Political Shifts

I do feel a bit weird commenting on internal debates among conservatives, since it feels like that shouldn't really be any of my business (given that I'm not particularly conservative). However, the various ways that some conservatives are responding to Tucker Carlson's recent comments (plus, of course, the monologue itself) offers not just some interesting thoughts on how conservatism might develop from here, but also some food for thought on what's going to happen to liberals in response.

Part of that is because there are parts of Carlson's piece (in between ridiculous misrepresentations of Democrats' priorities, some faulty logic about how we ended up here, and a frankly horrifying vision of how we should fix it) that I am generally able to agree with regarding the degree to which government should be trying to affect our society. If this is the sort of thing we can expect more of from prominent conservatives, there's a world in which they end up drifting to the left as far as government intervention in the economy is concerned. Possibly to the point of actually teaming up with the sort of liberal that cares more about reforming the economy than they do about social justice, although that's a bit of a stretch.

That would, though, leave a lot of mainstream left and right wing people out of that group, and if they wanted to exert any useful opposing force, they might find themselves teaming up as well. That would most likely involve the liberals abandoning some of their efforts to exert control over the economy (perhaps by reasoning that social pressure on companies to do the right thing could make up for the lack of government involvement), and involve the conservatives giving up on some of their opposition to socially liberal ideas.

Basically, we'd shift from a horizontal split on the Nolan Chart to a vertical split. Still a two-party system, but different coalitions and splits between them.

Now, do I think that sort of shift is actually likely anytime soon? Nope.

In the end, I think a lot of conservatives, even if they agree that government policies need to be designed to address various social problems, will still mostly argue that government involvement is what screwed things up in the first place, and simply removing government from as much of our lives as possible will fix the problem eventually. Carlson's piece might convince them to think more carefully about the limited ways in which they are willing to use the government, but I don't think it's going to get them to start turning to government policy so much that they can find common ground with socialists. Similar things can be said about the liberals here; even if they continue to use free market arguments regarding the economic dominance of big cities and pressure on corporate decisions, I don't think we're going to see them abandoning the idea that the government has a major role to play and drifting towards libertarianism.

But I think it's possible enough to speculate on, even if it is quite unlikely to happen soon.