By Avik Roy
Thursday, January 21, 2021
Thirty-one years ago, a mass gathering in front of an important government structure signified the high-water mark of the American conservative movement.
It was November 9, 1989. Harald Jäger, an East German
border officer, had watched a confused member of the Politburo announce that
the border between West and East Germany was now open. East Berliners, hearing
the same news, gathered at the Berlin Wall, demanding permission to go over to
the western side. Jäger, unsure of what his superiors wanted him to do, agreed
to open the gates. His decision liberated 125 million Eastern Europeans in one
peaceful stroke.
The triumph of the West over the Soviet Union could not
have happened without the post–World War II conservative movement built by
William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan. The vindication of their principles
was so total that a State Department official, Francis Fukuyama, described it
in The National Interest as “the end
of history as such: . . . Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government.” Bill Clinton dedicated much of his presidency to consolidating the
Reagan Revolution, enacting welfare reform, presiding over federal surpluses,
and proclaiming in his 1996 State of the Union address that “the era of big
government is over.
But today, as we reflect on the record of the
conservative movement after the end of the Cold War, the triumphalism of 1989
seems mystifying.
Today, it’s the era of small government that’s over. In
2020, for the first time since World War II, the size of the federal debt
exceeded the United States’ annual economic output. Indeed, recent Republican
presidents have overseen greater increases in the national debt than have their
Democratic counterparts. You have to squint really hard to find the political constituency
— in either party — for limited government.
Moreover, conservatives have failed to persuade the
broader public to return to pre-1960s social mores. While Trump overwhelmingly
won the votes of white born-again or Evangelical Christians, 76 percent to 24,
he lost the votes of everyone else by a margin of 62 to 36. That second group —
the non-Evangelicals — represented 72 percent of the electorate in 2020 and
will claim an even larger share in future elections. Thanks to the confirmation
of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, pro-lifers may finally get their
chance to overturn Roe v. Wade. But
what other possible victories for social conservatism lie on the horizon?
While everyone focuses on the events of the last three
weeks, it’s the last three decades that demand our attention. For if
conservatives can’t shrink the size of government, and if conservatives can’t
convince young people to live like their grandparents, what is it that
conservatives exist to do, other than shake their fists at their televisions?
What realistic policy goals should conservatives strive
to achieve in the 21st century? Can timeless conservative principles adapt to
the way rising generations actually live their lives today, and will live their
lives in the future? If so, how? Over the last four years, these deeper
questions about the conservative mission have gone unanswered.
The end of the Trump presidency is an ideal time to take stock: to refresh our thinking about American self-government, and to expand the coalition that yearns for it.
***
In 1950, Lionel Trilling famously described conservatism
as a set of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling
was wrong back then. But doesn’t the Capitol mob prove him right today? For
years, cable news and social media have fed us a steady diet of PC outrages,
while fewer and fewer conservatives take on the unglamorous work of developing
policy ideas that can attract broad public support.
If you think I’m being uncharitable, ask yourself this.
Over the last 25 years, outside of tax cuts, what transformative pieces of
pro-liberty legislation has Congress passed and the president signed into law?
Bills as impactful as, say, Obamacare or Dodd-Frank?
Do you know which reforms conservative politicians will
try to enact if they have a chance to run the government in 2025? Your guess is
as good as mine. And even if conservatives do get together and develop a policy
agenda that you feel you could rally behind, could it gain enough public
support to actually become law? To overcome a filibuster? How much would you
bet on that outcome?
Most important, would that policy agenda make Americans
better off? Ronald Reagan succeeded because his policies improved the
livelihoods of people in every state. After 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis,
the opioid epidemic, and COVID-19, more and more people are losing confidence
in the fairness of our economic system. As Charles Murray documented in Coming Apart, people without a college
degree have experienced declines in their relative economic standing and social
capital. Tens of millions are one missed paycheck away from insolvency. Tens of
millions more lack supportive communities of neighbors, families, and friends.
Modern American conservatism is at a dead end because
both its intellectual and its political coalitions have unraveled.
In the 20th century, conservatives liked to talk about
the “three-legged stool” of libertarians, social conservatives, and
anti-communists. But the dissolution of the USSR knocked out the most important
leg of the stool, the one that persuaded everyone else to subsume their
differences to fight the Soviet threat. As George Nash observed in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in
America Since 1945, attempts at “theoretical harmony” between libertarians
and social conservatives after World War II were “immensely assisted by the
cement of anti-Communism. . . . Nearly all conservatives were bound together by
consciousness of a common mortal enemy. The threat of an external foe . . . was
an invaluable source of cohesion.” After Harald Jäger unlocked those East
Berlin gates in 1989, that cohesion began to weaken.
