Conservatism Is Still a Coalition

S ometimes, being a conservative means jabbering about your philosophical views, however rickety, over a plate of overcooked chicken. Last year at the National Conservatism Conference in Florida, I sat down to dinner and found myself discussing John Locke with Ofir Haivry of the Edmund Burke Foundation. I repeated an argument I had made before, that Locke’s Second Treatise, which expounds on the rights of men, could not be separated from his theological views in favor of a “Reasonable Christianity” and his commentaries on scripture. Wielding a salad fork and leaning over the table, I said my problem with Locke is that he replaces the Divine Father of scripture with a Divine Whig, who owns mankind as a kind of property. The analogy then allows him to make the earthly Whig as unaccountable to tradition and custom as he imagines God to be. I repeated the criticism aimed at Locke by his Anglican contemporary, John Edwards, and said that his doctrine reduces to “political atheism.”

Reflecting back on it, there’s something slightly ridiculous about me in that moment. Locke will be read and studied for centuries to come; I dropped out before I could finish a degree in medieval studies. I’m a conservative journalist and autodidact, not a would-be professor. But at this point, Yoram Hazony, the conference organizer, leaned over to me and said more or less that he was deeply pleased to hear my views. Why didn’t others see Locke for what he plainly was — a Machiavellian in sheep’s clothing? Having respect for Hazony, I felt bonded to him and Haivry afterward. As dinner ended, the keynote speaker, Governor Ron DeSantis, arrived on stage — and we cheered him like crazy.

Hazony had recently launched with other thinkers a National Conservative “Statement of Principles” that I had signed, along with my then-colleague Nate Hochman. Manifestos are a fun way of picking fights. Very shortly after its publication, a very diverse group of Christian scholars wrote a response to that statement of principles. But beyond what I thought were a few misunderstandings or mischaracterizations of the NatCon statement, I found little to disagree with in their critique. It seemed that smaller political disagreements — over the usefulness of the European Union, or the wisdom of Brexit — were being gussied up into charges of philosophical error, or even religious heresy.

This week, a group of people calling themselves “Freedom Conservatives” also took a shot at defining their principles, in a statement of their own. Avik Roy led a large group of conservative thinkers, including some of my colleagues at NR; some national conservatives and new-right types blanched at the statement.

Understood as political gestures, the NatCon statement of principles and the Freedom Conservatives’ are declarations of war. And there is a kind of civil war within the conservative movement — there always has been — as peers and rivals seek patronage, publicity, or designation as the real leaders of the opposition to the left.

But, read alone as texts, I’m struck by how easily harmonized the NatCon and FreeCon statements are. In fact, there is just a lot of plain overlap. Both denounce crony capitalism, praise the family and the rule of law, commend the principle of national sovereignty worldwide, and clarify that racism has no place among conservatives. Both statements praise the contribution of immigration to national success, and both affirm that immigration policy must be tailored to the national interest. The NatCon statement differs only by pressing its immediate call for more restrictive policies presently.

The emphasis changes from one manifesto to the next, but in each, the caveats and “to be sures” end up making room for the entirety of the opposition.

Here is one example. In their praise of “the free enterprise system,” the FreeCons declare: “We commit to reducing the cost of living through competitive markets, greater individual choice, and free trade with free people, while upholding the rule of law, freedom of contract, and freedom of association.”

If the phrase had just been “free trade” without qualification, this NatCon wouldn’t be able to sign it. But to qualify it as “free trade with free people” is to potentially admit almost all the caveats NatCons express in their statement.

Under the heading of Free Enterprise, the NatCons recommend “an economy based on private property and free enterprise” because it “is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition.” But they say it cannot be absolute:

Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. . . . A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-making by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.

If we deem China not a “free people,” then all the measures NatCons recommend, measures that would be familiar to any Cold Warrior of the Right, become available.

There are other differences that might disguise bigger disagreements. The FreeCons talk of family but do not specify, as the NatCons do, that by “parents” they mean “mothers and fathers.” The NatCons denounce a previous generation of liberal imperialism “which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image,” while the FreeCons champion an “American-led” world order of sovereign states.

Roy says he took inspiration from William F. Buckley Jr.’s Sharon Statement, and one can see the influence. But the influence strikes me as incomplete. Buckley was a capacious thinker and a coalition-builder. He could at times seem more libertarian than most libertarians, and more nationalist than most American nationalists. Roy offers that part of his interest in organizing the statement comes from his disgust at the interest of NatCons in populist-right governments in Europe. I think he’s wrong to characterize NatCons as wanting to replace the Constitution of 1789 with Hungary’s of 2012. But in the grand scheme of life, Viktor Orbán and Lech Kaczyński look like Arlen Specter and Susan Collins compared with the foreign leaders that Buckley admired and publicized, before and after the Sharon Statement — men like General Francisco Franco. Are we really going to fall out over whether we prefer Germany’s or Hungary’s side in a dispute within the European People’s Party?

From one perspective there is a philosophical chasm involved. The pithiest way I can state it is that a conservative whose philosophy goes back to Burke believes he is free because the law guards him. A classical liberal who hearkens to John Locke believes he is free until the law trespasses upon him. One literally starts with an idea of established government, and the other builds upon individual freedom from a supposed state of nature.

But to most Americans, to people who aren’t in competition for think-tank patronage or jobs in a future administration, these philosophical chasms cash out in political differences that more resemble the finer cracks on the surface of an imperfectly baked cheesecake. One conservative is more open to tariffs when it comes to combatting China’s mercantilism, another is less enthusiastic. One is more enthusiastic about supporting Ukraine in a war against Russia, the other is highly skeptical. These differences are mainly ones of expedience, not principle. And they reflect the variety of views among right-leaning voters.

Almost all the signatories of both statements would be cheering for Ron DeSantis if he becomes the Republican nominee to challenge Joe Biden. And almost all the signatories would have some small and some serious reservations about his agenda. Conservatism is a coalition. The great political philosophers disagreed with each other — why should we expect unanimity?