The Grand Old Party. 1854 to 2024.

Lex Anteinternet: The 2024 Election, Part XIV. Wishful Thinking.:

March 12, 2024

North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley was chosen by the RNC to serve as the party's new Trump sycophantic head, and Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair in unanimous votes.

The Republican Party has died, which makes up my mind in my earlier "shall I stay or shall I go" question I posed here.

Positions with the RNC are being slashed as the party merges with the Trump campaign organization so that it can more effectively apply the Führerprinzip.

The Republican Party, founded on March 20, 1854, nearly 170 years ago, has died.  Donald Trump killed it.  Ronald Reagan, who was a Republican, and Newt Gingrich, who was too, gave him the weapons and ammunition to do so.

The GOP was founded as a left wing progressive party that embraced Federalism and the economic thoughts of the American System.  It opposed a party, the Democrats, that was racist, nativist and provincial.  The GOP used the absence of the Democrats during the Civil War to expand the nation's railroads and agriculture through direct government involvement.  It retained its essential views through the Taft Administration, after which it entered the political wilderness and stood for "business".  It became isolationist during the Great Depression, but returned to its traditional views, which it retained throughout the Cold War, at the start of World War Two.

It became, in the post Taft era, the conservative party due to in part its economic views, which were not laissez-faire, and in part due to its social views.  The social views became much more paramount following the Democratic Party's lurch to the left starting in 1968, causing the rise of Ronald Reagan, who obtained the Presidency by making a deal with Southern Democrats, bringing them and their laissez-faire, extreme populists, ideas into the party.

Though a combination of factors, which we have dealt with elsewhere, that wing of the party has now supplanted the party itself.  Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Hoover, and Eisenhower couldn't recognize this party, nor would they wish to be part of it.

With the co-opting of the RNC, there's no going back.  The current Republican Party doesn't resemble the party of old at all.  It's more Francoist than Buckleyite.  

If Trump fails to win the Oval Office in the Fall, it'll destroy the new GOP.  It's already throwing itself apart.  If he does win, that'll destroy the GOP, as the next four years will be ones of totally unpredictable turmoil.  Nobody really knows what Trump believes in, other than himself.  His followers apply the Führerprinzip to what they believe he reflects in their beliefs and belief that he reflects them back.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Musing for Conservatives from a real (well mostly, sometimes, 50/50 anyway) Conservative.

This comes, I'd note, at a time at which it's clear that much of the Wyoming GOP got to the station on the Trump Train, went into the station and had a few drinks, and re-boarded on Crazy Train, where it stumbled to the club car, and is now decrying the moral state of the country to the bar maid, who has ear buds in and is listening to Taylor Swift and hoping these guys leave a big tip, while knowing that they won't.

Witness:

Wyoming GOP Wants Investigation of Gov. Gordon’s Ties To Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffett

That is, quite frankly, and the only way it can be described, "batshit crazy".   This is going to reveal nothing, and it won't happen for that matter, but the fact that the GOP Central Committee endorses it is scary.

And hence the problem. At the same time that across the country a lot of Republican conservatives voted and said "whoooeeee, what's that smell in here. . . " and then marked the ballot for Democrats, the Wyoming GOP, listening only to the right wing edge of the party, has voted itself into total isolation. Right now, the state's party is about as aware of reality as close affiliates of Kim Jong-un are.

Somehow, it just figures.

And for that reason, they're going to take the state into political isolation, spouting nonsense, while one Senator proclaims that Joe Biden personally sets the price of gas every day, another tries to figure out which GOP Presidential hopeful stands the best chance of giving her a cabinet slot, and a freshman Congressman rails against whatever Kevin McCarthy says is a good thing to rail against today.

In four years we'll have so little say in the nation's politics that our even being a state will be utterly pointless, and beyond that, the Conservative "movement", if it can still be called that, will be about as relevant to the nation as the post World War Two Sicilian movement to make that island the 49th state.

You didn't know there had been one, did you?

Hence, my point.

So, as I am a conservative, of a sort anyhow, and feel that generally my sort of conservatism is correct, some unsolicited advice and commentary for conservatives.

With the first being, what is a conservative, anyhow?

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation . . . the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not . . . express themselves in ideas but only . . . in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

Lionell Trilling, 1950. 

A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

William F. Buckley.

Defining Conservatism.

The blue flag of Conservatism.  Blue is the traditional color, globally, for conservatism, but for some reason in the American political imagry its been substituted for red, which is the color of socialism. Perhaps this makes sense, however, as populism is really a left wing ideology, and as the national conservative party becomes more populist, it is in fact less conservative.

Defining conservatism isn't all that easy to do, and we'd submit, it's so frequently done clouded by either a liberal tradidtiion or a reactionary impulse, that its done incorrectly.

Take, for instance.

We, as young conservatives, believe:

• That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;
• That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;
• That the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;
• That the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power;
• That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government; and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;
• That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: Does it serve the just interests of the United States?

The Sharon Statement, 1960, drafted in part by M. Stanton Evans. Is it correct?

One of the real problems modern conservatives face is that they don't know what conservatism is, even if most vaguely have a grasp of it.  As a result of this, they've adopted a lot of libertarianism, which isn't conservatism by any means, and a fair amount, recently, of fascism, which actually originated in the radical left.¹

Without some sort of existential understanding of what it is, conservatism isn't really anything at all. And indeed, if you look at the current GOP, it is indeed a "big tent", but that tents a real mishmash of people with widely varying ideologies, or no ideologies at all.

The irony of the recent race in Wyoming is that one of the far fight candidates campaigned on the platform of "less government, more freedom". That's not conservative, that's libertarianism.  The same candidate has billboards up opposing abortion, which is a conservative position, and one I support, which has roots in theology, philosophy, and natural law, but which doesn't really square with the "less government, more freedom" platform.  A guy who is for less government, and more freedom, ought to take the position that you can pretty much do whatever you freakin' want to, which of course he really doesn't.

You can get to being pro life and be a libertarian, I'd note, but its harder.

Shoot, why not legalize dueling?  Less government. . . more freedom.

And that defines why the current crop of conservatives make nearly no sense.

I'd propose that Conservatism is this; it's a political/philosophical view that human beings are flawed and in some serious ways, de minimis.  We're a creature of some external force, that force being nature, and for those who are believers, nature's God.  What we are and how we should behave is defined by that, and as we are imperfect, we should always be extremely careful about departing from something we have conserved, i.e,. tradition, as by and large, tradition and traditional views are highly refined from experience and probably correct. Something we come up with in our own era stands a good chance of being wrong.  Because we are imperfect, we can find out that we are wrong on things, and we do over time, but we ought to never assume we've figured it out in our own era.  Added to that, as history is conserved knowledge, the past is nearly as alive as the present, and we should consider it and its voices constantly.

