Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 136 of Stephanie Slade’s important 2026 book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right:

Mainstream commentators sometimes describe today’s conservative movement as “more extreme” than in the past. There are ways in which that is the case, but there are also ways in which that is misleading. It helps to distinguish between the rhetorical and substantive dimensions, and to realize that the two are not always correlated. Republicans in the Trump era certainly have adopted a rhetorical extremism – a posture of cruelty toward outsiders and a ratcheting up of the stakes of political disagreement in order to whip their base into an emotional froth. But on substantive policy issues, MAGA conservatism is supremely flexible, even mushy. It has no strong commitment to streamlining government by cutting spending and devolving power from Washington. Quite the contrary.

DBx: Yes.

To the ears of people – left and right – who mistakenly think that American conservatism is about being bullyboy tough and rejecting nearly all tenets of liberalism, MAGAistas do sound “conservative.” But in fact, as Ms. Slade makes clear, MAGAistas have almost nothing in common with American conservatism of the sort embraced by Ronald Reagan and George Will. This genuine American conservatism seeks to conserve the classical-liberal foundation and sensibilities of the American founding. MAGAistas, in contrast, care almost nothing about these foundations and principles. Their ‘principles’ are very much akin to the ‘principles’ of progressives: an unprincipled mish-mash of intolerance, economic cluelessness, distrust of ordinary people left free of government-issued prescriptions and proscriptions, and the hubris that springs from ignorance.