What Fuckery is this? Conservatives have lost it.
The Trump Administration is bending industry to his whims, and the so-called principled "conservatives" are largely on board. I got nuthin'
It began with the "Golden Share" allowing Nippon Steel to buy the teetering US Steel company, basically handing the Trump administration "veto power" over important decisions:
Then it was the 15% vig for Nvidia to reopen sales of the H20 GPU to China, a skim for Trump:
And now, it is the US Government taking a 10% stake in Intel, because, I dunno, their CEO is kissing Trump's arse well enough (this week's South Park is FIRE. Strongly recommend watching it).
I mean, I am old enough to remember when Republicans in particular would have had conniptions about any of this shit. The markets and all that jazz being their jam. And indeed, in the 2008 financial crisis when the Obama administration took equity in the automakers as part of the bailout for an industry that defined American business acumen was met with howls of horror, the rise of the Tea Party, and all sorts of doom and gloom. Not so much when the US wound down those investments later, pocketing a tidy profit to boot!
Still, one wonders what the fuck is going on. I will say that the Never Trump spaces I still hang out in are horrified, but again, against the backdrop of all the horrors of Trump 2.0 this barely causes any rage.
And that is fucking sad.
Yesterday's newsletter by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, does a pretty good description of some of the undercurrents at play. I suspect that the Venn diagram of my readers and subscribers to HCR is probably a perfect circle, if you are not reading her, please toss her a sub. Nothing is behind a paywall, and she posts only once a day.
She starts off with this:
“It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future,” President Donald Trump wrote yesterday afternoon on social media. He took the stake in the company after calling on August 7 for its chief executive officer, Lip-Bu Tan, to step down. When Tan met with Trump on August 11, the president says, he told Tan the U.S. “should be given 10% of Intel.” Tan agreed. Announcing the deal, Trump referred to Tan as “the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company.”
An outstanding summary of the chain of events. The real surprise is the Republicans in office who are rallying around this as a good thing. As I mentioned above, I remember when Republicans would be literally shitting chickens over any of this.
She continues:
It is even wilder to see Republicans, who since 1980 have held so fervently to the idea of free markets that they have denounced even the most basic regulations as socialism, celebrate the government takeover of a private company.
The story of that shift is a larger story about how the Republicans came to put party over country and, now, how they have put power over everything.
From the end of WWII until at least 1974, when Republicans basically told Nixon he would be impeached and convicted, causing his resignation, the Republicans had been rational and at least credible in their positions.
Dr. Richardson then lays out the seeds that were the turning point. And this will get the Never Trump gang all het up, but Dr. Richardson is not wrong in this:
But 1980 saw the takeover of the Republican Party by an extremist faction known as the “Movement Conservatives.” Their roots lay in 1937, when men who hated the New Deal legislation being put in place by the Democrats came together to destroy it. Businessmen who hated business regulations and taxes joined with southern racists who hated Black rights and with religious traditionalists who hated women’s rights and wanted the churches to control welfare programs so they could police behavior.
Ah yes, "movement" conservatives. That is the strain that led to Newt, to Limbaugh, to a lot of bad shit. These movement conservatives coopted Reagan (and really, he was somewhat of an useful idiot, but his cementing of the Republican party to the Evangelical Christian "Religious Right" was the catalyst for a lot of the fuckery we see today).
Let's get back to the good Doctor:
Calling themselves “conservatives” because they wanted to dismantle the laws and recreate the 1920s, the Movement Conservatives produced a list of demands. They called for deregulation, tax cuts, an end to social welfare spending, and an end to government support for workers, maintaining that those principles would protect the bedrock of the economy: private enterprise. They also called for states’ rights, home rule, and local self-government, by which they meant that southern states could maintain discriminatory laws against their citizens, no matter what the Fourteenth Amendment said.
Let's see:
- Deregulation? Check
- Tax Cuts? Check
- End to social Welfare (or at least stigmatize it and sow shame) Check
- Calls for "State's Rights", Home Rule, and Local Self-Government - check, check and check.
Seems like a supercut of the Never Trump former Republican's wet dreams.
Today, The Lincoln Square has a post by Stuart Stevens [1] that documents his use of the Southern Strategy, and how deeply entrenched racism is in the Republican party, and conservatism as it exists today and even back to the 70's.
