I have written a bit of late about the collapse of our political institutions, both domestic and international. We are living through an interesting time in that we are seeing great technological progress that is threatening to blow apart the societies and institutions that brought about the technological revolution. It once again illustrates that nature is all about trade-offs. In a finite world, an entry on one side must have an entry on the other.

The world around us, in terms of traditions, cultural institutions, political institutions and so forth, was here when we got here. Take something as mundane as banking. We just take banks for granted, as if they are eternal, because to us, from our point of view, they are eternal. They have always been a part of the economic life we have experienced. Like most everything around us, we take them for granted.

I was in a meeting once around President’s Day and someone brought up that we should go back to calling it Washington’s birthday or maybe Lincoln’s birthday. A young gal said that we would have to have one for a Republican president if we’re going to have a day for the Democrat presidents. There was one of those odd silences and then someone changed the subject so we could avoid correcting her.

The young woman who thought Washington and Lincoln were members of the Democrat party was not a moron. She just lived her whole life in a time and place in which the good guys were Democrats who helped black people. She therefore assumed the guy who freed the slaves must have been a liberal Democrat. A surprising number of people make this mistake, underscoring the power of culture to blinker even the intelligent people.

That’s what we are seeing with our political institutions and the men and women who have made careers in them. They were born into a political world, for example, where Left and Right were defined along a linear economic scale. Libertarians were at one end and Communists on the other. One end worshiped free markets, while the other end had the labor theory of value.

The boys and girls that went into politics learned the team cheers, the responses to the other team’s cheers, their respective uniform options and so on. Their world was a comforting binary universe of us and them. There was no need to rethink anything. In fact, questioning orthodoxy was a good way to get sent into exile. The good liberal or conservative just repeated their lines from the catechism.

Anyway, the great challenge to the Orthodox Right we see underway in the Republican primary is a good example of the hollowness of their dogma. Consider this piece by Charlie Cooke posted at National Review Online today. It is supposed to be a response (dismissal?), of the question supposedly posed by the Donald Trump campaign. What conservatism done for anyone?

The interesting thing about the article is how little the author can come up with as a response to the question he claims to answer. Here is the key paragraph:

When confronted by this challenge, one is tempted to list the monumental ideological victories that the Right has won over the past 40 years. And rightly so. Since Ronald Reagan made his first serious presidential run, in 1976, conservatism has produced a cornucopia of significant changes — not only to government policy, but to the baseline presumptions of American life. Among these alterations are the tarring and feathering of the reflexively technocratic mindset that obtained from the outset of the New Deal to the end of the 1970s; the marginalization of wage and price controls, and of other centralizing tools; the lowering of destructive tax rates on income and other forms of wealth; the deregulation of a significant number of major industries; a renewed focus on national sovereignty; the successful reform of the welfare system; a consensus around free trade; a much lower minimum wage; a focus on both the text and the original meaning of the Constitution when discussing limits on government power; the restoration of the right to keep and bear arms; the stronger protection of freedom of expression; a national partial-birth-abortion ban; the death of speech-killing “campaign-finance reform”; and, lest we forget, the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet Union. For some much-needed context, understand that the GOP’s standard-bearer in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon, was the mind behind the Environmental Protection Agency, whereas today’s Republican candidates are opposed to so many departments that they can’t always remember all of their names.

These claims fall into three categories: Nonsense, fantasy and inconsequential. An example of nonsense is the bit about “tarring and feathering of the reflexively technocratic mindset.” National Review employs Ramesh Ponnuru who pumps out mountains of copy in support of using the tax code for social engineering. The Conservative Industrial Complex is brimming with organizations like AEI that do nothing but sell technocracy.

The fantasy part, and I’m being kind when calling it fantasy, is the stuff about eliminating wage and price controls and other centralizing tools. They were simply replaced with more subtle tools. Reagan gave us the modern Fed that sets prices through currency manipulation. Similarly, Carter started the deregulation process with the airlines. Of course, the line about national sovereignty is just a laugh out loud whopper.

No one cares about the ideological points Red Team scored against Blue Team at their annual softball games so those items go down as inconsequential, along with stuff like welfare reform and tax rates. If your great achievement was reversed by the next president, you achieved nothing. That’s the reality of Buckley Conservatism. It has left no lasting mark on American society, with one exception and that’s the Cold War.

But the Cold War is over.

Whether or not you think Buckley Conservatism was a winner or loser, does not matter all that much in the present. Conservatism may have been all that Charlie Cooke and his coevals say, but that avoids the heart of the question. What does Buckley Conservatism have to say about today and tomorrow? The answer is mostly a replaying of old tunes and the telling of stories by the geezers about the time they met Reagan.

