THE term “conservatarian” first appeared on my radar toward the end of 2006, having been adopted by disgruntled Republicans who objected strenuously to the direction in which their party had been pulled under George W. Bush and, in consequence, aspired to distinguish themselves from the establishment. “When I am around conservatives,” discontents would tell me, “I feel like a libertarian; but when I’m around libertarians I feel like a conservative.” Sometimes they would describe themselves as a “liberservative” or a “libertarian and a conservative,” or any other hastily assembled portmanteau that got the message across. Whatever the term, their meaning was obvious: I’m not one of those guys.
An essay titled “Conscience of a Conservatarian,” posted in 2007 to the Free Republic website, provides a glimpse into the minds of those members of the Right who were souring on the Republican Party and its treatment of the party’s ideology. In it, the author laments that “the ink on the conservative label has been smudged by too much abuse of the term.… There are people who call themselves ‘conservatives’ these days,” he adds, “who leave me scratching my head.”
Among the people by whom the author claims to be vexed are “neoconservatives” and “compassionate conservatives,” who have failed to “enthusiastically advocate less spending by government” and “libertarians” for their unacceptable positions on abortion, drugs, and immigration. A “conservatarian,” he proposes, is neither a “neoconservative” nor a “libertarian,” but instead “a mainstream conservative in the Goldwater/Reagan tradition who subscribes to the fiscal and modern federalist principles of the libertarian philosophy.” At the end of his critique, he suggests as an afterthought that “perhaps ‘modern federalist’ is a better appellation for my way of thinking, but the federalist label leads to confusion.” (It does indeed, and I will return to this later.) “It’s so much easier,” the author concludes with exasperation, just to say, “I’m a conservatarian.”
This definition, of course, is just one of many. Ask one hundred self-identified “conservatarians” what they mean by the moniker, and you will get one hundred different answers. But what is interesting about this one in particular is its combination of palpable irritation with the status quo and its unwillingness to go fully toward the libertarian side. Primarily, the author feels betrayed. He feels as if his party has left him. He feels as if there is a gap between its rhetoric and its behavior. He feels, in other words, as if the word “conservative” has been taken away from him. Like Martin Luther, who intended not to depart from the Catholic Church but to purify it, our friend feels compelled to reclaim his precious philosophy under a new and worthy name.
It is this purifying and clarifying instinct, I’d venture, that spawned the Tea Party. Tea Partiers are driven by dissatisfaction with President Obama’s overreach, to be sure. But this explanation isn’t sufficient on its own. As with the ostensibly antithetical Occupy Wall Street movement, the fervor that created the Tea Party grew out of dissatisfaction with the Bush administration’s decision to bail out the banks in the wake of the crash of 2008, and then with the Obama administration’s evident intent to accelerate down that path. It ballooned in response to Obama’s vast “stimulus” package, and it exploded during the debate over Obamacare. It was conservative, yes. But it was also refreshingly nonpartisan. As the pollster Scott Rasmussen observed at the time, the Tea Party was populated by people who were upset that “federal spending, deficits and taxes are too high, and [who thought that] no one in Washington is listening to them.… That latter point,” Rasmussen counseled, “is really, really important.”
As often as not, the targets of Tea Party ire are on the Right. And nobody is safe: not former favorite Marco Rubio, not Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, not House speaker John Boehner or his once-apparent heir Eric Cantor. This is simultaneously a blessing and a curse—a source of renewal but also of wasted energy. To borrow a religious analogy, one might say that the Tea Party exhibits the best and the worst of the Protestant tradition. The most beautiful thing about Protestantism is that any disgruntled Tom, Dick, or Harry can start their own church and claim to represent the truth. Likewise, the ugliest thing about Protestantism is that any disgruntled Tom, Dick, or Harry can start their own church and claim to represent the truth. In its early years, the Tea Party largely trained its fire on the Left and on what it perceived to be a conservative “establishment” that had let it down. Now there are strains within the movement that seem to be engaged in a perpetual game of one-upmanship, and for whom purity is regarded as being of greater value than is tangible success. On occasion, there has been something of Occupy Wall Street about the Right’s insurgency—a tendency, that is, toward nihilism and suicide, and, most regrettably of all, toward the belief that martyrdom is the greatest of political attributes. At its best, the Tea Party is independent-minded, reflective of the grass roots, and ruthlessly effective; at its worst it is petty, superficial, and fatalistic.
