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Trump essentially killed the conservative movement. It's not healthy, the old base now hates it and it's institutions have had to choose between sacrificing their souls or irrelevance. Just go to a MAGA space and say the word 'neocon' and see what happens.
MAGA doesn't even trust Conservative intellectual institutions. What progress is still being made (say, what's happening in Florida), is localized, not part of the national movement, which has shattered and died in most places.
Neocons are bad conservatives. Good riddance to that lot of big government military adventuring. Disaffected leftists turning bad and ruining Republicans.
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Neoconservatives are not and were not ever conservative. Their origin was in the Democratic party, in many cases as Socialists, who saw an opportunity to take over the foreign politics of the Republican party when they lost a struggle session to New Left Great Society culture leftists. This would be like if the Chapo guys defected with Anna Khachiyan to the right because they had some weird fascination with Eastern Europe and the Balkans and in 60 years you called them conservatives when they defected back to the left to ensure the (D) candidate doesnt stab Bulgaria in the back
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The "conservative" movement was about to fold on immigration after Romney, so one wonders what movement would have remained after another round of amnesty or civil war as they tried to force their base to accept this. Trump was drawing on something real after all.
— Robert Lewis Dabney, in 1897
What good is this sort of "conservatism", anyway?
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The neocons adapted so well to the Democrats that one wonders if they ever belonged with the Republicans in the first place.
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If it 'died' it is in large part because it wasn't fit for the new environment and DEFINITELY wasn't fit to battle its major competitor.
I'd view this as more of an adaptation than anything else.
History is more contingent than that. And it's not clear that MAGA is particularly well equipped to perform better. The old Movement Conservatism elected Presidents and won elections, too. Outside of Trump himself, MAGA has mostly lost Republicans elections over the last eight years and I'd bet it'd lose this one, too, if the Democrats hadn't chosen an invalid and then an incompetent to be their standard bearers.
Trump is probably a net drain now that he's broken the consensus. But Dobbs is a huge confounder here. The GOP was projected to gain in midterms even with Trump and the result of standard conservative maneuvering for the last few decades seems to have interfered.
Trump is notably less gung-ho on the pro-life issue than many in the party.
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Well my personal take is that "MAGA" as such dies with Trump. Doesn't mean he takes the entire right-wing edifice with him.
I'm far more interested in what comes after Trump, given how disruptive he was to prior alliances.
I suspect JD Vance is a hint of what we'll be seeing later on.
Realize how much of that was almost inevitable given the ideological demands the Dem base now makes. Think about why Kamala didn't pick Shapiro despite desperately NEEDING to win PA. Think about why the Dems can't do effective outreach to male voters or even acknowledge that male voters have their own independent set of concerns.
Can the Dems even run a standard, electable candidate without ticking off a large part of that base and triggering infighting anymore? Do they have candidates that can clear the primaries (a significant portion of the Dem electorate backed Bernie Sanders twice) and then be dominant in the general these days?
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Yes. And what were the outcomes of those victories? Why are election victories valuable?
Because otherwise you get the New Deal and the Warren Court.
I hate this argument. That the right should accept losing slowly as a "win," because it's not as bad as losing quickly.
I don't remember if it was here, or at the old subreddit, but I remember reading yet another gun control argument, yet another "cake slicing" characterized as a "compromise." When someone asked what exactly the pro-gun side got out of such a compromise, one gun control proponent got quite honest: you get to keep some of your guns for now. You get them taken away slowly, a bit at a time, rather than all at once right now. You get to lose slowly, instead of quickly, and you should be happy with that. It's a very vae victus attitude, an "I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further," attitude.
I'm also reminded of a Nick Freitas video where he complained about a constituent who called him "useless," then spent an hour explaining how state legislatures work, how little power elected politicians have, how the system is rigged against right-wingers so that it's often "lose-lose" — in short, how he's useless. Or, more specifically, that he personally is not useless, but that any right-wing politician in his position playing by "the rules of the game" will be just as impotent.
As I see it, "well, at least you get to lose slowly" isn't an argument for playing the rigged game, it's an argument for flipping the table. Because, as @FCfromSSC notes, even when we "win" electorally, we still end up in the same place.
Sun-tzu says not to fight where you are weak and the enemy is strong, fight where you are strong and the enemy is weak. Your argument is one that says electoral politics is a battleground where the right is weak. So why should we fight on that one, instead of one that's more favorable to us. Because there's one battlefield where we have, if not an advantage, then the least disadvantage — the literal battlefield. We have a lot more guns, more veterans, a lot of favorable geography, control of the food supply, and less dependence on some highly-vulnerable infrastructure.
As I see it, your statement here isn't an argument for why we should seek electoral victories for the Republican party, it's an argument for why we should grab our guns and start shooting.
