The Task Ahead for Conservatives in the Biden Age

N ow that Donald Trump has lost the presidential election to an egg-salad sandwich, taken the Republican Senate majority down with him, and inspired a bloody insurrection that has cratered the credibility of the Republican Party at large, Republicans might want to start thinking about how to use what little power they will retain in Washington for the next two years to do something constructive, and perhaps repair their reputation a little and earn back some of the public trust they have rightly forfeited.

The good news is that there is an excellent opportunity for responsible conservative action. The bad news is that conservatives are still, for the moment, reliant on the dysfunctional Republican Party as their only practical political instrument. Reforming the GOP is an urgent task that will fall to such leaders as Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, if it can be done at all. It is not obvious that it can be, but it must be attempted.

Joe Biden as a candidate attempted to be all things to all Democrats: an old-fashioned New Dealer and a woke crusader, a liberal internationalist and an “America First” — his words — nationalist who means to out-Trump Trump on protectionism and domestic corporate welfare, a moral crusader and a champion technocrat. The mix of responsible centrists and hard-left elements in his administration may prove to be a “team of rivals,” or it may prove to be a nest of vipers. It isn’t clear that Biden himself will be able to provide the kind of political leadership his administration will need in order to focus on the two or three pressing matters immediately at hand.

There, Republicans might be of some use.

Biden’s incoming national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has suggested that the administration’s top foreign-policy priority will be repairing our relations with our European allies and fortifying a trans-Atlantic alliance to counter Beijing. Our confrontation with the so-called People’s Republic of China is not merely a matter of trade deficits, as Trump seemed to believe: Trade is an issue, but so are military competition, AI and other technology issues, and human rights. While Trump was out burning bridges, Xi Jinping was building them, positioning China as a responsible partner in world affairs. It does not matter very much whether Americans believe that China actually is a responsible partner in world affairs — we mostly don’t, with good reason — but it does matter a great deal how our two countries are perceived in the world. The European Union does not take a naïve view of Beijing’s predatory authoritarianism, but it has nonetheless just concluded an important trade-and-investment deal with Beijing, facilitating greater cooperation between the world’s second- and third-largest economies. That this elevates Beijing at the expense of Washington is plain — it is by design.

The EU has for the past several years been talking a great deal about “strategic autonomy,” in no small part as a reaction to the growing nationalistic mood in the United States, which remains an important partner for the Europeans but an increasingly unpredictable and hostile one. Closer economic cooperation between the United States and the European Union — a genuine free-trade pact on the model of the defunct Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership would be ideal — will face two sets of problems: disagreement between Republicans and Democrats, and agreement between Republican and Democrats.

The Democrats (and the Europeans) will want more expansive environmental and labor commitments than Republicans will want to make. Republicans will have to think long and hard about what they are willing to concede on those fronts. But it would be a blunder to allow domestic political considerations, or the ambitions of such a figure as Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.), to create an even broader and more open field for Beijing’s ambitions.

Perhaps even more dangerous are the areas of agreement. The big technology companies are the most successful thing going economically in the United States; the Europeans, who have nothing to compare to a Facebook or a Google, resent them and fear them; Democrats hate them, blaming Facebook for the election of Trump in 2016 and remaining suspicious of anything that makes a man as rich as Jeff Bezos; Republicans hate them, too, believing (not without reason) that conservative voices and ideas are treated with hostility by Twitter, YouTube, etc. A sane country would cherish the industry and institutions that built these splendid fountains of wealth and innovation, but we are not that country.

Likewise, Biden’s union-hall spin on economic nationalism is likely to resonate with whatever rump Trumpism remains echoing around in Republican skulls. Biden proposes to expand “Made in the U.S.A.” rules, to subsidize American manufacturing businesses through a vast procurement and infrastructure program, to use punitive tax and regulatory measures to punish companies for offshoring certain business operations, and to aggressively use the World Trade Organization and other international bodies to the advantage of domestic firms, particularly in manufacturing. Republican populists are not likely to resist him much on any of that — they are likely to cheer him on and demand even more. Conservatives should try to press Biden to focus on what’s actually desirable and productive in his agenda: There is infrastructure to be developed and procurement that needs to happen, but these projects need to be evaluated and justified on their own merits, individually, rather than bundled into a multi-trillion-dollar slop-pail labeled “infrastructure.” The United States has legitimate trade beefs that need pursuing, but we should worry more about the theft of intellectual property in China than about the purportedly predatory pricing of Canadian lumber. Washington should not attempt to bully firms to reorganize their supply chains in a way that serves the domestic political interests of the ladies and gentlemen in Washington — it would be far more productive to make the United States a better place to do business.

Domestically, the Republicans will need to discover what someone (I can’t remember who!) once described as “the art of the deal.” There are better and worse outcomes: If the Democrats demand $100 billion in student-loan relief, Republicans should counter with $100 billion in new university-based basic-science research. If Biden wants to make federal money available for abortionists, Republicans should argue for directing it to adoption services and crisis-pregnancy centers instead. Republicans should support coronavirus-recovery projects and related public-health investments, which are going to be expensive, but should hold firm against bailing out insolvent pension funds and incompetent state and municipal governments in Illinois and New Jersey.

Domestic politics will be somewhat simplified for at least the next two years as the United States works to vaccinate the population against the coronavirus, a life-and-death project that is not currently being executed with great competence, while working rapidly to develop the capacity to deal effectively with the emerging strains of the virus that may throw a monkey-wrench into our vaccination-centered program going forward. At the same time, there will be much work to be done repairing, or at least mitigating, the economic damage inflicted by the epidemic. There is no more pressing domestic consideration at this time.

If the Biden administration intends to spend the next several years fortifying the trans-Atlantic alliance to counter China abroad and focusing intensely on coronavirus vaccination and recovery at home, then the Biden administration is on the right path. Conservatives can have no interest in subverting those projects, but we do have an intense interest in seeing to it that they are pursued intelligently and prudently rather than being used as a dump for every item on the progressive wish list.

Republicans have just spectacularly failed the test of power, and they have been judged for it. Now, they face the test of opposition. If they fail that test, too, then they are done.