By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, June 01, 2019
I like to start my classes on conservative intellectual
history by distinguishing between three groups. There is the Republican party,
with its millions of adherents and spectrum of opinion from very conservative,
somewhat conservative, moderate, and yes, liberal. There is the conservative
movement, the constellation of single-issue nonprofits that sprung up in the
1970s — gun rights, pro-life, taxpayer, right to work — and continue to
influence elected officials. Finally, there is the conservative intellectual
movement: writers, scholars, and wonks whose journalistic and political work
deals mainly with ideas and, if we’re lucky, their translation into public
policy.
It’s a common mistake to conflate these groups. The
Republican party is a vast coalition that both predates and possibly will
post-date the conservative movement. That movement has had mixed success in
moving the party to the right, partly because of cynicism and corruption but
also because politicians must, at the end of the day, take into account the
shifting and often contradictory views of their constituents. The conservative
intellectual movement exercises the least power of all. You could fit its
members into a convention hall or, more likely, a cruise ship.
Ideas matter. But the relation of ideas to political
action is difficult to measure and often haphazard. The line between shaping a
politician’s rhetoric and decisions and merely reflecting them is awfully
fuzzy. The conservative intellectual movement, in addition to generating
excellent writing, has had seven real-world applications since its formation
after the Second World War: originalism and supply side economics in the 1970s;
welfare reform and crime policy in the 1980s and ’90s; educational choice and
reform over the last two decades; James Burnham’s anti-Communist strategies
that found expression in the Reagan Doctrine; and the counterinsurgency plan
known as the “surge” that prevented the defeat of American forces in the second
Iraq war. There have been other successes, for sure, but also plenty of
setbacks. What’s important to remember is that liberals as well as Republicans,
conservative activists, and conservative intellectuals contested every single
one of these policies.
The story goes that, for many years, American
conservatives adhered to a consensus known as “fusionism.” Economic and social
conservatives put aside their differences. Freedom, they decided, was necessary
for the exercise of virtue. The struggle against and ultimate defeat of the
Soviet Union was more important than domestic politics or intramural
disagreements. Conservative intellectuals eager to privilege either freedom or
virtue like to attack this consensus, which they often describe as “zombie
Reaganism.” The truth is that the strength of fusionism always has been
exaggerated. The conservative intellectual movement has been and continues to
be fractious, contentious, combustible, and less of a force than most assume.
Episodes of division and strife are far more common than
moments of unity and peace. The more you study the history of American
conservatism, the less willing you are to describe it in monolithic terms.
There isn’t one American right, there are multitudes, every one of them
competing for the attention of politicians and policymakers. The most prominent
and politically salient varieties, as expressed in William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, Irving Kristol’s Public Interest, Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary, and William Kristol’s Weekly Standard, have weakened or
disappeared altogether. One of the reasons the intra-conservative argument has
become so personal and acrimonious is that nothing has replaced them.
Indeed, the situation today is awfully similar to that
which confronted conservatives in the 1970s. Then, the Buckley consensus had to
find a modus vivendi with neoconservatives as well as with the Catholic
integralists around Triumph magazine,
against the background of a populist revolt that called out failing elites
while relying on racial and ethnic appeals that sometimes crossed the border of
decency.
The campaign and election of Donald Trump complicated
this already cloudy picture. The debate over Trump’s character and fitness for
office opened, or poured salt on, wounds that have not and will not heal.
Moreover, the varying opinions of Donald Trump the person became hard to
disentangle from divergent assessments of his program. Fights over his rhetoric
and behavior morphed into struggles over his economic and foreign policies,
then changed back again. It became all too easy to score points by associating
one’s opponents with either Trump’s most radical supporters or his most
vociferous detractors.
Trump’s victory seemed to favor one side over the other.
