Steve Sailer writes: The Tea Party struck me as an implicit solidaristic conservative movement organized around an individualist ideology of libertarianism, but less for reasons of ideology than of patriotic history: America was founded by liberty lovers, so this history was seen (murkily, I admit) as offering a potentially unifying national theme in an increasingly diverse and fractious country. Of course, these citizenist stirrings were contemptuously rejected by the left as the racist twitchings of dying white men etc…
Individualistic Reagan-Kemp conservatism had a good run in its day, but then it hit diminishing marginal returns. So, it’s time for solidaristic conservatism for awhile. Do the low-hanging fruit that have been neglected, like build a border fence, implement E-verify, fire the SJWs from Executive branch sinecures, eliminate the most plutocratic tax loopholes like carried interest for hedge fund guys, encourage the most desirable global manufacturers to set up factories in America (as Reagan reluctantly did with Japanese car companies), etc.
Then when solidaristic conservatism starts to run out of ideas and gas, individualistic conservatism can have another shot, after they’ve been away in the wilderness for awhile and have had time and incentive to come up with some better ideas. First, though, let the solidaristic conservatives have a time to fix the biggest weaknesses in the individualistic model, such as not defending the nation’s borders in an age of ever increasing smartphone-enabled Third World migrations.
* The diminishing marginal returns idea is especially important when you’re dealing with ideas like decreasing tax rates and deregulating industry. How much it makes sense to pursue those policies depends on how high taxes are and how heavily regulated industry is. A world where the CAB is setting airline fares is a lot more ripe for deregulation than one where the top two companies in some space can routinely merge without antitrust worries (like Sirius and XM, say). Something similar works with tough on crime rhetoric–when the crack wars were filling up prisons and graveyards, getting tougher on crime might have been a good direction to take policy, whereas now, with historically low crime rates and a massive prison population, it’s probably a pretty bad direction to take policy.
* Question: What would be an ideal pivot away from individualistic conservatism toward a more solidaristic conservativism on say, foreign policy issues?
In other words, the neo-con mode of “Invade the world” just cause we need to bring democratic institutions to faraway places that never had them in the first place, should that be chucked out the window?
Would a more solidaristic conservatism be along the lines of: For now, let’s bring most of the troops home. Perhaps place many of them on the southern border while the wall/fence is being built to help beef up border security. Also, we’re pulling of Afghanistan and Iraq, period. AND we’re not gonna start any new wars/endeavors in faraway places. If faraway places really want to build a democracy in their own lands, that’s great. We’ll supply the moral encouragement. Let us know when they’ve succeeded. But meanwhile, we’re gonna take care of our own right in the good ol’ USA.
I mean, the logical opposite of the neocon “invade the world, invite the world” results in “the world’s not invited ’cause they first have to wait their turn in line legally, and we’ve called off invasions of the world ’cause we’re more focused on the homeland.”
Regarding foreign policy from a more solidaristic conservatism, that would seem to be the logical conclusion. The complete opposite of invade and invite.
Aside from the possibility of a Trump administration, its difficult to see any major candidate in either party implementing even ten percent toward that kind of solidaristic foreign policy, and with Trump, at best one could hope for would be about ten percent of it being implemented.
* The fact of the matter is no people on earth believes in conservative or libertarian economics. Every democracy in the world has universal health care, for example. There is support for cutting government in the abstract, but not for any actually programs.
So why do conservatives win elections? By being the slightly less anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian party.
Yet the establishment wants to take away the only reason anyone actually votes Republican.
There is no more clueless people on the planet than the Republican establishment. Those on the left have a version of the red pill they’ve taken. They’re blind to the stupidity of their own demographics, but know that conservatives only vote based on identity. Yet GOP establishment types are living in a fantasy world where you win in democracy by having the policy proposals that are best for growth.
