FluxBlog

What is a conservative?

That used to be an easier question to answer. While I never shared their priorities, I could respect their integrity. They had genuine principles with some logical consistency and they fought for them fiercely.

In the age of Trump, however, we are seeing a much more authoritarian brand of “conservatism” rise, a development that I find incredibly disturbing.

Now, as Trump runs for the presidency again, it’s clear he wants to succeed where he failed the first time. He wants to wield the strong arm of government directly against his perceived enemies.

This isn’t our parents’ conservatism.

What it is exactly, is the topic of this week’s The Big Picture.

— George Takei

“Drain the swamp!”

“Dismantle the deep state!”

These are common refrains on the political right, popularized by Donald Trump during his first term as MAGA rallying cries. 

And while conservative antipathy toward regulatory governmental agencies is nothing new, Trump took this notion of a cabal of embedded governmental bureaucrats who were secretly pulling the strings to a whole new level.

This deep state concept served an important purpose for Trump, of course, because it allowed him to create a convenient scapegoat for Republican legislative failures. 

After all, when the Republican Party had control of both houses of Congress AND the presidency, as they did from 2017 to 2019, Trump had to create some villain to explain away all of his broken policy promises.  

But it was clear during his term, and continues to be clear today, that Trump views the presidency as above interference from those pesky other branches of government. He sees the presidency as a centralized seat of power that controls the U.S. government. 

As he claimed during a 2019 campaign rally:

“I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.”

But while Trump failed to execute his twisted autocratic vision during his first term, when institutions ultimately held despite his best efforts to undermine our democracy, we now know that for 2024, Trump has no intention of making the same mistake again.

A new piece from The New York Times—based on a review of Trump’s own public policy proposals and interviews with Trump allies—previews what to expect if Trump manages to win next year.

Trump’s goal upon taking office in 2025:

"To alter the balance of power by increasing the president’s authority over every part of the federal government that now operates, by either law or tradition, with any measure of independence from political interference by the White House."

To accomplish this, Trump intends to bring agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communication Commission under direct presidential control, strip tens of thousands of career civil servants of employment protections they currently enjoy, “impound” funds or refuse to spend money mandated by Congress and: 

"...scour the intelligence agencies, the State Department and the defense bureaucracies to remove officials he has vilified as “the sick political class that hates our country.” 

Or as Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung put it bluntly:

“...eradicate the deep state that works against Americans once and for all.”

Of course, it’s no surprise that this is a central premise of Trump’s 2024 candidacy. He did not hide it 5 years ago, nor is he hiding it now.

But there is a new effort run by Trump allies, which will ensure that if any Republican wins the presidency in 2024, they will follow this same Trump playbook upon taking office in 2025. While such a plan is quintessentially Trump, it is no longer unique to him. 

This is the m.o. of the post-Trump “conservative” movement.

This playbook, a $22 million effort being led by The Heritage Foundation, even has a name: Project 2025. It is a self-described, conservative “2025 Presidential Transition Project.”

True to form, the effort’s policy page lays out their top priority:

“Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”

John McEntee—Trump’s former White House personnel chief who was dubbed Trump’s “loyalty cop” during his term in office and is involved with the 2025 effort—described it this way:

“The president’s plan should be to fundamentally reorient the federal government in a way that hasn’t been done since F.D.R.’s New Deal. Our current executive branch was conceived of by liberals for the purpose of promulgating liberal policies."

There is no way to make the existing structure function in a conservative manner. It’s not enough to get the personnel right. What’s necessary is a complete system overhaul.”

This is essentially a maximalist reading of the “unitary executive legal theory.” 

From The New York Times:

"The legal theory rejects the idea that the government is composed of three separate branches with overlapping powers to check and balance each other." 

"Instead, the theory’s adherents argue that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete control of the executive branch, so Congress cannot empower agency heads to make decisions or restrict the president’s ability to fire them."

Sound familiar?

On its face, such a strategy would appear to be anathema to conservatism, which over the course of decades succeeded in building a well-cultivated brand that prioritized “limited government.”

However, philosophical inconsistency is nothing new for the “pro-life” party fighting to bring back firing squads, the “fiscally responsible” party growing the deficit by trillions of dollars, the “law and order” party supporting a twice-impeached twice-indicted sexual predator, and the “pro-police” party vowing to defund the FBI.

This new brand of conservatism that seeks to wield the levers of government to get their way at any cost was perfectly described by Rick Wilson of The Lincoln Project on MSNBC recently:

“Traditionally conservatives believe in individual liberty and limited government in a broad philosophical way."

Wilson added: 

"These people are not limited government conservatives, they are unlimited government conservatives. They seek to use the power of the government to hurt their enemies."

