Crenshaw seems to be admitting that horseshoe theory with regards to the leftists and New Right is true, and that both basically want the same thing: unlimited power. One wonders what the welfare of the people even means if things like the Bill of Rights is not to be taken seriously. The government picks your religion? Decides what is ok to say and who you can associate with?
As Arnold points out, if you don't have limiting principles, if you in fact think they are bad, you are arguing for unlimited range of action towards whatever is expedient at the moment. If you are hungry at the moment but short on cash, kill that guy and steal his lunch. Not murdering other people and stealing are limiting principles on behavior, after all.
It is also hard to take people who apparently think "classical liberalism" refers to the liberalism of the late 20th century seriously.
The absence of elected officials exercising power is bureaucrats and judges exercising power. Power doesn't just evaporate into the ether if legislators won't do their jobs.
State power is the extent of gvt power over people's lives, political power is the share of state power. They're not the same thing.
State power is very large and very extensive, already, in the US. Some of that power is in places where voters can't easily access (by design) -- courts, independent agencies etc.
The power to liquidate or restructure an entire government agency, or refuse to spend a certain amount of money allocated by congress is still power. If often takes orders of magnitude more power to not spend 100 billion than it does to spend it, because the former steps on more people's toes.
That's a nice distinction, although I am not sure how widely used it is. Using your distinction, I am talking about state power, specifically how it needs to be limited, and in the modern USA cut way back, in terms of how those who disparage limiting principles apparently have no interest in doing so, only fighting over who gets to wield all that state power. I don't mind voting people political power who will limit state power, but I have a problem with people advocate for unlimited state power.
I think the US governments, federal and state, are headed for a stasis, where regulations take so long to come into effect that each new administration undoes the worst of the previous before they have a chance to sink in. On the other hand, I never would have guessed in a million years that assassinating a company CEO in cold blood, without even a personal gripe to "justify" it, would be so celebrated by political leaders; or that a President would be so tone deaf as to waste so much political capital so quickly when his party's House majority is already too small to pass even the simplest of his policies.
See, you say the worry sailed long ago, and you might be right. However, the New Right, especially in yours and Crenshaw's formulation, doesn't seem to be fighting back against that, but rather fighting to be the one stepping on everyone else's neck. When two wolves are fighting over which gets to eat you it makes little sense to label either as the good wolf. They are not fighting FOR you, they are fighting OVER you.
Now, whether Trump himself is really part of the New Right is another question.
You don't negotiate with Bolsheviks, but you don't become a Nazi either.
One of the terrible, horrible, very bad things that happened in the 1930s is how many intellectuals went, "The Nazis are horrible. The Communists oppose them. The Communists must be good guys. Maybe I should support them; at the very least, not say bad things about them."
Way too many people in the 1930s convinced themselves that the only choice was between the Fascists and the Communists, and they thought the Communists were less bad. (There were also a fair number of people who thought the Fascists were less bad, but they pretty much disappeared the day after Pearl Harbor.)
I don't know how the future will go, but I don't think the only two choices are a continuation of the last four years or a thorough-going New Right.
First, the bill in Congress is certainly not up to the gravity of the situation. Congress itself isn't. Trump can only go so far with Congress and this is a key problem. Of course, Trump could then decide not to spend the money... we've been waiting for this showdown to resolve for a while.
And this is the key difference between Trump and an authoritarian. Trump is arguing primarily for the authority to NOT exercise fiscal power given him (i.e. the Executive) by Congress (the legislative). This is profound. He is also arguing for the authority to REVOKE his own powers of regulation. This is also profound. He isn't stumping for new regulations, he is rolling them back.
With regard to DOGE, Trump also isn't arguing for the right to abuse PEOPLE, he is arguing for the right to restrict and eliminate OFFICES. While the US Gov't is supposed to be tightly restrained in its authority to arrest, etc, private citizens, the one place its authority to punish is supposed to be largely unconstrained it towards 'offices.' The enemy here is the federal employees unions, primarily, but this isn't so much about working conditions as the total volume of work and the degree to which it is unsupervised and arbitrary. The government officials will try to convince you that Trump is beating up on helpless people, when he is really beating up on powerful offices. The people - they get a free vacation and the freedom to go work somewhere else. The job is quashed.
These distinctions are being willfully overlooked.
Part of the reason for willfully overlooking those distinctions is because Trump is willfully wasting all the goodwill from the popular programs with distracting and unnecessary court battles, and pretending tariffs can block imports without raising prices.
The court battles are the Dems defensive moves, totally not Trump’s willful choice. His popular deportations are stopped by courts, your comment implies Trump should ignore the court, which would likely be terrible politically for Republicans.
Tariffs and especially the threat of tariffs is part of his economic policy, and prices / inflation are already coming down.
Dems who lie about Trump, and smart folk who predict disaster, wrongly, are bigger enemies than Trump’s too many words.
That's like saying "the shooting was the robbery victim's defensive move, totally not the robber's willful choice."
If popularity determines legality, then slavery was just fine.
Tariffs cannot lower prices.
This idea Trumpies have, that tariffs are good and harmless and effective, is bizarre. Trump and his fanbois make two main claims for tariffs: they will protect domestic industry and they will replace the income tax.
* They can only protect domestic industry by raising import prices so high that they reduce imports.
* That allows domestic industry to raise their prices. Ergo everything that used to be imported is now more expensive, nothing else drops in price as compensation, and overall prices rise.
* Reducing imports reduces revenue from import tariffs. Tariff rates have to rise even higher to compensate, imports reduce further, and revenue drops even further while domestic prices rise even further.
* It would take a 71% tariff rate on all imports to equal income tax revenue, an unsustainable rate. Imports would drop too much to ever generate enough tariff revenue to replace the income tax.
The end result is there will still be an income tax, prices will rise, and there will be fewer choices in stores.
The idea that 10% general and 30% Chinese tariffs are useful is even dumber. It doesn't generate near enough revenue to replace the income tax or raise prices enough to protect domestic industry, yet consumers will sure notice. 10% is harmless? 30% is harmless? Must be nice to have so much spare cash lying around that 10% and 30% price increases are invisible. And the IRS still exists, domestic industry still can't compete price-wise, and every economy around the world is disrupted. What a deal! That Trump, boy he sure is an artist!
Marx famously wrote that, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce".
But even Hegel and Marx could not foresee the the tragi-comic Lovecraftian Horror of what would happen the third time, when Jonah Goldberg wears a costume sports jersey for """Conservatism""" and Ben Crenshaw pretends to be The Final Prophet of the True Scotsman """New Right""" and two figures pretend to fight under flags of countries the languages of which they can't speak without making constant errors in heavy accents. The answer to "Laugh or cry?" is "Yes."
As I've pointed out before, this is not really a debate between differing sets principles, but a debate about whether -survival- ought to be a meta-principle, that is, whether a set of principles is really just cover for "the principle of being a beautiful loser" or instead implies the principle of "it's ok to do what must be done to keep the enemy from steamrollering right over you."
Of course the Old right was fiscally irresponsible, too Reagan, George W Bush Trump 1 and now Trump 1 cut taxes and increased deficits. I'll agree that failure to fix the funding of Social Security and Medicare is bi-partisan.
Right. "Paying lip-service but never actually accomplishing anything difficult when you had the rare chance, or when push comes to shove, or because there was some special reason the timing isn't right at the moment, and the next moment, and the moment after that too," is not "making a stand." What happened to judging by results instead of intentions?
