By Andy Smarick
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.
Conservatives have a special duty to protect iconoclasts.
At first blush, this idea doesn’t quite square.
Conservatism, properly understood, seeks to protect order and tradition. Why
should it defend those who challenge the status quo?
There’s a simple answer: Because iconoclasts sometimes
raise the right questions. Conservatives, at any given moment, could be
preserving a bad idea, an unfair practice, or an outdated system. By making
room for those willing to dissent, conservatives are actually guarding against
decadence and a misguided sense of certainty. Ideas now considered invaluable
were once thought heretical, after all: Isaac Newton’s and then Albert
Einstein’s theories on gravity, Adam Smith’s understanding of markets, Frederick
Douglass’ and Susan B. Anthony’s approaches to equality, Luis Alvarez’s
research on the extinction of dinosaurs.
At the same time, however, we must never forget that
iconoclasts are often dead wrong. Their ideas can be loopy, even dangerous.
They’d have us believe in deranged conspiracy theories, in ancient aliens, that
the position of planets and stars dictate human events. If some of these
iconoclasts gained power, they could undermine generations of hard-earned
wisdom and wreak havoc in essential institutions—the very things conservatives
fight to prevent. America’s right must be confident enough in their own beliefs
to listen to iconoclasts’ objections while staying principled enough to
generally keep them away from positions of authority.
Perhaps Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s
nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has some
worthwhile thoughts about food production. Perhaps Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick
to serve as director of national intelligence, raises a decent point about the
importance of civil liberties in an era of heightened surveillance. But, as
with so many other iconoclasts, their occasional defensible ideas are wrapped
up with a host of wrongheaded
beliefs
and troubling
behaviors.
Yes, hear them out. Sure, consider them intellectual provocateurs. But don’t
let them within a country mile of federal executive power.
Many conservatives in the Trump era have adopted an
anti-institutional posture that’s typically been reserved for progressives and
radicals, and understandably so, as many of our most important institutions
have failed in recent years to carry out their core missions. The pandemic, for
example, revealed the poor
judgment
and politicization
of too many public-health professionals. Too many elite universities have been
hostile to viewpoint
diversity
and free speech. Too many journalists
substituted
their political
preferences
for dispassionate
reporting.
Some leading banks helped precipitate
the Great Recession, and Congress seems incapable
of seriously
engaging
with the most important issues plaguing the nation. Prosecutors
in a number of our largest cities have grown indifferent
to basic matters of law enforcement.
In such cases, the typical conservative approach of
preservation and prudence—the approach perhaps best embodied by G.K. Chesterton’s fence
allegory—would seem wholly inadequate. In those areas and plenty of others,
we need major change—not more of the same. But the error some on the right are
making in this moment is forgoing strong, stubborn, sober reform and instead
finding common cause with people whose impulse is to swiftly and dramatically
upend or tear down. Kennedy, Gabbard, and Elon Musk among others are
conservative in neither political philosophy nor disposition. They seem to be
animated primarily by their animus toward institutions.
But that’s not how conservatives choose allies; that’s
typically how we choose opponents. Edmund Burke, arguably the founder of
modern conservatism, is best known for his criticism of the French
revolutionaries who wanted to overturn longstanding governing bodies and
religious and social arrangements. More recent conservatives have seen themselves
as fundamentally at odds with critical race and critical legal theorists and
Marxists, all of whom argue that our key institutions are built on and
perpetuate injustice and therefore need to be undone. Strong conservatives
don’t team up with such institution-levelers in order to win a current scuffle;
we oppose them because they threaten lasting societal damage.
This anti-institutional fervor on the right has fostered
a strange type of argument in favor of Kennedy, Gabbard, and Kash Patel—as well
as figures like Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, Linda McMahon, and Mehmet Oz. “Sure,
they might not be traditionally ‘qualified’ for these jobs,” the thinking goes,
“but previous ‘qualified’ people in those roles were terrible. At least these people
will
shake
things
up.”