At its heart, however, it is admirably honest. Tea Party conservatives are as likely as anyone else to express dissatisfaction with George W. Bush, with the growth of government spending during the first decade of the twenty-first century, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the housing bubble and the bailouts that followed it. The election of a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic House raised hackles, and Barack Obama’s open progressivism fueled justified fears that things were getting inexorably worse. These were the proximate causes that triggered the explosion. But the long-term causes had been percolating for a while, and they have not been forgotten.
This matters because, counterintuitive as it might seem, it is possible that the past five years of American political debate have been primarily defined not by Barack Obama but by George W. Bush. Obama ran twice for election as the anti-Bush, and to an extent he still sees himself in this way. When he says “We are not going back”—and he says this an awful lot—this is what he means: back to Bush and, by implication, to the war spending and to the economics that many Americans still blame for the housing crisis and for the Great Recession. President Obama may have failed to bring about an ideological realignment, but he has rather successfully managed to convince Americans of what they do not want. And in politics, that can be extremely powerful.
It is not just the center and the Left that have positioned themselves in relation to the last president. Republicans, too, have been scrambling away from the Bush years as fast as they can. When was the last time you heard an aspiring conservative politician say “As George Bush said …” or “I’m a George W. Bush conservative”? When was the last time you heard nostalgia for 2005? The mere thought is preposterous. This is not simply because Bush’s name has long ceased to be an electoral asset with the independent voters who decide American elections, but also because the Bush years have come to be regarded as a long-term disappointment for the Right. Conservatives will effusively praise Bush for his leadership after 9/11. And I daresay that most of them, if pushed, would rather that he were in charge now than Barack Obama. But that’s about it. On spending, health care, education, the role of government, foreign policy, federalism, and even gun rights, Bush’s model is out of fashion. And, in spite of much soul-searching in the years since 2008, conservatives have yet to find a new banner under which they can unite. This, in a nutshell, is the predicament in which the movement finds itself today.
Before we go on, it’s probably worth considering some of the language here. For disgruntled figures to cram the words “conservative” and “libertarian” into one term is certainly cute. In my experience, many on the American Right do indeed spend their time flitting between those two extremes—and for good reason: Both libertarianism and conservatism are seductive to the man who is motivated by a desire for ordered liberty. And yet the marriage also presents us with a real challenge—namely, that while conservatism and libertarianism share many of the same qualities, they are absolutely not the same thing, and, at times, they come into conflict.
The primary weakness of libertarianism is that it can become unreasonably ideological and unmoored from reality. At their very worst, libertarians can behave like Jacobins: disrespectful of tradition, convinced that logic-on-paper can answer all the important questions about the human experience, dismissive of history and cultural norms, possessed of a purifying instinct, and all too ready to pull down institutions that they fail to recognize are vital to the integrity of the society in which they wish to operate.
The primary weakness of conservatism is that, relying as it does on the Burkean presumption that society is the way it is for a reason, it can refuse too steadfastly to adapt to emerging social and economic realities and it is apt to transmute solutions that were the utilitarian product of a particular time into articles of high principle.
Because the two positions have in common a steadfast opposition to authoritarianism, these differences have tended to be pushed under the carpet when it has really mattered. But when the question is “What should we do?” rather than “What should we oppose?” they have come into harsh conflict.
Libertarians have a nasty tendency to start every discussion of policy with the pretense that both society and government are blank slates—which they are not—and, too, to pretend that one can apply libertarian solutions to a country and a government that is decidedly not libertarian—which one cannot. Libertarians can also fail to distinguish between the importance of a codified framework of negative rights that ensure free action and the manner in which those rights are used. The most salient criticism of the libertarian instinct—and I include my own tendencies in this critique—is that its adherents can reflexively defend anything that is said or done purely on the basis that it represents a free choice, regardless of whether or not it is a good choice. Thus do libertarians often ignore that crucial component of civil society: judgment. Just because something is legal does not mean that it is virtuous.