Now, going from there.

All reality is governed by, well, reality.

And what we know of reality is ultimately governed by nature.  

We can know nature, and know a lot of it by observation.  But we cannot redefine it.

Modern "ology" fields, outside of the hard sciences, have tried mightily, and indeed enormously succeeded, in shoving out vast piles of crap on our natures for well over a century. Sooner or later, the last crap starts to stink up everything and be revealed as crap, but not before many lives have been destroyed in the process.  

Psychology, sociology, sexolgy, all are hugely guilty of this.

Biology, geology, orthodox theology, and physics, are not.

If things aren't grounded in nature, as revealed by the real, i.e., hard, sciences, they are probably wrong.

Now, science doesn't have an explanation for everything, but it has the explanation for a lot.  And where it does, it must be listened to. And an awful lot about us can readily and easily be explained by evolutionary biology, which should not be confused with cultural anthropology, another one of the "ology" fields that tends to be in the category of "the self-explanatory flavor of the day rationalizing my own behavior".

The lesson of the hard sciences, like orthodox Christinaity, tend to make lot of people hugely uncomfortable, in part because starting with the, yes conservative, Reagan Administration the Federal Government gutted the funding for them.  Prior to that we had enlisted the hard sciences in the war effort against the Axis and then later against the Soviet Union.  At that point we really needed to know what science, often in the form of engineering (which is applied physics) had to say about things.

By the mid 1970s "Conservatives" had regrown uncomfortable with some things science had to say, particularly in the environmental fields, which I'll address below.² So they gutted it, and int he process they've managed to make modern Americans woefully poorly educated in the sciences.  There's no excuse for it.  Here's a good example:

Nobody remembers  this as in reality we treated viruses with a massively publicly funded health system and mandatory vaccinations.  Treating things with soup and Vitamin C is a trip to the cemetery.

But we're now so freakin' dense that this actually showed up on a recent candidates' website.

Reality, you smart mammal, is defined by nature and evolution.  You are formed existentially by external forces, and that is what you are existentially.  You, and we, don't get to change that.

Our own appetites don't define right or wrong.

But people sure seem to think that.

You would think this would be self-evident, but in this era of massive wealth, the concept of restraining your own conduct in any fashion is regarded as passé.

Among the things we are, we are broken. The standards are clear, but we don't always individually orient ourselves to them. That doesn't mean our disorientation should be given license.  

Indeed, we don't even know where to draw the line on this.  For eons human beings accepted, for example, the norm that sex should be contained within marriage, and that it was between male and female. The only real global divergence on how this worked had to do with whether polygamy was okay or not. That's about it. 

This isn't the only example, by any means, but it does show how conservatism isn't libertarianism or progressivism.  Progressives would require you to believe that the latest social "ology" items are real legally.  You may not assert, for example, that transgenderism isn't real, as that's not socially acceptable.  Libertarians don't care if you believe it or not, but they wouldn't have the structure of the state accept the scientific realities that it's far from proven, and up until it is, it's not a state matter to force, and because it's also contrary to long human experience, and frankly science, the burden of proof on it is very high.

Our own economic well-being doesn't define true or false.

Avarice, 1590.

But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evils; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs.

1 Timothy.

Somewhere along the path of things, conservatives started believing that capitalism is the natural order of things.  And beyond that, somehow conservatism began to equate itself with a worship of mammon.

Southerners justified slavery, which was in their perceived economic self-interest, on the basis that the Bible said it was okay, which it does not.  The Germans justified invading the Soviet Union on the "ology" basis that the Germans were a master race, and they therefore were entitled to the Slavic breadbaskets of Europe.

Think this doesn't apply to this argument?

Well, right now the GOP in Wyoming, which claims to be conservative, wants the state to investigate Gov. Gordon’s Ties To Bill Gates, George Soros, and Warren Buffett. Why?  Well somebody's economic ox is being gored as these men don't have the same view of the economic future as the Central Committee does.

Indeed, among those who are involved in economics and science, it's really clear that the Republican Party in Wyoming has literally walked up to a dead mule and put it in harness on the basis that the mule made us rich in the past, and he better now.  That's not how these things work.

Things do change, and you don't have a right to insist that they do not.  Railroad crews couldn't demand that the switch from steam to diesel not be made on the basis that steam engines employed a larger crew.  Sail mariners couldn't demand that the age of sail not yield to that of coal.  But that's what a lot of people in the "conservative" moment are doing right now.

Truth be known, we can learn that our own occupations are not sacrosanct, even though the lesson is hard.  Nobody argues, for example, that "I'm a tobacco farmer, and therefore cancer is a fib" anymore, but people did at one time.  We hear economic arguments of that type made in conservative circles all the time, however.

And that is not real conservatism. That's reactionary.  A real conservatism would realize that economics isn't the same as conserving core human relationships.

Conservatism sometimes has to aim to restore or recall what was already lost.

One of the common failings of conservatives, which opens them up to criticism all the time, is that they are often working at conserving either what is right now, or what was just very recently.

A good example of this is another economic one.  Conservatives constantly claim to be preserving capitalism. That isn't conservative at all.  Capitalism itself is a government made economic liberal construct designed to promote certain type of business activities.

Capitalism can be argued to be good or bad, and in varying degrees, in its own right, but the fact of the matter is that its contrary to nature in recognizing what would otherwise be a type of partnership as a "person", giving it a huge economic advantage against real people.  If conservatives truly sought to conserve, they'd look back and realize that the corporate innovation has evolved massively and to the detriment of the natural social and economic order.  In other words, they'd restrict the use of the corporate business form, which itself would go back to an earlier era.

None of this is radical, it's purely conservative, but because it understands the nature of how this works, and looks back prior to December 31, 1600, it doesn't seem that way.

Another example is in the area of men, women, sex and marriage.  Conservatives in our current era are full of horror about the recent developments in the area of sexual attraction, and they should be. But addressing this by taking it back to the pre Dobbs status quote actually isn't all that conservative. Taking things back to when the heart balm statutes still predominated would be.

"But, didn't William F. Buckley say. . .?" 

Yeah, so what.  He was wrong here.

We're all fallen, but nobody has the right to engage in open hypocrisy.

Strom Thurmond, the Southern Democrat and "Dixiecrat" senator who opposed desegregation for most of his career but whom also fathered a child by his 16 year old black maid, that child being his oldest offspring.

Oddly enough, this story was sort of hi lighted by a development that occurred after Cynthia Lummis went up on the decks of the SS Political Fortunes, looked at the weather gauge, and determined that it had shifted, probably resulting in her vote on Dobbs.  I've dealt with that extensively here.

