Conservatism doesn’t need more adjectives; it needs proven principles.
Conservatism doesn’t need more adjectives; it needs proven principles.
I recently debated Josh Hammer of Newsweek on his vision of “common-good conservatism,” and while you can watch our debate here, given the persistence of efforts to shape something along the lines of what Hammer is arguing, I thought it would be useful to readers to set out my own argument in print.
None of this debate is entirely new, of course. Whether they style themselves as the “New Right” (more properly the “New New New New Right,” given how regularly efforts at a “New Right” recur across generations), or whether they call themselves “common-good conservatives” or “national conservatives,” similar factions with similar arguments appear among conservative intellectuals every time we get a new generation of conservatives who did not live through the last “New Right.” I grew up in the Reagan years, and in my 50 years on this earth, I’ve lived through all manner of efforts at adjective-conservatism from all directions: Jack Kemp’s “bleeding-heart conservatives,” the Pat Buchanan paleoconservative revival, the McCain–Kristol–Brooks “national-greatness conservatives,” the George W. Bush “compassionate conservatives,” the Tea Party movement, “reform conservatism,” various efforts at a “libertarian moment,” “Trumpism,” and now this. The addition of adjectives to “conservative” tends to subtract more than it adds.
For my own part, I am comfortable identifying as a Reaganite. While that moniker is a snapshot of the movement in time, Ronald Reagan drew on timeless principles that were more or less in line with the basic philosophy worked out in the pages of National Review, once pejoratively labeled “fusionism,” and perhaps best summarized pithily in the 1960 Sharon Statement. This is a philosophy that sees liberalism — the classical liberalism of the American Founding and of Abraham Lincoln — not only as embodying enduring, universal principles but also as the specific cultural patrimony of Americans. It sees the older conservative values — virtue, order, family, faith, community — as enhanced rather than limited under a classical-liberal system of government that preserves a wide space for the individual and for communal institutions to live outside the control of the state. As Reagan said in his 1979 speech announcing his presidential candidacy:
I believe this nation hungers for a spiritual revival; hungers to once again see honor placed above political expediency; to see government once again the protector of our liberties, not the distributor of gifts and privilege. Government should uphold and not undermine those institutions which are custodians of the very values upon which civilization is founded — religion, education and, above all, family. Government cannot be clergyman, teacher and parent. It is our servant, beholden to us.
Hammer’s argument, as best as I can summarize, is that government actors — both political and judicial — should make “the common good” their central organizing principle. His view is that conservatives overemphasize individual liberty, free enterprise, small government, private civil society, and the evenhanded rule of written law, and that the state should be less restrained by such concerns. There are three major problems with this approach.
First, what exactly is “the common good”? This is a problem of perception (how a common-good movement could be sold to American voters), of substance (how policy-makers should apply the common good), and of process (who gets to decide what the common good is in order to apply it).
There are plenty of sources in pre-American philosophy, from Aristotle to Aquinas, that one might consult for a philosopher’s rendition of the idea. Ultramontane Catholic theocrats such as Adrian Vermeule argue that these ought to be the primary sources of legitimacy for American political actors more or less without regard to the consent of the governed. But that is not the argument advanced by Hammer or other more populist national conservatives. Nor should it be. As a Catholic, I might be perfectly happy living in a society ordered by the catechism of the Catholic Church, but I have no illusions that this is a practical political project in the United States. In fact, experience suggests that even the godliest communities are unsuited to purely religious rule over a nation of significant size.
If advanced within the American political tradition and the American democratic system of government, common-good-based politics run immediately into an obstacle: the American people. “The common good” as a lodestar requires a concise definition of “the common good” that is easily understood by the people and that provides a shared understanding that political actors can use to coordinate their actions. Right at the outset, this falls apart. It seems impossible to elicit a generally agreed definition of “the common good,” and Hammer never even tries to offer one. Moreover, the term is itself an unfamiliar one in the argot of American political discourse.
Most of us are conversant enough with the utilitarian idea of the greater good: the most good for the largest number of people, regardless of what that costs particular individuals. The greater good is an easy concept to grasp. In economic terms, we think of it as maximizing gross domestic product (GDP) and national wealth. A utilitarian greater good, efficiency-maximizing analysis should be part of every conservative’s intellectual toolkit in analyzing policy proposals, but no serious conservative argues that ours should be a solely utilitarian creed. Hammer, for his part, derides the focus of economic policy on maximizing GDP.
