David French is wrong to portray the Florida governor as a threat to the movement.
David French is wrong to portray the Florida governor as a threat to the movement.
P olitical philosophies do not exist in the abstract. They are derived from the study of the world of men, which is full of the accreted baggage of culture, the accidents of history, and the shifting sands of technology. They grow and develop in the course of human events. We conservatives take the world as it is and do not deal in the realm of Platonic ideal forms.
For classically liberal American conservatives, there are timeless truths at the heart of our philosophy: as Calvin Coolidge famously argued, “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.” But the application of those propositions cannot be separated from the governed themselves, who remain a moving target. American conservatism cannot be separated from America, or from American conservatives.
What is true of philosophies is doubly true of leaders. None are perfect or pristine; all are products of their time and place, and all are subject to the needs and demands of the governed. Conservatives, of all people, should be realistic about James Madison’s celebrated observation:
What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men…a dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.
In the history of American politics, there has never been a perfectly pure classically liberal conservative: not Coolidge, not Abraham Lincoln, not Ronald Reagan, not William F. Buckley Jr. or Barry Goldwater, not Madison, George Washington, John Adams, or Alexander Hamilton. All had their flaws, and all deviated at times from our ideals. If we demand purity, we will swiftly conclude that our philosophy is not just dead but has never really existed. Rather than fall back on the utopianism of “real Communism has never been tried,” however, conservatives are realistic about the fact that some liberty, some order, and some virtue is better than none, and the more the merrier.
Finally, the connective tissue between political ideas and political reality is not just leaders, but political coalitions — including political parties and their supporters. Enduring ideas do not die merely because they sometimes fail to muster a winning coalition, or because at other times they are compelled to seek bedfellows who are less than intellectually pure. Even the age of Donald Trump has not driven conservative thinking as far into the wilderness as it was when National Review was founded in 1955. Even then, much of the work of this magazine consisted not of coining new ideas but excavating enduring ones that had been submerged or encrusted with rubble.
Nor was conservatism killed by the Nixon years, when a Republican president bent the government against his enemies, imposed ruinous wage and price controls, pursued détente with Communist tyrants, sold out our allies in South Vietnam after waging clandestine war on their behalf in Cambodia, and appointed the author of Roe v. Wade to the Supreme Court. This magazine, after a doomed protest against Richard Nixon in the 1972 primaries, declined to endorse him for reelection but effectively acknowledged that Nixon was still preferable to the alternative — not the most purely principled stance, but one with which 60 percent of the American public concurred.
Looking back on the 1848 revolution in France, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “the inveterate habit that all our politicians had contracted . . . of painting their feelings in lurid colors” and accusing one another of “placing society in jeopardy” or destroying the government rendered them incapable of perceiving the imminence of revolution “even when the event arrived that would prove them both right.” We should not write obituaries for our movement lightly, lest we be caught unawares when the wolf is truly at the door. Still less should we write them about the last man standing between us and the wolf.
The Long Fuse
It is with those thoughts in mind that I turn to our old friend David French’s New York Times column the morning after Ron DeSantis’s presidential announcement, which greets the emergence at last of a viable Republican alternative to Donald Trump by claiming that DeSantis could “end conservatism as we have known it.” This is not just unwarranted catastrophism married to impractical utopianism; it is also a misreading of what American conservatism is as well as a betrayal of the principled conservative argument against Trump.
David begins by defining “fusionism” as “an alliance between social conservatives and economic libertarians” augmented, during the Cold War, by “the additional commitment to a strong national defense.” That’s really an incomplete vision of modern American conservatism. We can argue over whether fusionism is actually intellectually coherent, but its ambition was to argue that older conservative ideas about tradition, virtue, and social order were not just consistent with liberty, but were better able to flourish in a society that respected not only civil liberty but also economic liberty.
The core of the theory is that the man left alone in his private space beyond the government’s reach — on his own property, in his own community and associations, free to keep the fruits of his own labors — was better able to freely pursue virtue. In this vision, a government’s job is to preserve order, so that this wide private space could prosper free of private as well as governmental intrusion. The essentially Lockean aspect of that theory was neatly summarized by DeSantis himself in his 2011 book Dreams from Our Founding Fathers:
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.”
