Sohrab Ahmari has a long essay in the Spectator USA that promises a grand theory of the fight within conservatism:
Two broad camps divide American conservatism today: those who get it, and those who don’t — the woke and unwoke, if I may borrow a lefty term but give it a slightly different meaning. For the right to have any shot at taming liberalism’s raging furies, woke conservatives must remain ascendant and consolidate the movement.
This sounds promising. What is it that “woke” conservatives — he names Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, Tucker Carlson, and Bill Barr — “get” that the rest of us don’t?
It is simply this: that the political left neither loves you nor shares many loves with you, certainly not the love of neutral norms and procedures that have long been the stock-in-trade of the center-right establishment. . . . To be sure, some ‘moderate’ liberals still mouth the old rhetoric — ‘free speech’, ‘free inquiry’, etc — and get canceled for their trouble. But what their movement as a whole seeks is the brute enactment of substantive liberal commitments.
That’s . . . news? I have known that for 30 years. So has most everyone in the conservative world who has been following politics that long. And it’s older even than our lifetimes. Ahmari purports to discover, in 2020, what Edmund Burke knew in 1790. There are few hardier perennials than the observations that the activist Left is driven by anger against conventional American society and doesn’t care about the classical-liberal principles of the American founding, and that Democratic politicians and their pundit class have no fixed principles besides getting what they want. Ahmari goes on to say that it is merely empty “whining” when “unwoke” conservatives argue in favor of those principles and norms, and in favor of fairness and decency and telling the truth, instead of creating a mirror image of the Left that cares about nothing but substantive outcomes, that never asks any question but Lenin’s “Who does what to whom?”
The core of the problem with this line of thinking from Ahmari and others is that it assumes the world is divided entirely into the activist Right and the activist Left. Of course, you can’t persuade the other side they are wrong to do the things they do. But you can persuade other people. That includes not only those in the center who will never be at home on the Right or Left, but also those who are less strongly tied to one side and are capable of changing sides. Ahmari, as a convert, should know this. The divides in American politics are more deeply entrenched and sorted than in the past, but they are still not fixed-for-life categories. If they were, American elections in the past decade and a half would not have seen the presidency change partisan hands twice, the Senate twice, and the House three times. Public opinion would not shift on cultural, economic, and foreign-policy issues, sometimes rapidly. These things happen because people can be persuaded to change their minds — including the persuasion of young people and immigrants who enter American society without pre-existing tribal commitments. Majorities, in America, are built by continuously adding new people, not by disregarding how those outside our own tribe see us. And majorities are like Archimedes’ lever: Give us one and a place to stand, and we can move the world. In the end, you can even persuade the other side, at times, to retreat (if only temporarily) when they see that their position is outnumbered and hurting them. As Abraham Lincoln said, “With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.”
And how are majorities built? Why do people choose to join the Right? Yes, sometimes because they want the substantive things we want. But also, if you listen to them, a great many converts to conservatism down the years have come when people realized that their former friends on the Left did not respect their own stated principles, or did not care about fairness or liberty. As Reagan was fond of saying, “I didn’t leave my party, my party left me.” Many people join us when they discover how intolerant and humorless the Left can be, how totalizing is its view of the politicized life. We don’t get those converts if we adopt the same attitudes. And when we discard our own view of how to act, we drive people away. Right and Left, conservatives and liberals/progressives, Republicans and Democrats — these have never been symmetrical. The Right has long gained many of its converts simply from people growing up and preferring the respectable, law-abiding, American-values-protecting, adults-in-the-room approach of conservatives. The Constitution and its values, the old American idea of a level playing field — these are not extras, they are selling points. Scoff all you want at the notion that this is just style — and it is not — it is also a powerful tool for bringing people in and gaining broad acceptance for conservative positions even among people who do not necessarily share all of conservatives’ desired outcomes. When you stop caring how people outside your tent see you, you close the entrance to the tent.
None of this is to say that conservatives should not fight to, say, “ensure that the state bureaucracy doesn’t secretly undermine it at every turn.” The most effective way to do this is to use the tools of law and of popular sovereignty that the American system and American tradition give us, rather than tear those down and hope the other side takes no advantage when we reduce the contest to one of brute force. I remain skeptical that brute force is a contest conservatives can win, let alone one we want to. But how we fight is also a part of our message, and it is essential to giving us the numbers needed to win. Because shrinking our coalition is the worst disarmament of all.