So, if the common good is neither the imposition of a specific body of religious law nor a utilitarian analysis of the greater good, what, exactly, is it? Hammer’s argument seems to be that each public official should promote a robust moral vision, but . . . whose? That brings us eternally back to that most paramount of all political questions: Who decides?
Second, a singular focus on the common good neglects ideals at the core of American political culture from the Founding to today — namely, liberty, equality, and individual rights. Hammer writes derisively, with scare quotes, in describing a conservative “political movement that viewed ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ as preeminent organizing principles.”
Any “national” conservatism ought to reflect the nation it seeks to conserve. Scarcely anything is more characteristically American than the insistence of even the humblest individual that he or she has rights, liberties, freedoms that the state cannot touch. There is a reason why, 246 years later, the most famous and quotable sentence in American history is still the opening argument of the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
It’s all right there: liberty, individual rights that are “unalienable” by government, the equal dignity and status of all before the law (grounded in our creation by God), the consent of the governed as the greatest security for these equal and fundamental rights, and the right and power of the people to remake the government. Of course, individual rights were not the only purpose of government, then or now. But moreso than any other nation on the planet, ours was a nation founded in the vocabulary of individual liberty, a nation in which rights and freedom are the common language of the people, and a nation that has reached for liberty over and over — to promote its traditions and to justify reform, to rally people to the common defense, and to demand that they respect our Founding ideals.
There is a reason why the Declaration has remained, along with the Constitution, at the center of the political thought of the Republican Party from Lincoln to Calvin Coolidge to Reagan. As Coolidge observed in his magisterial address on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration:
[For] the principles . . . which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live. They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit.
Placing every man on a plane where he acknowledged no superiors, where no one possessed any right to rule over him, he must inevitably choose his own rulers through a system of self-government. This was their theory of democracy. In those days such doctrines would scarcely have been permitted to flourish and spread in any other country. This was the purpose which the fathers cherished. In order that they might have freedom to express these thoughts and opportunity to put them into action, whole congregations with their pastors had migrated to the Colonies. These great truths were in the air that our people breathed. Whatever else we may say of it, the Declaration of Independence was profoundly American.
Are those principles still “profoundly American”? We had a kind of political-science experiment in the country during the past two years: the Covid-19 pandemic, which confronted the nation with questions not often faced in living memory. Such an experiment proved a kind of political Rorschach test.
Arguments, some of them drawing on quite legitimate traditions, were made during the pandemic in favor of the common good, order, virtue, and self-sacrifice in favor of abiding by lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates. Many Americans of all political persuasions gave these arguments a hearing, at least for a time. And yet, anyone who observed the American Right and center-right would notice that the general tenor of response was not, “Okay, tread on me as long as is needed.” The response, just as happened a decade ago in the Tea Party movement, was a vivid flowering of demands for liberty — the liberty of the individual and the liberty of private institutions and communities. Americans wanted freedom to earn a living, freedom to worship in community, freedom to make their own medical decisions and risk assessments, freedom to decide how their own children are schooled and cared for, freedom to go to bars and beaches and the ballpark and to pursue happiness.
No political figure has been more of an icon of that movement than Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who is a popular figure among many New Right intellectuals, in good part for his fights with Disney and social-media companies. But DeSantis is hardly an avatar of statism. Consider how he opened his 2022 State of the State Address:
Together we have made Florida the freest state in these United States. While so many around the country have consigned the people’s rights to the graveyard, Florida has stood as freedom’s vanguard. In Florida, we have protected the right of our citizens to earn a living, provided our businesses with the ability to prosper, fought back against unconstitutional federal mandates and ensured our kids have the opportunity to thrive. Florida has become the escape hatch for those chafing under authoritarian, arbitrary and seemingly never-ending mandates and restrictions.
Even today, across the nation we see students denied an education due to reckless, politically-motivated school closures, workers denied employment due to heavy-handed mandates and Americans denied freedoms due to a coercive biomedical apparatus. These unprecedented policies . . . are grounded more in blind adherence to Faucian declarations than they are in the constitutional traditions that are the foundation of free nations.
Florida is a free state. We reject the biomedical security state that curtails liberty, ruins livelihoods and divides society. And we will protect the rights of individuals to live their lives free from the yoke of restrictions and mandates. Florida has stood strong as the rock of freedom. And upon this rock we must build Florida’s future.