Of course we should be frustrated if someone purportedly
qualified for a job fails at it. But if you have a bad experience with a
doctor, you don’t seek a second opinion from someone unfamiliar with human
anatomy just because he or she will “shake things up.” You find a better
doctor. If your daughter’s teacher isn’t very good, you don’t “shake things up”
and ask for a replacement who’s ignorant about phonics and child development.
You find a better teacher. We should respect our institutions and the work of
governing enough to recognize that disruptive novices are not the answer. There
are plenty of tough-minded, highly experienced Republicans and
conservatives—former governors, U.S. attorneys, state attorneys general,
veterans of previous GOP administrations—who could responsibly implement
meaningful reforms.
There’s one more reason for conservatives to avoid
embracing figures like Kennedy and Gabbard, and it has less to do with their
deficiencies than our understanding of and respect for key governing
institutions.
Over the last generation, we seem to have lost the
distinction between those who talk about politics for a living and those who
actually take responsibility in positions of authority. Commentators and
pundits think they are ready to govern, people in governing positions act like
commentators and pundits, and the public ends up believing the two groups are
interchangeable. That Kennedy, Gabbard, Hegseth, Oz, and so many other Trump
nominees have been gadflies and television personalities is not a coincidence:
This is the consequence of blurring the line between the two lines of work.
But experience in criticizing, speculating, and agitating
is not sufficient preparation for devising and implementing the myriad reforms
our institutions require. No, we need leaders deeply knowledgeable about policy
content and process and who possess the hands-on experience and disposition
needed to lead at the highest levels. Conservatives should be the first to
protect the integrity of our governing institutions in this way and the last to
allow those institutions to be turned into platforms for those pushing
insensible ideas, whether related to
vaccines or the traitorous
Edward Snowden.
I want to be very clear here about what I am arguing—and
what I’m not. Individuals have every right to take unusual, even wrongheaded,
positions. But that does not mean that the most powerful seats in the American
government should be held by those with poor judgment. We should appreciate
that there is a fundamental difference between what a citizen can do
and what a high-ranking public official should do.
Four years ago, as debates were raging over truth,
disinformation, exaggeration, conspiracies, and the infamous seriously-not-literally
divide, I defended (in a long
essay for National Affairs) the use of a wide array of rhetorical
devices, arguing that truth and meaning can be conveyed in a number of ways
that may not pass the test of “literal accuracy.” My first point was that the
public’s understanding of an issue can be aided by caricatures, fables,
hyperbole, myths, parables, parodies, satire, and tall tales, even if each of
these have some degree of untruth. But my second, larger point was that, while
citizens and private groups might use these devices, public institutions and
their leaders should not. We need the most authoritative institutions to be
absolutely reliable, straightforward, judicious, and respectable. Americans
must be able to trust such entities because so much rides on their statements
and actions. Americans will only give these institutions the massive power they
need to succeed if Americans believe those institutions are worthy of that
power.
This is the same way we should understand the difference
between the wild-eyed views of private citizens and prospective leaders. A
citizen has every right to hold avant-garde positions far outside of the
consensus of medical professionals. But we should not put such a person atop
the nation’s largest public-health agency. A citizen has the right to be
transgressive and express
sympathy for some of our nation’s enemies. But we should not put such a
person at the head of our intelligence community. A citizen has the right to
bombastically include in a book a list of supposed agents of the deep
state and imply criminal
or civil action against opponents. But we should not put that person in
charge of the FBI.
Even if conservatives are frustrated with an important
institution, we must recognize that those institutions should never be led by
those whose primary qualifications are eccentricity and provocation. You don’t
strengthen an institution by elevating people who will bring chaos and
subversion to the body; that is a recipe for the institution’s downfall.
Conservatives must not lose the distinction between an external agitator and an
internal leader.
There is always a role for inexperienced, intemperate
iconoclasts in society. There’s even a small role for them in conservatism. We
should be aware of their arguments and the evidence they marshal. But because
they typically have too little respect for and too little familiarity with key
institutions and because those institutions are so important to this nation, we
should keep them out of the most important positions of public authority.
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