Political views can be like a social disease. People adopt the views of others they associate with and whom they see as allies – even when those views are not logically or morally compatible with the person's own values or interests.

This affects both the left and the right, but the convergence of conservative groups is damaging our country and becoming a threat throughout much of the western world. Conservative Christians are joining forces with the neo-Nazi alt-right. Both blindly support recklessly pro-business policies that are disadvantageous to themselves. Worse, the two groups are adopting each other’s views, adding a more moralizing tinge to alt-right racism and sexism, and pulling white supremacist views into the platform of “values voters”.

This began in the eighties, when the Republican party brought in the religious-right as part of the “Reagan revolution”. Prior to Reagan, the party was socially conservative and generally religious, but conservative Christian views were not a litmus test for Republican candidates.

In the Reagan years, progressive and moderate conservatives were pushed out of the Republican party. This left a party that was defined by Christian conservatives and those who pandered to them – so much that by the 2016 election, only one of the many Republican Presidential candidates would dare say that he believed in evolution. It has become necessary to say that you are anti-science to be a national Republican candidate.

A disturbing side effect of the change is that the traditional pro-business, anti-big-government and religious right views contaminated each other in ways that were not necessarily compatible with these groups’ traditional views.

The Christian conservatives nearly universally adopted other conservative policies that are not necessarily very “Christian”, such as support for capital punishment, support for mass incarceration, fighting against welfare, supporting militarism, fighting healthcare reform, and supporting Reagan’s delayed response to AIDS.

Meanwhile, the mainstream conservatives adopted the religionus right’s policies that did not fit with the classic less-government and less-regulation policies of conservatives, such as increased censorship, more aggressively opposing gay rights and abortion, and attempting to legislate prayer into public schools.

The merging of conservative ideologies continued with the rise of neo-fascism under the name “alt-right”. The religious right and mainstream Republicans started adopting white supremacist and neo-Nazi views on racial superiority, “non-violent” ethnic cleansing, opposing women’s rights, and discriminating against other religions. The alt-right began embracing some of the more moralizing policies of Christian conservatives.

Somewhere along the way, conservatives subsumed the Libertarian concepts of property rights; so, now it is common for conservatives to argue against foundations of democracy such as education, based upon the idea that “it is immoral for me to have to pay for other people’s education”. This false “moral” argument has become the excuse to attack nearly every American institution. This has led blue-collar conservatives to adopt pro-business policies that would make their communities poorer while benefitting the rich.

Meanwhile, we have Republicans mainstreaming and adopting neo-Nazi rhetoric and policy. We have blue collar and Christianists demanding we burden our children trillions of dollars of additional debt so we can give tax breaks to the filthy rich. And conservatives in general adopting ever more judgmental, controlling, and anti-science policies rooted in the worst ideas of the religious right.

These incompatible groups have all become thugs willing to fight for each other’s most extreme causes. Worse, the mainstreaming of the alt-right’s neo-fascist ideas is even worse. Pro-authoritarian, anti-democratic, racist, sexist, xenophobic views are becoming popular throughout the US and Europe. If we allow this to become normal, we won’t be fighting just tax cuts for the rich or discriminatory laws; we will be fighting totalitarianism. You can see it already in Trump’s attacks on free speech and our government’s checks and balances being supported and justified by mainstream conservatives.

This isn’t a knee-jerk overreaction. I have hope, and I have faith in America’s institutions. But did you ever think that a neo-Nazi would be even temporarily put on the National Security Council? Did you ever think we would have a president that lies blatantly and consistently with no reaction from congress? Did you ever think we would have a President colluding with Russia with congress blocking investigation? Did you ever expect a President and his family to openly profit from the Presidency without action by congress? There is a real risk that we will slowly veer towards corrupt authoritarianism while assuring ourselves “it cannot happen here”.

We need to be vigilant. We need to call out and fight neo-fascism on every front. We need to fight using every legal method means available, and support those who carry on the fight for us. We need to stop quibbling over Bernie or Hilary and focus on the bigger issues. And we need to say:

This is not conservative.
This is not Christian.
This is policy written only to benefit the rich at the expense of the country
This is policy taken from Nazi philosophy.
This is un-American and anti-democratic.