Reading a William Graham Sumner essay from 1881 and thinking that conservative American thought hasn't really changed much in 140 years.
Sumner (1881): "The radical error of the socialists and sentimentalists is that...they bring forward complaints which are really to be made, if at all, against the author of the universe for the hardship which man has to endure in his struggle with nature..."
Sumner (1881): "When society is blamed for the ills which belong to the human lot, it is only burdening those who have successfully contended with those ills with the further task of conquering the same ills over again for someone else."
Sumner (1881): "Hence liberty perishes in all socialistic schemes, and the tendency of such schemes is to the deterioration of society by burdening the good members and relieving the bad ones."
Sumner (1881): "The law of the survival of the fittest was not made by man and cannot be abrogated by man. We can only, by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest."
Sumner (1881): The person who "addresses a demand to society for relief from the hardships of life...simply asks that somebody else should get his living for him."
This sounds like the philosophy of life I was taught in my High School social studies classes back in rural PA in the Reagan era. And it sounds like the memes my Trump-voting former classmates post these days on FB.