What does that statute really say? The Respect For Marriage Act, what it says, what it means, what it means behind what it means, and the reaction to Lummis voting for it.

There's almost no way to deal with this topic without being somewhat crude, but suffice it to say if you are on the current Super Conservative Special, you really can't be proclaiming what people who have unusual attractions are doing if you are shacked up with somebody, or bed hopping, or the like. Quite frankly, you probably can't say anything about family values if you are divorced and don't have a really good explanation or if you are married but childless and seemingly in a well paying career.  You can't say that "those people aren't acting" naturally, if you aren't either.

And yes, this harkens back to an age with children out of wedlock was regarded as conveying shame, and being a serial polygamist was frowned upon.  But hence the point.  This sort of topic is broad, not narrow, and you can't take your social programs off the shelf like cans of pinto beans, and leave the lima beans up there.  You are getting a sack of beans, and they're all in there.

"Freedom" may not be just having nothing left to lose, but it's not a defining feature of our beings either.  Nor is "liberty".

Freedom and liberty are the two most misused words in the political lexicon.

Conservatives, if they grasp it, do have a better claim on these words than liberals do, but freedom isn't an absolute and liberty doesn't equate with being a libertine.  

In Catholic social thought freedom is often noted as being a true positive but only when a true understanding of things is derived.  I.e., the framework of the Church doesn't impose shackles on my freedom so much as guardrails, so I don't fall off and lose it.  This is true of properly understood social conservatism as well.  And that's one of the things that distinguishes conservatism from libertarianism.

Looking at things from a point of view of nature, it becomes clear what things have to be provided with guard rails and which do not.  For example, recently, the Obergefell decision opened up same sex unions all over the country.  A frequent argument was that this meant you were "free" to marry whom you wanted. 

Marriage, however, is simply a natural institution for the protection of children created by male/female interactions.  It has nothing whatsoever, as a social institution, to do with "love".  The guard rails here are for the protection of kids, and then widows.  Nothing else.  They've been massively removed over the years to the detriment of society, which hasn't made people "free", but careless and miserable.

Another instance is the massive decriminalization of drugs in American society. Drugs don't make people free, they enslave people to them. The guard rails kept people free by helping them to preserve themselves against self-destructive impulses.  Frankly, Prohibition, in this context, was very much pro freedom and liberty.  Opening up the weed laws and, in Colorado's case, opening up the shrooms, is pro slavery (as well as worshiping money).

Most conservatives instinctively get this, but don't know why they do. People haven't thought out what this ultimately means. And what it means is that sometimes the expression of the people, legislative bodies, have to enact restrictions, rather than open things up.

This includes restraining some kinds of businesses, and not just those mentioned here.  Getting back to what is clearly a distributist bent, restraining some sorts of economic activities promotes freedom, including the right to make a living, but finding a conservative who realizes that isn't always an easy thing to do.

We ought to be honest, and occasionally blunt, but smart.

But at the same time, we ought to be knowledgeable.

We ought to say what we mean, but know why we mean it.

A recent populist Interim Secretary of State had, on his failed campaign platform material, that the United States Constitution was ordained by God.  He didn't say it that way, but was pretty close.  I'd have to look it back up.

That's not a conservative position, that a theocratic one, and it tends to indicate membership in one of several minority religions.  I note this, however, as I hear people relate their political views loosely to God all the time and often in a poorly thought out way.

I don't think the United States Constitution was ordained by God, and I also think that God loves Russians and Ukrainians every bit as much as Americans.  Americans may be exceptional, and right now we're not exceptional in ways that aren't universally positive, but simple unthinking citations such as this don't cut the mustard.

If your conservatism is founded in religious beliefs, fine, you ought to say so. But you probably need to go a bit further and really explain it in a thinking fashion.

Likewise, conservatives constatly spout "less government, more freedom" now days. What does that mean?  The logical conclusion to "less government" is no government, which is called anarchy of course, and which isn't very conservative.

What people who say that probably really mean is that the best government is the government that governs the least, a phrase attributed to Thoreau and to Jefferson, but which in reality nobody knows the author of. The Thoreau quote is as follows:

I heartily accept the motto, — “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, — “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

Thoreau, it might be noted, was in fact an anarchist, and was arguing for that.

Of course, Henry David Thoreau lived in an era in which you could wonder off in the woods and hang around there pretty much unimpeded, if you were a European American.  The prior occupants of the same territory had been forcibly removed by the government.  Those aboriginal occupants, it might be further noted, had their own form of government.

Given all of this, we can say, for instance, that stating phrases like "less government" and the like sound really nifty until you realize that a lot of them are bankrupt and always have been, if not explored more completely.  Less government?  Is that conservative, or is it simply anarchic?

Let's look again at the Sharon Statement:

• That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;

That certainly makes sense, but it probably makes sense to liberals as well.

And being free from arbitrary force concedes that some force isn't arbitrary. That often seems quite missed.

• That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;

That also makes sense, and is a basic tenant of conservatism, but one that's poorly implemented and understood. True economic freedom would require an economic leveling that modern conservatives seem to abhor. That is, some will do better than others, and all should be allowed to compete, but a guy wanting to start an appliance store really can't effectively do that if giant corporations, with shareholders protected from liability and personal loss, are running a mega store in the area, now can he?

• That the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;

Conservatives, truly, can agree with that.

• That the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power;

American conservatives, at least, can agree with that, but  recently they don't seem to be doing universally on all of its tenants.

• That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government; and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;

This is true, but conservatives weren't really arguing for this to be logically implemented at the time, and they still aren't.

Indeed, to some degree what conservatives seem to think is that they're fighting against "socialism". True socialism was knocked out in the fifth round and has been removed from the building. Today, conservatives are arguing against any sort of revival of The American System, but only to the degree they don't personally benefit from it.

• That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: Does it serve the just interests of the United States?

Every nation's foreign policy should be so dictated, but with the understanding that the United States isn't its own planet.  Like it or not, advances in travel, technology and the conservative insistence on the globalization of trade now mean that actions anywhere impact people everywhere, and we're all in this together.  In other words, have bat soup one day in China and the next thing you know, people are sick and Rome and Sacramento.

There are a lot more examples of how that works, but what the drafters of the Sharon statement were really after, at the time, was the Democratic inclination to intervene in foreign wars.  Conservatives of the 1950s had never really gotten over the US entering World War Two, which they didn't fully approve of but which thanks to the Japanese Navy they had no choice but to agree to. They weren't keen on the Korean War and they weren't all keen on the Vietnam War.  There was an odd conservative sense at the time that we could let the world slide into the Red Menace but protect ourselves through B-36s and B-52, not realizing that in the modern world Harley Davidson was about to get a run for the money from Honda.

