A NEW CONSERVATIVE AGENDA
A GOVERNING PHILOSOPHY FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
by Daniel McCarthyMarch 2019
What has been known as conservatism in the Republican party since Ronald Reagan left office, fully thirty years ago, has become inadequate. This has been evident for a while, though we’re only now noticing. From the Great Recession and loss of manufacturing jobs to perpetual war in the Islamic world and intensifying culture war at home, conservatism as the GOP understood it over the last few decades was not only not the answer to our woes but was in many cases their cause. Thus our present moment: Post-Reagan conservative intellectuals soldier on in think tanks and on opinion pages, but conservative voters are abandoning the cause.
Donald Trump’s program when he arrived on the national scene four years ago was in almost every respect the opposite of conservative orthodoxy: on trade, on the Iraq War, on the need to apologize for politically incorrect utterances (and sometimes worse). Yet Republican voters preferred Trump over the paragons of every major conservative faction in the 2016 primaries: the latest establishment Bush; the neocon of the future, Marco Rubio; the libertarian Rand Paul; Ted Cruz, the movement conservative’s conservative; and every other flavor. Those who claimed that Trump only won because the field was so divided overlooked the obvious. If post-Reagan conservatism was satisfactory, there should have been a plurality for any one of its champions, not for the candidate who campaigned like a Nixon Republican.
So now conservatism is in flux. There are those who still insist on the old formulas. There is the Trump administration, with its inevitably imperfect implementation of his campaign agenda. There are Trump imitators, mostly unsuccessful so far. And there are a great many politicians and policy minds attempting to combine something of Trump with a traditional post-Reagan Republican program. Which way is a conservative to choose, with eyes on the good of the country, not just on the success of a faction?
We need a conservative agenda fit for the twenty-first century, and the closest thing to it is in fact the program that follows through on the themes of Trump’s 2016 campaign with greater clarity and focus than the administration itself has so far done. This is not because Trump now defines conservatism, as his detractors allege when they complain about a cult of personality. (Trump has no more of a cult than his last two predecessors did, and less of one among professional conservatives than the deified Reagan.) Rather, Trump in 2016, whether consciously or not, drew upon what has been the clear policy alternative to the elite consensus in favor of global liberalism since the early 1990s: economic nationalism, and nationalism more generally. This is an honorable tradition whose roots in the Republican party run all the way back to Abraham Lincoln. So successful was the economic nationalism pursued by America in the twentieth century that we could afford to deviate from it during the Cold War for the sake of strengthening allies like West Germany, Japan, and South Korea—and even Communist China, an ally of convenience against the Soviet Union. But when the Cold War ended, our economic policy, no less than our foreign policy, should have taken a turn back toward the national interest over building a liberal world order. Trump’s essential appeal to voters was his promise to do just that. He is not an aberration; he is not even a second, more successful Pat Buchanan. He is a return, in however haphazard a fashion, to the policy orientation that once really did make America great and the GOP grand.
Economic nationalism is not just about tariffs. It is less about “economic” than it is about “nationalism”—that is, it takes account of the different needs of different walks of life and regions of the country, serving the whole by serving its parts and drawing them together. In the past, the challenge was to harmonize farmers, urban capital, and labor. The challenge now is to balance those groups with the post-industrial classes as well, and to strengthen the productive economy against the largely fictional economy of administrators and clerks. All of this is for the sake not just of prosperity, in raw dollar terms, but of a national economy that provides the basis for a healthy culture in which citizens and their families can flourish.
Culture comes first—but like a final cause or end in Aristotle’s philosophy, it is first in priority, not necessarily first in time or action. We need to bring this truth forward, for we’ve forgotten it over the past few decades.
What has been known as conservatism in the Republican party since Ronald Reagan left office, fully thirty years ago, has become inadequate. This has been evident for a while, though we’re only now noticing. From the Great Recession and loss of manufacturing jobs to perpetual war in the Islamic world and intensifying culture war at home, conservatism as the GOP understood it over the last few decades was not only not the answer to our woes but was in many cases their cause. Thus our present moment: Post-Reagan conservative intellectuals soldier on in think tanks and on opinion pages, but conservative voters are abandoning the cause.
