There is no conservative movement. The ‘Reagan coalition’ stopped
existing as an operational political force some time ago.
Many
conservatives are trying to figure out how Ronald Reagan’s conservative
movement can best advance its aims in Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Some
believe the conservative movement must embrace Trump, whether from principle or
simply to secure a place for the movement in a Trump administration. Others
believe the conservative movement must reject Trump so it can credibly lead its
prodigal party back from the wilderness.
All sides are
united in believing the Republican Party is deeply corrupt (true
enough), and that the only thing that can save the GOP is the conservative
movement.
The problem is, there
is no conservative movement. The “Reagan coalition” stopped existing as an
operational political force some time ago. The conservative movement cannot use
the Republican Party to advance its aims simply because, as a non-existent
entity, the conservative movement has no aims to advance.
This will come
as a surprise to many of you. After all, 37 percent of American adults describe
themselves as “conservatives.” That’s 89.7 million Americans in a
movement I’m saying doesn’t exist! Yet polls are often misleading, especially
regarding self-identification.
Self-identified labels—like “pro-life” and “conservative”—often have surprisingly
little to do with voters’ actual policy commitments. To
identify a real political movement, we have to dig beneath the label and find
out what exactly holds the group together.
Unfortunately,
when we dig beneath the “conservative” label to learn what ties bind the
conservative movement together, we find nothing at all.
A Current
Conservative Taxonomy
There are three
factions within today’s Republican Party, all of them deeply and structurally
opposed to one another. All three call themselves “conservative” and
berate the other factions for their deviations from “true” conservatism, but
each defines “conservatism” according to their own factional priorities.
The
populists are
nationalist, nativist, and pro-American. They supported Trump almost from the
start, and they read Breitbart and Drudge.
Because
they consider giving voice to “Americans” the defining characteristic
of conservatism, populist conservatives see support for illegal immigrants
as an
excommunicable offense, but are open
to raising taxes on the rich to keep middle-class
entitlement programs running, and are largely
indifferent to (or “pragmatic” about) “culture war” issues like
religious liberty.
Going by
presidential preference polls, populists make up about
a third of the Republican party. The other factions pejoratively
refer to the populists as “Know-Nothings,”
among other things.
The
establishment
is chiefly concerned with growing gross domestic product at all costs. They
supported Jeb Bush or John Kasich at
the end of February, and they read the Wall Street Journal and
the Financial Times.
Because they
view “growth” as the defining characteristic of conservatism, establishment
conservatives see tax increases or even tax
cuts that do not flow directly to the pockets of so-called “job
creators” as grave heresies against conservatism, but they are eager to increase
immigration and happy,
nay eager, to surrender to the Left on “culture war”
issues.
Although smaller than
the other factions, the establishment wields disproportionate
clout through its well-heeled donor class. The other factions pejoratively
refer to members of the establishment as “plutocrats,” among other
things.
The grassroots, which fights
for a culture that protects life, liberty, and the family, supported Ted Cruz
or Marco Rubio by the end of February. They read the National
Review, The Federalist, and First Things.
Because they
see “culture” as the central feature of conservatism, grassroots
conservatives obviously view so-called “culture war” issues as
essential. They see economic growth as just
one aspect of the movement (and do not take the establishment’s
rigid view of how to achieve it), and they take a more
nuanced, even “pragmatic” approach to immigration than either of the other
two factions. Like the populists, they seem to make up about
one-third of the GOP. The other factions pejoratively
refer to the grassroots as “religious fundamentalists,” among other
things.
Notice the
problem.
Although all
three factions describe themselves as “conservative,” they are directly
(often furiously) opposed to each other on issues each camp
considers essential. What’s vital to grassroots conservatives
is anathema to the establishment. The cornerstone of establishment
conservatism is an outrage to populists. The core of populist conservatism
is—at best!—alarming to the grassroots. On and around it goes. They’ve all come
up with nasty names for each other, because the three wings of “conservatism”
largely hate one other.
Ragnarok for
Reaganism
It
is not new to say there are different schools of conservatism, nor
is it new to find it’s tough to pin down a precise definition of
“conservatism.” But the depth of hostility between the three camps—that’s
new. An illustration: it is well-known that Republican voters (who
largely identify as “conservatives”) are historically
unhappy with Trump. But polls
showed that, even if the nominee were someone else—Rubio, Cruz, Kasich, or Bush—Republican
dissatisfaction with any one of them would have been at a historic high. No candidate had
the ability to unite the party, because the factions of the conservative
movement are no longer compatible.
The
establishment, which was once willing to tolerate grassroots cultural
conservatism (to a point) for the sake of political expediency, now openly
opposes the grassroots on some of its central issues. The
populists, once willing to accept the promise that sweeping free trade
agreements would eventually benefit working-class whites, have lost
their faith in the almighty global market. In short, the three
factions of “conservatism” are now so divergent that, by-and-large, they simply
cannot tolerate the core principles or favored candidates of the other
“conservative” factions.
The conclusion
is as difficult as it is inescapable: the “conservative” movement no longer has
either clear first principles or clear policy prescriptions on
virtually any issue, from domestic surveillance to overseas
military operations to taxation to policing to immigration to marriage.
