Conservatism has been wrongly declared dead by both Democrats and avid Trump supporters, but that’s a misreading of the situation both in the US and elsewhere in the world.
As if to drive the point home, Scott Morrison, Australian Prime Minister and leader of the country’s conservative Liberal Party, won an upset victory yesterday (Saturday) over the Labour Party, which for three years running had been predicted to win. Morrison’s victory was a resounding defeat of the Labour Party’s campaign centered on the pseudo-science of global warming. That humiliating defeat has chased the story of Morrison’s triumph from the front pages of the US Progressive press, supporters of the Green New Deal.
In the US, despite the fact that President Trump is clearly not himself a conservative, every one of his political victories has come about when he has been reading from a traditional conservative playbook:
- Deregulation,
- Appointment of conservative, originalist judges,
- Tax reform,
- Military buildup, and
- Foreign policy restraint.
Despite Democrats’ hostile attitude toward conservatism, veteran Dem pols realize that the Green New Deal and impeachment are too far left for much of the voting population. Hence, Dem party leaders and the Democratic Party-linked press’s renewed interest in the candidacy of their old war horse, former Vice-President Joe Biden, who is being presented as a candidate of the center, of moderate Democrats.
While in the Republican camp…
Interestingly, it has been the moderate and Never Trump Republicans who seem to be least aware of the survival of conservatism in a significant fraction of the US population. US conservatives aren’t happy with Trump’s motor mouth that alienates potential US and foreign allies. But they pay more attention to what he does than what he says and give him credit for the judges he’s appointed, his all-azimuths energy policy, and for the thriving economy.
Not so, the moderate and Never Trump Republicans, who are fixated on what he says rather than what he does. A recent example of this phenomenon is Justin Amash, the Michigan Congressman who became the first Republican legislator to join the Democrats in calling for Trump’s impeachment. Amash claims that the Mueller report “identifies multiple examples of conduct satisfying all the elements of obstruction of justice, and undoubtedly any person who is not the president of the United States would be indicted based on such evidence.”
Come again? Trump is the President. Mueller was serving under presidential authority but doubtless would have indicted if he could have — but couldn’t. So, ironically, while veteran Democrats are trying to move their party toward the center in response to their awareness of the strength of conservatism in much of the citizenry, moderate and Never Trump Republicans are moving to the left, away from the party’s conservative base.
Larry Diamond, who has written the lead feature (“The Global Crisis of Democracy”) in this week’s Wall Street Journal Review section, is another case in point. Diamond is a scholarly specialist in democracy movements who tends to treat them as intrinsic goods. He helped foster the 2011 Tahir Square movement that overthrew Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a US-allied autocrat. This led to a subsequent election that was won by the Muslim Brotherhood. Diamond, in his Wall Street Journal feature, bemoans the ebbing of democracy worldwide, in favor of autocracies encouraged by Russia’s Putin and China’s XI. He links President Trump to this autocratic upsurge:
“Until recently, U.S. resolve had helped to hold back today’s main foes of democracy: an ambitious and rising China, a resentful and declining Russia, and a new wave of populist authoritarians from Hungary to the Philippines. Now, however, America’s own political decay is increasingly advanced. President Donald Trump has insulted U.S. allies, befriended Vladimir Putin, excused a grim list of other dictators, embraced nativist politics and movements, and shaken the post-World War II liberal order….
“All of this is tarnishing the overall luster of democracy—and pulling America away from the world. If we do not soon reverse this U.S. retreat, democracy world-wide will be at risk.”
Diamond, like Amash, is fixated on the Trump motor mouth rather than the more important Trump administration hands. Does Diamond really think the US would have been standing up more strongly against China and Russia’s hostile activities under a Hillary Clinton or [insert favorite 2020 Democratic candidate]? If so, that’s an argument he’ll quickly lose, in the wake of Hillary’s uranium giveaway to Russia and Joe Biden’s family business interests in China.
We’ve said elsewhere that we’d rather President Trump declared victory and endorsed his conservative Vice President for the Presidency in 2020. The Trumpian ego seems to have conclusively excluded that thought, so we’ll just have to work with what we have and try to bend the bad policies, such as protectionism, in a more favorable direction, while supporting the President in the good ones, contrary to Congressman Amash and Professor Diamond.
President Trump and Australian Prime Minister Morrison have courageously turned their backs on the anti-fossil-fuel crowd, and so far, to the distress of the New York Times and its allies, the voters seem to be following their lead. In both cases, it’s the conservative legislators that have made this possible by backing this firmness of policy by their chief executives.
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