Donald Trump’s program when he arrived on the national scene four years ago was in almost every respect the opposite of conservative orthodoxy: on trade, on the Iraq War, on the need to apologize for politically incorrect utterances (and sometimes worse). Yet Republican voters preferred Trump over the paragons of every major conservative faction in the 2016 primaries: the latest establishment Bush; the neocon of the future, Marco Rubio; the libertarian Rand Paul; Ted Cruz, the movement conservative’s conservative; and every other flavor. Those who claimed that Trump only won because the field was so divided overlooked the obvious. If post-Reagan conservatism was satisfactory, there should have been a plurality for any one of its champions, not for the candidate who campaigned like a Nixon Republican.
So now conservatism is in flux. There are those who still insist on the old formulas. There is the Trump administration, with its inevitably imperfect implementation of his campaign agenda. There are Trump imitators, mostly unsuccessful so far. And there are a great many politicians and policy minds attempting to combine something of Trump with a traditional post-Reagan Republican program. Which way is a conservative to choose, with eyes on the good of the country, not just on the success of a faction?
We need a conservative agenda fit for the twenty-first century, and the closest thing to it is in fact the program that follows through on the themes of Trump’s 2016 campaign with greater clarity and focus than the administration itself has so far done. This is not because Trump now defines conservatism, as his detractors allege when they complain about a cult of personality. (Trump has no more of a cult than his last two predecessors did, and less of one among professional conservatives than the deified Reagan.) Rather, Trump in 2016, whether consciously or not, drew upon what has been the clear policy alternative to the elite consensus in favor of global liberalism since the early 1990s: economic nationalism, and nationalism more generally. This is an honorable tradition whose roots in the Republican party run all the way back to Abraham Lincoln. So successful was the economic nationalism pursued by America in the twentieth century that we could afford to deviate from it during the Cold War for the sake of strengthening allies like West Germany, Japan, and South Korea—and even Communist China, an ally of convenience against the Soviet Union. But when the Cold War ended, our economic policy, no less than our foreign policy, should have taken a turn back toward the national interest over building a liberal world order. Trump’s essential appeal to voters was his promise to do just that. He is not an aberration; he is not even a second, more successful Pat Buchanan. He is a return, in however haphazard a fashion, to the policy orientation that once really did make America great and the GOP grand.
Economic nationalism is not just about tariffs. It is less about “economic” than it is about “nationalism”—that is, it takes account of the different needs of different walks of life and regions of the country, serving the whole by serving its parts and drawing them together. In the past, the challenge was to harmonize farmers, urban capital, and labor. The challenge now is to balance those groups with the post-industrial classes as well, and to strengthen the productive economy against the largely fictional economy of administrators and clerks. All of this is for the sake not just of prosperity, in raw dollar terms, but of a national economy that provides the basis for a healthy culture in which citizens and their families can flourish.
Culture comes first—but like a final cause or end in Aristotle’s philosophy, it is first in priority, not necessarily first in time or action. We need to bring this truth forward, for we’ve forgotten it over the past few decades.
Conservatives have long believed that politics is downstream from culture, as Andrew Breitbart liked to say. Variations on the idea go back at least as far as Irving Babbitt, who was a rare conservative on the faculty of Harvard College even in 1924, when he wrote that “the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem in turn into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem.”
Babbitt meant that the class conflict of the nineteenth century, still very much alive in his day, was symptomatic of something deeper. Breitbart in turn meant that the cultural contexts created by news and entertainment media—by the storylines they script and the emotional cues embedded within them—largely define the limits of the possible in politics. These two views combine in the conviction that culture, in both the social and spiritual senses, takes precedence over politics or economics.
As important as that truth is, it is easily misapplied. In practice it has meant that conservatives emphasize certain “cultural” forms of argument without seriously confronting the hard questions of politics or economics—as if worldly matters will take care of themselves if only our rhetoric is elevated and our intentions pure. Sometimes this leads to a politics of cant. Sometimes it leads to political quietism or a drift toward literary utopianism. And sometimes it just leads to ham-fisted attempts to produce “conservative” films or other forms of popular culture, in which the political message is almost always more conspicuous than the artistic merit.