"They seek to maximize the power of the state…to aggressively harm people that they believe are their political enemies.”

In other words:

"This is not about a conservative principle, it’s an authoritarian principle. It’s an oppression-based government system.”

And while this brand of conservatism is rearing its ugly head at the presidential level in 2024, this is nothing new at the state level. 

Christian nationalist “conservative” Republican state legislators and MAGA governors have leveraged the governmental powers of their offices to impose their values on their entire constituencies in a decidedly authoritarian way, modeled after illiberal regimes such as that of Victor Orbán in Hungary.

Attacking the rights of the vulnerable while increasing the power of the state to surveil them is a key part of the authoritarian playbook.

What that looks like in modern America is legislation such as Texas’ SB8, essentially a 6-week abortion ban with a radical vigilante enforcement mechanism, as well as Ron DeSantis’ string of anti-LGBTQ+ laws targeting trans youth in Florida, including the ban of gender-affirming care for minors, despite the fact that such care is supported by parents and doctors and is well known to save lives.

But now, in perhaps the most egregious example of authoritarian conservative overreach yet, 19 Republican attorneys general around the country have submitted comments opposing a proposed Biden administration rule change to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountancy Act) that would keep the medical records of patients who seek an abortion out of state private.

These red state AGs argue that they should be able to track the private health records of any resident of their state to ensure that they are not traveling across state lines to seek abortion care. 

Unlimited government indeed.

That the chief law enforcement officers of these red states should have such contempt for privacy rights of American citizens, particularly ones they serve, should perhaps come as little surprise after last year’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade. 

The fish rots from the head, after all, and the Supreme Court has set the ball up well for Christo-nationalist state officials to spike it down.

Justice Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs was rooted in the rejection of any claim to a right to privacy in the Constitution.

And it led Justice Thomas to state in his concurrence:

“For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court's substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”

In other words, for conservative jurisprudence and law enforcement, the right to contraception—Griswold v. Connecticut—and the right to same-sex private sexual conduct—Lawrence v. Texas—and the right to same-sex marriage—Obergefell v. Hodges—are all on the table.

As University of Chicago professor of constitutional law Geoffery Stone told Insider:

"A key part of the rationale of Alito's opinion is that there is no such thing as a right of privacy in the Constitution. That's what the court relied upon in all of these cases. If that's true in Dobbs, then why isn't true in others?"

Back in 2003, Lawrence v. Texas, which ruled anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional, was decided on a 6-3 vote with conservative justices Kennedy and O’Connor siding with the liberals in the majority. 

At the time, Kennedy, who wrote the opinion, framed it this way:

“Liberty protects the person from unwarranted government intrusions into a dwelling or other private places. In our tradition the State is not omnipresent in the home…"

"Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct.”

The fact that Justice Thomas was in the minority for Lawrence back then but is now in the majority and urging a reassessment of that landmark case says everything about the shift in the conservative movement in the past 20 years. 

The invasion of the state into Americans’ private matters in the name of “conservative” values IS the new “conservatism.”

It’s not enough for red states to legislate forced birth in the wake of Dobbs. They have already begun their attempt to prohibit travel across state lines for abortion care.

A first-of-its-kind Idaho law went into effect in May that criminalizes the assistance of a minor in traveling across state lines to get an abortion. Many legal experts fully expect this model legislation to be adopted by other red states and to eventually slide down the slippery slope into prohibitions on adult out-of-state travel.

It’s clear the perpetrators of this authoritarian strain of conservatism feel emboldened. 

As Rick Wilson warned:

“You’re seeing it play out in places like Florida with Ron DeSantis, in Texas with Greg Abbott, in a variety of places with MAGA governors and Republican governors, they’re pregaming what Trump would do at a much grander scale."

"They’re predicting that they’re going to win and they will turn the power of the entire U.S. government against you.”

This is a bit ironic since Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and managed to lose the House for Republicans in 2018, the presidency and the Senate in 2020 and help Democrats gain a seat in the Senate and keep the GOP House majority to a whisker in 2022.

Additionally, poll after poll shows—on issues from abortion rights to climate change—they are on the wrong side of public opinion. 

But for local radical right legislators, none of that matters. 

They are in their own bubbles, having gerrymandered their way into no-lose majorities. There simply has not been any political pain for MAGA legislators, who are pushing the most radical legislation at the red state level.

At the presidential and congressional levels, we’ve seen the Republican Party begin to soften its hardline abortion stance in the wake of political losses driven by moderate and liberal anger over the Dobbs decision.

Losing elections is the only language these politicians understand. 

This is the only way we can divert the Republican Party off this road to authoritarianism they’re on. They must pay a political price for their overreach. 

That means voting, organizing, and donating to ensure Democratic victories next year up and down the ballot.

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