The Clamorous Conservative Project

I t’s no secret that conservatives disagree on a lot these days and seem increasingly willing to make their disagreements known. The libertarian-oriented conservatives are clashing with the self-styled national conservatives, with the former wanting the government out of their lives and the latter willing to use state power to achieve their ends and heal America’s decaying social fabric.

But Lee Edwards sees this conservative infighting as a good thing.

“It’s a sign of vitality and proof, it seems to me, of the movement’s importance and the role that it still plays,” he said.

A distinguished fellow in conservative thought at the Heritage Foundation and co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Edwards discussed the status and future of the conservative movement at length in an interview with National Review. Despite the aforementioned factional disputes, he spoke optimistically about that future — citing fusionism as still a winning formula for holding together the movement’s various components under one cohesive philosophy.

He pointed to William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan as the two most successful conservatives of the last half century. “Both of them were what I call master fusionists. Fusionism is the best blueprint for the conservative movement,” he said. “It’s a combination of individual liberty and limited government, or what several people refer to as ordered liberty.”

Edwards sees various tenets of the national-conservative doctrine, such as patriotism and the America-first creed, as beneficial to the movement. However, he also sees “glaring absences” in it.

“Whether we like it or not, we are the leading champion of liberty and freedom around the world, and that takes with it certain serious responsibilities. And I think that you cannot [leave] out, for example, libertarians, which it seems to me the national conservatives tend to,” he said. “They’re a part of this debate, and coming out of this debate will be a better, stronger, more inclusive conservative movement.”

Meanwhile, Edwards spoke of the need to untangle the Republican Party from the conservative movement a bit. That doesn’t mean a divorce by any means: They have similar goals and, as such, should maintain close cooperation. But they have distinct purposes that should not be confused.

“One is a political party, dedicated to winning elections, and the other, of course, is an intellectual movement, guided by principle,” Edwards said.

He cited, for instance, Trump’s false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen, a claim since parroted by many of his allies, including Trump-endorsed Republicans who are running for office in November — though Edwards suggested this narrative isn’t doing favors for the party or the movement.

“One thing you have to keep in mind with the American people is that they do not look back. They like to look forward,” Edwards said. “I just don’t think that you’re going to be able to capture Congress if all you’re doing is talking about the last election. [Voters are] going to say . . . ‘I want to know what’s going to happen, not what has happened.’”

Edwards argued that a post-Trump era is beginning, and it’s time to move forward. “This is not something new, but this fixation, this obsession Mr. Trump has with [the 2020] election, I think it’s going to run dry pretty quick,” he said. “There are just too many areas where he does not really reflect the conservative sensibility, and that really still is where the Republican Party is. It still is a conservative party.” (This interview was conducted prior to the search on Trump’s compound at Mar-a-Lago, which, of course, has the potential to delay such a post-Trump era, given the public attention it is attracting.)

One area where Trump succeeded in 2020, however, was in drawing Hispanic voters to the GOP. Trump increased his support among Hispanic voters by eight points from 2016 to 2020. The Republican Party has built on Trump’s success with the election of lawmakers such as Mayra Flores, the first female Mexican-born House member, who won her race in June in Texas’s 34th congressional district. Edwards is not surprised by the GOP’s ability to court more Hispanics in recent years given the party’s pro-family principles, among other aspects of conservative philosophy. “I think that some of the basic ideas of conservatism — limited government, free enterprise, traditional American values, and strong defense — are such inherent ideas, American ideas, that they will bring and garner a majority [of Hispanics] in the years to come.”

Then there are the culture wars. Edwards believes the debate is “stacked so much against us right now that a direct frontal assault probably isn’t going to work.” He pointed to some promising signs, such as certain television shows and films espousing conservative values, but said “we’re a long way from having a really serious challenge to the liberal progressive domination of culture.”

The solution comes down to reforming our current institutions as well as building new ones, according to Edwards. “You do both. You encourage the creation of institutions like the University of Austin, Texas. At the same time, you work through other means to challenge the establishment.” To Edwards, the core goal continues to be ensuring that the conservative movement and the Republican Party fuse traditionalism and libertarianism, winning principles for the party: “They have been in the past, and I think they can in the future, because they’re so basic to the American experiment.”