But such vindication may turn out to be just as much a mirage as the “zombie
Reaganism” straw man. It does Trump supporters no favors to ignore the facts:
The president did not win a majority, captured a smaller percentage of the
popular vote than Mitt Romney, and took the Electoral College thanks to 77,000
votes spread over three states. It is also the case that to date, President
Trump has been most successful when he has adhered to the traditional
Republican program of tax cuts, defense spending, and judicial appointments.
The rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, and nation-state
populism throughout the world certainly suggest that something has changed in
global politics. American conservatism ought to investigate, recognize, and
assimilate the empirical reality before it. The trouble is that no one has
concluded definitively what that reality is.
Not for lack of trying. Beginning in 2016, intellectuals
who favored Trump have been searching for a new touchstone for conservative
thought and politics. These writers are often described as populists, but that
label is hard to define. Broadly speaking, they have adopted the banner of
nationalism. They believe the nation-state is the core unit of geopolitics and
that national sovereignty and independence are more important than global flows
of capital, labor, and commodities. They are all, in different ways, reacting
to perceived failures, whether of Buckley conservatism, George W. Bush’s
presidency, or the inability of the conservative movement to stop same-sex
marriage and the growth of the administrative state. And they have turned away
from libertarian arguments and economistic thinking. Not everything, these
thinkers believe, can be reduced to gross domestic product.
This emphasis on the nation as not only an economic but a
political entity is apparent in the title of the “National Conservatism”
conference to be held by the Edmund Burke Foundation next month in Washington,
D.C. It is best articulated in Christopher DeMuth’s essay in the Winter 2019 Claremont Review of Books, “Trumpism,
Nationalism, and Conservatism.” The Claremont Institute and its affiliated publications,
including the new website The American Mind, have taken the lead in attempting
to develop a pro-Trump conservatism in line with the principles of the American
Founding.
Like populism, however, nationalism is a capacious idea
that encompasses many subsets of opinion. Claremont may be the main site of
nationalist conservatism, but it is not alone. Within the nationalist camp,
broadly defined, are four schools of thought. Each is associated with a young
Republican senator. The lines between these persuasions blur — some of the
senators I name could fit into different categories, and others might not
accept the labels I am about to bestow on them — but the conservative terrain
has become so difficult to navigate that it’s useful to have a map. Let me take
you through this new territory.
The Jacksonians
Some conservatives — myself included — see Donald Trump
through the lens of Jacksonian politics. They look to Walter Russell Mead’s
landmark essay in the Winter 1999 / 2000 National
Interest, “The Jacksonian Tradition in American Foreign Policy,” as not
only a description of the swing vote that brought us Trump, but also as a
possible guide to incorporating populism and conservatism.
The Jacksonians, Mead said, are individualist, suspicious
of federal power, distrustful of foreign entanglement, opposed to taxation but
supportive of government spending on the middle class, devoted to the Second
Amendment, desire recognition, valorize military service, and believe in the
hero who shapes his own destiny. Jacksonians are anti-monopolistic. They oppose
special privileges and offices. “There are no necessary evils in government,”
Jackson wrote in his veto message in 1832. “Its evils exist only in its
abuses.”
This is a deep strain in American culture and politics.
Jacksonians are neither partisans nor ideologues. The sentiments they express
are older than postwar conservatism and in some ways more intrinsically
American. (They do not look toward Burke or Hayek or Strauss, for example.) The
Jacksonians have been behind populist rebellions since the Founding. They are
part of a tradition, for good and ill, that runs through William Jennings
Bryan, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan,
Ross Perot, Jim Webb, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and Donald Trump. The
Jacksonians believe in what their forebears called “The Democracy.” They are
the people who remind us that America is not ruled from above but driven from
below. Irving Kristol captured some of Jacksonianism’s contradictions when he
described the movement as “an upsurge of revolt against the moneyed interests,
an upsurge led by real estate speculators, investors, and mercantile
adventurers, which spoke as the voice of the People while never getting much
more than half the vote, and which gave a sharp momentum to the development of
capitalism, urbanism, and industrialism while celebrating the glories of the
backwoodsman.”
