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Conservatism’s ‘Three-Legged Stool’ Has No Legs Left

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corbe:
Conservatism’s ‘Three-Legged Stool’ Has No Legs Left

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON
APRIL 26, 2024

Erick Erickson is wrong about the right, wrong about conservatism, and hopelessly out of touch with political reality.

Maybe you saw a recent clip on X from conservative talk radio personality Erick Erickson criticizing what he calls a “weird movement within conservatism” that questions things like “limited government” and “free markets,” principles long associated with the conservative movement.

If you haven’t seen the clip, take a look. It’s like watching someone talk about the state of conservatism halfway through Obama’s first term, when Republican leaders were vowing to repeal Obamacare and inveighing against Democrats for violating the Constitution with a “socialist” health care scheme. (Obamacare was of course never repealed and is now, all these years later, a permanent feature of America’s health care system.)

Erickson’s point, which he also made in a post for National Review, is that the Republican coalition for decades was built on the “three-legged stool” of fiscal conservatism, traditional values, and a peace-through-strength foreign policy. This is what won the Cold War and unleashed prosperity at home. I’m sure you’ve heard the story.

The problem now, he says, is that some people on the right (whom he doesn’t name) are calling into question these orthodoxies, especially free markets and limited government. They aren’t fighting to cut the size of the government but are instead working to gain control of it and wield power to achieve their preferred outcomes.

Erickson thinks this is bad, a betrayal of the old three-legged stool of Reaganite conservatism. After all, he says, if you use government power when your side is in control, the opposing side will use it against you when they’re in control. And we don’t want that, do we?

<..snip..>

https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/26/conservatisms-three-legged-stool-has-no-legs-left/

DefiantMassRINO:
Everyone who wants to be king of the hill wants a bigger hill.

The GOP got a taste of power during Bush '43, and they got addicted.

Their objective is not a pursuit of a principled relationship between the People and their Government.  Their objective is the naked pursuit of more power to the ends of accumulating more power for power's sake.

Both the left-extreme and the right-extreme find the Framers' system of checks and balancies inconvenient to achieving their ends.  Both extremes believe the ends justifies the means - that legislating, debating, compromising, and amending are unnecessary impediments to their greater ends.

Right-wing extremists are really reactionaries who want to take America back to 1860.

Left-wing extremists are really reationaries who want to take America back to 1490.

Both extremist sides want to take America backwards towards the past, and not forwards to the future.

America is a big boy.  It can withstand outside threats, but, it is more susceptible to domestic threats.  That's why Putin's USSR 2.0 and Xi's Communist China are using infiltration to get Americans to weaken and destroy their own country from within.

goatprairie:
It's one thing to argue against sending money to Ukraine, but it's quite another to argue that Vladimir Putin is some sort of hero to be admired by the right.
Putin is basically an authoritarian thug. His KGB past should have been a red flag as was his comment about the collapse of the Soviet Union being the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.
Anybody in the SU who stands up to Putin ends up in prison or dead.

roamer_1:
What a foolish article. Absurd and pretentious. It first mistakenly calls the Conservative Coalition the Republican Coalition which sets up his false concatenation.

There are three houses within the Republican camp. Three wings. Only one of them is Conservative. Only one has ever been Conservative.

It has not been that wing in charge but for three brief times within my lifetime.

So to say that Conservatism has failed us is simply false. It is the moderate neocon way that has failed us.

Fishrrman:
RINO claims:
"Right-wing extremists are really reactionaries who want to take America back to 1860.
Left-wing extremists are really reationaries who want to take America back to 1490."

1860 sounds just fine to me.
Thank you very much...

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