[H]ow exactly do conservatives get the masses on-board in the first place? Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”, the preferred liberal Rosetta Stone to unlocking the right-wing brain, suggests that non-elite rightwingers simply get “tricked” into supporting conservative policies. The Big Scary GOP demolishes labor unions with one hand, but draws crosshairs on Tiller the Baby-killer with the other. It’s the only way Frank can explain such “irrationality.”

Robin calls bullshit on that. Non-elite conservatives—the Red State bubbas that have cursed this land for so long—reap very real material rewards, but they’re rewards which fly in the face of the cheery “every one’s good at heart” worldview of liberalism.

Conservatism offers them something Robin brilliantly calls “democratic feudalism.” In other words, dominion over your “lessers” in the private spheres of the workplace (middle-management tyrants) and the home (lockin’ down the wife and daughter’s ladyparts): “the most visible effort of the GOP since the 2010 midterm election has been to curtail the rights of employees and the rights of women.” This is the link between the Santorums and the Pauls of the world–one which Reason magazine, the Mises Institute and other appendages of the supposedly “anti culture-war” libertarian propaganda circuit work very hard to obscure.