The Jacksonians have extended their conception of the
in-group to include Americans of every ethnicity and race. The somewhat
slippery distinction they make is between American and foreigner. I say
slippery because sometimes it is hard to tell when Jacksonians decide to accept
a legal immigrant as fully American. Jacksonians emphasize borders. They are
happy to see the government direct benefits to the middle class. They don’t
want to reform entitlements. They are willing to accept short-term sacrifice if
it ends up benefiting the people. They are skeptical of preemptive war, but if
a conflict arises, they want to finish the job quickly and ferociously. “The
very faults of the persuasion as a guide to prudent statesmanship,” wrote
historian Marvin Meyers, “may have been its strength as a call to justice. For
a society inevitably committed to maximizing economic gains, this persuasion in
its various forms has been the great effective force provoking men to ask what
their nation ought to be.”
The Jacksonian in the Senate is Tom Cotton. He’s taken
the lead on conservative immigration reform. A supporter of the president, he
is also a national security hawk. He was perfectly Jacksonian when he said a
conflict with Iran, should it erupt, would be swiftly concluded due to
overwhelming American force. A native of rural Arkansas and an Army veteran,
his new book Sacred Duty describes
the Jacksonian code of honor and sacrifice. If you want to know where this key
swing vote in American politics is headed, watch Cotton.
The Reformocons
Reform conservatism began toward the end of George W.
Bush’s presidency, with the publication of Yuval Levin’s “Putting Parents
First” in The Weekly Standard in 2006
and of Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s Grand
New Party in 2008. In 2009, Levin founded National Affairs, a quarterly devoted to serious examinations of
public policy and political philosophy. Its aim is to nudge the Republican
party to adapt to changing social and economic conditions.
In 2014, working with the YG Network and with National Review senior editor Ramesh
Ponnuru, Levin edited “Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited
Government and a Thriving Middle Class.” The report was the occasion for a lot
of publicity, including a Sam Tanenhaus article in the New York Times Magazine asking, “Can the GOP Be a Party of Ideas?”
Trump both hindered and aided reform conservatism. He
dealt it a setback not only because reform conservatives opposed him in the
primary (and many in the general) and he knows how to keep a grudge. He also
defeated the reform conservatives’ most promising champion, Marco Rubio. And he
did it in part by emphasizing two issues, trade and immigration, that were
missing from “Room to Grow.”
But that is not the end of the story. Trump also
obliquely aided reform by smashing the status quo and proving the Douthat and
Salam thesis that support from whites without college degrees is essential to
Republican victory. After the election, Rubio kept advocating for democracy and
human rights, but jettisoned supply side orthodoxy. He fought successfully to
expand the child tax credit in the 2017 tax bill. He proposed a paid parental
leave policy and criticized stock buybacks. In 2018 he delivered a speech
arguing for a “new nationalism” based on “an economy built on the dignity of
work,” the family as “the most central institution in society,” “working
together in community,” and “the belief that every human being is endowed by
God with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Rubio has cited Oren Cass’s The Once and Future Worker (2018). It’s worth noting that Cass is a
senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where Salam recently became
president. Meanwhile, Levin’s follow-up to his Fractured Republic (2016) is a call for rebuilding institutions
crucial to the formation of character. Reform conservatism, in other words, is
far from being a spent force.
The Paleos
Where the paleoconservatives distinguish themselves from
the other camps is foreign policy. The paleos are noninterventionists who, all
things being equal, would prefer that America radically reduce her overseas
commitments. Though it’s probably not how he’d describe himself, the foremost
paleo is Tucker Carlson, who offers a mix of traditional social values,
suspicion of globalization, and noninterventionism every weekday on cable
television.
Carlson touched off an important debate with his January
3 opening monologue on markets. “Culture and economics are inseparably
intertwined,” Carlson said. “Certain economic systems allow families to thrive.
Thriving families make market economies possible. You can’t separate the two.”
Carlson’s indictment of America’s “ruling class” and “the
ugliest parts of our financial system” was remarkable for several reasons.