Please stop saying this.
Why? He's right, given the premises. The people offering the lose-lose alternatives should take notice, unless (as I suspect) they already have and are perfectly willing to fight the real war.
Because it's boring and cheap.
The only thing to talk about at that 0point is internet tough guy shit that always sounds like twelve year old boys playing with Legos. "We have all the money so we're gonna win" "Oh yeah?! Well what're you gonna do when we cut off the water supply?"
I have no interest in reading a bunch of internet guys brag about their experience with Gorilla warfare.
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The next time you see blue tribe normies freaking out that Trumpists literally want to murder them all, remember that it's not just the top-down Democrat propaganda that made them think that. You contributed.
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Nice, fedposting, consensus building and stupid rolled in one.
Not entirely sure is it trolling or genuinely advocating for civil war. And unsure which one would be sadder.
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And my point is that we got the equivalent of the New Deal and the Warren Court even when we won.
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It’s not happening, and if it is, it’s a good thing?
more an argument over definitions, in my view. Red Tribe's prospects look better to me under MAGA than they have at any point since W's first term. The MAGA movement is pretty clearly a national contender; and this despite what one might euphemistically refer to as "procedural headwinds". It's true that we're aligning into a direct fight with the entire formal establishment, but that sort of fight is exactly how this nation was founded, and I like our odds. Certainly the present situation seems preferable to one where we endlessly sacrifice value to support that establishment and receive nothing in return.
In very different times, under very different conditions (geographic, economic, technological, military…).
On the basis of what? I, of course, question such optimism…
…but still agree with this part totally.
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The Neocons killed the conservative movement by expending its credibility in support of ruinous Forever Wars. If the Republican candidate had been anyone but Trump in 2016, I was planning to vote Hillary.
W wasn't even a neocon. Although the Bushes like 'compassionate conservatism', they were really just the wild Northeastern Establishment reaching it's dead hand forward into the 21st century.
The neocons were a core part of Movement Conservatism, from the beginning. They had no special connection to foreign policy and the weight of anti-war sentiment coming down on them was more a creation of left wing anti-war media than something central to the neocons themselves. While Reagan's three legged stool makes clear the neocons weren't the only part of the conservative movement, Trumpism has also abandoned the other two legs: the social conservatives have been thrown under the bus on abortion and the business conservatives/fiscal hawks have been shown the door both in rhetoric and actual practice.
The Old Right/Paleos have essentially entirely won the battle and so the Conservative Movement is dead. The Conservative Movement in America was something that grew out of the collapse of the Old Right in the face of the Eisenhower Presidency as essentially another path for opposing the New Deal Consensus. While the. Social base of the MAGA movement allowed for this revival of Paleoconservatism, the base of the New Right in the suburbs is moving Left too rapidly for the New Right to ever revive, so Movement Conservatism is essentially dead. Evangelicals will continue their deal with the devil and Business Conservatives will dither over what to do: go to the Democrats and just pray their socialist wing can be kept under control or try to influence MAGA to be more friendly to them.
But the old Movement is 100% gone.
Trump gave them the best win they could get from a President: removing the Supreme Court's federal restriction on pursuing their politics. If they can't win on a state level and abortion likely ends up codified like in every other industrialized nation (albeit with more restrictions) then maybe that's on them?
On gay marriage: okay, the party seems to have totally folded there.
This will happen very quickly after most of the boomers are in the ground as any look into pro-life vs pro-choice by age demographics will tell you.
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How have the social conservatives been thrown under the bus on abortion?
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Good? The old movement already lost twice to Obama, and then to Trump in the primary. It is non-viable in the current political environment, and any forseeable future environment, as the Republican party, at least. The National Review and David French can wail and gnash their teeth on the daily until the cows come home, but the world has changed, and they need to deal with that fact.
It also elected Reagan, twice, took Congress back for the first time in 40 years and gave us probably the most conservative policy decade since the 1920s, elected both Bushes four times in total, and won the House nine times (I'll let you guys have 2016, although I think that really was still momentum from the Conservative Movement), the Senate ten times, and brought Republican control of state legislatures and governor's mansions to a numeric height unequaled in a century.
It's not so clear that failing to beat Obama meant it was 'non-viable', although I know that's the self serving story MAGA likes to tell itself.
Reagan did some great things, and genuinely had a vision for the future. He also left office more than a third of a century ago. Bush Sr. is notable pretty much only for beating up on a couple of tinpot dictators and largely failing on the domestic front. Bush Jr is notable for being completely eclipsed by his VP, embracing the idiot wing of the GOP, finishing up his daddies work in the most expensive fashion possible, and entangling the nation in a festering quagmire of a war that wouldnt succeed in its objective of killing one guy until the next president and genrally being an enormous suck of lives and treasure; domestically he passed a terrible education bill and a few minor tax cuts while overseeing the regulatory idiocy that led to the 2008 financial crisis.
