Reaping the Whirlwind: The Conservative Dilemma

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

Hosea 8:7

With the 2024 election looming like an autumn iceberg in the mist, many people, liberals and conservatives, are wondering: “How did we get here?” How is it that, with the world collapsing around us on multiple fronts, we’re again stuck with two doddering octogenarians, who no one really wanted, vying for the presidency, in the political version of New Coke vs. Crystal Pepsi. A whopping 25% of voters say they don’t want either guy. USA, USA!!!

(and yes, I know that Trump is only 78, but anyone who is not quite sure of his own son’s age is an honorary octogenarian in my book — “He’s pretty young,,,I will say, he’s 17” — Barron is 18).

On the structural side of the “how did we get here?” question is the stranglehold that the two major parties have on the political machinery of elections, and the deeper stranglehold that the plutocrats have on those political parties. We all intuitively know that the wealthy have too much influence in DC (that’s the anodyne phrasing used by polls, and it scores high across the political spectrum), but by the time the Polarization Industrial Complex (PIC) gets done with its work, the waters get muddied and people end up moaning about nebulous threats like “special interests,” the Deep State, and crony capitalism (the last term is closest to the truth, but still off). We just can’t quite face the simplicity of the structural facts: the wealthy and powerful have purchased the organs of government and mass communications, and they put those products to use in serving their own interests, and not of regular people. That’s it. That the deal — full stop.

For the purposes of this piece, we won’t dwell on these mechanisms of plutocracy directly. Instead, let’s look at the quagmire that Conservatives have gotten themselves into, and how that could play out if Trump gets back into office in November. Conservatism has painted itself into a cultural-philosophical corner, and it’s not clear that the majority of the GOP, and Trump supporters more generally, really understand the full extent of what they signed up for.

Back to the Future

The roots of the current Conservative dilemma trace back to the anti-Clinton fever of the mid-late 90s. With his triangulation approach, Clinton pivoted the Dems away from traditional working-class, union-centric issues, in pursuit of the money emanating from the rising technocratic classes (lawyers, finance professionals, tech industry players). Commentators often bemoan this Democratic betrayal of “regular middle class folks,” urging a re-embrace of unions and blue-collar, kitchen table issues. But the world of work has changed too much, and the economic value of labor will continue to decline globally, making any older approaches like re-organization of unions non-feasible. See many of my earlier posts for background on this, and why a completely different approach (UBI, BHBs, and MMT) is the only way forward.

But for now, back to the 90s. The GOP realized that Clinton was side-stepping the usual terms of partisan engagement, and turning the Dems into a second, alternative party for Big Money. The old battle script called for the Country Club/Board Room GOP to go up against the hardscrabble coalition of minorities, women, and the poor championed by the Democrats. But with the new Clintonite approach, Dems were hitting up the plutocrats with gusto, eroding the GOP from within.

As the rich-but-socially-liberal captains of industry moved to the business-friendly Democratic party, the GOP needed to remake itself for the new reality. The response of the GOP to Clinton set the party off on a path that would eventually lead to Donald Trump. Rather than explicitly filling the void left by the Dems abandonment of the working class, Conservatism itself pivoted to the vitriolic, dualistic route, where the Clintons were denounced personally, and where liberals in general were demonized as enemies of America.

Republicans had the chance to reset the rules of partisan engagement on purely economic terms, where they would now represent the interests of the little guy against the rich fat cats. They could have thrown full support behind unions, defending workers against owners and management. They could have made a straight-up economic pitch to minorities, women, and the working poor, highlighting Clinton’s draconian changes to the welfare system. They could even have explicitly explained that the two main parties were undergoing a reversal in economic polarity, with the rich now aligned with the Dems, and the GOP as the new party of the economically downtrodden.

But the historical baggage of the Republican party would not allow this course. The anti-integration backlash still drove much of the conservative support for the GOP, especially in the South, and that put a damper on any full-scale embrace of minorities as a main source of party identity. And there was still far too much Big Money power in the GOP to allow for a platform driven by working-class issues.

Instead, the 90s saw the early flowering of hyper-polarization, the natal movement catalyzed and facilitated by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. This made cosmic conflict the dominant cultural and political motif, with Good-vs.Evil as the central operating principle.

Newt & Rush

Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House from 1995–1999, the first time the GOP had controlled the House in 40 years. But despite being the winners, with the victory driven by the Contract With America, Gingrich still acted as if they had lost. He made obstruction the name of the game, blocking anything and everything that Clinton wanted. He pioneered many of the tactics that make Congress so hated today: government shutdowns, debt-ceiling hostage theatrics, massive earmark spending to reward loyalty, vitriolic personal attacks capstoned by the impeachment of Clinton for the Lewinsky scandal, during which Gingrich was carrying on his own extramarital affair.

