2. from me, responding to a piece by Yuval Levin.
Lindsey writes,
The challenge that faces any effort to reconstruct the American right is immense. The Republican Party at present is overwhelmingly under the spell of Donald Trump and seems determined to plumb the depths of intellectual and moral self-abasement in the service of a cult of personality. Between this point and the opportunity for any real renewal likely lies sustained electoral failure at the hands of the Democrats. Only repeated repudiation at the polls can break the hold of the populist demagoguery and extreme negative partisanship that has led the Republican Party so badly astray.
Brink proposes that the Republican Party should coalesce around ideas that he calls small-r republican. In the article, he sketches out what these might look like.
I do think that the Trump Presidency puts Republicans in a deep hole intellectually. At the same time, conservative intellectuals are in a deep hole electorally.
I can feel Brink’s pain. But I don’t think he has the solution.
Brink has some nasty things to say about President Trump and some snide things to say about libertarians. That tells me who he’s prepared to subtract from the Republican Party, so that he can feel better about supporting it. But whatever this might achieve in terms of crawling out of the hole intellectually, I don’t see how it can do anything other than put Republicans deeper in the hole electorally.
The slogan I adopt in my essay is,
I would like to see the Republicans adopt a more moderate tone and a more conservative agenda.
Reading Lyman Stone twitter feed he notes conservatives leaders need to deal with local solutions to the Rust Belt issues as well. But why has the ‘small c conservative’ declined in power the last 30 years?
1) How do you bring about family, community and religion from the government?
2) If everybody can vote with their feet and move away form the community, then how does community hold its members? Looking at the Trump base and the French Yellow Vest protest, the core group are people living in communities with decreasing populations. Also how does a community become immune to the global competitive markets?
3) Why did the conservatives vote for Donald Trump? I believe one reason is the Party and their news have been dominated by talk radio, TV pundits and internet personalities. And this stuff is selling in the market and these pundits are making millions.
4) For instance, I still think the difference between Sarah Palin 2008 and Ronald Reagan 1964 was Reagan did not chase conservative pundit paycheck like Palin did after 2009. (Or Reagan did not have the opportunity for the Pundit dollars.) If Ronald Reagan been a conservative leader after 2000, he might have been a Fox News pundit instead of spending years as Governor and an important conservative leader with the MSM during the Carter years, honing his political skills.
Regarding (4), I don’t think conservatives did vote for Trump. Recall that in the primaries there were 5+ serious experienced republican candidates running, and each took ~5-10% of the vote in the primaries. Trump took a plurality most of the time, but nowhere close to a majority. I remember a lot of conservatives being actively angry at their least favored non-Trump candidate because “they’re splitting the vote, just bail already!” By the time most candidates got out, it was pretty clear that nobody but Trump was going to have enough support to win the nomination.
I also remember being at the Kansas Caucus in 2016, Trump showed up, gave a 10 minute speech and was actively booed by republicans in attendance. Remember, these are the reddest of red republicans, the ones that listen to Rush Limbaugh and Fox and Friends (funny story, we sat in front of this very elderly woman who became very upset at the booing when it started, she kept shouting “We don’t boo! We are republicans and we do.. not.. boo!”)
In the general election most folks in this area held their nose and voted against Hillary, not for Trump as best I can tell. Their support for Trump came after he started implementing the policies all the milquetoast republicans of the past said they supported but never followed through on, such as tax reform, deregulation, and supreme court nominees.
There is this meme going around that all republicans voted in lock-step for Trump, when the reality is that 2016 was closer to a Ross Perot type moment for the republican party. I think conservatives’ continued support for Trump lies with his willingness to support policies they like, despite his bad temperament and general belligerence.
Lindsey bitterly complains about the “cult of personality”, but he sings sorrowfully of the intellectual history of “Machiavelli to Madison and Jefferson”. Our political culture has always celebrated the personalities of presidents and political leaders, he fully participates in this cult of personality. On the surface, Brink Lindsey is not making sense. You have to read between the lines to understand that he’s fine with the cult of personality, he participates fully, he is just raving mad at specific personalities, notably Donald J Trump.
