That Fascism Essay and the End of Conservatives

Maybe you weren't online for the twenty-four hours that this essay was hot, but it's worth a look, if for no other reason than it confirms what many of us have been thinking--that what passes for "conservative" these days does not in any way resemble the conservative as we remember it.

The essay--"We need to stop calling ourselves conservatives"-- is by John Daniel Davidson, and it would be easy to dismiss as fringe silliness but Davidson is the senior editor at The Federalist which is a right-wing publication that is not nearly as far out on the fringes as one might wish it were. 

"The conservative project has failed," Davidson says, because there is nothing left worth conserving or protecting. You can't set out to protect Western civilization because "Western civilization is dying." 

Family values are dust. Religious freedom is not an issue in an irreligious nation. Conservatives worried too much about left wing politics when the real problem was "technological change so swift and powerful it fundamentally reordered society, swept tradition aside, and unleashed a moral relativism that rendered the conservative project obsolete." 

That's a diagnosis that cries out for some explanation, but lets move on to Davidson's prescription. 

So what kind of politics should conservatives today, as inheritors of a failed movement, adopt? For starters, they should stop thinking of themselves as conservatives (much less as Republicans) and start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.

There's another label that fits what Davidson is going to describe, but he's not going to touch the F word. Instead, let's look elsewhere for inspiration.

They might, looking to American history for inspiration, conjure up the image of the Pilgrims — those iron-willed and audacious Christians who refused to accept the terms set by the mainstream of their time and set out to build something entirely new, to hew it out of the wilderness of the New World, even at great personal cost.

That's a reading of Puritan history that is somewhere between generous and delusional. Not clear who the mainstream would be in his telling, nor the terms they objected to, but I don't think something "entirely new" is what they meant to establish. 

Or they might claim the mantle of revolutionaries, invoking the Founding Fathers’ view (or, at least, Thomas Jefferson’s) that periodic revolution to preserve liberty and civil society has always been and always will be necessary.

So, cherry picking a founding father quote. And Davidson wants to note what will not/has not/cannot work for his new breed.

The fusionism of past decades, in which conservatives made common cause with market-obsessed libertarians and foreign policy neocons, is finished. So too is Conservatism Inc. and the establishment GOP it enabled, whose first priority was always tax cuts for big business at the expense of everything else. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 heralded a populist wave and the end of Republican politics as we knew it, and now we are in uncharted waters.

I'm less inclined to view Trump as something new--we've seen his ilk before--and GOP politics had been crumbling for a while. But fair enough.

Indeed, a willingness to embrace government power has been a topic of fruitful debate on the “New Right” in recent years, as it should be. However uncomfortable traditional “small-government” conservatives might be with Ahmari’s argument, it is more or less true.

Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips.

The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.

And so subtext becomes text, and what has been implicit in much "conservative" politics is made explicit here. Never mind small government. Never mind live and let live. Never mind reluctance to grab the reins of power and wish, like Betsy DeVos, that those reins simply disappeared. 

Nope. The new MAGA right needs to simply grab all the power and force the nation into a shape that they find more pleasing.

To stop Big Tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.

Davidson also argues that wielding that power will mean "a dramatic expansion of the criminal code." Criminalize everything you dislike (starting with abortion) and throw the bums in jail. Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed and "parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse." I've lost track of how many movies that would outlaw, though I do wonder if such a law would affect the Muppets--is Miss Piggy in fact a drag character?  And of course, throw doctors in prison for performing "gender-affirming" treatment. 

And "teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted." Does this include the infamous sexy seahorses? Will he be using the definition that says anything that even mentions LGBTQ characters is sexually explicit? 

If this seems over the top, Davidson doesn't care:

If all that sounds radical, fine.

He notes that it's legitimate to worry about how power corrupts those who seize it, but his team can worry about that once they have seized power, or as he puts it, "after we have won the war."

It's a shame, because I have a soft spot for actual conservatives, and I have really missed them in the past many years. But if you have been thinking that folks like Ron DeSantis and the Moms for Liberty don't really sound like conservatives, well, Davidson agrees with you, and he's okay with that. They aren't Republicans and they aren't conservatives--they're some other thing and he is trying hard to come up with a name for a political party that exerts will to power and uses that power to forcibly inflict their values on their fellow citizens who are, in large part, of inferior moral stock, and I am super-reluctant to throw the F word around, so I'm sure we';ll come up with something to call this team soon.