The Whigs Haven't Re-emerged, They've Been Here All-Along

The Whigs were a political party active in the UK at times during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. They were the descendants of Cromwell's Roundheads, Puritans, anti-Catholics, anti-monarchists, anti-free traders obsessed with fighting the French and Spanish and building an international colonial empire. Their philosophical leader was John Locke.

In 1833 a group of US politicians called themselves Whigs, perhaps in respect to their English forebears or as an indication of the similarity to their beliefs. These Whigs were the architects of the "American System" and their leader was Henry Clay of Kentucky, a professional politician.

 rallypoint.com

Clay's "American System" involved federal income from tariffs used on projects meant to serve regional interests, canals, roads, eventually railroads. Clay and others, but not everyone, felt that by-passing free enterprise and using federal funding to create local infrastructure was the best way to quickly develop the country and extend it to the west, replacing the indigenous natives with European immigrants.

The Whigs eventually failed at the ballot box and their most ardent members joined the Republican party, bringing along the American System. Abraham Lincoln was an effective proponent of it, especially in regard to the government financed expansion of the railroads.

The tenets of the American System have been completely accepted by the US government and population. It's normal procedure now. One modern justification of government spending is defense, needed to protect the US from foreign adversaries. The interstate highway system is known to the government as the  Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. In a conflict similar to WWII equipment and men would be able to be moved across the country with dispatch, facing any invader. People now seem to believe that no travel would be possible from Omaha to Denver without the involvement of the federal government.

Now all US politicians are Whigs. There's little opposition in the Congress to any administration spending billions of public money on projects that the general public neither understands nor favors. Taiwanese semiconductor TSCM has been awarded $11.6 billion in grants and loans to construct fabs in Arizona. Intel has received $8.5 billion in grants and as much as $11 billion in loans for a similar purpose. 

There may not even be a verifiable total available of the subsidies meant to spur the elimination of hydrocarbon electrical generation with offshore wind turbines and thousands of acres of farmland covered by solar panels. The US Dept. of Energy, led by former Michigan governor, attorney, University of California professor and Canadian Jennifer Granholm, has spread around over $7 billion to various research institutions to further the production and adoption of hydrogen gas in whatever way it can be used to replace hydrocarbon energy. 

NASA, another Whig department of the US government, gets millions to spread the influence of the US beyond its terrestrial location into the boundless regions of the cosmos, as if this would be seen as a wise investment by the man on the cul de sac. Of course the public is told that space exploration has positive side effects, GPS and satellite communications, for example, which, if beneficial, would be provided by private investors in a free market economy, if such a thing actually existed.

So the Whigs are not political dinosaurs, made extinct by a changing environment. Instead they have evolved into a more effective organism.