Rick McGinnis:
A nagging question has been percolating through what passes for the conservative movement these days: What, if anything, has conservatism conserved? At its finest point the question asks what conservative politicians and governments have succeeded in preserving – in society and domestic policy, never mind in economics and foreign policy? But essentially, it’s a question about just what conservatism means today, in practical terms.
In my home province, Doug Ford’s government is regarded to be conservative in name only, with little in the way of core principles beyond its support of the premier’s backers in the development business. But that’s really nothing more than business as usual in this province with the cover torn off. The most cogent criticism Ford’s opponents have is that he’s a low-resolution populist working from a crib note version of U.S. president Donald Trump’s playbook.
As for Trump, who gambled that he could alienate his party’s traditional ideologues on his way to two (non-consecutive) terms in the White House, his second term has amplified questions about just what, precisely, he stands for. In an essay published on the George W. Bush Institute website, Andy Smarick of the Manhattan Institute writes that “conservative critics of the New Right have often argued that there is nothing conservative about tariffs, trade wars, industrial policy, protectionism, and tough anti-immigration measures.”
“These critics also point to the strains of the New Right that laud nationalism, integralism (the integration of religious principles into the state), and President Donald Trump’s I-alone-ism to argue that the movement is veering toward statism – long the antithesis of American conservatism.”
For older conservatives (and younger ones who’ve become invested in the cult around him), Ronald Reagan provided an idea, if not exactly a definition of conservatism all the way back in 1977, when he said that “the principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind.”
It’s a stirring self-justification for a movement that once held the political high ground, but with a slight tweak you could put this quote in the mouth of an esteemed liberal politician – Jimmy Carter, say, or John F. Kennedy – and its sentiment would vindicate Democratic policy at almost any point in recent electoral history.
Perhaps we need to go back to Russell Kirk for a definition of conservatism, and he was helpful enough to distill his into ten points in The Politics of Prudence, published in 1993, the year before his death. He wrote that conservatives believe in a moral order, in custom, convention and continuity, and “the principle of prescription…for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.”
They are “guided by their principle of prudence” and “the principle of variety” and are “chastened by their principle of imperfection” and are “persuaded that freedom and prosperity are closely linked.” Conservatives “uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism” and perceive “the need for prudent restraints upon power and human passions” and that “the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.”
But when Kirk celebrated “the principle of variety” he explained that for “preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality.” A realistic and rational idea to Kirk, no doubt, but you don’t have to be a populist to see how hard it is to sell this notion, which not only sounds wholly undemocratic but smacks of a defense of elites and elitism. Good luck trying to persuade voters while implying that they must resign themselves to their place in “orders and classes” and tolerate “many sorts of inequality.”
Andrew Sullivan – a very different kind of conservative from Kirk – tried to solve the growing split in American conservative politics in 2006 with his book The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get it Back. “If the essence of conservatism is conserving,” he wrote” “then our current moment is an extremely unnerving one. In the twenty-first century, the pace of change can at times seem overwhelming. Quantum leaps in technology have transformed how we communicate with one another and expanded everyone’s access to an endless array of life possibilities. Jobs last months rather than decades. Travel is cheaper and easier than ever before. Mass immigration has altered settled cultures across the globe. Freer trade has upended life’s certainties and customs in almost every society on earth.
“Assumptions we once made about who we are as a people, or as a country, or even as men and women, are now open to debate. The meaning of family, of marriage, of health, of sex, of faith, are not things we cannot simply take for granted as a shared understanding. And this pace adds a more bewildering and communal sense of loss to the more familiar, quotidian losses of human existence.”
Sullivan goes on in his book to try to square a lot of circles in making his argument against “fundamentalist” conservatism, including a decidedly (small-j) jesuitical defense of abortion in the earliest fetal stages. Both the world and Sullivan have gone through some changes in the two decades since he published his book: he endorsed Barack Obama and voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris (albeit with reservations) and has taken to calling himself a “liberal conservative,” which only sounds like an oxymoron if you haven’t lived in Canada with generations of Progressive Conservative governments. (Which in itself partially explains the success of Doug Ford.)
One solution is proposed by Timothy Goeglein, onetime George W. Bush staffer and now vice-president of Focus on the Family, in his recent book What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family. He gives it away in the title of the book: “The renewal of faith is the essential part of solving the break-down of marriage and the family.”
Goeglein advocates for conservatives to put family ahead of politics, noting that the college-educated elites “have outsized power over American culture and politics, and on matters of family, they are abdicating.” Though he notes – as many conservatives have – that “they typically don’t practice what they preach…Sometimes they preach the opposite, celebrating the practices they privately shun.” They’re statistically more likely to have stable, traditional families and even discourage their children from using social media and technology.
At the same time working class whites who have made populist conservatism an election-winning voting bloc are where you find “children born out of wedlock or living in a single-parent home.” It’s no surprise that Trump, thrice-married and nobody’s moral paragon, is sympathetic to them in a way that Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul weren’t. A party in power relying on this demographic in its base is in no position to talk about prudence or scold supporters afflicted with lost jobs and declining standards of living for their “fundamentalism.”
If you want to make a Republican metaphor, the current search for a definition of conservatism looks a lot like the proverbial blind men trying to describe an elephant by running their hands over its component parts; there are a lot of confident ideas but nothing that sounds coherent or plausible.
Conservatism right now can be anything you want it to be, much like the month-to-month policies of the Liberal Party of Canada, with the crucial difference that Canada’s federal liberals seek nothing more than to flatter the sensibilities of their voters, while conservatives (as Sullivan intuited) generally make their supporters nervous when they aren’t trying to frighten them. Promising anything to anyone might help a party survive from election to election, but it won’t do much to conserve what remains that’s worth value.