The most dramatic changes in the conservative coalition
have taken place among social conservatives. It’s not just that younger voters
are more secular and diverse. Social conservatism in the 1950s was itself a
fusion of many different types of people: Evangelical Christians, Roman
Catholics, southern Democrats, WASP elites, opera fans, and middle-class
readers of The Saturday Evening Post.
Today, those would-be readers of The Saturday Evening Post — temperamental conservatives who want to
fit in with the mainstream, conventional culture of their peers — identify less
and less with the cultural Right. “Popular culture” is, after all, popular, and
as more religious conservatives withdraw from the mainstream, that trend only
accelerates. We can quantitate this shift by looking at suburban voters, who
went overwhelmingly for Reagan in the 1980s but are increasingly a source of
Democratic strength.
In 1955, when National
Review was founded, our economic elites generally shared the cultural
worldview of social conservatives. God
and Man at Yale caused an outcry precisely because most Yale alumni shared
Bill Buckley’s concerns that Yale no longer actively promoted Christianity.
Those days, of course, are long gone. Though today’s business leaders often
lead their own lives in temperamentally conservative ways, they rarely identify
with right-wing culture warriors. This is especially true in Silicon Valley and
New York City, the two great citadels of entrepreneurial capitalism.
The economic side of the conservative coalition has its
share of problems, too. Lyndon Johnson used his landslide victory over Barry
Goldwater to enact a massive and politically durable expansion of the welfare
state, most notably Medicaid and Medicare. But because so many on the
anti-government right insist that there is no legitimate federal role in
helping the poor, conservatives have lacked a principled language that can
attract public support for a more liberty-oriented approach to government aid.
Furthermore, as Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute has
found, today’s Republican coalition is not uniformly conservative in the
ideological, 20th-century sense of the word. Ekins identifies five core
clusters of Trump voters, of which three — American preservationists (20
percent of Trump voters), anti-elites (19 percent), and the disengaged (5
percent) — lean left on economics, according to her polling. Two clusters —
staunch conservatives (31 percent) and American preservationists — emphasize
restricting immigration over most other issues. Only free-marketeers (25
percent) and staunch conservatives prioritize reducing the size of government.
What is the policy agenda that binds these disparate groups?
***
We can do our best to unite these factions — and build a larger,
more welcoming, and more coherent political coalition — by drawing from leading
19th- and 20th-century classical liberals such as John Stuart Mill, Frederick
Douglass, and Friedrich Hayek. These thinkers were not libertarian purists, and
their departures from purism are precisely the ones we need today.
Nineteenth-century liberals differed from their 17th- and
18th-century predecessors by prioritizing equal opportunity alongside limited
government. For example, hard-core libertarians oppose public education because
it requires taxation and involves government institutions. John Stuart Mill, on
the other hand, saw public education as the path to social mobility for the
working class. “Defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one
else to pay for them” was a proper role for government, according to Mill.
Frederick Douglass, of course, took the 18th-century
liberal principles and applied them to racial equality, an area where the
Founding Fathers had their inconsistencies. Friedrich Hayek, the free-market
avatar, understood that government had a legitimate role in regulating
monopolies. He even proposed a market-based form of universal health insurance,
to protect against the “hazards of life.”
We can apply 19th-century classical liberalism to
21st-century America through three core principles: equal opportunity, personal
freedom, and patriotism.
Conservatives often say, “We support equal opportunity,
not equal outcomes.” And yet when the rubber hits the road, the conservative
equal-opportunity agenda is thin. Imagine, instead, a conservative movement in
which every promising policy idea is filtered through the lens of its impact on
lower- and middle-income Americans, whom we might call “kitchen-table voters.”
We’d embrace Hayek-style universal health insurance and show how private-sector
competition and cost-reducing innovations can eliminate bankruptcies due to
medical bills. We’d join with progressives to reform “not-in-my-backyard”
zoning laws that restrict the supply of housing in costly coastal cities. And
we’d think hard about how to protect public safety while also holding bad
police officers accountable when they hide behind union contracts to avoid
responsibility for negligent or excessive force.
Personal freedom, in the context of the 21st century,
requires us to be implacable in the face of cancel culture, so that Americans
can speak according to their beliefs and worship according to their traditions.