All of which gets back to this.  Yes, maximum personal liberty is a conservative principle, but not up to the point of self-destruction.  The basic ethos is that we can provide a societal and cultural structure and hope that people succeed, and try to help them when they fall.  Pretending that we're the first person on virgin soil, however, isn't reality, and it in fact it never was.

Probably another way to put this is this.  Liberty can only travel with subsidiarity.  Freedom only travels with responsibility.  Success travels with duty.  And conserving means existential conservation, not reaction.

We don't really have fellow travelers.

Politics is the art of compromise, but the right/left divide in American politics blurs the lines on the nature of movements.  The Wyoming GOP is a good example of this, although the national Republican Party is as well.

Conservatives aren't populists.  Indeed, to some degree the old charge against conservatives as being elitists, a charge made against liberals as well, is true.  So what? 

Populism works just as well for left-wing mobs as right-wing ones, and in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries the American Populist Party was a liberal party that American conservatives fought against. Thomas Jefferson, who was a conservative, feared the day when populists would arise in the US, which he felt inevitable, as it meant the end of democracy.  He may well have been correct.

Given this, why are conservatives sitting in the corner of the club car holding their tongues but watching the populists hit on the bar maid?  They shouldn't be.

They are, of course, for the same reason that right wing German political parties held their nose and went along with the Nazi Party in the early 30s. They had a place they wanted to go, and they thought the Nazis would bet them there.  They didn't.  The populists won't get the conservatives get there either, and the populists have no desire to do so. Their nearly open declaration of war in Wyoming against conservatives, and the six-year campaign that they are "RINO's" should be lesson enough on this point.

Conservatives should be guided by Kipling (a conservative) on this point and take from The Winners, although it certainly isn't true on everything.

What is the moral ? Who rides may read.

  When the night is thick and the tracks are blind,

A friend at a pinch is a friend indeed;

  But a fool to wait for the laggard behind

Down to Gehenna, or up to the Throne,

He travels the fastest who travels alone.

White hands cling to the tightened rein,

  Slipping the spur from the booted heel,

Tenderest voices cry, "Turn again,"

  Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel,

High hopes faint on a warm hearth-stone

He travels the fastest who travels alone.

One may fall, but he falls by himself

  Falls by himself, with himself to blame;

One may attain, and to him is the pelf,

  Loot of the city in Gold or Fame

Plunder of earth shall be all his own

Who travels the fastest, and travels alone.

Stayed by a friend in the hour of toil,

  Sing the heretical song I have made

  His be the labour, and yours be the spoil.

Win by his aid, and the aid disown

He travels the fastest who travels alone.

Conservatism isn't a man and can't be reduced to worshiping a human being.

I've already mentioned a fellow here who was a conservative, Thomas Jefferson.  

He was a great man.

He also kept slaves, one of whom he was bedding, and he kept the kids born of that union enslaved. That's creepy and reprehensible.

A person we quote here frequently and whom we admire is G. W. Chesterton. He was a polymath and great thinker. A great man.

He was also anti-Semitic.

Ideas aren't people, and once the two are confused, you are in real trouble.

Some parties evolve towards cults of personality, and at that point, they're always on the verge of failure.  Once the party is defined by Il Duce's poster, it's pretty pointless.

Donald Trump is one man, and if a person strives to find what cogent philosophical positions he's held on anything, you'll be striving all day and night, for months, and fail to find them.  In truth, love him or hate hm, Trump was a mere vessel for those with certain hopes, many of whom he failed, rather than the originator of anything brilliant himself.  Trump didn't dream up the list of conservative names for the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society did.  Economically, we had good times, but how much of that was Trump, and how much of it was his staffers who came in with him as he declared himself to be a conservative.

Now, you can take this too far. No doubt there were ideas that originated with Trump, some good, and some bad, but he certainly wasn't an overarching intellectual titan that defined a movement.  No, rather, a series of movements, some very poorly defined, simply saw him as their vehicle.

That's been seemingly forgotten.

"Heroes" almost never meet their hype.  Political heroes exist, but where they do, they should be intellects that have contributed real thought. And even when they arise, they can't be the definition of a movement.

Theodore Roosevelt, a great liberal President came to define Liberal "Progressive" Republicans after he left office and a cult of personality developed around him. That lead to the Republican Party splitting and Woodrow Wilson entering office. After that, as a heroic figure, Roosevelt did the right thing.  He reentered the GOP and was pretty quiet.

By Di (they-them) - This SVG flag includes elements that have been taken or adapted from this flag:, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114863039

Footnotes

1. This is, I'd note, a debatable point.  I'd start off, however, noting that Mussolini had been a Socialist.  A Russian refugee of friend of Whitaker Chambers, as another example, who had been a Soviet general felt Communism was a species of fascism.  The Nazi Party had been a radical socialist party very early on, but once Hitler entered the picture its socialism rapidly waned.

2.  I've said "regrown" as the first real instances of conservatives becoming uncomfortable with science seems to have occured with Protestants becoming uncomfortable with the theory of evolution when it was first introduced. While evolution, as a scientific theory, is so well demonstrated it is clearly fact, some are still uncomfortable with it as this late date and occasionally there are efforts to preclude it from schools.  Apostolic Christians tend to be baffled by this, unless they've been heavily protestantized, as many in the US have been, as there really is nothing contrary to the Faith as they conceive of it in regard to evolution.  However, like going down a rabbit hole, rejecting evolution tends to end up as a rejection of all sorts of other science and, in the end, make Christianity weaker by making it look contrary to science, which it need not be.

Can real conservatism exist without authoritarianism?

By SanchoPanzaXXI - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3415994.  Francoist Span's coat of arms.   The motto means "One, great, and free".

Look at Wyoming GOP right now, and you would have to assume that the answer to this question must be "no".¹

And frankly, buying off on election theft myths and mutually reinforcing propaganda aside, there's some reason to think that.  That's basically what Patrick Deneen of Harvard has warned of.  He's the author of Why Liberalism Failed, a major work criticized heavily by the mainstream press, as we've previously noted, and adopted by current conservatives.  Yale's snippet on the book states, as we also previously noted:

Has liberalism failed because it has succeeded?

"Why Liberalism Failed offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril."—President Barack Obama

"Deneen's book is valuable because it focuses on today's central issue. The important debates now are not about policy. They are about the basic values and structures of our social order."—David Brooks, New York Times

Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

Now, Deneen did not state that we needed to elect an orange haired Duce  whom we "must work towards" in order to impose the proper order upon society.²  At least, I don't think he did, having not read his book.  And the essence of what Deneen apparently states here, as summarized by the Yale review, is correct.  Political liberalism "trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality"  It also "discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history."

All that is true.