Edit: I'm old enough to remember when the writers at places like National Review used to constantly complain how Republican politicians and GOP Establishment-types weren't "Old Right" at all, but pretend, fake right, doling out the equivalent of right-coded "boob bait for the bubbas", and who in reality had zero motivation or intention of ever doing any of the actually "post-war-conservativism-reflective" things their constituent voters wanted them to do. When people couldn't stand it anymore, when literally not one of over a dozen establishment-sanctified candidates was even willing to pay lip-service to most of those ideas anymore, "That's how you got Trump."
Again, if one stops judging by intentions or the debased media-theater of contemporary political performance art, and actually, you know, LOOKS at the list of Trump's Presidential actions, one sees the actual attempts to do an enormous wish-list of things the so-called "Old Right" politicians claimed to have wanted to accomplish, but somehow, mysteriously, never got around to doing even a little.
On this I will agree with you. Mr Kling's apparently claim that the New Right is uniquely unconcerned with spending does not align at all with complaints from Republicans and conservatives that GOP leadership for years has done little to restrain spending.
I think that by insisting that ONLY expenditure cuts may be used to reduce deficits is _ipso facto_ an irresponsible attitude of the Republican base, IF that is the attitude.
Did I say Democrats should not have? :) Somewhere in the last few days in some other comment (I suppose) I specifically said that Democrats in 2010 should have let the Bush tax cuts “die and ignominious death.”
The Dems raising taxes might well have made Romney the 2012 winner. Spending is popular, more taxes are not. Including the inflation tax, which even most non-college workers with jobs understand as less ability to buy stuff.
Politics is both downstream of culture and an influence on the direction of culture changes.
The behind-the-scenes actors who really run things are in the habit of presenting the masses with candidates whose differences are either phony or meaningless. Sometimes this is so obvious that only idiots who still believe what's on television would be fooled.
Take your example of Romney. The one issue that mattered to conservatives in 2012 was to try to repeal newly enacted ObamaCare before it could take effect and worsen our already too expensive and poorly run health care system. So the Republicans... nominated the one candidate they had who could not run against ObamaCare because he had written it himself. Did anyone in the whole country believe Romney could win, or that it would help if he did? I haven't found any.
Funding Medical Care for the citizens and social security is knowable math problem, and from that perspective simple. Taxes and a permanent model that would stand for at least 100 years should be adopted. It will not be free or even cheap. But the stability will be worth it. Bringing down some medical costs will require we not have our cake and eat it too. These are unpopular political decisions which why nothing ever gets done. No one wants to pay taxes, or they have been told they don’t have to. What is irrational about how people perceive medical costs is they would never deliberately endanger their job that has an outstanding salary and benefits (including healthcare). Your work is your “tax” to the company you work for. We need to ensure people have healthcare throughout their life, and there is a cost. Social Security is there to provide a stable benefit that is not tied to the whims of the stock market. Paying for these is worth it. We can decrease Medicaid by decreasing working poor and making sure more people have benefits so they don’t need Medicaid in the first place. Paying for it is the solution and it is common sense.
It's good to steelman the arguments about "liberalism" and about ends & means & norms and even about the usefulness of often misused labels.
L Liberals who talk about Rule of Law should all be appalled at the SCOTUS decision which stops Trump (actually the Trump administration) from immediately deporting illegal aliens, and instead demanding some undefined additional "due process". Those who violate the border law are law-breaking criminal non-citizens, and deportation, not US prison nor death, is the legally recognized response. In some commie countries, violating border laws, like trying to self-deport/ escape, DID result in guards shooting to kill and often killing.
The key labels, which also exist in Congress, are D Democrats & R Republicans. Not liberal nor conservative, left, right, Old or New Right, moderate, progressive, radical, whig (whig??? in 2025?); nor black, white, male, female, or other identity. Most Congressional voting is consistently D or R. Most bureaucratic law-making, non-constitutional but real, is Dem, or Dem influenced Congress direct.
On "norms", if the Dems have done it, violated some norm, with little or no Dem opposition to norm breaking, then the Reps can do it. It stops being a norm. Reps should do more of it than they've done so as to teach the Dems, that it's not a good idea to do that. Tit for tat works; and it's eye for eye, not 2 eyes or death for one eye.
Dems in power have already violated, tho not destroyed as an ideal, all the liberal principles "free speech, freedom of association, due process, free markets, individual rights"
Cancel culture on speech, anti-discrimination laws on association, J6 protesters imprisoned without due process as well as 11 million illegals being allowed in w/o due process, free markets (ha!), individual rights but required experimental vaccines (that saved millions but caused side effects for many).
The Current Situation is Unacceptable -- lots of voters think that. Trump (R) is doing far more to reduce the problems than Obama or Biden did, or Harris or Hillary was likely to try.
Kling: "My own pessimism is centered on the state of higher education. " -- yet no support for Trump's letter to Harvard against anti-Semitism, nor any serious proposal about increasing viewpoint diversity at the Ivy+ schools, rather a veeeery sloooow drift away to other alternative schools. Trump is right to attempt reform by cutting off govt money, especially tax exemptions, in other words to do what Kling says he wants to stop "throwing money and students at it."
The final Trump-distaste (not really hate) by Kling: "Another reason that I am not signing up for the New Right is that they are soft on the issue of fiscal responsibility."
Listener provides a good list of problems: "The illegal immigration crisis, our bloated federal bureaucracy, the NGO industrial complex which may literally be a criminal racket, (also written about here-- RICO the NGOs ) the unsustainable fiscal train wreck that is our debt & deficit, the higher education cartel that siphons billions of dollars off the Federal Government to exclusively indoctrinate members of one political party while building billion dollar hedge funds,
And Trump is working well towards reducing all the problems:
1) illegal immigrations -- deportations (though D judges oppose)
2) reducing bloated bureaucracies, like USAID (some judge injunctions against)
4) college cartels getting tax benefits for indoctrination more than education -- Trump's anti DEI and anti-Semitism actions, with likely viewpoint diversity becoming more important.
All of the above 3 are huge, but tractable problems, and Trump is working on them. Which leaves the fourth (but ordered in list as 3):
3) the unsustainable fiscal train wreck that is our debt & deficit.
I'm not sure the debt is unsustainable, and won't be convinced until Japan's much larger debt results in huge problems which hasn't happened since their "lost decade(s)" began in their 1989 property bubble burst. [I had read that Tokyo was worth more than the USA -- the entire USA was less than the floorspace rent & purchase price value of Tokyo. THAT was unsustainable, but they avoided civilization collapse. A huge & growing debt "to themselves" seems less existential. Rogoff's claims that Japan is now not doing so well might be the crisis signal, yet the "all at once" part hasn't yet happened.]
Arnold & the Old Right claim the only solution is entitlement reform, which I doubt is true but it might be. I'm sure that the US Congress won't do serious entitlement reform, cuts & reductions, until D Democrats are calling for it -- so any call for Reps to cut Soc Sec or other entitlements is basically a call for Reps to lose the next election (2026 now), so as to lose the power to solve any problems.
Congress should solve the immigration, bureaucracy, & college mono-culture problems first. They can be solved without losing elections, and maybe even gaining popularity, as populist parties which actually do what is popular usually do gain in popularity & votes. (#5 vote ID for more secure voting is also in play and doable).
Big deficit reduction is not yet politically feasible, tho highlighting it as a problem remains a good political tactic for some amount of time. Maybe even a govt shutdown worth more as a stunt than to get big spending reduction from a 2025 bill. I would argue better to focus on the 3-4 things that can be done in Congress first, so as to get some good results sooner.
Tit for tat says start by co-operating, then if the other party doesn't co-operate, stop co-operating. Then keep doing whatever the other party does. If the other party also plays tit for tat, the first non-cooperation leads to never-stopping lack of co-operation.
