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As I noted with my other answer: I’m in a bit of a unique position to answer this.I grew up a short distance away from the birthplace of the Republican Party. By the time I was old enough to be aware of politics, most people around me listened to WTMJ and Charlie Sykes. My great-grandmother would have voted for anyone that ran with an R behind their name, and she’s not alone. I was probably in college before I met a Democrat.I never agreed with the Tea Party, with their ideology or their tactics, and I’m a vehement never-Trumper. The Republican Party left me behind a long time ago and has pointedly told me where the exits are in recent years for having the temerity to stand up and point out that they are not acting conservatively, to be told that I’m really just a closet hippie libtard.I almost came to believe that label of liberal until I moved to the city for law school and met actual liberals, like die-hard progressive liberals whose email signature blocks contain “preferred pronouns.”I came to realize I’m probably one of the last of what used to be called “compassionate conservatives.” I’ve actually read a lot of Buckley’s work. I’m all for the idea of “hold on, let’s really take our time with this and think through all the ways this progressive proposal could backfire.”There was a time when conservatism was a strong brandy. Today, it’s a watered-down jug of hobo wine.1. You’ve redefined conservatism to mean “reactionary”.Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.The Princess Bride (1987).Conservatives today no longer believe in the conservatism of William F. Buckley, Jr., the chief architect of the modern conservative movement. They keep the old label of “conservative,” perhaps because it is familiar or perhaps because it lends some air of credibility, but conservatives today barely resemble the ideals of the modern conservative movement.In some sense, I think many people calling themselves conservatives actually realize this, but either don’t realize why it matters or simply don’t care.They don’t see the concept of conservatism as tapping the brakes on the wide-eyed and sometimes overly idealistic utopianism of liberals. They see it as their mission to undo it all. To say not only no, but to actively undermine and dismantle anything done by liberals because it was done by liberals.A once-proud tradition of careful consideration of the merits, of cautious, measured progress, has been overrun by people who think that if liberals are for it, they must be against it. Who think that making the liberals cry is a priority.Just as liberals need to realize that it is not enough to just be against something and that they have to be for something better, conservatives are no better today. I haven’t seen an original, forward thinking idea out of conservative circles since I was a kid.There’s a bit in The West Wing where Alan Alda is running for president and he is asked about his solution to something right after Jimmy Smits notes that Alda’s solution to everything is “tax cuts.” Alda responds without thinking to a question that the answer to the question was tax cuts, and everyone starts laughing at him because he didn’t mean it as a joke.Everything I see coming out of conservative circles right now is regressive. It’s about undoing the 20th century. Not about making any of it better or smoothing out the rough edges. It’s about crippling the foundations of any progress until it can be erased.Not replaced with something better, just erased.2. You have a nostalgia for that which never really was.Conservatives love to wax poetic to me about the great halcyon days when America was the shining city on a hill. When the markets and the men were free and liberty flowed in every stream. When the families were nuclear and divorce was rare and people had morals by gum.There was freedom then, they tell me. Freedom of speech and religion and you didn’t have this ridiculous nanny state running everything.We were prosperous. World leaders. The peak of civilization.It’s bullshit. It was always bullshit.First and foremost, freedom and prosperity for whom?This always gets glossed over.You can’t separate these two issues. The reason that some people had a lot of prosperity and freedom was because it was built on the backs of others who absolutely did not. We still have a lot of the lingering effects of that today.I’m not saying freedom is a zero-sum game. In fact, quite pointedly the opposite. Conservatives have to stop seeing others getting freedom and prosperity as a sign that you are losing yours.No, no. Stop it, right there.You are not less free than you were fifteen years ago.Bullshit. I call shenanigans.You have just as much free speech as you ever had. Hell, you are freer to speak than any time in goddamned history. When I see conservatives whining about loss of the freedom of speech, what they really mean is that they are no longer free to speak without consequence.Could you lose your job at a higher education institution for saying the conservative thing? Yeah, you could. Guess what? For most of U.S. history, that’s what it was like being a black guy saying something about racial injustice. It’s funny how conservatives didn’t seem to have a problem back then and were enshrining that lack of a freedom into law.It sure as hell wasn’t liberals who were blackballing people under McCarthy, and boy, oh boy wasn’t it freedom back then, right