Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A liberal, a conservative and a populist walk into a bar. The liberal orders a white-wine spritzer and begins ruminating on the sorry state of America’s social safety net. The conservative orders a dry martini and grumbles about his tax bill. The populist orders a Bud Light — then throws it in the bartender’s face.
If you don’t get it, you must have missed the controversy over Bud Light’s marketing campaign featuring transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney. Maybe you were focused on less-important issues like health care or tax policy or the war in Ukraine or some other minutia that isn’t nearly as urgent to Fox News Nation as the outrageous decision of a brewer to market its beer by appealing to the inclusive instincts of younger customers.
In any case, a lot of people who call themselves conservatives are coming unglued about “woke” Bud Light (having apparently moved on from being unglued about woke M&Ms). It’s the latest evidence that the old liberal-versus-conservative construct is insufficient to today’s political conversation. A third category is needed — one to encompass those who couldn’t care less about your civil rights or your entrepreneurial freedom, but who care a great deal about fighting culture-war battles and confronting anything they see as political elitism.
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This isn’t conservatism, it’s right-wing populism being served up in a similar mug. And it’s about as far from Ronald Reagan as Joe Biden is.
Many of today’s Republicans, perhaps most of them, aren’t “conservative” any more by any standard definition of the word. Conservatism as a political philosophy supports unfettered free enterprise, respect for constitutionalism and federalism, and traditional family values. Please tell me how any of that aligns with crusades like this one, designed to punish corporations for their marketing strategies, or Missouri’s constitutionally deranged new law presuming to opt out of federal gun restrictions, or America’s porn-star-paying ex-president and current Republican presidential frontrunner.
There are plenty of applicable words for this particular brew of reactionary extremism. “Conservative” isn’t among them.
I’ve looked far and wide, and I can’t find any traditional definition of “conservative” that would encompass a political leader who subjects public libraries to a Politburo-like censorship process, as Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft has done. Or a governor who goes on a scorched-earth vendetta against a free-market icon like Disney for opposing his policies, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has done. Or a political party that attempts to micromanage the medical decisions of millions of Americans, as the Republican Party is currently doing here and around the country regarding abortion rights.
Even in those instances where today’s Republican policies appear to line up with actual conservative principles — say, the small-government, hands-off approach Missouri currently takes regarding gun regulation — it’s conservatism applied selectively. There’s nothing hands-off about what those same Missouri politicians are doing regarding school curriculum, women’s health care or transgender issues. Apparently, the principle of keeping government out of people’s lives only applies to people who want to pack heat with no questions asked.
I guess Missouri’s decades-long failure to adequately fund the state’s roads and bridges could, in some twisted way, qualify as “limited government.” If you define that phrase as government not doing its job.
But where is “limited government” when a state official like Ashcroft uses the power of his elective office to unilaterally substitute his judgment for that of local librarians around the state? This is the same official who launched his gubernatorial bid this month by condemning the recent Missouri gas-tax hike that is the state’s first serious attempt in a generation to confront its infrastructure crisis. When it comes to governmental priorities, do any regular Missourians — even genuine conservatives — really think that scouring library shelves for objectionable material is more urgent than paving highways?
There’s a second punchline to the Bud Light joke: In response to the right-wing boycott movement that arose over the brewer’s transgender ad, Donald Trump Jr., of all people, has stepped up to defend the company. No, he wasn’t seized with some sudden fit of reasonableness and compassion. He just looked at the numbers and discovered that Anheuser-Busch is a major Republican donor. The National Republican Congressional Committee, facing the same realization, quietly deleted a sneering tweet in which it had declared (in a rare burst of accuracy) that “Bud Light tastes like water.”
The boycotters are pushing back, maintaining their principled stance of prejudice, apparently having missed the central takeaway from the recent Fox News libel suit: The Republican establishment views its right-wing populists as useful idiots, good for stoking electoral anger but not to the point of impacting the party’s bottom line. Some in the GOP, it seems, appear to understand that populism is a watery substitute for conservatism.
Kevin McDermott is a Post-Dispatch columnist and Editorial Board member. On Twitter: @kevinmcdermott. Email: kmcdermott@post-dispatch.com