So if Ds are assholes and Rs respond by being assholes, tit for tat means they both remain assholes forever.
Christian forgiveness is how this stops. Ds have been jerks, now Rs are jerks (maybe) both tribes claiming the others are jerks AND that the other tribe started it.
One tribe’s leader has to say Sorry, this is not working, and the other tribe has to accept some peace where both tribes stop the jerk behavior.
Tho you fail to specify that the Dems were assholes for allowing 11 million illegals in, and now you claim the Reps are assholes for trying to enforce the law and deport them, and maybe claim the Dems are assholes for using courts to stop the deportations. Is this what you mean in this case? Justice is case by case.
"On that issue [taxing and spending], it is the Old Right who are willing to make a stand. While the New Right lets these “hardliners” twist in the wind."
I'm really surprised you could write that with a straight face. Was it the 'New Right' that made Congress only able to pass, IIRC, 4 annual budgets in regular order since the implementation of the current budget and appropriation system five decades ago? Continuing resolutions and other extraordinary measures have been a regular part of our political landscape since the 1990s when Donald Trump was still building casinos in Atlantic City. The last serious attempt to reform Social Security occurred under Ronald Reagan (and screwed anybody under voting age at that point). Even in the current situation I see where folks like Chip Roy and Thomas Massie are the ones who are (somewhat mistakenly in my opinion) trying to codify further cuts in spending while Republicans like Mitch McConnell continue with the 'go along to get along' attitude that balloons spending on Democrat priorities to hid their own pet projects.
Culture war issues get a lot of play in the claim that self-proclaimed Conservatives have conserved nothing but fiscal policy is where the rubber of GOPe claims to be in favor of restraint have rarely if ever meet the road of actual implementation. Even Newt Gingrich only lucked into being able to restrain spending by a weak second-term Bill Clinton in the middle of a rising economy, and then the Democrats pissed a nearly balanced budget away as soon as they got back in control.
To be fair, it wasn't really Democrats who pissed away the balanced budgets of Gingrich/Dole and Clinton, but George W. Bush and Denny Hastert/Trent Lott.
It will take the fiscal default of the United States to even have a prayer of fixing what is wrong with the Federal Government and it is likely that a default will make the Federal Government even worse. Count me among the pessimists.
The current Trump budget largely uses tariff revenue (10% world, 30% China will fund hundreds of billions in revenue) to offset his income tax cuts. It's a perfectly reasonable policy proposal, and if the CBO included tariff revenue in the calculation it would be non-controversial.
Also, Trump is cutting Medicaid a lot for which I note you are giving him ZERO CREDIT despite it being the only serious entitlement cut anyone has attempted in a generation and he's taking huge political flak for it.
This is in contrast Biden who spent trillions both before and after COVID with no revenue to pay for it. His inflation also drove up interest rates and therefore financing cost. Most of the GOPe campaigned for Biden, so we can blame them too.
Where the Medicaid negotiations will end up is still an open question. It's worth pointing out that the major obstacles to even getting the FMAP levels back down (to be both hard ceilings instead of fake, soft floors with extra fed money coming in from the side, and forget about CHIP) is from politicians from Red States which have gotten used to dependency on federal largesse, the same way they are all defendant on federal money for education, and for recovery after every emergency disaster (or, you know, completely ordinary storms that happen all the time). That's something the Real Old Right warned would happen, but which the Fake Old Right were happy to help make happen.
I think Trump should come up with something like “poor red states will keep getting federal Medicaid subsidies but rich blue states won’t” to buy enough R votes. Reward friends, punish enemies. Fuck fairness.
I note that the state I’m moving to didn’t expand Medicaid even with huge fed subsidies.
Not sure how you think that would be at all sustainable over time. In order to stop the whipsawing back and forth at every change of administration, we really need to get back to a government that is reasonable and fair. Not that there's any indication of that in our future...
His tariffs are about as useful as setting fire to a bag of poop on a doorstep. He claims he wants to protect domestic manufacturing with tariffs high enough to cripple imports, which in turn means little revenue. He can't have it both ways. He can block imports, or he can generate a small amount of revenue. 30% is not nothing, he can only jawbone Walmart and Amazon so much before they have to pass along the price increases, and nothing gets voters as riled up as price increases. Ask Biden; his inflation dropped below 4% in June 2023, was "almost" back to the normal 2% by November 2024, yet the voters still remembered. Trump's going to lose the House in 2026.
And yes, Trump's price increases are not inflation of the money supply and he could reverse course and eliminate the price increases with more executive orders, but the way he's been screaming at the Fed, I wouldn't be surprised if he gets the true inflation cure for his tariffs fiasco.
I'll believe in his Medicaid cuts when they actually happen. Isn't that what all the Trumpies say? Pay attention to what he does, not what he says? His Medicaid cuts are just blowhard blather so far, and considering how little he cares about actual legislation, I expect nothing useful.
Being better than Biden in most areas does not make him 100% good. TDS is bipartisan. Lefties find him 100% evil, righties find him 100% good. They are both blinkered idiots.
Yes, he can’t have it both ways. I’m telling you what I think the actual effects of his actual policies in place at this time will likely be, and I like them. Hundreds of billions in revenue is not small. It’s literally enough to pay for the extension of his 2017 tax cuts.
He’s the first politician in history to claim his policies will solve everyone’s problems even when those problems contradict! No politician before has ever done that!
And he’s the first politician to blame retailers for price increases. I certainly don’t remember Biden blaming grocers price gouging for the inflation he caused. And I totally forgot how economists claimed it was all transitory.
You certainly aren’t going to get Medicaid cuts by constantly trashing the only person to meaningfully try in a generation. When it fails know that you were part of the problem.
Being better than Biden makes him the correct person to vote for in the last election. And I got news, the dems aren’t going to be any better in 2028.
Welcome to politics. It’s full of people and coalitions and horse trading.
I read your post as saying, "You can't blame Trump. He's just doing what Biden did and what other politicians do."
Okay. That's uncharitable. Perhaps more accurate is "Trump does lots of bad things that Biden and other politicians do. But he also does some good things that they don't. So he should be defended."
I can go along with that. But I'll also criticize the bad things.
The US collected $2.4T in income tax revenue in 2024. Imports were $3.36T and generated $64B in revenue. Replacing the income tax with tariffs requires 71% tariffs. Anything less than abolishing the income tax keeps its complete bureaucracy intact and ready to spring back into action with the next shift in political winds.
71% tariffs are self-defeating, unsustainable; they will reduce imports, just as Trump wants. Amazon and Walmart have to raise their prices, no matter how much Trump berates them. The intended side effect of reducing imports has the unintended side effect of reducing revenue and making it impossible to eliminate the income tax, contrary to what Trump and all his fanbois claim he wants.
Trump thinks US manufacturing has been hollowed out. He is dead wrong; manufacturing value is at an all-time high, and manufacturing jobs have been dropping since the 1940s. High-skill high-pay manufacturing and minimum wage laws offshored the low-skill low-pay manufacturing which Trump wants to bring back to the US; those are not quality jobs, and where will all those new low-skill low-pay workers come from? US manufacturing unemployment was lower in 2024 than general unemployment. It won't be immigrants, that's for sure, legal or illegal. The only possible answer is drawing workers from more efficient jobs which markets think are more valuable. Central planning, socialism, marxism, fascism, call it what you will; it ruins economies.
