{"id":1684463,"date":"2022-10-12T03:19:20","date_gmt":"2022-10-12T07:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1684463"},"modified":"2022-10-12T03:22:27","modified_gmt":"2022-10-12T07:22:27","slug":"the-1980s-called-they-want-their-foreign-policy-back-and-republicans-to-finally-wake-up-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-1980s-called-they-want-their-foreign-policy-back-and-republicans-to-finally-wake-up-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1980s Called. They Want Their Foreign Policy Back And Republicans To Finally Wake Up"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">30<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-1980s-called-they-want-their-foreign-policy-back-and-republicans-to-finally-wake-up-2%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1684463&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><\/div>\n<p>Forty years ago, I wasn\u2019t even born. Joe Biden still had his own hair. Scott Hahn was a Presbyterian. And I know this is hard to believe, but the Republican Party in Washington was focused on tax cuts, inflation, and fighting proxy wars against Russia.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s the first lesson in conservative politics. The more things change, the more the GOP establishment stays the same. So one answer to the question, \u201cWhat\u2019s new on the New Right?\u201d is simply, \u201cThe times.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Frankly, I\u2019m not even sure \u201cNew Right\u201d is an accurate description of the populist, nationalist energy now driving the conservative movement. Republican leaders of Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney\u2019s vintage may be disoriented by a grassroots base skeptical of free trade, hostile to concentrated power in the public or private sector, and suspicious of globalist utopianism and military adventurism. But Calvin Coolidge and Robert Taft would be perfectly comfortable in such a coalition.<\/p>\n<p>Don\u2019t forget that the Moral Majority, Laffer curve, Cold Warrior, fusionist conservatism of the 1970s itself was once called the New Right, as it should have been. Ronald Reagan was different from previous conservative leaders and succeeded mostly because he answered <em>his<\/em> moment in history. He updated conservatism to meet the Soviet aggression, stagflation, and malaise that defined Jimmy Carter\u2019s America.<\/p>\n<p>But fusionism, for all its successes, isn\u2019t holy writ. It was simply a pragmatic clustering of interests to form a political coalition <em>in its time<\/em>.<\/p>\n<h2>Update Your Agenda, People<\/h2>\n<p>The problem conservatives face today isn\u2019t necessarily Reaganism, or the old fusionism. It\u2019s the Republican Party and the conservative movement\u2019s refusal to move on from it. One need not condemn post-Reagan Republicans as soulless, unpatriotic, corporate stooges to say, simply, that they were wrong and naive about the world <em>and America<\/em> after the Cold War.<\/p>\n<p>They supported George H.W. Bush\u2019s New World Order, Bill Clinton\u2019s push for the North American Free Trade Agreement and trade with China, and George W. Bush\u2019s grandiose fantasies at home and abroad. They high-fived each other for economic booms that turned out to be bubbles. And they ignored what was happening all over the country.<\/p>\n<p>Family breakdown. A slow-motion border invasion. The China shock. Corporate consolidation. Outsourcing and deindustrialization. The retreat from religion and rise of pornography and opioids. Also, all along, the slow but relentless cultic radicalization of the elite left.<\/p>\n<p>Every institution in American life \u2014 from marriage and the family to the church to corporations and labor unions to media and academia to government \u2014 is fundamentally different than it was the last time Washington conservatives were in touch with reality. In fact, most of those institutions have been seized and weaponized by the elite left to bully un-woke heretics not rich or connected enough to insulate themselves from cancel culture.<\/p>\n<h2>Snap Back to Reality, Oops There Goes Gravity<\/h2>\n<p><em>This <\/em>is why grassroots conservatives today are less interested in the issues that defined the Reagan, Newt Gingrich, Bush, or even the Tea Party eras. More urgent and frightening issues demand their attention. For instance:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The FBI arrested a pro-life activist \u2014 for two felonies \u2014 for defending his son from the foul-mouthed harassment of an abortion-facility escort. Now they\u2019ve indicted 11 more pro-life activists.<\/li>\n<li>Vice President Kamala Harris said the Biden administration would give hurricane relief resources based not on need, but racial and gender \u201cequity.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>The proudly woke Pentagon just announced the U.S. Army\u2019s first openly trans officer turns out to have been a Russian spy.