Amerika

As the old saying goes, what did the conservatives conserve? And what did the progressives progress? It turns out that political parties are more like lifestyle choices designed to validate our self-image than sensible analytical decisions.

Conservatives tend to be gut instinct people who value first principles and a case-by-case basis. They dislike red tape and legal reasoning, see government as a giant failure, recognize the need for hierarchy, and tend to be aware of racial, ethnic, and class differences.

This however does not add up to a nice simple punchy idea like “equality.” When you ask a conservative what he wants, he will give you some combination of defending heritage, maintaing free markets, patriotism, religion, and designing society to reward success not subsidize failure.

Unfortunately, this means that there is no one binding symbol that makes conservatism work; on the plus side, this means that it does not fall prey to the blurring of distinction between self and social group that happens with symbolism, rationalization, and bourgeois jobber culture.

Consequently, conservatives struggle against their eternal failing: to treat government as a job, therefore to get along with coworkers by neutering their opinions, leading to a committee mob mentality that avoids controversial issues and therefore, ends up at “Christian libertarianism.”

This is why conservatives did not conserve. They were doing their jobs, not achieving their goals. They played nice with others, got along, and like any committee, made thousands of little compromises that killed any meaning to anything long before it came to a vote.

A couple things happened as a result. First, the voters did what all people in groups do, which is go for the easy options, which in turn means avoiding the most important issues. Second, anyone competent ran like hell from politics and refused to run for office.

When you see a bunch of clowns — and this is what most people see in conservatives — standing around pontificating and bloviating but only passing token laws or patches to a leaky ship of a system, you are seeing the result of most people giving up and fleeing from politics.

When Donald J. Trump took the stage at that first Republican convention, he bucked this trend. Instead of repeating the usual textbook Conservative™ stuff, he brought up huge issues that had been hiding in plain sight on top of the elephants in the room.

This shattered what was a nice little informal collusion between politicians of all stripes. To them, politics is a job; they want to keep their jobs, so they play their set roles, keep the system afloat, and worry only distantly about actual goals.

When Trump started talking critically about immigration, diversity, regulations, and the welfare state, suddenly the dispossessed who had fled politics were listening. Someone had broken through the conservative collaborator wall and hit on some real issues.

Sadly, not everyone got the memo, and they are following inertia toward what is convenient, back to the bad old “Christian libertarian” days, like poor J.D. Vance and his punt to civic nationalism:

“When you have people who say ‘my ethnic group deserves something, and yours doesn’t,’ or ‘that ethnic group is good and this other ethnic group is bad,’ that is how you erode the very foundations of commonality and common citizenship that we need to continue to have the United States be the most powerful and prosperous nation anywhere in the world.”

It gives me no pleasure to write that he has fully terminated any chance he had of being president. Having a foreign wife made his candidacy unlikely, but his strong assertion of civic nationalism just made him inconsistent with MAGA, and no one wants GOP tropes anymore.

Vance is hoping to trade on his position within the MAGA movement but with a quick flip of his hand, to go back to G.H.W.B. style conservatism, namely “Christian libertarian” with a strong bent for patching up the system, which preserves its Leftist aspects.

This way, he thinks, he gets the power of the MAGA name but can offer a cheaper substitute under the surface. He wants to be mostly Leftist and get along with the Left so that he can advance his career by not addressing the most significant issues.

Conservatives always dream of a moderate centrist bipartisan position because they think it lets them capture most voters, but in doing so they forget that the unmeasured middle are the people who do not ordinarily show up but would for a real conservative candidate.

These people are demoralized, dispossessed, alienated, and fatalistic because democracy is such a nightmare clown show.

Instead of brave people willing to do what is necessary to save the nation, they get managed decline so that professional politicians can keep their careers intact. After Reagan, we got GHWB, who was of this nature and therefore, demoralized the electorate since he was not of Reagan’s caliber.

You hear a lot of this bipartisan moderate centrist nonsense from careerists, and almost all of it reads like brochure advertising. Take this gem from Bill King:

I spent my Fourth of July in New York City — hanging out in Times Square during the celebration there, attending a Yankees game, and watching fireworks with 500 of my closest friends on a cruise boat on the Hudson River.

I saw Americans of every conceivable race, creed, and color joyously celebrating the birth of our country two and a half centuries ago. I saw Indian American parents explaining the significance of the day to their children. I saw a crowd at Yankee Stadium mesmerized by United States Army Staff Sergeant Madison Baldwin’s rendition of our national anthem, giving her a thunderous round of applause when she finished. No celebrity performance. Just a woman from Fort Payne, Alabama, choosing to serve her country and bringing the house down at Yankee Stadium.

Since 1948, the American National Election Studies have been surveying Americans about politics, elections, ideology, and public opinion. Those surveys do not show a country neatly divided into two hostile camps on every issue. To the contrary, they consistently show a large moderate middle. Almost always, the American people’s views are more complicated than the partisan caricatures we see on cable news and social media.

This is not a conservative vision; it is hostile to culture and common sense. It has no principles except what is beloved by committees and kindergarten teachers alike, namely everyone getting along in a state of pacifism.

We do not need a happy office in Washington. Growth comes through conflict, and conflict entails risk. That is anathema to the professional jobber, including those who work in the bureaucracy and keep The System chugging along.

If you want to lose all that MAGA and the European New Right have built, fall back on the Buckley Bargain of civic nationalism. But in doing so, you will make all of the voters who came out for Trump stay home instead.

Tags: bill king, civic nationalism, george herbert walker bush, j.d. vance, mike pence, william f. buckley