I enjoy this site even though I think I'm to the left of most of the people on the site. I've been reading Heinlein and musing on "Right to Work" that is about to rip my state in half and I think I've finally been able to crystallize why our opponent's do what they do. It's important to understand the people who oppose you instead of caricaturing them as suburban know nothings and racists. There is some inner struggle that they are trying to let loose, and if you understand it, it could be integral in defeating them once and for all.
So first off right wingers don't like democracy. The only reason they so fervently defend it is because of their authoritarianism. If I went back in time and convinced the founding fathers to have a new king, then right wingers would think monarchy was the basis of freedom and liberty. Democracy is the idea that human beings can be improved enough to where they can run their own country on the basis of what they collectively desire, and that they can ensure their freedoms on their own. That people can gather together to have conflict in a peaceful manner and resolve their differences. In fact, without democracy, humanity itself can never reach its potential. All other forms of government essentially say mankind isn't ready to take that kind of responsibility for itself, it needs and best a benign dictator who is super human and can save humanity from itself.
This is echoed through all manner of right wing rhetoric. Shifty, lazy welfare moochers are failed human beings who should be shucking grain and throwing it onto the back of a wagon until they learn the value of hard work. Union workers are thugs who use violence to get what they want instead of negotiating with their benign free market dictators who know what their value really is. People who want peace and are anti-war don't understand that peace and freedom are won by the selflessness and sacrifice of being a soldier in the face of a (simplistically) evil enemy. In all cases, human beings are weak and fragile, amoral, and need to be guided and beaten into shape because they lack the natural intelligence and willpower to go beyond themselves and actually form a functioning society.
And conservatism is supposed to be optimistic?
From the benign authoritarianism of libertarian free market thinking to out and out fascism, right wingers do not believe in the human project. This is why public education, unionism, social democracy, and equality are such anathema to them. I came to this conclusion after reading Starship Troopers, where the author presents a society where enfranchisement comes from serving in a harsh military where the vast majority of people flunk out or die. Without going through this inhuman process in a war with simplistic enemies, you cannot be enfranchised. In Heinlein's view, this keeps people who would otherwise never reach their "potential" from having any effect on the direction of society. Lazy moochers can live in their paradise so long as they don't make any big decisions. And for the people who die in basic training? At least they tried and we know that they were no good in advancing the human project. Darwanism for the win.
We, as the left, do so much, but we do not stand on the rooftops and remind people that enfranchisement is the reason why we have a civilization in the first place. When the far right takes power, such as Germany, Japan, Chile, Argentina, Spain, and Italy, you get a small minority of "pure" people trying to oust and destroy the lesser people. From the rape of Nanjing to the Holocaust, the far right believes that we shouldn't suffer the weak and that simply waiting around for natural selection to take place will destroy humanity.
This is what drives them ultimately, to greater and lesser degrees depending how deep on the right they land on the scale. It's also why they project all their personal faults on their opponents, from the far right conservative pastor who says gays will burn in hellfire and then has a gay lover on the side, to the the chickenhawk warmonger who would run straight to Canada after receiving a draft ticket, they want to expunge all of the faults that THEY themselves have in others.
They don't want right to work, they want right to rule.