A conservative on The Conservative Movement

[zoogs]

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/9/22/12892682/donald-trump-samuel-goldman

Samuel Goldman, assistant professor of political science at George Washington University and frequent author at The American Conservative

I think the great message of Trump is that there really are not that many movement conservatives.

There is an infrastructure of journalists, intellectuals who are vested in a conventional combination of limited government, a relatively hawkish foreign policy, and a sort of religiously inflected public morality. There are a few hundred such people, and they all know each other. But it turned out that there aren't that many voters who actually care about these things — or at least cared about them in quite that combination. (...)

One of the developments that follows this election may be distance between the Republican Party and the conservative movement. I don't think that's a terrible thing, actually. I think conservatives became too comfortable assuming that the Republican Party automatically represented them, and Republicans became too comfortable assuming that their voters were conservative.

I don't think that's a terrible thing at all, either.

There's a lot to appreciate in this dialogue. Great work to Goldman and Beauchamp.

 

[TGHusker]

Interesting article. I think the presidency of GWB greatly damaged the conservative movement. Linking conservatism to the wars and at the same time the tax cuts had a devastating impact on conservatism.

War + Tax cuts = economic chaos Then you add the housing bubble bursting and it created a real disaster. The conservatism of Ronald Reagan became something far different under GWB. One led to long term peace and economic prosperity and the other to terror and an slow down to our economy that we only moderately recovered from.

The Dems have seemed to go full bore liberal. The republicans are in the midst of an identity crisis that I wonder if they will ever recover from. I do think there is room for a third valid party if

people could come together and compromise.

Liberal Dems

Moderate Repubs/Libertarian - may be hard to merge these 2

Conservative/ Constitutional

 

[BigRedBuster]

Interesting read. I had a hard time figuring out sometimes where he was trying to go with what he was saying.

But, I think the gist of the article is true. Conservatism as it is today, is in real trouble and I think there are lots of people who are delusional as to what exactly all this means.

I also found interesting what he says about conservatives under trump think they are a majority when they aren't. They need to come to that reality with a slap in the face.