David argues that “fusionists such as me read the Declaration of Independence and reaffirm that governments are instituted for the purpose of securing our ‘unalienable rights.’ Thus, the protection of liberty is an indispensable aspect of American government.” Which, again, is true enough, but it is also too narrow in neglecting the importance of order, property, and virtue to conservative thinking. The first two are crucial preconditions for defending liberty; the third is its ultimate purpose.
Moreover, as Washington and Adams emphasized, and as Reagan warned in his farewell address, liberty and self-government themselves will die if the people cease to be virtuous, and if they are not adequately educated in an informed patriotism that transmits to the next generation the very ideals that we draw from the Declaration and the Founders. Nobody in America today has done more to fight for a pride of place in American education for precisely that sort of schooling than Ron DeSantis.
The Party and Its Members
David complains that the Trump-era Republican Party has been “more clearly defined by what it was against than what it was for.” It is certainly true that Trumpism has less coherent content than other past or present movements within the GOP, and that congressional Republicans for the past decade have been bad at articulating a positive federal legislative vision. But conservatism is always more clear on what it is against than what it proposes to change, because one of the core ideas of Burkean conservatism is to leave most things the way they are rather than demand programmatic change. It is hardly unconservative to just let things be, even if those things are philosophically inconsistent.
Moreover, it would be preposterous to accuse Ron DeSantis, of all people, of not being clear on what he is for. His governorship has been a whirlwind of activity that makes the Tasmanian Devil look like Deputy Droopalong by comparison. The recent session of the Florida legislature passed the most robust conservative legislative agenda since Reagan arrived in Washington.
David argues that, before Trump, “the G.O.P. perceived itself as a party united more by ideology than by identity,” and complains that “Trump . . . correctly perceived that the party was not — or was no longer — primarily an ideological party.” In this, his real grievance is not with Trump but with the party’s voters. But voters are often weakly connected to ideology, and will follow their leaders.
The complaint about Republican voters misreads three things. One, a major factor in the rise of Trump was a widespread belief by Republican voters that the party didn’t act as if it believed its own ideology, so it was worth choosing a leader who would (it was hoped) focus on results rather than Reaganite rhetoric. It will take time and effort to rebuild the voters’ trust that voting for Republican politicians actually gets you the implementation of Republican ideology. You know who has been wildly successful thus far at enacting the things he says he stands for? Ron DeSantis.
Two, even through the Trump era, the core Republican ideology has remained more continuous from 1854 to the present than its critics allow. That ideology is built around free labor, individual responsibility, public order, American nationalism, and civic virtue. Again, David makes no real effort to argue that DeSantis’s platform and record deviate significantly from that tradition.
Third, the intellectual tensions within the party, between the party and the conservative movement, and between the party’s thinkers and its ordinary voters, have been with us all along, ever since Lincoln brought the Know-Nothings into his coalition. As Matt Continetti has chronicled in his exhaustive study of the past century, the modern American conservative movement has always had these fights over liberalism, nationalism, populism, and virtue, and the major players have always included a share of illiberal cranks. As Michael Brendan Dougherty has written, conservatism has always meant “being, in some strange way, in the company of scores of millions of people, many of whom find each other intolerable bores, embarrassments, or alien in some way.”
Given this history, David’s comparison of supporting Ron DeSantis for president to firing a missile at ourselves is as ahistorical and overwrought as it is counterproductive.
Speech and the Free State of Florida
The heart of David’s argument is that DeSantis has been, in his view, too hostile to free speech. David has spent the bulk of his career fighting the good fight for freedom of speech and religion, so it is perhaps understandable that he places this at the center of his definition of conservatism. Even then, it is worth recalling that Adams signed the Sedition Act, Lincoln shuttered Copperhead newspapers, and George W. Bush signed McCain-Feingold, and none of these decisions ended conservatism.
Consider David’s indictment:
DeSantis punishes Disney for merely speaking in opposition to a Florida law that restricted instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida public school classrooms. DeSantis likewise attempts to regulate social media moderation, intruding on private corporations’ decisions about who to platform and what kinds of speech to moderate. He attempts to restrict speech about race and racial equality in public universities and private corporations. He’s banned even private employers from imposing a Covid vaccine mandate.
