Winter is coming for American conservatism
COVID-19 has been called the great accelerator for vaulting trends like WFH forward faster than they would otherwise have moved. Other trends such as net worth inequality also accelerated, though hardly anyone would call that a forward movement. The jury is still out on WFH, too, if we’re being honest.
Deliberatus believes you can add the death of American conservatism to the list of accelerated trends as well. Here’s why.
The self-inflicted decline of the Republican Party
Political storylines rarely have a defined starting point, but I put a finger on the 2008 financial crisis as the starting point for the Republican Party taking a turn for the worst. “True conservatives” had been slowly turning against George W. Bush as his presidency went on but his actions during the meltdown were the first time I remember the party’s far right vocally breaking from the Republican president.
Frustrations that the Bush-era GOP establishment turned its back on conservatism set the stage for far-right charlatans to dominate the Obamacare resistance that fueled the party’s success in the 2010 midterms. A phyrric victory if there ever was one. The Republican wave that year ushered into office a class of politicians who I saw firsthand had little to no interest in actual governing.
For the next five years we saw a steady decline/takeover of the delegate ranks by snake flag birthers who pushed actual conservatives out of the 2016 nomination contest, leaving the party with the biggest ideological fraud in American history at the top of the ticket. President Trump’s success at the ballot box came not from conservatism but from optimizing toward base emotions of people who couldn’t articulate why oBamaCaRE is SOciaLISm but insist that Jeb Bush is a moderate. Despite plenty of real conservatives giving it the opportunity to course correct, the party shows no signs of doing so and instead continues to allow itself to be hoodwinked by snake oil hustlers who wouldn’t know limited government if it stole their guns.
Failure to match the moment
COVID conservatism focused on the wrong things at the wrong time. “Leading” voices on the right spent so much time decrying lockdowns and masks or advocating for herd immunity and against vaccinations that two critical things happened.
First, they came off as completely out of touch to a public experiencing the pandemic first hand. Imagine how a nurse in an over-crowded hospital viewed the conservatives who insisted masks aren’t needed or aren’t effective. Or how the adult children whose parents sat alone in nursing homes ravaged by the virus must have felt hearing us insist herd immunity was the true way through the storm.
Seriously. Worse than missing the moment, this idiocy only played into conservatism’s perpetual misperception as an ideology lacking empathy.
Deliberatus believes few things are more damaging to a political movement than appearing out of touch with “the ordinary American.” Conservative “leaders” achieved this so completely during the first year of COVID-19 that you almost have to wonder if they did it on purpose.
The second critical negative result of conservatism missing the COVID moment is it led its own followers so far astray as to make the pandemic worse. The thing about people is, a lot of them like to be led. And when the voices who lead them think maskless gatherings and skipping vaccinations are the solution, guess what the sheep will do. They won’t get vaccinated. They’ll hold a motorcycle rally. They’ll catch and spread a deadly virus with no cure.
You cannot understate how disastrous this was, is and will continue to be. At a macro level, Sturgis was very likely a mega-superspreader event that seeded the virus across the upper midwest. At a micro level, the White House itself set off a cascade of cases leading all the way up to the president. At every level in between, the utter failure of conservatives to address the virus in a competent way helped the virus spread.
As it does, the fallout only grows. It took out their hero, President Trump, on Election Day. (If you can get them to believe it). It indirectly killed more than half a million Americans and left countless more with compromised care for other afflictions. You know the rest of the destruction COVID has wrought, there’s no need for me to explain.
Liberalism’s COVID orgy
While conservatives were distracted by masks and herd immunity, American liberals are going hog wild. Look no further than San Francisco for a view of what’s to come.
Universal basic income is here in the form of $1,000 monthly checks to every liberal’s favorite perpetual struggling community: artists. For six months starting next year, our friend the government will put a grand in their hand with no strings attached and no questions asked.
“The people selected for the program, once they start to get it, won't be subject to work requirements or other kinds of requirements that are accessed on other types of programs."
But Deliberatus, you might be saying, it’s just a pilot program. LMAO @ u. We all know what a government pilot program is: Just the beginning. The city’s Economic Recovery Task Force recommends begging the federal government to use some of its deficit-fueled budget to “provide dignity for all” through a universal basic income. Because true dignity comes once a month from the government. Yes, friends, UBI has come to San Francisco, and it’s here to stay.
Nationally it’s bombs away on universal health care, extending public school down to children age three, doing away with “quality of life citations that penalize people for their poverty,” reneging on student loan contracts, treating Internet as a basic right and literally anything the left can find a way to cram under the umbrella of COVID relief.
On the right…they seemed to finally accept the virus is real but are trying to tell us hospitals are no busier than a normal year. Yes, we have 600,000 deaths from a virus that didn’t exist last year and hospitals had enough extra capacity to handle all of them. Wait…a large portion of test results are false positives. And the virus has existed for two years. Besides, the FDA held off on authorizing the vaccine in order to prevent Trump from winning. Don’t live in fear! Or something. Such fools.
What a terrible waste of a crisis. With only minimal effort, Deliberatus can think of so many better ways for conservatives to have messaged the pandemic:
As an opportunity to clear out the regulations, mandates and taxes burying so many businesses pre-COVID in order to help them recover post-COVID;
As an example of how government is too large and clumsy to respond quickly when its people face a crisis, especially in contrast to how so many businesses—especially evil big ones—pivoted on a dime;
As an opportunity to explain why government should be less involved in health care, not more, because people wouldn’t be waiting on states and congress to act;
You can’t tell me those opportunities aren’t out there. The federal government will spend more than $6,000,000,000,000 this year. Where are the conservatives who point out what we could be doing to fight the pandemic if we weren’t wasting money on [insert literally anything here, but especially the things liberals love that wouldn’t stand a chance against the same dollars being spent on to address the pandemic.]? Making an example out of unpopular government spending should be a 101-level skill for conservative politicians. We should be hearing it from our state lawmakers, federal lawmakers and candidates up and down the ticket.
Instead we get…mask protests and a delusional belief that the election was rigged. What a political failure. What a political tragedy. Yes, I’m using the tragedy word. Not relative to the actual tragedies unfolding in hospitals and nursing homes everyday, obviously. Let’s allow ourselves the use of language and context like real thinking individuals.
The political tragedy is the way conservatives’ failed handling of the pandemic is elevating liberalism at a time when there could not be a worse prescription for America’s future than expanding our dependence on government. The consequences will play out for decades as more and more people are tricked into not recognizing that the hand they hold is the hand that holds them down.
For decades we’ve been tiptoeing up to the point where a majority of the electorate is prompted to vote by their desire to keep getting what’s “theirs” from the candidate who gave it to them. Decades from now, when UBI checks are delivered on national holidays and conservatism exists only as a memory, remember these days as when conservatives’ self-inflicted failures accelerated their own irrelevance.