By John Hood
Thursday, November 07, 2024
Raleigh, N.C. — Kamala Harris deserved to
lose.
A sub-par candidate prone to incoherent babbling when off
script, Harris lacked the skills a candidate can hone only by winning
repeated, competitive elections in one’s own right. She earned not a single
primary vote during her abortive presidential run in 2020 and her hasty
coronation in 2024. Her meandering political career — from tough-talking local
prosecutor to hothouse California progressive to Bernie Sanders leftist to
post-Biden conciliator — didn’t make her look thoughtful or adaptable. It
marked her as a conniver, a panderer in an era that, for good or ill, holds raw
authenticity in high esteem.
Moreover, Harris was inescapably tethered to a deeply
unpopular administration during a change election. When asked to specify how
her presidency would substantially differ from Joe Biden’s, she had no
intelligible answer. Americans are clearly unnerved by international conflicts,
worried about illegal immigration, and outraged by inflation. Progressivism is waning, not waxing. On nearly every highly
ranked voting issue, polls find Republicans more trusted than Democrats.
If I entered a time machine and jumped back 30 years — or
perhaps just a dozen — to ask political pros to predict the outcome of such a
contest, they’d forecast a landslide loss for Kamala Harris.
So there’s no need for an elaborate explanation for what
happened this year. Donald Trump is who he is. His rhetoric and behavior appall
many Americans, including millions who voted for him anyway on policy grounds.
Most voters hold right-of-center views, love America, are optimistic about its future, and disdain paint-by-numbers
wokery and pretentious elites. Not surprisingly, they’ve rejected what Harris
and her party offered them this year.
What remains to be seen, however, is whether Republicans
can consolidate their electoral gains into a true governing coalition in
Washington. The second Trump administration will play a critical role, of
course, but it is within Congress that the national government’s policy-making
powers are primarily vested. Executive orders aren’t laws, and federal
“guidance” is often lawless. While the powers of the commander in chief are
formidable, effective foreign-policy commitments require ratified treaties and
public consensus. And a nation as populous and diverse as the United States
cannot be “run” from the White House (or, indeed, from anywhere in the Potomac
swamp). Tackling such issues as health care, social mobility, entitlement
reform, and federal deficits will require major legislation often enacted with
bipartisan votes to invoke cloture or overcome defections.
It will also require a healthy conservative movement of
policy professionals, scholars, communicators, litigators, donors, and
grassroots activists. Its task is to apply timeless principles of individual liberty, civic virtue,
free enterprise, constitutional government, and human flourishing to today’s
most daunting challenges.
When my colleagues and I announced the
Freedom Conservatism initiative last year, ours was not an explicitly partisan
project. While there are prominent Republican operatives and former Republican
officeholders among us, most of our 300 signatories work for nonprofit
organizations, universities, media organizations, or private businesses. We
largely agree on public policy but differ on tactics and risk assessment. Many
FreeCons supported Trump, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Some are, in
fact, close to the once-and-future president and may well serve in the next
administration. Other signatories voted differently.
What binds us together is far stronger than what
separates us. Freedom Conservatives believe in free markets, free trade, free
speech, strong families, balanced budgets, peace through strength, and the rule
of law. We champion equal protection and equal opportunity. We think Washington
has too much power and that our states, communities, private associations, and
families have too little.
Rival factions within the American Right, including
National Conservatives and other populist voices, share some positions with us
while diverging sharply on such matters as trade policy, business subsidies,
and the devolution of governmental power. Over the coming months and years,
FreeCons and NatCons are going to tussle. We’ll debate big questions and small
details. Our signatories and allies will jockey for position within Congress,
the second Trump administration, state and local governments, and the institutions
that form the conservative movement. When Republicans run with
nationalist-populist ideas such as central planning or across-the-board
tariffs, we’ll try to block them. And when Congress or the Trump administration
run with FreeCon ideas such as tax relief, regulatory reform, and
decentralization, we’ll help and cheer.
This rivalry needn’t be bitter or acrimonious. It needn’t
scorch the political earth. “I object to a quarrel,” Chesterton memorably
observed, “because it always interrupts an argument.” But our rivalry is
necessary. And while I intend to listen carefully to everyone, keeping myself
open to fresh perspectives and unforeseen opportunities for consensus or
accommodation, I intend to do my part to help Freedom Conservatism prevail. I
believe America’s future is at stake.
I also believe that our conception of conservatism is, in
the end, likely to prevail. Despite its best efforts, the
nationalist-populist Right hasn’t persuaded voters to abandon their traditional
views, as both pre-election and exit polls confirm. More than 80 percent of
Trump supporters prefer a smaller government providing fewer services to a
larger one providing more. Only 22 percent of Harris supporters feel the same.
Republican voters overwhelmingly disapprove of labor unions and think their decline has been
good for working people and the country as a whole. Most Republicans, including
those who self-identify as MAGA, see both Russia and China as America’s enemies, are rooting for Israel to win and Vladimir Putin to lose, and want the U.S.
to remain the most potent military power in the world. Few agree, or will ever
agree, with fringy causes such as integrating church and state or repudiating
the classical-liberal legacy of the American Revolution.
As Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen pointed out just days before the election, most
late-deciding voters were instinctively right of center and blamed Biden’s
policies for inflation and social unrest but dislike much of what Trump says
and does. While enough came home to push the former president over the top,
they didn’t do so because they embraced the January 6 riot, Robert F. Kennedy
Jr.’s crankery, or Tucker Carlson’s antics. They did so in spite of
these turnoffs.
So, yes, Republicans prevailed in 2024. But the electoral
map for the 2026 midterms is less favorable. And they will have to broaden
their coalition still further to effect the dramatic course corrections
required to close federal deficits, counter foreign threats, expand economic
opportunity to those left behind, and restore the conditions that help American
families and communities growth and thrive.
When the next chapter of political history is written,
America’s conservative movement will have succeeded if it turns out that both
parties, not just the Republicans, were compelled to shift in our direction
to win competitive elections in 2026 and beyond. That’s precisely what happened
more than a century ago when the rise of the populist and progressive movements
shoved both Democrats and Republicans leftward, to embrace a more active role
for government in economic and social policy. Today, our country needs just as
significant and durable a shift toward conservative governance.
The 2024 election settled some things. Kamala Harris was
unprepared for the national spotlight. Most Americans deem Joe Biden’s
presidency a failure and held it against his vice president. And most think
Washington is more the problem than the solution.
But the fate of Trump’s second presidency — and of
America’s conservative movement — will depend in large measure on what American
conservatives do next. My FreeCon colleagues and I have committed ourselves to
fight for fiscal responsibility, for broader opportunity and equality before
the law, and for practical policies to make food, clothing, housing, education,
health care, and other necessities of life more affordable to more Americans.
We will defend our country’s founding principles against their critics,
whatever their political stripe, so that our children and grandchildren can
continue to live in the greatest country on earth.
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