To Power or Not To Power? That's the Question

 Davidson v. Erickson!!

Erick Erickson (a squish if there ever was one) said some stuff about the "three-legged stool of conservatism" to which Davidson takes serious exception.

...It’s like watching someone talk about the state of conservatism halfway through Obama’s first term, when Republican leaders were vowing to repeal Obamacare and inveighing against Democrats for violating the Constitution with a “socialist” health care scheme....

And that's the nicest thing he said about it!

... Erickson’s point, which he also made in a post for National Review, is that the Republican coalition for decades was built on the “three-legged stool” of fiscal conservatism, traditional values, and a peace-through-strength foreign policy....

Yes.  That's the old "Fusionism", the unworkable shotgun marriage arranged by Bill Buckley a few decades ago.  And by "unworkable" I mean that it couldn't last too long and its children (such as Obamacare) would be slouching bastards.

Davidson points out that Emperor Erickson (et. al.) has no clothes:

 ...On fiscal conservatism, we’re swimming in an ocean of debt that grows no matter which party controls Congress, while inflation is killing middle- and working-class families. On traditional values, we legalized gay marriage and then quickly moved on to normalizing transgenderism and acquiescing to so-called “gender-affirming care,” even for minors. On peace-through-strength foreign policy, we lost the War on Terror and are now funding multiple wars all over the world as part of a crumbling global imperium. The stool has no legs left....As for limited government, we saw how much the GOP cared about the former during Covid, and even recently when it refused to do anything about our intelligence agencies routinely spying on us and censoring disfavored speech online. And free markets, although fine in theory, have in practice served as a permission slip for massive corporations to hollow out America’s industrial base and ship jobs overseas, enriching the upper and managerial classes while everyone else struggles....

He didn't even mention abortion, and it still sums it up very well, and it's painfully accurate.  Very painfully for those who are forced to "learn to code" or flip burgers or go into drugs and suicide because GM, Ford, and Chrysler are making cars in Red China and Mexico.  Pretty soon all the coal miners will be coding too.  Ain't that swell??

So the question is:  what to DO about all this?

Contra Erickson, Davidson says Keep the Big Gummint (and club the Alinsky-ite Commies into submission or death.)

 ...we are in a life-or-death struggle against the left, and the left is playing by a different set of rules. If the right agrees as a matter of principle that it will not wield government power to achieve its preferred outcomes, but the left vows to use the government whenever and however it can, then the left is going to win every time. And that is exactly what has happened.

So what to do about this? Erickson’s admonition amounts to a posture of permanent defeat. If conservatives can’t wield power to bring about their vision of the good, of a rightly ordered public square and a prosperous society, then the leftist radicals will continue to seize power and press forward with their permanent revolution, as they have been for decades....

  we have to stop thinking of ourselves as conservatives and start thinking of ourselves, and our movement, as restorationist and counterrevolutionary. In a very real sense, we have to re-found our country, and to do that we will have to seize power from the left — and use it....

Hmmmm.