Will Conservatism Recover?

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, October 24, 2024

 

For traditional conservatives, this year’s presidential election has been a dispiriting affair.

 

The Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, is an old-school San Francisco progressive who is ruthlessly hostile to most aspects of the American constitutional order, who exhibits no principled opposition to the most radical of her movement’s policy positions, and who has thus far failed to demonstrate that she possesses leadership skills of any sort. At various points in her history, Harris has called for the abolition of private health insurance, for slavery reparations, for the prohibition and confiscation of handguns and modern sporting rifles, for the “Green New Deal,” for defunding the police, for banning fracking, for ending ICE, and for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for prisoners and illegal immigrants. Elsewhere, she has supported nuking the Senate filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, abolishing the Electoral College, and nationalizing much of the United States’ election system. Aware that the administration she serves is disliked and that she is personally unpopular, Harris has more recently been careful to equivocate on many of these goals. But there is no reason for voters to believe that dissimulation. Harris is weak, ignorant, and lazy, and, like Joe Biden, she will be swiftly captured by her side’s interest groups if she wins the presidency. If she is sworn in next year, she will immediately become the most left-wing commander in chief we’ve had since the Second World War.

 

The Republican nominee — for the third time in a row, Lord help us! — is Donald J. Trump, a capricious, narcissistic old man who tried to steal the 2020 election by rewriting the 1876 Electoral Count Act and the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, and who is able to run again only because the GOP declined to impeach and convict him for that attempt. On policy, Trump has some advantages over Harris, especially in the realms of illegal immigration and the judiciary, but he is a long, long way from being a conservative, and his egotism, poor discipline, and lack of attention to detail make the prospect of a second term an alarming one. At various points since he lost power, Trump has suggested “suspending” or “terminating” the Constitution, and, unlike most of the judges he appointed, he continues to demonstrate a faulty understanding of the limits imposed on the power of the presidency and of the role of the federal government. If Trump becomes president again next year, he will worsen our civic culture, spread corrosive lies with abandon, and make the work of the country’s constitutionalists more difficult.

 

It is true — and mercifully so — that the American system makes it difficult for elected politicians to effect sweeping changes to the legislative and constitutional status quo. It is also true that words and habits matter enormously over time. The best response to a politician who proposes drastic changes to the political scaffolding is a better politician who dissents. The best antidote to a free-spending, tax-hiking advocate of overbearing government is an eloquent champion of a responsible and limited state. The best counterpoint to a lightweight weather vane who adopts every batty social theory on offer is a grounded Chestertonian who has mastered the opposite case. By picking Trump as its standard-bearer, the Republican Party has rhetorically ceded every one of these crucial fields. In the short term, it may get away with it. In the long term, there will be a price to pay. We will all pay a price for its fecklessness this year.

 

It would be inaccurate to suggest that the 2024 election is about literally nothing, but, certainly, it is about very little that is comprehensible or concrete. Useful plebiscites set two coherent visions against each other. This plebiscite is entirely opportunistic. Like that of Kamala Harris and her Democratic Party, Donald Trump’s approach to this election has been to play Santa Claus for his Americans of choice, without any regard for the consequences of his vows. If he sees a group whose votes he wants to win, he offers that group special treatment. In Las Vegas, Trump has promised that the federal government will no longer tax tips; in Detroit, he has promised that the federal government will offer a deduction on the interest on loans for American-made cars; in New York, he has promised to restore the SALT deduction that his own 2017 tax bill finally managed to limit. Among seniors, he promises that Social Security benefits will be tax-free; among shift workers, he promises that overtime will be excluded from taxation; when addressing firemen, police officers, and the military, he promises to exempt them from taxation completely. When IVF became an issue, he announced that he not only supported its remaining legally available but that taxpayers would foot the bill. Trump has no plan for our endless deficits, he has no interest in reducing the debt, and he is allergic to discussing the entitlement reform that will be necessary to fix both problems. Worst of all, when he is pushed on any of these questions, he asserts either that everything will somehow be magically magnificent or that he will fix each and every problem the country faces by collecting large across-the-board import tariffs. Trump denies reality, avoids unpleasant topics, and acknowledges no trade-offs. As a practical matter, one can make an electoral case for such an approach. One cannot, however, call it conservatism.