boys?Ah, all those regulations, you say? You’re mad because you wanted to drain that wet patch on the back 40 for a few extra acres and some gubbmit stooge came around and fined you over it. It’s your property, right?We can have some rational debate over whether or not a regulation went too far, but you should always keep in mind: every regulation is written in blood.I do a lot of work with administrative law. Every regulation is written in blood. They all exist because someone decided to be an asshole and caused damage saying, “Well, it wasn’t illegal!”The very Framers that conservatives so often revere to me believed in ordered liberty. Not just the famous Jefferson quote about your right to swing your fist ends at my face. They generally agreed that all liberty came with responsibility, and I’ll happily point you towards the writings of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau that they were directly influenced by regarding that.It was never the idyllic world of Leave it to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show. We had a period of history with unregulated free markets and laissez faire government attitudes towards business. We had a world without environmental restrictions and pollution controls and everything else.And you know what? It sucked. It sucked enough that a lot of people stood up and saying, “We are tired of this bullshit.” There was enough nationwide consensus to pass multiple amendments to the Constitution and create these laws, because conditions fucking sucked.It wasn’t idyllic… unless you happened to be of a certain demographic.Sure, sure. You want everyone to have that now. You want to have the good bits without the bad ones. You weren’t there causing those problems. You aren’t to blame.I get that.But when you keep repeating phrases like Make America Great Again, what you think you’re saying and what it means to a lot of other people are not the same. When you uses phrases like America First because you think it will restore some halcyon glory days, you are directly calling back to a history that was horrifically traumatic for a lot of people.And you are directly ignoring the fact that those prosperous moments in history you are thinking about were built on the suffering of those other people.3. You are a lot more racist than you really understand, and your tolerance of open racism in your coalition makes you complicit.You don’t want to be called racist. I get it. Racism is bad. You understand that. You realize you shouldn’t say racial slurs and you shouldn’t make black jokes and Jew jokes anymore. You don’t harbor any animosity towards people from other ethnicities, so you totally aren’t racist, right? You’re not intentionally racist, so you aren’t racist. right?It’s a lot more complicated than that.Conservative history has a long trail of racism behind it, and you need to understand how even if you aren’t openly racist, much of the language you use is still coded racism.Conservative strategist Lee Atwater explained this very well back in 1981 in an interview that was to remain anonymous. The person who took the interview published it in 1984 without Atwater’s name, and republished it eight years after Atwater’s death identifying him. This isn’t just a smear job at Atwater. You can listen to the tape. It’s him.Atwater noted that by 1968, using racial epithets was no longer acceptable and backfired on racist conservatives. So, instead, they shifted to the abstract. They came up with policies that intentionally disproportionately affected blacks. Forced busing. State’s rights. Cutting taxes. They knew that this would hit blacks worse than whites. That was a feature, not a bug.Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman said the same of the War on Drugs. They knew they were lying about which drugs were more dangerous than others. It was about criminalizing enemies of the administration: particularly black people.You may very well believe in the ideology that you espouse without a shred of racist intent. You may very well believe in “state’s rights” and reforming the social safety net and limited government and everything else.But time and time again, these concepts have been coded ways to justify disparate and discriminatory treatment of racial minorities.The municipal administration of Ferguson, Missouri said that it was about law and order. It was all a lie. They used disproportionate and discriminatory enforcement of municipal code violations to extort and extract millions of dollars from the black community through fines, warrants, probation fees, surcharges for violations, and more.Advancing policies without regard for the history and their original intent furthers that racism, even if you yourself don’t have a racist intent.Additionally, conservatism has always had a lot of trouble with racist parts of its coalition and today is no exception.One of the great conservatives, William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of National Review magazine, had to fight long and hard to evict the John Birch Society from the ranks of the conservative movement and never fully succeeded. The Southern Strategy openly courted racist Southern conservatives away from the Democratic Party with the promise of continued seniority and influence.Even the inclusion of the evangelical Christian movement such as the Moral Majority, is problematic because the point of it was really to restore segregation.This racist contingent has never left