The United States is Driving Itself…SANE

The Good Liberals Are Back. The Progressives Are Massively Rejected by the Host Organism. MAGA (aka the Bizarro Progressive Movement) is Toast. And, like Dorothy, we knew all along.

My conservative friends and colleagues have been so busy pseudo mourning the Democrat Party’s lack of learning ability they are missing the real story. Both MAGA and the Left Progressives are simultaneously self-immolating, precisely because they are two sides of the same coin. Happily, their death will leave behind not a vacuum but an intellectually vital and restored liberalism and--though this is less evident to date--a renewed American conservatism.

Sure, it feels like midnight. But midnight comes first thing in the morning. And it’s about to be morning in America again.

In order:

The good liberals are back

Until their name was stolen by American progressives the U.S. had great liberals, whom we used to call classical liberals. Among Americans, Lincoln was the greatest of these. These days Lincoln is, quite sensibly, claimed by conservatives who note that his opposition to slavery was a natural extension of his free-market, commerce-favoring outlook, a point he often made quite explicitly. He was a classic American liberal.

Classical liberalism is committed to neutral principles of governance, aka constitutional procedure, aka due process, aka all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights… On economic policy this naturally tends to come out as favoring free markets, because free markets are fair or at least neutral markets. Market interventionists are always, whether they know it or not, seeking to bias the system in favor of some party. Only non-intervention is predictably neutral and opposed to rent-seeking.

Progressivism is liberalism’s precise opposite. It loathes the hamstrings of procedure, like, you know, the Constitution, as much as true liberalism loves them.

And right now, in America, the most vital political/intellectual movement we have seen in a long time is devoted to re-establishing neutral principles.

The Free Press, America’s first new liberal magazine in more than a century, is less than two years old and already has 1 million subscribers. It is also America’s best written and most interesting periodical, by a wide margin.

The Free Press rests on two great intertwining principles. (That it is also brilliantly written and edited is, partly the result of these principles and partly dumb luck).

The first is that the Free Pressers are uncompromising free speech absolutists—and they understand why they must be.

Free speech is not only or even primarily an individual right, a possession to treasure. As Robert Bork explained in his great 1971 Indiana Law Journal article, “Neutral Principles and First Amendment Problems,” free speech is primarily an enabling, or as I called it in National Review decades ago, an “architectural” institution of democracy. The way to understand what the First Amendment protects is to ask whether a particular application advances or retards democratic politics. Porn, not so much. Political speech, politicians’ favorite thing to regulate, is at the top of the protected list.

My impression is that the folks at the Free Press understand not only the what but the why of all this. The leaders all made their bones in the contemporary fight against censorship, whether in its explicitly government-backed or mostly social forms. For most the Covid lockdowns were seminal.

(Matt Taibbi, the great free speech hero of our time is not part of the Free Press, but he doesn’t need to be. He is the Luca Brasi of free speech, renowned for his ability to do the job of murder alone.)

The other great commandment of the Free Pressers (and Taibbi) is like unto the first. Journalists are to report what they see, absolutely regardless of what party might be benefited or harmed as a result. The extent to which the new liberal journalists practice this extremely difficult virtue, is, by today’s standards, amazingly great.

One million subscribers and most public intellectuals worth reading is a lot, a demonstration of power and appeal not to be ignored by anyone trying to figure out what’s next in America.

The (left) Progressives are massively rejected by their host organism

Not going to say much here because just about everyone has noticed how quickly the woke went broke, how fast the great awakening became the big sleep. It’s so pathetic the anti-wokesters themselves might die of boredom. This is altogether a more remarkable phenomenon than the stubbornness of a few doomed progressive Democrats. Note: In addition to Riley Gaines, give my girl Caitlin some credit for reminding people how much they prefer women in women’s sports.

MAGA (aka the Bizarro Progressive Movement) is Toast

Here is a great way to destroy a new political movement overnight. Of all the issues with which it could be associated pick the one most likely to be destructive, on the issue Americans most relentlessly base their voting choices, make it the center of your program, and ignore all the evidence it is failing miserably.

For a shortcut, just look into a mirror and say “short term pain, long term gain” three times while the moon is full and …wait for it.

There are many, many ways to boost high-paid employment in the U.S. Trump successfully picked one his first time out with his big reduction in corporate tax rates.

The tariffs, even the threat of tariffs will do the opposite, and MAGA has placed all its bets on that number. The GOP will lose the House big time in 2026, JD Vance will never live down his collaboration and never become President.

MAGA will burn because its deep world view is essentially indistinguishable from the left progressives’. At its core is envy and even worse an envy based on lies.

MAGA in its heart believes America cannot win against the Asian hordes. Because MAGA cannot admit even to itself that its beliefs assume American inferiority it develops a rhetoric of grievance, of tilted playing fields the righteous alone can right. Its favored rhetoric is of class war, condemning alleged “elites” who installed globalism supposedly to enrich themselves by impoverishing real Americans. And get this, the archvillain was Ronald Reagan, whose obsession with laissez faire impoverished America.

First order refutations are easy but unavailing. Any statistics cited to show the remarkable, widespread economic bounty ushered in by the Reagan reforms (which remained blessedly undisturbed for decades) can be dismissed as not benefiting “real Americans.” Who are the real Americans? Any of those who did not benefit.

MAGA’s second order arguments about an American middle class falling behind are themselves a tissue of lies, but complex enough to make their refutation somewhat painstaking.

Fortunately, that refutation, at least as regards MAGA itself, will be unnecessary as the MAGAs will not be around to hear it.

Like Dorothy, we knew the answer all along

Insufficiently recognized even today is how far the Reagan political economy differed from the ideology of the conservatives who brought him to power. Reagan destroyed monetarism, the GOP’s most statist tendency. He demolished the Phillips Curve and “root canal” economics pervasively powerful those days among Republicans. He even undermined the inordinate fear of Communism by never being afraid of it.

Reagan demonstrated empirically, via 40 years of high growth, falling inflation, and falling interest rates that the key to prosperity, indeed to the pursuit of happiness, is the thing “old conservatives” and “old liberals” love above all: liberty.

Sounds like a movement to me.