Last time we trashed the standard narrative that modern conservative movements are organic, bottom-up uprisings. Instead, what has appeared to be grassroots radicalization and mobilization is more often a soup of grievance politics stirred by elite capture and institutional control. Conservative power is less spontaneous rebellion, and mostly a coordinated, long-term business class welfare project. This is a sample of a premium episode. Sign up to listen to the entire episode. patreon.com/wetwired Whether we’re talking about anti-abortion campaigns, fighting gay marriage, or resisting the Equal Rights Amendment, what looks like ground-up conservative mobilization has been shaped and reshaped by elite priorities or simply absorbed and redirected toward preexisting economic goals. No doubt, grassroots anger is real but when it translates to policy (lol) it tends to preserve donor-class interests, with the scantiest symbolic concessions masking structural continuity. For every bathroom bill, there’s a corporate tax break. Popular outrage supplies energy, legitimacy, and votes, while elites retain control over funding, media ecosystems, legal pipelines, and economic policy. The result is a kinder and more gentle managed populism mobilized from below, governed from above—where the appearance of radical change often conceals long-term institutional stability. There are probably some true believers up at the top who hate trans people and immigrants, but those people are also self-maximizing actors and they’re never going to pass on that sweet free government money. Now we’re going to pick up where we left off last time with the identity crisis of modern conservatism from the post-9/11 era through the Tea Party, the proto-Chad Alt-Right, Trump 1, through grandpa’s turn at the wheel, and into Trump 2 and the current Heritage/MAGA realignment. Each apparent insurgency: the Tea Party, message board white nationalism and even QAnon has been either financed, absorbed, or neutralized by existing power structures, with grievance politics serving as fuel for institutional continuity. What looks like political insurgency settles into consolidation, as factions spin out, rebrand, and are folded back into the broader conservative coalition. When the dust settles, it’s always money who’s left standing. Fly your crypto-leftist flag with our personal love letter to Juan José Arévalo, philosopher and socialist president of Guatemala, and the airline he nationalized. wetwired.printful.me/
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