The Conservative Opportunity — 2021
Uniting America Against The Forces of Division and Domination
The most obvious observation about 2020’s winning Biden-Harris ticket is it was just the Obama-Biden ticket in reverse, less a reconciliation ticket, more of a redux. And there’s good reason to think the more moderate half of Obama-Biden could be a more successful president. While Barack Obama may be the Democrats’ Ronald Reagan, revered and emulated as an unmistakably great communicator, his presidency wasn’t much of a success. He would be the first to tell you his agenda was stymied every which way, first by centrist Democrats and then by ‘obstructionist’ Republicans. It’s impossible to name a single legislative accomplishment after 2010’s Affordable Care Act, because unlike his last Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, he remained rigidly committed to a more progressive ideology and refused to accommodate Republicans in control of Congress.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, does not come from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The Joe Biden known for 48 years in Washington is a pragmatic, bipartisan, go along to get along, old school Democrat. Republicans say he was the easiest to negotiate with in the Obama administration and one of the easiest Senators to work with, period. He campaigned as that Joe Biden in 2020 and continues to insist on reconciliation with Republicans as a mandate from the voters who elected him.
Of course, that isn’t how most Republicans see him. To Republicans, Joe Biden is a puppet, a mere placeholder for progressives who really only care about having the power to enact a their agenda.
There’s legitimate reasons to fear progressive domination.
Academia is wrought with anti-American pathology, histrionics instead of history, indoctrination instead of education. The very institutions supposed to be teaching civics, productivity, virtue, critical thinking, and respect for different views has been taken over by radical ideologues with an agenda and an axe to grind. They have catered and caved to online mobs and cancel crusaders all over the country. As Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will pointedly writes, “much education now spreads the disease that education should cure, the disease of repudiating, without understanding, the national principles that could pull the nation toward its noble aspirations.”
“The result is barbarism,” explains George Will, quoting the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, “A barbarian is someone whose ideas are ‘nothing more than appetites in words,’ someone exercising ‘the right not to be reasonable,’ who ‘does not want to give reasons’ but simply ‘to impose his opinions.’” Will concludes, “The barbarians are not at America’s gate. There is no gate.”
Progressives dominate Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the Forbes 500. And what they don’t control outright, they control through dominating public opinion.
Recall Lord Acton — “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” When given power, people have a tendency to abuse that power.
Given control over all corporate and academic institutions, there’s no reason to believe progressives don’t have their eyes set on dominating government at every level next. And there’s no reason to believe they won’t abuse such control to silence dissent and censor whatever and whomever they want.
Many can point to the permanent ban on President Donald Trump’s use of twitter and a general “purging” of conservatives from the platform. Others can cite the use of fact-checkers to prevent misinformation from spreading on Facebook which often looks more like content control biased against conservative politics. We’ve become accustom to sharing all of our thoughts on these platforms over the past 16 years, it’s easy to see them as our platforms. But they’re not. They belong to Facebook and Twitter and while they have terms of services that are not difficult to follow, I cannot say with confidence they try to accommodate different points of view. And when they do, there’s nothing stopping an online mob from tormenting a user into submission. But because they are not our platforms, there’s nothing we can do about it and conservatives should absolutely not look to the government to save them a space in social media. If something can’t be said on Twitter, there are other platforms, and I’m not talking about social media platforms; I’m talking about television, radio, podcasts, websites, magazines, and newspapers. I don’t foresee Fox News thoroughly succumbing to an outrage mob. And maybe that isn’t democratic, but the democratization and dissemination of information, especially misinformation, has been a real problem without any guardians to hold the gates.
Americans were aghast as civil unrest following police killings turned into full-scale rioting throughout much of the United States in the summer of 2020. Republicans, especially, sat aghast that Democrats did not do more to condemn and control (stop) the rioting. It appeared to us as if they were just letting the barbarians run amok because they viewed them as their ideological kin. After all, nothing so-called “antifascist” and Black Lives Matter rioters spew can’t be traced back to an academic ideologue and “critical race theory.”