He closed the speech by urging Floridians to “be thankful that God has blessed us to live and serve in America’s liberty outpost, the free state of Florida!” Those same principles of preserving private liberty grounded DeSantis in his first run for office during the Tea Party era, when he wrote, in his 2011 book Dreams from Our Founding Fathers:
The most famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence . . . was a close approximation of the natural rights trilogy of life, liberty and property that Locke outlined in the Second Treatise of Government. . . . By the time of the Constitutional Convention, Locke’s classical liberalism was a common philosophical touchtone for the delegates. One critically important aspect of Lockean liberalism was the centrality of the right to private property. As a matter of first principle, every individual possesses a fundamental right to his labor, and is entitled to the fruits of that labor . . .
For Madison, any acceptable constitution needed to be capable of protecting the property of its citizens. “Government is instituted to protect property of every sort . . .,” he observed. “This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.” . . .
Madison placed individual liberty at the heart of his political philosophy. . . . Government has no inherent value, and is entitled to wield no authority beyond that authority delegated to it by the people; it thus has to be limited to its delegated functions, lest it infringe upon the people’s authority.
DeSantis is a savvy politician who has navigated the transition from the Tea Party era to the Trump era, and he may be the first national politician to outline what a post-Trump conservatism looks like. It is surely a conservatism that values public order and decency. But for all of his promise as a national figure, DeSantis will not go far if he strays from his emphasis on liberty.
Hammer, for his part, takes some curious turns in arguing against liberty. He argues that “decades of unfettered movement of goods, capital, and labor have torn asunder the very fabric and sinews of all our most important institutions: the nation-state, the church and synagogue, and the family.” But it is far from clear how, say, Woodrow Wilson’s antitrust policy married to Herbert Hoover’s trade policy and Harry Truman’s labor policy would improve this state of affairs. Government fetters on goods, capital, and labor are traditionally not associated with societies that are prosperous or free. The size of government is itself a social issue, and extending its tentacles is likely to hand over powers that will be used in ways that we dislike and never relinquished. And what then? Hammer thinks we are in a “late-stage republic” state of emergency, but the eternal trouble of inviting fetters in the name of emergencies is that they are not so easily unfastened.
In fact, as recently as December 2016, Hammer himself argued that “conservatives should follow the lead of the American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks in emphatically reasserting the moral case for free enterprise. Since such a moral underpinning of economic liberty is itself intrinsically inseparable from the philosophical precepts of the American experiment itself, the gravity of such a task is enduring and, indeed, timeless.” This is just as true today as it was then.
An American conservatism that has moved on from liberty has moved on from America. Coolidge, 94 years ago, warned against such thinking:
It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
Third, Hammer treats the evenhanded application of written rules of law as a weakness, and limited government as a mug’s game. He decries as “Principled Loserdom” the idea that “it is incumbent upon conservatives . . . to act as righteous stewards of civic decency and defenders of the sacrosanct norms of liberal proceduralism, no matter how much our political foes have strayed.”
My initial response to this is that, if your principles are to be followed only when you are winning, they’re not principles, they’re just tactics. Conservatives should be the adults in the room who seek to preserve not only a moral and orderly society but also a government of rules, norms, and public legitimacy. We should do so because nobody else will, and the things we seek to conserve are worth conserving. We should also do so because standing for the rules that underlie public order is what brings people to conservatism in their adulthood.
Our constitutional system of limited government is a good in itself. The rule of written law, which applies equally to all, is a good in itself. The survival of every inch of a private sphere where the government cannot reach us, where we can do as we please and follow our consciences, is a good in itself. Our system, composed of our American way of deciding things, is a good in itself. We have democracy to involve the greatest number of people in making decisions, and we have deliberative democracy, with federalism and separation of powers, in order to ensure that their decisions to make changes are considered at length and incorporate support that is broad across time and constituencies. This was the very argument that Edmund Burke made for all manner of English institutions that resisted change, which “render deliberation a matter, not of choice, but of necessity . . . rendering all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many, for ever impracticable.”
We have traditions so that we involve an even greater number of people — those who lived in the past and learned from it. We have a written Constitution and written laws in order that democratic decisions remain final until the same democratic process is used to change them. As George Washington warned in his Farewell Address in 1796:
The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the Constitution which at any time exists, till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all. . . . Resist with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however specious the pretexts.
