I think this misperceives the nature of the American polity. 20-35% support secession of their state from the union, depending on region. https://images.app.goo.gl/8fwmTm44Q55ReEV76. For comparison, the Basque region of Spain is at 17%. That’s certainly not a position advocated by “the rich.” Is it so hard to believe that a big chunk of the rest are skeptical of big government?
Distrust of the government is deeply baked into American culture. Blaming it on “the rich” effectively denies that culture can be a thing (or assumes it can be easily constructed given sufficient monetary resources).
A related example might be the prevalence of downstate Illinoisans who support "seceding" from Chicago, despite the fact that downstate Illinois gets something like $3 for every $1 it pays in taxes, and Chicago less than $1.
Where's their leverage? In media, which is dominated by liberals? Or in academia, which is dominated by them even more overwhelmingly? Where exactly are all these powerful conservative voices? Is Fox News and Breitbart so much better at getting their message across than almost everything else?
> Isn't this a little like saying "in part that's due to the fact that conservatives are persuasive"?
At the risk of the No True Scotsman fallacy: Today's right wingers are more ethno-nationalist than Burkean conservative; they're persuasive mainly to others who are predisposed to believe the ethno-nationalist message and in the supposed superiority of their own in-group, which in the U.S. of course is mainly white Christian males.
(For context: I was an old-fashioned conservative Republican for most of my life. But then I worked my way around to the view that a corollary to the First Commandment is: Face the facts — live in the world wrought by the Creator, not the one that you wish existed. Then there's the notion that we're all created co-creators, to borrow a term used by Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner [0], working in the service of what you might call the Great Project, the continuing creation of a universe through natural processes, with the Summary of the Law being the two key rules for our effective participation [1], not unlike Conway's Game of Life [2]. Finally, life's experiences persuaded me of the wisdom of John Rawls's veil of ignorance [3], which incidentally seems to tie in nicely with the Golden Rule. All those things moved me decidedly away from conservatism, and eventually out of today's GOP entirely.)
