What for many attendees was a first conclave, especially in Washington, since the Before Times, those gathered could be forgiven for wondering whether they’d imagined the last 16 months, if not the last six years entirely. The worst of Covid-19 appeared over, but so did any sincere optimism around the future of Donald J. Trump.
Was it back to square one?
At the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s political economy conference in Alexandria, Virginia, over a twee weekend, a surly, nationalist-inclined speaker accused a Reaganite fellow panelist of a giving “a get-off-my-lawn speech.” That forever, would-be messiah of a better Grand Old Party—Marco Rubio of Florida—was on hand, too, for whatever reason, albeit virtually. A keynote speaker shopped the last president to sleep through his administration as the exemplar of good government, and that Reaganite’s advice to the gathered was simple: machete state spending, and “a thousand flowers will bloom.”
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