Social 'Conservatives' Are Not Real Conservatives

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

"Small government" is not real conservatism. And even if it was, you'd still hate it. You are describing liberalism.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

You are correct insofar as "conservative" politicians themselves willing conflated their ideology with limited government. But this is as much a case of them failing to be properly conservative as it is them failing to be in favor of limited government. That said, the failure of the two concepts to properly align has been evident for almost as long as the lie itself has been alive.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Since the post-Civil War industrial boom, there has always been a faction in America--allied with Republicans at several points--that strongly believed that the affairs of business should be left to business, and that the results of free economic activity were more or less just. However, this was not necessarily tied to other ideas of freedom of the body or social/legal equality.

It is important to note some currents of the post-New Deal Era. This was a time in which (a) conservatism came more and more to use the language of libertarianism, and (b) an era in which libertarianism itself started to become a discrete concept in American politics (the party was founded in 1971 after disappointments with the Nixon administration). Not coincidentally, the 1950s to the 1970s was a also period in which the federal government attempted to assert itself against the affairs of states and private business in a variety of areas--particularly in the realms of civil rights and racial equality. The ground was, as such, fertile for the rallying of the provinces against "big government liberalism" in the name of "small government conservatism" in a way that had very little to do with the typical definition of human freedom.

You see a similar confluence of right-wingers and libertarians on other social issues even today. Despite being pro-choice and in favor of ending drug criminalization, libertarians are not social liberals. They reject state-enforced equality.