The time has long past that we should be referring to the current Republican Party as Conservative. There is nothing conservative about them. Traditional conservatives seek to conserve – values, institutions, and practices. When seeking changes they are cautious, deliberate, careful in what they propose. They are generally respectful of what has shown its value by working for many years. They thus tend to defend the basic institutions and practices that have emerged over time, and thus are reluctant to quickly discard them. And they are certainly opposed to proposing radical, and untested, new programs.
Our current so-called “conservatives” are nothing like that. Rather they constitute a “Radical Right” that seeks to totally overhaul the American political system, its traditions and institutions, in the name of a corporate funded radical Christian Fundamentalism. Their programs bear more striking similarities to an American version of early 20th Century European Fascism — by its aggressive super nationalism and militarism, its unmodified corporatist economic program, its attack on organized labor and the basic right of individuals to union representation, its homophobia, its racism, its patriarchy, and its religious mobilization of a legion of fundamentalist quasi-shock troops, frighted by modern economic and cultural values and practices, and seeking “to get our country back.” Actually, in its patriarchical conception of gender and family relations, it most closely resembles that classic Germanic vision of the 3Ks, with the proper role of women being defined as “Kinder, Kirche, & Kuche,” that is, children, church, & kitchen.
By allowing the Radical Right to define itself as conservative, popular opinion is deluded into thinking that they are simply a contemporary version of traditional conservative politics, and that we can treat them as part of politics as usual, and not the serious threat to basic American values and institutions that they really are.