Earlier this summer, the Edmund Burke Foundation released a statement of principles outlining the tenets of “national conservatism.” Accompanying the statement was also a list of signatories expressing agreement with its principles. Amid a resurgence of the ever-present debates within conservatism, the statement has attracted considerable attention. It has also provided an occasion for what Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts and Intercollegiate Studies Institute president John A. Burtka IV called the “urgent and honest debate” that has always been an essential part of conservatism. In this spirit, then, it is worth looking at four recent appraisals of the statement.
Let’s begin with Henry Olsen, Washington Post columnist and senior fellow at EPPC. He is sympathetic with several national-conservative tenets, such as openness to greater government involvement in domestic life and skepticism of excessive devotion to free markets. He nonetheless believes that the statement lacks fealty to American principles:
The national conservative statement never mentions the idea of human or natural rights. Indeed, it implicitly rejects the core American notion when it claims that each nation “should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance.”
The document makes specific statements about the signatories’ belief in limited government, self-government and recognition of minority beliefs. Its avoidance of any clear statement that the citizens of those nations have rights that a just government must recognize to be legitimate, however, sunders those beliefs from any firm grounding. They become mere preferences, which a national majority can ignore in the self-proclaimed national interest. Black Americans whose ancestors lived in the Jim Crow South understand the fault of that thinking.
If a nation’s “particular inheritance” is not democratic, for example, then a self-governing nation could legitimately form a nondemocratic government — much as Russian President Vladimir Putin openly draws inspiration from his nation’s despotic, czarist past. National conservative principles would apparently have nothing to say against these tyrannical pursuits . . .
The national conservative effort to effectively write the Declaration out of American nationhood is manifest. It cites the Constitution and lifts language from it, but never does the same for the Declaration. It contends that “all men are created in the image of God” but says nothing about being created equal. Indeed, though it frequently praises nations and liberty, it never states the basic truth of human equality, which is the starting point for America’s founding principles.
Olsen therefore finds the statement and the principles it outlines “wanting.”
David Tucker, a senior fellow at the Ashbrook Center, makes a similar critique in Law & Liberty. Tucker notes the appearance of several individuals affiliated with the Claremont Institute in its list of signatories, and wonders how compatible national conservatism is with the principles of Harry Jaffa, the political philosopher on whose thinking (and by whose students) the Institute was founded. Jaffa, Tucker notes, “fought traditionalist conservatism relentlessly, since in the United States it was associated with slavery, and above all because it rejected the principles of the Declaration of Independence.” Yet the statement seeks to ground itself primarily in tradition, and in the Constitution, not in the Declaration. By this metric, Tucker argues, national conservatism falls short — again, for neglecting the Declaration:
Some of the policies of national conservatism are compatible with those derived from the Declaration, but on fundamental principles, we must conclude, national conservatism and the Declaration are opposed. Furthermore, without the guidance of the Declaration’s principles, the preferences of national conservatism have no inherent tendency to oppose religious oppression or discrimination. The statement of principles does not hesitate to quote from the Constitution and cite it as an authority, but American slaveowners could do the same thing. What saved the Constitution, through Lincoln’s statesmanship, was its connection to the Declaration.
“There is nothing good that national conservatism aims to achieve,” Tucker concludes, “that cannot be achieved through the prudent application of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.”
Also writing for Law & Liberty, Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, similarly questions the national-conservative orientation toward religion. Tooley finds portions of the statement’s assertions on religion “manifestly true,” as when it notes the importance of belief in God and both the moral and the civilizational value of the Bible. He considers the section that deals with religious questions “brief but potent.” But he has questions about the nature of the statement’s desire to instantiate explicitly Christian principles in public life. Such as:
Does this section [of the statement] call for the state establishment of Christianity? It does not say so explicitly but arguably implies it. What does it mean for “public life” to be rooted in Christianity? What does it mean for the state to “honor” Christianity’s paramountcy? How should non-Christian private institutions “honor” Christianity? Is this expectation to honor Christianity mandated by law or upheld by social custom? If Jews and other non-Christians are “protected” to practice their faith in their own communities, is their religion then subordinated in public life by law or by custom? And if adults are protected from “religious or ideological coercion” in their private lives, are their public lives potentially subject to coercion, legal or social, in favor of Christianity?
He adds that:
Incorporating Christianity specifically into a political manifesto, especially in America, is vexing. For two centuries, religion in America has not rested on state power. Its vitality, and its failures, are its own doing. Any revival of Christianity in America, or anywhere, depends on persons and communities, apart from government, seeking God through faith, prayer, and a thirst for holiness, with acts of mercy and love.
Tooley concludes that “public life in America will become more ‘rooted in Christianity’ and transcendence only if American Christianity itself experiences a revival.”
American Institute of Economic Research distinguished fellow in political economy (and National Review contributor) Samuel Gregg also has thoughts about the statement. Gregg was a participant in the very economic forum that Roberts and Burtka described as an example of the kind of debate conservatives have long had. Writing for the National Interest, Gregg finds some of the statement’s principles, meant as criticisms of libertarians too skeptical of government at home and of neoconservatives too enthusiastic about American involvement abroad, somewhat familiar. He considers the statement’s rejecting “any transfer of sovereignty to international organizations” a “commendable” view, but also notes that “it doesn’t represent any departure from post-1950s American conservatism which has long expressed skepticism of institutions with pretensions to transnational sovereignty.” He also sees familiar conservative touchstones in the statement’s opposition to the administrative state and support for the rule of law and federalism, though considers it odd that federalism is “prescribed as a type of concession to experimentation and freedom at the level of states rather than characterized as one of America’s fundamental contributions to Western constitutional thought.”
The true novelty of the statement, in Gregg’s view, is in economics. Though the statement “affirms free enterprise and private property and rejects socialism,” its other provisions on this matter amount to what Gregg calls a kind of “state capitalism,” involving industrial policy, the state picking economic winners and losers, and the like. About this, Gregg has serious doubts:
Leaving aside all the well-documented problems with industrial policy — the opportunity costs, how it is invariably captured by rent-seekers, the notorious difficulty in establishing causality between particular economic outcomes and specific industrial policies, to name just a few — there is no recognition of industrial policy’s documented failures in country after country after country, not to mention the ways in which it inflicts real political damage upon nations that deploy it.
That makes it somewhat ironic that the National Conservative statement’s economic reflections end with a condemnation of crony capitalism. For if there is anything that we know about industrial policy, it is that it breeds the cronyism that infests places like Washington, DC, and its surrounding environs.
Gregg concludes that the statement “provides few answers” to important questions about what it actually wants, and about the possible contradictions in its aims. Such as, for example, “Who will implement the interventionist policies designed to serve the general welfare if not the administrative agencies that the national conservatives say they want to curtail?”
These are only a few parts of the important conversation occasioned by the release of this statement of principles. Conservatism, properly understood, will benefit from the continuation of this conversation.