<\/li>\n<li>PayPal, the world\u2019s biggest non-bank lender, announced they would fine user accounts $2,500 if a user violated their policy on \u201cmisinformation.\u201d (They\u2019ve walked it back since this speech was given, following public outcry.)<\/li>\n<li>California passed a law stripping parental rights of moms and dads who won\u2019t let doctors mutilate their kids for \u201cgender-affirming surgery.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This hasn\u2019t been in just the last few months or the last few years. This is just in the last few <em>days<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Across the country and around the world, the woke progressives running elite institutions are wielding de facto state power, criminalizing and punishing dissent with totalitarian ferocity. People are being threatened not just with losing their social media accounts, but their jobs, their children, and their freedom.<\/p>\n<p>Leading leftist politicians \u2014 not fringe characters but media darlings \u2014 are <em>already <\/em>talking about stripping the tax-exempt status of churches that oppose gay marriage. The Justice Department <em>still<\/em> considers parents who oppose the 1619 Project and Covid closures as \u201cdomestic terrorists.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Nothing in the last 30 years suggests the left\u2019s fascist orgy is going to abate. No one knows what lunacy will be next, but we all know what\u2019s eventually coming: throuples\u2019 rights, normalized pederasty, forcible euthanasia, post-natal abortion, the persecution of dissident faiths, and the disqualification of religious traditionalists and political conservatives from banking, property rights, and public benefits. In this environment, things like tax extenders, military procurement, and drug reimbursement formulae <em>really don\u2019t matter.<\/em><\/p>\n<h2>Toto, There\u2019s No Longer a Kansas Anymore<\/h2>\n<p>That\u2019s why, for instance, former House Speaker Paul Ryan\u2019s famously wonky \u201cRoadmap\u201d plan for fiscal reform fell on deaf ears outside Washington and a few other elite enclaves. Ryan, to his credit, wanted to make sure America was still solvent 40 years from now.<\/p>\n<p>What he and his fans never grasped was that the modern left doesn\u2019t intend for America to still be <em>America<\/em> 40 years from now. We are also much further down <em>their<\/em> \u201croadmap\u201d than most professional Republicans prefer to acknowledge.<\/p>\n<p>Woke activists and their enablers \u2014 the rich, white privileged liberals terrified of being canceled themselves \u2014 now control most Americans\u2019 ability to communicate and share information. They control our education and health care systems. They control almost all large corporations, including those that make small business and mortgage loans.<\/p>\n<p>They control access to our electoral process and economic markets. They are using their power to slowly narrow the opportunities of social conservatives and religious traditionalists to access these institutions.<\/p>\n<p>Forty years ago, the great threats to the permanent things, in the United States and across the West, were Soviet communism and Western socialism. Today, it is the axis of Big Tech, Chinese, and corporate totalitarianism: what I call the Woke Industrial Complex.<\/p>\n<h2>Conservatism Turned Up to 11<\/h2>\n<p>Defeating it \u2014 rescuing America <em>from <\/em>it \u2014 will not require conservatives to abandon our principles, but to double down on them. Properly considered, populist, nationalist \u201cnew\u201d conservatism is in many ways just conservatism turned up to 11.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not half-hearted slogans about de-regulation and free enterprise. It is a radical commitment to defending the family from the relentless assault of technology, anti-human ideology, and economic exploitation.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, prioritizing the family in this moment absolutely means <em>de-prioritizing<\/em> the financialization and globalization of our economy, which has done so much damage to the \u201clittle platoons\u201d that protect individuals, families, and communities from the elite ambitions always at their throats.<\/p>\n<p>But today as always, conservatism stands for freedom against <em>both<\/em> license and oppression. For sovereignty against both xenophobia and globalism. For the family against both statism and atomization. For \u201cwe the people\u201d against the elite and the mob.<\/p>\n<h2>Divest, Boycott, Sanction Washington D.C.<\/h2>\n<p>No true conservative would disagree. But nor would any conservative seriously contend that those unchanging principles could only ever be reflected by open borders, free trade with enemies, economic corporatization, and an Amazon warehouse in every town.