Personal freedom also means standing up for free enterprise, the idea that has
lifted more people out of poverty than any other. It has become fashionable in
nationalist circles to point to some bad economic statistic — say, the high
cost of college — and blame it on “market fundamentalism.” The opposite is
true: Government regulations and cronyism conspire to keep prices high, and
enrich well-connected institutions, at the expense of ordinary consumers.
Conservatives have — and always should — love their
country. But there are important differences between patriotism and Steve Bannon–style
nationalism. In Michael Anton’s “Flight 93 Election” prose, America is under
siege by “Third World foreigners” immigrating to the U.S. with “no tradition
of, taste for, or experience in liberty.” Tell that to Cuban emigrés, without
whom Republicans in Florida would be an endangered species. Ronald Reagan was a
strong believer in legal immigration. He was fond of calling immigrants
“Americans by choice” and understood how fervently patriotic immigrants can be:
They know what it’s like to live somewhere that lacks America’s virtues.
The value of this new three-legged stool is that it maximizes the size of the coalition that supports self-government. Kitchen-table voters, suburban moderates, libertarians, and pro-market Democrats all want a country in which every American, regardless of race or ethnicity, has a fair shot at success. Not all of these voters are aligned with conservatives today, but they could be in the future. Just as we have seen with school choice, investing in the success of low-income Americans of all races can attract new voters to our cause and enrich the moral purpose of our work.
***
Rebuilding the conservative coalition will not be easy.
It will take leaders — in particular, people running for president in 2024 —
who are willing to challenge powerful economic and political interests. These
leaders must recognize that every American citizen, regardless of where his
ancestors were born, is a potential recruit to the cause.
We considered above the high-water mark of 20th-century
conservatism: its defeat of Soviet communism. But we can’t conclude without
also addressing conservatism’s low point: not the riots of 2021, but rather
conservatism’s absence from the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
In the canonical account of the history of the
conservative movement, Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign is described as a
triumphal moment. “Barry Goldwater lost 44 states, but won the future,” says
George Will, because Goldwater inspired the Reagan Revolution.
But Goldwater didn’t win the future. He lost it, by
opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and severing the historic relationship
between African Americans and the Republican Party. Whereas Eisenhower had won
39 percent of the black vote in 1956, and Nixon 32 percent in 1960, Goldwater
garnered only 6 percent in 1964. As a direct consequence, Goldwater won only
six states: his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South.
The 1964 presidential campaign was, unfortunately, not an
isolated episode. The blunt truth is that many conservative luminaries in the
1960s opposed federal civil-rights legislation. Two future GOP Supreme Court
nominees — William Rehnquist and Robert Bork — had advised Goldwater to oppose
the 1964 bill. Indeed, in 1963, Bork wrote a lengthy essay in The New Republic arguing that the
anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act represented “a principle
of unsurpassed ugliness.”
In 1960, Goldwater published his celebrated manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, with
the help of Bill Buckley’s brother-in-law, Brent Bozell. In chapter four,
Goldwater described the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education — desegregating public schools — as an
“abuse of power by the Court” and an “unconstitutional trespass into the
legislative sphere of government.” He asked Congress to propose a
constitutional amendment that would restore states’ rights to segregate their
schools. In 1957, Buckley himself argued in National
Review that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such
measures,” including disenfranchising black voters, “as are necessary to
prevail, . . . because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
Buckley and Bork came to regret their earlier views and
recanted them. But at the moments when it mattered, conservatives were not on
the same side as the people fighting to end Jim Crow and government-enforced
segregation. Contrary to conservative rhetoric then and now, it was the federal
government that expanded black liberty in the 1960s.
The partisan realignment of 1964 went both ways;
Republicans lost the black vote but gained the votes of many southern Democrats
who saw LBJ’s bill as a betrayal. Even though six decades have passed, the
ripple effects of that realignment are still with us. Just as an unfaithful
spouse can save a marriage only through honest atonement, conservatives will
regain the trust of right-leaning African Americans only by frankly and
forcefully acknowledging our movement’s past mistakes.
We conservatives like to claim that our principles are timeless and universal. If they are, they don’t apply only to Americans of European descent. They apply also to “Third World foreigners” and the descendants of liberated slaves. We’ve talked a lot about the white working class over the past four years. But it is only when conservatives gain the allegiance of all members of the working class — black, Hispanic, Asian, white, and everyone in between — that we will be able to vindicate the uniquely American experiment in self-government.
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