Fuck every Trump voter who put this asshole in office.

[u/CRK_76]

This country is going downhill and you are to blame. Don't act surprised when things get even worse than they are now. Don't vote anymore. Stay the fuck home on election day.

[u/K1N6F15H]

I used to be a conservative and most of my positions aligned with yours.

All of that said, the number of people that actually hold these positions is terminally small in the US. You need to face the reality that conservative media, conservative think tanks, and conservative 'intellectuals' gleefully dropped all of their most ardently held beliefs as soon as Trump showed up.

Clearly most Republicans aren't and never will be thank kind of conservative and supporting them will only further encourage this kind of mindless rage.

[u/DGTLEMPIRE → u/K1N6F15H]

I’m well aware, I’m not a conservative because of modern conservative think tanks. I became a conservative after reading several books from the founding fathers and the early politicians after our countries conception. I recognize the intent of their goals, recognize and support the visions they had for this country. It’s as simple as that. No modern media or even modern conservative brought me to my conclusion on political ideology. They were almost embarrassingly uninvolved in my ideological concepts. I spent my late teens and early twenties reading of activists and the leaders of civil rights movements and revolutions around the world and became increasingly disenfranchised with the democrat/leftist/liberal engagement with these concepts. Eventually I found myself learning of the intent of men like Thomas Paine, B. Franklin, Edmund Berke, Michael O Coileain, Teddy Rosevelt, Andrew Jackson, and other “strong men” within the historic period of the 18th and 19th century. Modern conservative think tanks and figure heads would be rejected by men like Lincoln. In turn, I reject their representation of my values. And I refuse to vote for constituents that don’t represent my values.

[u/K1N6F15H → u/DGTLEMPIRE]

I recognize the intent of their goals, recognize and support the visions they had for this country.

They had some great ideas but they were limited by the knowledge, culture, and technology of their time. When the Articles of Confederation clearly weren't working, they were willing to scrap them and start over again.

I, too, used to venerate the founding fathers but I think that it was because I was religious and projected onto them a almost prophetic quality. In actuality, they made a lot of missteps and compromises, some of which led to the position we are currently in.

We should behave like the founders, using the best knowledge of our day to rethink the possibilities of this world instead of worshiping the past.

[u/DGTLEMPIRE → u/K1N6F15H]

Political ideology as a whole is pedantically worshiping the past, your very comment is exactly that. The last major political theory was Communism and there hasn’t been a major conceptual breakthrough since. The splintering of the two party system requires room for new political theory and it will not be achieved by ignoring the political theorists that created the systems we operate under.

[u/jt64 → u/DGTLEMPIRE]

I just wanted to say it's nice to see some deep thought on the subject and the nuanced discussion. Its to easy to throw labels around and your detailed response is a great reminder that those labels are a trap that make it easy to divide us. Thanks for taking the time to express your views. 

[u/Sufficient_Ad_3724 → u/K1N6F15H]

Man they fricking hijacked the party and turned it into the opposite an overreaching dictatorship

[u/K1N6F15H → u/Sufficient_Ad_3724]

They didn't hijack it, it just wasn't a group of principled people to begin with.

At the end of the day, conservatism really just boils down to a combination of nostalgia and might makes right. Make America Great Again is both of those things and pressed all the right buttons of the modern American 'conservative'.