<\/p>\n<p>New times bring new challenges, which call for new political coalitions and new policy priorities. Some of that will require, as my friend Russ Vought recently <a href=\"https:\/\/americanmind.org\/salvo\/renewing-american-purpose\/\">argued<\/a>, a \u201cradical constitutionalism\u201d divesting power from Washington and federal funding from woke-weaponized public institutions.<\/p>\n<p>Some of it will require more activist intervention in the economy than Republicans have supported in recent decades: antitrust enforcement, forcibly divesting our financial sector from China, and applying a regulatory structure to new technologies.<\/p>\n<p>Americans today are at the mercy of distant forces, our livelihoods dependent upon the arbitrary whims of power. Our problems, once localized enough to be addressed by the little platoons or by the so-called \u201cmediating institutions,\u201d are now vast and globalized, and the tools the conservative right has always relied upon are dismantled \u2014 because we\u2019ve allowed them to be.<\/p>\n<p>We can no longer tell communities to \u201csolve problems locally\u201d and have \u201cneighbors take care of neighbors\u201d when our communities have been cratered by de-industrialization, opioids, and globalism. We can\u2019t tell families to do the work of raising emotionally secure, competent, and educated citizens when it is the policy of our government to tax marriage and make having children a luxury good. And we can\u2019t tell our churches and synagogues to fix our spiritual crises when the political right trembles and crumbles before every attempt by the left to banish virtue from public spaces while using the government to persecute people of faith.<\/p>\n<h2>The Old Right Was Wrong<\/h2>\n<p>I want to be very clear about something. The moment we now find ourselves in is, in some ways, simply the consequence of progress, the slow creep of modernity. But it is also the result of a specific set of policy choices made and endorsed by the political right. If the \u201cNew Right\u201d is to mean anything at all, it must be the humble acknowledgment that the right, as a matter of policy, has sometimes been wrong.<\/p>\n<p>It has been wrong about engagement with China, wrong about consequence-free free trade, wrong that \u201ccorporate monopolies are good, actually,\u201d wrong that unfettered immigration benefits U.S. workers, and wrong about the idea that the market would somehow correct for the left\u2019s slow march through the cultural, educational, and political institutions.<\/p>\n<p>A recognition of this fact does not call for arrogance. It does not call for spiking the football or gotcha politics. It also doesn\u2019t mean we should dump centuries of philosophical tradition overboard. Rather, re-orienting the political right calls first for humility, skepticism, and creativity. Most of all, it calls for hard work.<\/p>\n<p>Today, the right must understand that the things we cherish, the permanent things that make life worth living \u2014 family, faith, community, nation, and human dignity \u2014 do not just happen. They must be actively defended \u2014 at times against the government, and at times with the government working to create the space for a free people to flourish.<\/p>\n<p>Freedom, after all, is not a negative good. It is not simply enough, at this juncture, to \u201cget out of the way.\u201d Rather, freedom is a positive set of conditions that must be pursued, promoted, defended, and achieved for a meaningfully free life to follow.<\/p>\n<p>So maybe what\u2019s new about the New Right is our willingness to see that fact \u2014 and to do something about it.<\/p>\n<p><em>This article is an edited version of the author\u2019s remarks to the Restoring a Nation conference on Oct. 8, 2022.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  Rachel Bovard is The Federalist&#8217;s senior tech columnist and the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute.  She has more than a decade of policy experience in Washington and has served in both the House and Senate in various roles, including as a legislative director and policy director for the Senate Steering Committee under the successive chairmanships of Sen. Pat Toomey and Sen. Mike Lee. She also served as director of policy services for The Heritage Foundation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forty years ago, I wasn\u2019t even born. Joe Biden still had his own hair. Scott Hahn was a Presbyterian. And I know this is hard to believe, but the Republican<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":573,"featured_media":1684467,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1684463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1684463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/573"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1684463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1684463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1684467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1684463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1684463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1684463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}