PRAGMATIC LIBERTARIAN POPULISM.

We'll start at home, with an effort my Congressman is mounting to root Trumpism, or perhaps it's conspiracy theorizing, out of the Republican Party, or something. "[Adam] Kinzinger said the Wednesday House GOP member meeting will probably be 'the opening salvo in the fight for the party. Are we going to be a party of dark conspiracies, of lies or are we going to be a party of optimism and hope?'”

There's more than a party at stake, and there's a lot that a positively populist Republican party, or a coalition that includes Republicans could do, to undo, and there's more than a little bipartisan swamp-draining for effect.

This is also going to be a mini-dissertation, continuing after the jump.

We start with the arbitrary and ineffective house arrests that allegedly are slowing the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus.

Political class heavies from both parties stand to gain more by "bipartisanship" that generates rents for the usual suspects to dissipate, even though there are many people who don't go along with the latest Q-anon fever dreams who will also be hard done by.  There have to be, for instance, more than a few traditionally Democratic voters who are worse off for half a year of wilding supposedly in the service of their civil rights, and still stuck in decaying cities.  Wasn't that what urban renewal was supposed to fix?  Where are those model cities, and why aren't they resilient against plague and ward-heeler mayors?  For that matter, wasn't the War On Poverty supposed to meliorate the condition of people, starting over a half century ago?

Note also how the forecasts of environmental apocalypse have been consistently wrong.

Nice job, bipartisan technocrats, and I haven't yet gotten to "limited" and "nation building" wars that get a lot of people killed to little effect, and I don't even have to raise Medicare and Social Security, which will crash of their own weight whether somebody on social media predicts it or denies it.

That is to say, the conventional wisdom has a lot to apologize for, and the critics of that conventional wisdom from a left perspective will be their usual silly selves, as National Review's Kevin Williamson reminds us.

I do not expect the American Left to question the premise that “human action no longer encounters obstacles or limits, only adversaries,” because the American Left is, always has been, and always will be both utopian and juvenile. But an American Right that consistently fails to grapple with reality, as in the case of so many contemporary Republican elected officials and prominent right-wing media voices, is incoherent. It is no longer conservative in any meaningful sense, but, as expressed in the rhetoric of so much of the Right today, self-consciously revolutionary.

Yes, and in the same way that it's more important to put a socialist on his back foot by forcing him to disavow the gulag or the cultural revolution or the killing fields, it is important to put a technocrat on his back foot by forcing him to disavow the 55 mph speed limit, or the bundling of highway aid with the drinking age, or urban style coronavirus lockdowns on sparsely settled areas, or for that matter, any call for any national mandates not explicitly specified in the Constitution.  Devolution where possible, just might be what ends the insanity.  Another National Review contributor, Douglas Carswell, explains.

After years of partisan rancor, many Americans are weary of division. Why not appeal to them with a program that explicitly accepts that folks in Massachusetts may have very different priorities to those in Mississippi? Instead of forcing the agenda of one upon the other, give everyone more local control.

Not only that, there's a populist bench getting things done in the several states.

Incidentally, if we look to the states, we might also start to notice that this is where some of America’s brightest leadership is to be found. Ron DeSantis in Florida, Kristi Noem in South Dakota, Chris Sununu in New Hampshire, and even Jared Polis in Colorado are all examples of what real leadership looks like. There’s a bright future for the conservative movement if we shift our focus away from the Washington Beltway and direct it toward the states.

Let me add one more example.  Iowa is effectively open for business, with citizens being entrusted to be on their best behavior when they patronize restaurants or otherwise mingle, and unemployment rates have returned to Trumpian pre-lockdown levels.

That's the pragmatic part.  The next part is the heavier lift.  The antics of the people who get their news from the fever swamps of social media and talk radio do put off Normals who might otherwise be sympathetic to rolling back the administrative state, and devolving power from Washington, and the grifting rent-seekers and their Reichstag fire optics.

