I think it's a case of the tyranny of minor differences and what people are used to. My personal phone is an android and I'm used to it and like it, while my work phone is an iPhone and I use it for entirely different work-related reasons that it's great for.
Never shall the two meet! I actually like having my work and private lives segregated into two separate OS's that have little if any overlap.
I have at least a nodding acquaintance with that work and while I think it's worth considering and talking about, I don't find it to be at all the most convincing explanation for conservatism and am far more persuaded by conservatism as being motivated by a desire for the preservation of hierarchy that manifests itself through said psychological traits, but that is the ultimate prior that informs them. Otherwise we would expect to see liberalism and conservatism more evenly distributed throughout our population, as with other psychological traits, but we don't, to the contrary, they are very geographically dependent.
So while I don't think that psychology has nothing to say about the issue, I definitely don't think that its the most important factor.
Not really. The real answer is that different parts of the federal government are underfunded or overfunded according to political ideology and expedience. This is a great example; the SSA is underfunded while the military is overfunded which results in clear performance differences.
You'll never hear a conservative bitch about the US military saying that it can't do anything right, and it's like, yeah, duh, because it has a huge fucking budget and basically gets anything it asks for.
Social safety net programs? Not so much.
There's a relevant and oft' cited Churchill quote to the effect that while democracy isn't great, it's better than any other governing system we know of.
In other words, leave us not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
As for why democracy is the best system, it's simple; in theory democracy gives everyone a stake in governance. While it rarely if ever works out that way, Churchill was correct that it's better than any other system we know of.
Their sense of entitlement when it comes to public lands is unreal.
It's a common lie. The reality is that red states score much lower on every objective quality of life metric, while having much higher rates of things like violent crime, addiction and suicide than any blue state let alone any of the US's peer nations in the rest of the developed world. It's not even remotely close. With very few exceptions, the social pathologies we see throughout the US are concentrated in red states. Blue states have problems too, but they tend to be related to the fact that they are highly desirable places to live.
My father in law doesn't like music. He doesn't dislike it either, he's just indifferent. Apart from that he's just your garden variety somewhat-curmudgeonly 80-year-old dude.
I'm not attacking you personally. Personally, I wish you nothing but the best.
What I'm attacking is the phony mythology that has thousands of fatbodies imagining that being heavily armed is somehow a valid and necessary counter to the possibility of government overreach.
It's an objectively absurd and laughable proposition.
My dad served with the 4th ID in Vietnam, my grandfather fought from Guadalcanal to Okinawa where his war ended, and then he went on to fight in Korea and survived the clusterfuck that was the Chosin Reservoir.
My point is only that such men still exist in the US armed forces, and there is no universe in which "Fatbody Joe McGee" and his airsoft buddies stand a chance against them, no matter how heavily armed they think they are.
What's funny is you getting defensive about it. Sounds like you might have a fitness issue yourself.
I'm not saying that you necessarily are a "disgusting fatbody," (to quote Gny. Sgt. Hartman,) but if you were, that's exactly how you would react to the fact that every competent military on the planet demands high levels of physical fitness of their combat troops.
It's just a fact, my dude; you don't last long in real combat if you're heaving and gassed within the first 15 minutes.
That's only one relatively minor factor among many. Anyone who points to it without also mentioning the much more significant impacts of things like global supply chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine is either ignorant, or is trying to spin a particular narrative while being intellectually dishonest about their priors.
Especially since those guys are pretty much all lard-asses. There's a reason why every competent military on the planet emphasizes physical fitness before anything else; it's because real combat --as opposed to playing paintball with your fatbody friends-- is one of the most physically and psychologically punishing activities known to man.
Also Columbia owns brands like Prana and Mountain Hardware, so if you want higher quality stuff that's still basically Columbia, you have plenty of options.
The same is true of many other companies.