In other words, Trump is choosing high prices and less choice from tariffs, and an intact IRS, in exchange for hostile courts, disrupting the US and global economies for years to come, and ruining the US's reputation as a reliable trading partner. It's a colossal waste of political capital which gives voters every excuse they need to send Republicans packing and bring back wokism and the green raw deal in 2028. That's one hell of a deal, about as artistic as throwing cans of soup at the Mona Lisa.
10% World and 30% China would generate about $500B a year.
The CBO prices out the cost of Trumps tax bill at $4T over 10 years. Let's do crude math and say $400B a year.
So yes, that tariff revenue and the cost of his income tax bill are roughly in line.
"which gives voters every excuse they need to send Republicans packing and bring back wokism and the green raw deal in 2028"
If you choose to vote woke because he didn't give you every single thing you want then you're a retard who deserves everything AOC/Newsome gives you in 2028.
Learn to do something fucking politics. You're such a crybaby.
You think I like that we are going to get a bigger SALT when I live in a 0% income tax state? No. I thank Trump for, thus far, limiting it to such a small amount it won't cost much to buy those votes. But if assholes like you hold it up over "fiscal conservatism" we'll probably lose the Medicaid cuts and get a giant SALT because that's what it takes to get it over the finish line when you've got a five vote majority.
If you don't like the horse trading that comes with slim majorities maybe you shouldn't constantly be hemming and hawing and fence sitting and just fucking commit. My state was 50/50 in 2019 and now it's super maga and I have universal school vouchers. Because the people here aren't effeminate libertarian faggots that can't do politics. They are people that said "give me liberty and not a fucking face diaper" and moved to make it happen. The "fiscal conservative" faggots I live near DC couldn't summon the courage for that shit. They care too much about getting invited to the right parties to actually do anything.
Your tired 10% and 30% are meaningless. My 71% is what is necessary to get rid of the IRS. It's what Trump needs to "protect" domestic manufacturing.
Trump won this election by 1.5%, and didn't even get a majority, against one of the most awful candidates in history, with no primary vote, maximum woke, maximum green energy, and no platform. You think that's because the voters like woke and expensive energy? It's because Trump is so divisive, and it wouldn't take much to reverse that 1.5%. The voters remembered Biden's inflation 18 months later. You think they won't remember Trump's?
Learn to do some real politics, not your wannabe brand.
And stop pretending that harsh reality is betrayal. Trump could do with a few No men instead of the sycophants he's got.
Gee isn’t that just great, he can continue the status quo by raising some taxes and cutting others. Ain’t that just spiffy poo!
I don’t care what you think you are telling me. I care about the actual effects of his policies, and the self-destructive way he is throwing away political capital on idiocy instead of focusing on good solid reforms which would have the backing of ¾ of voters and pave the way for a JD Vance election in 2028. He might as well campaign for AOC or Newsome, the way he’s giving voters plenty of bad memories for November 2026.
You may not care what happens in 2026 or 2028. I do.
How “broken” are our governing institutions and how do we fix them? If you believe that our governing class is entrenched, self-serving, (ever more self-perpetuating), globalist, and hopelessly committed to foreign interventions and war, as I do, then you support a fairly radical approach to “reform.” Also, the idea that mainstream conservatives have been fiscally responsible or committed to preserving liberty is, frankly, laughable. The problem with the new-right is that its approach to governing would quickly morph into crony capitalism and “soft totalitarianism.” I’m very pessimistic that the American experiment can be preserved, but I would say that our one saving grace is federalism. A much greater commitment to returning power to states and localities seems sensible and necessary, and the sooner the better.
Saying the allocation of power in the union should return to the states is like saying the allocation of power in the federal government should return to Congress. The trouble is, they don't really want it.
Yes, the horse has long since left the barn. The only way to return to some kind of constitutional balance is to unwind all the Progressive meddling, which I put in the 1880s when the cronies decided they needed a modern Navy, which led to the 1898 war with Spain, imperialism, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, WW I, FDR's New Deal, and by then there was, and is, no turning back. Reagan's deficits, the Department of Education, Part D, Obamacare, and all the rest are just inevitable trifles in comparison.
Trump's only real benefit is putting brakes on climate catastrophe and wokism. But doing it by executive order guarantees they will bounce back with a vengeance, his tariffs and his focus on fighting the courts instead of real immigration reform all waste enormous political capital and run the real risk of impeachment again in 2027.
I personally think the Constitution was a pretty good first draft, but it can never be restored to a limited government. Its major failing was allowing government to set its own limits. When push comes to shove, government judges are going to take the government's side, whether out of political fear or having the same employer. Even if they only do that one time out of 1000, it's a one-way ratchet and we passed the point of no return long ago.
I suspect we will end up wallowing in a mud pit of cronyism, slashing back and forth between authoritarian regimes, and dictatorship by the Deep State bureaucrats, who will tighten down the screws after Biden and Trump have shown the evils of letting the President have too much independent power. The idea of Trump being Hitler, or Biden being Stalin, are suitable only for campaign slogans. Presidential races will become figurehead races.
A lot of the major issues that contribute to divisions and fracturing in the various political labels rest on open questions and paradoxes and it seems a lot of language gets used in popular discourse in misleading ways. Some entries at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that lay open the issues and open questions that might clarify as well as delineate areas of confusion among the dividing lines in the label wars are:
After giving the "New Rightist" piece a quick scan and some of the discussions mentioned therein, I thought that rather than spend a couple hours trying to engage with that writing I would be better off rereading the encyclopedia entries, which I did and don't regret. Also, I imagine the new Quentin Skinner tome on liberty is highly valuable but unfortunately it hasn't risen to the top of the pile quite yet.
At the cost of providing further validation of Godwin’s law: try to replace ‘American’ with ‘German’ in the statement ’the welfare of the American people should be the supreme good’ …
The founders seem to have been extremely concerned with good governance and putting in place structures to constrain the growth of government, and it seems that the past 100 years have seen an extremely rapid dismantling of those mechanisms and consequent ability for the government to grow in power and spending.
It seems that the New Right would be more effective if it restored the mechanisms that kept it in check instead of the current course of action.
Some of the mechanisms I refer to:
* Gold standard, or some way to limit spending. Obviously we could not return to the gold standard, but I see no reason that the Buffett rule could not be adopted ("all sitting members of congress are ineligible for re-election any year the deficit exceeds 3%")
* Voting - Originally there was 1 vote per household, implemented as a male landowner. Something like this could be restored by adopting the proposal of votes for children, as cast by parents.
* Part-time Congress, made up of business folks / citizens with real jobs, rather than career politicians.
* Dis-intermediated senator and president elections, due to exactly the drawbacks of populism (on the left AND right) that we see today. Idiocracy in action.
* Constitution that attempted to strictly limit the power of the Federal government. It's frankly absurd how one could read that and square it with the current behavior of saying what type of shower valve we are allowed to use in our own homes.
The system we have today does not resemble the system as originally designed, and the changes in mechanism were brought about by those who sought and achieved increased power as a never ending ratchet.
I think I hope the Stupid party wins instead of the Evil party, but I wish someone were seeking to restore some of these checks prior to crisis.
Crenshaw seems to be admitting that horseshoe theory with regards to the leftists and New Right is true, and that both basically want the same thing: unlimited power. One wonders what the welfare of the people even means if things like the Bill of Rights is not to be taken seriously. The government picks your religion? Decides what is ok to say and who you can associate with?
As Arnold points out, if you don't have limiting principles, if you in fact think they are bad, you are arguing for unlimited range of action towards whatever is expedient at the moment. If you are hungry at the moment but short on cash, kill that guy and steal his lunch. Not murdering other people and stealing are limiting principles on behavior, after all.
It is also hard to take people who apparently think "classical liberalism" refers to the liberalism of the late 20th century seriously.