Perhaps more disturbing is that liberalism/progressivism has unmoored itself from any sort of external greater force.  Depending upon how you view it, it either takes the position, basically, that man can vote on his own private wishes, and God must endorse them, or that individual desires are paramount and nature must bend to and accommodate them.  There's no possibility of unity in any of that, and it's deeply anti-nature. There's not even the possibility of a society functioning that way, on a long term basis.

So, given that, is it the case that conservatism must assert itself, by force?

That seems to be the conclusion that Orbán and a host of Eastern European leaders have concluded.  They're willing to tolerate democracy, but only if certain things are universally agreed on first.  And that sort of top-down directive nature of government, as long as it seems conservative, is the reason so many Americans of the MAGA persuasion, like Tucker Carlson, have been Putin cheerleaders.  It's also the reason that CPAC has swooned over Orban and has come very close to adopting his Illiberal Democracy point of view.  And it's the sort of point of view, sort of, that lead the Edmund Burke Foundation to adopt a "National Conservatism" manifesto this past June.

But it's also deeply illogical.

The basic core of real conservatism, indeed any political philosophy, is that it's right.  And conservatives believe they're right on two things, social issues and economic ones. . . well conservatives who have completely bought the package believe that, there are plenty of people who believe in one of the two tenants of conservatism and not the other.

But ironically, in believe that they are right, real conservatives, have always believed that man is flawed, and it's best to rely on tradition and what we know of science to guide us.  Old time conservatives, quite frankly, in the Buckleyite era, tended to be elitist, and proudly so. They were well-educated, at least at the upper levels, and didn't take their beliefs from the masses.  Indeed, often they assumed they were a permanent minority that could influence heavily, but was unlikely to rule.

We should note here that populist, at least right now, are fellow travelers of conservatives, but their views aren't really the same at all.  Populist tend to believe that the mass of people have some native instinct that's right because they have it.  It's thin on education and tends not to trust elites of any kid, because they ain't elite.

Basically, five guys in a corner drinking Budweiser, and lots of it, are presumed to know more about just about anything, to current populists, than five theologians or conservative philosophers.

And of course, in various circumstances, populists can be extreme rightist or leftists.  Early Soviet Reds were basically a  type of populist.

Note the irony of the illiberal democracy point of view.  Conservatives believe they're right, but they also believe, if they are illiberal democrats, that the attractions of progressivism are so strong that they'll overwhelm those truths unless they're enforced by force.

The current right, basically, believes that if offered dessert over dinner, kids will east dessert first every time.  Put another way, the current American right believes that given a choice, everyone is going to opt to be transgendered and there's no argument against it.  None at all. So people have to be forced to comport with what 99% of humanity already does naturally.

Progressives have believed something similar for decades, which is why they sought to enforce their beliefs through the courts. The basic concept was to enforce their beliefs through liberal courts and either plan on that enforcement indefinitely, or hope that people would get used to the enforced change over time and accept it.  Conservatives took the opposite view, at least up until recently.

This is what the recent battle of being "woke" is about.  Truth be known, hardly anyone anywhere, as a large demographic, has been in favor of things that may be defined as "woke".  But the courts enforced wokism, or at least opened the doors and windows for it. So, for example, you have Obergefel redefining what love means and the ancient concept of marriage, and soon thereafter "accepting" transgenderism is a major societal push.

Illiberal democrats argue that we should simply close the door on these arguments via fiat.

The problem with that is twofold.  No bad idea ever goes away in darkness. That's why the goofball economic theory of Communism rose up in autocratic states.  Bad ideas, like viruses, die in the sun.

Secondly, it presumes that your own arguments, while right, just can't compete.  Arguments that can't compete, however, can't compete ever.

Now, the way that Illiberal Democrats would probably put it is that the truth has been established but corruption, unleashed by evil, is always there to take things down.  In some ways, this view is an elitist one, even though populist that have adopted that are anti elites and don't know that (which is part of the reason that currently conservatism and populism may ride on the same bus, but they aren't the same thing).  Basically, this view at some level, openly or simply instinctively, takes the position that regular people are like children.³

Enforcing conservative via fiat has never worked.

Ask Marshal Petain.

The French political right has never recovered from Vichy, and it basically lost its ability to really influence anything.  

The Trumpist wing of the GOP is taking the Republican Party in that exact same directly.  If it keeps going this way, you can guaranty that Gender Queer is coming to a school library near you, pretty freaking soon.

There's a much better way to go about this.

And what that is, is this.

Conservatives should make their argument, and in making it, take a page from their Buckleyite past.  When accused of being elitist, embrace it.  Football players in the NFL are elites.  The Green Berets are elites.  Accused of being an "elite", lucky you.  Say you are, and as an elite, you know better.

Adopt Western Society, but its great thinkers and lights.  Donald Trump isn't one of them.

Don't try to be populists, populists can come to you.

Don't eschew science. Science is science and it aims at the truth.  If you reject it, your chances are better than not that you are favoring myth over reality, and dangerously so.

Realize that cultural conservatism doesn't equate with capitalism.  Capitalist are after the money.  You are after the culture.  Confusing the two sews the seeds of destruction.  Things that are deeply conservative, in real terms, are often anti-capitalist.

Embrace democracy.  You aren't always going to win, but you can always argue your point.  Arguing your point is trying to convince.  Forcing your point via fiat is a concession that you can't win through persuasion, as your argument is weak.

For a few minutes there, before Trump' narcissism spawned his coup, and the Supreme Court returned to the rule of law, you really had something.

You're blowing it.

Footnotes

1.  Based upon the most recent proclamations of the Central Committee, you also have to be deeply anti-scientific and an adherent to wacky conspiracy theories.  If you ever wondered how a rational German could have believed that the Jews were responsible for all of Germany's ills of the 20s and 30s, well just look at how the Central Committee thinks that Bill Gates and George Soros are messing with the state's energy sector.

2.  "Working toward the Führer" was a primary ethos of Nazi Germany.  Hitler didn't come up with all the bizarre beliefs and policies of the Third Reich on his own, his acolytes developed many just trying to figure out what Hitler would do if he was working on the topic. The Trumpist wing of the GOP has pretty much picked up on that sort of thing and worked towards Trump, who in turn has worked back towards them.

3.  The irony of this is that quite a few members of these movements have already eaten the desert.  If their underlying foundation is really meant, and they have, for example, adopted any aspect of the Sexual Revolution, which frankly most Americans have, they're hypocritical.

Related Threads.

Illiberal Democracy. A Manifesto?

"Bidenomics" and the return of the Great Society. . . and why that isn't good.

Lyndon Johnson in 1915.

I'm linking this in here not because I agree with the article, but because I don't.

How Bidenomics Unites America: A quarter century ago, I and other members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet urged him to reject the Republican’s proposal to end welfare. It was too punitive, we said, subjecting poor Americans to deep and...

