Conservatism's Moment

 

"If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or right, but I would like to suggest that there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down—up to a man's age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap totalitarianism, and regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course."
 
~Ronald Reagan, Address on Behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater, October 27, 1964 

I. Introduction
 
Searching for insight in the muck of political commentary—especially amongst the volleys of insults and underhanded strategy that occupy the Democratic-Republican axis of American politics—is like trying to find a lost engagement ring in the septic tank.  Occasionally there are moments of clarity, but these can only be seen retrospectively, when it is too late for them to be taken into account.
 
The 2008 election, almost exactly one year ago, was one such moment, when Barack Obama and his Democrats were swept into power on a wave of progressive hope: hope for an end to lies, hope for an end to incompetence, hope for an end to tendentiousness, and hope for a great, inclusive society no longer fighting the same old culture war.         
 
Nevertheless, in the year that’s passed, politics has regressed into politics; the hope has disappeared like the shine on a new pair of sneakers. Obama’s approval rating is down a whopping 17% in less than ten months.  The pundits of the right are throwing punches, the White House is countering them, and hard-line Obama supporters are frustrated that things aren’t moving fast enough.  It has become clear that while Obama may be well-qualified to be president, he only became one because he was a shrewd politician.
 
Nowhere is this more forcefully understood than within the Republican Party, the de facto heirs of traditional American Conservatism.  And while narrow-minded pundits on the left wax on about paradigm shifts and Republican suicides, the sleeping giant of the right becomes more and more of a single mind: Big Government has gone too far.
 
A year ago, Democratic strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville discovered that Rush Limbaugh was very unpopular with voters and anointed Limbaugh unofficial leader of the Republican Party.  It was a tactic meant to both marginalize the Republican base and split-away right-leaning moderates who find Limbaugh distasteful—classic divide and conquer.  Democrats preach the “Party of Rush” mantra as though Republicans are monolithic, but Wikipedia lists fourteen schools of conservatism: compassionate, cultural, economic, fiscal, green, liberal, libertarian, national, neo, paleo, social, Thatcherism, theo, and traditionalist. Though nuanced and prone to infighting, these schools are united in the support of those institutions which developed organically over a period of time—such as traditional morality and capitalism—and opposed to those institutions planned and executed by the state. 

With unrestrained economic stimuli and President Obama’s ambitious progressive agenda to rally against, conservatives may actually be much more unified now than they were during the confusing Bush years.  This article analyzes three philosophical hard-cores within the Republican Party that have significant political presence now: social conservatism, libertarian conservatism, and neoconservatism.      

II. Social Conservatism
 
"Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history."
 
~Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, 1968
 
According to the 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States, evangelical Christians constitute 28.6 percent of the American population and are quickly growing—both because they have large families and because they are evangelizing.  They overwhelmingly live in the less-populous states to the south and west, where they are undemocratically over-represented in both the senate and the Electoral College.  Evangelical Christians regularly vote Republican, vote at much higher rates than other segments of the general population, and actively participate in the political process.  Evangelical Christians are almost entirely socially conservative, but not all social conservatives are evangelical Christians.  There are also roughly 35 million socially conservative Catholics, socially conservative members of other religions, and secular social conservatives.
 
The presence of social conservatism is both academic and popular: institutions such as the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institute preach a restrained form, while populist radio and television announcers like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Schlessinger, Ann Coulter, and Michael Savage spread socially conservative views throughout society with more vigor.
 
Traditionally, social conservatives have allied with both libertarian conservatives and neoconservatives.  Although, there is tension with libertarian conservatives among social conservatives who believe traditional morality should be legislated above all else, and a significant segment of social conservatives are still bitter over the difference between the devout Christian George W. Bush they elected and the post-9/11 neoconservative, warmonger Bush they were stuck with.
 
While they are not a majority, social conservatives's strict adherence to core values has made them the most reliable voting block in the country. As such, their ability at getting like-minded politicians elected to legislatures is unequaled.  2012 election straw polls point to Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin, both evangelical Christians, as leading Republican candidates for President.  The issues of importance for social conservatives continue to be, as always, opposition to abortion and gay marriage, support for intelligent design, prayer in schools, gun rights, and the general promotion of family values.               
 
In last week’s Mid-Midterm Elections, social conservatives reminded America of their presence by overturning gay marriage in Maine on a ballot initiative.  Maine became the 31st state to ban the practice through that process.  Any Republican strategy in the future must acknowledge that social conservatives are the largest and most reliable constituency in the Republican base.        

III. Libertarian Conservatism
 
That government is best which governs least, because its people discipline themselves.
 
~Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, 1849
 
It’s often said that organizing libertarians is like herding cats.  According to Portrait of America, 16% of the American electorate have opinions that are libertarian, while only 2% define themselves as libertarians.  Libertarians have traditionally voted Republican, but are increasingly spread throughout both parties.  This makes them a valuable swing voting block.  Whatever party can best articulate a platform in line with the libertarian principles of individual choice, limited government, non-aggression and the free market, as advocated by the Cato Institute, Reason Magazine, Glenn Beck, and the tea party activists can pick up almost a sixth of the voting population.
 
The most vocal element of the libertarian faction of American conservatism is undoubtedly Ron Paul.  Paul was the leading Republican fundraiser in the fourth quarter of 2007, and received the most donations from the armed forces.  He also used grassroots marketing techniques, such as the “moneybomb,” to become particularly popular among the young and computer-literate.    In a Fox News Poll, Paul was declared runner-up to Mitt Romney of the 2008 Republican Primary Debate with 25% support.  Paul’s 2008 book, The Revolution: a Manifesto, went on to become the number one political book on Amazon.com and number one on the New York Times Nonfiction Bestseller List.  Ron Paul has benefitted particularly from the endorsements and sympathetic support of blogger Andrew Sullivan, another libertarian conservative.
 
Nevertheless, Republican brass ignored Paul for as long as possible, casting him as a “crackpot”, and Rudy Giuliani successfully cast Paul’s opposition to military interventionism as “isolationism” during the 2008 Republican Primary Debates, an accusation that continues to plague libertarians.  Despite his popularity, Ron Paul was never taken seriously in the race perhaps because his ideas did not fit into the neat, conventional wisdom of the two party system.  The libertarian torch has been passed to his son, Rand Paul, who is an unlikely and viable candidate for senate in the state of Kentucky.  No doubt, Republican pundits will be watching this race to see if libertarian conservatives are electable. 
  
Republican and Democratic leaders alike have taken a lack of organization as a sign that libertarians are not a significant political demographic in the United States. The fact that the rare libertarian candidates, like Ron Paul, do receive significant public support, however, suggests the problem is the dearth of libertarian candidates.  Many libertarian conservative elements, like Andrew Sullivan, voted for Obama in 2008.  If the Republican Party put up a candidate that sufficiently left people alone that don’t want to be bothered by regulations and taxes, it could gain this otherwise unrepresented 16 percent of the electorate.
 
The relationship between libertarians and social conservatives is strained; they have almost nothing in common and need a very big tent to accommodate both schools of thought.  Nevertheless, libertarian conservatives tend to focus more on economic issues and support local autonomy, so common ground between the two factions, like with Ronald Reagan, is possible.  The relationship between libertarian conservatives and neoconservatives is likewise tenuous.  They generally agree on taxes, and disagree on everything else.  Libertarians feel America should pursue peace with all nations through free-trade and mutual-dependence in contrast to the neoconservative ideal of democracy building.
 
For the foreseeable future, many libertarians will continue to ignore politics, while the politically-active among their ranks will engage in debates over irrelevant philosophical issues and accuse each other of ideological impurity.  Reagan effectively tapped this demographic in 1980, when the economy was bad, and again in 1984.  If the economy is still struggling in 2012, and the Obama Administration is still increasing government spending, perhaps the long awaited libertarian revolution will begin as libertarian conservatives cast themselves as the true heirs of the Old Right.

IV. Neoconservatism
 
"Power breeds responsibilities, in international affairs as in domestic—or even private. To dodge or disclaim these responsibilities is one form of the abuse of power."
 
~ Irving Kristol
 
Neoconservative influence in the Republican Party reached its zenith with Bush and Cheney.  Yet despite the taste the prior administration left in most people’s mouths, the philosophical roots of neoconservatism are still influential.  Many of the more-sophisticated attacks on the Obama Administration originate in the neoconservative faction of the Republican Party, specifically through the work of William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize winner, Washington Post columnist, contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, seminal researcher of bipolar disorder, originator of the term, “The Reagan Doctrine”, primogenitor of the idea of America as sole superpower after the demise of the Soviet Union, and leading neoconservative theorist.  Writes politico:

Krauthammer has emerged in the Age of Obama as a central conservative voice, the kind of leader of the opposition that economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman represented for the left during the Bush years: a coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the new president.  

In Obama: the Grand Strategy, Krauthammer discussed the inevitable rationing that would come with universal healthcare.  With the "Death Panels" meme, rationing has kept Obama’s main domestic goal at a snail's pace:

Taken as a whole, Obama's social democratic agenda is breathtaking. And the rollout has thus far been brilliant. It follows (Slate’s Mickey) Kaus' advice to "give pandering a chance" and adheres to the Democratic tradition of being the party that gives things away, while leaving the green-eyeshade stinginess to those heartless Republicans.

