Conservatism

The American right has a problem: it can’t stop talking about itself. Commentators, academics and journalists of what used to be called a “conservative” persuasion all tend to think that their ideas are tremendously interesting. And, in the way a difficult child becomes argumentative when he or she isn’t getting attention, they fight. They fear irrelevance and so they fall out with each other and take sides in order to prove to themselves that they have something worth saying. Things become messy and nasty and everybody gets carried away – usually in the hope of grabbing their own slice of an all-too easily distracted online audience. (Why else am I writing this?

New York socialist Zohran Mamdani is hailed as the social media sensation of American politics. He knows how to talk directly to young people, we’re told. Yet an account called “Thomas Sowell Quotes” has almost twice as many followers on X as Mamdani. Sowell turned 95 this year. He is an unlikely influencer and yet hour-long interviews with him, published by Stanford’s Hoover Institution, have been watched millions of times. In his most popular video, Sowell argues for personal responsibility over dependence on the state and is meticulous in his use of empirical evidence. Black men who read newspapers and own library cards have had the same income as their white counterparts since 1969. Married black couples have the same poverty rate as white couples and have done for decades.

Gearing up to launch his new "America Party," Elon Musk now speaks of a GOP-Democratic duopoly that has the country in its grip. But this system died ten years ago at the hands of Donald Trump: America's first third party president.  With a small band of misfit toys drawn from the world of Manhattan real estate Mr. Trump invaded an old and established party, replacing it with his own ideas and – in true cuckoo fashion – his own children. There is almost no intellectual continuity between the faction he now leads and the pre-2015 Republicans beyond a generic commitment to free markets and to law and order.

President Donald Trump is seeing a handful of House Republicans deal what he hopes is a temporary setback to his "Big, Beautiful Bill." Despite Trump’s repeated requests that House Republicans pass the gigantic reconciliation bill — which includes the codification of several of Trump’s executive orders, along with larger-than-expected spending cuts targeting across the board expenditures and a $4 trillion debt limit increase — several Republicans in the House tanked a critical vote in the Budget Committee, forcing Republicans to consider what comes next. While the specifics are uncertain, Republicans lack a plan B if they fail to pass some version of the bill. “It has to pass,” Congressman Glenn Grothman, a Budget Committee member, said.

Welcome to Thunderdome: have you placed a bet yet on if Chris Christie actually shows up to the debate with a pair of brass knuckles? It certainly would be entertaining to see the New York and New Jersey guys just ignore the rest of the field and tangle — it’d be enough to justify having the debate itself. But Trump might skip it, which makes the prospect of a DeSantis/Newsom debate the most interesting possibility on the horizon — and presents a make-or-break chance for the Florida governor. Meanwhile, Republicans struggle with how to aim their message in a time where culture war is the dominant narrative but perhaps not the most salient one.

It is an irony of history that the bronze Statue of Freedom which stands tall atop the US Capitol dome was commissioned by the man who would seek to break the nation apart a few years later. Jefferson Davis, secretary of war when the statue was ordered, clashed with Yankee sculptor Thomas Crawford over his original design, which included a liberty cap, the symbol of an emancipated slave, above the statue’s crown. The statue is adorned with a sword, a shield and a wreath of victory. It’s symbolic in other ways as well: struck hundreds of times by lightning, it conducts and dissipates that violent energy into the earth. Freedom makes an excellent lightning rod. Today, critiques of the statue and what it represents arise from different sources.

When Charles Barkley came to Salt Lake City for the NBA All-Star game, he found himself trapped in what he called a “boring-ass,” booze-free desert. (Impressively, Barkley did manage to at least sound drunk.) That's how it is in Utah, which sometimes gets depicted as the wet blanket of America. So it was that Marjorie Taylor Greene had cold water thrown on her by her Utah colleagues after she called for a national divorce on Twitter. “This rhetoric is destructive and wrong and — honestly — evil.” responded Utah governor Spencer Cox in a tweet. “We don’t need a divorce, we need marriage counseling.” "We're not going to divide the country,” said Utah senator Mitt Romney, “It's united we stand, divided we fall.

Pat Buchanan recently ended his syndicated column, essentially completing his retirement from public life. Yet it’s hard to think of any writer in his or her prime today whose ideas enjoy the currency that Buchanan’s now do. From trade and foreign policy to immigration and the “culture war” — a term that Buchanan introduced into popular politics — views that once set Buchanan apart from his fellow conservatives are now redefining the right. Buchanan was not the only conservative skeptic of free trade or foreign interventionism in the 1990s, but he was the only one that most newspaper-reading or cable news-watching voters knew about. At the zenith of American power and economic globalization, Buchanan defined the opposition to the spirit of the age.

For the last thirty years, the Republican Party has been a battleground between two competing ideologies. One of these is fundamentally liberal, although it is packaged and sold under a variety of brand names: “compassionate conservatism,” neoconservatism, classical liberalism, and — most misleadingly — Reagan conservatism. The other ideology is a rejection of modern liberalism and the post-Cold War elite consensus in American politics. It is skeptical of free trade, large-scale immigration and US involvement in foreign conflicts. Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump are the primary representatives of this view, which is often called populist or nationalist. The two sides are not evenly matched.

The main reason why I lined up in the pouring rain to vote for Bill Clinton in 1992 was that he’d campaigned as a gay-friendly candidate. It wasn’t just his promise to allow gays to serve openly in the military. It was that he talked about gays as if we were human beings and not demons — fully equal to our heterosexual brothers and sisters. Back then, for gay Americans, every new election cycle meant one thing for sure: we’d have to gird ourselves for a fresh round of gay-bashing by presidential hopefuls. Clinton seemed to promise a new era in politics, when our very existence would no longer be an issue. Well, Clinton won the election. And four years later he signed the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. “Defense” as in defense from us.

A famous passage in the preface to Lionel Trilling’s book The Liberal Imagination is widely quoted and just as widely misunderstood. Trilling, a Columbia University professor and literary critic, wrote that at the time — this was 1950 — that there was no articulate conservative or reactionary thought in America, only conservative or reactionary “impulses” expressed “in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling’s point was not to criticize conservatism but to set up an argument for his work as a literary critic. Liberals, Trilling argued, needed to be challenged; they had grown complacent in the absence of a vigorous conservatism to spotlight liberalism’s deficiencies.