{"id":1740581,"date":"2022-11-16T07:17:26","date_gmt":"2022-11-16T12:17:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1740581"},"modified":"2022-11-16T07:17:33","modified_gmt":"2022-11-16T12:17:33","slug":"national-conservatism-is-a-dead-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/national-conservatism-is-a-dead-end\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018National Conservatism\u2019 Is A Dead End"},"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\">12<\/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%2Fnational-conservatism-is-a-dead-end%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=1740581&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--><p>Since a civil war is about to break out and destroy the modern Republican Party \u2014 fingers crossed \u2014 let me tell you what grinds my gears.<\/p>\n<p>Young NatCons, many of whom I know and like, seem to be under the impression that they\u2019ve stumbled upon some fresh, electrifying governing philosophy. Really, they\u2019re peddling ideas that already failed to take hold 30 years ago when the environment was far more socially conservative and there were far more working-class voters to draw on. If Americans want class-obsessed statists doling out family-busting welfare checks and whining about Wall Street hedge funds, there is already a party willing to scratch that itch. We don\u2019t need two.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNational conservatism\u201d\u2014 granted, still in an amorphous stage \u2014 offers a far too narrow agenda for any kind of enduring political consensus. It lacks idealism. It\u2019s a movement tethered to the grievances of a shrinking demographic of rural and Rust-Belt workers with high school degrees at the expense of a growing demographic of college-educated suburbanites.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cNew Right\u201d loves to mock \u201czombie Reaganism.\u201d Well, the \u201980s fusionist coalition, which stressed upward meritocratic mobility, free markets, federalism, patriotism, and autonomy from the soul-crushing federal bureaucracy, was by all historical measures more successful than the Buchananism that followed or Rockefellerism that preceded. Zombie Reaganism was a dramatic success not only in 1980 but also in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.history.com\/this-day-in-history\/the-republican-revolution\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">1994<\/a> and again in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.usnews.com\/opinion\/blogs\/peter-roff\/2010\/11\/05\/measuring-the-size-of-election-2010s-republican-sweep\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">2010<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/politics\/archive\/2014\/11\/republicans-sweep-the-midterm-elections\/382394\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">2014<\/a>. The \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=c32G868tor0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">shining city on a hill<\/a>\u201d might sound like corny boomerism, but it\u2019s still infinitely more enticing than the bleak apocalypticism of Flight 93.<\/p>\n<p>Too many conservatives misconstrued Donald Trump\u2019s slim 2016 victory as a national realignment. It was a mirage. Trump, a uniquely positioned celebrity candidate, benefitted not only from Obama fatigue but, more than anything else, the cosmic unlikability of Hillary Clinton. Yes, the GOP needed an attitude adjustment, a stiffening of the spine. There is no denying Trump\u2019s presidency achieved some positive\u00a0results (most of them, incidentally, also on the \u201czombie Reaganism\u201d front with deregulation and the judiciary), and he made inroads with working-class voters and Latinos.\u00a0But Republicans have now blown three elections catering to largely incoherent NatCon populism.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>There is no one reason or person culpable for the right\u2019s failures in 2022, but there are certain types of candidates finding success. Ron DeSantis, Brain Kemp, and (in 2020) Glenn Youngkin can call out crony capitalism without sounding like Ralph Nader\u2019s comms director. All of them have been highly critical of lawlessness of illegal immigration, but none of them come off like chauvinists. All of them supported heartbeat bills and election integrity laws, and above all, they are competent administrators of government.<\/p>\n<p>The white-collar worker in Virginia or North Carolina, living in a multi-use neighborhood, probably isn\u2019t as preoccupied with drag queen story hour or the intrigues of Big Tech or the Justice Department or Chinese tariffs \u2014 as important as those issues might be \u2014 as Josh Hawley seems to believe. The suburban voter might be more socially liberal these days, but they are<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A rant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":831,"featured_media":1740584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[546],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1740581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-federalist"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740581","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\/831"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1740581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1740584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1740581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1740581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1740581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}