the conservative movement and it still exists today. Birtherism - the idea that President Obama was not a native-born U.S. citizen - is still alive and well, widely accepted, and its leader is sitting in the Oval Office right now. The “alt-right” is unquestionably racist and loaded with white nationalists.Conservative leader Charlie Sykes (well, perhaps former conservative leader, having been shoved out the door for his never-Trump views) wrestles with this in his book How the Right Lost Its Mind. Sykes is no RINO that never really had conservative credentials. He was one of the most dedicated, prominent conservatives in the nation and was instrumental in a conservative transformation in Wisconsin. He has bona fides coming out of every orifice.He writes:Blaming the backlash solely on racism is a tempting, but lazy reflexive retreat to a rhetorical safe zone for the Left. Crying wolf had serious consequences for both sides, because over time our audiences shrugged off the charges, responding to accusations of racism with an eye roll and “Not this again.” By the time the real thing came along, the Left had used up its rhetorical ammunition, and the Right had become numb to the bigots around them.But this does not let conservatives off the hook.For years, we ignored the birthers, the racists, the truthers, and other conspiracy theorists who indulged fantasies of Obama’s secret Muslim plot to subvert Christendom, or who peddled tales of Hillary Clinton’s murder victims. . . . The hope was that the center would always hold, things would not fall apart, and principled conservatives would rise to the occasion. Except they didn’t. . . .It is impossible to say how many conservatives actually harbor racial resentments, but what is undeniable is that a great number of American conservatives have proven themselves willing to tolerate or even accept racism and racial resentment. . . .The hard fact is that only a political party that had cultivated an indifference and insensitivity to racial issues could have nominated Donald Trump and embraced him so easily.Sykes’ point here is not that all conservatives are secretly racist, and I don’t suggest that all conservatives are racist either.But Sykes is absolutely right. Conservatives “cultivated an indifference and insensitivity to racial issues” that pervaded the ideology. A disdain of “identity politics” (and I’ll get to that later) and a profound victim mentality that conservatism itself was under siege by “the Left” has made conservatives embrace open racists like Donald Trump. I have no doubt that at least a half a dozen people will jump into my comments to defend him.Back in 2014, I remember when it came out that a whole bunch of people on conservative Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s staff were using state email to forward around some really shitty racist jokes to their officemates. Walker’s deputy chief of staff got an email about how dogs could qualify for unemployment because they are "mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can't speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddys are." She wrote back, “That is hilarious! And so true!”She was not fired. She was not disavowed.If you want to stop being accused of racism, you have to start being sensitive to racial issues. You can craft conservative policies around this, and that’s fine. But you have to understand how racism affects your policies.You have to purge the racists from your ranks. Aggressively. You have to primary people like Steve King and make it abundantly clear that you will not fund campaigns of people who are racists.You have to quit making excuses for passive racism. You have to quit setting the bar for what is racism so damned high that nothing short of uttering racial epithets with intentional hatred is considered racism.You have to understand what microaggressions really are. You have to understand what privilege really is. You have to understand how slavery and segregation continue to impact injustice in this country decades after either have been officially ended as policy.Conservatives today just don’t. They don’t. I’ve had these conversations with conservatives. All I get are eye rolls and dismissals and whining about “identity politics.” From what is invariably an all-white mostly male room whenever I go to local Republican events.Conservatives do not realize how much racism drives their policy proposals, or how much racism is the direct outcome of them.4. You have just as much a problem with “identity politics” and “virtue signaling” as liberals, if not more.I’ve been told by prominent conservatives on Quora over and over again that they don’t like liberals because of the “identity politics” and “virtue signaling.” The implication of this is that conservatism is purely merit-based and doesn’t play identity politics at all.This is bullshit. This has all the self-awareness of a dog licking its balls in public.Conservatives openly complain that the United States should be a theocracy based on Christianity.The ones that are more subtle about it talk about “religious freedom,” but when it’s time to protect religious freedom for Muslims, they’re dead silent or pushing resolutions to ban Muslims from holding party leadership. (This was an actual caucus proposal at a Republican caucus in Minnesota and it almost passed.)Every year, I have to deal with the goddamned “war on Christmas” bullshit because the most ubiquitous holiday in the