Rush Limbaugh was at his peak in the 90s, drawing upwards of 20 million weekly listeners. It is hard to over-emphasize Limbaugh’s role in birthing the partisan landscape that now all trudge through. When you think of stock terms used by Conservatives today (“libtard,” “feminizi”), chances are that were coined or popularized by Limbaugh. He was, after all, in the entertainment business, and nothing sells like conflict and bombast. His relentless attacks on the Clintons laid the groundwork for, and regularized, the ad hominem strategy that would spread like a cancer through the body politic and society at large.

The late 90s was an inflection point in American history and politics. Both major parties had become fully-purchased subsidiaries of the plutocracy. And that necessitated the emergence of the Polarization Industrial Complex, whose task was to create a new symbolic universe, an artificial terrarium of discourse where each “side” was pitted against the other as its arch-enemy. The plutocrats then watched the struggles going on inside the artificial bubble, continuing to operate the levers of real power to their ever-ballooning advantage. Pioneers like Gingrich and Limbaugh provided the initial fuel for this new polarized universe, which is now fully emergent.

Reality vs. Terrarium

After the pivot in the 90s, things were humming along quite nicely for the plutocrats (they seem to do well in good times and bad — go figure). But the world inside the polarized terrarium was starting to consume itself. Since the economy and society as a whole were not being run to make the lives of regular people better, conditions on the ground deteriorated, which made the people angrier, driving the dualistic, demonizing rhetoric to the extreme. The evil Other was painted in increasingly cartoonish hues.

This is the backdrop for the Conservative dilemma today. Polarization has created a bizarre coalition of fundamentally disparate elements inside the GOP. The Big Money core is still there: oil & gas industry, Insurance industry, real estate industry. But 30 years of dualistic condemnation of liberals has given other elements control over the Republican party. And these elements are defined mainly by what they hate: anti-immigrant, anti-feminism, anti-abortion, anti-woke, anti-trans.

For a while after the Gingrich-Limbaugh Big Bang, the moneyed classes in the GOP were able to exploit these culture warrior strands for votes and campaign donations, while continuing on with economic bussiness-as-usual when in power: tax cuts for the rich, welfare cuts for the poor, privatization of public resources, free trade, anti-union, and deregulation everywhere. But eventually, polarization reaches escape velocity and bursts its bonds. You can only feed people on rage and resentment for so long. At some point, a true believer in the hateful rhetoric will come along and actually take power. And then, you reap the whirlwind.

Trump & Project 2025

We’ve already had a taste of what Trump can do, but in that previous term, no one was really ready on the GOP side to fully exploit the situation and enact a targeted agenda. So for the most part, Trump bumbled around and served up a smorgasbord of policies: normal tax cuts and deregulation for Big Money players, cruel and hamfisted border and immigration measures, a Wall definitely not paid for by Mexico, a botched response to Covid, and other general stuff that made the stock market happy (although the markets always seem to be happy in the long run, as it mostly a plutocratic playing field).

If Trump wins again this year, his presidency will be much more ruthless and relentless than the first time around. Caught off guard by the 2016 victory, the true believer architects of the conservative agenda are ready this time. A huge policy document called “Project 2025” has been created for Trump’s new reign; he can just plug-and-play it, letting his loyalists do the heavy lifting on all the actual policy stuff, while he sets out on his promised Revenge and Retribution tour, smiting his enemies in all the land.

Seventy percent of Republicans still believe that the 2020 election was stolen, despite zero evidence. That is the power of polarization, When the assertion that Liberals and Democrats are evil has been drummed into your head for three decades, and when all your information is filtered through a Good-vs.-Evil worldview, then the fantastical becomes real, and falsity becomes truth.

But despite that 70% figure, I still think that most Conservatives don’t truly believe that Trump can do anything that bad or extreme if he takes power again. While his avid devotees view him as an avenging angel sent by God to punish the wicked, a much larger number of Conservatives still see him as a kind of exaggerated provocateur, a performer who will use power mostly just to symbolically own the libs while also doing the more important work of bringing down inflation, boosting wages, and slashing wasteful government spending. In other words, many moderate Trumpists see him as a loud-but-sensible corrective to the true extremism in America: liberalism.

As you might expect, I see this belief as incredibly off-base. If it was just Trump to deal with, then that the danger of extremist overreach might not be a big deal. After all, Trump will eventually die, probably sooner than later. And there will probably not be a similar personality in many years, as he is a unique combination of showman and relentless ideologue.

But it’s not just Trump. His legacy will be the personnel and the apparatus put in place, the polarized infrastructure of conservatism that would pre-figure a completely different United States from the version we have now. I don’t think moderate conservatives are ready for this kind of country, a nation more at home with the autocracies and dictatorships popping up all over the world. Is the US fated to just be the biggest autocracy in the world, forming a Big 3 with China and Russia?

