To your first paragraph, I would say it still doesn’t make a lot of sense. I do think your average conservative benefits from conservative rulemaking/enforcement in a “sundown town,” look-the-other-way-if-you’re-one-of-us sort of microcosm, but when you look at the effects of conservative policymaking on a macro-social and -economic level, it’s clear that middle-Americans are still getting a worse deal than they would under more progressive regimes.
The second and arguably more important component is that conservatives strongly believe in social hierarchies (even if they are themselves near the bottom). So it doesn’t actually matter if their lives get worse, as long as the lives of people below them (i.e. minorities) are even more miserable. In addition, they believe the rich should stay rich and maintain or increase their power, because they naturally deserve it (this would have been the monarchy and the landed gentry/nobility etc in the past).
To your first paragraph, I would say it still doesn’t make a lot of sense. I do think your average conservative benefits from conservative rulemaking/enforcement in a “sundown town,” look-the-other-way-if-you’re-one-of-us sort of microcosm, but when you look at the effects of conservative policymaking on a macro-social and -economic level, it’s clear that middle-Americans are still getting a worse deal than they would under more progressive regimes.
The second and arguably more important component is that conservatives strongly believe in social hierarchies (even if they are themselves near the bottom). So it doesn’t actually matter if their lives get worse, as long as the lives of people below them (i.e. minorities) are even more miserable. In addition, they believe the rich should stay rich and maintain or increase their power, because they naturally deserve it (this would have been the monarchy and the landed gentry/nobility etc in the past).