Just like “rule of law” and “family values”, “the troops” and some other stuff, free markets were never something they really care about.

The reality of Republican free markets were about compounding and growing big business and resource extraction at the expense of everyone else.

The rest is all about convincing suckers that getting kicked in the balls is good for them. The most obvious example being farmers. Most aspects of agriculture have been consolidated into oblivion and the markets are not super functional. 80% of the dairy operations in my state are out of business. 60 companies dominate eggs in the US - there used to be 3 in my city.

Immediately. It's always been a smokescreen, and markets have never been truly free. Thumbs on scale, at all times.

When they turned into an authoritarian movement.

I think without a clear, shared definition of “free” the term “free market” has no actual social value and just becomes a political football that sounds good but changes meaning at a whim. Some people use it to mean completely unregulated, some people use it as a synonym for “fair”, and ne’er the twain shall meet.

The big difference between left and right is that leftish politics are based on everyone being equal, and rightish politics accept that some are more equal than others.

It’s not such a terrible tension to live with. We can have, say, equal rights to life while also allowing unequal rights to gold nuggets. You might have more gold nuggets than I do but we both have the right to live in peace.

The far ends of the spectrum though involve, respectively, redistribution of gold nuggets to all, and at the other end a commitment to survival of the fittest that extends to viewing any kind of market regulation as commie bullshit.

I frequently see references to Regan and the ATC strike-busting. Can't tell if it's THE turning point but, it is a significant turn.

when has the market ever been free?

Trump doesn't actually stand for basically a single conservative value outside of immigration and somehow he's eaten the entire party

In the 2016 primary. Trump was always fiscally heterodox to the old GOP.

They never wanted the free market. They wanted an _unregulated_ market. There's a difference.

> When did conservatives abandon the free market?

You're using terms incorrectly. Conservatism has nothing to do with free market.

The people who care most about free markets are liberals (called libertarians in the US).

Presumably you mean to say "Republicans". And your answer is "under Trump". But it's important to note that Trump merely took the Republican party back to its roots. Traditionally, Republicans were more protectionists than the Democrats. Regan changed that, and Trump reverted.

But what annoys me about people who criticize this change, is that it often comes from people who don't believe in free markets.

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As a side note, I think the reason Americans use these terms so wrongly is because of the 2 party system. It forces all ideologies into two camps and for Americans "conservatism", "libertarianism", "nationalism", "fascism" are all the same.

Trump ran as on the Republican ticket, he had been a lifelong NYC Democrat up until he ran for president.

Republican != Conservative… and in reality Trump is neither, but at the same time, the type of Democrat he was no longer exists. It’s also a mistake to confuse Republican for Establishment GOP.