As can be seen, Robert Reich, an economist who was in the Clinton Administration, asserts by way of his caption in this piece that "Bidenomics" "unites America".

It'll unite it, alright.  In bankruptcy, dependency and inflation.

Biden's COVID relief bill has been rightly criticized as the enactment of a set of liberal economic wish lists.  It's level of expense, as noted in our last Zeitgeist issue, is beyond that of the last several wars fought by the U.S. combined and, amazingly exceeds the amount spent in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  It's as if Lyndon Johnson got every Great Society wish he ever had, and more so.

Billed as necessary relief to the economy during the pandemic, the bill ignores the fact that the American economy was actually little impacted by the pandemic in a universal way.  It was impacted, but only in selective "service" industries.  If you owned an airline, for example, you were hurt.  If you owned a trucking company or a railroad, you weren't.  If you were employed in IT, you were probably not hurt.  If you worked in a restaurant, you likely were. Indeed, almost 100% of unemployment in the pandemic has been in the service industry.

This doesn't mean that we should simply forget people, or industries, in the hurt category, but what it does mean is that spending cash economy wide with wild abandon doesn't send the money where it's needed.  It sends it into an economy that's otherwise doing pretty well, which will superheat it.

Indeed, we're repeating the errors of the late 1960s in all sorts of ways, that being one.  In the 1960s  the US superheated the economy with the combined Great Society and Vietnam War, an expense level which likely didn't match anywhere near what we're currently spending.  We paid for that by inflating our way out of it, robbing the incomes of average Americans and depleting their savings by directly reducing their value.  Some maintain that the high inflation rates of the late 1960s, which got out of control in the 1970s, were brought about intentionally as the inflation reduced the value of loans the government took out to pay for the era's massive military and social budgets.  Nearly any economist who has looked at it has concluded the dual effort of trying to send Ho Chi Minh out of South Vietnam and poverty out of the United States was an economic strain that the US simply couldn't bear.

The dual expenses went on into the late 1970s when Ronald Reagan's presidency began to address them. The defense budget remained high, but Reagan campaigned against the Great Society, which had become unpopular with Middle Class Americans.  The American welfare state came to an end, however, during Clinton.

Now its back, thanks in no small part to Donald Trump and the last four years.

Dating back to Reagan, but not really before then, the GOP was associated with "fiscal conservatism".  Reagan was, of course, also a social conservative, but it's really the Reagan era in which both of these things united in Buckleyite conservatism.  Richard Nixon, for example, was pretty content with big spending on the Vietnam War and social programs as well.  

Reagan has been lauded over the past forty years as a great man, but he was hated in his own era and the latent anger at him really comes through in Reich's post.  Liberals of the 1960s rejoiced in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, which did indeed have aspects of merit to it, but which also had elements of real social destruction threaded into its experimentation that the nation has never been able to recover from or ween itself off of.  In some ways, many of the urban social ills afflicting the nation today and particularly afflicting some minority populations can be laid at Lyndon Johnson's posthumous doorstep, even though he very deeply desired to help those populations.

Now, as Reich notes, Reagan is gone, swept out the door by a petulant self loving Donald Trump who preferred to wipe out the GOP's chances of retaining the Senate rather than see himself go down in inevitable defeat.  The only stolen election in 2020 was the one that Trump stole from the GOP in 2021.   Georgia would have remained Republican but for Trump.

Not that Trumpism didn't have a massive, ironic, impact on the GOP over the last four years, although the seeds of that were sewn back as early as 2016.  Whatever else the conservative Reagan GOP may have stood for, it really wasn't a party of the common man in a populist sense.  William F. Buckley wasn't a guy you were going to invite over for a dog and a beer on the Fourth of July and he sure wasn't going to invite you over for one. . . ever.   

The economic sense of that GOP was a "rising all boats" sense of things in which if capitalist were allowed free reign the economy would do well and everyone would do well with a good economy.  By and large, while railed at against the time, that GOP was proven right overall. What it didn't worry much about, however, was the impact that exporting work overseas would have on the industrial laboring blue collar worker or the impact that a massive immigration rate would have on the same class.

The Democrats didn't take that view of the economy but they didn't worry about exporting work or immigration either.  Indeed, their view was that you could always spend your way out of these problems somehow, with money from somewhere.  

Thread through the GOP theme at the time was the belief that you ought to pay for what you agree to spend for, although the GOP was never able to really manage it. With yet another irony, the only President who did during the pre Trump era was Bill Clinton, who ran a budget surplus in at least one year. So, while hated by conservatives, Clinton was the only President since prior to the Great Depression who managed a balanced budget and who eliminated welfare.

When the populist seized the GOP and Trump agreed to fly their flag, he also abandoned any pretext towards budgetary restraint, bringing in a further irony.  Trump played off of populist desires and indeed acted on some, but certainly not all.  One thing he didn't do, however, was to worry about balanced budgets and the GOP simply quit worrying about them as well.

That Trump wouldn't worry about them is no surprise.  People liked to say that "he's a businessman" and they therefore assumed he'd run the government like a business, something that no politician has managed to do that I can recall save for António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, who was an economist by training, and dictator by practice, and who didn't think that his governance style would survive himself.  The departure from fiscal conservatism, however, was massively significant in that it destroyed any Republican credence to argue for it.

Of course, as noted, the Trump presidency didn't only destroy that.  In its late state Trump effectively destroyed the GOP's retention of the Senate and reduced its image in the minds of non populist voters, many of whom have now departed the party.  Right now, it's busy trying to restrict the vote in various states, a strategy that will prove disastrous.  Hoping to take back the House in 2022, my prediction is that the infusion of free money, a rebounding economy, and grasping tightly to Trump will sink those chances and the GOP tide, which was rising but for Trump, will start to recede pretty quickly.  With support for an insurrection dangling above its head, getting out any message will be difficult for an American culture that will rapidly get used to Uncle Sugar sending out cash.

And sending out cash it plans on doing.  This year some parents will receive up to $3600 per child simply because they have children.

$3600 isn't enough to live on, so comments about it being a Universal Basic Income are very much overdone.  But the direct cash payment is a disturbing concept.  There's no imposed restraint on it.  It's well demonstrated that the best indicator that a child won't grow up poor is if the child grows up in a two parent household.  That's proven.  It's also proven that the most dangerous person in a child's life is the non biologically related male who is shacking up, probably temporarily, with the mother of a child.  Tragic proof of that can be provided by a recent toddler murder in Cheyenne.  Linking a payment to marriage, preferably of the parents, or some other sort of logic social control, would make sense, but the Democrats do not believe in social controls.  Lots of the payments will go to deserving parents.  Lots of it will go to underserving parents as well and never make it to the child.  It won't lift many out of poverty and by encouraging marrying the government, in essence, it will make more poor in the end.  The trail is well blazed.

