Conservatism

Trump and divine retribution

Is God lending a hand to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign?

I know that’s a borderline blasphemous question to ask. Presumably, our Creator has better things to do than monitor America’s electoral politics. But I can’t come up with any other reason to explain Trumpmania.

First things first: There is no doubt the Republican electorate loves the Manhattan mogul. His poll numbers explain that well enough.

But popular uprisings have historically been suppressed by the party honchos and connected elites. Clamping down on insurgent candidates is well-honed practice that goes back to Teddy Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson. Yet Trump seems to be leading a Jacksonian march straight into the White House. He’s treating basic political orthodoxy like his own personal punching bag – Trump branded and everything.

By far, the Republican Party has been the biggest casualty in Trump’s jihad against Washington torpor. The billionaire is winning over GOP voters by insulting every accepted party soundbite to date.

Just take a look at his recent win in South Carolina. The Palmetto State isn’t exactly known for strict family values. But it does have a sizable military presence, and tends to be more war hawkish than the rest of the Union.

Normally, retail politics forces candidates to appeal to voters who value someone that identifies with their needs. Somehow, that memo never reached Trump’s untidy desk.

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No, women shouldn’t have to sign up for Selective Service (or fight in war!)

Feminists, rejoice!

Horace’s dictum, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” will soon no longer be exclusive to American males. Sometime in the near-future, women will have the honor of being forced to leave their families, enter bullet-ridden battlefields, and risk having their limbs blown apart.

Surely, Virginia Woolf is cheering in her grave.

Last week, the chief of staff of the Army and the Marine Corps commandant came out in favor of lifting the exclusion of women from the Selective Service. Speaking before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Robert Neller, the highest ranking U.S. Marine Corps member, told lawmakers, “it’s my personal view that, based on this lifting of restrictions… every American who’s physically qualified should register for the draft.”

Congress must act to lift the males-only condition for Selective Service. But is there any doubt this will eventually happen? In the name of equality, Democrats will joyfully embrace the proposition. Republicans are already coming around: A bill to lift the female draft restriction was just introduced in the House of Representatives by two GOP reps who also served in the armed forces.

It’s only a matter of time before girls, upon turning 18, sign up for the draft. And just like that, we will have slipped further into the brave new world where men and women are interchangeable cogs in the machine of society.

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Conservativism and Race

nikkihaley

At the start of this election some think that the GOP would be re-branding itself. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio seem like the card to wing back the Latino electorate while Ben Carson was think could win a bigger portion of the black vote. However it was Donald Trump who made this election about race. First denouncing illegal immigration was seen by many liberals as code name for anti-Hispanic racism. Some neo-Nazis endorsing Trump haven’t help the Trump attempt to portray himself as a friend of minorities neither Trump retweeting them. The Muslim ban upset the Arab community and the use of the term “Anchor Baby” made Asian immigrants angry. The fact that most of his supporters are white is not necessary strange in Republican politics but his campaign has reached to unprecedented level of lack of political correctness. Michael Brendan Dougherty argue that paleoconservative writer Sam Francis predicted the rise of The Donald. Considering that Francis was an openly racialist, one has to wonder if the new kind of conservativism that Trump has to deal particularly with race or does that all the conservative tradition relation with explains the popularity of the billionaire.

Conservativism usually speaks about preserving a tradition, in most cases the western tradition. But is that western tradition has to deal with race? One could argue that at least in America conservativism had to do with a limited government. In the words of Daniel Hannan, limited government is a heritage of the Anglo-Saxon culture. However the campaign of Trump has made angry most libertarians by promising a big government that rivals in size with the socialist dreams of Bernie Sanders. Some describe these new form of conservativism as nationalism. Nationalism is still associated in America with the Nazis but nationalism is not inherently racist. During the 70s there in Latin America and Africa some governments that represent a left-wing forms of nationalism that promote the respect of the indigenous population. However after the Battle of Seattle the left had been preaching an alternative form of globalism and denouncing nationalism.

