A ‘burn it all down’ mentality has yielded few practical victories. There must be a better way.
A ‘burn it all down’ mentality has yielded few practical victories. There must be a better way.
I n commenting on the sparks that would light the fuse of the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that while a “disorderly and unwholesome” form of liberty “prepared the French to overthrow despotism, it made them perhaps less apt than any other people to establish in its place the peaceful and unfettered rule of law.”
After the GOP’s poor performance in Tuesday’s midterm elections, its disheartened supporters would do well to heed this lesson.
The Republican Party increasingly sees itself as the revolutionary one. This revolution seeks to uproot “wokeness,” progressivism, secularism, and the administrative state. In the wake of such a revolution, it seeks to restore a long-lost Eden (whether that be the 1950s, the 1830s, or 1776 is not a point of clarity, much less unity). It speaks in the revolutionary language of war. It acts, as January 6 showed most glaringly, through a combination of fear, grievance, and rage.
None of the underlying critiques are baseless. Nor is a move toward past principles, especially Founding and constitutional ones, wrong. But this “burn it all down” mentality has yielded few practical victories. Apart from in Florida and New York, Republicans woefully underperformed expectations.
The hope for a “red wave” was far from fanciful. Historically, the party in power in D.C. suffers significant losses at the state and national levels in midterms. Indeed, additional factors particular to this election added to the reasonableness of such thinking. We have stubborn, high inflation affecting middle- and working-class lives in tangible, painful ways. Crime continues to scare people, and many are frustrated by the effects of Covid-19 policies or of left-leaning indoctrination on their children’s education. Amid these difficulties, we have a president who routinely appears utterly overwhelmed by the challenges of the moment.
Yet the Democrats have defied the oddsmakers and held the Senate, and are on track to yield only a very narrow majority to Republicans in the House. At the state level, states that seemed to trend toward the GOP, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, saw decisive Democratic victories. In Michigan, Democrats will hold unified power of the elected branches for the first time in 40 years. Many losses in eminently winnable races involved GOP candidates selected by voters who had imbibed the revolutionary rhetoric, candidates who, whether grifters or fanatics, then preached its doctrines; from those doctrines, even minor divergence constituted heresy. Therein, they have betrayed a penchant for the disorderly and unwholesome distortion of liberty that seeks liberation from without but not proper self-governance from within.
A lot of diagnoses have, and will, focus on candidate quality, messaging, and, of course, the power that former president Donald Trump wields over all of the above. Yet we should dig deeper and ask whether a fundamental perspective of revolution is the most effective, much less the most just position. Have we shown ourselves fit to govern, rather than merely able to critique the governance of our opponents?
The language of reform presents a better option, primarily because it is more electable. The American people are rightly dissatisfied with the current direction of our country. But Americans have a fundamentally conservative disposition, one that tends to eschew quick, radical upheaval. Even our own Revolution of 1776 grounded itself in conserving principles that mixed the natural rights of man with the ancestral ones of Englishmen.
Second, reform over revolution better translates principles into policy. The last few years have been heavy on rhetorical firebombs and light on actual programs for improving people’s lives. Policy can be boring. It can’t be contained in a pithy tweet. But we must have actual policies to make the theoretical real — to accomplish in tangible ways what we preach in our words. With a few exceptions, we need to be much better at concretely protecting our citizens from crime, supporting American families, and rescuing American education from the siren songs of partisan indoctrination.
Third, reform over revolution better respects our needed commitments to our most cherished institutions and to the rule of law. Constitutional lodestars such as federalism and the separation of powers order our decision-making toward more rational actions. Dedication to working through the law keeps us from veering in the direction of anarchy of the mob or tyranny of a despot, however benevolent he might claim to be. Perhaps dismantling the administrative state is beyond a lightning-strike move, instead requiring gradual reforms toward a structure that abides by the distinction between legislative, executive, and judicial power while adhering more closely to the consent of the governed. Maybe the perverse incentives undermining federalism need a strengthening of the power of state parties as well as longer terms for state legislators.
Many Republicans decry the Left’s “long march through the institutions,” which has undermined our past principles and transformed so much of our society. But we must remember that American conservatism’s effectiveness itself comes from a kind of reforming as opposed to a revolutionary mind-set. After Tuesday’s disappointment, perhaps we should think of our future as a long march of its own, a reforming one directed toward restoration. That is, an ordered liberty worthy of our Constitution, our laws, and we the American people.