The Right Rediscovers True Freedom

Fighting Wokeness Becomes a Top Voting Issue

As leftist lawfare bludgeons Fox News into becoming a RINO network, as predicted exclusively here and here, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s famous lesson comes to mind:  The prospect of a hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully.  Woke brigades are overrunning every institution and threatening our basic civil liberties—but GOP voters are responding courageously.  The woke crisis has scrambled the hierarchy of priorities among conservative voters; issues of lesser importance that once determined our votes are being pushed down to make way for more urgent concerns.

This is terrific news.  Finally, we’re insisting on a MAGA agenda, and no longer doing the bidding of agenda-setting “conservative” tycoons (such as the Murdochs) who push their own fiscal interests ahead of what’s truly important.

A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed how far we’ve moved toward a MAGA plan of action and away from the gospel according to National Review­.  When asked to choose between fighting “woke ideology in our schools and businesses” and “protecting Social Security and Medicare benefits from cuts,” 55 percent of Republican primary voters chose the former, 27 percent the latter.  This result stunned establishment pundits and others who assumed economic issues always trump social ones.  But those numbers square with how in fact patriots cast their ballots (and with my own experiences while active in politics years ago).

Other results from the poll were equally hopeful, revealing growing resistance to rising leftist aggression.  When forced to choose between “securing our southern border and stopping the flow of illegal immigrants” and “fighting woke ideology in our schools and businesses,” 44 of GOP voters chose border control, 24 percent chose woke control, and 25 percent said “both equally.”  The peril posed by a militant woke Left has penetrated the average conservative’s life and mind to the point that these concerns are now driving voting behavior on the Right.

MAGA Revolution Shatters Twentieth-Century Conservatism

This is a very recent breakthrough.  For as long as there’s been a modern conservative movement in America, the political and private leaders of that enterprise have ensured its central energies were put into cutting taxes and business regulations, always in the name of more “freedom.”  These commercial concerns just happened to dovetail perfectly with the interests of the patrons bankrolling the politicians and foundations that championed these theories and efforts.  This fiscally obsessed agenda is the core legacy of modern American conservatism—which, in its founding, personalities and structure, is very much intertwined with elitist back-scratching.

William F. Buckley, a patrician from Connecticut, is remembered fairly as the essential exponent of what became, by default, twentieth-century conservatism.   In 1955, when few publications offered any defense of conservative or traditional principles, Buckley founded National Review.  There he would serve as editor-in-chief for 35 years while also hosting a long-running show on PBS, Firing Line.  That he was allowed to hold forth on left-leaning PBS for so long is curious and revealing in its own way.  Buckley’s speech was marked by elaborate erudition and a vocabulary that was either impressive or tedious, depending on one’s point of view—but not fundamentally frightening to the Left.  Like other prominent conservative intellectuals of the same era (George F. Will, Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, et al.), he treated politics as a sort of intellectual festival and never seemed terribly concerned as the Right lost ground to a voracious Left throughout his life. 

These thinkers wove together traditionalism and libertarianism into modern conservatism, which filled a giant ideological void.  However, these two strands of thought were antagonistic in many ways.  Traditionalism held that we should “conserve” the institutions we have inherited, such as national sovereignty and traditional marriage.  Libertarianism stood for the shorthand formula “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.”  It advocated tax cuts and government deregulation (which disproportionately aided the wealthy) along with liberal social policies on abortion and immigration. 

For years, what we now know as MAGA conservatives—traditional conservatives concerned about the outsourcing of jobs, chronically broken borders, useless foreign wars, and the destruction of family values—were sent to the back of the bus.  Promises made by Republican and conservative leaders to promote their agenda regularly vaporized even as the fiscal agenda of the plutocrats subsidizing these politicians, publications and institutes always seemed to find its way into law.  It took many years, but eventually MAGA supporters learned they were being duped by their own leaders.  This realization was instrumental in giving us the massive political upheaval of a Trump presidency.

This learning process was gradual not because grassroots conservatives were disinterested or stupid.  It took time for RINO hoodwinking to be exposed and political misalignment to become glaring enough to stimulate widespread changes in voting practices.  For a good comparison, consider the sorting that’s taken place between the political parties.  Only three decades ago, it was fairly common for Congress to count among its members liberal Republicans from New England and conservative Democrats from the South.  That was because of those regions’ long-standing historical attachments to those parties.  The ideological sorting of conservatives into the GOP and liberals into the Democratic fold took decades to accomplish because people habitually thought of their old party as a congenial political home.  Only as they saw their leaders continually betray their most basic values—a process hastened by the victories of a debauched, draft-dodging Bill Clinton in the 1990s and an outright leftist in Barack Obama a decade later—did they react forcefully, changing their parties and voting allegiances.

Original RINOs vs. Trump’s Rebellion

The bitter-enders on the putative Right who refused to acknowledge the jig was up are what we might call Original RINO’s.  They are the professional progeny of Buckley and company running National Review and now-defunct publications such as the Weekly Standard, journals I and other conservatives contributed to years ago, in the pre- and proto-Internet days, when those were basically the only right-of-center outlets available.  These sour souls became the most hard-core of the NeverTrumpers.  Throughout their careers, they sold “freedom” to the rubes as primarily taxation and regulatory policies heavily benefiting their well-heeled backers.  For them, political victory was a distant afterthought if it ever truly entered into their calculus.  All the while we were steadily losing to a rapacious Left our true freedoms:  those listed in the Bill of Rights.

The donors who shaped the conservative movement and their gofers have been dethroned by an improbable billionaire-cum-proletarian and millions of outraged, energized patriots tired of feeling used and seeing their homeland laid waste.  Those MAGA faithful are now a clear, rock-solid majority of Republican voters, well-informed and rightly fearful of what’s coming at them.  They have manned the ramparts against a surging woke Left and demanded that their leaders stand post as well.  This revolt has brought a new commitment to freedom, properly defined for our age:  life free of oppression from a wicked and tyrannical Left.

The Right’s rediscovery of true freedom is among the more remarkable aspects of the political revolution that should be remembered, whether he wins the presidency again or not, as Trump’s Rebellion.  The patriots of America and the West have found their voice and their movement.  Whatever the ultimate outcome of this titanic struggle for the future of our country, civilization and humanity itself, the world will not be the same.