But not only Donald Trump is alienating minorities. Over The American Conservative, Musa Al-Garbhi reach to similar conclusions of my analysis about why there aren’t Black Republicans. Candidates are trying to preach to a white audience and dismiss black voters. Why this happen over and over? Republicans had forgot the legacy of the GOP on racial issues before Goldwater was in a lot of ways better than the Democrats. But that not only happen to African Americans. Arab Americans which are generally more socially conservative that other groups dismiss Republicans for their attacks that some of them consider Islamophobia. Hispanics come from Latin America where governments had proved to fail, however because preaching being against illegal immigration they had demonized an entire ethnicity. Even Asian Americans whose opposition to affirmative action and language of family values could had made them near to the GOP had prefer being part of Democrat Coalition over what they see as a narrow agenda in the Republican Party. Probably libertarians and maybe some reform conservative like Nikki Haley or Jon Hunstman had try honestly to reach out to minorities.

Pat Buchanan which a lot of people compare to Donald Trump for his insurgent campaign in the 90s had some advice for the real estate mogul. He says that Trump represents the future of the GOP and that his nationalism is his opposition to both globalism and interventionism. He believes Trump could win, I don’t. I think that despite that is probably that in 1992 or 1996, Buchanan as the Republican nominee would had beat the Democrats. Now the panorama is different. He spoke about Reagan Democrats and while they maybe still some of them, most working class Democrats are minorities who distrust the GOP and particularly Donald Trump. He may try to sound a little different but I don’t see much difference. The BlackLivesMatter movement had an important impact in the African American population equal to the movement against deportations in the Latino community. Trump against Hillary Clinton maybe a close election but against Bernie Sanders he could be defeated by landslide.

But nationalism has other problems, some of the neo-Nazis supporters of Trump are trying to infiltrate the GOP. How the party is going to deal with them when the Republican nominee says a lot of the same things. Libertarians also may feel that they are no longer part of the Republican coalition. But in the future if some libertarians stay they could try to bring a real civil war on the right of their limited government philosophy against the big government nationalism. The fact that besides the Paul family the most prominent libertarian is Justin Amash, son of immigrants from the Middle East show that maybe there is path for GOP of rejecting racialism and stood for a message of self-reliance among communities of the color. Maybe that is the only way.

Conservative against the conservative movement

Less than one week to go before the Iowa caucus, and the battle lines are drawn.

On one side is brash businessman Donald Trump. On the other side is the near-entirety of the professional conservative movement – the thinkers, marketers, editors, donor-schmoozers, lawyers, consultants, money-bundlers, tax cheats, business shills, and communication hacks who profess allegiance to St. Ronald Reagan.

As Michael Buffers says: Let’s get ready to rumble!

Ever since Donald Trump announced his presidential bid last June, he has been walloping the hucksters known as Conservatism, Inc. By channeling working class resentment and throwing out the playbook when it comes to raising money and hiring consultants, Trump is turning traditional politics on its head. He isn’t being spoon-fed soundbites; he isn’t begging for cash; he isn’t bending over backwards to appease huge corporations.

He’s doing something few candidates have done in a long time: Advocating on behalf of the entire national community, rather than a few eggheads and CEOs with bottomless wallets.

Meanwhile, the high-salaried Republican brain trust is losing its collective head. This was most pronounced in a recent symposium hosted by National Review eloquently titled “Against Trump.” Conservative luminaries such as Thomas Sowell, John Podhoretz, and Glenn Beck contributed, lambasting the GOP frontrunner and pontificating on the need for a principled leader in the White House. Their polemics were chock-full of the high-minded ideals and a mastery of vocabulary that would have made William F. Buckley proud.

But even for such a long, erudite (and possibly illegal) spread, the message is the same throughout: Trump is not a cerebral conservative, and thus isn’t fit for the office of the presidency.

Years ago, this kind of concentrated effort to derail a Republican presidential candidate would have been a resounding success. But that’s all changed with Trump. The bedwetting Hayek-lovers in “tassel-loafers and bow ties” no longer call the shots. A man with $10 billion and a twitter account now runs the show.

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Trump and National Review

Culled from a private conversation last week

Hate-reading National Review’s attempt to keep the conservative movement flying from resounding success to resounding success by thwarting Trump. Has anyone else noticed the house style of larding editorials with hammy archaisms that stick out like sore thumbs — “show and strut,” “is not deserving of” (should be “does not deserve”), “tenderfeet” (has anyone ever used that word as a plural?), “excrescences,” a “brash manner” (nobody uses “manner” like that, “personality” or “style” would be better)?

