What ‘Freedom Conservatism’ Is Missing

By Natan Ehrenreich

Sunday, March 16, 2025

 

Last year, in the Claremont Review of Books, the great Charles Kesler published an astute observation on the ways in which the “national conservative” movement departs from the political legacy of the “American conservative” movement initiated in large part by the founders of National Review. As conservatives, we ought not to brush away those instances in which we take a different path from that of our predecessors. Yet it is not only the NatCons — or the “New Right” more broadly — who diverge from movement conservatism. This became obvious when I attended February’s inaugural “freedom conservatism” conference, which Jack Butler has also written about. Amid the FreeCons’ haste to criticize their ideological opponents, they overlook their own departure from the Buckleyite conservatism they purport to represent.

 

When the FreeCons published their statement of principles in the summer of 2023, I critiqued it (alongside many others) for its lack of an explicit reference to God. Without such a theological grounding, I argued, the FreeCons could not rightfully claim themselves as philosophical heirs of Bill Buckley’s conservatism. Several FreeCons responded by noting that their statement, while not explicit in having a religious outlook, is at least highly compatible with one. Regardless, it is difficult to make conclusive arguments based on an inherently vague statement of principles.

 

The first freedom conservatism conference, then, was an opportunity for the movement to demonstrate convincingly that it was animated by the principles of the American Founding and American conservative movement upon which it explicitly models itself. It did not do so, in my estimation. Unfortunately, the FreeCons’ lack of theological grounding appears to have devolved into a broader apathy toward the social conservatism and moral traditionalism that historians identify as a key foundation of movement conservatism’s “three-legged stool.”

 

Consider the defining social conservative movement of the last half century: the pro-life cause. Surely, in the aftermath of Dobbs, the self-proclaimed inheritors of Ronald Reagan and Bill Buckley ought not to be publicly silent regarding the very lives that movement conservatism spent 50 years working to protect. Yet I do not recall a single mention of abortion or the pro-life cause during the daylong conference. Other highly relevant social issues — such as transgender competition in female sports — were mentioned only sparingly.

 

Unfortunately, too many freedom conservatives have quietly sawed off one of the legs of American conservatism’s famous stool. They might not claim this aloud, but there is no alternative conclusion to draw when social issues are ignored to such an extent.

 

I suspect that this apathy toward social conservatism stems from the FreeCons’ theological agnosticism. During the session regarding what lessons the FreeCons might learn from their ideological predecessors (the session description explicitly mentioned Buckley), George Will argued that the primary role of politics is to “keep the peace,” and this means that politics ought not to address “the big questions.”

 

But there is no escaping the fact that the Declaration of Independence and, in turn, the founders of the American conservative movement, did boldly assert a “self-evident” metaphysical truth: that all men are endowed with natural rights by God. It is understandable if one is unsure about such a proposition. But it also means that FreeCons are departing, in a significant way, from the American conservative tradition of William F. Buckley Jr. And it’s not a surprise when such an ambivalence about God-given natural rights leads to an ambivalence about conservatism’s duty to protect unborn babies’ exercise of that most basic God-given right: life.

 

The metaphysical uncertainty of prominent FreeCons was manifest throughout the conference. Sitting across from Will, Jonah Goldberg described the modern push from some segments of the right to ban pornography as “autocratic.” I suppose reasonable people might disagree about the fairness of such a description. Bill Buckley’s American conservatism, however, certainly would not have stood for it. In a 1976 episode of Firing Line, in which he debated Alan Dershowitz about the dissemination of pornographic movies, Buckley was adamant that banning porn fit squarely within his interpretation of the American political tradition. He even compared the effects of widely available pornography to “genocidal” tendencies in their destructiveness:

 

And if indeed no freedom is possible, as was predicted by the Federalist Papers, except in a virtuous citizenry, it becomes a legitimate political concern of society to discourage such sentiments whether they are genocidal or whether they are reductionist in respect to the human body.

 

The next year, in a debate between Buckley and Dershowitz on the same topic, Buckley reasserted his position: “Communities since the beginning of civilization have exercised control over their form of entertainment . . . this century was the most licentious in history.” He proclaimed that “a society can end up hating its institutions if they fail to protect its citizens’ sensibilities.”

 

Buckley’s conservatism, then, certainly was not merely what February’s gathering calls “freedom conservatism.” As Buckley notably explained in God and Man at Yale, his own argument for economic freedom was entirely dependent on religious metaphysics:

 

I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.

 

To be clear, I am not denying that freedom is vital to the American conservative tradition. Nor do I think that the principles of every prominent FreeCon are necessarily antithetical to that tradition.

 

My argument is twofold and simple: First, freedom conservatism does not prioritize the metaphysics, rhetoric, or policy aims of social conservatism to the same extent as Buckley and his American conservative movement. Second, that difference is significant enough that the FreeCons ought to stop referring to themselves as Buckley’s ideological heirs. The FreeCons are more accurately described as descendants of a movement associated with — but not identical to — American conservatism: libertarianism. For the sake of intellectual honesty, they should start referring to themselves as such. And faithful Buckleyites should look elsewhere for a more complete accounting of our movement’s principles.