to speak in a fair description, then the vast gap between the TP GOP and moderate conservatism of past years like Eisenhower, or an acceptance of Roe V Wade as a plank, or in a parallel case when the NRA was for universal handgun registration.

There should be room for moderate conservative thought to come up, get discussed and maybe even impact policy where appropriate. Are middle class tax reductions such an awful concept? That’s conservative old school. Tax cuts for the Waltons? Thats a modern GOP extreme policy, undeserving of the term conservative except when you turn the word into a curse.

For my part, when I refer to conservatives and conservatism, I usually have “movement conservatism” in mind, which is the aggressively reactionary mindset that has come to dominate the GOP during and since the Reagan years.

Moderates within the GOP have lost control of the party. Moderate conservatives have lost control of their brand.

When people are polled on what they associate “conservatives” with and the answers comes back “religious zealotry”, “bigotry”, “intolerance”, “hard-heartedness”, etc., that isn’t the fault of liberals saying bad things about conservatives. That is the fault of the movement conservatives.