Reading Noonan’s advice to her party it sounds like she wants the GOP to occupy the political space so many centrist pundits imagined Joe Biden to occupy before he actually took office: someone determined to crush any passion or purpose out of politics on behalf of a traumatized white suburban middle-class exhausted by Trump and the pandemic. Looking a bit deeper, it’s the centrism of Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose “progressive conservatism” was for the most part an effort to anesthetize a nation seething with ideological tensions that finally exploded in the 1960s whose “excesses” offended young Peggy Noonan. Reagan’s forebear and idol Barry Goldwater sneered at Ike’s administration as a “dime-store New Deal.” Now Noonan wants Republicans to embrace the entire New Deal/Great Society legacy, “the whole edifice created in the past century by both parties to help people feel more secure and with a steadier foothold in the world.”
That ain’t happening. Trump remains the de facto leader of your party, and if he falters, he will be succeeded by someone as bad or worse if “excess” is the enemy and the “big center” is the goal. Yes, the pointy-headed right-wing intellectuals and propagandists who represented a forgotten part of Ronald Reagan’s legacy are mostly dead and gone. But their MAGA successors look not to Barry Goldwater or Herbert Hoover but to Viktor Orban and Jair Bolsonaro. They may not be traditional conservative ideologues, all right, but the last thing they want is a politics of “normalcy.” They want the fire and sword, not peace, other than the peace that comes when victors stand over the graves of the vanquished.
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