Cultural, philosophical, and religious assumptions suffuse public life, and in that sense politics is indeed downstream from culture. One can even go further and say that culture, broadly understood, is the riverbed of politics, setting the course along which it flows. But that course is checked and channeled by willful human activity—by building dams and canals, as it were. How this is done turns largely on economic questions, or rather questions of what used to be called political economy. Different kinds of political economy not only produce different dispensations of wealth and power but also profoundly shape family life, individual character, and the civic landscape. A political program therefore has to be an economic program, not just in the superficial sense of dealing with subjects like taxes and regulation but in the deeper sense of relating the nation’s economic way of life to its cultural fabric and the very conditions of its existence.
The underlying structure of American life should not be questioned at every election. But it does need to be considered anew when dramatic changes have taken place in the world or at home. Our present predicament is the result of letting political thought run on autopilot for too long. Donald Trump’s rise, and the rise today of an invigorated socialism in the Democratic party, are signs that conventional politics had failed because conventional politics was built upon an economic order that has ended without its advocates even realizing it.
There are times in a nation’s life when the terms of its politics are settled. Rival parties might disagree about how to achieve certain goals—winning the Cold War, increasing GDP, reducing crime—but they agree on the overall story of politics and frame their proposals in light of it. Republicans and Democrats shared a story throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, just as Britain’s Conservatives and Liberals shared a story in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Benjamin Disraeli never brought back the Corn Laws, just as William Gladstone never contemplated disestablishing the Church of England or abolishing the monarchy. Ronald Reagan said he wanted to conserve the New Deal, while Bill Clinton—after losing a bruising battle over national healthcare—decided to go no further and announced that “the era of big government is over.”
In foreign policy, both Republicans and Democrats still talk about “American leadership.” Even in cultural politics, stark differences in policy can be framed within the same narrative: Abortion is usually about individual rights, for example, whether a woman’s or the unborn’s. For many conservatives, the alternative to accepting same-sex marriage a decade ago was to propose domestic partnerships for same-sex couples. The details matter, and they can be matters of life or death. But even the gravest questions can often be addressed within a shared idiom.
Yet there are times when a nation faces a fundamental choice about its nature and direction. The choice between an agrarian and aristocratic or a commercial and bourgeois political order confronted both Britain and France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Americans too had to choose between agrarian ideals (belied by the reality of slavery) and industrial development at several points between the Constitution’s ratification and the outbreak of the Civil War. In the early twentieth century, the relevant choice was between unreconciled class struggle, of the sort that had been going on for nearly a hundred years, or the imposition of a new settlement upon labor and capital alike—the mixed economy.
America is now at another moment of choice. The class compact that came out of the Great Depression and World War II stabilized many of the social tensions dating back to the very beginnings of industrialization. It has broken down. The welfare state is heading toward bankruptcy. Americans are increasingly working as contractors rather than salaried employees, with fewer benefits and less security. Industrial jobs are vanishing. A family wage, lifelong work, retirement guarantees, and brighter prospects for one’s children and grandchildren are not part of the bargain anymore. Economic growth is concentrated in cities and college towns, leaving everyplace else to wither. If the country continues on its present course, all of this will get worse.
Until 2016, however, both major parties continued to campaign as if the class compact of the twentieth century still held sway. Conservative Republican policy ideas were limited to keeping federal spending in check—in theory, if never in practice—and cutting taxes and regulations, while looking for novel ways to continue providing the benefits Americans had come to expect: by privatizing Social Security, for example, or mandating the purchase of private health insurance (Mitt Romney’s idea before it became Obama’s). Progressive Democrats simply planned to have the federal government spend more to keep the welfare state expanding indefinitely. Though just as Republicans could spend as freely as Democrats, Democrats experimented with Republican solutions for making the welfare state more affordable or acceptable to business. Obamacare was one result.
These policies, whether right or left, can no more save the class compact of the twentieth century than farm subsidies could save the agrarian ideal. They may or may not be totally useless in their own right. But they are beside the main point. The American economy has changed in ways that require a new choice about the kind of country we are.
