Brad and Dan discuss three stories from this week that show American conservatism is over - and what is taking its place is a right-wing totalitarianism that should scare us all.
They begin by discussing new material on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy who it seems is willing to hold the country hostage by not raising the debt limit in order to get what he wants in the form of cutting certain government programs. Brad and Dan use this to delve into the shift from classical conservative ideals to radical burn-it-down-ism over the last two decades.
Brad then provides a brief profile of Arizona GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. She is the perfect example of how the contemporary American Right operates on the basis of grievance and revenge, rather than conservative principles. She is also a frontrunner to be Trump's VP pick if he runs in 2024.
They finish with the most important story of the day - an article from the Federalist that argues the following:
Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips.
The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.
This isn't conservative. It's a call to a totalitarian government.
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Axis Mundi You're listening to an irreverent podcast.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center, UCSB, and I'm here today with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Great to see you, Brad, and apologize to anybody who might hear lawnmowers outside my window.
They are beyond my control.
Yep.
I like how you just set up your lawnmowers on automatic.
When you said that, when you said they're beyond your control, I just imagined three or four lawnmowers like set to automatic.
Like robot lawnmowers?
Yeah, like somehow Dan Miller has invented lawn Roombas, which we shouldn't even be talking on air.
We should be talking off air and putting in a proposal and making billions of dollars.
So this is why we're just bad businessmen and hopefully better podcasters.
It's all that coding that we learned.
With all that humanities education we had, it was super useful for computer programming.
We're almost to Halloween, Dan.
Do you have a Halloween costume?
I don't.
So here's my super lame Halloween costume that I actually do wear from time to time.
I put on my high school letter jacket, and I carry a football, and I go as a dumb jock.
It was clever the first five times I did it.
Nobody seems to think it's clever since then, but that's about the end of it.
I do every year.
I'm like, this is the year.
I'm going to put some thought into it.
some plan.
I'm going to have like a really cool costume and so forth.
I do though, just to redeem myself, have plans.
I've got my oldest kid is almost past the trick or treating stage.
So we have plans of basically doing things like, you know, some big lawn display, but hiding in it and just jumping out and scaring people and stuff.
So, you know, super original ideas like that.
What about you?
Are you, uh, all you have to do now is just wear cargo shorts and be like, I'm a dad or, you know, whatever.
Right.
Like that's it.
Yeah.
And I have a one-year-old.
So as long as I think the one-year-old's in like a skeleton outfit or a pumpkin outfit, no one's going So I think that's, you know, that's true.
I'm going to share something right now that's going to raise some eyebrows for a minute.
And some of you are going to wonder, you know, what's wrong with Brad and is he OK?
And why is he sharing this?
But, you know, whatever.
My best ever costume was in grad school.
And it's when I actually had time to think about these things and put effort into them and cared about them and went to Halloween parties.
So, Dan, I was, I believe in 2010 or 2009, one of those, 2009, I was a testicle.
And I know right now everyone's like, oh, wow.
Straight white American Jesus has lost it.
They're about to be canceled.
It's about to be over.
But what I did, Dan, was I made a huge life-size Scantron.
a test and I wore it around, you know, like you would see someone on the corner, like walking around and like, hey, come by a cell phone thing.
So I wore it like over myself and it was like literally a life-size Scantron.
And then there was a stick coming out the back.
So it was like it was a popsicle, but it was a testicle.
Well played.
Yeah.
Well, thanks.
Thanks very much, Dan.
I appreciate that.
I have no idea why I'm sharing it.
I've been up since 5 a.m.
and, you know, maybe reading about the rise of American fascism just has me in a mood.
So let's talk about it today.
We're going to talk about three things that are very much related in my mind, and I think they very much show the The change in what has happened in our political sphere over the last decade or two, and kind of this very scary moment we're in as we head into the midterms in a couple of weeks.
So I think that the question to start for today, and I'll ask you this, Dan, because I think this is kind of right down your wheelhouse when it comes to political theory.
You know, we talk about conservatism and progressivism a lot, and I don't think people actually ever stop to think about what those mean.
So, traditionally, in terms of, you know, political ideology, if somebody says, I'm a conservative, what would they be saying in kind of, you know, political theory terms?
They would be saying things like, emphasizing certain things that all of us value, because we come out of this tradition, right, of individual autonomy, a certain notion of merit, a merit-based society.
What we now call, I'm just going to throw this out there, it's confusing, I don't know exactly why it is, but what we call conservatism is also classical liberalism.
If people hear the word liberal from, say, the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, that's what we're talking about.
So they were kind of throwing off aristocratic shackles, emphasizing autonomy, merit, things like equality under the law, that even the wealthy and privileged should be subject to law, and so forth, all things that most of us would advance.
Notions like liberty, individual liberty, that's why that language liberal was there, right?
It was about liberties.
But also things like capitalism, free enterprise.
John Locke says that the reason the state exists is to protect private property, and that's it.
That's where you get notions of small state, both in the sense of a state not intruding on people's lives, but also Emerging capitalism and free markets and things like that traditionally was also the, you know, the separation of church and state and different kinds of things like that.
So those are the kinds of things that when you hear the mantras of contemporary conservatism, when they talk about small government, when they talk about low taxes, when they talk about all those kinds of things, that's why.
And that's the piece where conservatism is still with us.
But what we call conservatism or American conservatism now also wraps in a whole bunch of other things that go in other directions.
And I think that that's where we're sort of headed here.
But those are some of the ideas of somebody like reads sort of a text and it says, you know, here's the textbook example of conservatism.
Those are some of those some of those marks.
So if you're conservative, in essence, you want to conserve what you take to be the kind of essence of the human condition, and you want to protect, you know, what you would take to be human rights, and human rights meaning autonomy, freedom, everybody being treated under the same rubric when it comes to the law.
And you're trying to conserve certain things.
Now, that expands in some cases, right?
It expands to certain values.
We want to conserve certain ideals or certain traditions about, as you say, the American founding or the Constitution or religious liberty or so on.
The reason I bring that up, Dan, is that we're going to talk about three things today.
Kevin McCarthy's Kind of preview of what will happen if and when the GOP takes control of the House in a couple of weeks.
Carrie Lake, who is a kind of emerging leading figure of the American conservative movement, who in my mind is not really conservative at all, And then I think most importantly, and if you're listening and you really want what I think, if I'm honest with you today is probably the most frightening and alarming and pressing thing we'll talk about.
That's a piece from the Federalist that basically says that.
American conservatives should turn into American radicals who abandon the idea of small government and instead use the government to enforce what they want.
And I think that's just the kind of chef's kiss to what we're talking about today.
So we're going to lead up to that to that point.
So let's start here, Dan.
This week, I think the country got a little preview of what Kevin McCarthy thinks he's going to do.
When he puts in his very bold vision as somebody born to be a JV baseball coach who yells at people at Chili's for messing up their awesome blossom.
A man with this kind of charisma and skill certainly has, you know, plans for what he's going to do when he finally becomes Speaker of the House.
What is that?
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