Republicans Need an Agenda

By Yuval Levin

Thursday, August 25, 2022

 

The notion that politicians vying for seats in Congress should put some set of policy ideas before voters is hardly a bold, piercing insight. People seeking to be legislators should presumably seek to legislate, and candidates who want to be elected lawmakers should probably explain how electing them could result in better laws.

 

And yet, for more than a decade now, Republicans running for Congress have treated the question of whether to propose particular policy ideas at election time as though it were a tangled strategic quandary. Indeed, they have often concluded that offering an agenda would be a mistake, and that instead proposing nothing would be more clever, savvy, and even principled. 

 

Some have made a kind of libertarian argument that Republicans should be the party that wants government to do less, and so should not dream up clever new programs but only stand in the way of bad ideas from the left. Others have argued that a Republican congressional majority should just advance the agenda of a Republican president or oppose and investigate a Democratic one, since you can’t really govern from Congress anyway.

 

But more often, the case is more cynical than that, and focused on saving Republicans the trouble of having to defend anything. Voters are in a sour mood, this argument suggests, so let the election be a referendum on the Democrats and the public will vote “No.” Why put a target on our own backs?

 

This is not a mindless view. Its most prominent advocate over the past decade has been Senator Mitch McConnell, who is nothing if not savvy and effective. But it is nonetheless profoundly wrong.

 

The case for passivity on libertarian grounds makes little sense given the sheer scope of the progressive administrative state. If what you want is a government that doesn’t overreach, then you want a government very different from the one we have, and you’re going to need a lot of legislation to get there. As F. A. Hayek put it, “Liberty in practice depends on very prosaic matters, and those anxious to preserve it must prove their devotion by their attention to the mundane concerns of public life and by the efforts they are prepared to give to the understanding of issues that the idealist is often inclined to treat as common, if not sordid.”

 

The case for focusing just on the president, meanwhile, is outright constitutional dereliction. Our system cannot function when the first branch is willfully weak and passive. And oversight of the executive does not amount by itself to an agenda fit for a legislature. What will you have achieved when you’ve spent two years really getting to the bottom of Hunter Biden’s odious corruption? At best, you might agitate your core voters enough to elect you again — but to what end? More hearings? By all means, Congress should hold the executive branch to account, but as a supplement to, not a substitute for, legislative work. And while it’s true that you can’t simply govern from Congress, you can set the parameters of governance; recent presidents have rarely vetoed bills supported by bipartisan majorities.

 

But the argument against giving voters something to oppose may actually be the most deficient. It runs to the heart of what has gone wrong with American politics, and what it would take for Republicans to make the most of some extraordinary opportunities for electoral success over the coming years. 

 

Politics in a free society is ultimately about common action for the common good. The national legislature in particular is an arena for resolving differences and addressing national challenges through bargaining and negotiation. That means that lawmakers need to engage one another over substantive legislative measures, not just to engage in rhetorical combat at a distance. They need to articulate priorities and propose bills, and then to build coalitions around mutual concerns and ambitions. This kind of legislative action is inherently accommodational, while political speech divorced from any prospect of such action is inherently divisive.

 

That does not mean that a would-be legislative majority should propose compromise measures. It means, rather, that it should propose a forthright agenda that puts forward its vision of how some significant public problems might be mitigated, and should then be prepared to negotiate with legislators who have different but reconcilable approaches to the same problems. That sort of work is not for everyone, but people who are not up for it should not run for seats in Congress, because such work is what that institution exists to do. Our economy affords plenty of other employment opportunities for capable, ambitious men and women.

 

The reluctance of would-be Republican legislators to take the first step toward this kind of political action — to lay out some ideas for how our laws could better serve our country — makes every further step harder too, and so deforms the political arena. In the absence of genuine political speech (that is, speech directed to common action), we are left with empty partisan rhetoric. Such rhetoric can be heated and confrontational, but it cannot be productive of real legislative activity. For members of Congress, it is not a way to fight for victory; it is a way to lose.

