My most right-wing views

Human nature, law and order (if only they applied it to Trump’s cronies ...), and capitalism

Andy Thomas’s painting “Grand Old Gang” features Republican presidents playing poker. (Image via TIME)

I wrote last week about the issues where my views most line up with conventional progressive politics, and this week I’m writing about my views that best line up with conventional conservative politics.

Thinking this through the last two weeks has had me reflecting on the contingencies of life.

For most of my career, I would have listed free trade as one of the big topics that I think conservatives are basically right about. This is one of the issues that I’ve changed my mind least about since I was a college student. But the world has changed dramatically. Now I think this might be a left-wing take, except when Biden was president he seemed to be neither for nor against free trade, just kind of hoping it wouldn’t come up. So I’m not totally sure how to characterize it right now. But with the Tariff Man in the White House, I’m definitely not going to put it on this list.

But that flop on trade is a good reminder that one of the structural properties of the right is that it’s fundamentally less committed to any specific ideas than it is to defeating the left.

There’s a level on which I can appreciate this pragmatism. I think conservatives generally do a better job of saying to themselves, “Holding a trifecta in New Hampshire is really impressive, so let’s try not to fuck it up” rather than immediately collapsing into infighting.

On the other hand, this same spirit of pragmatism means that a defining quality of actually existing American conservative politics is a great deal of willingness to go along to get along with the naked criminality of the Trump regime. This strikes me as morally wrong, but also corrosive of intellectual integrity. You can’t really instantiate sound conservative ideas without carving out broad Trump-adjacent exceptions.

You need to punish people who break rules

I don’t believe in especially harsh criminal penalties, but something that conservatives are broadly correct about is that it is good to detect rule-breaking and punish those who break the rules.

Progressives, by contrast, have mixed feelings about this.