Ross Douthat: What Are Conservatives Actually Debating?

Ross Douthat:

“In March the religious journal First Things published a short manifesto, signed by a group of notable conservative writers and academics, titled “Against the Dead Consensus.” The consensus that the manifesto came to bury belonged to conservatism as it existed between the time of William F. Buckley Jr. and the rise of Donald Trump: An ideology that packaged limited government, free markets, a hawkish foreign policy and cultural conservatism together, and that assumed that business interests and religious conservatives and ambitious American-empire builders belonged naturally to the same coalition.

This consensus was never as stable as retrospective political storytelling might suggest; even successful Republican politicians inevitably left many of its factions sorely disappointed, while conservative intellectuals and activists feuded viciously with one another and constantly discerned crises and crackups for their movement. But the crisis revealed or created (depending on your perspective) by our own age of populism seems more severe, the stresses on the different factions more serious, and it is just possible that the longstanding conservative fusion might be as dead as the First Things signatories argued. …”

The only points that I have in common with mainstream conservatism are social conservatism and authoritarianism. Otherwise, I reject the lolbertarian economics and the neocon foreign policy. When George W. Bush was president, the first led to the Crash of 2008 and the second to the Iraq War. I think lots of people made up their minds about conservatism in those years.