David, in your piece about the ways conservatives can move forward and start rebuilding following Donald Trump’s likely nomination, you write:
Fourth, reject the cult of celebrity in favor of building enduring, meaningful conservative cultural institutions. If the current election cycle has revealed anything, it’s demonstrated that large chunks of the celebrity Right — you know, the people who spent most of the last ten years or so calling out “RINOs” and proclaiming themselves the true arbiters of American conservatism — have proven that they’re little more than populist audience-whores, following where the lowest common denominator leads.
I agree with you about the need to reject the cult of celebrity. And maybe I am not understanding this paragraph correctly but I would warn against being afraid of calling out Republicans who are acting like Democrats and shaming those in Congress or outside of Congress who denounce them. I think the Republican party is partially in the current mess because pundits and others have all too often given a pass to conservative lawmakers who systematically betray what they claim to believe in. For example, the GOP hasn’t fully acknowledged the damage done by the multiple assaults to free-market and limited government principles during the Bush years: large spending increases, impressive increase in bureaucrats, Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, statements like “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market,” the 2007 “stimulus,” and more.
Also, I think that since 2010, Republicans in Congress — despite enjoying periods of relative power — have consistently failed to act in a way that is congruent with what they promise voters. Too many people have been wiling to give these lawmakers a pass in the name of saving their majorities. If I think of the last six years — with rare exceptions — it’s been hard to differentiate Republicans from Democrats, even taking under consideration that Obama was president. As the former president of the Club for Growth has rightly said: “What good is a majority if you aren’t going to use it? What good is being part of a team, if the team is the problem?” I would go further to say that doing nothing or doing bad things with a congressional majority should have serious political consequences, which, for better or worse, is what we are witnessing now with the rise of Trump.
The questions is what do conservatives stand for? I know what it means on the social side. But what about the economic side? What are the limits of government intervention in the economy? That has been unclear to me ever since George Bush championed the government bailout of big banks and Wall Street.
If conservatives continue to signal that all they are willing to fight for are social issues but are unwilling to fight for free-market principles, I predict that they will continue to have a problem. They will become the anti-freedom party in toto — in contrast to the semi-free Democratic party. This will sever their link with their own history of representing limited-government principles, while becoming even more philosophically unmoored and intellectually bankrupt. I’d wager that this won’t be a winning formula.