The Conflation Problem

Typical social conservative positions on the issues should not be conflated with support and defense of election denialism.

Newly elected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Public domain image uploaded from house.gov.

Since Republicans achieved their razor-thin House majority, holders of, and aspirants to, the Speaker position have been tainted, to one degree or another, with election denialism.

The current speaker could make the case for embracing the most consistent conservative set of principles of any of them, were it not for his wholesale enthusiasm for Donald Trump. But the fact that he has so vocally espoused those principles, and mixed them thoroughly with that enthusiasm, has had mainstream media outlets and Democratic politicians licking their chops from the moment he passed the 217-vote threshold.

That enthusiasm has led a lamentable number of right-of-center figures to succumb to the temptation to see "the times" as calling for the core's situational tweaking. We've seen such developments as "national conservatism," which is basically gussied up protectionism, and, more recently, a clouded understanding of the stakes involved in Ukraine. 

This provides a ready-made heyday for the left to conflate these positions—and, more importantly, the election denialism that has poisoned the stances of all Republican Speaker aspirants in the past several months, to one degree or another—with solidly conservative positions that Never Trump conservatives get behind: unborn Americans' right to life, the understanding of what marriage is common to all cultures throughout all human history until five minutes ago, the understanding that cheap, dense and readily available energy sources have made for the quantum boost in human advancement over the last two centuries, and the principle that government ought to have to puke all over itself to take the first red cent of any citizen's money.

The next step is for the left to oh-so-cordially invite conservatives to consider the question: "Don't you think this presents you with an opportunity to reassess this whole conservative enterprise you've been so solidly behind most of your adult life?”

I’d wager that it doesn’t. There are still so many voices—The Freemen News-letter, among them—as well as National Review and The Dispatch (and my Substack Precipice) that did not swallow the Kool-Aid and are still capable of extracting Trumpist sludge from immutable verities.

But impressionable ordinary Americans, particularly the younger ones coming out of an "educational" system that has left them woefully ungrounded in a comprehension of the West's unique blessings for humankind, are vulnerable to a low-taxes-and-traditional-marriage-equals-election-denialism formulation as they prepare for the coming election cycle.

The task among those who still prioritize clarity is to strive with all available effort to disentangle this conflation. It is going to increasingly require a supreme steadiness of nerves. 

-Barney

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