I have never seen the word thought used so many times in one sentence.
Apologies. I need to post less when I'm really tired. My point was that I have read a lot of your longer posts and I do have a lot of respect for the thought you put in to what you say.
Fundamentally, I don't have a very high view of human nature at all, and while I have eased back from my Hobbesian excesses and quit pining for the days of the ancien regime years ago, I see unrestrained human impulse as the pavement of the road to hell. Anyone who fails to understand this, or worse seeks to harness it for their own selfish ends, is a dangerous person and is too irresponsible to hold power. Historically speaking, Democrats have done this more often, but when Republicans do it, they really really, really do it.
The reason why I like Edmund Burke so much, is because Burke understood that people are dangerous and that government is dangerous because it is composed of people and they both need to be restrained. "Conservatives" of today hate Burke because John Roberts hides behind him and uses him as a shield and they view Roberts as a traitor. This is a horrible misunderstanding of Burke himself and at the same time irrelevant to what motivates me politically. I couldn't give two fs what John Roberts whispers himself to sleep with after selling America to his corporate backers.
I actually would agree with most of your first paragraph, expect for the part about Democrats doing it more often. I'm not sure what you're getting at with that particular statement. When it comes to human nature, I think a lot depends how one's needs are being met. Human nature at its worst is ugly, to say the least. However, I do not necessarily believe that it is an inevitability. There has to be something that provokes the worst of human nature beyond specific social or cultural issues. I think one of the fundamental issues in modern society is economic security. When that is eroded or shorn away, I think it can expose the very raw and nasty core of human nature. However, I think that's only part of the issue now. On a different issue, the Uvalde shooting, I wrote a post shortly after about what I believe is a toxic hyper-individualism that has infected this country. It's brief, but it's here if you want to read it. It's heavy with frustration, I admit.
Conservatism really doesn't have a large natural base, therefore it appropriates support from other sources, be it the establishment (conservative elements thereof, typically military establishment, religious establishment etc), opposition to the establishment, or various tribalistic rivalries. That said, conservatism is therefore vulnerable to being subsumed by its constituent appropriated components and this is what has happened at various intervals that I have condemned, from the Bush era, to the tea party, to the Trump era, one faction after another seeking to define conservatism in its own image and then burn all the heretics losing site of the core premise.
It also explains why I am against labeling Hitler as a socialist. It runs the risk of ignoring the danger from your own midst of extremism, but more importantly ignores the very real process by which "Conservative elements" of German society were subsumed by a popular movement of nutcases either to oppose a perceived greater ill (Marxism) or a naïve belief that such could be manipulated to their advantage (Von Papen).
I don't have a problem with "conservatives" turning on the establishment now, it actually makes perfect sense seeing how secularized and liberal it has become. It was also very reasonable for the Republicans to overthrow and replace the GOP establishment as it existed in the 2010s, for being horribly out of touch. However, a conservative has to be able to govern and hold power "responsibly", has to understand that the dangers of human impulse are universal, and that both government power and human impulse need to be reigned in through various restraints.
Once again, I pretty much agree with everything you said. I do feel I have to ask what you think conservatism is then, if it isn't any of those rebrands that you seem to have issue with. Prior to those rebrands, it seems to me, especially in the Anglo-American sense, that post-WWII conservatism and those that call themselves traditional conservatives largely define themselves in opposition to the left. That includes both opposing what the left has done and attempting to reverse it. (The Tea Party was clearly just a rebrand of distilled Reaganism on steroids.) In that sense though, I ask what conservatism offers. On so many issues now, it isn't a debate between liberal or conservative solutions to the problems we face as a society. The political debate has decayed into whether certain problems are even problems at all and the two sides are not equal on that at all.
Its not that the rebrands are a problem. Those rebrands are essential for survival, its when the rebrands go too far and break the core tenet or undermine societal stability. War and economic dislocation are factors that can cause this, and they themselves often beget desperate people and desperate people in turn tend to embrace the crazy people, which then itself breaks the core tenet.
