Monday, November 11, 2024
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Conservatism – and the Nation – at a Crossroads



The right in America has been indulging the revolutionary spirit. National conservatives advance a new theory of conservatism to replace the old familiar ones. Common-good conservatives propose a novel regime to overturn and supplant the established political order. Still other conservatives entertain comparisons between our present discontents and the circumstances that would justify invoking the Declaration of Independenceโ€™s affirmation of the peopleโ€™s right to alter or abolish forms of government that have deteriorated into โ€œabsolute Despotism.โ€

These conservative crusaders have their reasons for demanding bold action. Impatient with doleful criticism, feeble or counter-productive policy alternatives, inept administration, and maladroit statesmanship, they are keen to combat the leftโ€™s conquest of the federal bureaucracy and weaponization of law enforcement against conservative political opponents; governmentโ€™s collaboration with the mainstream and social media to hector red America and stifle opinions that depart from progressive orthodoxy; K-12 and university educationโ€™s deterioration into indoctrination; corporationsโ€™ falling into line with the administrative state and education establishment by embracing the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry; and globalizationโ€™s market dislocations, which have fallen disproportionately on the working class.

Projects aimed at drastic change do not sit easily with the traditional conservative spirit. In 1790, Burkeโ€™s โ€œReflections on the Revolution in Franceโ€ set the tone for conserving a political society that secures individual freedom. Since Burke, the conservative spirit in Britain and the United States has tended to reject grand efforts to remake culture and politics. Thatโ€™s because the conservative spirit respects the past and the inherited. It appreciates the flaws of human nature, including the limits of human knowledge, the unreliability of human judgment, and the unruliness of human passion. It esteems the wisdom born of experience and the common sense of ordinary men and women. It distrusts innovators in moral and political theory because of their propensity to disregard stubborn realities and their partiality to utopian schemes. And, schooled in history and grounded in everyday life, it grasps the tendency of ambitious political undertakings to collapse under the weight of unintended consequences.

The gap between the new rightโ€™s ardency and audacity and the conservative spiritโ€™s disciplined balancing of competing principles and interests raises a crucial question: Can one honorably and effectively address the enormous challenges our nation faces โ€“ implicating culture, education, the family, religion, media, the market, government, and national security โ€“ without repudiating modern conservatismโ€™s defining characteristics?

โ€œThe new conservative dilemma: a symposiumโ€ in The New Criterionโ€™s October issue sharply formulates the problem and provides a fascinating and instructive set of replies. In his introduction, โ€œThe Abnormal as the New Normal,โ€ editor Roger Kimball argues that conservatism must be rethought because the conditions under which it emerged and developed have dramatically altered. Modern conservatism arose to contend with the perplexities generated by free societies, which challenge tradition by welcoming experimentation, innovation, and progress. By preserving limited constitutional government, which recognizes a private sphere in which citizens are largely free to organize their own affairs, American conservatives secured ample room to care for their families, maintain their communities, and follow their faith. That changed, argues Kimball, beginning in the mid-1930s with the New Dealโ€™s great expansion of the federal government. Attacks on the nationโ€™s founding principles and longstanding cultural norms in the 1960s accelerated the governmentโ€™s empowerment. Another critical factor in blurring the line between public and private has been the federal governmentโ€™s arrogation over the last 60 years of authority to regulate thought and action touching directly on family, community, and faith.

In โ€œThe New Conservative Dilemma,โ€ Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow James Piereson puts conservativesโ€™ quandary in stark terms: โ€œto go along with the cultural revolution and the growing powers of government officials to control information, censor contrary opinion, and disorient their opponents, in which case conservatives will be silenced, enfeebled, and eventually destroyed; or, alternatively, to take aggressive steps to confront it, in which case they run the risk of disrupting the current order, with American prosperity and international power hanging in the balance.โ€ While conservatives โ€œare not inclined by temperament either to disrupt the system or to question the legitimacy of government,โ€ writes Piereson, โ€œthey may have little choice but to take those risks to save themselves and perhaps the constitutional order itself.โ€ The need for โ€œa more aggressive politics than conservatives have practiced heretofore,โ€ he stresses, must be oriented around the โ€œdefense of old principles newly endangered.โ€

In โ€œCan conservatives still win?โ€ my colleague, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson, argues that conservatives can mount a comeback and win politically provided they learn from the past. They must first understand why they have performed poorly in elections despite the relative popularity of conservative positions on hot-button issues such as illegal immigration, energy independence, public-school indoctrination in progressive dogma, and transgender surgery for minors. Hanson blames lackluster candidates who once in office govern like Democrats; the Democratic partyโ€™s alliance with the super-rich, which enables them to outraise Republicans; and progressive control of the media โ€“ print and social โ€“ as well as of the administrative stateโ€™s permanent bureaucracy.