First, he delivered it on a network whose opinion programs normally laud American
capitalism and free enterprise. Second, the speech was wide-ranging,
criticizing everyone from Mitt Romney to Sheryl Sandberg to parents who let
their kids smoke weed. Third, Carlson offered a theory of the case. Social
decline, he said, is related to the loss of manufacturing jobs. It happened in
the inner cities. Now it’s happening in the Rust Belt and in rural America.
When jobs disappear and low-skilled male wages decline, family formation breaks
down.
While Carlson noted in passing that wage income is taxed
at a higher rate than investment income, he did not make any specific
proposals. “I’m not a policy guy, I’m a talk show host, but I sincerely believe
that no problem is solved unless you have a clear image in your mind of what
you want the result to be,” he told Michael Brendan Dougherty at the National
Review Institute conference in March. Earlier this month, he welcomed John
Burtka, the chairman of the paleo journal The
American Conservative (TAC), on to his program. Burtka argued for treating
the social media giants as monopolies. Carlson loved it.
In a separate piece for TAC, Burtka offered a defense of
“economic nationalism.” He advocated a national industrial strategy, without
providing many details, though presumably incorporating some mixture of tariffs
and government-directed investment. This reluctance toward nuts-and-bolts
legislative proposals is widespread. “We still need to figure out a lot of the
details for how this vision of conservative politics, a pro-family, pro-worker,
pro-American nation, conservatism actually looks in practice,” J. D. Vance told
a recent TAC gala. We’re waiting!
Paleos have brought renewed attention to the condition of
American communities. Tim Carney of the American
Enterprise Institute and Washington
Examiner devotes his new book, Alienated
America, to the frayed bonds that barely connect working-class Americans to
each other. Like Carlson, Mike Lee might not accept the paleo label, but he
best represents this mixture of traditionalism, communitarianism, and
nonintervention in the U.S. Senate. His social capital project is a major
effort to assess the strengths and vulnerabilities of American society. He’s
worked with Rubio on parental leave, though it should be said that unlike
paleos he opposes Trump’s trade policies. Paleos might not have exact answers
when it comes to domestic policy, but they are certain American foreign policy
should be restrained, within constitutional bounds, and prioritize diplomacy
over military force.
The Post-liberals
Here is a group that I did not see coming. The Trump era
has coincided with the formation of a coterie of writers who say that liberal
modernity has become (or perhaps always was) inimical to human flourishing. One
way to tell if you are reading a post-liberal is to see what they say about
John Locke. If Locke is treated as an important and positive influence on the
American founding, then you are dealing with just another American
conservative. If Locke is identified as the font of the trans movement and
same-sex marriage, then you may have encountered a post-liberal.
The post-liberals say that freedom has become a destructive
end-in-itself. Economic freedom has brought about a global system of trade and
finance that has outsourced jobs, shifted resources to the metropolitan coasts,
and obscured its self-seeking under the veneer of social justice. Personal
freedom has ended up in the mainstreaming of pornography, alcohol, drug, and
gambling addiction, abortion, single-parent families, and the repression of
orthodox religious practice and conscience. “When an ideological liberalism
seeks to dictate our foreign policy and dominate our religious and charitable
institutions, tyranny is the result, at home and abroad,” wrote the signatories
to “Against the Dead Consensus,” a post-liberal manifesto of sorts published in
First Things in March.
“The ambition of neoliberalism,” wrote the editor of First Things in the spring of 2017, “is
to weaken and eventually dissolve the strong elements of traditional society
that impede the free flow of commerce (the focus of nineteenth-century
liberalism), as well as identity and desire (the focus of postmodern
liberalism). This may work well for the global elite, but ordinary people
increasingly doubt it works for them.” The result, he said, has been populist
calls for the “strong gods” of familial, national, and religious authority.