But our own gates didn’t hold either. History’s synopsis of Donald Trump will forever be “he was the president that was impeached for having incited an insurrection against the government of the United States.” The insurrectionist barbarians are indistinguishable from Antifa. Their belief systems run a similar course: some deep rot at the center of American democracy makes it irredeemable and their only option is terrorism. I have always seen it as National Review writer Kevin Williamson described them, “two sides of the same very sad little coin, basically a life-action game of Dungeons and Dragons with silly politics and no sense of adult responsibility.”
Instead of immediately condemning the violence at the Capitol as consistency demands, or even just to signal “we’re better than THEM,” some Republicans even claimed, without evidence, Antifa infiltrated the crowd of pro-Trump protesters and started violence against Capitol Hill police officers to make them look bad. Even those who condemned the violence continued to push the objections to the electoral vote that legitimized and precipitated the siege. A majority of House Republicans voted to object and ostensibly overturn election results even after the insurrectionists were removed from the Capitol. One newly elected Freshman Congressman recounts how a fellow freshman cast a vote they knew was wrong out of fear of threats to their family. This is awful, fascistic, behavior. Instead of guarding the gates, far too many Republicans cowered and catered to the barbarians.
It should really come as no surprise, though — they abandoned the gates for the past four years. When Donald Trump became a dominant force in the Republican primaries in 2016, many Republicans originally resisted but for a variety of reasons got behind the eventual nominee and when he shocked the world and won the 2016 election, they saw much to gain from marrying longtime conservative policy aims with his populist fervor. But I will never understand how so many conservative Republicans became complete and total supplicants to Donald Trump. Were they afraid his tweets would cost them in a primary? Were they intimidated by his followers?
Following the insurrectionist riot, Trump was impeached with 10 House Republicans joining Democrats to charge the president with incitement of insurrection. Whatever the merits of his impeachment and a possible conviction and disqualification from holding future office, Trump voters will see it less of an act of civic hygiene and more of what they fear most.
“If you believe, however erroneously, that the election was stolen from the only political figure you think listens to or represents you, that the courts and other national institutions ignored it or were complicit, and that the system was irrevocably corrupt, would the political class’ 11th-hour removal of that figure from office — even on a bipartisan basis — coupled with a ban on his running in the future, really convince you otherwise?”
That is the question put forth by James Antle in an essay for The Week magazine arguing impeachment will only worsen the GOP’s legitimacy crisis. What crisis? Republican voters, and many new, first-time Republican voters, turned to Trump because they feel their so-called representatives have failed them. The system failed them and Donald Trump was the only political figure they believe even cares about them.
Trump voters come from all different walks of life. They’re my friends and family members, neighbors and coworkers. They’re out-of-work blue collar workers reeling from decades of deindustrialization, gold star moms and veterans’ dads, Christian conservatives and well-meaning moderates concerned with overtly progressive values in their churches, schools, workplaces. They’re patriots who care about their country, their place in it, and their way of life. And they see all that under threat — from foreign competition, from unscrupulous lenders, from progressives encroaching on their communities.
They see how progressives took over higher education, and conservatives failed to stop them. They see the deplatforming of conservative voices, and Republicans powerless to stop it. They see how immigration went unchecked, how popular culture has gotten more progressive, and now there appears to be no place for them. They feel besieged, and they feel betrayed by Republicans who promised to protect their way of life. Trump voters, all 74 million of them, are going to be key to any Republican success. We need their votes, but we’ll only deserve those votes if we care about their lives and respect them, if we can deliver solutions and meet their needs.
