Arnold Kling is somewhat dismissive of Christopher DeMuth’s (paywalled) proclamation in The Wall Street Journal:
The essential purpose of modern American conservatism is to conserve the American nation. My program for doing so would be in part antiprogressive. It would re-establish national borders, reduce our million annual illegal entries to zero, and calibrate lawful immigration to the needs of cultural assimilation, social harmony and economic growth. It would abolish all official racial and other group preferences, quotas and gerrymanders. It would liberate the energy sector.
My program would also address causes of national disorder in which conservative politicians have been fully complicit. This would include returning to a balanced federal budget outside of wars and other emergencies; redirecting federal spending from personal entitlements and income transfers to public goods such as national defense and infrastructure; withdrawing the collective-bargaining privileges of public-employee unions; and instituting stable currency—not 5% inflation, not today’s official goal of 2% that quintuples prices in a lifetime, but zero.
And it would include not only the historical tried-and-true but also modern innovations. These include universal school choice and initiatives to mobilize science and enterprise to dominate China in advanced computation, communication and weaponry and to repatriate production of national essentials such as pharmaceuticals.
Kling says,
DeMuth’s ideas seem to me to fall somewhere between Trumpism and the establishment. He used to head up the American Enterprise Institute.
The first and second paragraphs in the quotation from DeMuth strike me as old-fashioned Republicanism of the Goldwater-Reagan variety. There’s nothing “establishment” (i.e., “bipartisan”) about any of it. To the extent it’s “Trumpist”, that means “Trumpism” isn’t just baloney.
I’d want to think harder about the implications of the third paragraph. If DeMuth means that government should throw money at certain outcomes, I’d demur. But if he means that government should back off in certain areas and let market outcomes dictate, I’d approve. But I will say that I’m entirely sympathetic to the repatriation of the production of national essentials — including but not limited to the production of fossil fuels and steel.