Similarly, he’s outraged at “populism”, where the populists are the angry peasants outside the castle. I read this as he was comfortable with Obama, the Bushes, and the Clintons in the castle and the Trump fans being rightfully ignored and exiled. He’s raving mad that Trump is in the castle.
This op-ed would make sense if you are already convinced that Trump is this unique monster unlike the Bushes or the Clintons or Obama. If you are not convinced of that, and maybe consider Trump an improvement that advances wise, realistic, practical policy, in terms of domestic issues, taxes, health care, foreign policy, and even immigration, and sure he has a loud, even funny persona that is able to fight in the political sphere and hold his own in the political news cycle, then this op-ed is just another bitter former elite who is stark raving mad about the recent turn of events.
Lastly, this “advice” is probably the advice I would give to the Democrats. Please go throw your current political ideology in the trash and adopt the opposite ideology, and you will have my support, thank you very much.
My suggestion for both parties would be better government. I’m not impressed at how either party executes its duties.
Look at how many states and cities pension plans are grossly underfunded. For that matter look at Social Security. What does either party propose to overcome the shortfall of money coming in the next decade? Other than making unrealistic promises that can’t be kept, the current party line for both parties.
Immigration. What is Trump’s policy? As far as I can tell he is simply doing the same as previous presidents only more enthusiastically, plus he wants to build a big beautiful wall. What is the democrats policy? I hate Trump. I really hate Trump. The current immigration situation is bad. we have tens of millions of people in the country illegally (undocumented if you prefer). What should our policy be? How much will it cost and how will it be implemented?
Our “anti-poverty” programs trap people in poverty. See the following post:
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/11/poverty-trap.html
This isn’t rocket science. This graph is right out of Greg Mankiw’s favorite textbook. i.e. it really is Economics 101. What should we do to get rid of this trap?
I could go on, but let me end with just two words.
Flint Michigan
Yes, the problem with the current Republican party and it’s enamoration with Trump is NOT too much libertarianism. Trump is actively anti-libertarian on immigration and trade, among other things, and has even called out the Koch network as enemies. Moreover libertarians lean left on social issues, and the Trump cohort is full of far-right culture warriors, which largely constitutes Republicans current moral abasement – the rampant racial hostility and misogyny displayed by members of the rank and file, not to mention Trump himself. If there’s one piece of advice that the Republican’s needs it is to drop the culture war and focus exclusively on economics.
Libertarians are definitely divided on immigration. They might bitterly dispute that, but it’s true. Hans-Hermann Hoppe is widely considered a prominent libertarian philosopher, that fully supports restrictive immigration. Milton Friedman supported immigration restriction. Lots of libertarians support immigration restriction.
On trade, I see a divide that is largely fabricated for political reasons. Ronald Reagan, Bush, and Obama enacted lots of protectionist tariffs. Next, tariffs are often used as sanctions for various political, military, or human rights purposes that are considered outside of classic economics.
NAFTA was Reagan’s idea. It’s true that they supported various limited specific instances of protectionist tariffs, but that didn’t prevent them from pursuing broad trade liberalization in the larger scale – via NAFTA and via the WTO. Reagan/Bush wanted to expand NAFTA into Central America. And they’re not libertarians. Libertarian economists generally support unilateral free trade – there’s not really much of a dispute about this.
I’m not very familiar with Hoppe, but I belief Friedman’s comments on immigration have been overstated. He made some comments about unrestricted immigration being incompatible with an unrestricted welfare state, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t think open immigration was the ideal state. They also not supportive of the argument made by many restrictions that Latin American immigration is a cultural threat to a libertarian society.
Reagan advocated for NAFTA. Trump advocated for USMCA. Reagan also advocated for lots of tariffs. Trump has, admittedly inconsistently, advocated for free trade. He advocates bilateral free trade, not unilateral free trade. He chose prominent free trade economists like Larry Kudlow to head his economic team. Groups like CATO bash Trump on trade, but that’s less about Trump’s trade policies, and more that CATO has a bitter grudge against the Trump Republicans in general.
