MODERN CONSERVATISM, IN ONE WORD CLOUD

Here's a tag cloud I found on the front page of the right-wing site Townhall.com:



Notice what's not there? Apart from "border security" "border wall," and "national emergency," there's nothing about conservative policies. Nearly every tag identifies a right-wing enemy -- AOC, Andrew McCabe, Jussie Smollett, CNN, the FBI, socialism, and so on.

What do conservatives want? They want a wall. What else? They want to see someone smack down their enemies. There isn't a right-wing health-care plan or a right-wing infrastructure plan or a right-wing plan for dealing with opioids. There's just rage and the wall.

By contrast, Axios reports this:

At a half-dozen events 2020 candidates held in Iowa over the weekend, attendees barely mentioned President Trump — and not a single person asked about Robert Mueller’s investigation or Russia.

The big picture: Instead, most of the questions were about policies — most often health care, climate and immigration.

The attendees at a soup dinner, meet-and-greets, and town halls asked hard-hitting questions about biofuels, money in politics, taxing the wealthy, preventive health care, arts in education, immigration reform, the environment, abolishing the filibuster rule in the Senate, and foreign policy.

To be fair, that's on the campaign trail. The left-wing media tends to be very focused on enemies, particularly the president. But it's also focused on climate change, on health care, on changing the tax code, on dealing with gun violence, on establishing a humane approach to immigration, and a lot of other serious policy issues.

In the Bush years, being a conservative meant being in favor of war in the Middle East. That wasn't my policy, but it was a policy.What do conservatives stand for now, apart from building a wall and inducing liberal tears?