MAGA-Lite: What "Bari Weiss Conservatism" Is, and Why It's Dangerous

[Celerity]

The new CBS executive isn’t exactly MAGA. But her polite Trumpism will still help destroy America as we know it.

https://newrepublic.com/article/201401/bari-weiss-cbs-news-conservatism-maga-lite

https://archive.ph/di84v


Bari Weiss and House Speaker Mike Johnson at an event in January. Leigh Vogel/Getty Images

The ascent of Bari Weiss, who Paramount announced on Monday will be editor-in-chief of CBS News, at first glance seems like a media story. But it’s really a story about American politics and the two major parties. There is a new kind of “moderate” Republican, perhaps best exemplified by Weiss. And this kind of Republican is poised to keep gaining power and shifting the country to the right in harmful and destructive ways, even if they never have the political power of more explicitly pro-Trump conservatives.

For most of my lifetime, the Republican Party was informally divided into a more moderate wing and a more conservative one. (I say “more moderate” rather than simply “moderate” because the old true moderates—senators like Lowell Weicker and John Heinz—are long gone.) George H.W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and John McCain exemplified this “more moderate” bloc. These Republicans took some very right-wing stances, but even so, they were to the left of figures such as Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, who emphasized their fierce opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights and openly promoted the idea of America as a Judeo-Christian, male-led society. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush tried, at times successfully, to chart a middle ground between these two factions and be embraced by both.

The H.W. Bush-McCain-Romney wing was already losing steam when Donald Trump started running for president in 2015. These Republicans didn’t really have a strong agenda. They favored cutting corporate taxes and rolling back of liberal programs like Medicaid … just at a more gradual rate than the party’s right wing. The one area they really differed from the party’s right wing was they had more favorable views towards immigration and greater inclusion of women and people of color in American society.

So Trump easily vanquished them. As his 2016 campaign showed, very few Republican voters were enthusiastic about greater multiculturalism, and many were ardently opposed. By the end of 2020, after Trump had won two Republican primaries and one presidential election, it was clear that figures like Romney had little room in the party. Trump hadn’t been that religious or socially conservative before 2015, but he aligned with the right wing of the party and helped it win a decisive victory over the center-right.

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