If you won't seize power, someone else will.
The absence of elected officials exercising power is bureaucrats and judges exercising power. Power doesn't just evaporate into the ether if legislators won't do their jobs.
Funny, there was definitely a time when government didn’t exercise power over every aspect of our lives… I guess it was just because someone forgot.
State power is the extent of gvt power over people's lives, political power is the share of state power. They're not the same thing.
State power is very large and very extensive, already, in the US. Some of that power is in places where voters can't easily access (by design) -- courts, independent agencies etc.
The power to liquidate or restructure an entire government agency, or refuse to spend a certain amount of money allocated by congress is still power. If often takes orders of magnitude more power to not spend 100 billion than it does to spend it, because the former steps on more people's toes.
That's a nice distinction, although I am not sure how widely used it is. Using your distinction, I am talking about state power, specifically how it needs to be limited, and in the modern USA cut way back, in terms of how those who disparage limiting principles apparently have no interest in doing so, only fighting over who gets to wield all that state power. I don't mind voting people political power who will limit state power, but I have a problem with people advocate for unlimited state power.
I think the US governments, federal and state, are headed for a stasis, where regulations take so long to come into effect that each new administration undoes the worst of the previous before they have a chance to sink in. On the other hand, I never would have guessed in a million years that assassinating a company CEO in cold blood, without even a personal gripe to "justify" it, would be so celebrated by political leaders; or that a President would be so tone deaf as to waste so much political capital so quickly when his party's House majority is already too small to pass even the simplest of his policies.
There is no majority so durable that it won’t find ways to divide itself into smaller subgroups competing for status.
See, you say the worry sailed long ago, and you might be right. However, the New Right, especially in yours and Crenshaw's formulation, doesn't seem to be fighting back against that, but rather fighting to be the one stepping on everyone else's neck. When two wolves are fighting over which gets to eat you it makes little sense to label either as the good wolf. They are not fighting FOR you, they are fighting OVER you.
Now, whether Trump himself is really part of the New Right is another question.
You don't negotiate with Bolsheviks, but you don't become a Nazi either.
One of the terrible, horrible, very bad things that happened in the 1930s is how many intellectuals went, "The Nazis are horrible. The Communists oppose them. The Communists must be good guys. Maybe I should support them; at the very least, not say bad things about them."
Way too many people in the 1930s convinced themselves that the only choice was between the Fascists and the Communists, and they thought the Communists were less bad. (There were also a fair number of people who thought the Fascists were less bad, but they pretty much disappeared the day after Pearl Harbor.)
I don't know how the future will go, but I don't think the only two choices are a continuation of the last four years or a thorough-going New Right.
First, the bill in Congress is certainly not up to the gravity of the situation. Congress itself isn't. Trump can only go so far with Congress and this is a key problem. Of course, Trump could then decide not to spend the money... we've been waiting for this showdown to resolve for a while.
And this is the key difference between Trump and an authoritarian. Trump is arguing primarily for the authority to NOT exercise fiscal power given him (i.e. the Executive) by Congress (the legislative). This is profound. He is also arguing for the authority to REVOKE his own powers of regulation. This is also profound. He isn't stumping for new regulations, he is rolling them back.
With regard to DOGE, Trump also isn't arguing for the right to abuse PEOPLE, he is arguing for the right to restrict and eliminate OFFICES. While the US Gov't is supposed to be tightly restrained in its authority to arrest, etc, private citizens, the one place its authority to punish is supposed to be largely unconstrained it towards 'offices.' The enemy here is the federal employees unions, primarily, but this isn't so much about working conditions as the total volume of work and the degree to which it is unsupervised and arbitrary. The government officials will try to convince you that Trump is beating up on helpless people, when he is really beating up on powerful offices. The people - they get a free vacation and the freedom to go work somewhere else. The job is quashed.
These distinctions are being willfully overlooked.
Part of the reason for willfully overlooking those distinctions is because Trump is willfully wasting all the goodwill from the popular programs with distracting and unnecessary court battles, and pretending tariffs can block imports without raising prices.
He is his own worst enemy.
The court battles are the Dems defensive moves, totally not Trump’s willful choice. His popular deportations are stopped by courts, your comment implies Trump should ignore the court, which would likely be terrible politically for Republicans.
Tariffs and especially the threat of tariffs is part of his economic policy, and prices / inflation are already coming down.
Dems who lie about Trump, and smart folk who predict disaster, wrongly, are bigger enemies than Trump’s too many words.
That's like saying "the shooting was the robbery victim's defensive move, totally not the robber's willful choice."
If popularity determines legality, then slavery was just fine.
Tariffs cannot lower prices.
This idea Trumpies have, that tariffs are good and harmless and effective, is bizarre. Trump and his fanbois make two main claims for tariffs: they will protect domestic industry and they will replace the income tax.
* They can only protect domestic industry by raising import prices so high that they reduce imports.
* That allows domestic industry to raise their prices. Ergo everything that used to be imported is now more expensive, nothing else drops in price as compensation, and overall prices rise.
* Reducing imports reduces revenue from import tariffs. Tariff rates have to rise even higher to compensate, imports reduce further, and revenue drops even further while domestic prices rise even further.
* It would take a 71% tariff rate on all imports to equal income tax revenue, an unsustainable rate. Imports would drop too much to ever generate enough tariff revenue to replace the income tax.
The end result is there will still be an income tax, prices will rise, and there will be fewer choices in stores.
The idea that 10% general and 30% Chinese tariffs are useful is even dumber. It doesn't generate near enough revenue to replace the income tax or raise prices enough to protect domestic industry, yet consumers will sure notice. 10% is harmless? 30% is harmless? Must be nice to have so much spare cash lying around that 10% and 30% price increases are invisible. And the IRS still exists, domestic industry still can't compete price-wise, and every economy around the world is disrupted. What a deal! That Trump, boy he sure is an artist!
Marx famously wrote that, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce".
But even Hegel and Marx could not foresee the the tragi-comic Lovecraftian Horror of what would happen the third time, when Jonah Goldberg wears a costume sports jersey for """Conservatism""" and Ben Crenshaw pretends to be The Final Prophet of the True Scotsman """New Right""" and two figures pretend to fight under flags of countries the languages of which they can't speak without making constant errors in heavy accents. The answer to "Laugh or cry?" is "Yes."
As I've pointed out before, this is not really a debate between differing sets principles, but a debate about whether -survival- ought to be a meta-principle, that is, whether a set of principles is really just cover for "the principle of being a beautiful loser" or instead implies the principle of "it's ok to do what must be done to keep the enemy from steamrollering right over you."
Of course the Old right was fiscally irresponsible, too Reagan, George W Bush Trump 1 and now Trump 1 cut taxes and increased deficits. I'll agree that failure to fix the funding of Social Security and Medicare is bi-partisan.
Right. "Paying lip-service but never actually accomplishing anything difficult when you had the rare chance, or when push comes to shove, or because there was some special reason the timing isn't right at the moment, and the next moment, and the moment after that too," is not "making a stand." What happened to judging by results instead of intentions?
Edit: I'm old enough to remember when the writers at places like National Review used to constantly complain how Republican politicians and GOP Establishment-types weren't "Old Right" at all, but pretend, fake right, doling out the equivalent of right-coded "boob bait for the bubbas", and who in reality had zero motivation or intention of ever doing any of the actually "post-war-conservativism-reflective" things their constituent voters wanted them to do. When people couldn't stand it anymore, when literally not one of over a dozen establishment-sanctified candidates was even willing to pay lip-service to most of those ideas anymore, "That's how you got Trump."
