American Conservatives Have Become Everything They Once Feared

Once the self-proclaimed guardians against state tyranny, the modern Republican Party has become everything it once warned us about — and worse.

For decades and up until very recently, Republicans warned about the dangers of "big government", centralized control, and government overreach. They developed and preached a culture of distrust and suspicion particularly about the federal government, but also extending to their state and local officials too. Today however, we see that as soon as they get into power, they strengthen the same centralized authority they built careers opposing.

Barry Goldwater warned “A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have.” Ronald Reagan famously declared “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” These weren’t just slogans, they were the ideological backbone of modern conservatism: a suspicion of central power, a belief in individual liberty, and a deep mistrust of federal overreach.

But today’s conservative movement doesn’t just tolerate government overreach — it embraces it. Where Reagan once joked about the uselessness of politicians and government workers in providing assistance, today's conservatives attempt to solidify that uselessness as a key feature of government, not a bug — actively working to cripple the state's capacity to help, while simultaneously consolidating state control and supercharging its ability to punish and ruin.

Electoral democracy itself has become a threat to today's conservative movement. As Republican policies and culture war crusades grow increasingly unpopular, the GOP no longer adapts. When elections don't go their way, they attempt to delegitimize the results or sabotage them outright.

If a Republican candidate loses, it’s rarely accepted as a reflection of public will. Instead, they baselessly claim voter fraud, question the intelligence of the electorate, or even try to overturn the outcome outright. And when the law prevents them from nullifying an election directly, they go after the systems that made it possible.

Take Missouri. In 2015, voters in St. Louis approved a modest minimum wage increase. In response, lawmakers in Jefferson City — over 100 miles away — passed a law preempting local wage ordinances^[1][2], effectively canceling the vote and slashing the wage back down^[3][4]. It was one of the only times in recent history that a U.S. city had its minimum wage forcibly lowered in defiance of a democratic vote.^[5]

Or take reproductive rights. In 2024, Missourians successfully passed a constitutional amendment protecting the right to abortion as a healthcare choice^[6][7]. But within months, Senate Republicans invoked rare procedural rules to shut down debate and pass a bill overturning the amendment.^[8]Previous court ordered injunctions that provided relief from regulations designed and put into place specifically to limit access to reproductive healthcare were overturned on a technically^[9][10], once again shuttering the few clinics that provide care within the state.^[11] Almost immediately, new legislation was introduced to place a new referendum aimed at repealing it entirely.^[12] When democracy delivers results they dislike, they don't adapt, they throw a tantrum and try to break the machine.^[13]

But breaking the machine isn't just about overturning elections. Sometimes it's about making sure the /wrong/ ideas never enter the public conversation to begin with. If the conservative movement can't win in the marketplace of ideas, it simply tries to shut the marketplace down.

In Republican-led states, we've seen a wave of legislation designed not just to ban actions, but to criminalize expression. In Florida, teachers faced punishment for mentioning LGBTQ people in classrooms.^[14] In Texas, books about race and gender are being pulled off shelves.^[15] In Tennessee, drag is treated as inherently obscene.^[16][17] None of these are about protecting children or families — they’re about regulating which ideas are allowed to exist in public life. These aren't just culture war skirmishes. They're full-blown campaigns to control thought and police the mind.^[18] The conservative movement would sooner arrest you for committing a thought crime than they would provide funding to fix a pot hole.

It’s not just an issue for teachers, librarians, drag performers, or women seeking healthcare. The conservative movement’s obsession with control and punishment has metastasized far beyond classrooms and state capitols. It now reaches into immigration courts, detention centers, and foreign prisons, and it’s dragging in people who aren’t even supposed to be there.

In March 2025, Kilmar Abrego García, a legal U.S. resident from Maryland who was protected by a federal court’s stay order, was illegally deported by ICE to El Salvador.^[19] There, he was locked inside CECOT, a massive military-run mega-prison infamous for torture, indefinite detention, and complete lack of legal oversight.[20]

For over two months, the U.S. government defied multiple court orders to stop the deportation and then to return him.^[21][22] Officials claimed they were "unable" to act, portraying the government as too weak to enforce its own judicial rulings^[23][24] — until June 2025, when they suddenly reversed course and announced his extradition back to the U.S. to face charges in a sprawling human trafficking conspiracy that legal analysts, lawyers, and reporters widely suspect to be fabricated using AI-generated narratives.^[25][26]

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled the deportation unlawful and warned that the logic ICE used could apply to anyone — even American citizens.