Like most neoconservatives, Krauthammer came from the left, having worked for the Carter Administration and as a speechwriter for Walter Mondale.  Indeed neoconservatism has its roots in Trotskyism.  As the left became more oriented towards international organizations, a faction of Trotskyites split off and started the neoconservative movement.  This begs the question of whether the neoconservative movement is even conservative at all.  Conservatives have traditionally distrusted government solutions to problems, believing that governments can not take the place of individuals and families in fixing society.  Neoconservatives believe, like liberals do, that they can solve problems.  The Iraq War, as conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, was meant to transform the Middle East from a troublesome collection of dictatorships into a new bastion of democracy.  This is not a conservative idea; it's liberal in a fundamental way—even if its rhetoric, goals, and philosphy look conservative.  
 
The relationship between neoconservatives and social conservatives was strained within the Bush Administration, despite the support of socially conservative voters in 2004: war is hardly in line with Christian values.  Many social conservatives are disappointed with the direction the Bush Administration went after 9-11: a politician whose platform of "Compassionate Conservativism" had resonated with them seemed to be spending too much time and money democracy-building in the Middle East, while gays high-jacked the institution of marriage at home and the social conservative agenda was neglected. 

The relationship between neoconservatives and libertarian conservatives is poor.  Many libertarian conservatives voted for Kerry and Obama respectively in 2004 and 2008, largely because of the Iraq War.  Jeffersonian libertarian conservatives and Wilsonian neoconservatives fundamentally disagree on international policy: libertarian conservatives generally support engaging nations through free-trade and open borders, while neoconservatives appear to have more in common with the revolutionaries in France than with Edmund Burke.  The only thing the two factions agree on is keeping taxes low.  Libertarian conservatives are generally disgusted by what they see as the profligate spending of the Bush Administration and the threats to civil liberties via the Patriot Act.  As Cato Institute President Edward Crane famously said in a 2003 Financial Times Editorial:

The neoconservative agenda is a particular threat to liberty perhaps greater than the ideologically spent ideas of left-liberalism. Always a movement of bright intellectual leaders, neoconservatism has mostly been a movement with a head but no body. One rarely runs into a neocon on the street.   

Neoconservatism will continue to be disproportionately represented in the intellectual leadership of modern conservatism.  As neoconservatism has accepted the welfare state and other reforms of The New Deal, which are now overwhelmingly popular, neoconservatives are better positioned than politically obsolete libertarian conservatives to ally themselves with social conservatives, the Republican Party's main voter base.   

V. Conclusion
 
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
 
~Alexis de Tocqueville
 
Social conservatives will continue to be the primary pool from which Republicans draw their voters, but  Social conservatives alone are not enough to win an election or govern a country.  Furthermore, social conservatives generally feel there has been limited progress on their issues and are primed to vote for a third party.  It will be important in the future for Republican leadership to shore-up its base with fresh, positive policy initiatives, rather than just spirited dissent. 

Conservatism is faced with an inevitable choice between libertarian conservatism and neoconservatism.  The former has the advantage of a large demographic from which to draw votes, but is generally inconsistent and uninvolved in the political process.  Libertarians have an agenda that is remarkably simple, but consequently inflexible; their rejection of the fundamental changes brought upon American society by The New Deal is politically unpalatable.  They seek a return to the 19th-century style of small government that is largely inconsistent with a voter pool dependent on government services and the welfare state.  It is unlikely that the libertarian message will reach the mainstream unless the profligate spending of the Obama Administration is seen to reach a crisis point. 

However, neoconservatism remains deeply unpopular in the wake of George W. Bush and is universally associated with threats to civil liberties and pre-emptive war.  Furthermore, neoconservatism has its roots in recent liberal ideology and has been cast by libertarian conservatives as disguised liberalism.  Neither libertarian conservatism nor neoconservatism can capture alone enough voters to justify a position of prominence within the Republican Party.
 
Nevertheless, there is a clear way forward.  Many see the election of Michael Steele as RNC Chairman as an attempt to redefine the Republican Party in Democratic identity-politics terms.  The elevation of Steele, however, was, at worst, a failure of Republican leadership to understand why Obama was elected, and, at best, an attempt to hedge against anticipated Democratic use of the race card.  As the experience with Sarah Palin shows, the Republicans will fail if they attempt to accept identity politics, which the Democrats have mastered, instead of insisting on the universality of individualism in an age of increasing centralization of governmental powers.
 
