A POSITIVE POPULISM IN A TIME OF STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF OUR NATION.

The Conservative Political Action Conference is in progress in Florida, rather than somewhere near the Federal Capital, in part because Florida's governor isn't a lockdown-happy tyrant.

As far as standard-issue conservatives are concerned, though, the event might as well not be happening, judging by the sparsity of coverage at National Review, contrasted to that at the various Pajamas Media or Town Hall or whoever the umbrella organization is sites.

In part, that's because there is a struggle for the soul of conservatism.  Ask yourself, dear reader, who longtime speechwriter David Frum is writing about.  "And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as 'losers.'"  You could say, "Donald Trump," but Mr Frum wrote the preceding, for Newsweek, in 2009.

With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence—exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we're cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush's every rancorous word—we'll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Mr Trump might be famously germ-phobic, and tee-totaling, and yet, you can bet whoever is pulling the strings for the current president will point out the private plane and the personal bulk, and the tangled marital history, and the self-indulgence.

Without the dittoheads and the Trumpians, though, there's no populist coalition.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

But do the rest of us understand what we are doing to ourselves by accepting this leadership? Rush is to the Republicanism of the 2000s what Jesse Jackson was to the Democratic party in the 1980s. He plays an important role in our coalition, and of course he and his supporters have to be treated with respect. But he cannot be allowed to be the public face of the enterprise—and we have to find ways of assuring the public that he is just one Republican voice among many, and very far from the most important.

That gets more difficult when it's a past president who might be running for a second, non-consecutive term; on the other hand, in the reality that the past president did not earn a second consecutive term because he failed to build a coalition there might be a way to make a deal for a broader appeal, and without the reflexive cocking a snook at establishmentarian types for their food snobbery or their cocktail parties.

Here's how Mr Frum saw it from 2009.  First, he proposes to take the sting out of Mr Limbaugh's notorious "I hope [Barack Obama] fails" comment.

Notice that Limbaugh did not say: "I hope the administration's liberal plans fail." Or (better): "I know the administration's liberal plans will fail." Or (best): "I fear that this administration's liberal plans will fail, as liberal plans usually do." If it had been phrased that way, nobody could have used Limbaugh's words to misrepresent conservatives as clueless, indifferent or gleeful in the face of the most painful economic crisis in a generation. But then, if it had been phrased that way, nobody would have quoted his words at all—and as Limbaugh himself said, being "headlined" was the point of the exercise. If it had been phrased that way, Limbaugh's face would not now be adorning the covers of magazines. He phrased his hope in a way that drew maximum attention to himself, offered maximum benefit to the administration and did maximum harm to the party he claims to support.

There's a lot more at the essay, but it's offered more in sorrow than anger, concluding,

On most issues, I doubt Limbaugh and I even disagree very much. But the issues on which we do disagree are maybe the most important to the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party: Should conservatives be trying to provoke or persuade? To narrow our coalition or enlarge it? To enflame or govern? And finally (and above all): to profit—or to serve?

In like manner, the Trumpian populists and the more conventional Republicans, and more than a few Democrats, might be more in agreement than not today.  The successful formula might be one offered by Astral Codex Ten, which, in his fashion, is long, but it has a pithy abstract.  "Pivot from mindless populist rage to a thoughtful campaign to fight classism."  Both Mr Limbaugh and Mr Trump understood the enemy, although their messaging, whether it's "new castrati" or "stupid people" might not have won waverers over.

Trump managed to excite people, but you don't know how to turn his personal appeal into a new platform. Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people than it won; absent his personal magic it seems like a losing combination. You seem to have picked up a few minority voters here and there, but you're not sure why, and you don't know how to build on this success.

I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck. Also, the more confused you are, the more you flail around sabotaging everything. All else being equal, I'd rather you have a coherent interesting message, and make Democrats shape up to compete with you.

That's correct, dear reader, there are other ways of coming to the conclusion that Democrats suck than populist talk radio ways.  It's possible that he, too, falls into the food-snobbery-cocktail-party-metrofexual-aesthetics trap, but stay with the argument.

Trump stood against the upper class. He might define them as: people who live in nice apartments in Manhattan or SF or DC and laugh under their breath if anybody comes from Akron or Tampa. Who eat Thai food and Ethiopian food and anything fusion, think they would gain 200 lbs if they ever stepped in a McDonalds, and won't even speak the name Chick-Fil-A. Who usually go to Ivy League colleges, though Amherst or Berkeley is acceptable if absolutely necessary. Who conspicuously love Broadway (especially Hamilton), LGBT, education, "expertise", mass transit, and foreign anything. They conspicuously hate NASCAR, wrestling, football, "fast food", SUVs, FOX, guns, the South, evangelicals, and reality TV. Who would never get married before age 25 and have cutesy pins about how cats are better than children. Who get jobs in journalism, academia, government, consulting, or anything else with no time-card where you never have to use your hands. Who all have exactly the same political and aesthetic opinions on everything, and think the noblest and most important task imaginable is to gatekeep information in ways that force everyone else to share those opinions too.

In there, though, is a positive populist formula that well might garner votes, rather than (as we saw in the Georgia run-off elections) turn them off. "Consciously embracing the project of fighting classism would let future Republican politicians replicate Trump’s appeal without having to stoop to his tactics. It could tie together all the fractured constituencies of the Republican party."

I don't know if the proposal is offered in good faith, or if it's erudite trolling, but it's interesting.

First target: higher education.  "As it currently exists, college is a scheme for laundering and perpetuating class advantage. You need to make the case that bogus degree requirements (eg someone without a college degree can't be a sales manager at X big company, but somebody with any degree, even Art History or Literature, can) are blatantly classist."  That might require work to overturn or modify Griggs v. Duke Power, a ruling that sanctified higher education as offering nondiscriminatory methods of certifying people as qualified.  It's interesting, though, that in the midst of a defense of continued woke indoctrination in higher education, an Inside Higher Ed contributor says the quiet part out loud.  "[B]eneficiaries of privilege are wholly blind to their advantages and condescending toward those with less power."

Second target: credentialed expertise, where the holders of those prestige degrees feel entitled to condescend once they have the power.  "Democrats have invented and propped up a fake concept of expertise as a way of making sure upper-class people who can game admissions to top colleges control the discourse."  He proposes lifting restrictions on prediction markets.  There's something disturbing about being able to buy an over-under on "two million Americans dead of coronavirus by May 2020" or "half a million Americans dead with coronavirus by February 14, 2021," but then, I have more confidence in emergence, and the public health experts have been regularly wrong.

Third target: the credentialed legacy media.

Fourth target: woke indoctrination.  "If anybody asks you for your theory of racism, it should be that a lot of modern racism is a subform of classism, where people naturally assume minorities are lower class."  That scales.