The good news is that those people can be part of a new "Leave us alone" coalition, and The Week's Matthew Walther has a name for them: the Barstool conservatives. That's a phenomenon we've called attention to, with Barstool founder Dave Portnoy funding businesses that have been hammered by the arbitrary lockdowns (and thrice Most Valuable Player Aaron Rodgers hinting at a second act?) and calling out precisely the most obnoxious manifestations of Establishment Technocracy.

But in the last year, as Portnoy emerged as one of America's most visible critics of the lockdown policies instituted by virtually every state governor, it became clear to me that more so than anyone else he embodied the world view of millions of Americans, who share his disdain for the language of liberal improvement, the hectoring, schoolmarmish attitude of Democratic politicians and their allies in the media, and, above all, the elevation of risk-aversion to the level of a first-order principle by our professional classes.

It's always hard for a governing class to elicit cooperation by hectoring, condescending, or deplorable shaming, but, from Official Washington, we get that in spades.

In politics, you add by adding, and here's Rod "Benedict Option" Dreher saying as much.

We trad Christians have to realize that the Leave Us Alone Coalition is probably the best thing we can hope for, given how much American culture has changed.

I don’t know to what extent conservative Christians believe in this idea that you used to hear among old-school Evangelicals: that we can “take back America for God.” This, usually stated as part of a political appeal. If there is anybody left in this country who believes that, please, stop. It’s just not possible through political means, and believing that it is blinds you to the realistic possibilities of constructive political allyship with those who don’t share Christian conservative views, but who at least don’t hate conservative Christians and therefore seek to destroy our institutions.

As is usually the case with a Rod Dreher post, it's a collection of excerpts and links that will reward careful study.  For purposes of today's essay, it's sufficient to note that conserving the institutions that work, and rolling back the overweening administrative state, are tasks worth doing and currently doable.  The evangelical cultural issues, perhaps currently not so much, but as many of those are experiments against reality, the more pragmatic thing to do might be to wait them out.

Right now might be a populist moment, as National Review's M. B. Dougherty suggests. "Trust in institutions is collapsing, social media intensify conflict, and our leaders seem arrogant and unaccountable." That puts the leaders in a place of having to reform if they would preserve.

What quells populism? There are usually two things that do it. The unpleasant one is that populists elect a leadership class of fellow populists who wreck the economy, and then the whole project blows up in their faces, scattering populist energies and passions to the wind. The other, usually better end to populism comes about when populist energy effects a transformation of the elite, partly by substituting in new members and partly by inducing incumbents to reform their ways for their own survival.

The Biden^* restoration looks like an attempt to buy off one part of the insurgency (the traditional Democrat dependents) and suppress the other part with the usual condescenscion. I'd bet against that.

A pragmatic populism might build a coalition along lines suggested by Avik Roy.  He notes that there used to be a coalition of evangelicals, business interests, and libertarians, all primarily opposed to International Communism.  Today, there is a new potential coalition, all hard done by by the rent-seekers and technocrats.

The value of this new three-legged stool is that it maximizes the size of the coalition that supports self-government. Kitchen-table voters, suburban moderates, libertarians, and pro-market Democrats all want a country in which every American, regardless of race or ethnicity, has a fair shot at success. Not all of these voters are aligned with conservatives today, but they could be in the future. Just as we have seen with school choice, investing in the success of low-income Americans of all races can attract new voters to our cause and enrich the moral purpose of our work.

Note, he's envisioning adding, rather than subtracting. Mr Trump was not good at adding to his totals or his party's delegations at the national level, but he might have gotten people interested in seeking state or local office involved.

We conservatives like to claim that our principles are timeless and universal. If they are, they don’t apply only to Americans of European descent. They apply also to “Third World foreigners” and the descendants of liberated slaves. We’ve talked a lot about the white working class over the past four years. But it is only when conservatives gain the allegiance of all members of the working class — black, Hispanic, Asian, white, and everyone in between — that we will be able to vindicate the uniquely American experiment in self-government.

That's the adding on. There's also work to be done, putting the advocates of the administrative state on their back foot.

