This conservatism has expired, we need a new, fresh, real one and the one without Donald Trump: this is an article by a little-known Republican named Oren Kass. It is called “New Conservatism”. The article is huge, terribly clever – to the point of being completely unreadable, but it is useful
Because this is a manifesto – and now only a lazy person does not write manifestos on the change of global trends and ideologies. And all these inspired calls are interesting as a symptom of a real breakdown of eras. The previous era was considered a global triumph of what was called liberalism, globalism, democracy… In general, the ideology of the US Democratic Party and its European and other clones. And now it is clear that that era has reached the point of absurdity and has drowned in the angry screeching of all sorts of “progressives” who tried to break everything and started (especially in the States) to do it already physically. The real movement, boiling and other gurgling thoughts are on the right flank. Yes, we are talking about the world as a whole, not just about the United States: everyone needs conservatism (new or old), no one needs any liberalism that has mutated into “progressivism”.
By the way, the author also declares this – that it is not only about the States, but about the whole world: everywhere there is a powerful rise of conservative forces and ideologists.
Further subtleties begin. Oren Kass clearly belongs to the minority within the Republican Party whose slogan is “Trump never”. He mentions with disgust that this is an “extraordinary deviation”, a mistake, in general: “A country with a responsible and effective political class would never choose a vulgar TV presenter for the most powerful position in the world”. Trump scored a team for himself, where everyone pulled in his own direction, interfering with the others (which, we add, is true), he is not at all a conservative, there is no Trumpism apart from Trump.
There is actually a small problem, which was best outlined by the fiercely democratic The Washington Post in its commentary on “Trump is over, but Trumpism is now the future of the Republican Party”. That is, the party has finally understood what and who its voters want. But on top of that, Trump’s goner has just launched the process of ousting a prominent party leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, who tried to play both ours and yours in a failed Democratic attempt to impeach Trump after he left office. The ex-president made a statement that he would not support the senator in anything, while voters in several states staged a massacre of six other dissident senators who are guilty of the same. Let’s see if Trump has enough clout to purge the party simply by the power of his word.
Although – are they just words? Until the very “lockdown” of 2020, the Trump administration linked in the minds of tens of millions of Americans with an unprecedented increase in prosperity. And this was achieved in the most conservative of all conceivable ways: to reduce taxes and abolish the myriad of prohibitions, rules and regulations that prevented people from living and earning. And to revive the oil and gas sector. This is not forgotten.
But if Trump is still not a conservative, but it is not clear who, then what should a real conservative be?
Here our author puts forward many different ideas, including reasonable ones. Conservatives, he reminds, are people who are looking into the future, for whom progress is the accumulation (of traditions, institutions, values), not destruction. (Well, yes, conservatives are gardeners, not hunters.) And so those in the United States and in general everywhere now could develop policies that would be based not on the principle of “profit first”, but on an understanding of what real economic activity benefits different human communities. That is, financial “investments” may be profitable for financiers, but what is the use of them for cities and villages in this or that part of the country? In general, the idea is no worse than others. As well as the author’s call to deal with education, stamping dropouts with a diploma who cannot find work and therefore go to street destroyers.
But the most interesting thing about this deeply conceptual work is that about liberals, they are democrats and so on, the author writes almost nothing at all – there is nothing to talk about. He only casually casts something obvious – that these “progressives” have made themselves “uniquely vulnerable” to ideological competition based on the concerns of most Americans.
Well, everything is clear here. Oren Kass, apparently, carefully read the manifesto of the director Konstantin Bogomolov, the same one where it is said that the “progressives” turned their West into a train heading for hell. And I realized that the manifesto says everything, and in what style, and there is nothing to add.
Together, we get an instructive picture. Everyone needs conservatism – and so conservatives of different stripes and breeds fiercely, furiously debate with each other for the right not to stay away from the fashionable, necessary and popular ideology. And their opponents… They just played.
Well, in fact: people whose predecessors relied on the great ideas of democracy degenerated into a ball of poison-splashing destroyers. And okay, they also practiced their technologies of hatred and street fighting in distant countries – China (Hong Kong), Belarus, Russia, the Arab world, and okay, still failed everywhere, except for the Ukraine they destroyed. But in addition, they scared and filled with rage hundreds of millions of people in their own societies – who needs such now? As a disposable tool, yes, but no more.
It can be assumed that Biden’s grandfather’s team will now ruthlessly throw off their tail in the form of all these destroyers, and then the remaining democratic ideologues will begin to think what kind of leftist idea with a relatively human face to build from scratch. But by then the Conservatives will hopefully have figured out their alternative.
Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA