ON my desk at National Review, there is a piece of cardboard that was mailed to me by a man who is no great admirer of my work. “Conservatism SUCKS!” it declares in erratically scrawled capital letters. “Let’s get really conservative and go back to pre–Magna Carta days!”
This is a jab to which I have grown accustomed in the past few years, based as it is on a popular misapprehension as to what those of us on the Right actually believe. It is worth clearing up this error at the start. That in America the friends of liberty are called “conservatives” and the centralizing authoritarians are referred to as “liberals” is one of the great semantic jokes of history. In almost every other part of the world, rightward-leaning political movements seek primarily to conserve the long-established order, and in consequence compete not for meaningful ideological terrain but for stewardship and for stasis. Elections abroad tend to be narrow and meretricious affairs, in which minor reductions in the considerable power of the state take on great significance and “philosophy” is seen as a dirty, even dangerous, word.
In the United States, by happy contrast, conservatism is marked by its unorthodoxy and its radicalism. Conservatives are passionate and ambitious, and their concern is for neither the international norms nor the tribal precepts that have animated most of human history, but for the manifestation of eccentric ideas that have surfaced only recently—among them property rights; separation of powers; hard limits on the power of the state; staunch protections of the rights of conscience, assembly, speech, privacy, and self-protection; a preference for local governance over central planning; a free and dynamic market economy that permits rapid change and remarkable innovation; and, above all, a distrust of any government that would step in to answer questions that can be better resolved by civil society.
Insofar as conservatives look back into the past, they typically do so to reestablish their purchase on timeless truths about the nature of politics and of human beings and to reacquaint themselves with a subversive political framework that—although more than two centuries old—has been the most effective steward of political progress and material improvement in human history. So accustomed have we in the West become to the blessings of ordered liberty that it can be tempting to believe that this is the natural order of things. Alas, it is not. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, correctly observed that “the natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground,” adding wisely that freedoms, once lost, are rarely regained. But he did not mention that enjoying liberty in the first instance is a rare privilege indeed—one that has been accorded to only a handful of the billions of people who have come and gone from the Earth. If conservatism in America has one goal, it is to preserve that opportunity.
This country’s founding generation was preoccupied with designing a system that would prove difficult for evil and ambitious men to commandeer—not because there was an uncommonly large number of such men here in the late eighteenth century, but because history had shown them to be a feature of every age and a threat to all peoples. For most of the country’s history, my colleague Kevin D. Williamson notes, “politics” has been the word used to describe the altercation between those laboring under the impression that “our institutions could be channels of moral action and reliably ethical arbiters of such ill-defined standards as ‘fairness’ and ‘social justice,’ if only we put the right people in power,” and those who believe that “man is a fallen creature” who cannot always be trusted to act rationally and magnanimously. This question, of the essential nature of man, is at the very root of the disagreement between the Left and the Right—the Right’s skepticism resting heavily upon the presumption that human beings do not change when they are accorded great power and that, if anything, we should be more and not less suspicious of anybody who seeks out influence; the Left taking the opposing view.
The Right’s acknowledgment of the limitations of man and of the state that he has created is imperative. It is often asserted that free markets perform better than does central preparation, and that governments are unable to achieve by design what a free people may spontaneously. But it is rarely explained why this is the case. The answer is refreshingly simple: Because so much that the state does it is not designed to do well, however ingenious are the men and women we put in charge. Brilliant as our bureaucrats may be, they are simply incapable of running a country this size. As George Will discerned in 2014, the United States “is not a parcel to be ‘taken’ anywhere. It is the spontaneous order of 316 million people making billions of daily decisions, cooperatively contracting together, moving the country in gloriously unplanned directions.” It does not matter whether we have a Harvard professor or a business mogul or a lifelong politico running the Department of Energy; none of them can do half as well for a local in Springfield, Virginia, as that local can do for himself. It does not matter how accomplished or credentialed the economists at the head of the Department of Commerce are; they will never grasp the details of the market better than the businesses they are seeking to aid. All too often, our politics is focused on a rotten capital city that sits on the Eastern Seaboard and not on our various institutions of meaning: the churches, charities, clubs, associations, sports teams, businesses, families, towns, cities, counties, and states that make up the whole. This vexes conservatives, at least ostensibly. But they might do more with their aggravation the next time they are in a position of power, steadfastly resisting the temptation merely to replace one set of tsars with another and choosing, this time, actually to let go.
There will be such a time. That the United States remains so keenly politically divided—and that its conservatives have not yet given up—is a matter of great disappointment to social democrats and a source of considerable inspiration to me and to many millions of others. In the United States, questions that were long ago settled in Europe and beyond serve as matters of daily deliberation. Among those questions: “What role should the government play in health care?” “Should the national government take a leading or a limited role in the national economy?” “Are individuals to be trusted with their own protection and allowed to possess the tools with which they might defend themselves?”