That, in the end, is the great missing opportunity that has been Donald Trump’s candidacy and presidency. When David French and other conservative critics were accused of “preening” when Trump appeared to be on his way to losing the 2016 election, French responded with “not preening, mourning.” To French, from his vantage in rural Tennessee, Trump had tapped into “deep anguish” but instead of offering real solutions, repeated their grievances. To critics like French, it looked like exploitation. To the voters, representation. Their ‘representatives’ failed them so they looked to Trump to save them, and absent any alternative, they still will. “The frustrations that caused so many people to turn in desperate directions for a political voice are not going away when Trump leaves the White House,” explains Senator Ben Sasse in an essay for The Atlantic, “because deception and demagoguery are the inevitable consequences of a politics that is profoundly, systemically dysfunctional.” They’re not likely to accept any final judgement on him from the political class; they can’t even accept the results of the election. The question isn’t if Trump voters are radicalizing, it’s how many and how much? But radicalization is reactionary — revolutions don’t happen when things are going right — so the bigger question is what is going so wrong in their lives they turned to Trump, and in far too many cases, more unsavory saviors?
Former Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman and Maryland’s Republican Governor Larry Hogan, national co-chairs of the bipartisan No Labels Foundation, point to gridlock as the fuel behind this disillusionment with democracy writing, “when the nation’s leaders fail to deliver, the American people stop believing Washington is working for them.” They continue, “for some of the most alienated Americans, this void has been filled by online conspiracy theories about “the deep state,” QAnon and demagogues who take advantage of public frustration for their own political power.”
The QAnon conspiracy theory would be DOA at any respectable news outlet. Conspiracy theories surrounding voting machines and hacked counts fall under the lightest scrutiny of a serious judge and journalist. As much as conservatives hate biased mainstream outlets and created Fox News to provide balance in the marketplace of ideas, there’s no denying that without guardians and gatekeepers against conspiracy theories, they flourish, and social media mobs can radicalize into actual mobs.
That’s when guardians at the gates are needed most.
While mindful of the demand for these radical narratives and conspiracies, we cannot ignore the politicians, pundits, and networks who provided plenty of supply. As Senator Sasse details, “media outlets have discovered that dialing up the rhetoric increases clicks, eyeballs, and revenue.” They mainstreamed the narratives, and Trump legitimized far too many radical and insane conspiracies himself.
His progeny is coming now, to campaign for and hold official and party offices. The insurrectionists may not have succeeded in installing a thugocracy in Washington D.C. but what’s to stop them from running fiefdoms all over America? Conservatives need to lead Republicans to oppose, expose, and defeat the cranks, conspiracy theorists, and frauds in our ranks. We need to choose respect, but not indulgence, of people’s grievances and tell the truth no matter what. We need to restore the good name of our party as a home to all those united to restoring America to its true mission of champion and promulgator of liberty instead of a conduit for conspiracy and propagandist for socialism.
Ask any Trump voter why they would vote for him after years of chaos emanating from his twitter feed and mismanagement of a global pandemic and they’ll tell you clearly — they are sincerely afraid of a coming communist takeover of government that threatens to destroy America as we know it. They point to the Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters bailed out by Senator Harris and various leftwing celebrities. They argue political violence has been normalized and the seizing of the U.S. Capitol was the inevitable result of Democrats giving tacit approval to Antifa rioters burning American businesses. Democrats didn’t control the barbarians, they argue, but encouraged them, and joined them in the hopes of attaining political power. Some contend it’s part of an insidious plot to destroy the United States and build a socialist utopia upon its ruins. Most conservatives believe they have no choice but to fight back and win, to “own the libs” before they own us. Dominate or be dominated.
For the first time in my life, I fear for the future of our country because this is now a bipartisan problem — there is no one guarding the gate. There is no gate.
Americans need a sane, rational alternative to the forces of domination on both sides. Conservatives, we know limited government is essential to the flourishing of a free society. We know balance is essential to freedom of thought. We know anarchy is a direct threat to stability and we know our defense of those gates — those norms and practices of restrained government and auxiliary precautions in the Constitution — are all that stands between civil society and barbarism. So we better get our act together and get back to those gates. The barbarians are still clamoring for power. We better make damn sure they never get it, and make no mistake Republicans, if we don’t, no one else will.
