If you think those people are "conservative" then I'm not sure what political yardstick you are using? I guess you can argue the so-called "horseshoe theory" of politics; that is the far right and the far left sort of merge or come together in some areas. So someone on the hard left resembles someone on the hard right.
Who (including a Conservative like you) doesn't want to see themselves as "Independent" and not unshakably attached to some dogma? Both JFK and Goldwater fancied themselves as "Liberal". Supposedly American Republicans and Democrats agree on 80% of things. Really, is there than much that changes in America regardless of who gets in? The Democrats contained their Left Wing by manipulating Biden into their Presidential candidacy.
Jim Garrison called himself a "libertarian conservative" but his view of America, of who he thought ran the country (the "war state"), sounded exactly like that of the New Left of the 1970s, of the anti-American leftwing, and the "woke" left of today, that views the American project as thoroughly corrupt.
Oliver Stone produced a movie for HBO - "The Untold History of the United States" - that argued that the Cold War was caused solely by the policies of the US, that if we had elected Henry Wallace instead of Harry Truman in 1948 that none of the subsequent conflict would have followed. Yes, poor Uncle Joe Stalin never had a chance <g>. That's a left wing view of US/Soviet relations. It's even further left than what a Chomsky or Zinn said. They at least were critical of both sides.
Isn't that Stone being wary of Democrats? He also thought FDR had foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Both Stone and the DiEugenio are, in my view, on the political left. I have no idea what "conservative" view they hold. Could you give us an example?
Stone did movies that were partially sympathetic to hated Republican Presidents: "Nixon" and "W". The "JFK" movie opened with Eisenhower's warning about the Military-Industrial Complex.
"Stone’s co-writer on
Year of the Dragon was Michael Cimino, whose Oscar-
winning epic
The Deer Hunter was unusual for its sympathetic treatment of
small-town working-class men whose church is central to their lives. Critic Pauline
Kael sneered at
The Deer Hunter’s “traditional isolationist message: Asia
should be left to the Asians, and we should stay where we belong, but if we have
to be over there we’ll show how tough we are.”
A Trumpian message, on Trump’s better days. Cimino blew up his career with the
sprawling
Heaven’s Gate, a commercial disaster that snuffed his long-dreamt-of
goal of filming Ayn Rand’s novels
The Fountainhead and
Atlas Shrugged."
-- The American Conservative, December 4, 2020 (
Link )