Today’s nightmare may be the natural result of the original progressive project. But the original progressives and their successors in the 1960s would be appalled by progressivism’s modern incarnation. [Administrative law expert Philip] Howard insists that they never dreamed “of thousand-page rulebooks, ten-year permitting processes, doctors spending up to half of their workdays filling out forms, entrepreneurs faced with getting permits from a dozen different agencies, teachers scared to put an arm around a crying child.”

That passage sounds wonky, and, as it's Power Line quoting George Will quoting a lawyer, it's going to sound wonky. The point, though, is that it's no longer participants in law school workshops or administrative hearings or public broadcasting shows that are getting slammed by the process worship: it's everybody declared "nonessential" by a dictatorial governor. There's a lot of political hay to be made there.

Paul Mirengoff continues,

True. I wonder, though, whether Howard, in his attack on rule-based neutral administration purged of human judgment, isn’t fighting the last war or at least ignoring an important second front. Many modern progressives probably have no more use for neutral administration than Howard does. They favor a government preoccupied with “equity,” by which they mean the creation by the government of favorable outcomes for certain groups.

Thus, we may be heading for the worst of all worlds — government paralysis when it comes to performing traditional tasks and government hyper-activity when it comes to the untraditional task of remaking society.

Or, because arbitrary administrative actions made more arbitrary and less productive because of equity considerations that will turn out themselves to be experiments against reality, perhaps there's more people being hard done by who might welcome pragmatic populist arguments.  Here's John C. Goodman.

In every large city in the country, large numbers of low-income minority families are forced to live in substandard housing and send their children to failing schools. They benefit the least from almost every public service, from transportation to health care to public safety. They are also denied job opportunities by medieval-style occupational-licensing laws. These cities are almost always run by Democrats, usually liberal Democrats. A reformist conservative agenda would advocate school choice, the liberation of the housing and job markets, and private alternatives to essential city services.

Likewise, too many American seniors are trapped in antiquated social-insurance schemes that should be an embarrassment to a civilized society such as ours.

See, he put Social Security and Medicare in play.

Here's Stephanie Slade.

The weight of evidence through history is that concentrated government power in the best case leads to incompetence and waste, while in the worst case it degenerates quickly into tyranny. Whether your main concern is material enrichment or the protection of human rights, limited government has been shown on the proving grounds of experience to be the best available means to that end.

Note, in particular, how quickly "fifteen days to slow the spread" has deteriorated into incompetence, waste, and tyranny.  Now they own it.

There being nothing especially artful about this stratagem, and most Americans not being utterly stupid, its success depends exclusively on the media’s near-unanimous complicity in it. That unanimity, however, may be getting harder to maintain. Not only is the binding objective—getting rid of Trump—no longer there, documents are surfacing that show the material complicity between Anthony Fauci, the oligarchy’s fountain of authority in all matters COVID-19, and the development of the virus itself. Covering for that level of professional incompetence and corruption may be a bridge too far, even for today’s media.

The votes are there, notes Daniel McCarthy, awaiting only the alertness to pick them up.

But the Republican right thrives on the decay of Washington’s liberal consensus, and that consensus cannot be saved by COVID or the repression of dissent on social media. Winning the 2020 election was one thing; reviving faith in the politics of yesteryear is quite another. The Republican party’s future is bright indeed if it can foster an organized right. If not, entropy will keep the party and the right alive, though their gains will only be prelude to the next crisis and yet more prophecies of doom.

By its own poisoned fruits shall that consensus be undone, and perhaps in the coronavirus is a way that I can be happy to have been wrong.

The major parties are acting as if voter disutility functions are quadratic, meaning each party has to please the more vocal elements of its base, rather than cultivate the median voters.  I'm not clever enough to see the strategy by which a limited government party could attract members of both the fiscal Leave Us Alone coalition and the social Leave Us Alone coalition.

Those shutdowns have probably made a lot of people will all sorts of ways of living tired of being called "nonessential" or told not to have fun. Let Elizabeth Warren not have any fun.