Where did Milton Friedman ever say Latin American immigration was not a cultural or political threat? I love lots of Latin American people and many parts of their culture, but realistically, it’s politically left-wing. California and Orange County in particular was the home place of Reagan and Reagan style politics. In hindsight, immigration, mostly from Latin American, really did push California far to the left. And we see the same pattern in other states. New voters, new policy preferences. Americans of Latin American ancestry simply do vote for more big government type policies and politicians. The arguments to the contrary seem quite absurd.
The Republican Party’s problem can be summed by a simple observation- had they nominated anyone other than Trump in 2016, Clinton would be president today. Any one of the other candidates would have certainly lost WI, MI, and PA to Clinton, probably would have lost IA. The only states another candidate might have won that Trump didn’t win were NH and VA. Another candidate might well have lost OH, too.
Lindsey might not like the populism of Trump, but that populism picked the electoral lock the Democrats have developed over the last 20 years. Without it, the Republicans won’t be able to win another national election in my lifetime.
Right.
There is some irony in Lindsey thinking “repeated repudiations at the polls” or “days of reckoning” will cause some kind of widespread epiphany on what needs to be done and what needs to be discarded. The GOP had several repudiations in a row, at the hands of Democrats, and most recently at the hands of Trump, and still cannot seem to learn anything much from it in terms of the necessary direction and scope of adjustment.
After every major loss, the political commentariat likes to talk about party leaders and intellectuals going “back into the wilderness” which is supposed to provide an opportunity to learn lessons, for an after-action post-mortem, and for some going back to the ideological reconstruction drawing board with some very frank reassessment of where it all went wrong.
Check out this NYT coverage of CPAC 2013 after Romney’s defeat: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/us/politics/conservatives-take-up-question-of-change-at-retreat.html
Amusingly enough, Trump is mentioned in the article as mingling in the audience, and he won by doing pretty much the opposite of what the then-leading contenders on stage were advising.
That being said, it seems to me we have finally arrived at the moment where right-leaning intellectuals are actually taking stock of the situation, moving past mere NeverTrump denial, and groping and grasping for a major intellectual reconstruction effort. I will be submitting my own suggestions in due time.
Well, when the voters at the polls keep insisting on policies that you know are bad and harmful, it can be really, really hard to adjust your intellectual priorities to fit what voters want.
But then, there’s the issue of whether you just want to get power, or you want to lead and change the world, (or at least the country). Does the Republican party exist to convince people of it’s ideals, or does it exist to get power on behalf of clients? And what ideals, and to what extent, those ideals should be sacrificed to obtain power so that other ideals can be implemented in policies.
When people talk of intellectual reconstitution, they are almost always really saying “give up what you believe in so you can get power”.
I find myself reflecting on a comment from a couple days ago…probably Handle’s…about the increasing futility of debate in the current environment.
The rising stridency from certain quarters is sort of like someone hitting an ice patch while driving. They hit the brakes (“Misogynist! Naked power grab!”) but don’t get the usual result of rational, reasonable normals quieting down. So they push harder on the same lever without considering that the underlying conditions have changed.
Political Ideas without Political Power are like gas-combusting cars without gas. Sure, 50 years later, someone might look back in admiration and say, “Oh my, what an absolutely gorgeous antique automobile. Too bad it never got anybody anywhere.”
As Milton Friedman said, the role of the political intellectual in our democracy is not to convince politicians to do the right thing, or convince voters to pick the ‘right people’ but, “to make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.”
So, political ideas and values are like a business plan, and consumers with choices can be nudged a bit with marketing efforts, but otherwise one has to adjust, optimize, and compromise to accommodate consumer preferences or else go bankrupt. There is thus no alternative to a feedback between the content of ideas and values organizing one’s coalition and what is pragmatically expedient to obtaining and maintaining the power to implement them.
