One thing that really bugs me about modern day, Fox-watching ‘conservatives’ is how little interest they have in maintaining and expanding the institutions that have made America great. I receive blank stares or even hostility when I talk about supporting institutions that I consider fundamentally conservative, and even WASPy-hegemonic. Somehow, the MAGA-partisans have convinced themselves that these institutions are Maoist at heart. Among these institutions are the major educational institutions of the USA — public schools, public libraries, universities, non-profit journalism, and real ‘think tanks’. We should be supporting copy-cat institutions abroad, and yet the MAGA-partisans are committed to destroying them at home.
Maybe the problem is that I’ve been influenced by northeastern liberalism; forgive me, but I view the ‘establishment liberals’ of the 1950s to be traditional authorities (perhaps even going back to some Anglosphere grandees of earlier days, like Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin). I’m thankful for the writers, film-makers, scientists, and educators who have encouraged so many people around the world to learn my native language (English), even if MAGA denigrates them.
If you talk to MAGA folk, you’d think that being ‘conservative’ means respecting the people who killed Abraham Lincoln and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who fought under his leadership. I see people like Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates as the quintessential American conservatives, and yet MAGA folk consider common-sense, pragmatic leadership like building schools and improving medical treatments to be some newfangled deep-state conspiracy.
So MAGA does not qualify as conservative in my book. Not by any means. But the really painful thing is that they aren’t republican either. I guess that makes them RINOs. They want “RINO” to mean someone who is insufficiently loyal to their party, but to me it means someone who is disloyal to the Republic of the USA — with its separation of powers and regular peaceful transfers of power. I think we’ve reached the point where the Democratic Party is the natural home for both conservatives (focused on what has made our country great) and progressives (focused on making it better); both republicans (focused on institutional structure) and democrats (focused on broad accountability). Let’s pull together and get it done.