Is there anything less attractive, or arguably less conservative, than appeals to a discrete “conservative philosophy”? Their editorial calls him “philosophically unmoored,” unlike, I guess, the conservative case for gay marriage that their managing editor wrote a few months ago. The piece is full of non-sequiturs — the idea that he’s “dismayingly conventional” when it comes to legal immigration, besides being a silly cheap shot, is just not true. The rest of the paragraph even admits that. It also misstates his bromance with Putin, which I’m pretty sure Trump started.

One of the big reasons why National Review is not nearly as interesting as it was in its glory days is because they portray conservatism as this settled thing — a “broad conservative ideological consensus,” when in fact no such thing exists, and never did. Consequently NR is completely unable to explain Trump aside from the Salon strategy of pointing and shrieking. What makes 1950s-60s NR enjoyable reading even today is that it was full of people who were ideological refugees.

E.J. Dionne serviceably described Frank Meyer’s fusionist conservatism as “libertarian means in a conservative society toward traditionalist ends,” which gets at the difference between American conservatism and European rightism — American conservatism’s job is to conserve the liberal revolution — against king, authority, mercantilism, etc — which means it has built-in contradictions and limited class appeal. What does American rightism, call it conservative or not, look like when the “silent majority” of attitudinally conservative people care more about nationalistic concerns, like globalization and immigration, than the libertarian economics that has cemented the Republican Party’s close relationship with business. This is the conversation I’d love to see us having right now, but of course nobody is interested in having it.
Let’s talk about the kicker for a minute, though:
Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.

Now we’re getting to the real issue (though it should be, “on behalf”). Let’s be charitable and say this isn’t just a complaint that Trump has avoided the usual patronage networks and movement box-checking, thereby marginalizing professional conservatives. What does this statement imply? If American conservatism was really so fragile that Trump is an existential threat to it, maybe that explains why American conservatism can’t even stop the sale of baby meat. Yet, it’s that very movement we’re supposed to care very much about being traduced? Seems like Rich Lowry needs to be working a little bit harder to make the case for the utility of the conservative movement to the sort of people that are attracted to Trump, no?

I was thinking about Bill Kauffman’s comparison of Trump to William Randolph Hearst, and it’s actually much more apropos than he even goes into here. Hearst really got into it with people who would later become conservative stalwarts, like James Burnham and Garet Garrett. One of Garrett’s embarrassing early-career missteps involved trying to bring Hearst up on charges for violating the Espionage Act for his anti-war stance in 1917 (Garrett would later have reservations about intervention in the Second World War). This is the proto-conservative example of a phenomenon that continues today. Recent converts to the right demarcate the bounds of conservatism they find acceptable. Hofstadter wrote Paranoid Style as he was shifting to the right. Buckley denouncing the Birchers is another example.

Also read Scott McConnell, James Poulos, MBD, and Chris Morgan

Will Trump save us from political correctness?

Reprinted from the Press and Journal

Is Donald Trump slaying the beast of political correctness?

That’s what the Washington Post contends. In a piece titled “Why Trump may be winning the war on ‘political correctness’”, reporters Karen Tumulty and Jenna Johnson get to the heart of why the real estate mogul has won the allegiance of frustrated, disaffected Americans.

The reason is understandable: Normal people living paycheck to paycheck have no time for feeling-friendly language. They’re tired of being told to mend their ways by haughty academics and journalists. So they turn to the most brash man on the national stage.

Cathy Cuthberson, a 63-year-old retiree interviewed by Tumulty and Johnson, says that Trump is acting as a voice to “what a lot of Americans are thinking but are afraid to say because they don’t think that it’s politically correct.”

It’s true that no man or woman in the current presidential field speaks their mind quite like Trump. From accusing illegal immigrants of being criminally-inclined (stats from the Government Accountability Office and Department of Justice bear this out) to calling for a blanket ban on Muslim migration to the United States, the billionaire reality TV star has dared to go where few, if any, politicians have gone before.

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