A successful political party needs all three legs of the stool of it’s political business plan: 1. Money from Big Donors, 2. Votes from a constituency large enough to win elections, and 3. A common set of ideals to rally around, in a framework that is respectable, useful, and attractive to elites, leaders, and intellectuals, and accessible by and appealing to ordinary people. Emphasizing just one or two at the expense of the other(s) is a recipe for failure.
This was the real strength of Kling’s “The Trouble with Conservatives these days” essay, which was the best of the lot by far because it both emphasized this fundamental dilemma and need for both proper diagnosis and reconciliation, and the fact that many of the major commentators on the issue were losing sight of the other legs holding up the stool of which they were, for better or worse, a part, and upon which they depend on to stay upright.
The donors and voters are often at odds, but they can still realize that what they’re being offered is the best they can get given the circumstances, and they can hold their noses and give or vote, respectively. But it is the special job of the intellectuals to make sense of it all, to rationalize, justify, spin, and reconcile, and add a spoon-full of sugar to help the bitter medicine of having to work in coalition go down.
An analogy could be to the movie business. The writer and director may have a glorious, high-brow artistic vision and want to see it realized without modification or compromise. The producer is fronting capital and wants to realize a highest rate of return and skimp on costs and charge high rates. And the audience wants to be entertained according to their preferences, with a high quality product at a low price, and to have their ticket expenditures ensure that the kind of movies they like keep getting made, by keeping the studios in business using the actors and stories they prefer.
And it’s the job of the writing/directing team to make it all work, and to make the donors and audience both happy, and to bend instead of break when they have to accommodate those realities. No matter how good they might think their product is, when the focus groups don’t like it / “dogs won’t eat it”, it’s, “Send back to rewrite!” in the “filmed before a live studio audience” TV sitcom business, writers are actually on hand during filming, and if the crowd in attendance doesn’t laugh at a joke, it can get rewritten on the spot, or else they start working right away on how to fix it with post-recording editing or re-acted replacement scenes.
But that all depends on the writers having a sense of humor and really having a good understanding of what makes people laugh and being able to figure out quickly how a joke they thought would kill fell flat.
Unfortunately, most establishment or mainstream conservative intellectuals are not good doctors and are neither focusing on the right symptoms nor correctly diagnosis the disease. And they sure as hell don’t want to admit that their prior guidance was completely off base. So their prescriptions turn out to be really awful, concluding that they merely needed to double the dosage.
Specifically, the focus on mostly material conditions and economic anxieties completely misses the mark of what social circumstances and trends are really motivating their own voter base.
What motivates the voter base is (as Kling describes) culture war issues. The problem is that is exactly what is poisoning the Republican party. So you can’t really keep the same coalition of voters and keep serving them the same culture war issues while abandoning principled stances on trade in order to keep that same group of voters that is poisoning the party loyal. Something has to give. Find a new coalition of voters. Trump of course DID find a new coalition, but not one that is compatible with ” A common set of ideals to rally around, in a framework that is respectable, useful, and attractive to elites, leaders, and intellectuals”. I.e. Trump’s set of ideals, necessary to hold together his voter coalition of working class white labor is repugnant to the elites, leaders, and intellectuals.
Thus rather than abandon their positions on trade policy, Republicans should reach out to different voters, who are more willing to support a package of ideals that isn’t morally repugnant.
I don’t buy this at all, where is your evidence?
The fact that MI, WI, and PA were won by the Democrats in every election in the last quarter century against the standard “acceptable” Republican candidate. Even won by the Democrats in 2000 and 2004. Even worse, Virginia, once reliably Republican, now has a Democratic tilt of about 2%- it can only be won if the Republican can win the national vote total by more than 2%. The same applies to Nevada, Colorado, and New Hampshire- these were all Republican leaning states that now lean Democratic.
Not a single one of the other candidates were distinguishable from Mitt Romney who lost handily in 2012. Republicans are looking at losing all of the national elections. Trump is probably an outlier, and his lesson won’t be learned by the party. So, enjoy the wilderness- you will die in it.
