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Comment by true_religion | Hacker News Reader

Not the original poster, but I’ve been married 13 years. My spouse is liberal, and I was originally conservative.

I feel like back in the day, the political spectrum was more narrow and although there were disagreements it was more on how to apply the law, not on if a law should exist at all.

Roe v Wade for example is from 1973. This law was established in my childhood, and as a nominal conservative I support it. Removing it is a radical change, leading to an alien landscape where people are fleeing newly antiabortion states and refusing job offers on the basis of what laws they have to live under. Life, death, and medical care are too fundamental to be left to the states. If you do, then do you really have a strongly knit country?

I’ve digressed a bit, but I think the stakes have changed so people on both sides of the spectrum share little common ground.

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> This law was established in my childhood, and as a nominal conservative I support it.

The trouble, there, is that the modern American mainstream right (and to a large extent the right, or at least the far-right, in most developed countries), _is not conservative_; in general it's far more radical, and wants to make far more sweeping changes, than the mainstream left.

There was a fairly long period when the political right heavily overlapped with 'conservatives', that is people who are perhaps overly into Chesterton's fence, but that's largely over now.

> leading to an alien landscape where people are fleeing newly antiabortion states and refusing job offers on the basis of what laws they have to live under.

I would note that that people having to be conscious of repressive state laws isn't _all that alien_; ethnic minorities in the US have moved states based on the laws they'd be living under for literal centuries, and LGBT people have similar concerns (it wasn't even legal to be gay nationwide in the US until 2007, for instance). The difference here is the abrupt _removal_ of pre-existing rights, of course.

Many European countries have either outright abortion bans or limits on abortion after a certain number of weeks (including Germany, Italy, Spain and Ireland). This is similar to many Republican states you call "radical."

> The trouble, there, is that the modern American mainstream right (and to a large extent the right, or at least the far-right, in most developed countries), _is not conservative_; in general it's far more radical, and wants to make far more sweeping changes, than the mainstream left.

As a post-conservative (hard right for two decades), I agree with this. I also think the left had a part in our arrival here. ex: I think ignoring the rural poor for generations whizzed away a lot of good will. In this, the left clearly lost their way.

But I also keep coming back to one overriding factor: That no one anywhere wants to clean their own house. No matter what I belong to now or have ever been a part of - that nature either dominates or barely doesn't.

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