Now, I have been critical of DeSantis on some of these fronts. I think his social-media bill is unconstitutional, his abortive proposal to lower the bar for defamation suits was ill-considered, and his attempt to prevent cruise ships from imposing vaccine mandates invaded a federal responsibility and ignored the unique needs of oceangoing vessels. That said, it is vital to recognize that DeSantis is not pursuing the sort of blunderbuss assault on speech and conscience freedoms that we see on a daily basis from Democrats.
As I have detailed at some length, virtually every one of DeSantis’s moves on this front has involved one or both of two features. First, he is asserting an expanded power for the elected statewide government over other governmental entities, whether unelected bodies such as schools, universities, and public-health bureaucracies or local elected officials. Second, he is acting against those who stand in the way of individual liberty, free expression, and/or the evenhanded enforcement of rules and the law. His premise in nearly all of these fights has been that the status quo fails to adequately protect individuals from arbitrary and biased enforcement, fails to allow them space in which to resist mandates and pursue their own consciences, or (in the case of schooling) seeks to instruct students against the classical liberal American ideals upon which our first freedoms rely. He is, in short, proceeding from the premise that conservatism is already in trouble and needs his help.
In the Disney case, as I have detailed, it’s impossible to discuss the controversy without recognizing the background of weaponization of corporate power over the past decade against self-government and freedom of conscience, and without noting that the only consequence visited upon Disney was that it was deprived of governmental power.
There is plenty of space to quarrel with DeSantis’s choices in each of these controversies, but a fair assessment of whether he is some sort of menace to conservatism should consider his case on these points, as well as assessing whether doing nothing is, in these instances, likely to produce more or less free speech and freedom of conscience. Is DeSantis creating new weapons that could be turned against us? In most cases, no — at most, he is using tools that are already being pervasively deployed against us. At the public university level, for example, should we really be worried that more elected state control might lead to the University of California system becoming a left-wing hothouse of racialism and radicalism that is hostile to conservative faculty? In the corporate workplace, are we worried that employment and labor law might intrude on what companies and their employees can freely say, especially on matters of race and gender? Are these really still, at this late date, hypotheticals, or are they descriptions of the world we already live in?
Principle and Practice
David also argues that DeSantis is “more anti-left than conservative in the classic sense” as illustrated by “flip-flops” on Ukraine and vaccines. But to start with, being pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, in general or in any specific case, is not a question of conservative principle, but a pragmatic question. There are two general conservative principles involved in vaccination debates: Individual liberty argues against vaccine mandates, while public order argues that government must sometimes have the power to control epidemics. But there is no neat ideological formula for balancing those two principles.
To a certain extent, the same is true of the Ukraine war. As a principle, conservatives should be against a tyrannical Russia attempting to extinguish the sovereignty of a neighbor, particularly one with a government that is generally democratic and (whatever its flaws) noticeably more classically liberal than Russia’s. But the question of how and to what extent we support the Ukrainians out of our own budget involves a large measure of prudential rather than principled considerations. DeSantis’s original Ukraine statement to Tucker Carlson was ham-handed, pandering, and poorly phrased, but that and follow-up comments represent an effort to define the minimum conditions of a Western victory, not argue against siding with Ukraine in general. David’s description of DeSantis as having merely been a “supporter of lethal aid to Ukraine during the Obama administration” also misleadingly omits DeSantis’s position on Putin and the war since it began. There is quite a lot more to DeSantis’s views on foreign policy and national security than two words out of a single statement.
Things Unmentioned
If we are going to discuss whether DeSantis represents some sort of existential threat to conservatism, it would seem important to consider where he stands on a broad array of issues that implicate conservative principles, rather than focusing narrowly on his faults.
A preference for smaller government, which spends less of our money, limits less of our liberty, and enables more citizen choice, is surely a core conservative concern. David cites the vices of “sweeping, large-scale government programs,” but neglects to mention where DeSantis (one of the founders of the House Freedom Caucus) stands on such programs. He has, in the House and as a governor, been a champion of lower taxes and an enemy of big spending, and he has presided over a vast expansion in school choice in Florida. (This should matter to David, who has championed school choice as the way out of the woke education wars.) He has also taken significant criticism for protecting unborn life and expanding the rights of gun ownership. He has, at the same time, nominated constitutionalist judges, promoted honest elections, and insisted upon public order and enforcement of the law. There is much more in his record that accords both with conservative policy priorities and conservative philosophy. That doesn’t insulate him from particular critiques, but it ought to be part of an assessment of the overall pros and cons of his leadership to the conservative movement.
