“Well, you hate conservatives, so.”
The family member I was talking to didn’t feel obligated to finish the sentence, and I didn’t really need him to.
In trying to think out a suitable reply, a few points came up that I thought worth making.
First of all, I don’t object to conservatism, depending on who’s defining it and who’s adhering to it and what they mean by the word; and I don’t really hate anybody.
In fact, I’m pretty conservative myself, depending on who gets to define the word, on a number of issues.
In fact, what I object to most, in politics as in life, is untried, unargued novelty presented as an inevitable and enduring matrix for living. (I also object to trying things that have been tried and have been found awful.)
And if that’s not conservative to you, you’ve either not been reading Edmund Burke or you’ve been listening to too much Fox News. Or both, since those two things go together with astonishing regularity lately. (And if you call yourself a conservative and have not read Edmund Burke, you’re barely literate. There. I said it.)
No, what I object to most is a lack of seriousness in public conversations, and while nobody ever gets a monopoly on a lack of seriousness, the most egregious practioners are generally on the Right at the moment.
Novelty used to be the Left’s thing, specifically digging into the corners of American life to root out any potential victimhood and redress it by extraordinary and radical measures. Sometimes they’ve been right. Now and then they’re nuts. It has frequently been difficult to have serious conversations about liberal policies because they have been so well-motivated but so trivial. The goals of the Green New Deal are laudable, but the mechanisms are batshit crazy and as divorced from reality as climate denialism.
Similarly, the conversation about transgenderism in America is of incredible importance, but on both the Left and Right almost entirely bereft of any seriousness. The Right doesn’t want to have the conversation; the Left wants to restructure conceptions of justice around transgenderism without fully understanding it. It is of no consequence whatever that the topic is of great importance to a number of people if we aren’t honest and straightforward about what this really represents: emotion does not make a matter serious, disciplined intelligent attention to reality does.
But that’s the point. I’m a great believer in the genius of The Federalist Papers, which are shot through with the belief that the machinery of government should be resistant to novelties, fads and trends that stress our common life unnecessarily. Not trending takes more thought and deliberation. The rage-merchants at Fox and MSNBC want to trend. They want clicks and eyeballs. They do not want to pause, breathe, think, consider.
[W]e’re still talking about 77 million Americans who voted for a candidate who named his son after an imaginary friend invented to brag about the candidate’s business and sex-life. This is not a serious person, and any suggestion that the word “conservative” applies to him is laughable.
The MAGA movement is based on serious emotions, principally anger and fear, but it is not at all a serious movement. It has slogans, not a philosophy. It has idolatry of an individual, not any clear idea of what that individual’s character or mind contains. If we wipe out January 6 as disqualifying, if we ignore the breathtaking economic ignorance, if we forget the political incivility, we’re still talking about 77 million Americans who voted for a candidate who named his son after an imaginary friend invented to brag about the candidate’s business and sex-life.
This is not a serious person, and any suggestion that the word “conservative” applies to him is laughable.
And the movement reflects the leader. Let the record show that finding 77 million Americans willing to tolerate a total lack of seriousness in its leadership isn’t a stretch. He doesn’t resemble Hitler so much as Berlusconi in this regard.
Consequently, and it seems ludicrous that this has to be said again, the MAGA movement is not conspicuously conservative.
Of course words change their meanings a lot in this life, but calling a Whig a Tory isn’t just a change in meanings; it’s a pretty clear indicator that you don’t know what the words mean, and since 2016 the MAGAverse has been pursuing this policy of erasure of any content in the word “conservative.” (There are some pretty heinous reasons why, which we’ll get to below.)
It isn’t merely that the Republican Party, after decades of free-trade policy, suddenly reversed course and discovered the glories of tariffs; nor that, after supporting strong immigration policies that favored paths to citizenship they opted for a xenophobic and hysterical rhetoric about the Southern Border. Times change, policies sometimes are obliged to, though in this case times didn’t change that much.
It’s that the MAGA agenda (insofar as there is one) doesn’t really seem to stand for anything that had previously been owned by the Conservatives, except pro-life policies, gun-rights, a taste for downmarket legal philosophies, and a general rhetorical fetish for low taxes. (I say “rhetorical” because I don’t count running endless mammoth deficits, which every president since George W. Bush has done, as sound fiscal policy no matter what your revenue department is doing.)
And the emptiness, the total lack of philosophy, is showing up all over, even at Conservatism’s pro-life desk and now and then at the gun-control desk. (Full disclosure: I think red state legislatures are completely insane.)
So no, I’d rather not have my anger about the MAGA movement and the cowardice of the Republican Party tarnished as being “anti-conservative.” The two things have nothing to do with one another.
Still… it’s worth examining how the Republican Party got itself into this mess, with an eye on how the word “conservative” is being abused in Right Wing echo-chambers.
Our story starts innocently enough, in 1988, coincidentally the year that Ronald Reagan stepped away from the helm.