* Neoconservatives are constantly telling us what the opposite of their foreign policy is, when it’s not one worldism: isolationism. Because they call almost anything that falls short of starting wars every other year and doesn’t involve U.S. troops wearing blue helmets, that doesn’t tell you much. But, yes, calling troops home to defend our actual borders instead of the borders of our empire, is to them isolationism. This has nothing to do with individualism versus solidarity, though. You can easily be an individualist and an “isolationist.”
* Trump’s statements are all over the place.
One curious statement he made that in the past would have been a litmus test for all candidates is is stance on F-35. He brought it up once, and nobody asked him about it, and none of the other candidates brought it up.
Trump wants to ‘fire’ F-35.
So Trump is the least militaristic candidate running. Hillary is the most militaristic, just like Goldwater. But these are different times.
* Partisan politics gives some evidence, though not alot, to a shift more to the left.
With presidential politics, the Republicans won 5 out of 6 presidential elections between 1968 and 1988, inclusive. In only one of these elections, 1976, a real outlier, did the Democratic candidate carry more than a dozen states, and only in 1976 and 1988 did the Democratic candidate get over 43% of the popular vote.
In the next six presidential elections, between 1992 and 2012, the Democratic candidate got at least a popular vote plurality five out of six times. This included a majority twice, as opposed to once (barely) in the earlier six elections, and winning at least 47% of the popular vote in all these elections except for 1992.
The presidential votes are important because that is what people pay attention to and where they vote their ideology. Most of the electorate doesn’t bother to vote in the down-ballot races. And when they do, ideology places less of a role, almost none in local races. This decreases the importance of the huge wins the Republicans have been racking up in Congressional, state, and local elections since 1994, especially since the Congressional majorities seem to have been due to wiping out what used to be a a considerable caucus of conservative Dems. I suspect that there has been substantial deterioration in the Democratic Party organization that is being masked by the general public starting to prefer them more on the presidential level.
In terms of policy, on economic policy there has been a clear shift to the right, if you define “right” and “left” the way that it has been traditionally defined, more vs less inequality. Median income in real terms has fallen, and the share of wealth going to the top has increased, and this is plainly due directly to policy changes such as the “free trade” agreements. The police have more power, more people are in jail, and there is more surveillance. In foreign policy, the US has taken to invading countries seemingly at random and changing their governments. All these used to be regarded as right wing ideas.
On red state blogs, such as this, I have seen what I wrote about in the above paragraph explained away either through outright denial that these trends are happening, claiming that the traditional definitions of left and right don’t exist and these things are happening and part of a left-wing agenda, or pointing to the fact that the culture doesn’t push the 1950s style nuclear family with clear separation of gender roles much, which is true, but then greatly overemphasizing the importance of this vs the other things going on. The 1950s was something of an outlier, the nuclear family and suburban lifestyle pushed in that time were much less prevalent earlier. Also I question diversity training at the workplace, basically private employers getting their workers together and lecturing them on how they should think about non-workplace issues, is really a left-wing project.
So yes, policy has been shifting to the right, to the point of running into diminishing marginal returns, and the general public is not as supportive of this as in the past. There has also been a deterioration, or lack of precision, or outright inversion in the use of political terms that makes it difficult to describe what is going on. Also more difficult for tradition-minded people who want more equality of income and put alot of value on civil liberties to find a team to root for.
* To your wider point regarding the tension between conservatism and solidarity, this is largely due to the fact that the Republican Party now includes major segments of the old Democratic coalition that favored solidaristic ideas and have migrated over to the GOP since the 60s. “Solidarity” is basically old left, labor liberalism. The GOP was traditionally the party of northeastern business elites and Midwestern and Western independent farmers and small town businessmen. The northern working class and the South switched tot he GOP, which now includes these divergent tendencies. This can be seen in the geographic divide between Cruz and Trump’s electoral successes, and Trump is even extending these trends by bringing in many former Dems and Independents into the GOP.
If I had to guess, I suppose the GOP will move in a more solidaristic direction, and Trump’s success may just be the beginning. The northern WASPs that make up the traditional GOP don’t have the demographic and cultural influence, even within the white population, let alone the wider population.