That’s the reality dawning on many Americans who have counted themselves as men of the Right. Buckley Conservatism was basically two things. Beat the Soviets and keep the Progressives from pulling the roof down on us. The Soviets are gone and the Progressives are too busy hooting about men in dresses to care about pulling the roof down. Buckley Conservatism, it turns out, is not a timeless philosophy after all.

I’m running long here so let me just finish with this. There was a time when the Whigs were an important check on the Jacksonian Democrats. No one knows what a Whig is today. Fifty years from now, it will be hard for people to understand “conservatism” and why it was important. The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.

The old right, which I would define as Anglo-Saxon traditionalism, was obliterated in America during the first years of the 20^th century. When Wilson abandoned traditional American isolationism in favor of Teddy Roosevelt’s jingoistic internationalism, American conservatism was finished as a dominant political ideology. It could not exist in a world where America was an active participant in European intrigues. It staggered along after Wilson, until the Great Depression delivered the final blow.

What replaced it was the mild corporatism of FDR that was an adaptation of what we would come to understand as European fascism. In America this meant that the government would be the referee between business and labor, but sometimes marshaling both sides in support of national goals, while other times putting a thumb on the scale to help one side or the other. Mussolini would fit right in with the Democrats, even today.

The “conservatism” that emerged post-war was nothing like the old version. Instead, it was intended as a brake on the part of American corporatism that was always on the lookout for monsters to destroy. It’s why conservatism has such a terrific losing streak. You beat crusades with brute force or by de-legitimizing them, neither of which is in the modern conservative toolkit.

The New Deal coalition carried on brilliantly in the two decades after the war, mostly because the rest of the world was in rubble. It’s not hard to be the economic superpower when everyone else is rebuilding from the greatest civilizational catastrophe in human history. America was winning by default. Then the rest of the world got back on its feet and the party was over. The 70’s saw a decade of economic and cultural decay not seen in America since the Depression.

The mathematics of the New Deal coalition simply could not hold up in a competitive world where cheap labor and cheap land was still available in huge quantities. The Japanese could deliver better cheaper commodity products like economy cars and transistor radios. The Europeans could deliver better middle brow items popular with the middle class.

The solution was not a dismantling of the New Deal system of governance. Instead, what emerged was a politics of necessity. Both sides of the political class settled on new currency arrangements formalized in the Louvre Accords. Credit money controlled by the Federal Reserve would allow America to wage the Cold War, maintain the New Deal politics at home and provide the American middle class with a standard of living the political system required.

This looked like a winner. The 80’s saw a booming economy with only a small hiccup at the end. That was followed by another boom that lasted until the tech bubble burst. Even so, the recovery in the Bush years convinced everyone the party was still going. What they did not see is that the New Deal economic arrangements were being supplanted by the emerging global capitalism created by credit money.

The brewing revolt is due, in large part, to the fact that American politics has remained locked in amber. The one side dreams of new noble causes to which they endeavor to rally the masses. The other side wrings its hands and makes snarky comments about those crazy liberals. On the one side it is the politics of old women thinking they can still dine out on their looks. On the other side it is the politics of old men complaining about the kid’s music today.

Sanders and Trump are not leaders of new political movements. Both are where they are because they are willing to put a finger in the chest of their respective party leaders. Neither man makes a great case for himself, but like those Muslim men wandering into Germany, threatening to collapse Europe, they correctly see that the old guard is a collection of yesterday men, unable to defend their position.

The wailing and moaning coming from the Conservative Industrial Complex conceals the terrible truth at the core of their thing. That is, there’s nothing there. The “movement” they carry on about has nothing to show for itself since the 80’s and now it is being knocked out of the box by a guy they call a “witless ape.” Whatever it was or intended to be, it’s just an artifact of a bygone era now. It’s a museum piece.

The noise on the Right has drowned out what’s happening on the other side. Sanders is an unreconstructed Stalinist for goodness sake. That said, his arguments sound pretty good against a party that thinks the plight of men in sundresses is a great crusade. Sanders offering free tuition sounds sensible compared to offering free rubbers to coeds. Sanders may have his head up his ass, but the rest of his party has theirs in their vagina.

America is long overdue for an overhaul of its political system. The yesterday men of both parties are like guests who won’t leave. Eventually, they have to be made to leave. That’s what we’re seeing today. The wrecking ball is swinging, preparing the way for what comes next. If Trump and Sanders are a clue, the future of American politics may look more like the 19th century than the 20th. We shall see.