The Realignment Won’t Purge Libertarians

Subject: The Realignment Won’t Purge Libertarians Mon Apr 26, 2021 10:07 pm

As the parties exchange constituencies, conservatives should prepare for a rowdy coalition, not a uniform one.

The Realignment Won’t Purge Libertarians Rand-Paul

The Realignment Won’t Purge Libertarians Rand-Paul

T he American conservative movement has never really impressed deep political thinkers, even its own. The frustration was evident almost from the beginning of this magazine. Russell Kirk seemed slightly dissatisfied with his own Anglophone genealogy of “conservatism.” James Burnham, the Communist turned anti-Communist, developed modern Machiavellian theories of power, but applying them to the real world often ended with perverse results. Frank Meyer occasionally seemed as unsatisfied with his “fusion” of traditionalist and libertarian impulses into a conservative system, as all the critics of fusionism were.

Now, this shouldn’t be surprising. In history, it is hard to find thinking people of long life who end up altogether happy with what has been wrought by their former friends and colleagues. The only people who end up satisfied with political movements — Left or Right — are profiteers, chancers, and apparatchiks. Because they only expected a little money or fame, not the deepest concord between their convictions and the state of our fallen world.

But, since the election of Donald Trump, there is talk of realignment in the air. You can look at it any number of ways. In one sense, this realignment is part of a natural churn in American politics. Over time the traditional American establishment — the spiritual and occasionally the physical heirs of the Mainline Protestant churches — has settled at the center left or far left. Upwardly mobile suburbanites and the college educated have defected to the Democrats. A larger share of downwardly mobile voters were willing to vote for Donald Trump and the Republicans behind him on the ticket. You can even see The Realignment at work in the name of podcasts like the one Saagar Enjeti hosts with Marshall Kosloff.

This realignment has been happening pretty much since the last one ended, the one that brought the South solidly into the Republican fold and gave the Republican Party a far more evangelical personality. Now America’s largest corporations, which benefited so much from Republican policies in the past, are taking the side of the Left in most of America’s cultural disputes. This reflects the double capture at work. The managerial class has captured power over corporations and policy, and progressives have captured the managerial class.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-realignment-wont-purge-libertarians/

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The Realignment Won’t Purge Libertarians

The Realignment Won’t Purge Libertarians

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