The payment, of course, is limited to just this year, but already Chuck Schumer is seeking to make it permanent, which has another element to it. An enthusiastic Democratic backer on Meet the Press repeatedly claimed that with this payment "we're just giving you back your taxes", but we aren't.  We're giving money from other people's taxes and money that we borrowed from the Chinese who just this week launched a massive cyber attack on the United States and which is preparing for war against us.  The morality of such a payment scheme is, therefore, questionable in the larger sense.

Here I do indeed depart from traditional Republican taxation views.  I'm not opposed to taxation at the higher income rates disproportionally, which of course already occurs.  I'm opposed to massive borrowing (and indeed any borrowing) to pay for the government.  All taxes, in some ways, separate people's cash from their wallets by force.  I'm not of the view that "taxation is theft", but I do think that any taxation based expenditure, which are all government expenditures , should implicitly come with the question of "would I voluntarily pay for that".  If the answer to that is yes, maybe there's a way it could in fact be voluntarily paid for, which in fact most social expenditures were at one time.

Anyhow, this gets back to the concept of Distributism, but if you are going to tax to "redistribute", you aren't going to achieve that in this fashion unless you do it at a Scandinavian level.  And if you are going to do that, you ought to spend the money in a manner which involves just handing people cash.  

Spending it on actual projects that have societal value, like nuclear power plants., electrification of railroads, building a new modern Navy, education in science and engineering, and the like would achieve something needed and valuable.  And indeed, having just passed one massive spending bill a massive infrastructure bill is just behind it.

Reich concludes his post with the following two paragraphs.

The economic lesson is that Reaganomics is officially dead. For years, conservative economists have argued that tax cuts for the rich create job-creating investments, while assistance to the poor creates dependency. Rubbish.

The first item (also a belief of liberal hero John F. Kennedy) may well have been wrong. The second, however, certainly wasn't rubbish.  Indeed, that dependency helped bring about the Trump era.  And, as for rubbish:

Bidenomics is exactly the reverse: Give cash to the bottom two-thirds and their purchasing power will drive growth for everyone. This is far more plausible. We’ll learn how much in coming months.

The bottom two thirds will soon be lower than that, unless the economy really tanks.  But what is far more likely will be that Bidenomics will tank all of the other liberal spending wishes did, just as the Vietnam War did for the Great Society. The damage will have been done by then, however, and we'll be trying to find our way out of a new inflationary cycle that will destroy the savings of the very Middle Class that, in part, Reich asserts he wishes to see helped.  Ironically, Donald Trump will share the blame with Joe Biden for that, and the GOP will be in a poor position to argue anything.

George F. Will. What he proposes, and what it means.

George F. Will, far left, in happier political days.

I try to keep my election posts, for the most part, all in one thread as sort of a running contemporary history thread.  But the most recent item, on George F. Will's recent column urging Republicans to abandon their party, and his former, party, which I featured here;

Lex Anteinternet: The 2020 Election, Part 8: May 31, 2020 Friday May 29 marked the last day to register for the Primary Election in Wyoming.  So, this is a good place to start ...

probably deserves a closer look in various ways.

Here's what I posted:

June 5, 2020

Yesterday conservative Washington Post columnist George F. Will came out with an editorial that not only called for election defeat of President Trump, but also for his "Congressional enablers".

Will is a very prominent conservative voice and can probably legitimately be regarded as being the premier conservative columnist in the country, a status he rose to even prior to William F. Buckley's death.  Together with Buckley he might be regarded as one of the two defining intellectuals of modern conservatism, although other voices have been prominent in recent years who have taken a different track from the sort of Buckleyite conservatism of the post World War Two era.  Will left the GOP, which he'd been a member of for decades, in 2016 when Trump was nominated.

In some ways the Will departure has always focused the sharp divide between Republican populist and Republican conservatives.  While the two do blend, they are different.  Early on in the Trump Administration there were a fair number of pundits who expected the conservatives to balk at the Administration, but they instead fell into line fairly quickly, especially when it became obvious that the Trump Administration would support conservative policies in economics. law and in the social arena.  Essentially a sort of quiet deal was reached where the conservatives supported the Administration as long as the Administration supported conservative goals.

This has managed to hold together in spite of a lot of strain and to the disdain of those like Will.  In recent weeks, however, the strain has beginning to really show and by this point there's real reason to believe that Trump will be a one term President and he might end up taking Republican control of the Senate down with him.  Only a couple of months ago there was, interestingly enough, some serious speculation that the GOP might regain the House.  Now that's definitely not going to be the case and there's concern that things are going to go very badly.

For some of Will's view the deal reached with the Administration has been so corrupting that they're now arguing against their party or former party.  Will knows that a victory like he's now urging, which would not only end the Trump Administration but also bring in a united government that would be the most liberal one the country has seen since the Great Depression, would permanently bring into the government ideas and concepts that he's opposed his entire life. That's how opposed to what is going on he is.

What seems to underlay this line of thinking is a belief that conservatives have been pushed out or aside in the GOP anyhow, and therefore there's not really a place left for them in the party.  By urging its defeat, they're essentially arguing that the game is lost for the sort of intellectual conservatism they represent and by bringing down the populist centered GOP they can rebuild a new conservative party.

A

How this will develop will be interesting to see.  Will isn't so influential in Republican circles that voters are going to follow his lead because he's urged them to take this step, but it might indicate that others are thinking the same thing.  More probably, it likely means that the Republican center is abandoning support for the Administration's continuation in November and independents are very likely to have irretrievably left.  The recent events in Minneapolis and the President's handling of it may have begun to cement his fate, or are at least definitely impacting his campaign at the present time.

But what Will urges, and whether it sound for a lot of conservatives, raises a lot of interesting questions.

Will, I'd note, is a columnist I've long admired. I should note there that I read columnists from both sides of the political fence. He's a conservative columnist I've always liked and still like. This column, and indeed Will himself, however, more than anything point to the oddity and deficiency of a two party system.

Let's start with the obvious, which we've discussed before. A two party system, which has become institutionalized in the United States, makes no sense at all and in fact is anti-democratic. Will's departing the GOP in 2016 illustrates that in a way that is dramatic and recent, but not unique.

Will is an intellectual conservative. Trump is not. Trump is a sort of quasi libertarian, sort of, populist. There's some common ground there, but frankly there's a lot of common ground between quasi libertarians and the radical Democratic left. Indeed, the candidate most like Trump on the Presidential scene is, in some significant ways, Bernie Sanders. The politician that most resembles Trump today who is simply on the political map may be AOC.

