Someday the USA might be as good as Iceland or Lithuania. Of course, if it slips a bit more it'll fall behind the international diplomatic powerhouses of Romania and Bulgaria.
That's conservatism in it's purest sense. "The law should protect, but not bind, the in-group while the law binds, but does not protect, the out-group."
Authoritarians (The Authoritarians book) does a phenomenal job digging into these kinds of mentalities. It completely predicted where we're at, and did it using decades of research up to when it was published in 2007.
Looking back, his research was spot on for what was coming next in the US.
Aside from the wealth concentrating in the hands of a few, there's also noting that it's "working full time". More people are stuck into part time or multiple part time jobs to make ends meet.
Suspicion? This has been the goal of right wing and conservative think tanks for decades now. The end goal of conservatism is monarchy. "Plenary Authority" is just a fancy way of saying "The King can do anything he wants".
Windows 95/98 sucked shit. I liked the games, but the kernels were terrible.
I dual booted or ran two machines Linux (RedHat 5.2 to 6.2, wtf was up with 7?), then whatever worked (usually Debian based) for a while. Mostly used Linux alone for years, but used Win7 for a bit. That one was okay, but Microsoft can't build dev tools on their own OS to save their lives.
It's been Linux Mint for a long time now on desktops and Debian/Armbian on servers.
Basically, I've been mainlining Linux since about '97 and it's doing me just fine. Works great for my kids and wife. We're a mostly Linux household. It saves me a ton of headaches. Easy to install, patch, and almost no other maintenance.
Conservatives are, and have always been, about power over others. We kept their more evil nature's focused externally for a while with cold war, but without an external threat to point them at, they always turn on their neighbors eventually.
Because it's an artificial monopoly with a captive audience? Because the government demands all kinds of extra overheads with sometimes dubious need beyond justifying government agency work?
Ala cart disease control. It's about letting people opt out of vaccines individually. The net result will be people failing to get a patchwork of shots (who wants five in a single go? - I'll remember to come back later). So, we lose our herd immunity because the CDC has made it harder to get everything the community needs.
Someday the USA might be as good as Iceland or Lithuania. Of course, if it slips a bit more it'll fall behind the international diplomatic powerhouses of Romania and Bulgaria.