The Punches We Pull
David asks:
Should someone like me quiet his critique of DeSantis in the interest of defeating Trump? I say no. I believe we can walk and chew gum at the same time, opposing Trump while upholding a vision of state power that limits its ability to “reward friends and punish enemies” so that all Americans enjoy the same rights to speak, regardless of their view of the government.
The framing of this question misses an important point. Of course conservatives should not stifle all of their critiques of DeSantis’s choices. Neither I nor my colleagues have been shy about doing so on the issues David raises. Nor, for that matter, did National Review hesitate to criticize past Republican leaders, including Reagan, on grounds of principle.
But perspective is also crucial. We do not write only to hear ourselves talk, but to persuade. And persuasion in the context of politics and elections means having a sense of proportion, an understanding of the stakes, and a decent respect for your own credibility with the people you’re trying to persuade. Whether you can walk and chew gum at the same time depends upon how much of your effort is devoted to the walking, and how much to the chewing gum.
Ron DeSantis may not be an ideal conservative in every conceivable way, but to describe him as a mortal threat to conservatism solely on the basis of a few of his positions is to lose the forest for the trees. He may not be perfect, but he is vastly superior in every particular both to Donald Trump and to Joe Biden, as a political leader and as a man of character. Unless and until there is a dramatic change in the political winds, he is also the only alternative to Trump or Biden. Even if your conscience won’t permit you to cast a vote for him, choosing the morning after his presidential announcement to paint him in the nation’s largest newspaper as an existential threat to the movement is a wholesale failure of realism about the relative danger to our common principles presented by the alternatives.
Finally, deploying this sort of rhetorical catastrophism against DeSantis at this moment undermines the moral credibility of the entire conservative case against Donald Trump. That argument has always been premised upon the idea that Trump was uniquely bad as a matter of character, competence, principle, respect for our constitutional order, and political toxicity. If those of us who dissented from Trump merely argued that he was fundamentally un-conservative in some important ways, well, how is that any different from Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or Bob Dole, or George H. W. Bush, or even for that matter George W. Bush? Yet most of us pulled the lever for all of those people in November, and refrained from painting them as existential threats to conservatism even when they promoted big expansions of the entitlement state or wrote or signed legislation unconstitutionally restricting political speech. We did so partly out of a sense that these were fundamentally responsible men; so is DeSantis, a smart lawyer who served his nation in Iraq.
We also did so partly out of a sense of proportion and realism about coalition politics. As I wrote in explaining at great length why it was so difficult for me to vote for Trump even in 2020:
Those of us who find Trump repellent and want a better Republican coalition must grapple with the reality that there are a lot of people in the party who support Trump now, a good chunk of whom actually wanted him heading the party. We will, sooner or later, need to call on those people to support a different Republican. Trump is uniquely bad, but to people who cannot see that, they will always ask us: Why should I back your guy, if you would never back mine?
Ron DeSantis is well within the mainstream of conservatism and Republican ideology in his philosophy and his actions. He is more conservative across the board than anyone the Republican Party has nominated for president since Reagan. That’s still not pure enough?
For the past seven years, David French has inveighed against the poison of Donald Trump to the Republican Party and the conservative movement. So have I. We had weighty reasons to do so, and still do. It trivializes those arguments to criticize DeSantis in terms so hyperbolic — such as suggesting he could “destroy conservatism as we know it” — that it encourages the reader to rationalize washing one’s hands in a choice between him and Trump, or suggests to Republicans that there might be any morally defensible basis to sit out an election between DeSantis and Biden. No one serious about conservatism in principle or practice can believe that — especially no one serious about the very principles upon which we have criticized Trump. It is bound to be read by those who have been skeptical of “Never Trump” arguments as a confession that those arguments weren’t about Trump, but about Republican voters.
Painting the last man in Trump’s way as a mortal threat is like complaining about the seaworthiness of the lifeboats after the Titanic hit the iceberg. The duty of a columnist demands a better sense of proportion than that.