By Daniel McCarthy
Wednesday, February 05, 2025
In our polarized era, there are fewer and fewer spaces
where people who disagree can do so productively and in good faith. The
Dispatch’s Debate Series aims to be an outlier: a regular feature
where two writers with opposing views can hash out some of the thorniest
political and cultural issues roiling the national conversation. If you have an
idea for a future topic, please let us know at debates@thedispatch.com.
There’s nothing as cliche as a conservative quoting
Edmund Burke, but in this bewildering age of political dislocation, it’s worth
remembering the political theorist’s warning: “A state without the means of
some change is without the means of its own conservation.” Some conservatives
would prefer that conservatism itself never change—that it continue to adhere
to the same set of principles in place by 1989. Ronald Reagan would never
have appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard to his Cabinet, and if
Reagan wouldn’t have done so, Donald Trump shouldn’t either.
Kennedy isn’t pro-life, and he holds many beliefs about
health and medicine—particularly
vaccines—that are sharply at odds with the scientific consensus. Gabbard
has served her country patriotically in the armed forces during wartime, but
her critics contend she is too
quick to give a hearing to anything despotic regimes such as Vladimir
Putin’s or Bashar al-Assad’s might have to say. They worry she trusts
anti-American sources more than America’s own intelligence community.
Reagan himself had an imperfect record on the right to
life, to say the least. As governor of California, he signed
into law one of the nation’s most permissive abortion laws, and as
president, he appointed to the Supreme Court two justices, Sandra Day O’Connor
and Anthony Kennedy, who were reliable votes for upholding the Roe regime.
Reagan did not challenge medical science itself the way RFK Jr. does, but he
was assailed by activists and a hostile news media for his administration’s
supposed lack of urgency in addressing the AIDS epidemic.
The differences between Reagan and Gabbard are plain
enough, too: She is not, or not yet, the full-spectrum conservative he became.
But Reagan desired
peace as ardently as Gabbard does—and he, too, was willing to meet with
dictators in pursuit of it. The 40th president was caricatured as an
apocalyptic warhawk by the left, but to some
on the right he occasionally seemed like a naive dove. But looking back,
Reagan was right and his right-wing critics were wrong: His bold diplomacy was
the key to winning the Cold War without turning it hot. Those critics’
spiritual descendants on the hawkish right are equally wrong about Gabbard
today.
Indeed, Reagan was a more complicated statesman than most
who lay claim to his legacy today recall. It’s not inconceivable he might have
found a place for a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or a Tulsi Gabbard in his
administration, depending on how their views today are translated back into the
terms of the 1980s. If Reagan himself were navigating the politics of the 21st century,
his approach might look rather different, just as the Reagan of the 1980s had
rather different views on abortion than the Reagan of the 1960s.
None of this, however, tells us whether figures like RFK
Jr. and Gabbard are helpful in advancing the conservative cause in 2025. “Some
change” is necessary to conservation, as Burke noted, but does that apply to
the changes that brought these ex-Democrats into the conservative coalition?
In Gabbard’s case, the answer is very clear: Change is
necessary and she will introduce the right kind. The United States’ foreign
policy approach over the last 25 years has led to a series of disasters, all of
which stem from a lack of appropriate skepticism and realism. As director of
national intelligence (DNI), Gabbard would put an end to the kind of intelligence abuses that led
to the Iraq War and to two
decades of self-deception about the progress of the war in Afghanistan.
Gabbard will help Trump formulate a more restrained and genuinely conservative
foreign policy, the hallmark of which will be prudence rather than high hopes
or excessive fears.
Gabbard’s courage in
speaking out against ill-premised and unwinnable wars
gives her credibility with a war-weary public that would benefit any
administration. The American people have learned from bitter experience to
distrust what Washington says about war and foreign policy, and Gabbard can
help restore that trust, not only by doing good work as DNI but by bringing her
reputation as a critic of the last quarter-century of U.S. foreign policy to
bear.
This reputation, of course, is a mark against her in the
eyes of those in both parties who are responsible for that foreign policy and
who would like to see it continue. Few advocates of the Iraq War and prolonged
occupation of Afghanistan suffered any harm to their careers for their errors,
on the principle that if all the best people are guilty of the same thing, no
one can be singled out for blame. As a result, there has been less change in
personnel and policy concerning intelligence and war than the dismal record of
the recent past demands. Gabbard herself, however, is a change for the better,
and as DNI, she will bring about more. Conservatives should applaud that, even
if in some cases they were themselves fooled by the alternating fear-mongering
and happy-talk of the experts who advocate constant foreign interventionism.
A regime change at the Department of Health and Human
Service (HHS) is necessary as well, in response to not only federal public
health authorities’ handling
of the COVID-19 pandemic but the deterioration
of American health more broadly under the watch of recent HHS leadership.
Kennedy, like Gabbard, is skeptical of the experts, but in his case the
skepticism extends beyond those areas where the established authorities have a
record of failure. Kennedy’s skepticism is healthy in some cases—even
the best authorities need to reexamine some of their assumptions in light of
the obesity epidemic, for example—but it is excessive
in others, and often comes coupled with a faith in unorthodox explanations
that is misplaced.
That said, the secretary is not the whole of HHS, and
Kennedy will not have the power to abolish vaccines by fiat or defy Trump’s
wishes on abortion policy. The president quite
clearly wants abortion regulation to be left to the states, and while many
pro-lifers find this philosophically objectionable—how can human life be any
less human because of geography?—as a practical matter, Trump’s approach
provides the most
realistic avenue for restricting abortion. Trump himself has
shown little interest in limiting the availability of abortifacient pills,
which makes Kennedy’s
own views superfluous.
Although he might not appreciate the comparison, Kennedy
himself would serve as a vaccine of sorts if confirmed to lead the HHS. Just as
a vaccine introduces a weakened virus into the body to prompt an immune
response that will prevent more serious infections by the same pathogen,
Kennedy would introduce a degree of doubt about established science that could
prompt a fresh and more persuasive defense of that science by legitimate
experts.
Kennedy gives a voice to millions of Americans who, for
both rightful and wrongful reasons, feel
great distrust toward the nation’s top health authorities. Because trust is
vital to the effectiveness of those authorities, the public’s discontent must
be heard and answered—or else it will only deepen. In 2025, when trust in
authority of almost all kinds is in decay, Kennedy is the right choice to
restore a measure of public faith in government accountability on matters
concerning health, even if it galls experts to think they must be accountable
to laymen.
***
What we now think of as the conservative movement was
born in the 20th century in a bout of populist skepticism: a
rejection of New Deal expertise in economic management and the elite liberal
foreign-policy consensus about the Soviet Union and communism. But this
conservatism faced a dilemma from the start, having arisen at a time when the
public had deep faith in the capacity of government to do good when guided by
science, both hard and soft. If conservatives rejected social-science
expertise, they risked looking like kooks to the intellectually mainstream,
newspaper-reading public. But if they embraced social science and its role in
government administration, they would come to resemble the very elites they set
out to criticize.
This dilemma played out in institutions like National
Review, where ideologues and philosophizers like Frank Meyer and Richard
Weaver often
clashed with more scientifically minded editors like James Burnham. William
F. Buckley founded National Review to serve as the flagship for a
respectable right, but respectability didn’t just mean purging
antisemites and conspiracy theorists. It also called for accepting elite
social science in place of the “pre-scientific” philosophical predilections of
many old-guard traditionalist thinkers.
The rise of neoconservatives within the conservative
movement was in part a result of this tension: They gave the American right
social-science credibility, exemplified
the by work published in The Public Interest, but that
credibility—as far as the old literary and philosophical conservatives were
concerned—also called
into question their conservative bona fides. The right, therefore,
could neither fully reject social science nor fully embrace it. Over time,
however—especially during the administrations of George H.W. Bush and George W.
Bush—those more comfortable with social-science expertise won out, both in the
government and in the conservative movement’s various institutions.
But the sweeping critique of
government-by-scientific-expert that traditionalists and libertarians had
pioneered in the middle of the 20th century proved to have been
correct all along, at least given what has transpired in the United States
since the turn of this century. Ironically, the public faith in expertise that
had roiled conservatives for so long began to collapse at the very zenith of
the right’s acceptance of social science. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns—they all
chipped away at trust in established authorities and their claims to sound
scientific knowledge. Many other developments, technological and otherwise,
accelerated the trend.
Ultimately, acceptance of this reality is perhaps the
biggest change that is necessary for the conservation of conservatism itself:
The dilemma of the last century has been resolved in favor of skepticism toward
liberal scientific expertise that had marginalized the right for so long. In
their own ways, Gabbard and RFK Jr. represent a realignment of the American
right back toward its own roots.
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