The core belief of conservatism as I defined it above, is the recognition that humanity is flawed, and therefore human nature leads people towards wicked acts when the restraints are removed. At the same time though and this is where Burke differs from Hobbes and where conservatives would differ from "some" reactionaries, is the recognition that government itself is a reflection of the flawed humans that control it. Therefore leviathan is just as dangerous as the tyrannical mob in the streets and likewise government itself, because it is ruled by people, needs to be limited and restrained also. People who remove those restraints are irresponsible and thus should not be put in positions of power. The Bolsheviks in Russia, the Jacobins in France, were all horrific examples of "the irresponsible" breaking the system to achieve their utopia and all that ended up resulting was rivers of blood.
Conservatives are anti-utopian, because they recognize that humanity is flawed, they realize that no perfect world or utopia can ever exist. Anyone trying to implement such, is dangerously naive/misguided, or worse knowingly seeking to unchain the beast so that they might obtain or increase their own power. Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler would all be on this list.
Since Conservatives are realists by necessity, anti-utopian by definition and skeptical of human and government excess, conservatives naturally tend towards certain political positions. Constitutionalism, fiscal responsibility, and preservation of a traditional religious structure/moral code all are a given in this sense and I could explain why but I have already composed the lower portions of this post and it is massive (lol). However, because of the nature of politics and the need to "absorb support", elements often become inserted into the mix. Some of these are extensions of the core elements (support for the military and police make sense in recognizing the need for a limited gov't and areas that are its preserve, in contrast to pure libertarians on these points for example).
This occurs in the form of the "rebrands" as we said and this is a natural process.
I have long said the GOP had to go more populist on trade and immigration because of how its base had shifted demographically in the 2000s and that by failing to do so, the "responsible adults in the room" opened the door to a "populist demagogue" (see below) who did take these positions. This was the direct result of the GOP establishment trying to appease the donors first and since the donors are the first ones to say they are fine with moderating on immigration policy and the last one to support moderating on economics, its no surprise that the GOP primary voters went the opposite direction on both counts in the primary, donors be damned.
Prior to that, there was a general recognition, that in the aftermath of the GFC, the GOP had to shift on economics in some form to remain competitive, and I agreed with this assessment in 2008 and 2009, but I didn't understand the demographic determinism that would necessarily make it happen at the time, and how the interlude that the tea party created in the opposite direction would serve to cause a spring action effect and thus when this forced itself finally, it would manifest as it did. I will come back to this later though.
Part I: Neocons: I criticized Bush era neocons for trying to purge old line Conservative "realists" (who historically are the generic conservative position on foreign policy) Watch this video from Historia Civilis:
https://youtu.be/CH1oYhTigyA?t=813. Neoconservatism is an attempt to interject "Liberalism" into conservatism in the arena of foreign policy, the belief that values can be exported and peace obtained through universal alignment of values. This is fundamentally utopian and thus contrary to the basis for Conservatism as I espoused above, since if you view the world as anarchic as Historia Civilis says, and you view human nature as fundamentally flawed, then any such attempt at world peace through "exportation of democracy" is hostile to conservative understanding of the world and that it has been so thoroughly rejected among Republicans so quickly, is a testament the unsuitability of the marriage in the first place.
Furthermore, constant war has a disruptive effect on society and the longer it goes on, the worse that becomes. This creates more desperate people and the more desperate people are, the more appealing the "dangerous men" of the land become as a "solution" to the "problem", and along with which you end up giving up quite a lot. Endless war is thus hostile to societal stability and cohesion and creates demand for an "irresponsible man to take charge".
War is also horrendously expensive, expands the power of the state relative to the people and it drains the living standards as the economy is shifted to produce goods only the state can use. While I disagree with an caps on say abolishing the military, it must be recognized that such elements of government are a drain on society and productivity, and thus a necessary evil to only be used when absolutely necessary.
Part II: Tea Party and Economic LiberalismIn the beginning, I loved the idea of the tea party. The establishment had become too corrupt (Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, Mark Foley were all big stories when I was just getting started following politics). To me, the best thing for the GOP would be to shake off the crooks, boot them in primaries and then elect a bunch of outsiders, so we wouldn't be dragged down by the scandals of the establishment anymore.