Huey Long, the legendary Louisiana populist.

That may seem like an odd thing to say but all of those politicians are populist without a deep attachment to a philosophical core in a lot of what they say. They'd hotly dispute that, but its their pitch to populism that most characterizes them. Their meme, if you will, is Huey Long.

Now Trump has shrewdly overcoming this by allying himself with Mitch McConnell, who has done the same, for their mutual political self-interests. But the significant thing here in this post is that Trump and Will aren't really in the same political party, if we assume that Will is a Republican. Will and McConnell, however, are in the same party, which may explain part of Will's overall anger that at his fellow conservatives who haven't followed his path.

The question then becomes for people who are in the same party as McConnell and Will on where to go.

That's where what Will urges will not work for large numbers of the people who admire him and want to follow his lead.

Will is an anomaly among Buckleyite conservatives. He's one of them, but in significant ways he's not like them at all.

William F. Buckley with Ronald Reagan.

Buckley defined and informed the modern conservative movement. He was an intellectual who gave a philosophical base to a conservative movement in the United States which had never had one before. There had been conservatives, but they were instinctual conservatives, with their conservatism often founded on nothing in particular other than a gut feeling. Liberals in the country, however, tended to be the opposite. They always had a strong philosophical base. Ironically, they lack one now to the degree they once had, having abandoned much of the intellectual core that once defined them. This is, indeed, making them much more like the populist we noted above, who also lack a philosophical core.

Buckley's vision was so strong that over time it displaced the old conservatism that had been around for the entire 20th Century through the 1950s. It first started to assert itself in the late 1960s but it really started to come into its own in the late 1970s and saw its first victory with the election of Ronald Reagan, a President who was hated by liberals to nearly the same degree which Trump presently is, but for completely different reasons. Founded on a real intellectual core, the Reagan reforms of government were deep and very long lasting, still exhibiting a major influence on the government today. Anyone born after the Reagan Administration is unlikely to be able to grasp how different the government was prior to that, and how both the right and the left tended to look back on the model of Franklin Roosevelt's Administration and emulate it. By way of an example, Richard Nixon would be regarded as a Democratic centrist today if he were running for office.

Buckleyite conservatives, held, at their core, that there were certain things that were dictated by nature, of which human nature was part. That defined their approach towards everything and their view was, to a large degree, Thomist in nature. Interestingly, this was also true of one of the two branches of American liberalism that emerged in the mid-19th Century and which was still influential throughout Buckley's life, which would explain why Buckleyite conservatives and some liberals were easily able to come together on some issues, civil rights being primary among them.

Holders of that view held that nature was real and physical, and that human beings were subject as part of that to human nature. They also held that the world was broken and always would be. Humans were incapable of producing a Heaven on Earth, but they would do as well as possible by observing, accepting and acting in accordance with nature, to include human nature. As noted, one significant branch of American liberalism held the same thing and differed only on the degree to which human interaction could and would improve things. Conservatives tended to take the view that except in certain areas conserving action was the best approach, whereas liberals tended to take the opposite view.

In contrast to both of these veins of thought were those liberals who held that nature was solely subject to human definition, including human definition, and anything could be changed to make a self-created Utopia. This has actually come to underpin liberal philosophy in recent years and it constitutes its underlying weakness in basically being based on nothing. In its most extreme form, it underlined the philosophy advanced by Marx and it came to influence the global left through his massive early 20th Century influence even though its contrary to nature and its application tend to be extraordinary problematic.

Buckley’s influence on the conservative movement was so strong that he can basically be regarded as modern American conservatisms, and perhaps even western conservatism’s, founder. As he advanced in intellectual spheres he gathered to himself those who he influenced and in distinct ways formed their thought. So its important to note that Buckley’s thoughts weren’t just Thomist in their basic nature but they shared an underlying belief. Buckley was a devout Catholic.

More than a few, but not all, of Buckley’s early acolytes were likewise deeply Catholic men, although not surprisingly as time went on many of them fell in comparison. Buckley was one of those interesting examples of somebody who remained personally and professionally loyal to his deep convictions and cannot be accused of hypocrisy no matter what a person may think of his ideas and ideals. Many of those he likewise influenced are also highly admirable in that way, but not all have proven to be. At any rate, the significant thing here is that not only did Buckleyites take a view that conservatism was founded on nature and that human nature was part of nature, but underlying it they accepted the proof of God’s existence, something that has to be denied in denying nature itself, as the ultimate underpinning of the natural order.

Which makes Will the exception and which may explain why his views aren’t really ones that other conservatives can readily accept.

George F. Will, age 79 now, was the son of a philosophy professor and was provided with an excellent early education. His BA was in religion from Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut, but unlike Buckley and many of his close fellows, Will is not a religious man and has claimed to hold atheistic views which in fact don’t come across that way. A protestant by heritage, his first wife was a diehard Presbyterian and his children were raised in that faith. That may explain his view as much as anything as his primary exposure would have been to Calvinism rather than to the Apostolic faiths which are the foundation of modern western thought. Will himself really basically places himself in the category of being unsure about God but disinterested this oddly places him in the position of being a supporter of religion while not being a member of any. He’s frank about his views on natural law and nature underpinning conservatism.

Will came up through Buckley and was the editor of Buckley’s magazine National Review at an early age. But in his later years his problem has been that its become increasingly obvious that his work, while always interesting, actually built simply on the shifting sand of being a conservative without having a deep foundation. Indeed, he has an avowed dislike of intellectuals even though he is one, which in some ways may be his way of avoiding the obvious, nature exists and there’s a reason for it, you simply can’t say it is.

But that view is why Will can take the positions he’s taking and not face the same issues that others do. Will really isn’t loyal to anything in particular as nothing makes him be loyal. So there are no moral issues for him, at the end of the day. And that makes his philosophy inherently weak.

Other conservatives can’t take that view in an election For those whose conservatism is founded on the metaphysical, rather than the physical, the natural order cannot easily be departed from. Voters who regard all human life as sacred don’t have the option that Will does of voting for an order that not only supports abortion but which would increase it, for example, and that’s only one such example.

Indeed, seemingly only having the common urban American’s view of the world, Will’s world outlook is remarkable small, and that also makes his election choices remarkably broad. He’s shown disinterest in some large issues of the day that require scientific inquiry. And for those things that many Americans engage in and have a fanatic loyalty to, he only seems to be a fan of baseball outside of his office. I’m a baseball fan too, but to just have this intellectual life, and baseball, is amazingly narrow.

Of course, I don’t know him, and all of these things may prove to be untrue. But they seem to be, and explain why Will can argue to just throw his former party to the wolves, accept the inevitable outcome that would mean, and then rebuild towards a new conservatism. He doesn’t have to worry about the now in that analysis.