They were wrong, of course, but it wasn't that long ago that economic conservatives were a thing - the majority, even. Now the culture war brain rot they had to deploy to deflect from how ineffective things like trickle-down economics are have consumed them completely.

[–] madcaesar@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

How far back do I have to go to find non bigoted Conservatives? Iike to watch old cspan debates as far back as the 90s with Gingrich it was already hate, fear and culture war. I'm trying to find these mythical Conservatives that want to balance the budget without discriminating or putting some minority group down...

[–] WaxedWookie@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Tl:dr: the non-bigoted conservatives died when the last of the non-culture-war messaging did.

Depends on how you slice it.

From a consequential standpoint, conservatives are and basically alway have been bigoted.

If you're looking at people who know their vote has bigoted outcomes, but don't care and are motivated by other things, that's probably the majority historically.

If you're asking if people are being intentionally bigoted, when the conservative messaging is now exclusively culture war nonsense, they're the overwhelming majority today.

I'd say that a reasonable portion, potentially the majority of your McCain and Romney voters were well intentioned - wrong, but we'll intentioned.

There's also a bloc of voters that will vote conservative because they always have - no thought whatsoever - the dems are worse. Why? Shrug

I think it's now impossible to be a good person and vote conservative - you'd need to somehow ignore everything they say and do to vote blindly, which is bad in and if itself.