Yeah, except Trump’s not the only part of 2016 that changed — none of those other candidates were running against Hillary Clinton, who was especially disliked by a lot of people. I think Romney (or Jeb, or whomever) would have beaten Clinton, both in 2012 and 2016.
By winning which states, exactly? Had Trump won every state Romney won, plus OH and VA, he would have still lost. You have to make the case that any of those other candidates would have won WI, MI, or PA. All the evidence says those three states would have remained in the blue column absent the outlier candidacy of Trump. You are making the ridiculous case that Clinton was particularly awful, but here is the problem with that- she won the popular vote by over 2%, and yet still lost because Trump appealed to voters who had voted for Obama- not a single one of the other candidates the Republicans put up could have done that.
Every time I read something from these Niskanen guys it’s like reading Shakespeare without a modern translation or footnotes. I read the words, but I can’t comprehend what I just read. I have no clear concept of what Niskanen is all about.
So, to consider what should and shouldn’t be the role of government is to live in the libertarian cul-de-sac. Just doing what’s in the public interest, that’s what it’s all about!
Then he quotes Lincoln. Now those were some glorious years of peace, prosperity, and effective problem solving! (And no, before you jump to any conclusions, I have no love for the Confederacy either.)
He says that libertarianism is utopian, but then he seriously suggests:
It also means embracing the need for active government in some key arenas — to help people develop the skills they need to thrive in an increasingly demanding labor market, and to provide social insurance that protects people against the inevitable losses and dislocations associated with a dynamic market economy.
Did I miss something? All this time I thought the government was spending a tons of money on those very things and doing a quite embarrassing job of it. My mistake, I guess!
I really enjoyed Brink’s book, The Age of Abundance. It was quite an enlightenment for me. But now I read something from him and seriously wonder if it’s the same Brink Lindsey who worked at Cato all those years.
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe Brink is on to something; but those guys need to do a better job of helping me understand what it is.
My guess is that they have concluded that is impossible to get rid of the welfare state; every single developed nation has some version of it, and Medicare and Social Security are probably the two government programs with the most public support (and we are talking about overwhelming public support).
If you take as an axiom that the voting public demands social insurance and will not tolerate politicians opposed to social insurance, I think you pretty quickly can follow what they are thinking about at the Niskansen center. They are trying to imagine how to get the most libertarian version of the government given the constraints placed upon policy makers by the voting public.
Their thinking on the welfare state is a bit off though. It works in Scandinavia for specific reasons, none of which they seem to understand or account for. Heck, we can even see where the Scandinavian societies welfare states are failing and learn something from it.
Moreover, what is “left on social issues” even mean. Sorry, but when I read the Niksean center on culture issues it might as well be lifted from the pages of a far left campus firebrand. It’s vitriolic and unhinged.
I do think the Niksean Center wants to sell something like “UBI in exchange for not becoming Venezuela”. However, they don’t seem to understand why Venezuela happened. Or what’s happening throughout America and most of the OECD.
Anyway, I don’t think UBI advocacy is really going to buy them what they want (small bubbles of super zips getting high and (maybe, but probably not) getting laid without making babies???).
They are a bunch of people who used to believe in one dogma, and now they believe in another, with a mixture of unhinged ideology and crass careerism.
I only really have read the stuff by then that I find interesting, which is the stuff about how the political economy of the welfare state should impact how libertarians approach politics and the Overton window. The rest of the stuff does sound pretty weird for supposed libertarians. I thought that they were trying to basically go a Charles Murray sort route without all the baggage associated with him.
You are giving Brink Lindsey way too much credit. He’s a loon.
He laments how the grand old “party of Lincoln” could ever degenerate to the “cult of personality” of celebrating a President.
I guess I don’t see a problem for Republicans, just conservatives. Trump’s policy taking points during the campaign, while poorly fleshed out, are broadly popular. In fact, there is reason to believe that another candidate with the same general policy ideas but without the baggage of Trump’s misogyny would have done even better.
