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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Isn't conservatism to some extent at odds with atomistic individualism?

I believe that's the point. American conservatives employ individualistic and libertarian rhetoric in support of their political goals, but while this makes some amount of sense in the context of opposition to welfare or regulation, it is more broadly incoherent because they're religious communitarians rather than libertarian individualists. You might be able to square banning abortion with libertarianism on the grounds that you regard it as murder, but it's harder to do that for, e.g. restricting drugs and alcohol, wanting Christianity to have a privileged status, banning immigration, or more generally wanting collectively enforced conservative social norms.

I'm not entirely convinced by the above; I think the GOP's failure to achieve many of its goals are less a matter of a mismatch between goals and rhetoric and more a matter of being unable to resolve real tension between disparate goals (or between their stated goals and maintaining electoral success). Of course, a mismatch between goals and rhetoric may impede the resolution of these tensions, but the root issue is their existence in the first place.