Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Alright, time for a politics thread.

In retrospect, I think this was the best politics-related thing I've ever written: noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2016/07/trump-…

2/It's impossible to understate how rudderless the right feels in America today, and it all goes back to what happened in the 00s.

3/The three pillars of ideological conservatism, dating back at least to the 70s, were:
* laissez-faire economic policy, especially tax cuts and financial deregulation
* Christian conservatism
* muscular, proud nationalism in foreign policy

4/In the 00s, what happened to laissez-faire economic policy?
* Bush tax cuts didn't boost the economy
* Financial deregulation caused a crisis
* The middle and working class got screwed
* The stock market didn't even go up
* People lost much of their wealth

5/In the 00s, what happened to Christian conservatism?
* Gay marriage won popular acceptance
* America started to become much more secular

6/In the 00s, what happened to muscular, proud, nationalistic foreign policy?
* The pyrrhic victory of Iraq
* Massive loss of American prestige
* The quagmire of Afghanistan
* Rising disgust with foreign entanglements on both the right and the left

7/In the 00s, all three pillars of American conservatism were smashed all at once.

But the people who voted for conservatives didn't go away.

And the sentiments that had made them vote for conservatives didn't go away.

8/The American right became like the forest spirit in Princess Mononoke, when its head was shot off - a rampaging, aimless monster.

9/The worst, most regressive elements of the right - the absolute dregs, the white supremacists and the nativists and the faux-populists - have risen to the top because there was just nothing else to take the helm.

10/So what's to be done now?

The NeverTrumpers' answer: Restore one or more of the old pillars of conservatism. ("Forest spirit, we give you back your head!")

The Left's answer is: Defeat the right until the right just vanishes.

11/But the people who vote for the right aren't going to vanish.

And there are reasons why the old pillars of conservatism can't return.
Trickle-down economics just *doesn't* work.
China's rise means American hyperpower is over.
And America will probably keep secularizing.

12/But nor can the people currently in charge of the right succeed. Xenophobia and regressive populism always fail, often spectacularly. And most Americans despite Trumpism.

13/What the American right needs are new thinkers. Ideological entrepreneurs that can give it some unifying ideology that is neither dead-end Trumpism nor a return to the Bush years.

Something based neither on racism nor on stuff that is proven not to work. (end)