The problem for conservatives (and libertarians) is that voters genuinely dislike their policy ideas. My suspicion is that over time, the Republican Party follows the voters to some sort of center right populism, ditching their commitment to smaller government and lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
Please note that this isn’t an endorsement of those ideas as good policy; just a prediction about how politicians will react to the electoral environment.
CATO says, “We’re an economy with a country, not a country with an economy.”
https://twitter.com/AlexNowrasteh/status/1032792735768563713”
That view is the opposite of conservative.
Trump expresses the opposite world view, “Each American generation passes the torch of truth, liberty and justice in an unbroken chain all the way down to the present.” Whatever you think of the rest of Trump’s character, that viewpoint is conservative in the purest sense of the word.
Trump promised to raise taxes on the wealthy, which is prima facie anti-conservative movement. I assumed we weren’t talking about Burke, but rather using conservative as a shorthand for the “conservative” movement.
What is your take on Colin Woodard’s “American Nations”?
Conservatism is simply conserving something special of the past. That’s it.
Low taxes on the wealthy is more associated with free-market economics or capitalism. While most of us are used to those being grouped under the “conservative” political coalition, they really aren’t inherently about conserving something special from the past, so they really aren’t inherently conservative.
I skimmed the Amazon listing on the “American Nations” book you reference. It’s interesting. Looking at the map, it’s not really accurate. Is Chicago and all of Michigan including Detroit, Ann Arbor, and the rural UP really one “Yankeedom” culture? Is NYC and Nortern New Jersey including cities like Newark really New Netherland? No one would agree with that. I assume you are driving at some other point that I’m looking past.
I guess my question for you was how much the US had ever been a “one people, one nation” sort of place? I think that the existence of strong, deeply rooted regional cultures makes Burkean conservatism a strange ideology for animating a political movement in the US. Whose culture and traditions are we trying to preserve? I personally don’t know think of people from other regional cultures in the US as constituting part of my culture or people. Yankees, whatever extent of territory you give them, aren’t New Yorkers, and neither are Appalachians or Californian. Granted, this takes me mostly in a Federalist direction of a smaller Federal government and (potentially) larger state governments.
In response to your question: “how much the US had ever been a ‘one people, one nation’ sort of place?”
The question of identity is a complex one. I would defer to the expert I respect on this subject, Samuel Huntington. I’m reading Samuel Huntington’s “Who Are We” which focuses on the exactly this issue of US identity. I hope you don’t consider that a dodge. But he’s who I learn from on the subject, and his writing is far better than anything that I would write.
A few Huntington quotes from his book:
“Are we [Americans] a ‘we’, one people or several? If we are a ‘we’, what distinguishes us from the ‘thems’ who are not us? Race, religion, ethnicity, values, culture, wealth, politics, or what?”
“America’s identity problem is unique, but America is not unique in having an identity problem.”
“For all practical purposes America was a white society until the mid-twentieth century.”
“America was founded as a Protestant society, and for two hundred years almost all Americans were Protestant.”
“prior to the 1960s, ‘immigrants were expected to shed their distinctive heritage and assimilate entirely to existing cultural norms.’ which he labeled the ‘Anglo-conformity model'”
“Throughout American history, people who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become Americans by adopting America’s Anglo-Protestant culture and political values. This benefited them and the country. American national identity and unity, as Benjamin C Schwarz has said, derived ‘from the ability and willingness of an Anglo elite to stamp its image on other peoples coming to this country. That elite’s religious and political principles, its customs and social relations, its standards of taste and morality, were for 300 years, America’s and in basic ways they still, are–despite our celebration of diversity'”
Maybe it’s just because I am Appalachian, but that just sounds like a paean to New England Yankee WASPS to me. Now, all in all, I think that they did a good job ruling the country, but it was still clearly them ruling the country, with people like Andrew Jackson viewed as abhorrent embarrassments to the country.
That’s a refreshingly honest statement from CATO. It’s why dressing themselves up in “American traditions” and anything smacking of home and hearth feels so disingenuous.
Dead on.
Trump has been his own worst enemy. Imagine if Trump was a well-spoken and charismatic individual.