Self-identified “conservatives” with strong conservative credentials and large
followings openly contradict one other on nearly all of them. Schisms over one
or two major issues are routine within political movements, and are usually
self-healing, but this isn’t a schism; this is a shattering.
Conservatism
is not a political movement. It’s the memory of one. The Reagan
coalition has fallen, and there is no sign it is ever coming back.
“Conservatism,” insofar as it persists, is now a mere tribe, incapable
of mobilizing for anything besides stopping the
liberal tribe, which it
pretty consistently fails
to do anyway.
Conservatism is dead.
Wake Up and
Smell the Ashes
I have always
identified as “conservative,” and maybe you do, too. For you and I, then, this
is an especially strange moment. We didn’t “leave” the conservative
movement; we simply find there is no conservative movement left to leave.
It is like we
woke up one morning to find that our house was demolished while we were asleep.
Meanwhile, our housemates are still wandering around in the ruins as though
everything were normal, showering with the hose and eating breakfast on a table
of rubble, homeless but oblivious.
Heading down to the city planner’s office,
we learn the house was condemned months ago, but our housemates couldn’t agree
on a contractor to come in and fix the problems. As a great conservative
president once said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” So it
didn’t.
There’s nothing
for it: we need a new house. And new roommates. This presents a great challenge
to us. Yet it also presents a great opportunity to return to the lost roots of
conservatism.
When the modern
conservative movement started out under the political leadership of Barry
Goldwater and later Reagan, it was built on centuries-old principles handed
down by men like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Toqueville. In 1953, the great
intellectual, Russell Kirk, summarized those
central premises of conservatism.
In his “six
canons,” Kirk articulated a conservativism that embraces “a transcendant order,
or body of natural law,” because “[p]olitical problems, at bottom, are
religious and moral problems.”
Conservatives, Kirk said, reject “uniformity,
egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims,” even as they recognize “ultimate
equality in the judgement of God and… before courts of law.” They maintain the
importance of property rights against Leviathan government, and distrust
“sophisters, calculators, and economists who would reconstruct society on
abstract designs.” Finally, a Kirk conservative is prudent, recognizing “that
change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring
conflagration, rather than a torch of progress.”
The modern
“conservative movement” has lost touch with these essentials. The
establishment builds entire fiscal plans out of the “abstract designs” of
“calculators and economists,” and the Wall Street Journal editorial
board wouldn’t recognize a “body of natural law” if that body hauled back and
punched L. Gordon Crovitz in the nose. Even if they did take notice,
the Journal and its Acela Corridor buddies would find it gauche in
the extreme to actually speak out loud about political
problems in fundamentally “religious and moral” terms.
The populists,
for their part, often preach about problems in highly charged moral
language, but their only common theme is outrage, and their chosen avatar is
Trump, the serial adulterer. Moreover, their desire to burn down all our
political institutions is the very definition of the
“devouring conflagration” Kirk warns of.
Conservatism has
failed, then, partly because a large swath of the “movement” has lost
touch with its central ideas. The very word “conservative” has been
badly damaged. Corrupted and polarized, the label has become little more than
a tribal
marker, and alienates many voters who would otherwise naturally align
with Kirk’s principles.
By Any Other
Name
Yet those core,
conservative ideas, plainly stated and honestly championed, are still popular
across a wide swath of American society, including large groups of voters who
wouldn’t be caught dead identifying themselves as “conservative.” (I think here
of black
economic moderates, various first- and second-generation immigrant
groups, white union Democrats, and others.)
This
is only one vision of a conservative future after the conservative movement.
There are many others out there. Some are good. Some are not.
The same can be
said of many “grassroots” conservative ideas; Ben Domenech is right to
be shocked that no major presidential candidate this year supports major
abortion restrictions, even though Americans
overwhelmingly do. That means there is still hope for
the canons of Burke and Kirk. But our hope, ironically, no longer
lies in the so-called “conservative” movement, nor in the Republican Party it
animates. We need to build a new house.
For example, it
is not
impossible to imagine a new coalition that makes “human dignity” its
watchword. The coalition would guard the life, liberty, family, and property of
every individual—in the womb, on the deathbed, and everywhere in between
(school, poverty, church, parenthood, the factory floor, and beyond). Likewise,
the coalition would stand fast against the twin heads of Leviathan—Big
Government and Big Business—by rebuilding an ownership society with strong,
healthy, and independent local institutions.
With these
principles, a new coalition could draw supporters from both Right and
Left—libertarians, traditionalists, minorities, the Christian Left, and more—so
the media would probably not label it “conservative.” Yet, in the truest sense
of the word, conservative is exactly what that coalition would be.
This is only one
vision of a conservative future after the conservative movement. There are many
others out there. Some
are good. Some
are not. But we cannot properly debate how to rebuild unless we recognize
the full scope of what’s been destroyed: a movement that dominated American
politics for decades, that gave us “morning in America,” Antonin Scalia, the
Iraq War, and, for many of us, our first political identity. It will be greatly
missed.
Conservatism is
dead. Long may it live.
James
J. Heaney is a Java application developer from St. Paul, MN. He blogs at
jamesjheaney.com, and his work has previously appeared at Aleteia. He always
reads the comments.