Some conservatives are abandoning the movement's doctrines of small government and free markets and embracing the administrative state to bring their enemies under control, according to a new analysis.
President Donald Trump's populist MAGA movement has moved toward a form of Catholic-tinged authoritarian state capitalism, and some right-wing thought leaders – such as The Federalist's John Daniel Davidson and Catholic University professor Jon Askonas – are calling to reject conservatism's old tenets altogether, wrote Salon's Jim Sleeper.
"Davidson and Askonas want a conservative counterrevolution against a corporate technocracy whose fixation on maximizing profit has trapped Americans in a spiderweb of come-ons that grope, goose, track and indebt us, bypassing our brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and wallets," Sleeper wrote. "But are they truly rejecting 'free market' conservatism, or is this just a tactical shift in their strategy to support the scramble for sheer profit and accumulated wealth, glossed over with religious rhetoric?"
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This new breed of conservative has been warning that their movement has given up too much ground to "woke" liberals on diversity, equity and inclusion and allowed libertarians and free-market conservatives to reshape society in the free market's "amoral" image, rather than maintaining Western civilization and traditions.
"In this reading, conservatives must seize power to restore moral and social order, even if that requires using big government to break monopolies and redistribute income a bit to some of the Americans they’ve claimed to champion while feeding the plutocracies that leave them behind," Sleeper wrote. "Davidson and Askonas blame fellow conservatives for buying into 'woke' corporate capital’s intrusive, subversive technologies, which treat citizens as impulse-buyers whose 'consumer sovereignty' suffocates deliberative, political sovereignty."
Some MAGA conservatives hope to curb the excesses of the free market, especially tech's distorting influence on society, by embracing religious doctrines.
But Sleeper noted that history is littered with warnings against that.
"If religion tries to seize political power, as some of Trump’s crusaders long to do, it becomes intolerant and intolerable," Sleeper wrote." Genuine religious faith is often indispensable to resisting concentrations of unjust power in a republic, as it was in America's civil rights movement. But when it overreaches, it undercuts what it claims to encourage. Striking that balance requires a different kind of faith and sound judgment that Bible-thumping Trump loyalists lack."
Davidson calls for the breakup of big tech firms and starving universities of their funding, which Sleeper views as statist solutions to longtime conservative grievances.
"Conservatives need to look more carefully into the Pandora’s box that they’re opening," Sleeper wrote. "Those who crave a more-godly relation to power should ponder a warning from John Winthrop, first governor of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, in 'A Modell of Christian Charity': 'It is a true rule, that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.' They certainly can’t subsist defensibly in a society that’s being disintegrated by capitalism. 'Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay,' warned the Anglo-Irish poet and novelist Oliver Goldsmith in 1777."
"Admonitions like his and Winthrop’s made sense to conservatives such as Whittaker Chambers in the 1950s," the columnist added. "Conservatives are now flouting them at their, and our, peril."
