While many members of the GOP still see themselves as conservative, the party’s tone and direction have severely drifted into the realm of populist nationalism as it has been willing to abandon core traditional tenets of conservative orthodoxy.
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I have often left little doubt about my feelings of the Left. But while they may have lost their constitutional grounding, the Right has, as Charlie Sykes puts it, lost its mind. For all the excesses of the Democrats, at least it can be said a good portion of them know and understand what they are. They understand they are attempting to leave both cultural and political traditions behind. Many of them are radicals and revolutionaries, and they know it and own it. The same cannot be said of much of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
They’ve taken the off-ramp from the high road. They’ve exited the highway of consistent principle. They’ve chosen the wrong fork and left the path of limited government and constitutional ideals. And most of them don’t even know it.
What was once the conservative movement is now a populist movement full of angry nationalists and culture warriors. They’re counter-revolutionaries, anti-liberals, and reactionaries. Much of who they are, and who they support, is determined by a sense of aggressive opposition to both the real and perceived excesses of the Democrats. In this struggle, no excess is too excessive, and no hypocrisy is without justification because the excesses and hypocrisies of the enemy are always worse.
Fear of losing a cultural struggle to Leftist radicals has led to a declaration of political war, a war that justifies setting aside foundational principles. A movement that once expected and demanded moral living and abiding character in its leaders now justifies support for anyone willing to champion culture war priorities and “stick it to the Left.” A movement that once manifested itself as The Tea Party, demanding fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets, now rolls its eyes at such concerns, it being a distraction from the cultural battle at hand. A movement that once understood the dangers of the imperial presidency and the Leviathan of centralized government, now happily wields these monsters for their own designs.
This isn’t ordered liberty. This isn’t a movement trying to conserve and reassert American traditions of government. This is an ultra-traditionalist authoritarian uprising of anger and discontent. These are nationalists seeking the arm of government to put their cultural foes in their place, to seize control by any means possible.
We need only look at some of their ideas and policies to confirm this movement has trended away from the sphere of natural law.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign spoke of a deportation force, of a Muslim ban, and of forcing a sovereign nation to pay for a domestic construction project. Each of these ideas violates the fundamental principles of modern conservative philosophy.
Most conservatives agree that illegal immigration is a problem. Still, even just a few years ago, most would concede that mass deportation would necessarily require martial law to accomplish, a centralizing of power and authority in the federal government that no true conservative wanted.
And, while border security has always been a plank of modern conservatism, forcing a neighboring country to pay for it was absurd. We believed in sovereignty. America’s original foreign policy was the Monroe Doctrine, voicing to the world we would defend the sovereignty of the nations on the American continents against European involvement. Now, we’re okay with abandoning our belief in the sovereignty of our neighbors because we want a “big beautiful wall”?
And perhaps most egregious of all is this idea of a Muslim ban. We, conservatives, who have fought to ensure that freedom of religion is a secure and fast feature of our society, were suddenly willing to support a religious test on immigrants to our country? I was frankly astounded as self-proclaimed constitutionalists and Christians suddenly began repeating ideas I’d only heard touted by extreme anti-religious atheists, notions that have often been directed at Christians and that are held at bay by the First Amendment.
And when I pointed out the inconsistencies of Trump’s goals with constitutional law, with the ideas of natural rights, what was the answer I received from those who often call Democrats traitors for their unconstitutional excesses? “The constitution isn’t a suicide pact” they would tell me.
And this was just resulting from Donald Trump’s campaign. His presidency has made the marginal drift of the conservative movement even starker.
A major plank of conservatism has always been a resistance to centralized economic planning and support for the free market. Yet, they now treat Donald Trump as CEO of the American economy and celebrate his interferences with the free market.
Sure, there has been a lot of deregulation, something a typical Republican president would have done. But this has been accompanied by arbitrary protectionism. And protectionism is literally the use of centralized government power to shelter a country from the realities of a global free market.
