American democracy is in peril, teetering between democracy and authoritarianism and under siege by Donald Trump, the Republican Party and the larger white right. To call them "conservative" is an insult to language.
In a recent Salon essay, historian Robert McElvaine addressed this directly, calling out "the media's ingrained tendency to aid and abet the enemies of democracy through the careless use of language," and especially "the ubiquitous use of the word 'conservative' to describe extreme right-wing radicals and their beliefs, which only seek to conserve white supremacy — and more specifically the class or caste supremacy of a small minority of wealthy and nominally Christian white men."
