The embarrassment of "conservative" Erick Erickson

There's a supposed conservative in the radio business named Erick Erickson who's been around for 2 decades or so, and is one of the most pretentious to claim the mantle. John Daniel Davidson describes how Mr. Erickson is totally out of touch with reality on only so many issues:

Maybe you saw a recent clip on X from conservative talk radio personality Erick Erickson criticizing what he calls a “weird movement within conservatism” that questions things like “limited government” and “free markets,” principles long associated with the conservative movement.

If you haven’t seen the clip, take a look. It’s like watching someone talk about the state of conservatism halfway through Obama’s first term, when Republican leaders were vowing to repeal Obamacare and inveighing against Democrats for violating the Constitution with a “socialist” health care scheme. (Obamacare was of course never repealed and is now, all these years later, a permanent feature of America’s health care system.)

Erickson’s point, which he also made in a post for National Review, is that the Republican coalition for decades was built on the “three-legged stool” of fiscal conservatism, traditional values, and a peace-through-strength foreign policy. This is what won the Cold War and unleashed prosperity at home. I’m sure you’ve heard the story.

The problem now, he says, is that some people on the right (whom he doesn’t name) are calling into question these orthodoxies, especially free markets and limited government. They aren’t fighting to cut the size of the government but are instead working to gain control of it and wield power to achieve their preferred outcomes.

Erickson thinks this is bad, a betrayal of the old three-legged stool of Reaganite conservatism. After all, he says, if you use government power when your side is in control, the opposing side will use it against you when they’re in control. And we don’t want that, do we?

It’s hard to overstate how out-of-touch this way of thinking is, as if the past 15 years simply never happened, to say nothing of the past 50.

Consider the three legs of the stool. On fiscal conservatism, we’re swimming in an ocean of debt that grows no matter which party controls Congress, while inflation is killing middle- and working-class families. On traditional values, we legalized gay marriage and then quickly moved on to normalizing transgenderism and acquiescing to so-called “gender-affirming care,” even for minors. On peace-through-strength foreign policy, we lost the War on Terror and are now funding multiple wars all over the world as part of a crumbling global imperium. The stool has no legs left.

Read more at the page. I've been fairly familiar with Erickson myself, and he's nothing more than cure for insomnia. Most likely he's not particularly concerned about the issues Davidson cited, and it's about time Erickson go into retirement. Besides, much as I feel bad to say this, even Reagan wasn't perfect, and never confronted the issue of Iran's totalitarian regime properly.