Lindsey Graham and the Capitulation of Liberal Conservatism
After a sudden illness republican senator Lindsey Graham has passed away. Graham was a figure that encapsulated the way the republican party has been captured by an ideology that is ultimately alien to its establishment. Conservatism is divided historically between liberal and illiberal conservatives. The former view civil rights + rule of law as the best means of achieving the ideological goal of conservatism; the preservation of inherited culture, institutions, and relations. The latter see civil rights + rule of law as a hindrance to this conservation project.
In coalition with centrist liberalism which also prioritizes the construction of a state under rule of law liberal conservatism became a leading ideology within the culture of the capitalist world-system (the modern geoculture). This allowed for the construction, since 1945, of a centrist technocratic politics which defined political community in terms of a democratic state engineering overlapping consensus among constituencies through the construction of policy mechanisms by experts. This is a form of politics which strictly limits the political participation of the masses of people to participating in cyclical and voluntary electoral duties punctuated by occasional referendums. Actual decisions are made by elected officials and appointed functionaries with a significant portion of social life being dominated by private enterprise and thereby the owners of private industry and finance as protected by rights to private property.
The result of the construction of this liberal democratic and technocratic political community within the global North has been increasing wealth inequality, tensions between dominant and minority groups, increasing capture of government by the wealthy, inaction on climate change, and recurrent economic crisis. From the late 2000s to early 2010s populist movements on the liberal left and conservative right began to assert themselves by arguing for the overturning of liberal constitutional elements of the constitutional democratic state (rule of law and civil rights). In the United States this took the form of the ascendency of Donald Trump to leadership of the republican party which was erstwhile dominated by liberal conservatives. They had to cede Trump leadership because his populist demagoguery appealed to many American right-wingers disaffected with liberal democratic politics and its attendant problems.
Lindsey Graham was an exemplar of this process. Graham comes from the so called neo-conservative movement that dominated the republican party from the Reagan to the Trump eras. Neo-conservatism is not an ideology itself, but a faction within republican liberal conservatism which emphasizes the use of American power to promote American values around the world and the revitalization of American values through conservative morality. This is why Graham was an extreme war hawk; vociferously supporting the Iraq war, calling for permanent American occupation of Afghanistan, supporting Israel to the hilt, and endorsing Trump's Iran war.
As a liberal conservative in 2016 Graham initially decried Trump's xenophobic populism as being completely unrepresentative of the republican party. However, Graham, like the rest of the republican party, since became a staunch Trump ally. This doesn't mean that he gave up his liberal conservative worldview. Before he died he demanded more support for liberal democratic Ukraine against an illiberal enemy of the west in Putin's Russia. Graham's case highlights the way in which liberal conservatives have had to acquiesce to an illiberal ideology as a result of the success of Trump. This phenomena should make us question whether liberal conservatives are up to the task of challenging right-wing populism.
Sources
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCfxenBjuY0
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/#ModConSidOakScr
Conservatism, O'Sullivan
Populism, Mudde and Kaltwasser
Politics, Tansey and Jackson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-bhdv3OQ4M&t=238s&pp=ygUccG9wdWxpc20gaW4gdGhlIHdvcmxkLXN5c3RlbQ%3D%3D
