RE: Ratchet Effects

It may be painting with a broad brush, because the rank-and-file who consider themselves conservative tend to favor something like free markets and individual liberty, but the policies of the right wing of the political class indicate a deep fear of the poor achieving economic and political independence. On the one hand, the political class actively courts the poor with promises of political plunder, and on the other, the poor tend to not fit the WASPish mold of stuffed shirts in politics. They listen to the wrong music, wear weird clothes, consume unapproved mind-altering substances, have different cultural touchstones, and so on. The conservative instinct is fear of the other, and opposition to the different. Homogeneity is seen as virtue. It takes tradition as gospel, and the past as sacred. To be fair, in politics, the left is not much different in practice despite using the rhetoric of revolutionary idealism from time to time.