This Post Is By TONY WIKRENT
Faced with Trump’s populist seizure of the Republican Party, establishment conservatives and libertarians are trying to redefine classic republicanism (referring to the ideas on which the USA was established as a republic, not to the Republican Party) to exclude anything other than market capitalism.
The Winter 2019 issue of conservative quarterly National Affairs carries an article, “Republicanism for Republicans,” which marks the intellectual grave of American conservatism. It was written by Brink Lindsey, former director of regulatory studies at the radical libertarian Cato Institute and fromer senior editor of Regulation magazine. Lindsey is now drawing his thirty pieces of silver as vice president and director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center. [1]
Lindsey begins by summoning together the bedraggled and disconsolate disciples of “pure” conservatism and libertarianism. Looking over the smoking ruins and salted earth of their conservative paradise laid waste by Trump and his hordes of “ethno-nationalism”, Lindsey laments that “What was once your political home, or at least a familiar haunt you visited regularly, has been overrun by people or ideas you find repellent.”
We cannot simply wait for Trump to pass from the scene, or for Democrats to win big, and hope that things will then somehow go back to normal. We must face the fact that the Trump presidency is not a freak accident, but rather the culmination of developments that have been corrupting the conservative movement and the Republican Party for many years. To root out this corruption, to build a new center-right that can lift this country up to its noblest aspirations instead of dragging it down to its darkest impulses, we must return to our intellectual foundations and build anew from there.
This is a clear admission that the seven decade rise and ascendancy of modern American conservatism has met its ignoble demise at the hands of a grifting conman and TV huckster. It’s over, there is no life left in it, it has flat-lined: the relentless and richly funded climb of conservatism to national power that began with Strom Thurmond’s states rights Dixiecrats in 1948, the Austrian School economic shit-fest of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek excreted from the rancid rectum of the Hapsburg empire in 1944 and 1945, and tail-gunner Joe’s 1950 discovery of Communist Party membership cards in every desk drawer of the State Department, is finally over.
In a just universe, the fellow travelers of Barry Goldwater, Milton Friedman, William Buckley, David and Charles Koch, Jesse Helms, Lee Atwater, and Karl Rove would pop out of mortal existence and re-emerge in Dante’s infernal eighth circle, suffering each healed wound to be ripped anew. But in this world, justice is only bent toward, so we must suffer for some time the continued brain-dead lurching and staggering of conservatism: an ideological zombie still dangerous in its capacity to inflict harm and consume the flesh of the living.
A large part of the problem is that most leftists have never really bothered to understand the ideological thinking of their enemies, preferring to saute themselves in the purity of their own ideological beliefs. So, I was not too surprised that most liberals and leftists failed to notice the intellectual death of their arch-foe.
And, they have forgotten what republicanism is long ago. Actually, they probably never learned. Rather than master the ideas of statecraft developed by the antique city states of Greece and Italy, the Hanseatic League of the southern Baltic, and England in the time of Cromwell, liberals have busied themselves severing ties with the working class, collecting the contributions and currying the favor of the one percent, or at least the professional class. Meanwhile, leftists willingly descended into a mass act of historical amnesia by dismissing the creation of the United States — supposed to be a republic, but who knows or cares what that means? — as just another act of oppression committed by privileged white men.
Scrambling to control the coming discourse
So we have Brink Lindsey putting forth a project, to dress the zombie in new duds, and keep it staggering on into — who knows when or where? “To build a new, post-Trump right, we need a new political language in which to express ourselves,” Lindsey writes. Well, of course, because after Newt Ginrich and Frank Luntz finished savaging the English language, every word and utterance of conservatives for years now have been nothing but half-truths at best, outright lies at worst. “Right to work” has been redefined to mean “surrender to the boss man” and “No child left behind” turns out to mean “no child capable of thinking for him- or her self.” Say “reduce fossil fuel dependence” and conservatives hear “war on coal.” A federal mandate that everyone purchase health insurance — just like state mandates that every driver have auto insurance — is vilified as “death panels.” Feed the poor, house the homeless, care for the sick, and conservatives don’t see dedication to the injunctions of a great world religion, they see socialism and looming despotism. How can any political language survive such a consistent and persistent record of misuse for diabolical dissembling and massive misinformation? Of course Lindsey feels the need for “a new political language.”
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