100 is a big round number, and as a culture that uses a base ten system for math, we like big round numbers. So I should use the 100th anniversary of our "Cliffnotes" series, which we're now correcting to what it should have been, CliffsNotes, for something profound.
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And, profound or not, I know what I want to post on this, but it's one of those things where its so broad, or difficult to define, that I don't really know how to do it.
So I'll start with this.
The US is in phenomenally stupid times, with our stupidity actually amazingly reduced in various ways to the person claiming to be President, and who most have accepted as the same.1 That would be, of course, the profoundly self centered, weird, demented, and dumb, Donald Trump.
The Trump regum is profoundly altering everything to such an extent that he's not only harming the US, but the entire world. When he leaves office the world is going to be profoundly different, and the US might quite frankly never recover from the vandalism of his administration. He's given rise to the worse instincts in our culture, and revived ways of thinking and acting that haven't been acceptable in our society for decades.
Worse yet, perhaps, the antiscientifisim of his followers is going to kill people and is harming the planet.
All of which, ironically, would get me branded by some of his acolytes as a "radical lefty", such as those like Chuck Gray look under their beds at night as the monster of their childhood dreams.
One thing that I've had a hard time explaining, but I can do here now, is that in fact I'm an actual conservative.
I've always been opposed to abortion, which would place me in the social conservative camp in and of itself. I'm not keen on gun control either, although I'm not in machinegun in every closet camp. I don't believe transgenderism is anything other than a mental illness. I believe that marriage can only occur between a man and a woman, and beyond that I don't think divorce should be recognized, or at least easily. I feel that a man who helps bring a child about should be responsible for that child's upbringing and if he's not married to the mother at the time of the child's birth, a common law marriage and all that entails should be legally imposed. I'd revive the "heart balm" statutes. I'm extremely leery of the government taking over what I regard as parental and familial obligations, such as the feeding of children simply because they are at school.
All of which should place me in the populist camp, right?
Not hardly.
Well what about the NatCon or Christian Nationalist camp then?
Definitely not.
How so?
Well, that's where I've had a hard time smithing my words to fit my thoughts, but I'll give it a try here.
I think you can, as a conservative, conserve the structure of societal norm, but I don't think you can force your beliefs on anyone. Indeed, the liberal attempt to do just that with gender norms caused, at the end of the day, the rise of one profoundly immoral man, Donald Trump.
And beyond that, I think that people who waive the bloody banner of the culture wars have to go right to the source in order to argue for their cause, and that's something most can't do. The American Civil Religion, in which you can have six wives, as long as it isn't more than one at a time, and a girlfriend on the side, and still go to Jim Bob's Do It Yourself Evangelical Church doesn't comport with that, or frankly Christianity.
I also frankly am horrified by the anti scientific nature of the populists and the NatCons. Yes, transgenderism is a horror, but because its an anti scientific movement that doesn't comport with science. By the same token, denying Global Warming is being caused by humans is also an anti scientific horror. Admitting poth of those need not be political in any fashion, nor need they be based on religion in any fashion, but if religion motivates and informs your beliefs ti would demand that you oppose them both and accept the science both.
And yet we're denying reality in spades. If populists get that transgenderism is a fib, on climate change and medicine they're full bore into fiction. The fact that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has a health role in the government, or that Dr. Oz does, would be comical if it was not so horrific.
Nor does being a real conservative mean that every expenditure of the government on medicine and foreign aid can morally be cut off. Lethal sins of omission are not conservative, they're gravely evil.
Which in turn gets us to the topic of expenditures themselves.
Every since the The Great Depression conservatives of some stripes have lamented what occured in the New Deal and have detested Franklin Roosevelt. But here's the thing. Government expenditures in and of themselves are not wrong, let alone morally wrong, simply because they are.
Rational people would apply principals of subsidiarity to this and look to see what necessary or beneficial expenditure are best undertaken by the government, and at what level. The simple claim "the government spends to much" means utterly nothing whatsoever. It is clear that the government is wrongfully not collecting enough in revenue to cover what it spend, but the mere assumption that it spends too much is simply nonsense without something to back it up. The real question, which hasn't even been asked, is what should it be spending money on? Many of the things that were cut were things the American public clearly supports or needs. Conversely, ontoing spending on Trump golf weekends or airplanes for Trump go on, when clearly these are expenditures which do not pass muster.
That leads us, of course, to the fact that Americans are undertaxed. They hate to admit it, but they simply are. Rich Americans are particularly undertaxed. Indeed, whether a society should even tolerate the uberwealthy is a question that should be asked, but isn't. It's clear that vast wealth has not been a good thing, by and large, for many who have it, or society as a whole. Trump, Bezos, Epstein, and Musk are all good examples of this. Greed isn't good.
So here we find ourselves, due to reasons we've discussed before, not where so many on the right claim, but at an enshrinement of a certain sort of trash culture. The trailer park come to rule.
