SNAP, Crackle, Gone
The real story of American conservatism isn’t betrayal, it’s follow-through.
I can’t help but feel we are moving back into a pre–New Deal, even pre–Square Deal, America. Maybe this is our natural condition. A large polyglot republic that is complex to govern and constantly riled by local bigotries, industrial sabotage, and spiritual amnesia. The conservative movement didn’t invent this. It’s been riding the currents of a Social Darwinist strain in American life that never really went away. It’s the ideology of “let the strong survive,” dressed in the polite language of markets, morals, and meritocracy.
Right now, the nation is living in another prolonged government shutdown, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is hanging in the balance. The USDA has already warned that if the shutdown persists, no new benefits will go out on November 1. That’s 42 million people, many of them children, the elderly, disabled, veterans, about to be told, “Sorry, nothing left this month.”
Not because the crops failed.
Not because the money’s gone.
But because the American experiment once again confused cruelty with efficiency.
And let’s not pretend this is just some bureaucratic accident. SNAP’s demise, slow or sudden, is the logical outcome of a project decades in the making. The worst part isn’t the policies themselves. It’s the people who deny their consequences. The ones who have spent decades pushing the tax cuts, deregulation, and anti-welfare rhetoric, only to gasp in genteel horror when the final form of their agenda arrives in a blue suit and a long red tie. He mocks their elite sensibilities but fulfills their policy dreams. And suddenly, we’re told, “This isn’t conservatism.”
That’s disingenuous. It’s narrative laundering by the American center. They are still dictating campaign strategy, op-eds, and donor decks; they refuse to reckon with the movement they helped legitimize. Because if they did, they’d have to confront an ugly truth: the current administration’s political culture isn’t a betrayal of conservatism. It’s its culmination. It’s fruit. The end of a long project that began with Goldwater, matured under Reagan, and took on its final, chaotic form under Trump.
Trump isn’t the problem.
He’s the reveal.
And that’s why, odds are, he will be a success, not just electorally, but ideologically, because the “vacuum” he’s creating isn’t empty. It’s ripe. Ripe for a new political reality that doesn’t revolve around the comforts of suburbia, the rituals of bipartisanship, or the delusion of a past that never existed. We’re watching the social safety net: food stamps, public housing, and voting rights all get sold off piece by piece. Not just out of malice, but out of fear. Fear of a rising, pluralistic, participatory democracy that would dare to redistribute power.
And let’s be clear: the New Deal was never secure. The Great Society was always provisional. Every advance, Social Security, SNAP, and Medicare, was met with suspicion and sabotage by those who believed poverty was a choice and help was a sin. Goldwater called it a “dime store New Deal” under Eisenhower, and then Reagan’s rise (a Goldwater supporter) began the hollowing of it out. Nixon expanded food stamps under pressure, but only because hungry children in Appalachia made for alarming headlines. Before all that, the Gilded Age left food insecurity to soup kitchens and sermons, with the Charity Organization Societies moralizing about the “deserving poor.”
In that earlier Gilded America, if you were hungry, you could knock on the back door of a church and hope for stew. Poorhouses and workhouses were society’s answer to systemic poverty. And they were deliberately miserable, because the lesson was this: hunger teaches responsibility. Assistance should sting. That mindset never really disappeared; it just got new branding and a congressional budget line.
Today, the fight over SNAP is pitched in sterile language: “budget caps,” “work requirements,” “fraud prevention.” But it’s the same fight. The same fear that giving people food without humiliation might make them believe they’re owed dignity. That’s the heresy.
That betrayal is now wrapped in appeals to fiscal responsibility and false nostalgia. And too many centrists, well-meaning, data-driven, decorum-obsessed, keep trying to shine the ruins like they’re salvageable. But the past they’re polishing wasn’t built for us. It was built for a narrow idea of America: racially coded, property-owning, suburban, and held together by myth.
I’ve studied Never Trump conservatives. Some of them are kind. Thoughtful. Genuinely distressed by what’s happened. But too many are still stuck trying to resurrect a party and a politics that were, at their core, always allergic to equity. They want to save the soul of conservatism without admitting it sold itself long ago.
It’s time to write the real history. To stop waiting for the mythical sensible center to deliver us. To build something better, not just as a strategy, but as a story. Because if we don’t, then yes, the gilded mask comes off. And what our kids inherit is not the American Dream, but the American Pattern: inequality as fate, charity as policy, and democracy as a managed illusion.
But here’s the thing. The vacuum Trump creates could also be a clearing. A rupture. A moment to build policies and politics that involve everyone. That reflects a country as it is, not just one that flatters the ghost of Reagan or clings to the legacy of a TV presidency sold in black-and-white.
Let’s tell the truth. Not just about what went wrong, but about what could be built in its place. Because if SNAP falls, it won’t just be a policy failure. It will be a moral signal that America, once again, is choosing spectacle over substance, punishment over prevention, the past over the possible.
The Center; Jesus said, if you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold I shall spew thee out of my mouth.
The center is the residence of cowards of those without principles and orals. These people are professionals, that is how they make their living, they give a little to the right, to the left, they ameliorate meanwhile sucking in salaries, benefits, and social status. Take a look at the "leftist" James Carville, he is married to that right wing Harridan Mary Matalin, George Conway was married to the left wing harridan, Kellyanne Conway.
Colin Woodard, which divides the country into 11 distinct cultures rather than the 50 states. While this theory is not universally accepted, it suggests that regional cultural differences are so significant that the U.S. functions more like a confederation of these different cultural nations, each with its own values, history, and political leanings.
Therein is the problem, the south is locked in time, to it's slave owning past, and the lost cause.
I struggle with calling them racists per se, for they will vote for and follow a Bobby Jindal, a Nimrata Haley, a Vivik Ramaswamy, a Kash patel, even a black so long as he or she isn't an American Descendant of a Slave, with the exception of the Kanye's, Thomas's and Herschel Walker's, the house slaves that sip brandy with the master, and gives him advice on how to handle the field slaves. (Stephen, Django Unchained)