Again, if one stops judging by intentions or the debased media-theater of contemporary political performance art, and actually, you know, LOOKS at the list of Trump's Presidential actions, one sees the actual attempts to do an enormous wish-list of things the so-called "Old Right" politicians claimed to have wanted to accomplish, but somehow, mysteriously, never got around to doing even a little.
On this I will agree with you. Mr Kling's apparently claim that the New Right is uniquely unconcerned with spending does not align at all with complaints from Republicans and conservatives that GOP leadership for years has done little to restrain spending.
I think that by insisting that ONLY expenditure cuts may be used to reduce deficits is _ipso facto_ an irresponsible attitude of the Republican base, IF that is the attitude.
Heh, "Real Expenditure Cuts Has Never Been Tried!"
??? People claim to try every few years.
Paul Ryan voted for Medicare Part D and the Iraq War.
But he is *theoretically* in favor of cutting Social Security.
We cannot be sure about the past, but my guess is that If Republicans had wanted to pay for Part D, Democrats woud have gone along.
So, why didn't the Democrats do this in 2010, Thomas?
Did I say Democrats should not have? :) Somewhere in the last few days in some other comment (I suppose) I specifically said that Democrats in 2010 should have let the Bush tax cuts “die and ignominious death.”
Fair enough. I withdraw the comment.
Any opportunity to restate my views is positive. :)
The Dems raising taxes might well have made Romney the 2012 winner. Spending is popular, more taxes are not. Including the inflation tax, which even most non-college workers with jobs understand as less ability to buy stuff.
Politics is both downstream of culture and an influence on the direction of culture changes.
The behind-the-scenes actors who really run things are in the habit of presenting the masses with candidates whose differences are either phony or meaningless. Sometimes this is so obvious that only idiots who still believe what's on television would be fooled.
Take your example of Romney. The one issue that mattered to conservatives in 2012 was to try to repeal newly enacted ObamaCare before it could take effect and worsen our already too expensive and poorly run health care system. So the Republicans... nominated the one candidate they had who could not run against ObamaCare because he had written it himself. Did anyone in the whole country believe Romney could win, or that it would help if he did? I haven't found any.
Funding Medical Care for the citizens and social security is knowable math problem, and from that perspective simple. Taxes and a permanent model that would stand for at least 100 years should be adopted. It will not be free or even cheap. But the stability will be worth it. Bringing down some medical costs will require we not have our cake and eat it too. These are unpopular political decisions which why nothing ever gets done. No one wants to pay taxes, or they have been told they don’t have to. What is irrational about how people perceive medical costs is they would never deliberately endanger their job that has an outstanding salary and benefits (including healthcare). Your work is your “tax” to the company you work for. We need to ensure people have healthcare throughout their life, and there is a cost. Social Security is there to provide a stable benefit that is not tied to the whims of the stock market. Paying for these is worth it. We can decrease Medicaid by decreasing working poor and making sure more people have benefits so they don’t need Medicaid in the first place. Paying for it is the solution and it is common sense.
It's good to steelman the arguments about "liberalism" and about ends & means & norms and even about the usefulness of often misused labels.
L Liberals who talk about Rule of Law should all be appalled at the SCOTUS decision which stops Trump (actually the Trump administration) from immediately deporting illegal aliens, and instead demanding some undefined additional "due process". Those who violate the border law are law-breaking criminal non-citizens, and deportation, not US prison nor death, is the legally recognized response. In some commie countries, violating border laws, like trying to self-deport/ escape, DID result in guards shooting to kill and often killing.
The key labels, which also exist in Congress, are D Democrats & R Republicans. Not liberal nor conservative, left, right, Old or New Right, moderate, progressive, radical, whig (whig??? in 2025?); nor black, white, male, female, or other identity. Most Congressional voting is consistently D or R. Most bureaucratic law-making, non-constitutional but real, is Dem, or Dem influenced Congress direct.
On "norms", if the Dems have done it, violated some norm, with little or no Dem opposition to norm breaking, then the Reps can do it. It stops being a norm. Reps should do more of it than they've done so as to teach the Dems, that it's not a good idea to do that. Tit for tat works; and it's eye for eye, not 2 eyes or death for one eye.
Dems in power have already violated, tho not destroyed as an ideal, all the liberal principles "free speech, freedom of association, due process, free markets, individual rights"
Cancel culture on speech, anti-discrimination laws on association, J6 protesters imprisoned without due process as well as 11 million illegals being allowed in w/o due process, free markets (ha!), individual rights but required experimental vaccines (that saved millions but caused side effects for many).
The Current Situation is Unacceptable -- lots of voters think that. Trump (R) is doing far more to reduce the problems than Obama or Biden did, or Harris or Hillary was likely to try.
Kling: "My own pessimism is centered on the state of higher education. " -- yet no support for Trump's letter to Harvard against anti-Semitism, nor any serious proposal about increasing viewpoint diversity at the Ivy+ schools, rather a veeeery sloooow drift away to other alternative schools. Trump is right to attempt reform by cutting off govt money, especially tax exemptions, in other words to do what Kling says he wants to stop "throwing money and students at it."
The final Trump-distaste (not really hate) by Kling: "Another reason that I am not signing up for the New Right is that they are soft on the issue of fiscal responsibility."
Listener provides a good list of problems: "The illegal immigration crisis, our bloated federal bureaucracy, the NGO industrial complex which may literally be a criminal racket, (also written about here-- RICO the NGOs ) the unsustainable fiscal train wreck that is our debt & deficit, the higher education cartel that siphons billions of dollars off the Federal Government to exclusively indoctrinate members of one political party while building billion dollar hedge funds,
And Trump is working well towards reducing all the problems:
1) illegal immigrations -- deportations (though D judges oppose)
2) reducing bloated bureaucracies, like USAID (some judge injunctions against)
4) college cartels getting tax benefits for indoctrination more than education -- Trump's anti DEI and anti-Semitism actions, with likely viewpoint diversity becoming more important.
All of the above 3 are huge, but tractable problems, and Trump is working on them. Which leaves the fourth (but ordered in list as 3):
3) the unsustainable fiscal train wreck that is our debt & deficit.
I'm not sure the debt is unsustainable, and won't be convinced until Japan's much larger debt results in huge problems which hasn't happened since their "lost decade(s)" began in their 1989 property bubble burst. [I had read that Tokyo was worth more than the USA -- the entire USA was less than the floorspace rent & purchase price value of Tokyo. THAT was unsustainable, but they avoided civilization collapse. A huge & growing debt "to themselves" seems less existential. Rogoff's claims that Japan is now not doing so well might be the crisis signal, yet the "all at once" part hasn't yet happened.]
Arnold & the Old Right claim the only solution is entitlement reform, which I doubt is true but it might be. I'm sure that the US Congress won't do serious entitlement reform, cuts & reductions, until D Democrats are calling for it -- so any call for Reps to cut Soc Sec or other entitlements is basically a call for Reps to lose the next election (2026 now), so as to lose the power to solve any problems.
Congress should solve the immigration, bureaucracy, & college mono-culture problems first. They can be solved without losing elections, and maybe even gaining popularity, as populist parties which actually do what is popular usually do gain in popularity & votes. (#5 vote ID for more secure voting is also in play and doable).
Big deficit reduction is not yet politically feasible, tho highlighting it as a problem remains a good political tactic for some amount of time. Maybe even a govt shutdown worth more as a stunt than to get big spending reduction from a 2025 bill. I would argue better to focus on the 3-4 things that can be done in Congress first, so as to get some good results sooner.
