"Conservative" has been the polite term for "Right-winger" for decades, maybe a century or more. [View all]

[JHB]

Sometimes "archconservative" makes an appearance, but such phrasing is always intended to soften the impression of extreme views and deflect implied criticism.

It's come to the fore due to recent events, with Charlie Kirk being incessantly described -- even by nonconsevative media -- as a "conservative activist", not at the right-wing agitator that he was.

Objectively, there are distinctions that could be made between "conservative" and "right-wing", but not in everyday language and current common usage. There's no boundary that reliably sorts views into different categories; all RW points of view are welcome under the "conservative" umbrella. After all, it made recruiting much easier, facilitated bringing all these factions to the current Republican coalition.

I don't bring this up to save the word "conservative". The people who'd most like to do that, the NeverTrumpers who spent their careers building an extreme voter base who would just swallow whatever their favorite people told them. Not only were they part of the problem, they've repeatedly shown themselves to be absolutely useless in shifting any of their former audience off the wingnut reservation.

I just want the rest of us to not sugar-coat open, blatant extremism. Soft-peddling hasn't worked before, and it won't do anything now.