Earlier this month in Florida, the third National Conservatism Conference was held to promote a nascent movement on the right toward using the power of government for culturally and politically conservative ends.
As Reason Magazine descrives it: “What differentiates national conservatives from some other right-wing varietals is the desire to use government to destroy their enemies.”
Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, a champion of national conservatism, recently presented a “primer” on the sort of policy ideas preferred by NatCons.
These include “drastically reduc[ing] legal immigration from its current levels,” a rejection of laissez-faire economics in favor of tariffs and “a national industrial policy” and government intervention against technology companies.
As Reason’s Stephanie Slade summed up, NatCon activist Rachel Bovard, in a speech at the conference, “explicitly urged conservatives to use the government to break up tech companies, tax the endowments of left-wing universities, impose trade barriers, build a border wall and increase the size of the child tax credit.”
The common throughline here is the push to use government action to punish those they don’t like and reshape the American economy and society through selective prohibitions, regulations and subsidies.
The NatCons, then, are trying to mimic the tools and methods relied upon by the left to pursue illiberal ends.
This is precisely the wrong direction the American right should go. The reason America finds itself in its current plight of intense polarization is because both the Democratic and Republican parties have pushed America away from the limited government vision of the nation’s founders and toward one of increased government power and management of issues.
The ceding of greater and greater powers and responsibilities to government means there’s more at stake in every election because there are more things to bicker over through the horrible mechanism of government.
We already have a political faction, broadly referred to as the left, which encourages greater government control over matters. The right merely plays into the left’s hand by pushing to give government greater powers and greater means to try and manipulate human affairs according to the preferences of whoever is in office at the time.
Just as national conservatism is a poison currently leading the right in the wrong direction, a fondness for socialism is a long-running poison for the American left.
This past week, Pew Research Center found that 57% of Democrats and people who lean Democratic have a “positive impression” of socialism, compared to the national average of 36%.
While the vast majority of Republicans fortunately perceive socialism as a system that “restricts people’s individual freedoms,” 52% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning Americans deny this.
Socialism is fundamentally tyrannical. The dictionary definition is straightforward: “a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”
From Bernie Sanders to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the left has been steered in the wrong direction from their noble goals of improving the economic prospects of working families and ensuring no American goes without basic needs. Socialism? How’s it going in Cuba? How about Venezuela?
Governments that can barely be trusted to pave the roads or distribute unemployment checks competently cannot and should not be trusted to correct all of the ills of society. But that is the delusion Democrats are evidently operating under.
Both the left and the right need to purge themselves of the toxic devotion to government power and any preference for using the force of government to fulfill their visions.
Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com