"Tit for tat works"
Tit for tat says start by co-operating, then if the other party doesn't co-operate, stop co-operating. Then keep doing whatever the other party does. If the other party also plays tit for tat, the first non-cooperation leads to never-stopping lack of co-operation.
So if Ds are assholes and Rs respond by being assholes, tit for tat means they both remain assholes forever.
Not what I think of when I think of "works".
Christian forgiveness is how this stops. Ds have been jerks, now Rs are jerks (maybe) both tribes claiming the others are jerks AND that the other tribe started it.
One tribe’s leader has to say Sorry, this is not working, and the other tribe has to accept some peace where both tribes stop the jerk behavior.
Tho you fail to specify that the Dems were assholes for allowing 11 million illegals in, and now you claim the Reps are assholes for trying to enforce the law and deport them, and maybe claim the Dems are assholes for using courts to stop the deportations. Is this what you mean in this case? Justice is case by case.
I was being very general, not specific to any particular person or issue. As you imply, different cases have different mixes of assholery.
"On that issue [taxing and spending], it is the Old Right who are willing to make a stand. While the New Right lets these “hardliners” twist in the wind."
I'm really surprised you could write that with a straight face. Was it the 'New Right' that made Congress only able to pass, IIRC, 4 annual budgets in regular order since the implementation of the current budget and appropriation system five decades ago? Continuing resolutions and other extraordinary measures have been a regular part of our political landscape since the 1990s when Donald Trump was still building casinos in Atlantic City. The last serious attempt to reform Social Security occurred under Ronald Reagan (and screwed anybody under voting age at that point). Even in the current situation I see where folks like Chip Roy and Thomas Massie are the ones who are (somewhat mistakenly in my opinion) trying to codify further cuts in spending while Republicans like Mitch McConnell continue with the 'go along to get along' attitude that balloons spending on Democrat priorities to hid their own pet projects.
Culture war issues get a lot of play in the claim that self-proclaimed Conservatives have conserved nothing but fiscal policy is where the rubber of GOPe claims to be in favor of restraint have rarely if ever meet the road of actual implementation. Even Newt Gingrich only lucked into being able to restrain spending by a weak second-term Bill Clinton in the middle of a rising economy, and then the Democrats pissed a nearly balanced budget away as soon as they got back in control.
To be fair, it wasn't really Democrats who pissed away the balanced budgets of Gingrich/Dole and Clinton, but George W. Bush and Denny Hastert/Trent Lott.
It will take the fiscal default of the United States to even have a prayer of fixing what is wrong with the Federal Government and it is likely that a default will make the Federal Government even worse. Count me among the pessimists.
The current Trump budget largely uses tariff revenue (10% world, 30% China will fund hundreds of billions in revenue) to offset his income tax cuts. It's a perfectly reasonable policy proposal, and if the CBO included tariff revenue in the calculation it would be non-controversial.
Also, Trump is cutting Medicaid a lot for which I note you are giving him ZERO CREDIT despite it being the only serious entitlement cut anyone has attempted in a generation and he's taking huge political flak for it.
This is in contrast Biden who spent trillions both before and after COVID with no revenue to pay for it. His inflation also drove up interest rates and therefore financing cost. Most of the GOPe campaigned for Biden, so we can blame them too.
Where the Medicaid negotiations will end up is still an open question. It's worth pointing out that the major obstacles to even getting the FMAP levels back down (to be both hard ceilings instead of fake, soft floors with extra fed money coming in from the side, and forget about CHIP) is from politicians from Red States which have gotten used to dependency on federal largesse, the same way they are all defendant on federal money for education, and for recovery after every emergency disaster (or, you know, completely ordinary storms that happen all the time). That's something the Real Old Right warned would happen, but which the Fake Old Right were happy to help make happen.
I think Trump should come up with something like “poor red states will keep getting federal Medicaid subsidies but rich blue states won’t” to buy enough R votes. Reward friends, punish enemies. Fuck fairness.
I note that the state I’m moving to didn’t expand Medicaid even with huge fed subsidies.
"Reward friends, punish enemies. Fuck fairness."
Not sure how you think that would be at all sustainable over time. In order to stop the whipsawing back and forth at every change of administration, we really need to get back to a government that is reasonable and fair. Not that there's any indication of that in our future...
His tariffs are about as useful as setting fire to a bag of poop on a doorstep. He claims he wants to protect domestic manufacturing with tariffs high enough to cripple imports, which in turn means little revenue. He can't have it both ways. He can block imports, or he can generate a small amount of revenue. 30% is not nothing, he can only jawbone Walmart and Amazon so much before they have to pass along the price increases, and nothing gets voters as riled up as price increases. Ask Biden; his inflation dropped below 4% in June 2023, was "almost" back to the normal 2% by November 2024, yet the voters still remembered. Trump's going to lose the House in 2026.
And yes, Trump's price increases are not inflation of the money supply and he could reverse course and eliminate the price increases with more executive orders, but the way he's been screaming at the Fed, I wouldn't be surprised if he gets the true inflation cure for his tariffs fiasco.
I'll believe in his Medicaid cuts when they actually happen. Isn't that what all the Trumpies say? Pay attention to what he does, not what he says? His Medicaid cuts are just blowhard blather so far, and considering how little he cares about actual legislation, I expect nothing useful.
Being better than Biden in most areas does not make him 100% good. TDS is bipartisan. Lefties find him 100% evil, righties find him 100% good. They are both blinkered idiots.
Yes, he can’t have it both ways. I’m telling you what I think the actual effects of his actual policies in place at this time will likely be, and I like them. Hundreds of billions in revenue is not small. It’s literally enough to pay for the extension of his 2017 tax cuts.
He’s the first politician in history to claim his policies will solve everyone’s problems even when those problems contradict! No politician before has ever done that!
And he’s the first politician to blame retailers for price increases. I certainly don’t remember Biden blaming grocers price gouging for the inflation he caused. And I totally forgot how economists claimed it was all transitory.
You certainly aren’t going to get Medicaid cuts by constantly trashing the only person to meaningfully try in a generation. When it fails know that you were part of the problem.
Being better than Biden makes him the correct person to vote for in the last election. And I got news, the dems aren’t going to be any better in 2028.
Welcome to politics. It’s full of people and coalitions and horse trading.
I read your post as saying, "You can't blame Trump. He's just doing what Biden did and what other politicians do."
Okay. That's uncharitable. Perhaps more accurate is "Trump does lots of bad things that Biden and other politicians do. But he also does some good things that they don't. So he should be defended."
I can go along with that. But I'll also criticize the bad things.
Here is a longer, less-snarky, reply.
The US collected $2.4T in income tax revenue in 2024. Imports were $3.36T and generated $64B in revenue. Replacing the income tax with tariffs requires 71% tariffs. Anything less than abolishing the income tax keeps its complete bureaucracy intact and ready to spring back into action with the next shift in political winds.
71% tariffs are self-defeating, unsustainable; they will reduce imports, just as Trump wants. Amazon and Walmart have to raise their prices, no matter how much Trump berates them. The intended side effect of reducing imports has the unintended side effect of reducing revenue and making it impossible to eliminate the income tax, contrary to what Trump and all his fanbois claim he wants.
Trump thinks US manufacturing has been hollowed out. He is dead wrong; manufacturing value is at an all-time high, and manufacturing jobs have been dropping since the 1940s. High-skill high-pay manufacturing and minimum wage laws offshored the low-skill low-pay manufacturing which Trump wants to bring back to the US; those are not quality jobs, and where will all those new low-skill low-pay workers come from? US manufacturing unemployment was lower in 2024 than general unemployment. It won't be immigrants, that's for sure, legal or illegal. The only possible answer is drawing workers from more efficient jobs which markets think are more valuable. Central planning, socialism, marxism, fascism, call it what you will; it ruins economies.