 

Given the closeness of the polls — and the likelihood that the election will yield divided government — the prospects for dramatic change seem slim for at least the next two years. Conservatives should not confuse that outcome with victory. Calvin Coolidge was correct when he remarked that “it is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” but one ought not to conclude from this that it is unimportant to pass good bills. The utility of gridlock is that it prevents any situation from getting worse. This, though, is a positive thing only when what is being preserved is desirable. In the 1990s, gridlock served to lock in many of the Reagan-era reforms. Today, gridlock would put Washington, D.C. on autopilot and prevent it from addressing looming disaster. Given the candidates on offer, this may be the best we can aspire to for now. At some point soon, it won’t be enough.

 

Preparing for that “some point” will require discipline. If Trump wins, it will be tempting to focus on the inevitably ridiculous reactions to his victory, just as, if Harris wins, it will be tempting to derive satisfaction from fighting her every move. Neither response will be sufficient. Conceptually, conservatives ought to start thinking of themselves as they did in the late 1970s: aware of where their ideas were most likely to be adopted but politically homeless nevertheless. The last ten years have been peculiar, but, one way or another, the Trump era is on the verge of coming to a close. My suspicion is that, once the man himself is gone, the Republican Party will be more open to an infusion of sober thinking than is otherwise assumed. Larger-than-life politicians rarely hand their ideologies over successfully, and there is nothing about Trump — or “Trumpism,” whatever that is supposed to be — that indicates an exception.

 

Which, I suppose, brings me to the good news. I, too, am dispirited by this election — by its candidates, by its vapidity, by its lack of a solid conservative bent, and all the rest. But I am not as dispirited as many others seem to be, because, unlike them, I do not believe that conservatism has truly disappeared. It is notable, I think, that the problem that I have described seems mostly to be confined to the federal level, and, therein, to be confined to the executive and legislative branches (happily, the Supreme Court is more intellectually rigorous and originalist than it had been in a hundred years). In the states, by contrast, conservatism is ascendant.

 

You will note that I write “conservatism” rather than “Republicans,” for, over the last decade or so, conservatives have not only managed to win a stupendous number of elections at the state level, but having done so, they have pushed through substantive policy changes. Among their various victories have been the passage of the largest set of state-income-tax cuts since the 1920s, the widespread deregulation of business, the development of right-to-work laws, the restoration of the Second Amendment, the restriction of abortion, the advancement of school choice, and the resisting of faddish theories on crime, policing, and homelessness that have done great damage to progressive-run states such as California, Washington, and New York. Were an alien to come down from outer space and visit the entire country — as opposed to just Washington, D.C., Twitter, and the green rooms of our national television stations — he would be astonished to hear it said that conservatism was at a nadir. What of Texas, and Florida, and Georgia, and Ohio, and . . .

 

The same would be true of the notion that our present predicament is unique. To listen to many right-of-center commentators is to get the distinct impression that Donald Trump’s apostasy has broken a perfect line of conservatism that runs from 2015 back into the mists of time. This, though, is incorrect. Conservatism was so inchoate and weak in the 1950s that this magazine was founded to reintroduce it. In the 1960s, the model conservative candidate, Barry Goldwater, lost in a devastating landslide to the statist alternative, Lyndon Johnson. In the 1970s, the Republican and Democratic parties fused into a grotesque and mushy consensus, and the GOP’s most electorally successful president since the 1920s, Richard Nixon, adopted a set of economic positions that would have made Elizabeth Warren blush. Reagan fixed a great deal of this, but he failed to convince his successor, George H. W. Bush, to continue the work, and, a decade later, when George H. W. Bush’s son took over the White House, his initial priorities included the increased federalization of K–12 education and the passage of an unfunded expansion of entitlements. To underscore the complexity of conservatism’s history, consider that the most conservative political era since before the New Deal came in the 1990s, when a Republican Congress served alongside a Democratic president and, for the most part, bent him to its will. Donald Trump is a serious problem — although even he managed to achieve an originalist Supreme Court and a Paul Ryan–inspired tax-reform bill — but he is a problem that conservatives, of all people, ought to understand. Each generation is obliged to learn the lessons of the past over again, and, alas, that obligation is now in force.

 

I do not wish to be Pollyannaish. For a conservative classical liberal such as myself, this election season has been alarming and grotesque, and I am convinced that, one way or another, we are destined to pay a price for it. But I do not worry about conservatism in the longer term, because I believe that the central insights of conservatism are correct. Human nature is immutable. The world is a dangerous place. Ambition must be channeled productively. We cannot spend more than we make. There are no solutions, only settlements. Equality under the law is superior to the alternatives. Practice is a better indicator of success than theory. Power corrupts less when it is shared between competing institutions. Government ought to be as close to the people as possible. That which cannot go on forever will stop. From time to time we take a vacation from these truths, but a vacation is all it can be, for, eventually, reality will kick in — yes, even in Washington, D.C.