Stuart Stevens
Dr. Richardson again identifies that Reagan was the spark that ignited the journey (no matter how much the staff at The Bulwark want to claim that Reagan wasn't key in how we got to where we are today):
Ronald Reagan tapped into the Movement Conservatives in 1964, when he backed Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for the presidency. When he ran for the presidency in 1980, his promises focused on economic freedom, but the racism and sexism in the radical faction was always present; he deliberately appealed to racists with a promise to defend states’ rights and to the sexists trying to combat the women’s liberation movement with an appeal to religious traditionalists. Reagan promised to put businessmen in the driver’s seat, but he depended on the votes of racists and sexists to win the White House.
Yeah, Reagan began his fuckery with the doomed Goldwater campaign of 1964, and he used his time in the California Governor's mansion to fine tune his shittiness.
Still, the damage that Reagan and the rise of the "Movement Conservatives" wrought upon his ascension to the Presidency, surrounded by savvy operators who, like Trump 2.0, were prepared to fuck with the levers of power. Hell the fucking Heritage Foundation was started in the 70's[2] to build policy packages to do this shit. They've been at it a long time.
Reagan’s tax cuts tripled the federal debt and left his successor, George H.W. Bush, facing a $171 billion deficit in 1990, along with the threat of automatic cuts of 40% across the board if the deficit wasn’t reduced. Bush reneged on his promise not to raise taxes. Movement Conservatives signed on in private, but in public they attacked the deal as a betrayal of Reaganism and common people. Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich used the opportunity to purge the Republican Party of its traditional base: those who believed in an active government. He accused anyone who stood against him of being a “Republican In Name Only,” or “RINO.”
I should paste the "memberries" gif here again, but instead, here's a supercut of the scenes - totally worth watching for a minute and 20 seconds:
I am hearing the same language from the Never Trump crowd (and particularly from The Bulwark) that they lament that Dem's are shifting too far left, and that if only there were more moderates, that they could be more helpful in assisting, but if the Dems keep lionizing people like Zohran Mamdani, and Gavin C. Newsom, well, fuck, I guess they will have to write in Edmund Burke or some such shit.
Many of these so called "true" conservatives were just fine with this:
If keeping Democrats out of power meant it was necessary to skew the system, surely that was justified. Republicans began to talk of purifying the voter rolls in the 1990s, and in 1998 the Florida legislature passed a law that purged from the system as many as 100,000 Black voters presumed to be Democrats. This purge paid off in 2000, when Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College. The contest came down to Florida, where a confusing ballot had siphoned about 10,000 votes intended for Gore off to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan.
It was becoming solely about the power, and anything that helped them marginalize the Democrats was justified and justifiable. Especially after the election of a Black man.
I swear to God that the loss in 2008 broke their fucking brains. As per Dr. Richardson:
When voters elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, Republicans declared war. On the night of Obama’s inauguration, Republican senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and other Republican leaders agreed over dinner to oppose anything that the new president proposed, regardless of whether they agreed with it. “For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,” Republican senators told incoming vice president Joe Biden.
They also worked to make it easier for Republicans to win. In 2010 the Supreme Court overturned a century of campaign finance laws to permit unlimited corporate and other outside money to flow into elections.
Yeah, totally.
Now the descendants of this "Movement Conservative" faux conservatism is rejoicing open nationalization and if not seizing the production, certainly taking a meddling hand in it.
And I fear that it is just getting started.
This will not be easy to undo, and frankly, we are not sure what the ultimate effect on the economy will be, but I suspect that it will be muy no bueno.
I will leave you with this from the deep thinker, Christopher Rufo:
Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo explained yesterday on social media that “a new conservatism has emerged. We are leading a rebellion against the establishment and dismantling the elements of the left-wing ideological regime—not for the purpose of nihilism, but for the purpose of rebirth, or restoration, of our republic.”
Rufo’s statement is, as one commenter noted, “just textbook 1930s fascism.”
We might not be Nazi Germany, yet, but we are speedrunning it, and with Vought and the goons from the Heritage Foundation in the driver's seat, with the tech Broligarch's all in on this, it's gonna be a hell of a ride.
1- I recommend reading Stuart Stevens' book: It Was All a Lie.
2- The Heritage Foundation was started on February 16, 1973 to counter the Brookings Institute think tank. It's founders are a who's who of conservative fuckers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation
