That means some big changes. The United States should resist any binding international commitments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Surrendering any economic sovereignty for the sake of climate action is a foolish choice. Similarly, the president’s actions so far on the climate are poorly designed, economically destructive, and beyond his constitutional limits.
.. Directly pricing carbon, adjusting that price at the border, creating a technology-agnostic research and development agenda, and using our massive development engine to bring U.S. technological achievements to a broader market form the heart of a policy that conservatives can and should get behind. Couple any price on carbon with corresponding reductions to or the outright elimination of existing taxes, as well as the rollback of redundant regulations, and a conservative carbon policy can shrink the government and emissions alongside positive economic growth.
Yuval Levin: Right Casts Away Most Conservative Field in Memory
Republicans are frustrated with the party’s leadership on a range of issues, and want to see more assertiveness and combativeness in general on the Right. Assertiveness and combativeness in general—very general—is roughly what Trump seems to offer. But these Republicans are casting aside the most conservative presidential field in living memory in favor of the least conservative Republican presidential aspirant in living memory above all because he has been particularly forthright in advancing a kind of economic nationalism.
.. Populist-leaning Democrats, meanwhile, are frustrated with their shortage of options, and are not eager to be stuck backing a bungling, power-mad, Wall Street cipher with negative charisma.
What if the populist, nativist bloc of the party turns out to be larger than the intellectual conservative movement?
Back in August, the conservative writer Ben Domenech asked, in a prescient essay, “Are Republicans for freedom or white identity politics?” Trump, he said, threatened to reorient the GOP away from ideological conservatism, along the lines of right-wing European political movements. The divide within the GOP has long been described as the “establishment”—power brokers, donors, elected officials, consultants—versus the “conservative base.” But it’s increasingly clear there are two separate conservative bases within the GOP. There’s the intellectual conservative movement, a decades-long project of institutional actors like the Heritage Foundation and the American Conservative Union, which seeks to push the party toward strict adherence with a set of ideas about limited government, strong national defense, and the traditional family. And then there is the populist, nativist strain, which isn’t really about ideas so much as a raw appeal to emotion. Trump’s dominance of the primary field is forcing the party to confront a frightening prospect: that the populist bloc may be the bigger of the two.
When Donald Trump Met Edmund Burke
But from that simple conservative premise—that the law is paramount—comes the most radical policy offered by any Presidential candidate in either party this year: the involuntary removal of some three per cent of the American population. (One estimate is that it would cost about thirteen thousand dollars per immigrant to implement a Trump-like mass-deportation plan.)
.. Which of these responses is “conservative”? The father of modern conservatism is Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British political philosopher who was deeply suspicious of radicals of any stripe. Burke generally viewed prudence and stability as the guiding lights of conservatism. “A statesman, never losing sight of principles, is to be guided by circumstances,” he wrote, in an oft-quoted passage, “and judging contrary to the exigencies of the moment he may ruin his country for ever.”
.. Trump, who would have the federal government spend billions on mass deportation and fundamentally transform America, is a revolutionary conservative on immigration. Bush, with his emphasis on “practical plans,” and Kasich, who insisted Trump’s proposal “will not work,” spoke as Burkean conservatives.
.. The Burkeans have been losing ground in the Republican Party for a while now. Too often their old conception of conservatism strikes others in the G.O.P. as a form of surrender or, at the very least, an acceptance of the liberal status quo. When a successful Democrat has been in power for two terms, the Burkeans can appear too ready to accept the other party’s legislative victories. It is the political equivalent of stare decisis, the principle by which judges generally respect precedents, or things already decided, to maintain stability and social order.
.. Two of the big stories of the Republican primaries so far are how the Party’s grass roots have rejected Kasich and Bush’s Burkean approach to immigration and how the Party’s foreign-policy establishment has rejected Trump and Paul’s Burkean approach to the Middle East. The two candidates on the rise, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, seem to have a better chance at navigating this terrain.
..
On foreign policy, Rubio is in the revolutionary camp, often arguing, along with Bush, that America can and should enthusiastically intervene around the world to shape outcomes in our favor, though he is also careful to downplay the cost of such proposals in terms of troops sent aboard or dollars spent. Meanwhile, Cruz, though at times quite hawkish, has emphasized the limits of American power in the world.