The same month, in March, ICE began quietly using an old wartime provision — the Alien Enemies Act — to deport Venezuelan asylum seekers, many of them legal residents, to military-run prisons in Central America. Legal scholars, human rights organizations, and even federal judges described it as an unlawful overreach of executive power that bypasses asylum hearings and violates international refugee protections, enabled by the conservative movement’s broader assault on the United States Contitution and international law.

Among those deported was Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay Venezuelan hairdresser and makeup artist who had fled political persecution.^[28] Despite having no criminal record, ICE labeled him a gang affiliate based solely on tattoos and deported him to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.^[29] He was never allowed to plead his case in court. He now languishes in CECOT — denied legal counsel, medical care, and even acknowledgment from U.S. consular authorities.

And it’s not just legal residents. In April 2025, ICE deported a 4-year-old U.S. citizen with stage-4 cancer, along with his 7-year-old sister and their mother, after a routine check-in in Louisiana. The children were removed without access to medical care or legal defense.^[30][31][32] A federal judge called the act "indefensible." This wasn't a border case, or a criminal fugitive. It was a dying child with a US passport, disappeared by his own government.

Even when citizenship is not in doubt, ICE still acts as if it doesn't matter. Across the country, US citizens by birth and by naturalization have been detained, interrogated, and threatened with deportation by agents who treat proof of citizenship as a suggestion, not a fact. Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a U.S.-born man from Alabama, was arrested during a traffic stop and held for four days despite showing his birth certificate.^[33][34] Jose Hermosillo, a mentally disabled citizen from Arizona, was detained for ten days while ICE “verified” his status, even after he presented a Social Security card and valid ID.^[35]

In Illinois, Julio Noriega was forcibly taken off the street and interrogated for hours despite being a citizen. Jensy Machado, a naturalized citizen in Virginia, was handcuffed and detained during a workplace raid, even while carrying his naturalization certificate.^[36] And in Florida, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, born in Georgia, was arrested under the state’s immigration law despite having a U.S. birth certificate — which ICE agents dismissed as suspicious.^[37]

And yet, through all of this — the unlawful detentions, the vanishing of citizens, the open defiance of court orders — the so-called patriots are nowhere to be found.

Where are the Second Amendment hardliners and self-described defenders of the Constitution? The ones who warned that government tyranny must be resisted with violence?^[38][39] Who wrapped themselves in flags, stocked up on firearms, and swore they'd never let the government trample their rights?^[40][41] Perhaps it eluded public awareness that their vision of "freedom" was always personal, never collective; that their crusade wasn't for liberty in general, but for the unchecked privilege to live above the rules they demand for everybody else.^[42][43] Because under their watch, their guidance, their administration, they are the ones detaining and deporting citizens and legal residents, ignoring judges, and disappearing children.

This is what conservatism looks like now: not limited government, but a government big enough and powerful enough to disappear legal residents, or even citizens, without accountability. A government that sends people into foreign torture facilities based on accusation alone, with no trial, no rights, and no return. A government powerless to provide its citizens with assistance, but powerful enough to ruin lives and even end them.

They're calling it fascism.^[44] Many^[45] people^[46] are^[47] saying^[48] it.^[49] A movement that preaches liberty while practicing cruelty; that professes redemption through Christ but worships Mammon; that swears allegiance to the Constitution while setting it on fire. And it's not theoretical, it is administrative. It's paperwork, court dates, policy memos, executive orders, bureaucracy. It's kids in cages, citizens in handcuffs, and the American Gestapo throwing away birth certificates.

So what do we do? We stop treating this like politics-as-usual and recognize it for what it is: legalist warfare. And as the Heritage Foundation previously threatened the nation with their anti-American^[50] manifesto, it will remain administrative and bloodless as long as the conservatives keep it that way.^[51] A violent civil war hasn’t begun, despite Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller’s best wishes, but the government’s enforcement apparatus has already been supercharged and turned inward, unleashed against its own people.^[52] The only question now is how far they're willing to go — and how long the rest of us are willing to let them.