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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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Shouldn’t conservatives, i.e. the party of law and order, be a fan of measures which promote public safety?

I'll try to explain this cultural gap as someone with a bit of familiarity with both American and European (I assume that's where you're from) conservative culture. To massively generalize, for American conservatives, the purpose of law and order is to enable the liberty of law-abiding people. Strong law enforcement, yes, but of laws written to be relatively minimal and with a common-sense focus on "real crime", with the goal to enable people to freely live a "normal" (i.e. productively employed, not using drugs, etc.) life. Red Tribers are often happy to break laws they see as unnecessary government overreach if they can get away with it. They're concerned about the breakdown of law and order, but just as concerned that abuses of state power will crush that freedom to live one's American life. Covid measures were a question of the latter issue to American conservatives. They don't see what MAGA is doing in terms of law and order, like ICE raids, as authoritarian because it's going after people who have broken what they consider just and reasonable laws, but lockdowns were unjust.

As for MAGA's populist economics, yeah, in many ways it's no longer a movement of 80s free-market economics. The more hardline economic populists will tell you that the left-wingers advocating those policies a hundred years ago were the real populists back then, and they were wrong to give up economic populism in the 20th Century in order to fight over culture and long march through institutions - they'll even be gleeful when leftists point that out.

There remains a fairly large contingent of traditional law-and-order conservatives, the kind who believe every regulation is a good thing and to be followed, that if you were arrested you are guilty and in any conflict between an individual and authority, authority is right. Rather overrepresented among police officers (who of course see themselves as authority), but rather underrepresented among online conservatives, "second amendment people", and MAGA.

I'm sure that's true, also among older conservatives in red states. I've only known big-city cops, who generally take a somewhat cynical attitude to their department and a relaxed attitude to common-sense violations of regulation because both are necessary for their job.