The Runback: The Unmaking of the Conservative Ideology
The new strands of conservatism are many things, but they sure aren't conservative
Welcome to another week of The Runback. Have you been enjoying The Duckpin? Do you have comments or suggestions? Do you want to write for us? Let me know at theduckpin@gmail.com. And please be sure to follow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Thanks in advance.
News and Politics
The Maine Senate, by the numbers: An updated look at the Maine Senate results
Fazenbaker Involved in Breach of Contract Suit: MDGOP Chair Candidate's Liquor Store at the Center of the dispute
Fazenbaker Faces Legal Action Over Unpaid Rent: New case contradicts Fazenbaker's previous statement on the matter.
Schifanelli Blasts Dan Cox, Andy and Nicole Harris: The failed Lieutenant Governor Candidate is attacking everybody, takes no blame for anything
Brittney Griner Trade Makes the World a More Dangerous Place: In exchanging an arms dealer for a drug user, the Biden Administration has made the world a more dangerous place
RNC Needs an Adult: McDaniel, Lindell, and Dhillon aren't leaders, they are the Three Stooges.
The Socialist Agenda: Put the Screws to Maryland Taxpayers: The radical agenda that Democrats plan for Maryland is going to hit working families where it hurts
Ryan Dorsey's Temper Tantrum: A white City Councilman is mad that term limits passed. Here's why his proposal to repeal them reaks of racism.
Robin Ficker Running for U.S. Senate: If at 8th you don't succeed, try try again
New MDGOP Board Most Diverse Ever: It may also be the most diverse leadership team of either of the two major parties in state history.
Sports
The End Of An Era In Portland, Maine: Portland Sea Dogs bought out by national corporation
The Duckpin Dashboard Let's Have a Real Playoff, End of 2022 Season: Plus: A look at how flawed the College Football Playoff Planned Expansion is
The Monday Thought
After seizing power, a strongman often (ruthlessly) imposes order and peace at home. For most of the last few years, Trump has been a unifying force in the GOP and, more broadly, on the right (not counting the small percentage of Republicans who became Never Trumpers and were purged).
But what happens when a strongman starts to appear vulnerable? Chaos ensues. People rise up and/or the power vacuum is filled by local warlords.
We are starting to see evidence that those on the far right are jockeying for position in a potential post-Trump world.
This of course would be expected. A beta male like Donald Trump can only keep up the façade of being strong for so long. And given that Trump’s political rise was a non-ideological mishmash of totalitarian policies with enough “conservative” ideas mixed in to keep the rubes happy, a schism was bound to happen.
But that’s not the interesting part.
On a Friday night in early October, in a downtrodden city in eastern Ohio, a speaker laid out a grim vision. At the height of 2020's first, most terrifying wave of COVID-19, an employee at a Chinese slaughterhouse led his coworkers on a walkout. For years, the state-owned company had abused its staff with continual video surveillance, punishing production quotas and demerits for bathroom breaks. Now it was casually disregarding their safety during a once-in-a-century pandemic. Following the walkout, the employee was fired, and then vilified through a PR campaign that denounced his protest as immoral and possibly illegal.
Both jokes were preface to a larger punchline, one that's particularly relevant after the 2022 midterm elections: This wasn't happening at a Bernie Sanders rally or a Democratic Socialists of America meetup, but a decidedly conservative conference at Ohio's Franciscan University of Steubenville, a center of U.S. right-wing Catholic thought. The speaker (and conference organizer) was Sohrab Ahmari, a Catholic writer best known for his 2019 polemic against conservatives insufficiently committed to the culture wars. The conference, "Restoring a Nation: The Common Good in the American Tradition," was a showcase for the modestly-sized but well-connected Catholic integralist movement, part of the broader current of conservative thought known as postliberalism.
Over the two-day conference, 20 speakers, including then-Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance, hammered home the argument that the same faith used to justify abortion bans and curtail LGBTQ rights also demanded a different approach to the economy, one that might plausibly be called socialist. Laissez-faire capitalism, speakers said, wasn't the organic force conservatives have long claimed but the product of state intervention; ever-expanding markets hadn't brought universal freedom but wage-slavery and despair; Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal — demonized on the right for generations — was in fact a "triumph for Catholic social thought"; social welfare programs were good.
After a pause came the reveal: That hadn't happened in China, but in New York City's Staten Island; the hero wasn't a Chinese meatpacker, but a young warehouse worker named Chris Smalls; the villain wasn't the Chinese government but Amazon.com. The speaker went on, quoting from Karl Marx about "masters and workmen" and the "spirit of revolutionary change" before clearing his throat to deliver another correction: Apologies, that was actually Pope Leo XIII.
All that might be striking enough. But the conference also served as something of a rebuttal to another gathering of right-wing intellectuals that had taken place a few weeks before: the third major National Conservatism conference, held this September in Miami. The two conferences — one in a hollowed-out former steel town, the other in a $400-per-night golf resort — represented two sides of what some partisans recently called a "fraught postliberal crack-up." Broadly speaking, these are ideological kin: members of the Trump-era intellectual "new right" who see themselves as rebels fighting an elite "Conservative, Inc." But it's a family in the midst of a feud, and the public split signified by the two meetings comes after months of less visible infighting over questions only hinted at in headline Republican politics.
I encourage you to read the entire Salon article to understand the scope of the discussion.
What Kathryn Joyce is hinting at with this story is the fact that ideological conservatism is going through an evolution and becoming more insular, more religious, and more comfortable with the exercise of state power. To a point, this is not a revolution of conservative policy but instead a revision to the conservatism of the 1700s.
To be a conservative in the 1700s was to be a “traditionalist conservative” supporting:
Religious faith and natural law
Tradition and custom
Hierarchy and organic unity
Agrarianism
Classicism and high culture
Patriotism, localism and regionalism
This is similar to the modern “National Conservativism” ethos, supporting state authority, insular policies, a controlled economy, and high tariffs. National Conservatism is, to a general extent, monarchism.
On the other hand, some of this goes back to the 1930s. Catholic Integralism does not exactly have a banner history of doing good in Europe:
Integralism emerged during the years in between the First and Second World Wars in majority Catholic countries. Middle class Catholics feared either secularizing forces of liberal governments or outright violence from socialist forces. Because they could not support liberal or socialist parties, Catholics felt cornered. Consequently, they often opted for reactionary “integralist” parties that promised some version of restored throne and altar politics and either became or made common cause with fascism. To name a few, there was the alliance between integralist Carlists and fascist Falangists in Spain, the National Integralism of Charles Maurras and his Action Francaise party in France, the Plinio Salgado’s Brazilian Integralist Action support for Estado Novo of Getulio Vargas, and what Loathar Hoebelt called the “embarrassment of options” for Catholics seeking fascist parties backing Engleburt Dollfuss in Austria. While the implementation of Catholic social teaching was the high-minded goal for some, just as important was the desire to oppose the enemies of the Church: communists, Freemasons, and Jews.
So yes, Catholic Integralism has a very negative history with 1930s Fascism. I don’t see a lot of small government conservative values in Francoism. 1
But there is one important thing when it comes to National Conservatism or Integralism: it is supportive of state power. It is the ideological opposite of modern conservatism and what has made conservatism electorally successful in the past forty years.
The problem of course is: what is the correct way to proceed? What is the ideological counterweight to the statist visions of National Conservatism and Integralism? That is the question that must be asked and we must be prepared to discuss it at length.
This is a topic I will explore further in the coming year.
Francoism also led back to Monarchism since King Juan Carlos I was Franco’s designated successor, though