This would be enough of a departure from conservative doctrine, but Trump has enacted this economic policy mostly using the pen-and-phone approach pioneered by President Obama, an approach that had many clamoring for his impeachment not so long ago.
The emergency powers of levying tariffs, given to the executive branch by Congress, have been wielded by Donald Trump as an ordinary exercise of the office. Entire economic markets have been wiped away as Trump has arbitrarily engaged in trade wars and disputes with international friends and foes alike. And, it’s American consumers and American farmers who have borne the brunt of these trade wars.
American agriculture is on life support, being held aloft by government subsidies (again largely enacted arbitrarily by President Trump outside of the legislative process). This new bailout has now risen to higher levels than the auto bailouts under President Obama, and, unlike the auto bailouts, it is unlikely this money will ever be paid back.
But what about the budget? Trump promised to balance the budget in eight years. So, where are we at now that his first term in office is winding down?
There is no other way to describe where we are other than at a complete and total abandonment of fiscal conservatism by the Republican Party. This last year saw the yearly budget deficit rise to the levels only seen in the early years of the Obama presidency, when he was crafting stimulus packages. When asked about this failed promise, Trump cavalierly said, “Who the hell cares about the budget?”
But most concerning to me has been the acceleration of accumulated powers and autocracy in the office of the president accompanied by the stripping of institutional integrity and independent authority of Congress.
Sure, the Constitution gives the power of the purse to Congress. But when they don’t fund Trump’s wall, he can just issue an executive order and fund it anyway. Political opposition, the importance of the political minority? No, they’re obstructionists and unamerican traitors. The independence of the court system, the checks and balances of judicial review? They’re just activist judges seeking to overthrow the will of the people. What about having Senators and representatives stand on principle and represent their state’s unique interests? No, we need to give trump members of Congress who will support his agendas.
And to add to all of this has been the crazy directions Trump’s defenders took during the process of his impeachment. The various points of their argument added up to what amounts to a growing belief that the Presidency is entirely unchained. Trump has flat out said, “I have an article two where I have the right to do whatever I want as president” and enablers have arisen to argue this is, in fact, the case.
Think about it. Trump’s enablers have put forth great effort to narrow the scope of impeachment to indictable crimes. Absent such indictable crimes, many Republicans denounced the House’s vote on impeachment as an illegal coup. And yet, as we learned after the Mueller investigation, the DOJ has a policy that a sitting president can’t be indicted.
Trump’s defenders further argued that a President can’t be impeached for exercising legitimate article two authority and that, if the President disagrees with the nature of an impeachment inquiry, he can thwart the entire process by ordering his subordinates to ignore congressional subpoenas. To the argument that action taken using legitimate article two authority for personal interest is impeachable, his defenders responded that as the elected President, his personal interests are the national interest.
Put all of these arguments together. They claimed impeachment is a coup if not built on an indictment but that a sitting president can’t be indicted; therefore a president can obstruct the impeachment process at will because he hasn’t been indicted, and that all of it is a waste of time anyway because he is free to conflate his personal interests with the national interest.
The Republicans who not so long ago spoke of impeaching Obama for his use of the imperial presidency have become actively engaged in crafting a presidency that is unindictable, unimpeachable, and unrestrained in the use of power and authority.
As if this extension and expansion of the imperial presidency weren’t enough, they demonstrated a willingness to further sink Congress in the process. The Senate acquitted the President of wrongdoing without even calling witnesses. This elected body, traditionally considered the world’s greatest deliberative body, declared its willingness to shirk one of its most essential functions because voters demanded absolute loyalty to President Trump.
Far from a fully executed impeachment trial that sought to acquit or remove the President believably, the process became nothing more than ritualistic institutional suicide. The integrity of the Senate was literally laid down on the altar of Trump.
There should be little doubt that while most of the Republican Party still sees themselves as conservatives, they have become populists and nationalists who are quickly occupying the authoritarian margins of the political spectrum. They are far afield of the sphere of natural law.
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