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Why limited-government conservatism is likely to make a comeback after Trump
[Washington Examiner] As conservatism takes its new shape in the face of President Trump's takeover of the Republican Party, old alliances have been fractured, and multiple fights have broken out about what conservatism should look like. Many of those who waded into the debate have assumed, not without justification, that recent political developments have shattered limited-government conservatism and that any future conservatism is likely going to be less libertarian than that which preceded Trump. But there are a number of good reasons to believe that limited-government conservatism will make a comeback.Trumpism has managed to expose deep fissures that had been growing for a long time on the Right, and every so often, a commentator will come out and say something that triggers a round of opinion pieces on what conservatism is or really should be about. Fox's Tucker Carlson kicked a hornet's nest earlier this year when he offered a blistering critique of capitalism. More recently, a fight has broken out after Sohrab Ahmari, writing in First Things, used National Review's David French as a foil to essentially make the case for a more aggressive conservative posture in the culture war. I don't want to relitigate the fight at this late stage, but it did strike me that many of the responses to the Ahmari-French skirmish morphed into meditations on what conservatism might look like after Trump, with the assumption that it's likely to be different than it was before. In one of the more recent entries in this debate, Ross Douthat has considered the future of traditional fusionism on the Right. Roughly speaking, this is the name given to the alliance of social conservatives, economic libertarians, and national security hawks that emerged during the Cold War and existed in some form, with its own set of tensions, until Trump came along. Throwing out some ideas about what a post-Trump version of this may look like, Douthat writes, "the basic concept of a right rooted more in cultural conservatism and economic populism than in libertarianism and individualism isn’t fanciful; it describes the emergent right-of-center ideological formations all across the Western world." Douthat is not alone in suggesting that the limited government ideology that was a fixture on the Right for decades could continue to recede in influence going forward. Trump's populist success within the GOP would provide empirical reasons to be skeptical of the future for the limited government branch of the conservative movement. After all, Trump has launched (or threatened) multiple trade wars, has resisted doing anything to address entitlement spending, and has managed to increase deficits during a booming economy. Yet he enjoys sky-high approval among Republicans, and no serious candidate is willing to challenge him in a primary. These are all good reasons to assume that the populist forces that Trump has unleashed will remain after he leaves. Posted by: Besoeker 2019-06-05 |
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