Instead the best course forward for the Republican Party is to discover the urgency of now: jettison the unpopular Bush and publicly divorce the neoconservatives.  Republicans should cast Bush as a liberal anomaly, as libertarian conservatives have been doing for years, viscerate the fiscal looseness and belligerence of both Bush and Obama, and focus on economic and social responsibility.  Social conservatives will continue to loyally support Republican candidates, libertarian conservatives will change loyalties from Obama to the Republican Party, which they see as saving America from runaway government excess.  Neoconservatives will continue to operate behind the scenes, scapegoats for a deeply unpopular Republican regime.
 
In general, President Obama’s progressive statism is controversial and capable of being a conservative rally point, like The New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.  The Republican Party has always been its strongest when it has had a common cause around which to rally its disparate factions.  Remember, the conservative coalition, which ruled Congress for twenty-two years, coalesced in reaction to Roosevelt’s radical, progressive reforms.  The Reagan Democrats came into existence out of spite for the well-meaning, progressive Carter; Reagan, and his political heir, George H.W. Bush, held the Presidency for twelve years, only losing because Ross Perot split the vote in 1992.   As with Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" in 1994, the spectre of radical government-led change is there to oppose.  Indeed, Barack Obama’s very campaign slogan—"Change We Can Believe In"—is opposed to the core belief of all forms of conservatism.  Polls indicate that America remains a center-right nation: there has been no paradigm shift.  The Republican Party would be best served to exploit that fact, reestablish its conservative credentials, rally the troops, and reject change by returning to the philosophies and traditions that have made America what it is today.

Comments

[Andrew Kitchell]

From the viewpoint of a 'liberal' this is a fascinating piece. As much as I like the true values of the conservative movement these values scarcely exist in the Republican Party that is portrayed by the media (and the people who vote Republican...). This piece calls for a revolution of sorts in the Republican Party - "jettison the unpopular Bush and publicly divorce the neoconservatives. Republicans should cast Bush as a liberal anomaly" - however, the Republican Party seems to blanket such a huge range of voters (as demonstrate by the 14 strains of conservative thought) that jettisoning Bush would likely alienate as many people as it would please. Now, you could to argue that the people who would be upset (Religious voters, fools) are so conservative that they will always vote for the Republican Party. Therefore, opening the doors to more libertarian voters would not damage the party's numbers. That is a big conjecture, but seems plausible.

HOWEVER,

For someone who wants so much change from a party, why not create real change: Start a new party that can take advantage of both Democrats and Republicans who are fed up with government spending, war, etc. Sure, proposing this makes you sound like a fringe lunatic (A three party system? Why he must be crazy!) but is it better to have a patched up party that talks one way but in the end answers to a religious base, or could we see the progress you seem to want more easily by pushing for a viable 3rd party?

Fire away...

[Christopher Carr]

Kitchell, I tried to address your concerns in my post here: http://www.theinductive.com/blog/2009/11/10/rejoinders-to-conservatisms-moment.html?SSScrollPosition=411.

[Alison Cox]

As a person who deeply resents being manipulated to make decisions, thus not watching TV in any form and having rejected radio talk shows and NPR, I find it interesting that Wikipedia has me classed into some sort of Conservative segment. As though there were much of a choice to choose from in the voting world. The last few presidential elections left me wondering who is really running this thing. For goodness sakes the best that the Republican party could come up with was John McCain? And, as much as I like Sarah Palin, she is much too polarizing to be of any use to our country. The Democrats did a great job nominating Obama. He reminds me of Reagan. He said, up front what he is and has been consistent. Although I don't like his policies at all, I have to admit that he is trying to pull off what he promised. (unlike Reagan he hasn't been able to sell the American people on his vision)
As a voter I am lost in a sea of decisions. I care about the environment but am unable to trust the choices that are offered to me, I often wonder if there is some unseen person behind the scenes profiting from this new 'idea' of environmental salvation. I really hate to see the government grow any bigger but which decision will shrink the right parts? All those people who for more legislation on abortions, are they saying this to get my vote and then do nothing about this crime against women?
As a Christian, I resent the term 'legislating morality'. If all laws are not based on morals, on what are they based? I think a better term would be 'legislating religion'. We don't want to live in a world where religion is legislated, but in a world where morals are legislated. In a republican society our morals are submitted to our Congress who then legislate them. The problem we are having here in the United States is that hardly anyone is paying attention to Congress and they don't seem to have any morals. Hence the mess we have today.
A third party is unworkable t this time. That needs no explanation. All we can hope for is a bland leader that won't upset too many people. Someone who won't excite either side to much criticism, then we can more like Canada. God, help us!