Are we doomed?
We may in fact very well be. It might be the case that the United States as a great nation has run its course, and we're going to take our place with nations like Russia that have lapsed into right wing squalor But maybe not.
There may be some reasons for hope.
One of those reasons might be the National Conservatives themselves. When it first got rolling National Conservatism in the form imagined by Patrick Dineen, Rod Dreher or R. R. Reno was a product of despair. They looked at the state of the country under late liberals, such as President Obama, and felt that the cultural rot had set in so deep there was no recovery from it. That brought about views like Dreher's The Byzantine Option which, while Dreher now denies it, basically advocated for holing up for generations until sanity returned at some future time. Not everyone felt that way, and NatCons took over the Heritage Society, where they may have always been in strong numbers anyhow.
The Success of the Federalist Society in the first Trump administration may have been a bit of a roadmap for them, but more than that, the Heritage Society relied upon Trump's laziness which allowed them to insert themselves into his campaign. They even managed to get a major fellow traveler, J. D. Vance, in as Vice President.
The reason that this might offer some hope is this. NatCons may be thick in the Trump administration, but frankly they almost certainly regard some members of his administration as de facto thick. It's unlikely that the NatCons think much of Kennedy, Noem or Oz, for example. But they also know that they never could have been influential on their own. They may be gambling, and it is a gamble, that Trump will burn everything down, and then, when they push him out, which they will do, they'll seem so much more reasonable in comparison.
There is historical precedence for things like that. Many nations have gone through terrible cataclysms, including social cataclysms, to be relieved by some sort of normality which didn't fully match what had come before. The Reformation through England into turmoil to the point where it ulti9mately came unglued, resulting in the English Civil War. The restored monarchy was a welcome relief from the forces of Calvinism and it ultimately set England towards the path which lead to the modern parliamentary democracy.
Another example might be provided by our own Civil War, which saw forces very much like those in the Republican Party today, including some real fire breathing nuts, try to take half the country out on its own to form a white racist republic. It's failure resulted in a return to normalcy which has only now unraveled.
There's a real risk to this strategy, however, which frankly is the only strategy that NatCons have or are going to have. Their shotgun marriage to Trump not only hitched them to somebody loathsome, and whom some of them no doubt loath, but he was the only suitor in town. It was, that is, a marriage of convenience for both of them.
The risk is that like somebody married to a bad person, it becomes hard for that taint to wash off. The longer the marriage lasts, moreover, the more that's the case. The NatCons can't openly dump Trump as the populists will turn on them. They need to allow him to reign long enough, moreover, that he wreck what they want wrecked, but not so long that they're permanently associated with the wreckage. And right now, the first really bitter fruits of Trumpism are beginning to be felt. If they wait too long, they'll had the House of Representatives, then the Senate, and the the Oval Office, back to the Democrats.
That's the second real possibility.
Right now the Democrats do not have their act anywhere near together. The party is still controlled by the Clueless Old who just don't know what to do, other than, like Robert Reich, insist that they hold on to the policy positions that tanked them. That'd be a stupid strategy. It might work, however, if the NatComs fail to abandon Ship Trump by replacing him too late.
If that occurs, everything that the populists brought about will evaporate overnight. Newt Gingrich like, most populists believe that they're burning things down so that they can't be rebuilt. They can be. Like Trump's stupid plaza replacing the rose garden, a legislative Kubota can come in and tear it out, and the roses, like them or not, be back in place overnight.
The thing is, however, that this would also be a massive change. The very things that caused the populist revolt would triumph. There's a very real chance of that.
But that's not the only possibility. A third one, even if the NatCons come into power, and even if the Democrats do, but not strongly, is also possible. That example might be provided by mid 20th Century France.
The 3d Republic was in terrible shape with politics ripping it apart before World War Two. The republic technically endured into the Second World War when forces very much like the NatCons took control of it while it was under the Third Reich's heel. There was serious Allied thought to actually continuing the 3d Republic and even retaining Marshall Petain but the forces that had sided with the Allies clearly did not want to do that. That gave rise to the 4th Republic, and then in 1958, the 5th, under DeGaulle, a right wing Catholic monarchist who restored the country to one in which all sides could seriously work and cooperate.
That latter example may offer the best hope. The NatCons, like the French right wing, cooperated in the Trumpist nightmare and may very well find themselves discredited by it. People like Vance may find themselves in the dustbin. In may take some time, but this might, perhaps, be a watershed moment from which the country emerges a sane new country, not the one that tore itself apart like the 3d Republic, and not one that reflected its late totalitarian stage under a Petain, or in our case, a clown like Trump.
We can only hope so.
Footnotes
1. Donald Trump does not legally occupy the Oval Office and there's a good argument that everything he is doing might end up simply being voided as null as a result.
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