What Happened to American conservatism?

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David Brooks weighs in:

“When I look at the Trump administration I see a massive attempt to return us to dog eat dog… nasty, brutish and short.”
 
It was always a lie. Every bit of it. The hypocrisy and the incoherence and the inconsistency has always been the point. It’s about power for power’s sake. It has no other aim, no other goal, no other desire, no other ambition other than power for power’s sake, to benefit a select few at the expense of many. It does not want progress. It wants hierarchy. It does not want equal opportunity. It does not seek common good. It is a movement built inherently upon fear and insecurity.

Sincerely,

A Former American Conservative
 
Was there a time when conservatism in the USA matched up with Edmund Burke and if so when?
 
CFordUNC said:
It was always a lie. Every bit of it. The hypocrisy and the incoherence and the inconsistency has always been the point. It’s about power for power’s sake. It has no other aim, no other goal, no other desire, no other ambition other than power for power’s sake, to benefit a select few at the expense of many.

Sincerely,

A Former American Conservative
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Eh. I don't think I'd agree it was always a lie. Conservatism, if morally grounded, serves an important role in the political order. That has been much more the case in times past than it is now. In my view, American conservatism sold its soul when these two things happened:

1. The party of individual liberties was coopted by the dominant (albeit much less influential now) Southern Baptist Convention to become the party of religious "moralism."
2. Under the guidance of Feldstein and Laffer, the 1980s era GOP decided fiscal responsibility was irrelevant.

Once those two tendencies took root, American conservatism was functionally dead. And nothing occupies a fallow field better than the cultural and social weed that is grievance-based populism.
 
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lawtig02 said:
Eh. I don't think I'd agree it was always a lie. Conservatism, if morally grounded, serves an important role in the political order. That has been much more the case in time past than it is now. In my view, American conservatism sold its soul when these two things happened:

1. The party of individual liberties was coopted by the dominant (albeit much less influential now) Southern Baptist Convention to become the party of religious "moralism."
2. Under the guidance of Feldstein and Laffer, the 1980s era GOP decided fiscal responsibility was irrelevant.

Once those two tendencies took root, American conservatism was functionally dead. And nothing occupies a fallow field better than the cultural and social weed that is grievance-based populism.
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3. The rise of fascism and consolidation of executive power under the guise of the MAGA movement, which co-opted said grievance-based populism through a prolonged campaign of propaganda and misinformation using AI driven messaging to polarize its base.
 
lawtig02 said:
2. Under the guidance of Feldstein and Laffer, the 1980s era GOP decided fiscal responsibility was irrelevant
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Neither of those economists thought fiscal responsibility was irrelevant. I don't think the GOP did either. They just liked tax cuts more.
 
There’s an argument to be made that American Conservatism is a modern phenomenon that begins with Buckley’s synthesis of various strands.
 
lawtig02 said:
Eh. I don't think I'd agree it was always a lie. Conservatism, if morally grounded, serves an important role in the political order. That has been much more the case in time past than it is now. In my view, American conservatism sold its soul when these two things happened:

1. The party of individual liberties was coopted by the dominant (albeit much less influential now) Southern Baptist Convention to become the party of religious "moralism."
2. Under the guidance of Feldstein and Laffer, the 1980s era GOP decided fiscal responsibility was irrelevant.

Once those two tendencies took root, American conservatism was functionally dead. And nothing occupies a fallow field better than the cultural and social weed that is grievance-based populism.
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The only thing I would criticize about your post is that you did not drop the mic 😞
 
Here's an interesting look at conservatism and how early the media became important to them.

newrepublic.com

The Birth of Conservative Media as We Know It

It all started in a small apartment in Washington, D.C.
newrepublic.com newrepublic.com




Dedication to “the reporting of facts that other newspapers overlook” thus inspired the founders of Human Events. But while touting this fact-based approach, they also promoted a distinct point of view. By the early 1960s, Human Events arrived at this articulation of its mission: “In reporting the news, Human Events is objective; it aims for accurate representation of the facts. But it is not impartial. It looks at events through the eyes that are biased in favor of limited constitutional government, local self-government, private enterprise, and individual freedom.” Distinguishing between objectivity and impartiality, the editors of Human Events created a space where “bias” was an appropriate journalistic value.
 
donbosco said:
That's interesting. I don't think of Lincoln as conservative.
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Lincoln was the embodiment of classical liberalism. Identifying him as a conservative gets to the heart of the tension of American Conservatism. We’ve always had reactionaries. There wasn’t a true ideologically conservative movement until relatively recently. Does being conservative in temperament make someone a capital C Conservative? I don’t think so.
 
The online, open access U.S. History textbook The American Yawp doesn't mention conservatism until "Volume II, Chapter 29, titled "The Triumph of the Right." This chapter examines the rise of the conservative movement in the United States during the mid-20th century. It discusses the political mobilization of the American right following World War II, highlighting figures like William F. Buckley Jr., who in 1955 declared that his magazine, National Review, “stands athwart history yelling Stop.” The chapter also addresses the political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, including the challenges faced by the conservative movement and its eventual resurgence."

I ran that question through ChatGPT, i.e., "What is the first mention of conservatism in The American Yawp? The American Yawp"
 
Paine said:
Lincoln was the embodiment of classical liberalism. Identifying him as a conservative gets to the heart of the tension of American Conservatism. We’ve always had reactionaries. There wasn’t a true ideologically conservative movement until relatively recently. Does being conservative in temperament make someone a capital C Conservative? I don’t think so.
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I'm not sure that's correct. I've always seen Lincoln as someone to the right of classical liberalism. Seward was more of a classical liberal.
 
donbosco said:
The online, open access U.S. History textbook The American Yawp doesn't mention conservatism until "Volume II, Chapter 29, titled "The Triumph of the Right." This chapter examines the rise of the conservative movement in the United States during the mid-20th century. It discusses the political mobilization of the American right following World War II, highlighting figures like William F. Buckley Jr., who in 1955 declared that his magazine, National Review, “stands athwart history yelling Stop.” The chapter also addresses the political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, including the challenges faced by the conservative movement and its eventual resurgence."

I ran that question through ChatGPT, i.e., "What is the first mention of conservatism in The American Yawp? The American Yawp"
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Exactly. Buckley created the ideological movement of Conservatism in this county. He unified segments of the right: moralists, anti-Communists, and the free-market types.

Before that, a lot of Republicans were just liberals in GOP team colors.
 
lawtig02 said:
I'm not sure that's correct. I've always seen Lincoln as someone to the right of classical liberalism. Seward was more of a classical liberal.
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I think the difference between Seward and Lincoln in terms of their conservatism was much more related to temperament than ideology. Both were liberals. Lincoln perhaps more of a constitutional liberal and Seward a moral liberal.

Lincoln’s commitment to proceduralism strikes me as deeply liberal.

That being said, I take your critique in terms of saying he was the embodiment of classical liberalism. That’s putting it a bit too far. I suppose you could say he was to the right (or left? Hard to say since we see things a lot differently now) of classical liberalism in that he embraced a certain economic nationalism and strong executive action during the war.
 
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