By Austin Ruse, Crisis Magazine, August 28, 2020
We like to say that American conservatism is a three-legged stool. The “legs” are the three dominant factions in the Republican Party: social traditionalists, economic libertarians, and foreign policy interventionists. Conventional wisdom holds that the Right is only stable if all three legs are balanced. Yet, over the last half-century, the only “leg” that has consistently gotten its way from the GOP are the war hawks.
Sure, economic conservatives have gotten lower taxes, but the federal register of encumbering regulations has grown exponentially. The red-headed stepchildren of the fusion coalition have been the social conservatives. What we have seen is our issues given short shrift and sacrificed pretty quickly in the light of foreign policy contingencies. (See George W. Bush and the war in Iraq.) All our issues went down the drain when the neoconservatives began braying for nation-building down a gun barrel. …
