Thread by @ChrisPolPsych

What I keep coming back to is that the modern 'conservative' ideological framework -- crystallized under Reagan -- more or less collapsed during GW Bush's second term. (1/n)

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1384951416540835842

By 'ideological framework,' I have in mind the conservative elite consensus behind Reaganism: laissez faire economics, muscular foreign policy, and traditional values. (2/n)

The Great Recession and its aftermath (along with long-term growth in inequality as a function of education, professional status, etc) discredited the small-government ethos, which has struggled to contend with the resulting challenges. (3/n)

In turn, the Iraq debacle and forever-war fatigue has discredited the militant American-led interventionism favored by older GOP elites. (3/n)

Lastly, exogenous cultural changes have made core elements of religious conservatism less palatable than they used to be (e.g., hostility to LGBT folks). (4/n)

But a lot of the mass factors behind GOP identification are still efficacious: racial resentment, white identity politics, anti-cosmopolitanism, and sheer negative partisanship. (5/n)

Indeed, an entire media industry exists to constantly inflame and prime these sentiments, and its most prominent figures are more powerful opinion leaders on the right than many GOP elected officials. (6/n)

So, you have this combination of an old elite conservative consensus that is like an iPhone at 1% right now and a GOP mass electorate that is more motivated by various media-inflamed cultural resentments than by ideological concerns, e.g., small govt. (7/n)

Both elite constituencies (e.g., business leaders, military elites) and mass constituencies (e.g., educated middle class whites) that would typically be attracted to center-right politics are turned off by the chaos and controversy. (8/n)

Business, in particular, is being forced to choose between the nominally business-oriented party and keeping itself free of associations with intolerance and anti-democratic sentiment that are bad for branding. (9/n)

It's sort of like we are stuck in a long period of disjunction (centered on the right) that's been unfolding since 2008 -- a point folks like @julia_azari and others have commented on. (10/n)

What now comprises 'conservatism' is deeply motivating to a minority of the population whose power is amplified by our institutions (and that is big money to the right-wing culture industry), but too alienating to many others to generate a broader coalition. (11/n)

What you get from this is that an entire segment of the political culture looks like a root-finding algorithm that's stuck in a saddle point, endlessly and fruitlessly iterating in one window while the rest of us doom-scroll in another. (12/12)