If you follow a lot of conservative personalities on social media, you are quite familiar with our clichés:
- Taxation is theft
- You don’t hate the media enough
- Government is the problem
- That tells you all you need to know
- I support the Constitution
- Back the Blue
- Faith, family, and freedom
- The Founding Fathers believed…
You get the picture. There’s nothing particularly wrong with any of these statements, but beyond the momentary adrenaline rush of posting or reacting online, they offer no actionable steps to help us achieve our policy goals.
Sure, at a basic level, all taxation is coercive. The government takes our money under threat of force and spends it on things we may or may not support. This has been a conundrum for mankind ever since the first pastoral nomads settled into cities. No man is an island, and societies require law enforcement and other investments in the common good. Our society is built on the English tradition that no taxes should be levied without the consent of the people’s representatives. Our Founding Fathers believed (see what I did there?) that taxation was legitimate only when approved by those representatives. Their slogan wasn’t “Taxation is theft,” but “No taxation without representation.”
Of course, that paragraph doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.
It’s the same with all the other clichés. Conservatives have developed a shorthand for discussing politics that, over time, has evolved to the point where the original ideas themselves can be hard to discern. This shorthand has turned into shibboleths, passwords that are used not to communicate ideas but to indicate membership in the group.
I recently read a very long essay on the Conundrum Cluster Substack about the need for conservatives to reacquire a deep intellectual foundation, rather than relying on repetitive slogans. The whole thing is worth reading, but here’s one part where the author explains the danger of reducing your beliefs to bumper-sticker slogans:
As previously stated, after decades of dysfunction people have come to view their beliefs not as beliefs but rather as signifiers of their personal status or membership in a broader subculture. As such, to them, when you challenge their beliefs, you are not challenging a claim or piece of information, but rather their self-identity. You are not in discourse about this or that topic, but rather leveling a personal attack. These topics do not exist for themselves (as all things in reality do), but rather merely in service of the people talking about them.
Later, the author shifts from critique to prescription. Engaging in politics, he says, is not about drive-by slogans, but about slowly and surely enacting meaningful change:
Why are we all here? What is this all about? Where should we direct our energy? Is the goal of rightwing politics to redpill the normies? Is it to show others how smart or transgressive or correct you are? Is it to predict defeat and then wait to be proven right? Is it to commune with demons in the Noosphere to manipulate crypto markets? Do we need to go back ten years, or a hundred years, or ten thousand years?
No. The goal in politics is to win and then make the world a better place.
Commenting “taxation is theft” on social media might feel satisfying, but since we’re not going to abolish all taxes anytime soon, it does nothing to explain how we should structure our tax policy. It simply reassures you — and your audience — that you belong to a certain tribe.
It can even be dangerous to try to dig deeper. Say you argue that we should cut income taxes before sales taxes, and suddenly the replies flood in: “So you support sales taxes? I guess you’re not really conservative, are you?”
Perhaps modern media culture is partly to blame. Over the past century and a half, we’ve gone from consuming news through longform newspaper articles, to radio broadcasts, to television, and now to 15-second clips on social media. Today, the art of political communication often consists of summing up your entire worldview in a single tweet or a TikTok. While brevity may still be the soul of wit, and I enjoy the back-and-forth that Twitter allows, it’s no substitute for the serious contemplation our ideas deserve.
What’s the solution? First, I suggest placing less stock in what you read on social media. Sure, the banter is fun, but it can’t replace the serious ideas that only come through in-depth reading and thoughtful discussion. For example, some people have been posting on social media that Sen. Brandon Shippy is no better than Abby Lee, whom he replaced in 2024, using screenshots of Shippy’s Freedom Index score as proof. He responded with a detailed explanation of why he voted the way he did on certain bills, which the Idaho Freedom Foundation viewed differently. Yet many commenters still dismissed his explanation out of hand simply because of a number on a website.
As I always say, the Freedom Index is a valuable data point. Before it existed, it was difficult for voters to gauge whether their representatives were truly living up to their conservative promises. But it’s just one data point; it’s not the beginning and the end of political analysis. I encourage everyone, especially the voters of District 9, to read Sen. Shippy’s essay and decide for themselves what to think.
That is my mission here at the Gem State Chronicle: not to bombard you with bumper-sticker slogans that short-circuit critical thinking in the name of supporting this candidate or opposing that one. Instead, I want to help you think for yourself, to understand complex issues as well as you possibly can, and then use that knowledge to engage with the process. As Conundrum Cluster said, the point is not to “redpill the normies,” nor is it to “own the libs with facts and logic.” The point is to enact substantive policies that preserve and improve the quality of life for us and our posterity.
Bumper stickers are fun, but they should lead you to deeper ideas, not remain an end unto themselves.
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About Brian Almon
Brian Almon is the Editor of the Gem State Chronicle. He also serves as Chairman of the District 14 Republican Party and is a trustee of the Eagle Public Library Board. He lives with his wife and five children in Eagle.