The post-liberals are mainly but not exclusively
traditionalist Catholics. Their most prominent spokesman is Patrick J. Deneen,
whose Why Liberalism Failed (2018)
was recommended by that ultimate progressive, Barack Obama. Israeli philosopher
Yoram Hazony’s Virtue of Nationalism
(2018) is another important entry in the post-liberal canon. Hazony has
contributed essays to both First Things
(“Conservative Democracy”) and American
Affairs (“What Is Conservatism?”) making the case for conservatism without
Locke, Jefferson, and Paine.
The post-liberals have put forward two contradictory
political strategies. The first, advanced by Rod Dreher, who is Eastern
Orthodox, is the Benedict Option of turning away from the secular world and
shielding, as best you can, spiritual life. The second, as put by Sohrab Ahmari
also in First Things, is “to use
these values [of civility and decency] to enforce our order and our orthodoxy,
not pretend that they could ever be neutral.”
Another post-liberal, Gladden Pappin of American Affairs, says,
Rather than asking the question,
‘What should conservatives/progressives do?’ considerable advances can be made
through certain purely practical considerations: ‘How can the integrity of the
national political community be assured?’ ‘How can commercial activity and
technological development continue to be turned toward the common good, and
toward our own strategic advantage?’ ‘What can we do with the reins of power,
that is, the state, to ensure the common good of our citizens?’
The closest the post-liberals have to a spokesman in the
Senate is freshman Josh Hawley, who attends an evangelical Presbyterian church.
Not six months into his term, Hawley has already established himself as a
social conservative unafraid of government power. He has picked fights with the
conservative legal establishment by criticizing two of President Trump’s
judicial appointments. He has identified Silicon Valley as a threat to
traditional values and proposed legislation to begin to rein in the tech
industry. And in a little noticed commencement address to King’s College, he
inveighed against the fact that
For decades now our politics and
culture have been dominated by a particular philosophy of freedom. It is a
philosophy of liberation from family and tradition; of escape from God and
community; a philosophy of self-creation and unrestricted, unfettered free
choice.
This “Pelagian vision” — Pelagius was a monk condemned by
the Church fathers as a heretic – “celebrates the individual,” Hawley went on.
But “it leads to hierarchy. Though it preaches merit, it produces elitism.
Though it proclaims liberty, it destroys the life that makes liberty possible.
Replacing it and repairing the profound harm it has caused is one of the great
challenges of our day.”
The post-liberals say that the distinction between state
and society is illusory. They argue that, even as conservatives defended the
independence of civil society from state power, the left took over Hollywood,
the academy, the media, and the courts. What the post-liberals seem to call for
is the use of government to recapture society from the left. How precisely they
intend to accomplish this has been left undefined. (Though the levy on large
university endowments included in the 2017 tax bill is a start.)
Another question is whether the post-liberal project is
sustainable in the first place. The post-liberals, like other nationalists, may
have over-interpreted the results of the 2016 election. Trump is many things,
but it is safe to say that he is not an integralist. Prominent online and in my
Twitter feed, the post-liberals might also misjudge their overall numbers.
Before they recapture the state, much less re-moralize a nation of 300 million
and hundreds of sects and denominations, they must first convince their
co-religionists.
Appeals to the common good are rhetorically powerful, but
they often run up against the shoals of America’s constitutional structure and
overwhelming emphasis on individual rights. That is one potential reason the
post-liberals seem more interested in European philosophy and politics. It also
could be why many of them are eager to abandon the term “conservatism.”
Which might be for the best. Fusionism’s critics say that
it was historically contingent on the unique situation of the Cold War. But if
you read the best expression of “fusionist” conservatism, the Sharon Statement
of 1960, you see that its ideas of freedom and constitutionalism are deeply
embedded in American intellectual traditions. “There is only one American
political tradition,” wrote Irving Kristol, “and every political movement must
obtain its sanction, invoking the same memories, the same names, the same
archetypal images, even the very same quotations.” A conservatism that does not
incorporate the ideas of freedom and civil and religious liberty that imprinted
America at its birth not only would be unrecognizable to William F. Buckley,
Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan, Americans themselves would find it alien
and unappealing. And rightly so.
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