We have to show democracy still works. Republicans and centrist Democrats need to stand together in defense of democracy. They need to prove accommodation still works. They need to prove comity can heal. They need to guard the gates and commit to keeping government in its lane. They need to make the people’s priorities their priorities and deliver for working families. As the national co-chairs of the bipartisan No Labels foundation write, “political incentives drive this all in the wrong direction.” “Campaign donations, social media likes and press attention flow to figures most adamantly opposed to working across the aisle, creating a vicious cycle of gridlock and dysfunction.” They call on elected officials to “address the gridlock that’s poisoning our politics.” That may be true but this essay is not so much concerned about gridlock as it is with radical experimentation. After all, gridlock is a feature of American government, not a bug. That isn’t to say bipartisan problem solving isn’t a goal — it absolutely is — but it needs to come from sincere cooperation and forging a lasting consensus.
Progressives cannot be allowed to attain absolute power. Again, given power, they have a tendency to abuse it, from a president who insisted he had “a pen and a phone” to circumvent Congress whenever they didn’t do his bidding, to academics so afraid of hearing a different point of view, the National Association of Scholars keeps a running list of “academic cancellations,” 117 as of January 2021.
Once again, conservatives should absolutely not look to the government to save them. Those in college now, and new students and faculty, need to listen to former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and “be brave,” be bold, do everything they can to oppose, expose, and defeat intolerant progressives. Nothing less than the future of free expression depends on it. What President Lincoln called our “political religion” is under attack in the schools. Defend it, with all you have, on every platform, everywhere. Alumni, pull your donations. Non-profits, end your partnerships. Corporate boards and boosters, pull their funding if they won’t allow for a diversity of opinion. School boards, do your part to advance a curriculum that shares the incredible story of American progress, not misguided and inappropriate polemics.
Never let progressives attain absolute power. I’m a Republican and in my ideal world, Republicans would run everything — Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court (especially the Supreme Court), but also every mayor’s office, city council, school and water board, and where the offices are nonpartisan, the more controlled by people with conservative sensibilities, the better. But we don’t live in the ideal world. We live in a representative democracy and the people of those cities, states, and districts voted for Democrats to represent them.
The first thing we should point out: how’s that working out for them? Think of one large American city, and they’re all dominated by Democrats now, that is considered well-run. American cities are rampant with corruption, poorly-maintained infrastructure, substandard housing, failing public schools totally dominated by teachers’ unions, pension insolvency, endemic poverty, and businesses only survive because so many customers live nearby. They may be known for cultural acclaim, public transportation, and the convenience of centralization, but certainly not for cleanliness and public safety. Democrats fail the very people who keep putting them in control. It’s sad, really.
And for an example of progressives in absolute control, look no further than my home state of California. Homelessness is rampant — 150,000 homeless individuals may be living unsheltered any given year. State highways are among the worst in the nation, housing is unaffordable, among the worst-in-the-nation public schools are totally under the control of teachers’ unions, a pending pension tsunami of red ink awaits, poverty is endemic throughout the state, and the only businesses that survive are those large enough to lobby lawmakers and/or navigate California’s myriad tax and regulatory policy progressive lawmakers change with every legislative session. As the incoming Biden administration touts California’s leadership, it is actually a blaring siren warning America of what total progressive domination looks like.
Contrast the perils of the nation’s most populous state with its second most populous, Texas. Texas lures more people from California than any other state with its thriving job markets, affordable housing, and financial stability keeping cops on the beat and teachers improving children’s lives, with enough money left over for arguably the best roads in America. And all without a state income tax! Texas even experimented with real criminal justice reform that worked while California’s criminal justice reform experiments have plunged much of the state into a public safety crisis without closing a single prison. Texas, under Republican leadership, has been thriving well into the 21st century and progressives have about as much influence or hope of attaining control as Republicans have in the Golden State.
I encourage everyone to watch former Texas Governor Rick Perry explain how Texas’s approach improved the lives of the most impoverished and vulnerable citizens, proving conservative approaches not only serve the most people, they help those who need the most help. Republicans can point to success stories like Texas’s to contrast our leadership with that of the Democrats but we understand not everyone wants to live in Texas.
When then-first year Senator Barack Obama delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, MA that launched his political career, he thundered, “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America.” His onetime running mate, Joe Biden, pledges to be a president who “doesn’t see red and blue states.”
