Are Republican Ideas Dead?
There is a postulate that holds that ideas take twenty-five years to filter down from intellectual thought into the mainstream. This assertion posits that an idea -- or a set of cogent or even incoherent ideas -- discussed among intellectuals twenty-five years prior to any date, will take hold and root in mainstream thought almost a generation later, once the natural cycle of life happens and eighteen year-olds who are most likely to come across new thoughts become parents, citizens, and voters.
So what to make of the political landscape of the past generations? National Review, founded in 1955, was ultimately responsible for the Reagan revolution of 1980 with its Cold Warriorisms and its free market, low-taxation economics that differed radically from the high-tax, appeasement doctrine of the left circa 1976. The neoliberal globalization of the Democratic nineties and aughts can be chalked up to a shift within the major magazines of the Democratic movement -- like The New Republic -- away from the Old Left and an embrace of capitalism and centrism in the 60s. This nod towards technocracy was a product of the thought that the emotional underpinnings of the New Left ideology so popular in its day was too much, that the policies and theories advanced by the New Left were destructive to society. Those magazines embraced the social revolution but not the economic one, and President Clinton stepped to the fore to cement that line of thought. For a more modern example, see the writers from Commentary Magazine in the 1980s coming to the fore in the Bush administration. Bush's campaign promise of humility abroad and "compassionate conservatism" at home, necessarily morphed into policies stemming from a distinct slice of reality, becoming beholden to the policies and prescriptions of the neoconservatives regarding the Middle East and Israel that were to be its main concern for the next eight years.
So what to make of a party that looks to older ideas but leaves us nothing in the name of progress? Reagan had a "shining city on a hill," and ancient as the sentiment may be, it is an eternally progressive, one of looking forward rather than one of return. Bill Clinton and Al Gore helped us out with logic, redefining what the "is" is. George Bush brought Wilsonian liberalism to foreign policy concerns, making front and center the democratization of the Middle East (which failed). Barack Obama oversaw beer summits and portended to signal a new resolution and tempered social revolution about race. So what of the twenty-five years prior to this one? What was the ideological underpinning of the thought that united or moved conservatives from the mid-nineties?
An astute observer in Washington, D.C., a young libertarian with relatively little life experience in years lived, but a world of years in books and ideas consumed, posited that conservatives were suffering from "epistemic closure," a phrase that indicated his belief that there were no new underpinnings of conservative thought, nothing to lead a populace out of the darkness and into the light, as it were. His postulation was talked about in certain circles in D.C., prompting a lot of intellectual tut-tutting and to and fro, but Julian Sanchez had hit upon something, though he may not have realized exactly what he was hitting upon at the time, nor made the fine distinction that I will argue that he hit upon.
So Republican ideas are dead. Or so the claim goes. That Cold Warriorism and low-tax ideology that formerly animated the movement are no longer concerns of the conservative movement. The modern neoconservatives are dead in all but necessary action for the survival of the Republic -- the foreign policy endeavors have an almost desperation about their final landing spots, and that desperation has all led to withdrawal of the troops from Iraq and Afghanistan (again, major diplomatic and practical failures.) That all of these ideas are dead can be seen in the comments made by the most popular and populist leaders of the GOP. President Trump sought withdrawal of the troops from Afghanistan, and was praised by the intellectual conservative movement of the day.
On the domestic side, Josh Hawley comments that Republicans are the party of the working class, and the comment is ceded with barely a fight in the popular consciousness of Democratic candidates and party members alike. Sure, there are protestations given as sort of a token assurance of fighting for the working class, but voting patterns in the suburbs and among likely voters confirm what we know: that Democrats are the party of college graduates now, and that high school degrees and manual labor concerns vote Republican. It is only a matter of time before each Party's economic interests come to the fore, and an inversion of the economic policy is cemented in platform.
