The Runback: How Conservatism Died
How a recent Heritage Foundation revelation shows us how Republicans learned to stop worrying and love statism
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News and Politics
Maryland General Assembly Ends Its Reign of Terror: Maryland took several huge steps backward in the last ninety days.
Into The Echo: The first Republican Presidential Debate will be on two Republican-forward outlets. Is that wise?
Margaret Chase Smith's Presidential Campaign: How a Mainer ran the ultimate outsider campaign for president, even though it shouldn't have been.
Moore's Abortion Drug Stockpiling Says Everything: Proposed action by the Moore Administration once again highlights the immorality of Governor Moore particularly, and modern-day Democrats in general.
Maryland Young Republicans Elect New Leadership: Sackstein Elected Unopposed
Sports
Anything But The Dong Bong: The Orioles have a new celebration. It may have a dumb name.
Lifestyle
The Saga of the Snow Pile, Edition the First: A play in five parts
The Monday Thought
I was rather surprised the other day on Twitter.
The Heritage Foundation was once the brain trust behind social and fiscal conservatism in the sense of promoting small government solutions to problems. Now, you have Heritage putting out stuff like this:
While critiques of the market have a long history in traditionalist circles, most American conservatives have held for several decades that protecting markets from government was essential for human flourishing. But that consensus is quickly changing as many elements of classical liberalism are now being challenged.
That Wilhelm Röpke and his model of welfare-state capitalism is being embraced by Heritage tells you how much there has been a sea change in the American right, away from free markets for free people and toward traditionalist statism.
This can be seen by some of the candidates and leaders Republicans have embraced in the Trump era:
Republican leaders are now adopting increasingly autocratic measures, using the police powers of government to impose moralized regulations, turning private citizens into enforcement officers and expelling defiant elected Democrats just as county Republican parties, particularly in Western states, are electing militia members, Christian nationalists and QAnon believers to key posts.
Yes, the moment that Donald Trump descended upon that golden escalator was the moment that broke the GOP from conservatism and sent it headlong into its left-wing statism with a traditionalist skew.
In hindsight, though, that was to be expected.
Here’s an interesting excerpt from a Politico piece on the recent kerfuffle in Tennessee:
Today, Tennessee represents the grim culmination of the forces corroding state politics: the nationalization of elections and governance, the tribalism between the two parties, the collapse of local media and internet-accelerated siloing of news and the incentive structure wrought by extreme gerrymandering. Also, if we’re being honest, the transition from pragmatists anchored in their communities to partisans more fixated on what’s said online than at their local Rotary Club.
While I disagree with their view about if the Tennessee Three should have been rejected due to its….creative interpretation, I do think that this above paragraph goes back to something that I have been saying for damn near a decade. The nationalization of politics and the lack of focus on local elections, politics, and issues has broken political society.
The collapse of local media led to local news deserts…….media consolidation led to the nationalization of issues and media groupthink, which combined with the explosion of the internet and easy blogging and alternative media platforms led to information silos…….already existent gerrymandering was hyperradicalized by new computer software and the nationalization of politics……it was all a vicious circle that led us to this moment in time.
Is it sad that Heritage abandoned its principles to find new ones? Yeah, to a point. But in this instance, Heritage was choosing not to lead their party to new ideas, but to follow their party into the cold abyss of socialism, statism, and expansive government intervention. They followed the donors…but most importantly, the money and the donors they keep Heritage’s doors open.
Heritage and most of the people who have worked there, as I said, were true champions of true free market conservatism. But they too were seduced by the red-vs-blue tribalism between the two parties. Heritage’s lot was in with the GOP. When the GOP Electorate followed Trump to the left, Heritage and the rest of the D.C. Establishment followed. This left the country with two parties that are both of the left, becoming more like the United Kingdom than traditional American politics.
And that has ramped up the tribalism to the Nth degree. The three issues where the parties actually differ? Aborton, transgenderism, and guns. Is it any wonder that the biggest fights, actions, and threats of violence surround those three issues? On both sides?
This piece was titled “How Conservatism Died”. But that question is very hard to answer. It’s all of the things I mentioned above. Media consolidation. News silos. Polarization. Gerrymandering. Tribalism. There is no one moment where Republicans indeed abandoned the idea of Goldwater, the economics of Friedman, or the exceptionalism of Reagan. It has been a gradual descent, but we know exactly when and where the final descent started, and it was on that escalator.
But that does not make it any sadder.