Right-Wing Books, Wrong Answers - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...rvatism-jeff-flake-dsouza.html
policy politics crisis culture trump gop intellectual
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Whether in the name of honorable libertarianism or frenzied, “I’m not saying they’re Nazis, but they’re Nazis” anti-liberalism, the senator and the demagogue both think that conservatives need to … cut social programs in order to cut taxes on the rich.
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That striking agreement distills conservatism’s crisis. As Flake’s sharpest critics on the right have pointed out, a simple “cut the safety net to pay for upper-bracket tax cuts” agenda is both wildly unpopular and a non-response to our present socioeconomic problems.
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the G.O.P. has two options. It can follow Flake’s lead and be a high-minded party of small-government principle, disavowing bigotry and paranoia — and it will lose elections, because purist libertarianism plus supply-side economics is not a winner in the current crisis.
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Or it can follow D’Souza’s lead (and Trump’s, now that his populist agenda seems all-but-dead) and wrap unpopular economic policies in wild attacks on liberalism. With this combination, the Republican Party can win elections, at least for now — not because most Americans can be persuaded that liberals are literally Nazis, but because liberalism’s intolerant and utopian tendencies make people fear the prospect of granting progressives political power to match their cultural hegemony.
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Winning this way is a purely negative achievement for the right, a recipe for failed governance extending years ahead.
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the way up from Trumpism requires rethinking the policies where Jeff Flake and Dinesh D’Souza find a strange sort of common ground.