Who is looking out for us?

Mark Steyn writes,

On Wednesday's show Rush Limbaugh discussed the Trump phenomenon through the lens of a 20-year-old Sam Francis article:

"Imagine giving this advice to a Republican presidential candidate: What if you stopped calling yourself a conservative and instead just promised to make America great again?" What do you think might happen in the current climate, where the middle class in the country feels totally left out of everything going on?

They feel like they've been targeted by every liberal Democrat policy that has not been stopped by the Republican Party. What if you dropped [talking] about the free market," stop all of that, "and promised to fight the elites who were selling out American jobs? What if you just stopped talking about reforming Medicare and Social Security and instead said that the elites were failing to deliver better health care at a reasonable price? What if, instead of vainly talking about restoring the place of religion in society ... you simply promised to restore the Middle American core," and everything it stands for?

Rush's view is that "nationalism and populism have overtaken conservatism in terms of appeal" - ie, that there are insufficient takers for conservatism. It comes to something when the nation's Number One conservative talk-show host is putting it that way, but you can see what he's getting at.

In contrast to the ebb and flow of eternally shifting multiparty systems, America has a rigid, inflexible two-party choice:

One party is supposed to be the party of big government, the other the party of small government. When the Big Government Party is in power, the government gets bigger, and, when the Small Government Party is in power, the government gets bigger.

One party is supposed to be the party of social liberalism, the other the party of social conservatism. When the Socially Liberal Party is in power, the country gets more liberal, and, when the Socially Conservative Party is in power, the country gets more liberal.

One party is supposed to be the party of foreign-policy doves, the other the party of foreign-policy hawks. When the doves are in power, America loses wars, and, when the hawks are in power, America loses wars.

So much for American conservatism's three-legged stool. "Mainstream" Republican candidates are essentially reduced to the argument: This time it'll be different, I promise.

Democrats' principal appeal isn't to philosophical coherence: They tell their coalition that they'll take care of their own - the gays, the blacks, the feminists, the transitioning, the environmentalists, the Hispanics, the educators... This time round, a big chunk of the Republican base has figured it'd like someone who's looking out for them, too.

If the present polls hold up through Iowa and New Hampshire, it'd be the reconfiguration of Mr and Mrs Main Street America as just another interest group. So a philosophical commitment to free trade means less to them than the degeneration of mill and factory towns into wastelands of fast-food service jobs and heroin addiction. An abstract respect for religious pluralism means less to them than reducing the number of crazies running around whose last words before opening fire are "Allahu akbar!" A theoretical belief in private-sector health care means less to them than not getting stiffed by crappy five-figure health "insurance" that can be yanked out from under you at any moment under Byzantine rules and regulations that change 30 times a day. And bipartisan myth-making about "a nation of immigrants" means a whole lot less than another decade of Press One For English, flatlined wages, sanctuary cities and remorseless cultural transformation...