But what are they voting for, precisely? That seems to be the question at hand, and is one for the asking. It appears, given the Republican Party platform in 2020, that they are voting for a nation of man, not laws, to invert the famous saying. The Republican Party of 2020 gave a platform -- seriously -- that basically intoned that whatever President Trump said of policy was official Republican policy. And not to rehash too much here, but given the vagaries of politics, they have pretty much hewed to whatever that meant, both in policy, party promotion and discipline, you name it. The kingmaker is there and the Republicans know it.
And who does he hold as his intellectual influences? Who are his intellectual fathers? Snark aside, he seems to believe in a mixture of economic nativism -- Pat Buchanan being the original author of large-scale political nativist concerns in the 1992 Republican primary -- that hearkens back to feudal mercantilism, defined as the economic theory that trade generates wealth and is stimulated by the accumulation of profitable balances, which a government should encourage by means of protectionism. See our trade wars with China, his tariffs, his economic protectionism, as it were. He couples this mercantilism with a nod to cultural conservatism in all forms, especially those forms that appeal to the working class, comfortable in their ways, their bodies, and their means of expression. His victory -- and he was a member of the Reform Party once, and a candidate, remember -- was really the Reform Party come to life in 2016 from Ross Perot's 1992 bid, only twenty-five or so years later. But what was new about these ideas, or forward-looking in thrust? Nothing. Nothing in mercantilism can be considered forward-looking in economics, nor can the ideological creature comforts of the working class suffice for social movement.
Contrast this with Democrats and their agenda. Theirs is a forward-looking agenda, now matter how ill-fated it might seem to the observer. Their economic agenda takes our progress within "history" into account, and especially recognizes the Marxist leanings that economic "history" implies. If socialism is to take place at the end of capitalism, then Democrats are arguing that history is here. Our late-stage capitalism is now subject to reevaluation, and justice, they argue, demands state intervention into the economy. And they argue not just from justice grounds, but from efficiency grounds also. State intervention into the economy is okay because this time the monetary shenanigans of the past have been replaced by refined management techniques. The intervention into the production and distribution of goods is suffused with modern, technocratic statistics, they argue, and therefore feasible. The redistribution of wealth is overseen by an abundance of production and an ease of administration heretofore unheard of. Their policy may be 1848, their methods are 2020. Republicans are embracing the feudal in both respects. Their 17th Century economic outlook is matched by methods just as old.
And what of social policy? Well, the Republicans seek to return to a more bucolic time, where roles between the sexes were settled, where sexual orientation was categorizable and policy could flow therefrom. Democrats, on the other hand, view the self with the same frontierism that our predecessors reserved for the Wild West. Where the right seeks a return toward silent majoritarianism, the left pushes the envelope ever-further in the name of individual rights. The big arguments of the day rest in the battle over transgender rights. To the right, one is born a man or woman, and stays that way. To the left, the envelope is pushed in favor of self-actualized rights. Self-identification is king and even trumps the natural gifts or strictures that we were born with. Born a woman? One can declare one's self a man and be recognized with the "proper" public and social accommodations flowing therefrom. Arguments are advanced for the state funding of sex reassignment before puberty, taking a child's sex and reassigning it to its natural gender indentity. On the right? The radical reindentification of self is met with platitudes about the conscious acceptance of gayness and other moot issues long not settled for the religious right, especially. One side pushes public funds into drag queen reading hours with children, the other side, impotent to debate the advancement on any other grounds but traditionalist grounds, cedes the public spotlight and loses the argument. The self becomes a frontier all unto itself, its actualization something the privileged few know and navigate.
How did the right lose so badly? Whereby did it become the party of such losses to both the supposed progress of economic "history" and the frontierism of the self, including the extension of the rights that were to follow. Simply put, the organized right had no arguments to the contrary other than those rooted in tradition. But it never explained tradition. It fought theory and reason on theory's grounds, something religious impulses have always lost to in debate, if not in raw power. And that is what leads us to the intellectual right today. Its worship of power.
