Only U.S. conservatives can currently get away with saying "just don't retire yet because of the political party we oppose!"

mmmmmno, actually. From Hannah Arendt to Benedict Anderson to Jason Stanley to Johnathan Haidt, the reality is populists and nationalists everywhere can get away with saying "we oppose whatever we want to oppose with the thinnest of justifications" because that's the way it works. Liberals ally over ideas. Conservatives ally over traditions. And because traditions are fluid, "our people don't do that" is whatever you need it to be.

It's a double-edged sword: Trump fully took the Republicans from "here's a constellation of memes that we all generally believe in and beat each other to death with while we jockey for position" to "does Trump like you." Burned a lot of people to the ground, that did. Then Trump tried the most half-assed coup in the history of democracy and now, the party whose memes were all flushed, is busily wallpapering over the void to see who gets to conduct the barking.

That's why Biden did something unprecedented at the State of the Union - he called out one of their memes, the one that they all hold closest to their hearts in close company but disavow loudly in polite company, and made them take a position in public. If you're a part of the memepool it was super annoying and I hate you I hate you I hate you but if you're running in a district where you might possibly be opposed, you now have to answer to non-believers.

Why we're not in a full-blown recession yet is beyond me.

Couple ways to look at this:

1) Because we move the goalposts on "recession." If we were using '90s rules we entered a recession in November.

2) Because Claudia Sahm and others have done an effective-enough job of calling the Fed out for their Phillips Curve worship that the Fed is no longer going "we will raise rates until more people lose their jobs."

I think normies believe there's an iron-clad definition of "recession" that we either hit or we don't, rather than understanding that recessions and depressions have always been called at least 90 days after the fact using metrics that are reorganized and reconfigured on the spot for political purposes.

btw, the need for cheap labor clashing with anti-all-immigration rhetoric is so hilarious to me.

The Republican Party is currently in the throes of zealots whose prophet has been discredited. Since that prophet had no religious tradition and left no clear successor, their only recourse is an inquisition. It's a good time to avoid Spain - and what comes out of it may be virulent and powerful. But the most likely outcome of an internecine war is weakness and attrition.