Natcons, Neocons, Taxcons and Justcons, Part 1

The Republican party of Calvin Coolidge, Robert Taft and Ron Paul is long gone. What these stalwarts of  capitalist prosperity and constitutional liberty had in common, of course, is an understanding that the fundamental philosophical dividing line in the battles of contemporary American politics is about whether the state should be viewed as a friend to be amplified or a foe to be contained.

As principled conservatives they not only saw the state as foe, but also understood that in America’s two-party system the Democrats had long ago claimed the mantle as the the pro-state Government Party. The latter incepted with Woodrow Wilson’s War to Make the World Safe For Democracy a century ago; was cemented into place by FDR’s domestic New Deal soon thereafter; and has been amplified by subsequent Democrat policies ranging from the Great Society to all manner of Nanny State regulation, industrial policy interventions, Green New Deal/Climate Crisis hoax depredations and the Woke/DEI insult to human intelligence and color-blind administration of the law.

Accordingly, there has never been any point in the GOP me-tooing the Government Party. What’s needed in the political space available to an Opposition Party is for it to function as a countervailing anti-statist force in behalf of sound money, fiscal rectitude, personal liberty and small government at home and non-intervention and peaceful commerce with the world abroad.

Alas, beginning during the Reagan era the GOP became progressively infiltrated by political ideologies that were essentially statist, thereby evenutally diluting to the vanishing point its essential Opposition Party mission. Instead, in the pursuit of allegedly higher policy goals—global power abroad and economic growth, public safety and cultural traditionalism at home—the Federal government was christened an engine of GOP-style goodness. The latter has taken the form of hegemonic neocon national security policy, debt-financed tax cuts, Trumpian natcon wars on immigrants and imports, Washington-instigated campaigns against drugs and crime and the wielding of Federal power in behalf of various pro-family, pro-life, pro-Christian cultural stands.

Thus, back in the Reagan era the neocons took control of GOP national security policy, advancing a massive military build-up and expansion of the American Empire abroad, when the objective circumstance of the world pointed in the very opposite direction. The Chicoms were on the verge of retreating into a form of Red Capitalism that posed no threat to America at all owing to the Chinese export-dependence it fostered, while the Soviet Empire was sliding rapidly into the dustbin of history due to the inherent flaws of centralized autocratic and autarkic socialism.

Thus, while the near tripling of the national security budget during the Reagan era had very little to do with the final internal collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the neocon-inspired defense build-up did generate four drastic historical errors:

• The rise of the defense budget from $134 billion under Carter to $300 billion by 1989 pulled the political props right out from under the already wobbly GOP Congressional support for shrinking the Welfare State by even tiny amounts.

• The allocation of more than 90% of this massive defense build-up to enhancing conventional warfare capacity (i.e. the 600-ship Navy and huge procurements of tanks, planes, helicopters, airlift and missiles) provided a ready-made armada for the subsequent neocon wars of invasion and occupation.