 The labels liberal and conservative dominated political discourse for decades in post-World War Two America. In terms of defining the positions of the people who claimed one label or the other, both labels have proven elastic to the point of absurdity. A conservative of the 1950s, for example, may have supported racial segregation in public and private facilities, opposed New Deal programs such as Social Security and agricultural subsidies, and though anti-communist to the core, would have been suspicious of any aggressively interventionist foreign policy. No self-identifying conservative would hold these positions today. Liberals have suffered a worse fate. Beginning in the 1990s, liberals swapped out the label liberal for the more accurate label progressive. True liberals, especially those who support the first, fourth, and fifth amendments and are skeptical of foreign entanglements, are few and far between. As all diligent students of American political history know, false dualisms are the bane of American politics. The venerable two-party American system is not made up of two political parties, if by party one means a group of people who share strong ideological commitments and policy goals, but a coalition of groups jockeying within the parties to steer the party toward embracing its ideas and policies. European political parties are far more unified and exercise far greater discipline over their members than the Democrats and Republicans. The occasional splintering that occurs in Tory or Labour ranks is a constant among Democrats and Republicans, though underreported by our incurious media. The Pew Research Center has published for decades a linear study of the shifting sands of the coalitions which make up the Republican and Democratic parties. In the Center’s most recent study, “Beyond Red and Blue: The Political Typology,” published in November 2021, Pew found the Republican and Democratic party coalitions to be constructed in the following manner.
Pew breaks down these groups by education, age, ideological commitments, ethnicity, and political attitudes. A cursory glance will reveal considerable overlap among certain groups, for instance one may question what exactly distinguishes Progressives from Establishment Liberals, and certainly the “Stressed Sideliners” may have more in common with each other than with the parties with whom they identify. The report is well worth a read, but its usefulness is limited by the fact that the party coalitions do not necessarily resemble the governing coalition in Washington, D. C. The two most important groups in the ruling coalition in Foggy Bottom are the Progressives and Establishmentarians. The Progressives are best defined as those politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, college and university faculty, and government contractors who place a high value on “expertise” and credentials, viewing these as a license to shape and direct the implementation of public policy. The world of the Progressives is located in the country’s great metropolitan centers, peopled by folks holding advanced degrees and high positions in the worlds of finance, technology, academia, and government. It is, ironically, a parochial bubble of confirmation bias, an echo chamber of biases that holds in contempt the people who are not members of this exclusive tribe. Overlapping the Progressives are the Establishmentarians, men and women who hold the senior and mid-level positions in the federal bureaucracy, and in the business and financial firms dependent upon or in symbiotic relationship with the federal government, as well as the lobbying firms of K street in D.C. These are the true legislators and the true executors of the law at the federal level. They have the most important seats at the table in the bill writing and amendment process; they are the gatekeepers for the implementation of policy. Other less important groups exist in D.C. On the left the Neo-Jacobins, perhaps best exemplified by the members of “The Squad,” are critical of the corporatist and fascist tendencies of the Progressive-Establishmentarian axis, but they are too few in numbers to matter much beyond generous media coverage which only distorts their real influence, which is modest at best. The few attempts of “The Squad” in 2019 were easily rebuffed by Nancy Pelosi, a stalwart of the Progressive faction. The Libertarian faction is a faction of one as Representative Thomas Massie is the only consistent defender of liberty in the Congress, occasionally joined by backbenchers such as Virginia Representative Ben Cline, and even on occasion members of “The Squad,” particularly in opposing foreign aid to Israel. (To be fair to Massie, he opposes aid to every foreign country.) The much more important rising force in American politics is the resurgence of the Populists and their assorted allies in the Freedom Caucus. Populism, whether in its nineteenth century incarnation, George Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency in the late sixties and early seventies, or its current form centered around Donald Trump, emerges as a movement of protest against distant elites who are disdainful of ordinary people and their concerns. Populists are not libertarians, though there is often an overlap in their concerns. Populists, however, are less concerned with the size and the scope of government than they are with the orientation of the government’s policies. For example, Mr. Trump, who is campaigning as a Populist, has recently announced a platform advocating a significant increase in tariffs. In fairness to Mr. Trump, his platform also includes corporate tax cuts and a less interventionist foreign policy. Populism has always had a pragmatic streak to it, its concerns center less upon ideological positions than upon a desire to eradicate what they view as self-aggrandizement of the members of the Progressive-Establishmentarian axis and to enhance the well-being of the common person. Thus, high tariff rates and a restrictive immigration policy are viewed by Populists as necessary protections for Americans living in fly-over country, even though such policies do little to contain the size of government. The reason the Populists represent a significant threat to the Establishmentarians and the Progressives has little to do with violence or rhetoric inciting violence. Indeed, any cursory search of the internet will reveal an abundance of violent rhetoric on the part of members of the left. Populism is enough of a threat to the status quo’s power and ill-gotten gains from the public purse. Populist and Populist leaning Republicans in the House have uncovered a good deal of the rot and corruption in American society. Collusion between the leading tech firms and the federal government to censor unapproved views, conflicts of interest in the medical bureaucracy in the acceptance of vaccine royalties from the companies they are supposed to regulate, a Pentagon that cannot pass an audit and cannot account for 20 trillion dollars of missing funds, a weaponized DOJ; rogue intelligence agencies hatching a “Russian hoax,” to unseat a sitting president etc. Just holding the investigations is an existential threat to the Progressive-Establishmentarian con. What is missing in this political cosmos are the liberals and conservatives, species of homo politicus now nearly extinct. Members of the Left, once staunch defenders of the first, fourth, and fifth amendments have become staunch enemies of the civil liberties of their fellow citizens. The covid tyranny placed the last nail in the last coffin of liberalism. As for the members of Congress who deem themselves conservative, allow me to quote Burke, “The revenue is the state.” In the American context, when has a modern “conservative,” or a Progressive, an Establishmentarian, or Populist for that matter, lifted a finger to reduce the revenue to reduce the state? What exactly are the conservatives claiming to conserve? Indeed, Americans have come a long way. At the beginning the country’s political awakening, the people and their leadership were nourished on the solid food of Cato’s Letters (after the Holy Bible the most common book in colonial American libraries), the letters of Viscount Bolingbroke, and the speeches and pamphlets of the Old Whigs and Country Tories. The message was simple and clear, beware of political parties and their alienation of the patriot’s loyalty to his country, beware of corruption, beware of governments who bribe with offices, sinecures, and the public treasury. The old America saw in large activist government a terrible danger to the liberties and the civic virtue of the people. Today, the governing factions are competing to control and direct the very thing, the bloated and corrupt federal empire, which has undermined the country and its patrimony. If the Populists are the least guilty here, they are naïve to believe they will be able to reform corrupted institutions and practices of governance that afflict us. Jumping the shark is not a best practice. Only when this lesson has been absorbed can a real reform begin, the shrinking of the federal state and a return to the principles of the Confederation. Now that is a truly conservative reform.
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