Democracy isn’t about domination, but accommodation. Unity comes not from domination but from freedom. The “live and let live” freedom of the Founders’ intent is the only approach that would let California continue to be California and let Texas be Texas so that, in the words of President George Washington, “every man shall sit in safety of his own vine and his own fig tree and none shall make him afraid.”
The goal is maximizing happiness. Everyone knows the famous God-given rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence — “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — but it’s the next sentence that lays out the purpose of government altogether: to organize power among people in such form as to “effect their Safety and Happiness.” All politics is supposed to be oriented toward facilitating maximum happiness. Democracy isn’t about domination, but accommodation.
I always thought there should be political power in the common sense of subsidiarity — letting the people closest to the problems be the ones in charge of, and held accountable for, solving them. Federalism, and its cousin, localism, offers the chance to let locals control their communities and states, provided they uphold all constitutional rights. As David French puts it in his book, Divided We Fall, “federalism ends where the Bill of Rights begins,” something California lawmakers keep needing to be reminded.
The value of conservatism is not political and cultural domination. It’s balance and respect for dissenting views. Progressives can have a seat at the table, just not all the seats. American conservatism, or as it was long known, “classical liberalism,” is the only political sensibility that aims to preserve a pluralistic system that accommodates as many different views as possible. This is the key to keeping government in its lane so that free enterprise, civil society, families and communities, can flourish in maximum freedom. Such a system tempers the ambition for radical experimentation and guards against corruption because power is so diffused among many competing voices, no one can wield it absolutely.
And make no mistake, Congress is corrupt. Not in the taking bribes and making backroom deals with lobbyists definition of corruption, though there’s far too much of that too, but in the larger sense of the word. As Jonah Goldberg explains in his book, Suicide of the West, corruption comes from the Latin corpus, as in the root word of “corpse.” It’s literal meaning is rot and decay, moral decay. Corrupt intent is doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and Congress suffers from the heavy rot of an institution responding to corrupt incentives, from lawmakers who continuously do the wrong thing even knowing it’s wrong. It’s not necessarily their fault, though. Congress is a political institution and so responds to political incentives, the strongest of which is getting reelected. Lawmakers spend most of their time fundraising for the next campaign and while it used to be a place where lawmakers aimed to get things done so they could earn a platform for their ideas, it has become a place where anyone gets a platform even if they accomplish nothing. Senator Ben Sasse calls it a “parliament of pundits.” None is more obvious than Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican from Florida, the congressman who found it feasible to insinuate Antifa had infiltrated the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol just hours earlier. Gaetz has accomplished nothing in office or his life but he’s a regular on Fox News and a loudmouth on Twitter. Former House Speaker Republican Paul Ryan said of him, “Matt Gaetz is not a legislator, he’s an entertainer.” And something must be really rotten in the congressional pipeline to let Matt Gaetz prosper.
He’s not the worst though. That title has to be reserved for Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, a Republican from Georgia that believes her election is a chance to stop the “Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles” running the world. QAnon in Congress. Taylor-Greene managed to win a primary in a deep red district and so was guaranteed a seat in the U.S. House but instead of sidelining this crank slipping through the cracks, Republicans embraced her! President Trump tweeted she was “a rising Republican star” and Georgia’s appointed Republican Senator saw fit to campaign with her. Enough is enough. Now that Trump is leaving office, Q must go too. Let us never speak of QAnon again and oppose, expose, and defeat any of its devotees attempting to claim party or public offices.
This is why America doesn’t trust us. It has nothing to do with our policies. and everything to do with our tolerance of, and adherence to, cranks and conspiracy theorists, frauds and charlatans, the very barbarism conservative sensibilities are supposed to guard against. This is not a sane alternative but there is good news.