I agree with Trump on getting out of useless, fantastically expensive foreign military adventures, which never seem to end.
On international trade, there is no such thing as free, fair or foul trade. Trump recognizes this. Comparative advantages today are almost always creations of government, such as export subsidies.
I love immigrants. But immigrants depress wages of people whose wages are already low. If you want to create a permanent underclass in America, just support lots of immigration. And watch how voters react to that.
The GOP would be wise to find another Donald Trump, but one without his baggage.
The multinationals can pour unlimited funds into media, think tanks, lobby groups, trade associations, academia, foundations, and even political campaigns. Globalism is sacralized. Many pendants and academics are simply bought off.
Yuval Levin: “Conservatism has ceded its economic thinking too thoroughly to libertarianism since the 1990s in a way that has caused us to forget this. It is time for that to change, and so for some rebalancing of our priorities.”
Wow. That’s scary.
Ayn Rand was right about conservatives.
I read Brink Lindsey’s piece as basically advocating for a principled form of the economic populism promised by Trump during his campaign. I only see a repudiation of Trump the man, not (for the most part), his politics. Also, I find it interesting to note that Black voters started shifting to the Democratic Party while the party was still the home of the Dixiecrats. I don’t think that appealing to racial resentment of whites means that the Republican cannot also broaden their appeal to minorities if the Republicans back policy that benefits minorities in a bread and butter way.
One more semantic point; I see Trumpism as what Trump promised during the campaign, not what he has done while in office. Is there a better shorthand for that distinction?
Any viable coalition in either party leaves out about 30% of their base. Government goods do not scale well. So, the disaffected group are left out fr the electorial period, eight years, abut a quarter of their working life. During their outcast years, they coalesce around a retake, a rotation back to their side. If Texas misses is shot at the presidency for too long, the republicans down there begin long term takeover planning. This election i was simply New Yorks turn, we have been leaving them out since FDR..
The Republican party, much more than the Democratic/Libertarian parties is a collection of individuals. As long as each member thinks for themself, especially in pragmatic terms with respect to local constituencies, and keep their heads down, I suspect they will do relatively well. The Democrats and Libertarians are much, much more about conformity, grand schemes, and hating the right out groups. To more Democrats and Libertarians stay in the spot light, the better off Republicans will be. No taxes on imported goods, high taxes on domestic production is loony in any terms. Outlawing private health insurance, abolishing ICE, more spending on government training programs, ditto, ditto, ditto. Kowtowing to China for 8 years and pallets of cash to Iranian mullahs is the bar that Trump has to clear on foreign policy. Quite frankly he would have to try a lot harder to fail that. Over the next two years, I predict Trump is astute enough to give the opposition enough rope to hang themselves. Paul Ryan was good for one thing and that was not bringing anything to the table. The new House is even better with ts bozos on parade ethos. As Tyler Cowen rightly observes in his column, Republicans can sit back and let the opposition do their campaigning fot them.
I’m a “conservative intellectual”, but if that makes you spit your coffee, I’m happy to withdraw “intellectual”.
I don’t think conservatism needs grand strategy – or rather, I’m sick of seeing liberalism getting tactical wins over and over and over again. What conservatives need is a little bit of that – tactical stuff: supreme court wins, govt size reduction, tax reduction, govt withdrawal from social activism, defeat of obamacare mandates, assertion of US independence from global governance, incrementally flowing revenue and power back to local authorities.
Granting people “exit” from federal government is actually not a thing that requires deep intellectualization.
Having read much of the literature linked in Arnold’s post, I think one big elephant is missing from the discussion: Albion’s Seed. That book (by David Hackett Fischer) describes the original British colonists who first settled in North America. Their cultures persist to the present day.
The Scots-Irish are likely the largest single ethnic group in our country. They have been a part of most presidential coalitions since WWII. The Bush family, for example, are Yankee blue-bloods who moved to Texas, and managed to combine a Yankee agenda with Scots-Irish sensibilities. Clinton was himself Scots-Irish, but he attended college in New England and married a Yankee (Hillary). Kennedy–another Yankee–picked that archetypal Scots-Irish LBJ to be his running mate.
