Photo via Amarillo Pioneer Staff
This weekend, I attended CPAC 2022 in Dallas. It was my first time attending CPAC in person, though I had watched live streams of previous CPACs for years and followed conservative politics all of my life. As someone who has long considered myself to be a small-government libertarian, I was disappointed but not surprised to see the erosion of libertarian influence over American conservatism on full display. For years, conservatives spoke highly of the need to shrink the government and get politicians out of peoples’ wallets and lives.
Unfortunately, governments tend to be predisposed towards growth. This has always made having a principled stance against big government difficult to maintain. Still, there has at least been a tradition of speaking out against big government within conservative messaging. It’s especially important now, considering the growth of government under President Biden and the reckless inflationary policies he is pursuing which are directly harming everyday people.
The Culture War: How Republicans Avoid Keeping Promises
But there has also long been an alternative: Focusing on culture war issues. Republicans, especially incumbents, will say that we do need to shrink government, but, first, we need to defeat the Democrats on whatever the latest culture war is. In other words, only later can we shrink the government. While these issues can be important, it often feels to me that these issues are little more than a distraction from shrinking government.
Of course, Democrats are often more than happy to play along. After all, if Republicans are busy fighting culture war issues, Democrats can increase taxes and spending. In fact, it also benefits them in a similar way: When Democrat voters ask why their politicians aren’t shrinking government in the few areas Democrats ever promise to shrink government, they have the same answer: culture war now, shrink government later.
And, for those on the even more extreme ends of the left, it’s also a great deal: In order to continuously justify the necessity of culture war now, shrink government later, Republicans have to find the most egregious examples of why we need to fight the culture war. By doing so, they give a free platform to the most extreme on the left, bringing them to an audience size they previously would likely have never reached.
These days, though, it feels like this isn’t even just a distraction anymore. At CPAC this weekend, it felt like everything was culture war, culture war, culture war. One of the only speakers to mention the Federal Reserve’s spending spree, Representative Warren Davidson of Ohio, was overshadowed by other more bombastic speakers pushing, you guessed it, the culture war.
There is a real thirst for shrinking government among voters. No matter what is done with elections, Republicans will continue to lose ground if they continue to ignore the fact that liberty is a central pillar of what makes the United States of America so great. Sure, the culture war is great for sounding bombastic. Sure, it gets people excited for a short amount of time. But, in the long run, this focus on the issue of the week instead of sticking to principles is eroding trust in voters.
Modern Monetary Theory: The Real New Threat
It’s also important to note that these issues aren’t just hypothetical. This focus on culture war rhetoric has allowed Democrats to push through disastrous policy, and it keeps getting worse and worse. Just take a look at the obligatorily mistitled Inflation Reduction Act. In many ways, it’s the latest big win for modern monetary theory. For those unfamiliar with the term, modern monetary theory, or MMT for short, is an absurdist school of economic thought based around two intellectually bankrupt ideas:
First, it states that national debt doesn’t matter. They claim this is the case because the government can just print more money to pay off that debt. Of course, as you might remember from Econ 101, printing a bunch of money leads to inflation. That’s where their second idea comes into play: When inflation happens, just raise taxes to reduce the amount of money in circulation. Yes, it really is that stupid.
But, of course, an idea simply being stupid has never prevented government from turing it into policy. Of course, that’s what we’re getting from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act now. However, this was not inevitable. Just a few years ago, the idea of the Democratic Party directly embracing MMT was laughable. Sure, there were plenty of those on the left advocating for MMT, and it even occasionally made its way into some policy. Still, it was largely relegated to the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But instead of stopping MMT in its tracks, Republicans decided to focus on the culture war. So, while your taxes skyrocket in the middle of a recession, you should of course thank Democrats, but don’t forget to give Republicans their due as well.
Not Just Washington: How Ginger Nelson Gets Away With Tax Hikes
This issue of culture war distractions isn’t unique to national or state politics. The same thing is happening in our own backyard. Nothing encapsulates this better in my mind than how local activists have let Ginger Nelson get away with tax hikes year after year while still getting reelected over and over again. If conservatives had actually stuck to their principles, Ginger Nelson would have been voted out of office in 2019. (Better yet, she wouldn’t have been elected in 2017.) If conservative activists had learned their lesson in 2019, they would have defeated her in 2021, especially after she tried and failed to push through the largest municipal tax hike in Amarillo history.
But, instead, the star of the local conservative movement, Claudette Smith, got humiliated at the polls in both 2019 and 2021 after running a campaign that seemed to go to great lengths to downplay the importance of actual fiscal issues when running. Sure, she got a small group of people really fired up, but most voters saw how empty her campaign really was. After her most recent loss, her supporters still don’t seem to have learned their lesson. Instead, they want to cast blame on candidates like Michael Hunt who actually focused on lowering taxes and getting government out of the way.
They continue to this day to claim he was splitting the vote. Not only is that claim obviously false given the fact that Amarillo elections include runoffs, but, as will be shown in The Amarillo Pioneer’s upcoming mini-documentary, “The Amarillo Game,” a larger field of candidates actually hurts incumbents.
