There are people, even on DU who argue that we need a "conservative" party to balance the equation.
People still talk about how Republicans stand for "small government", "family values", "fiscal responsibility", etc...
All of that is bullshit.
Republicans do not care AT ALL about the size of government. They will grow government as big as they need to to advance their agenda. They want to impose the status quo, the current structure of power within society. They say "small government" because they want government powerless to interfere with the desires of the wealthy and for profit corporations.
Family values basically means, support of the desires of wealthy, White, Christian, men for social control. Notice that they attack "non-traditional" family structures and practices like infidelity and viewing pornography WHILE ENGAGING in those behaviors themselves. The reality is that they want everyone to know their place as a subordinate. Infidelity is a practice that only those "betters" who can manage that responsibility. The dirty masses need to have morality imposed on them, but the wealthy can manage on their own.
Christianity must reign supreme. It must not be challenged. Religious freedom means nothing to conservatives, other than the freedom for the rest of us to follow their religion or shut the fuck up. They do speak about Muslims as "radicals" who want to convert people to Islam or kill them, when they want the exact same thing. When you have been used to your religion being the default and promoted by society, any push back against that status feels like oppression. Plus, Christianity has a built in persecution complex. Several times in the New Testament there is the warning that "you will be hated by the evil people" so naturally when some idiot fundamentalist christian pisses someone off with their stupid behaviors, they write it off as "being hated by the evil people".
If you think of conservatives, not from a strictly political, but from a philosophical perspective, their ideology is built on the idea of hierarchy. The conservatives in America in the colonial period were the Royalists or Loyalists (I forget what they were called). Those who wanted to remain British. Why? Because they thought that Monarchy was the natural order. Modern conservatism grew out of defense of aristocracy and monarchy during the time of the American and French Revolutions. Edmund Burke was interested in "the rights of man" but felt that deposing nobility was an abomination of natural order. While the founders wanted to throw off the British Monarchy, many of them were by no means, in favor of the average person in the colonies getting to vote. Black people were not even considered citizens, or fully human. Women were considered too irrational to vote. Native Americans while "close to white intelligence" had an impoverished culture. The very concept of the "constitution" meaning what progressives in the modern age say it means, is abhorrent to conservatives. Their mentality about the "natural order" and hierarchy has not changed, merely WHO should be at the top. No longer Kings or Queens and landed nobility, but the wealthy White, Christian, men who "built industry" and have been favored by god with riches. Conservatives have been able to use race, misogyny, and religion to agitate a smaller but more vocal and active part of the population to actually defend the power of the wealthy. And they accuse liberals of "identity" politics.
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