It became more about ideology and less about corruption, and previously the opposition to corruption had spanned the ideological spectrum (as did the corruption as well). The Tea Party had been composed of three primary groups (Immigration populists pissed about the 2007 bill, Ron Paul's anti-war libertarian followers, and then the populist hatred of government after the bailouts), but over time it shifted away from these. Rick Perry satisfied none of these groups, but was a "tea party opponent to Mitt Romney". The same was true for Newt Gingrich.
The real problem though was the hyper opposition to government. Which is fine for a libertarian to take as a position, sure. However, conservatives are fundamentally not libertarians at least not completely and over time the gap between the political class and the voting base of the party widened. I used to refer to this as a leadership class pushing an agenda for 1985 Orange county, in 2010s Kentucky. Republicans had gained a lot of people who were more down market but socially conservative, and shed an lot of upper income secularists and it would be impossible to not have this lead to a reckoning at some point, which arguably came in the form of Trump versus Cruz. Republicans had increasingly become the party of the areas that had been decimated by outsourcing and now were facing increased competition for jobs and reduced wages from massive immigration in mostly low skilled sectors.
The economic liberal argument really doesn't speak to these areas at all and this gets to the heart of a contradiction in conservative ethos. It stresses reliance on family and religion instead of government dependence, then it also says "move to find work/learn to code". Economic liberalism, is still liberalism, and for all of the talk of America's frontier tradition and rugged individualism, there always also been a communitarian element to American society as well. Its impossible to fall back on institutions that "liberalism has destroyed", whether it was social or economic matters less the end result is that it is destroyed.
This means that for the first time in decades, the absorption of classical liberalism as the economic philosophy of conservatism had reach a point where it tore itself asunder and this explains why you see the shift away from the previous Republican support for trade (likewise for immigration) and also a disappointment in the "all you got us was tax cuts", which used not to be uttered in the sense of "that's all?". Furthermore, Jeb Bush or one of his aides stated that "Republicans care more about taxes than trade and immigration" back in 2016, look how that turned out.
I reached these conclusions, and came to reject supply side economics in 2015, not because I ceased to be a conservative, but because I realized that in so many ways supply side economics is not conservative policy and works at cross purposes with other conservative objectives (just like with neoconservatism, economic liberalism was an absorbed external force trying to dominate and exterminate those that held to a truer conservative position, while actively undermining conservatism long term). This is not to say conservatism is anti-capitalist, "not fiscally conservative" or against markets, or should be for that matter, mind you.
Part III: PopulismPerhaps it should come as no surprise, that with a leadership class wedded so much to the whims and demands of donors who are very much in favor of neoconservativism and liberalism, that the only way the overthrow of these two "increasingly out of touch insertions" would manifest as populism (populism really only means mass movement in opposition to the establishment/elites). That is why these positions on immigration, trade, and so forth get labeled "populist" because they are hated by the establishment and there is a mass of people who support them in opposition to the establishment.
Thus it did not have to be this way and the establishment could have "gone populist" on these issues, got back in line with the broad base of their own voters and told the donors to take a hike. However, instead this did not happen, the establishment rallied around the donor line and in the end, Trump got the nomination and also the Presidency.
Populism is whatever a broad mass of people want in opposition to the establishment. There are no rules for populism, there are no restraints for populism. Populism is in this sense completely incompatible with conservatism. This is why Andrew Jackson is on my bottom five lists of Presidents, it is why wrote in Mike Pence instead of voting for Trump in 2020 and it is why I wrote my Senators urging impeachment.
For a conservative, power is dangerous, power needs to be restrained regardless of whether it comes from above or below. Since people are flawed, consolidated power is dangerous. This is the "realistic assessment of human nature" demonstrated the history of the world over (save only for George Washington). Populism removes these restraints, therefore, populism leads to irresponsible men consolidating power into their own hands. This rejects the core tenets of conservatism.
For a conservative, populism can be just as dangerous as fascism or Communism, precisely because they all break the same rule. Either in ignorance of human nature or blind faith in their own ideals/side, they break the restraints and allow the savage brutality of humanity to come out and have its way.
In that sense populism is doing the same thing now, that both the Bush era neocons of the 2000s and the tea party of 2010s are doing. The difference now is, populism is more directly undermining the core tenet as we saw on January 6th.