Up to now, the choice has been made by default. Leaders in both parties, in corporate America and in the academy and media, have assumed that what worked twenty or thirty years ago will continue to work today. The reigning assumption has been that politics should focus on fine-tuning the private and public sectors to provide the growth, opportunity, and security Americans have come to rely upon. A tax cut or a new entitlement is all we need. But the America of the twentieth century was a country in several ways profoundly different from the one we inhabit today. It had strong community ties supplied by religious and ethnic groups. It had a powerful private-sector labor movement. Its economy was localized, not globalized; where an industry was located mattered. America exported goods to the world—enjoying a trade surplus as late as 1975—and manufacturing was at the heart of the economy (though it was never the largest employer). In Europe the class bargains that tamed the strife between labor and capital characteristic of the nineteenth century put primary emphasis on the welfare state, but in America the welfare state was secondary. More important was the reigning political economy’s promise of a vigorous private sector that would provide prosperity and continuous flourishing for all.
By the late 1970s, the postwar economic order was under obvious strain. Stagflation was one symptom; lagging American competitiveness against the allies we had rebuilt was another. The liberalization of the economy that started with conservatives in Congress under President Carter and expanded under President Reagan was necessary to restore the postwar promise. And it worked, in part by unleashing technological innovation that would be more creative than destructive over the next decade. The 1970s and ’80s also saw the creation or expansion of international institutions that were viewed at the time (if not always explicitly acknowledged) as instruments of Cold War policy. Everything from the acceptance of China into the American-led world economy to the construction of a European union was part of a strategy aimed at constraining the Soviet Union in the long run. Only the long run proved to be much shorter than anyone expected. By 1992 the strategic environment was totally transformed.
Yet America’s leaders did not think through the implications. Free trade agreements that made sense as a component of Cold War strategy took on a logic of their own, with plenty of support from academic economists who dreamed of nothing but global efficiency. Instead of viewing post–Cold War China as a rising rival, America’s elites saw the remaining communist superpower as a land of opportunity for themselves. The original rationale for America to pursue a global economic order had vanished. Yet instead of once again focusing on the economic interests of America’s workers, the country’s leaders committed themselves to universal liberalism. The result was a political backlash: The Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot campaigns of 1992 and 1996 featured pitched battles in Congress over “most favored nation” status for China and street protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999—the “Battle of Seattle.” But the backlash was undercut by a decade’s worth of technology-driven prosperity, and rather than conceding that the critics had a point, the consensus in Washington pushed ever further ahead. That led to a plunge in American industrial employment after 2000, as China was fully welcomed into the world economy.
Members of the credentialed class like to depict Trump’s voters as “nostalgic” for an America that is never coming back. If anything, it is our leadership that is nostalgic—for the 1990s—and deep in denial. Globalization was relatively pain-free during the 1990s because going into that decade Americans did not know what would happen next. The class compact of the past defined the public’s outlook and expectations more than the unknown future. Now the future without a class compact is clear to everyone, even if many in the leadership class are reluctant to describe it in frank terms. It means an America broken into three relatively immobile classes: a credentialed and knowledge-based elite, a large service class that prepares the first’s food and tends to its children (also the class of the urban Uber driver and suburban Amazon warehouse worker), and a vast economically unneeded population in what used to be the commercial and industrial heartland.
In their presidential campaigns, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Hillary Clinton all provided insight into how the elite views those they consider part of the unproductive class: as “bitter clingers,” as a parasitical “47 percent” who are not “job creators,” and as moral “deplorables.” They are simply unnecessary to the next stage of economic and cultural liberalism. They want wages that are too high and career prospects to which they are not entitled. Their expectations are too great, in contrast to those of immigrants whose prospects only brighten if they come to the U.S. from the developing world.
.......
Read more: www.firstthings.com
Babbitt meant that the class conflict of the nineteenth century, still very much alive in his day, was symptomatic of something deeper. Breitbart in turn meant that the cultural contexts created by news and entertainment media—by the storylines they script and the emotional cues embedded within them—largely define the limits of the possible in politics. These two views combine in the conviction that culture, in both the social and spiritual senses, takes precedence over politics or economics.