world is somehow under assault because Starbucks didn’t put Jesus on their cups and some parade in Tulsa changed its name to be more inclusive.Conservatives have just as much virtue signaling as liberals do, if not more. Outward displays of conservatism are wildly popular (and heavily profitable). My brother-in-law has a big travel mug he uses daily that says “liberal tears” on it.I constantly deal with conservative friends who post derogatory or even outright threatening to social media about those who do not show enough respect to the flag, who kneel for the national anthem, who do not appropriately (in their minds) respect the police, about Muslims, and more. I live in an area that has a lot of large trucks with things like large stickers of a bootleg Calvin peeing on the word “liberals” or thin blue line flags.This area has several businesses who have been in competition about who can put up the largest American flag. The prior record holder was an electrical company which had put up a 125 foot pole with a 20 x 38′ flag, which surpassed a local truck dealership. That truck dealership, not to be outdone, put up a 150 foot pole and a 30 x 60′ flag in December, because fuck yeah, ‘Murica!I’ve seen an almost idolization of veterans and the military out of conservatives. Look, I’m all for supporting the troops and everything, but it’s gotten out of control. We don’t have to thank the veterans and have a military parade at every event.There’s a local grocery store with prominent parking spaces right next to the handicapped spaces labelled for veterans and not for pregnant mothers or those with small children. There’s a VA hospital here, so maybe that’s not entirely off, but still.All of this is virtue signaling and identity politics.5. You seriously have a problem with corruption and skirting the law.Conservatives often tout “law and order” as a big part of the ideology. But for some reason, cough cough, it just almost always seems to be conservatives at the heart of politicians behaving badly and then nobody doing anything about it.This is not just a Trump thing. This started long before then.I’ve lived through numerous corrupt schemes and outright lawbreaking by conservatives in Wisconsin over the years. I remember the Caucus Scandal in the early 2000’s. It wasn’t just Republicans involved, but the majority of the people involved were conservative Republicans.That scandal gave rise to the Government Accountability Board, a nonpartisan panel of judges to oversee elections.And then Scott Walker took office. Walker had somehow escaped personal culpability for numerous aides and staffers and deputies in his county administration that violated or skirted the law. They set up a secret network and email system to campaign on state time, a felony in Wisconsin. Several went to jail and prison over it.Walker’s disdain of laws that restricted him from winning elections at whatever cost didn’t stop there, either. He illegally coordinated with various PACs, which was investigated by both Democratic and Republican county district attorneys with the oversight of the Government Accountability Board. Walker’s surrogates fought it every step of the way with Walker’s hand-picked conservative Supreme Court finally handing him the win in an unprecedented decision without oral arguments and with virtually no explanation.Then conservatives changed the law allowing coordination with PACs and disbanded the nonpartisan GAB to be replaced with the same kind of partisan elections board that caused the Caucus Scandal in the first damned place.It was conservative operatives who conducted a massive absentee ballot scam in North Carolina that led to having to completely re-do an entire House representative election.It was a conservative who body-slammed a reporter who asked him a question he didn’t like. And that guy was still elected after that.I won’t even get started on the current presidential administration.When it’s not outright lawbreaking, crony capitalism and corruption are rampant. In Alabama, not exactly known to be a liberal bastion, conservatives passed a law that allowed for sheriffs to personally pocket leftover cash from the food budget for jail inmates. That went pretty much exactly as you’d expect: at least one sheriff pocketed over three fucking quarters of a million dollars by basically not feeding inmates.In Wisconsin, I watched at least one contract go to a Walker supporter for a quarter-million dollars to simply bulldoze a grassy hillside next to an interstate and replant more grass. That was it. Nothing more. No drainage installed, no dirt hauled away, no brush cut down and removed. They literally brought in a small dozer, scraped the grass off, and put down more grass. The contract went to a company whose owner donated $20,000 to Walker’s campaign.Walker forced out the head of the Department of Transportation shortly after he took office, a person in a civil service position who had two doctorates in civil engineering and public infrastructure, and got the conservative legislature to approve converting the position from a civil service position to a political appointment. He then appointed a 20-something kid with no experience in civil engineering, management, or anything else to run the DOT. That kid was the son of a campaign donor.Over the last 30 years, a stunningly high number of conservative Republicans have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar and ended up with prison sentences