The 1970s saw the proliferation of single-issue interest groups that constituted the New Right. The first Conservative Political Action Conference was held in 1973. In 1977, a year after losing the Republican nomination to incumbent Gerald Ford, Reagan addressed the conference. “The new Republican party I am speaking about,” he said, “is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat, and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism.”
.. American Affairs got its start as a blog, the Journal of American Greatness, whose objective was to provide, in the words of its most famous contributor, “a sensible, coherent Trumpism.”
.. It is not Trumpism but this larger concept that needs to be made sensible and coherent. I am speaking of nationalism.
.. It is not Trumpism but this larger concept that needs to be made sensible and coherent. I am speaking of nationalism.
.. When the Cold War ended, Mitchell writes, victorious elites in Washington, London, and Brussels began constructing a world where attachments to national identity would be attenuated or even severed. One would belong to a group above the nation — be a “citizen of the world,” an employee of a multinational corporation or NGO, a partisan of Davos, a subject of the EU — or to a hyphenated group below it.
.. Increasingly, power is shifted away from individuals elected to represent the political community toward unelected officials qualified to hold the positions responsible for administering the government — that is, providing for consumption. Like all managers, they derive their power from the administrative expertise and credentials that qualify them for office rather than from democratic legitimacy. They are accountable, that is, not to the political community but to the other managers that define their qualifications.
.. This lack of accountability has been highlighted again and again over the last 16 years. First 9/11 happened and no one was fired. Then Saddam turned out not to have had WMD and no one was fired. The economy came close to collapse — and the banks were bailed out.
.. This lack of accountability has been highlighted again and again over the last 16 years. First 9/11 happened and no one was fired. Then Saddam turned out not to have had WMD and no one was fired. The economy came close to collapse — and the banks were bailed out.
The Bow-Tied Bard of Populism
Tucker Carlson’s latest reinvention is guided by a simple principle—a staunch aversion to whatever his right-minded neighbors believe.
“I’m so pathetically eager for people to love D.C.,” he admits. “It’s so sad. It’s like I work for the chamber of commerce or something.”
If this boosterism seems out of character for a primetime populist like Carlson, he doesn’t seem to mind the dissonance. He speaks glowingly of his Northwest Washington neighborhood, a tony enclave of liberal affluence where, he tells me, he is surrounded by diplomats, lawyers, world bankers, and well-paid media types. They are reliably “wonderful”; unfailingly “nice”; “some of my favorite people in the world.” If you’ve watched Carlson on TV lately, you know they are also wrong about virtually everything.
.. “Look, it’s really simple,” Carlson says. “The SAT 50 years ago pulled a lot of smart people out of every little town in America and funneled them into a small number of elite institutions, where they married each other, had kids, and moved to an even smaller number of elite neighborhoods. We created the most effective meritocracy ever.”
“But the problem with the meritocracy,” he continues, is that it “leeches all the empathy out of your society … The second you think that all your good fortune is a product of your virtue, you become highly judgmental, lacking empathy, totally without self-awareness, arrogant, stupid—I mean all the stuff that our ruling class is.”
.. Carlson’s true talent is not for political philosophizing, it’s for televised partisan combat. His go-to weapons—the smirky sarcasm, the barbed comebacks, the vicious politeness—seem uniquely designed to drive his sparring partners nuts, frequently making for terrific television. Indeed, if cable news is ultimately theater, Carlson’s nightly performance is at once provocative, maddening, cringe-inducing, and compulsively watchable. Already, in its few short months in primetime, Tucker Carlson Tonight has created more viral moments than it had any right to do.
.. Though he has earned a reputation among his media antagonists for being an ambush artist—luring guests onto his show under false pretenses and then humiliating them with “gotcha” questions—Carlson says he’s always upfront while booking interviewees, and strives to avoid mean-spiritedness.
.. When I ask him why he was so infuriated by Duca, he thinks about it for a moment.
Finally, he answers, “It was the unreasonableness … It’s this assumption—and it’s held by a lot of people I live around—that you’re on God’s side, everyone else is an infidel, and by calling them names you’re doing the Lord’s work. I just don’t think that’s admirable, and I’m not impressed by that.”
.. the essence of Carlson’s case against the educated elites and well-heeled technocrats that comprise America’s ruling class (not to mention his neighborhood). They are
- too certain of their own righteousness,
- too dismissive of dissenters,
- too unwilling to entertain new ideas.
.. When Carlson first joined primetime last year, he assigned his show a mission statement: “The sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink.”
.. united in their hatred of a common enemy, the smug elites who Carlson rails against every night. And while he may have spent his life happily living among them, he’s clearly demonstrated he has no qualms about taking them on.
Death and Tax Cuts
And after all that inveighing against the evils of Obamacare, it turns out that they’ve got nothing.
Instead, they’re talking about freedom — which these days is the real refuge of scoundrels.
.. Jason Chaffetz insisted that the public outcry is just “a paid attempt to bully and intimidate”; Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, calls all anti-Trump demonstrations a “very paid, AstroTurf-type movement.”
.. flat tax credits, unrelated to income, that could be applied to the purchase of insurance.
These credits would be obviously inadequate for the lower- and even middle-income families that gained coverage under Obamacare, so it would cause a huge surge in the number of uninsured. Meanwhile, the affluent would receive a nice windfall. Funny how that seems to happen in every plan Mr. Ryan proposes.
.. This week, perhaps realizing how flat his effort fell, he began tweeting about freedom, which he defined as “the ability to buy what you want to fit what you need.”
.. Any plan that makes essential care available to everyone has to involve some restriction of choice.
.. Suppose you want to make insurance available to people with pre-existing conditions. You can’t just forbid insurance companies to discriminate based on medical history; if you do that, healthy people won’t sign up until they get sick.
.. It means that workers don’t have to fear that quitting a job with a large company will mean loss of health coverage, and that entrepreneurs don’t have to fear striking out on their own. It means that those 20 million people who gained coverage don’t have to fear financial ruin if they get sick — or unnecessary death if they can’t afford treatment. For there is no real question that Obamacare is saving tens of thousands of lives every year.
.. mainly they hate Obamacare for two reasons: It demonstrates that the government can make people’s lives better, and it’s paid for in large part with taxes on the wealthy. Their overriding goal is to make those taxes go away. And if getting those taxes cut means that quite a few people end up dying, remember: freedom!
How CPAC Helped Launch Donald Trump’s Political Career
Trump didn’t wing it entirely. He shrewdly picked issues ― abortion, guns and Obamacare ― to appeal to the GOP base, earning standing ovations when he pledged his conservative orthodoxy on these matters. The crowd (at least the non-Ron Paul-supportive elements of it) ate it up, while out in the halls there was palpable buzz.
.. Trump almost didn’t make it to CPAC that year. The gay-conservative group GOProud, which was waging its own battles with conference organizers, initially invited him.
.. GOProud’s former chairman Chris Barron thought of the idea of getting Trump to attend. He reached out to Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime confidant, about the possibility. They collectively agreed to the idea... “When Trump walked into the building, it was like Michael Jackson coming out of a Japanese airport. There were throngs of people around him,” he added. “From the moment when he walked into the door, I knew this was different.”
.. “The mere fact of showing up ultimately makes you more acceptable, because being nice to people and talking to them beats the hell out of calling them names,”.. “Though he does both.”.. “Here’s a person who’s willing to expand the party, the movement. Him being accepting to gays … is one of the biggest reasons why I thought young conservatives would accept him,” she said.