 

If this were effective as an electoral formula and failed only as a mode of governance, maybe it could be excused as a way at least to stop the Democrats. But it is not great politics either. It is a strategy rooted in the notion that electoral victory can be achieved by maximizing the cohesion and energy of your devoted partisans. In a 50–50 electorate, that kind of approach can narrowly win elections about half the time. But a 50–50 electorate is in part a result and not just a premise of this sort of strategy. To win by more than just the barest of majorities, which is what it takes to govern in our republic, you have to not just maximize your team’s engagement but also appeal beyond your devoted partisans and take a serious bite out of the other party’s coalition. That is very hard to do by focusing only on the villainy of that coalition, or by cleverly refraining from giving voters who aren’t already on your side any reason to join it.

 

The polarized deadlock of our politics in this century has been fed by a vicious cycle: A strategy that takes that deadlock for granted has made it exceedingly difficult to break the deadlock. A politics that is about nothing but why the other side shouldn’t win has increasingly turned both parties into losers.

 

The Democrats often play their part in this cycle by proposing legislative measures designed only with their most engaged partisans in mind, thereby actively turning off potential voters. The Republicans play their part by proposing almost nothing, thereby failing to give potential voters a reason to vote for them. Both parties thus strike many voters as too detached from their everyday problems. Neither party acts as though it wants to expand its coalition, and, in general, neither does expand it.

 

To help break this cycle, Republicans who want to be legislators should help voters see how they would legislate — and they should propose to legislate in ways that would be broadly popular. This means not only proposing an agenda but speaking especially to the issues that now most frustrate the electorate, and to those that might be most amenable to legislative bargaining and remediation.

 

For Republican candidates for Congress, that should mean, at the very least, proposing a substantive agenda that tackles rising living costs, education issues with a federal nexus, immigration, health care, and the various challenges arising around the governance of information technology. Those aren’t the only issues that matter, but they are among the ones that at this point best combine the public’s priorities and the potential for legislative action.

 

In each case, Republicans can draw upon some key conservative assumptions about how to address public problems. They should prioritize the family, protect religious liberty, and take our national sovereignty seriously. They should look to empower local institutions and communities where they can, rather than centralizing power in Washington. They should provide people in need with resources that will help them enter competitive markets as consumers, rather than having federal agencies manipulate or displace those markets. They should avoid the familiar progressive mistake of subsidizing demand while restricting supply and should instead look to give Americans more options for meeting their needs. 

 

These general rules of thumb are useful guides for policy-making. But by themselves, they are far from a sufficient agenda. Offering voters appealing solutions will require Republicans to become more deeply familiar with the problems confronting Americans now, to consider the appropriate roles of public policy in addressing those problems, and to propose creative ideas that might distinguish them from the Democrats yet also leave room for cross-ideological appeals and cross-partisan bargains. 

 

The point of such work is not the technocratic management of public affairs but the putting into practice of different facets of a distinct vision of the good. A politics properly rooted in such a vision requires us to give practical form to our understanding of the meaning of justice, freedom, and order; the character of our society; the nature of men and women; our obligations to the rising and the passing generations; and the implications of the ideals enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. But by requiring us to express these commitments in the language of law, to direct them to concrete public challenges of the hour, and to make them appealing to our fellow citizens, such a politics both deepens and moderates our disputes about them, and so enables our political engagement to serve the common good rather than to divide and embitter our diverse society.

 

The idea that Republicans should avoid getting into the details of policy so that they can win elections by not giving voters too much to oppose is therefore a dangerous distortion of the nature of the politician’s role. It is not more sophisticated, but more naïve, than the commonsense proposition that people asking to be legislators should explain how they would legislate.

 

The work of appealing in practical terms to potential voters is essential to the formation of leaders in our democracy. A Republican Party engaged in that kind of work, rather than in relitigating the last election or flamboyantly despairing over the fate of the country, would be not only better able to govern but also better able to reach beyond its base and win new supporters. It would, in other words, be better able to do its most basic work.