The FreeCons have a long way to go from where they are now to where they wish to go next.
It was a hotly contested competition, but the Mendacity of the Week Award goes to this one: “Everybody is against waste and fraud, but Elon Musk and DOGE are not the way to attack the problem.”
Beltway creatures participating in this tribal chant include:
• Senators and congressmen who have never returned a single dollar to the Treasury from their own bloated office budgets.
• Senators and congressmen who have never voted against an omnibus (and thus obscenely profligate) spending bill.
• Senators and congressmen who have spent lavishly to educate the people of, oh, Lesotho, in the fine points of, oh, gender transition.
• Senators and congressmen who, building on the legacy of their predecessors, have run up a national debt fast approaching $37 trillion.
No, the Beltway creatures and their friends in the echo-chamber media contend, Elon Musk and DOGE are cutting waste and fraud in all the wrong ways. Just as, a generation earlier, the Tea Party was said to have mis-imagined its own ambitious cost-cutting program. And not all that differently from the way, a generation before that, Reagan had botched his campaign against wasteful government spending. All of those were laudable efforts, you understand, but none of them were real mustard-cutters.
We taxpayers never seem to get it right.
And so, we’re curious, Senator Warren and Representative Raskin (to accost just two of the fungible members of the Waste and Fraud Caucus): What’s the right way to cut government spending? We ask only because the debt crisis has now become an existential threat to the nation. You do wish to avoid the collapse of our financial system, don’t you?
Crickets.
It is against this ominous background that we read Jack Butler’s NRO account of the Freedom Conservatism conference (see it here). It’s a hopeful development, the FreeCons. They seem to be, in the merely descriptive and non-pejorative sense, a reactionary group, generated spontaneously as a kind of antibody to the rise of the National Conservatives. To grossly oversimplify their basic disagreement: Where the NatCons see a need for more government involvement in the economy and a stronger defense of the inherited culture, the FreeCons see a need to protect and enhance the personal freedoms of American citizens. Sounds like a healthy debate between the competing claims of order and liberty. Sounds like a thoroughly American debate. (Sounds to me, as a bloodied veteran of the fusionist wars waged by field generals Frank Meyer and Brent Bozell, like something I’ve heard before.)
The FreeCons have a long way to go from where they are now to where they wish to go next: It’s a long road from “promising development” to “potent force” and the FreeCons will be obliged to do three things to have any chance of completing that passage. They will have to (1) identify some real, follow-me leadership, (2) agree on a coherent message, and (3) attach themselves to a galvanizing issue.
The leadership issue will probably resolve itself. There’s no headhunter in the world who, handed the job specs for “charismatic leader of embryonic political movement,” is capable of returning quickly with a batch of penny-bright prospects. The new leader will emerge from the FreeCon start-up frottage. Or not.
The message problem could be solved with the insertion of a single paragraph in the basic FreeCon manifesto (see it here). They could acknowledge that a citizen’s basic rights come not from a king or a tyrant or even from an improvisational form of self-governance, but from our Creator. From God.
I have looked over the list of manifesto signers. I know more than a score of them. They are believers, almost all of them, but I can imagine their challenge. As the boisterous FreeCon meeting wound down, as people began to check phones for airline departures, there would have been a few holdouts of the absolutist sort — a few people who would refuse to sign a document acknowledging the Creator’s role in any benefaction whatsoever. In the interest of comity, then, and in the hopes for an impressively long list of signatories, the hosts would have fudged the question. In the FreeCon manifesto, our basic rights as Americans come from . . . wherever. That’s how I imagine it went down, anyway.
There are some questions in political life, alas, that can’t be fudged. Not even Thomas Jefferson, the most rhetorically agile of the Founding Fathers, could fudge the rights question. (See the Declaration of Independence.) If you can’t define the origin of a human right, well then, to simply assert that right becomes an empty gesture and you are thus left with a factional document rather than a coalitional document. The FreeCon manifesto, as it stands, is a statement that cannot attract broad and potentially decisive popular support: It is thin-soup libertarianism, similar in its narrowed appeal to the soft socialism of the NatCon manifesto.
There comes a time in movement building, I learned during the fusionist wars, when the emerging leader is compelled to say to the persistent lady in the third row, “Thank you, Ms. Rand. That’s enough. We’re moving on now.”
As for the galvanizing issue, every man and woman even mildly interested in the FreeCon proposition must now be entertaining the possibility that there is indeed a God and that He loves all of His children unconditionally. How else to explain the arrival of Elon Musk, of all people, who has elevated the debt issue to the top of our national consciousness? How else to explain that it has been Elon Musk, of all people, who has reminded the American people why they have always preferred a less intrusive and less expensive and more republican form of government?
One doubts that the Trump–Musk political marriage will last until death do them part: They do not appear to be genial, for-better-or-worse types. The day cannot be far distant, one then guesses, when the hard, grinding work of fiscal recovery must be taken up by serious people looking for a galvanizing issue. Sounds like a FreeCon project.