In other words, Trump is choosing high prices and less choice from tariffs, and an intact IRS, in exchange for hostile courts, disrupting the US and global economies for years to come, and ruining the US's reputation as a reliable trading partner. It's a colossal waste of political capital which gives voters every excuse they need to send Republicans packing and bring back wokism and the green raw deal in 2028. That's one hell of a deal, about as artistic as throwing cans of soup at the Mona Lisa.
10% World and 30% China would generate about $500B a year.
The CBO prices out the cost of Trumps tax bill at $4T over 10 years. Let's do crude math and say $400B a year.
So yes, that tariff revenue and the cost of his income tax bill are roughly in line.
"which gives voters every excuse they need to send Republicans packing and bring back wokism and the green raw deal in 2028"
If you choose to vote woke because he didn't give you every single thing you want then you're a retard who deserves everything AOC/Newsome gives you in 2028.
Learn to do something fucking politics. You're such a crybaby.
You think I like that we are going to get a bigger SALT when I live in a 0% income tax state? No. I thank Trump for, thus far, limiting it to such a small amount it won't cost much to buy those votes. But if assholes like you hold it up over "fiscal conservatism" we'll probably lose the Medicaid cuts and get a giant SALT because that's what it takes to get it over the finish line when you've got a five vote majority.
If you don't like the horse trading that comes with slim majorities maybe you shouldn't constantly be hemming and hawing and fence sitting and just fucking commit. My state was 50/50 in 2019 and now it's super maga and I have universal school vouchers. Because the people here aren't effeminate libertarian faggots that can't do politics. They are people that said "give me liberty and not a fucking face diaper" and moved to make it happen. The "fiscal conservative" faggots I live near DC couldn't summon the courage for that shit. They care too much about getting invited to the right parties to actually do anything.
Your tired 10% and 30% are meaningless. My 71% is what is necessary to get rid of the IRS. It's what Trump needs to "protect" domestic manufacturing.
Trump won this election by 1.5%, and didn't even get a majority, against one of the most awful candidates in history, with no primary vote, maximum woke, maximum green energy, and no platform. You think that's because the voters like woke and expensive energy? It's because Trump is so divisive, and it wouldn't take much to reverse that 1.5%. The voters remembered Biden's inflation 18 months later. You think they won't remember Trump's?
Learn to do some real politics, not your wannabe brand.
And stop pretending that harsh reality is betrayal. Trump could do with a few No men instead of the sycophants he's got.
Gee isn’t that just great, he can continue the status quo by raising some taxes and cutting others. Ain’t that just spiffy poo!
I don’t care what you think you are telling me. I care about the actual effects of his policies, and the self-destructive way he is throwing away political capital on idiocy instead of focusing on good solid reforms which would have the backing of ¾ of voters and pave the way for a JD Vance election in 2028. He might as well campaign for AOC or Newsome, the way he’s giving voters plenty of bad memories for November 2026.
You may not care what happens in 2026 or 2028. I do.
How “broken” are our governing institutions and how do we fix them? If you believe that our governing class is entrenched, self-serving, (ever more self-perpetuating), globalist, and hopelessly committed to foreign interventions and war, as I do, then you support a fairly radical approach to “reform.” Also, the idea that mainstream conservatives have been fiscally responsible or committed to preserving liberty is, frankly, laughable. The problem with the new-right is that its approach to governing would quickly morph into crony capitalism and “soft totalitarianism.” I’m very pessimistic that the American experiment can be preserved, but I would say that our one saving grace is federalism. A much greater commitment to returning power to states and localities seems sensible and necessary, and the sooner the better.
Saying the allocation of power in the union should return to the states is like saying the allocation of power in the federal government should return to Congress. The trouble is, they don't really want it.
Yes, the horse has long since left the barn. The only way to return to some kind of constitutional balance is to unwind all the Progressive meddling, which I put in the 1880s when the cronies decided they needed a modern Navy, which led to the 1898 war with Spain, imperialism, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, WW I, FDR's New Deal, and by then there was, and is, no turning back. Reagan's deficits, the Department of Education, Part D, Obamacare, and all the rest are just inevitable trifles in comparison.
Trump's only real benefit is putting brakes on climate catastrophe and wokism. But doing it by executive order guarantees they will bounce back with a vengeance, his tariffs and his focus on fighting the courts instead of real immigration reform all waste enormous political capital and run the real risk of impeachment again in 2027.
I personally think the Constitution was a pretty good first draft, but it can never be restored to a limited government. Its major failing was allowing government to set its own limits. When push comes to shove, government judges are going to take the government's side, whether out of political fear or having the same employer. Even if they only do that one time out of 1000, it's a one-way ratchet and we passed the point of no return long ago.
I suspect we will end up wallowing in a mud pit of cronyism, slashing back and forth between authoritarian regimes, and dictatorship by the Deep State bureaucrats, who will tighten down the screws after Biden and Trump have shown the evils of letting the President have too much independent power. The idea of Trump being Hitler, or Biden being Stalin, are suitable only for campaign slogans. Presidential races will become figurehead races.
>this might require suspending parts of the Constitution
Nope. Not signing on to this bullshit.
None of this resembles any right-winder, "new" or "old," in my experience.
Both the Left and the New Right agree on one thing: in order to save democracy "we" must first destroy it.
God help us if either of them get their way.
A lot of the major issues that contribute to divisions and fracturing in the various political labels rest on open questions and paradoxes and it seems a lot of language gets used in popular discourse in misleading ways. Some entries at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that lay open the issues and open questions that might clarify as well as delineate areas of confusion among the dividing lines in the label wars are:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/constitutionalism/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/republicanism/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/
After giving the "New Rightist" piece a quick scan and some of the discussions mentioned therein, I thought that rather than spend a couple hours trying to engage with that writing I would be better off rereading the encyclopedia entries, which I did and don't regret. Also, I imagine the new Quentin Skinner tome on liberty is highly valuable but unfortunately it hasn't risen to the top of the pile quite yet.
At the cost of providing further validation of Godwin’s law: try to replace ‘American’ with ‘German’ in the statement ’the welfare of the American people should be the supreme good’ …
The founders seem to have been extremely concerned with good governance and putting in place structures to constrain the growth of government, and it seems that the past 100 years have seen an extremely rapid dismantling of those mechanisms and consequent ability for the government to grow in power and spending.
It seems that the New Right would be more effective if it restored the mechanisms that kept it in check instead of the current course of action.
Some of the mechanisms I refer to:
* Gold standard, or some way to limit spending. Obviously we could not return to the gold standard, but I see no reason that the Buffett rule could not be adopted ("all sitting members of congress are ineligible for re-election any year the deficit exceeds 3%")
* Voting - Originally there was 1 vote per household, implemented as a male landowner. Something like this could be restored by adopting the proposal of votes for children, as cast by parents.
* Part-time Congress, made up of business folks / citizens with real jobs, rather than career politicians.
* Dis-intermediated senator and president elections, due to exactly the drawbacks of populism (on the left AND right) that we see today. Idiocracy in action.
* Constitution that attempted to strictly limit the power of the Federal government. It's frankly absurd how one could read that and square it with the current behavior of saying what type of shower valve we are allowed to use in our own homes.
The system we have today does not resemble the system as originally designed, and the changes in mechanism were brought about by those who sought and achieved increased power as a never ending ratchet.
I think I hope the Stupid party wins instead of the Evil party, but I wish someone were seeking to restore some of these checks prior to crisis.
Don’t be a weenie