By Rich Lowry
Friday, May 29, 2020
It’s 2009 again, or feels like it.
That was when spontaneous, grassroots protests against
overweening government sprang up and were widely derided in the media as dangerous
and wrong-headed.
The protesters then were inveighing against Obamacare;
the protesters now are striking out against the coronavirus lockdowns.
The anti-lockdown agitation shows that, despite the
revolution in Republican politics wrought by President Donald Trump, opposition
to government impositions is deeply embedded in the DNA of the Right and likely
will reemerge even more starkly if former vice president Joe Biden is elected
president.
The Tea Party that was so powerful in the Obama years,
roiling Republican Party politics and making stars out of the likes of Marco
Rubio and Ted Cruz, sputtered out and was subsumed by the Trump movement in
2016.
The emphasis on constitutionalism, opposition to deficit
spending, and American exceptionalism gave way to an emphasis on American
strength, opposition to immigration, and nationalism.
The differences shouldn’t be exaggerated — the Tea Party
was opposed to amnesty for undocumented immigrants, and Trump has faithfully
nominated constitutionalist judges. The Tea Party, like Trump, hated the
mainstream media with a passion. But the shift from an overwhelming focus on
fiscal issues to Trumpian cultural politics was very real.
The change was exemplified by the House Freedom Caucus,
founded in 2015 and defined by its hard line on government spending, reliably
lining up behind Donald Trump, who has pursued a notably expansionary fiscal
policy — with huge budget deficits — even before the coronavirus crisis.
The intellectual fashion among populists and religious
traditionalists has been to attempt to establish a post-liberty or
“post-liberal” agenda to forge a deeper foundation for the new Republican
Party. Instead of obsessing over freedom and rights, conservatives would look
to government to protect the common good.
This project, though, has been rocked by its first
real-life encounter with governments acting to protect, as they see it, the
common good.
One of its architects, the editor of the religious
journal First Things, R. R. Reno, has sounded during the crisis like one
of the libertarians he so scorns. First, he complained that he might get shamed
if he were to host a dinner party during the height of the pandemic, although
delaying a party would seem a small price to pay for someone so intensely committed
to the common good.
More recently, he went on a tirade against wearing masks.
Reno is apparently fine with a much stronger government, as long as it never
issues public-health guidance not to his liking.
Reno has published vituperative attacks on the
conservative writer (and my friend and former colleague) David French,
supposedly for having a blinkered commitment to classical liberalism. But it is
the hated French who has actually tried to thoughtfully balance liberty and the
common good during the crisis, favoring the lockdowns at first and favoring
reopening now that the lockdowns’ goals have been achieved.
What’s happened during the lockdowns is that the natural
distrust that populists have of experts has expressed itself in opposition to
government rules. Being told what to do by epidemiologists and government
officials wielding all-caps SCIENCE as their authority has been enough to bring
Tea Party–era liberty back in vogue.
We’ve also seen a return of the glue that has held moral
traditionalists and libertarians together in the conservative coalition for so
long — the belief that big government is a threat to traditional institutions.
Hence, the focus on resuming church services.
In retrospect, the Tea Party wasn’t as much a purely
liberty movement as it seemed at the time. A populist anti-elitism was an
enormously important factor, which is why it faded into the Trump movement so
seamlessly. On the other hand, Trumpian populism has a big streak of liberty to
it.
All it has taken to bring it to the fore is extraordinary government intrusion into our lives. If Biden is elected president, there’s more where that came from.
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