As important as that truth is, it is easily misapplied. In practice it has meant that conservatives emphasize certain “cultural” forms of argument without seriously confronting the hard questions of politics or economics—as if worldly matters will take care of themselves if only our rhetoric is elevated and our intentions pure. Sometimes this leads to a politics of cant. Sometimes it leads to political quietism or a drift toward literary utopianism. And sometimes it just leads to ham-fisted attempts to produce “conservative” films or other forms of popular culture, in which the political message is almost always more conspicuous than the artistic merit.
Cultural, philosophical, and religious assumptions suffuse public life, and in that sense politics is indeed downstream from culture. One can even go further and say that culture, broadly understood, is the riverbed of politics, setting the course along which it flows. But that course is checked and channeled by willful human activity—by building dams and canals, as it were. How this is done turns largely on economic questions, or rather questions of what used to be called political economy. Different kinds of political economy not only produce different dispensations of wealth and power but also profoundly shape family life, individual character, and the civic landscape. A political program therefore has to be an economic program, not just in the superficial sense of dealing with subjects like taxes and regulation but in the deeper sense of relating the nation’s economic way of life to its cultural fabric and the very conditions of its existence.
The underlying structure of American life should not be questioned at every election. But it does need to be considered anew when dramatic changes have taken place in the world or at home. Our present predicament is the result of letting political thought run on autopilot for too long. Donald Trump’s rise, and the rise today of an invigorated socialism in the Democratic party, are signs that conventional politics had failed because conventional politics was built upon an economic order that has ended without its advocates even realizing it.
There are times in a nation’s life when the terms of its politics are settled. Rival parties might disagree about how to achieve certain goals—winning the Cold War, increasing GDP, reducing crime—but they agree on the overall story of politics and frame their proposals in light of it. Republicans and Democrats shared a story throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, just as Britain’s Conservatives and Liberals shared a story in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Benjamin Disraeli never brought back the Corn Laws, just as William Gladstone never contemplated disestablishing the Church of England or abolishing the monarchy. Ronald Reagan said he wanted to conserve the New Deal, while Bill Clinton—after losing a bruising battle over national healthcare—decided to go no further and announced that “the era of big government is over.”
In foreign policy, both Republicans and Democrats still talk about “American leadership.” Even in cultural politics, stark differences in policy can be framed within the same narrative: Abortion is usually about individual rights, for example, whether a woman’s or the unborn’s. For many conservatives, the alternative to accepting same-sex marriage a decade ago was to propose domestic partnerships for same-sex couples. The details matter, and they can be matters of life or death. But even the gravest questions can often be addressed within a shared idiom.
Yet there are times when a nation faces a fundamental choice about its nature and direction. The choice between an agrarian and aristocratic or a commercial and bourgeois political order confronted both Britain and France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Americans too had to choose between agrarian ideals (belied by the reality of slavery) and industrial development at several points between the Constitution’s ratification and the outbreak of the Civil War. In the early twentieth century, the relevant choice was between unreconciled class struggle, of the sort that had been going on for nearly a hundred years, or the imposition of a new settlement upon labor and capital alike—the mixed economy.
America is now at another moment of choice. The class compact that came out of the Great Depression and World War II stabilized many of the social tensions dating back to the very beginnings of industrialization. It has broken down. The welfare state is heading toward bankruptcy. Americans are increasingly working as contractors rather than salaried employees, with fewer benefits and less security. Industrial jobs are vanishing. A family wage, lifelong work, retirement guarantees, and brighter prospects for one’s children and grandchildren are not part of the bargain anymore. Economic growth is concentrated in cities and college towns, leaving everyplace else to wither. If the country continues on its present course, all of this will get worse.
Until 2016, however, both major parties continued to campaign as if the class compact of the twentieth century still held sway. Conservative Republican policy ideas were limited to keeping federal spending in check—in theory, if never in practice—and cutting taxes and regulations, while looking for novel ways to continue providing the benefits Americans had come to expect: by privatizing Social Security, for example, or mandating the purchase of private health insurance (Mitt Romney’s idea before it became Obama’s). Progressive Democrats simply planned to have the federal government spend more to keep the welfare state expanding indefinitely. Though just as Republicans could spend as freely as Democrats, Democrats experimented with Republican solutions for making the welfare state more affordable or acceptable to business. Obamacare was one result.