Conservatives, meanwhile, can infuriate libertarians by inconsistently applying the philosophy and rhetoric of individual freedom and by frequently becoming confused as to what the tenets of liberty mean in practice. As the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney has been documenting for years, one substantial achievement of the Tea Party is that it has forced conservatives to recognize that there is a tangible and crucial difference between a government’s being in favor of free markets and a government’s being in favor of big business. Calvin Coolidge famously argued that “the business of America is business.” This may well be so. But, insofar as it exists to interact with business at all, government exists only to create a stable environment within which businesses may live and die. It does not exist to privilege some over others or to ensure that existing corporations remain healthy and powerful.
Just as libertarians may underestimate the importance of what is being said and done by free actors, conservatives have of late tended to overestimate its importance, and thus often hold seriously contradictory judgments as to where the balance lies between individual rights and societal harms. A solid example of this is the thorny question of why most drugs are banned but alcohol is not. Conservatives generally fail to explain why this makes sense without resorting to the sort of sentimental, unpragmatic language they denounce on the Left. Since the resurgence of the conservative movement in the 1950s, there has always been a certain tension between the traditionalists and the libertarians, and therefore a good deal of criticism of a Republican Party that was tasked with synthesizing the two strands of thought. But in recent years, that critique has in some ways become deeper and more visceral—based less on a conviction that the party has ceased to serve effectively as a big tent, inclusive of everybody in the coalition, and more on a belief that it has flatly betrayed its soul.
In some regards, it has. As I established in the first chapter, the Republican Party has often failed to live up to its rhetoric—which matters, because an awful lot of people care about the issues the Republican Party claims to champion. As a rule of thumb: If your politics are defined primarily by an interest in liberty, you are a Republican; if you are more motivated by equality of opportunity than by equality of outcome, you are a Republican; if you want the state to be smaller and the basic structure of the American government to stay intact, you are a Republican; if you are interested in education reform, you are a Republican; if you are skeptical about the government’s capacity to make significant changes to society, you are a Republican; if you think that man cannot be perfected, you are a Republican; increasingly, if you are pro-life, you are a Republican; if you are jealous of your religious liberties and your freedom of expression, you are a Republican; if you are protective of the right to bear arms, you are a Republican. And so on and so forth.
This is not, of course, to say that you have to be a member of the party, nor that you even have to like it. In fact, you may loathe it, as do many who nonetheless vote for it. But, unless the system changes radically, it remains the only realistic vehicle in town for the champions of a small state. A few holdouts notwithstanding, it should be clear by now that Americans who want the government to be bigger and more active are a lost cause to the Republican Party and the conservative movement—and that they should be let go. Republicans will never outspend, out-bribe, out-activist, out-divide, and out-promise the Democratic Party, and they should not aspire to. Instead, they should try to gather as many people as they possibly can behind their vision.
It is telling that “conservatarian” is the mot du choix and not, say, “Republicrat.” There are a whole host of genuine independents in America—tens of millions, in fact. But my suspicion is that if you call yourself a “conservatarian,” you are not among them. Instead, you are motivated by a desire to push the Republican Party in your direction, your choice being less whether to vote for the Republicans or the Democrats than whether to vote for the Republicans or the Libertarians—or, perhaps, whether to vote at all. Your worry, in other words, is not as to whether you are on the Right but as to whether the Right’s coalition is constructed in a way that you find palatable. It is, after all, easy to be against things, but your wish is that those with whom you mostly agree would give you something concrete for which to go out and vote.
After banging around for a while trying to discover what he means, the author of the Free Republic essay finally settles on the term “federalist.” This was no accident. It is, I think, becoming increasingly clear to some conservatives that the best way to run the country—and also to combine the various intellectual factions on which they rely—is not so much to “go libertarian” as it is fashionable to claim, but instead to advocate for a system in which as few decisions as possible are made from Washington, D.C.
If there is a conservatarian ideology, its primary tenet should be to render the American framework of government as free as possible and to decentralize power, returning the important fights to where they belong: with the people who are affected by their conclusions and who are therefore best equipped to resolve them. This way can many of the cracks between the libertarians and the conservatives be mended. This way can the coalition’s competing visions be best harmonized. And, most important of all, this way can the primary objective of the movement—to oppose the centralization of power and the establishment of a permanent ruling class that dictates to hundreds of millions from a faraway city—best and most permanently be achieved.