Obama was the first president in modern history (that I can think of) to completely exclude the Scots-Irish from his coalition. They became “deplorables,” and the result was rage. Revenge has come in the form of Donald Trump, whose core base is Scots-Irish, and who has radically excluded the Yankees. That’s the real source of the problem.
Yankees (Romney, Hillary, Brink Lindsay) hate Trump. The feeling is reciprocated. If the Scots-Irish are “deplorables,” then Yankees are “elitists,” “Pocahontas,” “swamp-dwellers,” “unpatriotic globalists,” etc.
At core, the whole thing is an ethnic conflict. The resolution depends on finding a way to rejoin Yankees and Scots-Irish into a coalition. Given the insults they’ve been throwing at each other this seems really unlikely.
I’m not saying Albion’s Seed explains everything–it obviously doesn’t (e.g., gender differences). But it explains a lot.
The Yankees goal is the replace the Scots-Irish with Hispanics. How many more Hispanics have to move into Allentown before someone like Trump can barely squeak out a win in PA.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Scots-Irish. Maybe they are the trashier of whites in many ways, but they are quintessentially American. They have been on the right side of most conflicts (they provided the backbone needed to muscle out the British twice), mostly fought for the Union to the extent geography allowed them, and provided a disproportionate share of the armed forces that won us the world wars. They are some of the few to truly discard their hyphenated American status (reporting as simply “American” in most surveys) and are the most patriotic of the American nations.
If I had to identify a “common sense” swing vote in American politics it would be the Scots-Irish. They tried in vain to moderate the Democratic Party (Bill Clinton vs Dukakis), and they are trying to change the Republican Party.
Once the Puritans have imported enough vote banks to dominate the other whites, watch out. America has had a balance between these groups since its founding. The Puritans have never been able to get too Puritanical before.
One question I have, to which I don’t have an answer, is how Hispanics (esp. Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans) will fit into the Democratic coalition? It doesn’t seem like they will fit well together with the college educated suburban voters that Democrats have recently been pursuing. That strikes me as more of a class based thing, as even college educated white women will balk at higher taxes to pay for more government spending on lower income, working/service class Americans.
They won’t like it, but by the time they realize they won’t like it, the electoral math will no longer care what they think.
Also, when we say “spend money on low class Americans” what we really mean is “use tax dollars to pay professionals to provide them services”. The professionals getting paid are coming out ahead on that deal.
Remember that a lot of this is one group of professionals trying to increase their lot in life at the expense of others/middle class, and the poors are just one of the tools they can use to do that.
Brink says: “we need to recover the elemental civic virtue that makes government by persuasion possible — namely, treating our political opponents as rivals, not enemies.”
But he says Trump is doing this, Trump is the problem.
Wrong.
Ted Cruz was also Hitler. So was Romney, and McCain; with Palin a C*nt (on nat TV); and of course so was Bush, for whom was coined Bush Derangement Syndrome. Which could be traced back to Reagan, Nixon, Goldwater, and Nixon.
I call it Democrat Derangement Syndrome, but Brink almost gives a good definition for it:
“Democrats who treat political opponents as the Enemy, instead of rivals”
The Dems have been “at war” against Reps, especially Christian Reps, since before Roe v Wade, but it has gotten worse, since the Reps were not “fighting back”.
Trump’s HUGE change is that now, he is fighting back, as a Rep.
You, better get used to the idea… (recently saw again: Monty Python, Grail)
Jeremy has it right. What the Republicans need are more tactical wins on stuff. Trump has produced more of these in two years than Bush did in 8. McCain and Romney gave us zip.
Purity in ideology is over rated. So is being nice. Especially when dealing with the Democrats’ leadership.
What are the tactical wins? The Supreme Court and deregulation are what any Republican president would deliver. Same with the tax cuts. I guess I don’t see how Trump is performing better than a replacement level Republican president from a conservative point of view.