compared to their liberal counterparts. If you want to complain that liberals do it just as much, then you have to at least tacitly admit that conservatives are just that much more incompetent at hiding it.I don’t think conservatives realize just how bad this has been, or they just don’t care. I honestly can’t get a real response out of conservatives back home on this. They openly deny that any of this all happened, even though it’s a matter of public record. They’re convinced that we don’t hear about liberal crimes because the “media” covers them up.Or they excuse it, because it means winning elections and continuing to get the policies they want.In the words of their own prophet: “What good does it do a man to gain the whole world, but lose his soul?”The first step to solving any problem is to admit you have one. Conservatives, you have a hell of a problem with your own ranks when it comes to law and order.6. Your demonization of intellectuals and science is going to get us all killed.From climate change to the current coronavirus pandemic, conservatives consistently just refuse to accept basic science and pan intellectualism as “elitist” or made-up. Conservatives consistently denigrate scientists, defund scientific research, and edit untidy bits they don’t like out of textbooks.Conservatives are the ones who keep thinking that oil will flow forever and that we can pump as much carbon into the atmosphere as we want without any effects. It’s never liberals who are coming to me to tell me how the “climate is always changing” (not like this)I have consistently seen conservatives expressing a disdainful attitude towards experts of every kind. Conservatives decided to appeal to the “everyman” and Joe the Plumber by glorifying ignorance. Instead, conservatives prop up people like Ben Shapiro, who crumbled under even the least bit of scrutiny and stormed off like a child.Conservatives right now are attacking the expert who is currently trying to save all their lives because he is not sufficiently fawning of President Trump and has to constantly go on national television and contradict straight up wrong things Trump says. Rather than figure out that Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about, they go after a guy with a list of medical credentials longer than my leg.This all started long ago. You can trace it back to Newt Gingrich, and maybe before. When you embrace as a huge part of your coalition a group of people who believes that the world is 6,000 years old and that humans rode around on velociraptors, it’s not hard to see where even the least bit of scientific rigor would be seen as anathema.Conservatives still believe in the entirely discredited Laffer curve and trickle-down economics. Conservatives still believe in James Watt, the Reagan-era EPA director who openly stated that we didn’t need to protect the environment because the Rapture was coming soon to end the world.Not listening to experts with the current coronavirus pandemic is making it massively worse, and it’s going to start hitting areas that aren’t taking it seriously much, much harder. Rural areas are going to get it later than urban areas, but their health care infrastructure is considerably weaker. In the meanwhile, anti-intellectual idiots who believe their “gut” is better than the expert knowledge of public health professionals are spreading this thing like wildfire.I’ve been told over and over about how there’s such a strong liberal bias on college campuses that conservatives can’t even talk about being conservative without getting fired or otherwise discriminated against, and honestly, I don’t buy it.You know when I have seen conservatives shut down on college campuses? When they’re assholes about it. When their positions are intellectually indefensible. When their work doesn’t hold up to scrutiny but they demand to be treated like it does. Convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza is an example of this. His “scholarly” work in the early 90’s just doesn’t hold up.I’ve never seen someone discriminated against on any college campus I’ve been part of (undergrad or graduate) for simply being conservative. Only ever for being loud and obnoxious about it and treating their unsupported opinions as fact and then getting pissy because they couldn’t defend it.Now, is this all conservatives? Of course not. We all have to paint with a broad brush. There are plenty of intellectual conservatives on Quora and elsewhere. But they’re far and few in between and they’re getting harder to find as the conservative movement seemingly drives them out.There are conservatives who are anti-racism, vocally so, and sensitive to racial issues. But they are getting harder to find.Some conservatives are self-aware of the flaws of conservatism and willing to acknowledge them. Some conservatives are humble enough to have honest discussions and reasonable negotiated solutions while still standing up for the tenets of conservatism.Most conservatives are honest rather than grifters who get into government to get their own personal handouts. But more and more of them are that way and more of them than their liberal counterparts. And far too many of them are willing to accept grifters and con men into their ranks and excuse their behavior so long as it keeps them in increasingly minority power because it allows them to continue instituting conservative policies that they could not otherwise achieve through democratic means.