Wanted: Conservative Heroes

By Rachel Lu

Saturday, May 07, 2016

Politics is often a distasteful affair. There’s a reason why Dante’s Inferno is packed with civil servants. The political arena tends to bring out the worst in human beings.

It seems our political system is preparing its own candidates for their entrance into Dante’s dark netherworld. Our electoral pageants attract the worst kinds of people. They are catnip for hucksters and attention-seekers, all attended by retinues of sycophants. The election process itself is almost perfectly engineered to further the moral decline. Voters frequently reward the candidate who lies, flatters them, stokes their resentments, and sells out future generations to secure their present comforts. There aren’t many heroes in this game.

When a culture is healthy and government working as it should, we don’t need heroes. At these times, the business of governance is dull, and even stultifying. Good leaders are the people who aren’t prone to wild enthusiasms (almost all of which call for irresponsible spending). They are Coolidge-esque non-interferers. They balance the books. They ensure that the trash gets collected. They keep the wheels on and tamp down the histrionics of excitable underlings. Most of the time, the good official is the one who shuns pie-in-the-sky social agendas and devotes his energies to road repair and trash pick-up.

At its best, the GOP has for decades offered that kind of no-nonsense, prudent governance. Its track record is very far from perfect, but it’s also very notably better than the opposition, which is a major reason why state legislatures are dominated by Republicans. Most of the time, the elephant holds his own by promising that he will tend to core state functions, allowing citizens to get on with their lives. Vote Republican. We’ll make sure your city doesn’t stink.

In good times, we want our leaders to focus on fixing potholes, not philosophies. Good-value government delivers order and stability at a reasonable price, which is what healthy cultures want and need. Ours, unfortunately, is not a healthy culture. Consequently, we need something more. We need heroes.

In fact, politics always has a moral component, even in those happy periods when most citizens aren’t thinking about it. Patching potholes is not an end in itself. Good roads are part of good infrastructure, and good infrastructure allows commerce to extend its creative arms from sea to shining sea, facilitating the discovery of medicines and the development of technologies and putting healthy vegetables on your children’s plates. It lays a foundation for broad cultural endeavors, from Bonnaroo to the Indy 500 to the March for Life. It enables families and friends to stay close even when the vicissitudes of life draw them to different regions of the country or world. Raise a glass to the noble road crew! Municipal workers are among the many stalwarts who make advanced civilization possible.

In sane periods, we don’t spend much time romanticizing that kind of work. The value of honest labor and good governance is sufficiently obvious that high-minded defenders are unneeded. In most parts of the country, Americans have grown used to assuming that important jobs will be done, so they look for the party that can do it efficiently, enabling tax cuts and balanced budgets. Republicans aim to be that party, and much of the time they succeed.

At a national level, though, an unromantic, we’ll-keep-the-books-balanced party can only succeed if it enjoys the support of a core of functional voters. To maintain such a party, you need 60 or 70 million of the sorts of voters who can successfully keep their own books balanced. It seems we no longer have that, and in consequence, our party is suddenly in shambles.

The reasons are complicated, and no doubt we’ll go on discussing them for years to come. To a considerable extent, we are witnessing the fruits of a progressive model of governance that keeps the Democratic party strong by ensuring that America isn’t. Progressives simultaneously push for a strong social safety net and a libertine moral agenda that erodes our social fabric, thus cementing voters’ reliance on the safety net the Democrats champion. It’s an insidious but effective way of cannibalizing our voting base, and we could think of Trumpism as a manifestation of the fact that the process has advanced far enough to make a good-governance party unviable.

That explanation is partly right, but oversimplified. It glosses over details that are important for forestalling both self-righteousness and excessive despair. The cultural and moral decline of white America is one part of the Trumpite story, but another is the inadequacy of budget-balancing pragmatism to speak to the anxieties that arise in times of sweeping cultural and economic change. When the surrounding cultural landscape is comparatively serene, “good value” government has broad appeal. When the skies grow darker, people start looking for a more comprehensive vision and message, along with the kinds of leaders who seem competent to follow it. They want prophets and heroes, not tinkerers and accountants.

Conservative populists were able to win influence because their gloom-and-doom message resonated with the voters’ sense that the foundations of their social world were crumbling. The populist message was bruising and destructive. Lacking any substantive vision or ideas of their own, most populists settled for heaping scorn on the Republicans, as though solutions were within easy reach for anyone courageous enough to grab them. Many of the criticisms were wildly unreasonable, and the messengers were anything but heroic. But the people were increasingly ravenous for a champion, and the Republicans weren’t supplying any. Seeing that the role was available, Donald Trump decided to audition.

He is, as innumerable commentators have noted, a fraud of horrifying proportions. He exemplifies everything that is ugly about politics, and hardly pretends to care about conservative principles. As a man he is crude and morally repugnant. His vision is rooted in some combination of resentment and nostalgia. He is the solution to exactly none of our problems.

Nevertheless, the people wanted a larger-than-life candidate, and Trump is accustomed to living large. After months of pundits and politicos arguing about electoral lanes, it turned out that the “champion” lane was the only one that mattered, and Trump was the only person in it.

There is no point in denying that this is a calamity. Damage control will be the primary theme of the next six months and will continue long after that. To many of us, it seemed that the conservative movement was starting to ripen into something promising, with a good harvest visible over the next horizon. Now, that promising yield has been blighted by an early frost, and it is unclear what, if anything, can be saved.

If there is a way forward, it will require us to broaden our political palate. We must recognize that our good-value promises are inadequate to the present moment. At this time, voters demand more than filled potholes and low taxes. We must work to articulate a more comprehensive vision, and look for heroes who can help bring it to life. If we can do that, conservatism will again have some capacity to shape our society and culture, regardless of the size of the welfare state or the makeup of our courts.

A more comprehensive vision need not be a statist vision. Indeed, it must not be. Increasing diversity (ethnic, economic, and moral) mixes badly with a growing and ever-more-intrusive government. Federalism is a necessary tonic at this stage, without which we will find ourselves grappling with even more social unrest. But limited government needn’t imply a limited perspective. We need our compatriots to see that the conservative vision is not just traditional, but also expansive, forward-looking, inclusive, and humane. We can secure our liberties only with a platform that has both deep roots and broad horizons. Americans are anxious for such a vision. We need to supply it.

This is a dark hour for conservatism. It is in dark times, however, that heroes start to emerge. It’s time.