In 2020, not a single Republican incumbent lost a House race. In fact, Republicans gained back much of what they lost in the elections in 2018, including four congressional seats in California. That means progressives didn’t take any new seats, either. The majority makers, or majority-holders for the Democrats, are moderates, not progressives. In contrast, with the likes of Reps. Nancy Mace, Peter Meijer, Stephanie Bice, Nicole Malliotakis, Maria Elvira Salazar, Carlos Gimenez, Tony Gonzales, Yvette Herrell, Burgess Owens, Kat Cammack, Young Kim, Michelle Steele, and others, Republicans have the most historically diverse caucus in our history. Tough Republican women — “badasses in their own right” — and military veterans helped win tough races in swing districts so Republicans have the room to experiment and grow the party like never before. And if Democrats don’t figure out how to stop progressives and socialists from hurting their image, they can expect more formidable challenges in 2022 as well.
Still, Republicans lost control of the Senate, likely due to tying the fortunes of two Republican incumbents to the grievances of a defeated, and loathed, president. With Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff heading to the Senate to represent Georgia and Kamala Harris as Vice President to break any 50–50 ties, Democrats effectively have control of the Senate. However, for almost all legislation with a few exceptions for budget, tax, and spending bills, 60 votes are needed to bring a bill up for a final vote. This vote, called cloture, is regularly abused and now grants the minority party a veto point against legislation backed only by the majority party.
Standing in the middle is the Democrats’ 50th vote, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin has sworn off ending the cloture and filibuster rules for legislation so any bill is going to need the approval of 10 Republicans to make it to a final vote. Manchin, a co-chair of the nonpartisan No Labels Foundation, should take a page out of the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus, and find 9 centrist Democrats to vote as a bloc with 10 Republicans. That way, no bill advances without bipartisan buy-in. Still, Democrats will be allowed to appoint judges, including Supreme Court justices should a vacancy arise, and will be able to appoint executive officers and pass bills related to taxes and spending, which is broad enough to cover a variety of progressives’ pet projects. One can hope Joe Manchin or some other sensible Democrat(s) will oppose, expose, and defeat them, but hope is not a strategy. Raw political pressure, fear of the next election, will be needed keep them in line. Still, conservatives should see this as a opportunity to force Congress to work across the aisles, and fulfill what Governor Hogan calls Biden’s “mandate for moderation.”
I won’t lie and say I’m optimistic. Perhaps a new era of bipartisan cooperation is upon us, but be weary of big government programs sailing though because of bipartisan buy-in. Such legislation tends to be favored by corporations and special interests who aggressively lobby both sides . And perhaps Biden meant it in a debate when he opposed gun control by shouting “it’s not constitutional!” to his incoming Vice President. We’ve had enough of presidents testing the limits of their power, testing the limits of the Constitution, and daring the courts to stop them. Precautionary constitutionalism in a Democratic administration would be a welcome return to normal. But perhaps his worst critics are right, and Joe Biden will be a puppet controlled by progressives who will jam through as much radical policy experimentation as possible and demand states and cities accede to their demands. After all, they make no secret about their aims for absolute cultural and political domination.
Ours is a republican form of government, that is one in which the people are empowered to elect representatives. And ours is especially a constitutional republic, that is one in which the people are empowered to elect their representatives and one in which those representatives are restrained from exercising too much power themselves. As James Madison writes in Federalist №51, “in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” He continues, “a dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” Those precautions? Checks and balances, veto points built into the constitutional structure to prevent any branch of government from becoming too powerful and tyrannical.
These veto points at every level are essential to the preservation of liberty from both authoritarian government and a “tyranny of the majority.” A system where “ambition was made to counteract ambition,” as Madison described it, is one that would preserve the rights of the people affirmed by the Declaration of Independence no matter who took power, and in what numbers. These are the very gates conservatives are to vigilantly guard, carefully using the government to block radical legislation.
The result might be gridlock which will be deliberately confused for “obstruction.” Our job is to stop bad legislation and support good laws that will ensure the safety and prosperity of all Americans. If Democrats make the peoples’ priorities their priorities, there’s much Republicans can do to strengthen their policies so they are constitutional, fiscally sound, and effective (Democrats tend to miss on all 3) and run on our ability to get results for the American people.
If, however, Democrats insist on advancing unworkable and radical progressive policies, we have no choice but to oppose them, expose them, and defeat them.