Let’s be more specific about what we can expect from a new Trump term:

• Full weaponization of the justice system against political opponents. It is telling that Conservatives are always complaining about how Dems use the system for politically-motivated prosecutions, but then can barely contain their joy when conditions allow them to turn the tables. In a polarized worldview, your political opponents are not deserving of equal justice, as they are really enemies of the state (and agents of Satan, to boot).
• Continuing on the religious theme, expect a new Trump term to bring full-throated Christian Nationalism to the everyday discourse of government. Trump himself and Project 2025 both want it loudly trumpeted that “America [sic] is a Christian nation.” Conservative steps will be taken to get some measure of Bible-based system of law enforcement into the mix. How this would impact non-Christians and non-religious people in general remains to be see. My guess would be: “not well.” And just a note here that 28% of Americans now identify with no religion at all, let alone Christianity.
• Unsurprisingly, Project 2025 mandates the elimination of all attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as global warming is not seen as an actual thing. The EPA would be gutted, and other sources of “climate change alarmism” will be shut down. As the planet continues to roast and as other natural systems cascade into collapse, “alarmism” will probably be our default national mood before too long.
• Expect further rollbacks in women’s reproductive freedoms under another Trump term. With Roe already repealed, don’t expect anti-abortion zealots to be satisfied with state legislation. Trump would probably select two more SCOTUS judges, so everything will be on the table. There would no doubt be a rapid push towards a national ban via the courts. And a Trump FDA would quickly withdraw approvals of abortion drugs. Abstinence education, reduced access to contraception, defunded Planned Parenthood, and other old saws of Conservative morality will be rejuvenated. But of course, there will be no economic support that might be seen as “subsidizing” single parenthood.
• You can check out Project 2025 itself for other goodies like: mass purging of Deep State federal employees (people who put professional standards and adherence to mission mandates above personal loyalty to the President); the outlawing of pornography (how would that even work?); abolition of DEI initiatives; rollback of employee discrimination protections based on sexual identity; retribution against people who teach Critical Race Theory; mass deportation of immigrants; tariffs; the use of the US military for domestic law enforcement via the Insurrection Act (ah, the irony) — and so on.

If Trump wins, this kind of full-spectrum social engineering will be back on the table for every future Republican candidate going forward. This is the long-tail of the polarization trek started by Gingrich and Limbaugh. We are a long way here from the libertarian, live-and-let-live ethos of older forms of Conservatism, where government intrusion into people’s lives was anathema. Trump and Project 2025 are planning nothing less than the wholesale remaking of American society, but not the one that most Conservatives expect. Conservatives are anticipating more freedom from government, some economic tweaks (nothing new and exotic, just the stuff Trump did last time) that raise wages and get gas and food under control, and a heathy dose of symbolic public shaming of Libs and their whackadoodle ways.

But what Conservatives will get instead is a double-edged sword with no hilt or scabbard: Trump using his power to parade all his enemies into court and then jail, preferably (for Trump) on camera and in cuffs; and then a massive social engineering project where government intrudes more deeply and intimately into people’s lives than could be previously imagined. And remember, both of these prongs are predicated on the belief that Democrats and Liberals are not only enemies of America (a frequent Trump label), but enemies of God.

Are Conservatives really ready to sign on to a theocratic, moralistic remaking of our nation, aimed at rooting out the impure and subhuman? I hope not, but we’ll see.

One Last Jolt

I’d like to end on this long piece with a final note on the whole Trump-Project 2025 thing, and how it fits in with the Polarization Industrial Complex in general. Remember that the PIC is itself a creation of the plutocracy, and artificial place for people to fight with each other while the wealthy continue running their business-as-usual algorithms that keep power concentrated at the top. In that light, Project 25 and Trumpian dualism constitute a massive overreach by a whole bunch of people who are not in on the gag. In other words, like Howard Beale in Network, they are “meddling with the primary forces of nature,” not understanding that “we no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies.” And like Beale, if Trump and/or his successors stray too far and upset conditions for the plutocracy, they will be dealt with and put back in line by their owners.

Conservatives are now committed to a massive remaking of the third largest country in the world, based on a dualistic, theocratic ideology spawned in the Iron Age. It won’t work, and it will do incredible damage to our true prospects for the future.

I really do empathize with Conservatives stuck in this spot. I get it that the world is out of control, and that disaster seems to lurk everywhere. But the answer to our problems cannot come from a political party and cultural movement based on retribution, dualistic demonization of the Other, and theocratic persecution of perceived evildoers. If we head down that road, the whirlwind will be the least of our worries.

Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on June 23, 2024.