Diego, conservatism is still about lower taxes and smaller government. The Republican party has left their base in that respect, but I have hope they’ll come back.
Your second paragraph just doesn’t fit with facts, though. Conservatives don’t hate immigrants, we just want to make sure that immigration is fair and orderly, and produces loyal American citizens. I know decent guys who are in the country illegally. But I also know decent guys in the tech sector who have been working towards citizenship for years. Seems like the Democrats (and, sadly, the president) want to let the folks who came illegally from central America jump in line in front of legal immigrants from the rest of the world. That’s not fair. I’d like to see immigration overhauled so people coming in legal channels from India, China, Europe, and elsewhere have a better experience with the immigration bureau. As a conservative, I think the less contact with govt agencies the better, so the process needs to speed up.
I also think the legal limit on Mexican immigration is absurdly low. (Around 25,000 a year.) Clearly we can use more than that. At the same time, I think the US is a better country than Mexico, and I’m concerned that allowing too many immigrants from one country risks importing the pathologies of that country.
I also think there’s no more conservative hatred of gays than there is gay hatred of conservatives – animosity both ways, but no outbreaks of violence I’ve heard of. Personally I have no problem with gays, civil unions, etc, and I say that as a straight man (and a pretty one, judging by the attention I got the last time I was in SF on Pride Day.)
Incidentally, even if conservatives did hate immigrants and gays, how much government spending would that entail? Couple million bucks for a fence?
Finally, the ‘love war’ canard has got to go. Conservatives are the ones signing up for the military, right? You think they want to get shot? They’re the ones prone to marry and have kids. You think they want to kill people? Why are they doing foot patrols instead of artillery assaults?
We don’t love war, and you don’t want the terrorists to win, ok? We just think there are things worse than war. If an extra year of the Korean war had turned Pyongyang into Seoul, wouldn’t that have been worth it? If we had pushed into Baghdad in 1991 – when Saddam was reeling, a popular revolt was beginning, and he indisputably was working on nuclear weapons – wouldn’t that have been better than what did happen (tens of thousands of Iraqis killed by Saddam, a decade of the sanctions that the Muslim world blamed on us, a costly US presence in Arabia that was bin Laden’s principal grievance)?
There’s a guy in my old apt complex in Cardiff who’s in the service. You can’t miss his apartment – it has a crayon drawing of the flag with ‘welcome home daddy’ under it. You can’t miss his car – it has the Purple Heart license plate. And you can’t miss the guy – he’s 6ft about 230, maybe 32 years old but will have hearing aids the rest of his life. He doesn’t want to die, and he doesn’t want to kill people. But he believes in what he and his comrades are doing over there. If you don’t, or you think the war’s run badly, or a mistake, those are all defensible positions; but don’t say he loves war.