These policies, whether right or left, can no more save the class compact of the twentieth century than farm subsidies could save the agrarian ideal. They may or may not be totally useless in their own right. But they are beside the main point. The American economy has changed in ways that require a new choice about the kind of country we are.
Up to now, the choice has been made by default. Leaders in both parties, in corporate America and in the academy and media, have assumed that what worked twenty or thirty years ago will continue to work today. The reigning assumption has been that politics should focus on fine-tuning the private and public sectors to provide the growth, opportunity, and security Americans have come to rely upon. A tax cut or a new entitlement is all we need. But the America of the twentieth century was a country in several ways profoundly different from the one we inhabit today. It had strong community ties supplied by religious and ethnic groups. It had a powerful private-sector labor movement. Its economy was localized, not globalized; where an industry was located mattered. America exported goods to the world—enjoying a trade surplus as late as 1975—and manufacturing was at the heart of the economy (though it was never the largest employer). In Europe the class bargains that tamed the strife between labor and capital characteristic of the nineteenth century put primary emphasis on the welfare state, but in America the welfare state was secondary. More important was the reigning political economy’s promise of a vigorous private sector that would provide prosperity and continuous flourishing for all.
By the late 1970s, the postwar economic order was under obvious strain. Stagflation was one symptom; lagging American competitiveness against the allies we had rebuilt was another. The liberalization of the economy that started with conservatives in Congress under President Carter and expanded under President Reagan was necessary to restore the postwar promise. And it worked, in part by unleashing technological innovation that would be more creative than destructive over the next decade. The 1970s and ’80s also saw the creation or expansion of international institutions that were viewed at the time (if not always explicitly acknowledged) as instruments of Cold War policy. Everything from the acceptance of China into the American-led world economy to the construction of a European union was part of a strategy aimed at constraining the Soviet Union in the long run. Only the long run proved to be much shorter than anyone expected. By 1992 the strategic environment was totally transformed.
Yet America’s leaders did not think through the implications. Free trade agreements that made sense as a component of Cold War strategy took on a logic of their own, with plenty of support from academic economists who dreamed of nothing but global efficiency. Instead of viewing post–Cold War China as a rising rival, America’s elites saw the remaining communist superpower as a land of opportunity for themselves. The original rationale for America to pursue a global economic order had vanished. Yet instead of once again focusing on the economic interests of America’s workers, the country’s leaders committed themselves to universal liberalism. The result was a political backlash: The Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot campaigns of 1992 and 1996 featured pitched battles in Congress over “most favored nation” status for China and street protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999—the “Battle of Seattle.” But the backlash was undercut by a decade’s worth of technology-driven prosperity, and rather than conceding that the critics had a point, the consensus in Washington pushed ever further ahead. That led to a plunge in American industrial employment after 2000, as China was fully welcomed into the world economy.
Members of the credentialed class like to depict Trump’s voters as “nostalgic” for an America that is never coming back. If anything, it is our leadership that is nostalgic—for the 1990s—and deep in denial. Globalization was relatively pain-free during the 1990s because going into that decade Americans did not know what would happen next. The class compact of the past defined the public’s outlook and expectations more than the unknown future. Now the future without a class compact is clear to everyone, even if many in the leadership class are reluctant to describe it in frank terms. It means an America broken into three relatively immobile classes: a credentialed and knowledge-based elite, a large service class that prepares the first’s food and tends to its children (also the class of the urban Uber driver and suburban Amazon warehouse worker), and a vast economically unneeded population in what used to be the commercial and industrial heartland.
In their presidential campaigns, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and Hillary Clinton all provided insight into how the elite views those they consider part of the unproductive class: as “bitter clingers,” as a parasitical “47 percent” who are not “job creators,” and as moral “deplorables.” They are simply unnecessary to the next stage of economic and cultural liberalism. They want wages that are too high and career prospects to which they are not entitled. Their expectations are too great, in contrast to those of immigrants whose prospects only brighten if they come to the U.S. from the developing world.
.......
Read more: www.firstthings.com
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