In an earlier post I talked about the Great Awakening on the Right. And every day makes that claim more obvious. The old way of framing the agenda on the Right and those that championed that mindset are becoming less and less relevant. Fewer people even care to argue with these yesterday men anymore and are abandoning their sites and publications for more relevant sites.
All of that is clear. What isn’t clear is what comes next. The New Right is anything but monolithic, in point of fact it’s like a boiling pot.
I struggled to come up with a witty analogy for what the current situation could be described as. Here is an idea. Let’s say that Cold War Conservatism was like a tool that was cast from various metals to form an alloy. Anti-Communists, Social Conservatives and Fiscal Conservatives would be examples of some of those components. During the Cold War it more or less held together and to some extent it served its purpose. But because of the preferences of the metallurgist who formulated the alloy it included some materials that didn’t actually alloy very well but ended up as unassimilated lumps which made them weak spots in the structure. These weak spots would be the Neo-Cons and the Limousine Republicans. And he also left out some materials that would have made the alloy stronger or more useful but he didn’t care for their source. This would equate to when the Paleo-Cons like Buchanan were ejected twenty years ago.
When this tool began to crumble it no longer served its purpose so the owner has gone to another metallurgist and asked him to recast the tool. Well, waste not want not. So, the metallurgist took the scrap left from the old tool and broke it up and discarded the lumps that hadn’t alloyed previously and threw the rest in the crucible and melted it down and then added some of those previously excluded materials to the melt. This molten metal is currently mostly just potential. It has no known properties yet. Soon it has to be cast and cooled and tested to find out if it’s any better than the alloy before.
Okay, enough poetry. My point, right now we’ve decided that Conservative Inc. is broken. We’ve taken a sledge hammer to it and now we’re taking the good-looking chunks and throwing them into the melting pot and chucking clinkers like JEB! and Mitt and Bill Kristol and George Will into the slag heap. We’re also adding in some nationalism and some pro-normal-American identity politics into the mix. And right now, we have a molten mass that has no known properties, just potential. But soon it will coalesce into something. Now someone has to build the mold to cast it into a usable tool.
So, four hundred words into this word goulash I’m getting to my point. What’s next? What will this new thing look like?
First of all, I don’t think it will become a new political party to challenge the Republicans at the polls. Splitting the non-progressive vote is suicide. I think we continue to take over the Republican party. Most (but not all) of the truly hard core RINOs have done us the favor of retiring or switching sides. Without a doubt there are plenty of grifters still in Congress and the government in general just looking for the paycheck and the perks. But that’s not something that will ever change. But when the wind shifts our way these vampires will at least rubber stamp what the majority of the party endorses in order to keep their meal ticket punched.
But there has to be some organization to allow for the debate and consensus building that goes along with a movement. The old right had the GOP Establishment and the think tanks and the media entities like the National Review and the Weekly Standard to debate and communicate policy. We have none of that. We have blogs and a few mainstream media voices (Rush or Tucker) and then nothing. Some of these sources will expand. Some of the mainstream media (maybe Fox, maybe not) will jump on the bandwagon. But is a political organization necessary? Everyone remembers the fiasco of the Tea Party. The last thing people want is a raft of grifters sucking up funds and side-railing actual results. But how does any organizing get done? How do decisions and policy get decided? It doesn’t seem that everything can be done informally.
My guess is an umbrella organization could provide a way for local groups and single-issue groups to coalesce around a common platform. A consensus could be reached that allows politicians and activists to know what the deplorables are thinking. But how to get something like that going? A few ways occur to me:
- A social media site can provide functionality for the organization and communication needed to negotiate some kind of a policy platform.
- One of the existing think tanks can sponsor a convention either actual or virtual for the deplorables to attend and coalesce around. I’ve liked some of the people who have come out of Claremont Institute. Maybe that is a possibility.
- The Republicans might finally wake up and realize that they are throwing away the golden opportunity to represent their natural constituency. If they would analyze how and why President Trump was able to wash away their whole field of candidates and the Democrats, they would see that he threw in his lot with the normal people and rebelled against his own class. If the Republicans had the courage to follow his lead they would be rewarded with loyal voters.
- Finally, President Trump may have to do it himself. His own structure to organize the deplorables on a permanent basis would be another workable option.
I’ve said that it needs to be done but I’m not trying to kid anyone into thinking it will be easy. When I said that the New Right is like a boiling pot I wasn’t kidding. Chaos and kinetic energy are the only rules and there is absolutely no consensus between the various groups that make it up. They range from radical separatists who are busy storing ammo for the shooting war, to Tea Party civic nationalists who can’t figure out why John McCain didn’t get elected in 2008, to religious businessmen who want the government to stop persecuting them for their beliefs, to Rust Belt forgotten men who want to stop the globalists from putting the last nail into their economic coffins. Herding cats would be a cakewalk in comparison. But it will need to be done if we hope to avoid being back at the mercy of the Stupid Party.
It will be interesting to see if someone steps up to get the ball rolling. I’d volunteer myself but the day job keeps me pretty busy. But it’s an enormous opportunity for a savvy operator. I’m undecided whether it will be a silicon-valley type, or a media operator, or a venture capitalist, or another entrepreneur like Trump. Or maybe it will be one of the Dissident Visionaries who first recognized that the GOP Establishment were actually the Washington Generals.
But if it doesn’t happen, we could end up with the next generation of the Bush clan being foisted on us as the future of the right wing. Anyone old enough knows that’s how we got into this mess in the first place, GHW Bush telling us he was a conservative. If that happens, we run the risk of this whole project ending up on the slag heap. Total failure.