Conservatives have several options, argues Hanson, starting with the obvious: โ€œRaise more money, register more Republican voters, increase voter turnout, and find more resolute, charismatic, and conservative candidates to run.โ€ While many conservatives turn inward by moving to friendly states, practicing home-schooling, and tuning out Hollywood, much more can be done. Hanson sees promise in โ€œthe growing grassroots resistance to the cultural and political left.โ€ The resistance, which is โ€œmostly divorced from institutional Republican politics,โ€ depends on rejecting the false choice of either reclaiming old and venerable institutions such as the university that โ€œhave long been culturally hijacked by the leftโ€ or building new โ€œconservative counterparts.โ€ Conservatives, he counsels, must proceed on both fronts.

In โ€œConservatism reconfigured,โ€ Daniel McCarthy, the editor of โ€œModern Age: A Conservative Review,โ€ offers a grimmer assessment. โ€œConservatism from Peel and Disraeli to Thatcher and Reagan rested on three social foundations: the patriotism of the masses, the enduring cultural hegemony of Christianity, and the business communityโ€™s need for mass-based conservatism as a protection against the threat of socialism,โ€ he writes. โ€œToday the business community feels little threatened by socialism; economic nationalism and Christian morality are a greater nuisance as much of corporate America is concerned.โ€

Conservatives are grappling with โ€œthe disappearance of the conditionsโ€ that brought modern conservatism into existence in four distinct ways, according to McCarthy. โ€œRestorationistsโ€ seek โ€œa return to the industrial economy and a Christian culture.โ€ Right-wing โ€œnihilistsโ€ vehemently oppose the left but offer nothing of substance to remedy the current disarray. To preserve the good life as they understand it, โ€œwithdrawalistsโ€ favor โ€œโ€˜national divorce,โ€™ the Benedict Option, and outright state secession.โ€ And โ€œaccommodationistsโ€ โ€“ quislings in McCarthyโ€™s eyes โ€“ offer apologies for โ€œpost-industrial, culturally progressive Americaโ€ while enjoying its fruits in gated communities and pandering to progressive opinion by attacking the restorationists and the nihilists.

McCarthy sides with the restorationists. Not that he thinks the chances are good of rebuilding an industrial economy and reviving a Christian culture. He doesnโ€™t much like the prospects of two other possibilities that, he believes, could provide a viable approach to the new conservative dilemma: a conservatism โ€œreasserting Americanism โ€“ in a more passionate form than the tepid โ€˜proposition nationalismโ€™ of the liberalsโ€; or an โ€œimperial conservatismโ€ in which an inspirational leader tied Americaโ€™s major factions to the center by balancing their competing concerns. Whatever its components, a conservatism adequately reconfigured to meet the momentโ€™s demands, he argues, must either โ€œregenerate the conditions that gave it political life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries or find a different social base for the twenty-first century.โ€

Lawyer and journalist Margot Cleveland declares in โ€œThe promise of populismโ€ that โ€œthe leftward lurch of the governing classโ€ precipitated the centerโ€™s collapse and sapped ordinary peopleโ€™s confidence that constitutional government can be counted on to protect the freedoms that enable them to care for their families and communities and practice their faith. Eschewing โ€œknee-jerk opposition to the ruling class and the elite,โ€ Cleveland advocates an enlightened populism that involves a recovery of the nationโ€™s โ€œgoverning fundamentals,โ€ which are rooted in unalienable rights and limited government based on the consent of the governed.

Like her fellow symposium contributors, Cleveland embraces Pieresonโ€™s stringent characterization of โ€œthe new conservative dilemma.โ€ All contributors also agree that conservatives must forge an alliance with the people against progressive elites. Only McCarthy exhibits ambivalence about the centrality to conservatismโ€™s renewal of the nationโ€™s founding principles. Yet the continuing resonance of individual freedom and equality under the law for working-class and middle-class Americans and their widespread desire to govern themselves provides a common ground for conservatives to engage in grassroots organizing and in drafting and implementing a more pertinent and effective legislative agenda.

Circumstances oblige conservatives to take bold action to address the nationโ€™s enormous challenges. But the boldness must be anchored in Americaโ€™s founding principles and constitutional traditions. Otherwise, the undertaking would not prove conservative in any meaningful American sense and would not yield a victory for the nation worth achieving.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.