None of this is worth celebrating- good riddance to it.
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And what did the Right get from all that, in terms of concrete outcomes? And I mean wins, not just "well, the left didn't get as much as they could have otherwise."
Why should the right be satisfied with "well, you didn't lose as quickly as you could have"?
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Failing to beat Obama after the 2008 financial crisis.
Did any 1st-world governing party except Merkel's CDU survive that? Post-2008 German politics is hilarious - the 60% or so of the electorate who want Merkel out keep trying to vote her out (including by punishing her coalition partners) but she keeps finding a new coalition partner willing to trash its relationship with its own voters for four years running the German foreign ministry.
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This is true, and the 80s were a real success. They also ended 34 years ago. It's notable that in your summary, your detailing of concrete outcomes stops there, in favor of detailing process "wins".
Because it allowed Blue Tribe political and cultural victories to snowball victories to the point that the term "Blue Tribe" became a necessary part of the lexicon. since the 80s, its wins were pyrrhic at best, to the point that the best option currently available to its constituents is to organize behind an analogue of 1990s-era Bill Clinton.
The movement you are eulogizing played a significant role in the destruction of America as a viable political entity. We will be paying for its mismanagement for decades to come.
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I voted for W, and one of the biggest reasons I voted for him was his firm stance against nation-building. 9/11 was shocking enough to change my mind for a year or two, but before his first term was out I had achieved escape velocity from the Conservative movement of my birth almost entirely because of the war and the whiplash-inducing abandonment of principles that went with it. Torture was fine. Fiscal responsibility was out the window, with the meme at the time being us dumping pallets of hundred dollar bills out the back of airplanes in Afghanistan. Two ruinous foreign wars leading to what were obviously going to be indefinite and doomed exercises in nation-building, based on deliberate lies to the public. Massive violations of civil liberties, "free speech zones", ubiquitous government surveillance. I had opposed Clinton and the Democrats explicitly because I didn't want any of that!
I suppose I was fooled then, because what I remember is The Project for a New American Century and W's administration being notably staffed by neocon true believers in numerous prominent positions, and that they set policy in numerous ways from those positions. I remember those policies defining the era, and I remember the results.
The social conservatives have gotten Roe overturned, and are now one of the core nuclei for serious Red Tribe organization in the culture war. W's attempts to support the social conservatives as an integrated part of American society failed categorically. The current strategy seems like a better deal to me, given the present realities. We no longer have any illusions that public morality can be maintained, but that is probably for the best. Better for us to accept our role as the outsiders, to recognize that this nation and its social order are incompatible with our understanding of universal truth.
As they should have been, because they have zero credibility with any part of the public any more. Offshoring manufacturing in favor of the "service economy" was supposed to provide broad prosperity. It did not. "Learn to code" is a cruel joke now, but I remember when that was the actual, inironic policy prescription. Fiscal responsibility is a joke after W and the Obama presidency; there will never be a balanced budget, and pretending otherwise is foolish; even if we could maintain it under Republican leadership, which we couldn't, there is no benefit to tightening Red Tribe belts to pay down Blue Tribe's credit card. We let the business conservatives lead, and they consistently led us to failure and to outright disaster. Then when we'd beggared ourselves supporting their defunct ideological prescriptions, they promptly dumped us and defected wholesale to the Blues.
You are describing outcomes, but you are not accounting for the process by which those outcomes arrived.
The social base of America is dead. The social cohesion you see right now, where cities are haunted by the specter of nation-wide race riots and federal politicians are dodging assassins' bullets, this is as good as it's ever going to be, and it's never going to be this good again. In less than a week we're going to vote in a national election, and no matter what the result may be, social cohesion is going to decrease significantly, yet again. Nor is it going to recover in the next ten years any more than it did in the last ten. The Culture war consumes all other concerns, and it continues to escalate. Red Tribe has a pressing need to mobilize to a war footing versus the Blues, and MAGA is the best option available for achieving that. There is no reason to compromise that mobilization to prop up a social order not only dead but visibly rotting off the bone.
So you agree with me that the Conservative Movement is dead.
I agree with you that a conservative movement is dead, certainly.
Yes, for 60 some years now what people meant when they said 'Conservative Movement' is dead.
And given what that "conservative movement" looked like, how is that a bad thing for people on the right?
Because the entire great desideratum is gone.
The one good thing that has come out of it so far is to get you people to admit you're against everything conservatism has stood for since the 1950's.
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And yet, it seems to me that my conservative principles find better representation under the current environment than they did under the old arrangement. Why should I mourn this outcome?
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Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condi Rice were, though. Even W's speechwriters like David Frum were.
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