Why Not Progressive Conservatism? It’s the sweet spot that led to Trump’s victory in 2016.

[Wild74]

Why Not Progressive Conservatism? It’s the sweet spot that led to Trump’s victory in 2016.
American Conservative ^ | 7-14-2020 | F. H. Buckley

The dwindling band of NeverTrumpers fondly imagines that Republicans will snap back to the former party of beautiful losers when Trump departs the scene. We’re the people with ideas, they say, and we have ownership rights over Republican thinking. But they’re merely a rag-tag bunch of neocons, libertarian purists, prissy mugwumps, and party apparatchiks who have little in common apart from their detestation of Trump.

On both right and left, American politics has degenerated into a brain-dead battle over personalities, not principles. Which raises the question of where we’ll be when Trump leaves the scene. The Alexandrine poet C.P. Cavafy wrote about what happens when threats just go away. People had been terrified by the thought of a barbarian invasion. Except one day everyone realized that the barbarians wouldn’t show up. “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.”

A real solution will come, however, when we recognize that the principles which guided the Trump campaign will remain after Trump, and that they represent a form of progressive conservatism. That might seem an oxymoron. It’s not. Burke would have recognized the need for policies that look forward to posterity while conserving what we’ve learned from our ancestors. So would Disraeli and so, obviously, would T.R. Roosevelt. And that’s how the Trump campaign cracked America’s electoral code in 2016.

...

(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanconservative.com ...

[Monte1076]

Well, I see two "main" branches of Conservatism that kind of fight it out.

One is "nanny state" Conservatism. Another is what I refer to as "Libertarian Conservatism" (closer, in my opinion, to a "small government" model).

The problem is there's "gray area" there, too. I tend to lean oftentimes toward the "Libertarian Conservatism" side of things. Mostly.