Does a conservatism that downplays the Declaration of Independence and embraces the ‘Swamp’ deserve prominence on the right?
There has been a lot of talk about “national conservatism” as a new current of thought on the right. Its adherents are purportedly distinguished from other kinds of conservative by their renewed focus on matters directly pertaining to national sovereignty (trade, immigration, foreign policy); by their greater willingness to employ state power to secure political ends; and by their claims that the conservatism of the past few decades is inadequate to our present challenges and merely serves as a reinforcement of the status quo, whether intentionally or not.
But in a Public Discourse essay last Friday, I noted some of the flaws in national conservatism. The first is that it fits uncomfortably within the American political tradition, especially in its sidelining of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration goes unmentioned in last year’s National Conservatism Statement of Principles, signed by many leading national conservatives as an attempt to present consensus among them. Yoram Hazony, one of these leaders, believes the Declaration is an aberrant part of American thought. But this flies in the face of, among other evidence, the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln:
Abraham Lincoln, likewise, confounds Hazony’s analysis. Hazony writes that, “although Lincoln comfortably mixed Jeffersonian rhetoric with his imposing biblical imagery, his policies as president were in a tradition the Federalists would have easily recognized.” But Lincoln did more than comfortably mix these things. Jeffersonian rhetoric was central to his time as a public figure. Of the Declaration, Lincoln wrote that he gave “all honor to Jefferson” for introducing “into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” He also said, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”
Moreover, in their greater willingness to employ centralized political power to achieve desired ends, national conservatives shortchange limited government and federalism:
National conservatism, supposedly a challenge to the status quo, actually doubles down on it. One of the biggest failures of conservatism since the end of the Cold War is its evolution into a business headquartered in Washington, DC. Increasingly, conservatives cared more about status and power in the institutions in the DC-centered conservative movement than about their ideological commitments. Conservatism lost a focus not just on the culture but also on the political importance of the states. To the extent that conservatives achieved success in these fields, they were often afterthoughts, exceptions, or even accidents. DC was the aim. Of course, as long as DC is our national seat of government, there will always be some need for a conservative presence in it. What truly national ends this country has, let’s debate them, and then pursue them well, through a restored emphasis on the proper channels of deliberation and decision-making that the Constitution ordains. But everything else must be redistributed back to the people and to the states.
National conservatives often forget or even downplay the virtue of restoring congressional supremacy and reviving federalism as a genuine distribution of power. This defect arises, in part, from the weak relationship between national conservatism and the American political tradition. In these respects, it is not a disruption from the centralizing status quo, dependent on deviations from our constitutional order, but a continuation of it. Some of its proponents, so keen on invoking “the people,” appear to be nothing more than power-hungry status-seekers casting about for a group in whose name they can create a comfortable life in DC. It seems we have a new vanguard looking for its new proletariat. They seek not to diminish the Beltway’s grimy sinecures, but merely redistribute them.
Does a conservatism that downplays the Declaration of Independence and embraces the “Swamp” deserve prominence on the right? I have my doubts. Read the whole essay here for more of my assessment of this burgeoning ideological phenomenon.