The French poet Charles Baudelaire once said that “the devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist”. The “New Right”/”Postliberals” seem to be trying the same trick, though clearly they are not up to the devil’s level of competence, as can be seen by Rachel Bovard pretending that “new right” and “postliberal” are made up terms, despite delivering a “keynote address entitled ‘What’s New in the New Right’ as a post liberal conference.” So, what does their words and action actually indicate?
They are “new right” in that they claim to be on the right while hiding the fact that they don’t mean the Right from an American or even Anglo-American vein, but from a post-Western vein. It is an intentional and dishonest trick. They are “postliberal” because they are against the Classical Liberalism which was a natural and organic development of our Anglo-American heritage spanning back to nearly a millennium.
They again intentionally conflate that with Progressive Leftism that stems from the same European thinking that they openly embrace. They are socialist in the old sense of the term before Stalin, et al., convinced people that “Socialism = Communism”. Be they democratic socialists or social democrats, they are all very Unamerican.
Anyone who thinks reforming the regulatory state is nothing more than cutting the number of regulations (but not reducing the substance) or having fewer employees (lack of too many results in greater regulatory burden) doesn’t understand what they’re talking about. The question is not the number of regulations or the number of employees to process those regulations, but on the breadth of government itself in its control over people. You can have bigger government with fewer employees/regulations.
All in all, the postliberals are wolves wearing a shepherd carcass like a skinsuit while saying they will protect the sheep from the shepherd draped in a wolf hide.
The difference between your humble author and a “Common Good Conservative” is that your humble author is a conservative who believes in the common good. They are more accurately described as believing in the “Collective Good”.
But they need to hide that fact and pretend that who they really are doesn’t exist.
