My take is that the foundation of Conservatism today is NPD. They hate “the Left” (Liberals) because we do not feel the pain they feel, and cannot escape from.
1. Consider all the people for whom Trump is still a hero.
2. There's a Conservative commentator from the Hoover Institute, William Davis Hanson, whose comments are full of suspicions, not exactly evidence, of what Liberals are up to. He comes on as a major intellectual and scholar. [Reminds me of the 1971 movie They Might Be Giants (George C. Scott and Joanne Woodward), in which the paranoid schizophrenic judge convinces his therapist that his worldview is reality.] So, Hanson is possibly a working paranoid schizophrenic, and "fits right in".
3. An interesting precedent: Secrets of the Dead: Egypt's Darkest Hour (PBS). The Egyptians did not see climate change coming, and so it wiped out the Old Kingdom about 4000 years ago (scientists dated the collapse with ice cores and mud cores). So, a culture CAN collapse.
4. We know that climate change does loom, for us.
5. Interesting little book: The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014, Columbia U. Press, Naomi Oreskes). A climate scientist fantasizes about a conference in China on the 300th anniversary of "the great Collapse of 2093".
6. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)
So, these ARE the times we live in.
Human history has been going on for about 200,000 years. I decided to investigate what we know about the human end-game, i.e., death. Jesus and Time and Eternity (Amazon). Very surprising, very good news.
Note: In all of human history, there is only one person who has actually died and actually returned from death. Only one.