CPAC Is Now Entirely Festivus for Facebook Dads
What is the conservative plan to combat the climate crisis? What's the plan for income and wealth inequality? Monopoly power and corporate concentration? Racial justice in policing and the criminal justice system? The $1.7 trillion in student-loan debt dragging millions of Americans into misery? For infrastructure? For healthcare? On some things, one or two individual Republicans—usually senators—might have a plan. Mitt Romney has a child allowance proposal that would, like its Democratic counterpart, lift millions of American children out of poverty. (We've got some of the highest rates of child poverty among rich countries.) But how many of his colleagues would back it? He's got a plan for a minimum-wage hike with Tom Cotton, but they've tied it to a draconian immigration proposal that's D.O.A. with Democrats. Besides, the new minimum they're backing—$10 by 2025!—is just laughably inadequate.
No, there isn't much of a conservative policy agenda to speak of. In the election just past, the Republican Party opted to simply not adopt a platform. Whatever Trump Tweets Every Morning was apparently their proposal for the next four years of American governance. That, and spending a few billion more on the F-35. (Democrats, it should be said, also love a defense spending bill.) And now that the ex-president lost, and spun wild conspiracy theories about the outcome for months culminating in the January 6 insurrection, not a whole lot has changed among the Republican rank-and-file, the overwhelming majority of whom voted to acquit him on the charge of doing what we watched him do on television.
Not a lot has changed in the surrounding right-wing infotainment sphere, either. CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, is set to kick off in Florida this weekend. Donald Trump will speak on Sunday, and surely roll out a comprehensive policy platform. Ha! As CPAC bigwig Matt Schlapp made clear to Dave Weigel of the Washington Post on Thursday, there shall not be too much concern for actual conservative policies down in Orlando.
“The idea that we’re going to come up with some kind of conservative platform at CPAC, it rings a little hollow,” said Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, which organizes the conference. “Right now, half the country” feels cheated “by the media coverage of the election. So we’re going to go back and cover the facts that most people in the media canceled.”
Conservative ideas at a conservative conference? Please. We're gonna do a rerun of the stolen election crap. Festivus for Facebook Dads. Sure, we've got some ideas—about how there was fraudulent voting on such a massive scale that we were unable to prove it across 60-plus court cases. This is the same impulse that led Madison Cawthorn, one of the more unfortunate new additions to the House Republican caucus, to declare his congressional staff was not recruited with an eye on silly things like legislating, but for "comms." He is there to fight the culture war. Why would he hire somebody who knows about healthcare? Marjorie Taylor Greene, who makes Cawthorn look like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is at this point paid $170,000 by taxpayers to troll people. All these people will likely be reelected next year. At what point can we simply declare that American "conservatism" does not exist, if it ever did, and its purported practitioners now spend their time fueling the reactionary nationalist impulse with paranoid conspiracies about the ongoing theft of The America You Know and Love?
Say what you will about the Democrats, but they have offered proposed policy changes with respect to many of the major issues of the day. You may think these solutions flawed or insufficient, but at this point, we're often talking about the difference between 1 and 0. And the sad part is that, if the Republican Party had not completely lost its mind quite some time ago, the framework of Obamacare could have been their solution to healthcare in this country—it was Mitt Romney's once upon a time—and the Democrats could have backed at least a public option. (They could have done that anyway, but yes, they are The Democrats.) Instead, we have a somewhat timid center-left party, moving in a promising direction in recent years, and we have a complete freak show. By all means, though, tune into CPAC this weekend to hear for the 46th time how Georgia was stolen for Joe Biden by a bunch of Republican state officials. Christ almighty.
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