THE WOKE rIGHT:

One would have thought that conservatives would recoil in horror that Trump is turning his back on practically everything they have spent the last half a century fighting for and rededicate themselves to looking for ways to restore the "conservative value of limited government." But one would be wrong. In a conservative version of wokeness, they are positively giddy about the possibilities for deploying state power that Trump has opened for them.

At a recent gathering of conservative luminaries in Washington, D.C., even as the University of Pennsylvania's Amy Wax lamented the failure of non-Western immigrants who litter and talk too loudly to culturally assimilate into America, Yarom Hazony, an Israeli citizen and author of The Virtue of Nationalism, who is fast becoming the intellectual godfather of the neo-right, intoned that it was time for conservatives to "declare independence...from what they call classical liberalism." Given that Thomas Jefferson essentially relied on classical liberalism when he asserted in the Declaration of Independence that the government's job was to protect the God-given and inalienable rights of individuals but otherwise leave them alone to pursue their life, liberty, and happiness as they saw fit, Hazony's wording was explicitly calculated to invite conservatives to turn their back on America's founding. But did the audience break into chants of "send him back"? No. It applauded in approval.

Not to be outdone, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a former libertarian who has taken to delivering fire-and-brimstone sermons against the evils of market capitalism that would put the jeremiads of the loudest mullahs against the ills of capitalistic usury to shame, declared to a rousing ovation that the "main threat to your ability to live your life as you choose, does not come from the government, but the private sector." If an immigrant had said anything like that, Schlafly would have wasted little time branding them unfit for America.

It gets worse.

The emerging consensus among smart-set conservatives is that if there is anything wrong with Trump's protectionism, it's that it is not radical enough. Trump, apparently, is still too concerned about global supply chains and productivity. What the country needs, Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance argues, is an ambitious industrial policy dedicated to rebuilding the lost manufacturing base of the heartland, combined with massive infusions of government cash to reverse "family decline, childhood trauma, opioid abuse, community decline." Conservatives, Vance believes, need to "be willing to use politics and political power to accomplish those goods."

It is not just the economic realm that conservatives want to remake by deploying "political power," but the social as well.

New York Post editor Sohrab Ahmari, a recently converted Catholic, electrified some conservative quarters when he suggested in First Things that it was time for Christian conservatives not just to dispense with politeness and decency when dealing with liberal enemies that have turned "elite institutes" into "libertine and pagan" strongholds, but also the bogus notion of state neutrality in matters of religion. Such notions, he suggested, were preventing them from using the government to "defeat [the liberal] enemy" and promote their faith in a bid to "[enjoy] the spoils in the form of a public-square reordered." In plain English, Ahmari is spurring conservatives to dispense with this foolishness about separating church and state--so that they can use the state to impose their religion.

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