The Realignment Won’t Purge Libertarians

Sen. Rand Paul arrives to question former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power at a confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington, D.C., March 23, 2021. (Greg Nash/Reuters)

As the parties exchange constituencies, conservatives should prepare for a rowdy coalition, not a uniform one.

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As the parties exchange constituencies, conservatives should prepare for a rowdy coalition, not a uniform one.

T he American conservative movement has never really impressed deep political thinkers, even its own. The frustration was evident almost from the beginning of this magazine. Russell Kirk seemed slightly dissatisfied with his own Anglophone genealogy of “conservatism.” James Burnham, the Communist turned anti-Communist, developed modern Machiavellian theories of power, but applying them to the real world often ended with perverse results. Frank Meyer occasionally seemed as unsatisfied with his “fusion” of traditionalist and libertarian impulses into a conservative system, as all the critics of fusionism were.

Now, this shouldn’t be surprising. In history, it is hard to find thinking people of long life who end up altogether happy with what has been wrought by their former friends and colleagues. The only people who end up satisfied with political movements — Left or Right — are profiteers, chancers, and apparatchiks. Because they only expected a little money or fame, not the deepest concord between their convictions and the state of our fallen world.

But, since the election of Donald Trump, there is talk of realignment in the air. You can look at it any number of ways. In one sense, this realignment is part of a natural churn in American politics. Over time the traditional American establishment — the spiritual and occasionally the physical heirs of the Mainline Protestant churches — has settled at the center left or far left. Upwardly mobile suburbanites and the college educated have defected to the Democrats. A larger share of downwardly mobile voters were willing to vote for Donald Trump and the Republicans behind him on the ticket. You can even see The Realignment at work in the name of podcasts like the one Saagar Enjeti hosts with Marshall Kosloff.

This realignment has been happening pretty much since the last one ended, the one that brought the South solidly into the Republican fold and gave the Republican Party a far more evangelical personality. Now America’s largest corporations, which benefited so much from Republican policies in the past, are taking the side of the Left in most of America’s cultural disputes. This reflects the double capture at work. The managerial class has captured power over corporations and policy, and progressives have captured the managerial class.

Or you could look at it as the emerging political division between the winners and losers of economic globalization that, in America, means not much more or less than the incorporation of China into the global trading system.

Some thinkers, however, foresee in the realignment a hope to settle scores with their rivals, see their ideas come to fruition, and kick out all the useless people from the movement once and for all.

Conservative thinkers who might be heirs of Russell Kirk, or (more exotically) Brent Bozell Jr., see a chance to expel the libertarian elements. Kirk held that the ideological commitment to libertarians distinguished “a tiny though unproscribed minority,” while a majority were conservative. Many thinkers bearing this chart of political affinities believe the same, that conservative populist nationalism is a governing coalition. Besides, what good are free minds and free markets right now? It’s a time of evident social atomization, and we need cohesion. America’s major corporations are, more than ever, on the other side — let’s dispense with this Cold War aberration of pro-capitalist conservatism. These conservatives are excited by conservative nationalist movements in Europe and South America. And it is true that the new circumstances give traditional conservatives new opportunities.

However, I submit that being liberated from libertarians is probably not one of them.

This talk is done in evident isolation from the other half of the realignment, which was excited by Trump in part because he replaced the religious personality of conservatism with a nationalist one, and he seemed to replace moral conservatism with libertinism.  The writer Matthew Walther sees in “Barstool Conservatives” the potential death of the religious Right. But the new anti-Left constituency is not, as a rule, populist in the same way as David Portnoy and Caitlyn Jenner — it is also made up of those liberals who are appalled by the new speech codes on campus and in corporate life. It is led by the major writers at Quillette and other castaways from the center-Left mainstream. If the trads care about cohesion, these other anti-leftists (who often have a big audience on the right) emphasize free speech and inquiry. Some of them like Trump, but others would have preferred the old pre-COVID Boris Johnson.

And in all likelihood, these two tendencies will tend to find common ground. Battles over the role of religion in American life are unlikely to revive a pure Gelasian conception of “the liberty of the Church.” Instead, Americans will vindicate their churches with arguments that depend on America’s First Amendment. Similarly, the refugees of liberalism will, in their battles with the Left, tend to see the social and moral benefits of social cohesion, and even religiosity. Writers like Jonathan Rauch and Douglas Murray have been plowing in this field for some time now.

And in the midst of these groups may be yet another — one that is primarily motivated by geopolitical concerns. In their great battle with what they see as Chinese domination of the world order and subornation of our ruling class, they will ally with both the traditionalists who want to combat Chinese mercantile policy and the classical liberals who want to combat its censorship and intolerance.

A realignment is happening. And it promises to be just as thrilling, and ultimately disappointing, as all the life that passed before it. My advice is that we should all try to make the best of it.

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