We have free markets for the same reason: so that the largest number of decisions-makers influence the allocation of labor, capital, and goods. All of these ways of making decisions are part of the American patrimony that we should seek to conserve and bequeath to the next generation. They are more than just good manners.
Hammer prefers a state that can “reward friends of our just regime and punish enemies of our just regime.” (Oddly, Hammer excepts from this enemies list the people who run private-sector unions, even though hardly any institution is more captive to the Democratic Party.) He adds the qualifier, “within the confines of the rule of law,” but a government devoted to rewarding friends and punishing enemies will soon search for ways to redefine “rule of law” to mean something other than the constraints of written law, applied the same to the humble as well as the powerful. It was precisely to avoid this that John Adams, in the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, laid down the purest statement of separation of powers:
In the government of the commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them; the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them; the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them; to the end that it may be a government of laws, and not of men.
Adams felt that the obstacles to a united power followed necessarily from the tendency of power to corrupt virtue: “My opinion is, and always has been, that absolute power intoxicates alike despots, monarchs, aristocrats, and democrats, and jacobins, and sans culottes.” This is one of the major reasons why Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind, identified Adams as the first American conservative thinker. Adams, like James Madison, understood that the animal spirits of humanity cannot be expunged, and so much of the job of conservatives is to design rules and systems that can constructively channel them. We tear those down at our peril.
Adams, in 1800, accepted his defeat in that year’s presidential election. That led to the first-ever peaceful transfer of power by a national head of state due to an election. America owes Adams a great debt for his acceptance of the republican principle of popular sovereignty — a stance as principled as his defense of the accused British soldiers in the Boston Massacre. (Adams did less well when he allowed the cries of expediency to overwhelm his principles, as with the Alien and Sedition Acts.) Adams lost the election, but the manner in which he did so marked him as anything but a loser.
Of course, while it is possible to compose conservative ideologies, conservatives are not rigid ideologues. Our principles are a compass, not a straitjacket. We understand that all of politics involves collisions and trade-offs between competing principles and values. Enduring principles can and should be adapted to new strategies. But our True North should still be the private liberty of families, churches, businesses, and the other organs of voluntary association.
Hammer’s theory, and that of many of today’s New Right, is that we stand under greater threat today from private actors — woke capital, social-media titans, the heads of universities, etc. — than from the government, and should therefore, like Boromir in The Lord of the Rings, ask ourselves why we cannot use the Ring to defeat them. I do not dismiss the gravity of Hammer’s argument. The Left’s capturing of various institutions, many of them outside government, from which they pursue an illiberal cultural agenda and from which they can be ejected neither by popular vote nor by market forces is, in fact, a very grave threat to a free society. It requires us to consider new strategies. But in exploring those strategies, we should not lose sight of what we believe in. Is the current threat existential? Ask any past generation of conservatives that question, and they would regularly say yes.
There are, in fact, weapons to hand that we can wield in these battles that do not require compromising our fundamental principles. Sometimes, help comes unlooked-for: Elon Musk has breached the citadel of Twitter without any government lifting a finger to aid him. Sometimes, we need to remember what we stand for: Much of what appears to be “woke capital” is, in fact, government pressure on business. Sometimes, we need to return to the places we gave up on too easily: The fight against critical race theory and its fellow-travelers in public schools may not be an adequate substitute for the longed-for end-state of universal school choice, but it requires us to acknowledge that government schools are the government, and therefore should be subject to oversight by the voters. Reagan himself warned in his Farewell Address of the danger of failing to educate the next generation in an “informed patriotism.”
Reaganism did not slay every dragon it set out to fight, and some of its victories need winning anew today, but it is ignorant of the recent past to neglect how wildly successful the conservative movement was between the mid 1960s and the end of the 1990s: defeating the global menace of Soviet-led Communism, moving the country electorally and ideologically to the right, ending Democratic dominance of the Senate after 26 years and the House after 40, beginning the long march of constitutionalists through the institutions of the courts and legal scholarship, reviving the Second Amendment, engineering the dramatic decline of street crime in our cities in the 1990s, enduringly reducing the nation’s confiscatory income-tax rates, defeating stagflation and inaugurating a long cascade of economic booms, and ending the Fairness Doctrine so as to create a landscape for a dramatic flowering of conservative media voices.
Of course, there are new battles to fight today. There always will be. But we need not, as the socialists do, sneer at “yesterday’s man” and try to create a new type of man or a new world order. We have inherited much, and we should aim, instead, to conserve it.