The scholar Francis Fukuyama, who in the mid-1990s declared that history had come to an end, seems now to be disappointed that its contributors are still kicking. Lamenting rather hysterically in 2013 that America’s exceptional character was “not necessarily a good thing,” Fukuyama spoke for many progressives when he observed that in the rest of the world, “the losing side of the election generally accepts the right of the majority to govern and does not seek to use every institutional lever available to undermine the winner.” Not so in America, where change is slow and the losers are afforded ample opportunity to regroup and to push their ideas. Fleshing out his objections, Fukuyama turned recently to Obamacare, proposing that
only in America can a government mandate to buy something that is good for you in any case be characterized as an intolerable intrusion on individual liberty. According to many Republicans, Obamacare signals nothing short of the end of the United States, something that “we will never recover from,” in the words of one GOP House member.… It is this kind of rhetoric that makes non-Americans scratch their heads in disbelief.
Let them scratch. It should be clear by now that any genuine diversity of thought will naturally produce both good and bad results. As Fukuyama himself concedes, the same structural and cultural frameworks that have allowed a genuine political opposition to prosper have also “slowed down or prevented the growth of a large, European-style regulatory welfare state, allowing the private sector to flourish and unleashing the United States as a world leader in technology and entrepreneurship.”
Fukuyama and his ilk underestimate the virtue of the space that government retrenchment leaves, and do not understand that preventing the metastasis of the state has more benefits than just economic dynamism. Governments are unlike most private enterprise, which must stand or fall by its merits, and unlike civil society, which survives only by convincing volunteers that their time is being well spent. Able to recruit an almost endless stream of treasure and violence to its cause, Washington makes mistakes that live on for decades—becoming petrified by the self-interested and then wrapped for the electorate in warm language and vague sentiment that has little to do with the actual consequences of whatever is being discussed. Having a movement that opposes much of this in principle is not an annoyance; it is a prerequisite for liberty.
The Tea Party and libertarian contingents, both of which are perpetually rolling their eyes at mainstream Republicans and their allies, have done the broader movement a great service by demanding that such power as the ostensible champions of limited government enjoy is to be leveraged in service of reform. Those elements have been right, too, to observe that the conservatives whose idea of change is simply to replace the management have abandoned a core American principle: That there is only so much that the state can, and should, do. Some among this group have become sufficiently frustrated with their brothers-in-arms to have established new and discrete groups, even abandoning or amending the “conservative” and “libertarian” labels traditionally used to describe the two strongest building blocks of the Right’s coalition. These are the “conservatarians” referred to in the title of this book, and they have an important point to make.
But not an exhaustive one. Pace George Washington, parties and ideologies can be extraordinarily useful organizing tools, and those who dismiss them out of hand tend to ignore the fact that the cabal and the clique are as inevitable as is politics itself. Nonetheless, however virtuous or natural they might be, all organizations are at risk of stagnation and calcification, and range from time to time into the danger of losing their souls and their appeal. On drugs, on gay marriage, on defense, and on the structure of the government—to name just a few areas in which the Right is unself-reflective—conservatives have all too often tended to rely upon reflexive justifications that they might never accept in other areas, opening themselves up to charges of hypocrisy and weakening their case with both their natural allies and with the independent voters that have customarily been the key to their success. This, I will suggest, is a dangerous mistake.
This is a book about a party and a philosophy that, in a number of areas, has lost its way. It is a book about change but also about tradition; a book that is sometimes critical but ultimately optimistic; a book that, at its heart, appreciates the age-old truths that man is not capable of perfection, that what cannot go on forever will stop, and that there are no solutions, only trade-offs; and a book that attempts to apply those timeless principles to the present day.
It is a book that offers the good news that most of what ails America can—and by rights should—be fixed by the conservative movement. Conservatives remain keenly in touch with the principles that have led the country to its present position of plenty and of international primacy, but of late they have exhibited a nasty habit of focusing on the wrong things and ignoring what it was that catapulted them to a position of influence in the first place.
These mistakes have not been fatal. The supposedly ebullient progressive moment of 2012 was, it turns out, little more than a mirage—a particularly turbulent swing of the pendulum that benefited but did not solidify the Left’s agenda. Barack Obama and his philosophy have not captured the American heart.
Nor, alas, have conservatives. But, I will argue, they can. In particular, I hope to remind the American Right that ours is an iconoclastic movement. I do not, of course, have all the answers. Nobody does. But I hope, at least, to start an argument within the group and to force conservatives to reexamine some of their basic principles and to question why they support what they support. There is limited virtue in merely restating the case against one’s opponents, and I have no intention of doing so here. If you are looking for a straight-up polemic, then I suggest you buy a different book. If, perchance, you are interested in a reappraisal of the conservative movement that seeks to leave it ever more vital and more closely in touch with the timeless principles that have guided it to this point, I hope you will find here something of use.