The current form of American so-called conservatism, particularly as it has evolved under Trumpism and aligned with far-right movements, is so biologically adverse in that it promotes conditions that undermine human nervous system regulation, relational safety, and social well-being.
This is not a moral judgment, but an observation grounded in how human beings function.
Chronic Threat Physiology
Narratives of danger, invasion, and us-versus-them framing drive this strain of conservatism. It floods the body with stress hormones by emphasizing fear of immigrants, trans people, “wokeness,” and societal collapse. When people live in constant fight-or-flight mode, their bodies suffer immune suppression, heart disease, disrupted digestion, anxiety, and insomnia. A system built on chronic fear is fundamentally anti-homeostasis. It promotes chronic illness, mental health conditions, and recurrent pain.
Disconnection From Co-Regulation
Humans regulate stress through safe, reciprocal relationships. The far-right ideology celebrates hyper-individualism, disconnection, and dominance over others. It often mocks empathy and caregiving as weak. This leads to loneliness, mistrust, and isolation, which are major predictors of poor physical and mental health.
Suppression of Emotional Truth
Conservative culture as it currently exists often demands emotional suppression, especially in men, and discourages vulnerability, nuance, and repair. Emotional suppression doesn’t make feelings disappear; it drives them into the body, where they show up as illness, addiction, and explosive rage. This is a nervous system under siege.
In-Group/Out-Group Stress
When policy and rhetoric divide the world into “real Americans” and everyone else, it doesn’t just affect the marginalized. It also poisons the internal physiology of those told to maintain this hierarchy. Fear of difference, hypervigilance about purity, and the pressure to uphold a rigid identity trigger threat responses and erode flexibility, curiosity, and connection.
Control of Bodies
Current American conservatism includes efforts to control reproductive rights, restrict gender expression, and criminalize bodily autonomy. When people lose agency over their bodies, the nervous system responds with threat, depression, and dissociation. Bodily sovereignty is not optional. It is core to safety and health.
Shame-Based Control
This ideology relies heavily on shame of poverty, queerness, disability, and dependence to maintain social control. Shame is one of the most dysregulating emotional states. Chronic shame is associated with self-harm, disordered eating, violence, and social withdrawal. A culture of shame is a culture of dysregulation.
Denial of Interdependence
Current conservatism often mocks the idea that people should care for one another through public systems like healthcare, education, and housing. But interdependence is biology. Human systems depend on reciprocity and shared regulation. Ignoring this leads to systemic trauma and generational harm.
Rigidity Over Adaptability
Biologically, health requires the ability to adapt, to change course, metabolize new information, and respond flexibly. The current conservative movement prides itself on ideological rigidity and rejection of evidence, even in the face of the climate crisis, mass shootings, or pandemic science. This rigidity mirrors trauma responses and leads to cultural brittleness and collapse.
Exploitation of Stress for Political Gain
Perhaps most dangerously, this movement deliberately keeps people in stress responses to maintain control. It activates fear, then offers scapegoats. This weaponization of threat creates a loop where people are constantly on edge, looking for enemies, unable to rest. It’s not just cruel. It’s biologically corrosive.
The dominant form of American conservatism today is built on conditions that degrade relational safety, suppress truth, disrupt physiological regulation, and increase suffering for those it targets and for those it claims to protect. That makes it biologically adverse, anti-human.
Human systems require connection, flexibility, safety, and fairness to thrive. Any ideology that undermines those things, no matter what it calls itself, is a direct threat to health and humanity.
