Ex-Bush-speechwriter Michael Gerson has an article in The Washington Post lamenting that “conservatism should be at its modern nadir just as the Republican Party is at its zenith — if conservatism is defined as embracing limited government, displaying a rational, skeptical and moderate temperament and believing in the priority of the moral order.”
He goes on to say:
…the reason for politics is to honor the equal value of every life, beginning with the weakest and most vulnerable. No bad goal — say, racial purity or communist ideology — outweighs this commitment. And no good goal — the efficiency of markets or the pursuit of greater equality — does either.
Is honoring “the equal value of every life, beginning with the weak and most vulnerable” really what conservatives think of as the top priority of politics? This was the promise of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” which was dubious from its birth in the 2000 campaign, and became only more ridiculous throughout the Bush administration.
But let’s allow — in the spirit of generosity and for the sake of argument — that Gerson really believes in this principle, and that other conservatives do too. How does this principle translate into conservative policies like Bush’s tax cuts that benefit the rich, virtual abandonment of New Orleans after Katrina, or the continuing conservative opposition to Obamacare’s extension of health care? And how did the Republican Party end up metastasizing into the party of Trump? I think the answer lies at the end of Gerson’s definition enumeration of conservative principles — “the priority of the moral order.”
“The moral order” strikes me as odd. It assumes that there is one moral order, and one side (conservatives) prioritize it, whereas liberals ignore it. In reality, much of political debate centers around exactly what the moral order is. “The moral order” is not a thing.
But “order” is definitely a thing, and conservatives prioritize it more than liberals. Republicans from Nixon to Reagan to Trump have proudly called themselves a “law and order” candidate. In the words of D. Robert Worley in his “Defense of Conservative Thought”:
Conservative thought includes a belief in hierarchy, i.e., there is a hierarchy across and within societies. Not all states are equal in power; not all men are equal in power. That’s the way it is, that’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way it always will be. Government intervention is unlikely to change that. Hierarchy represents order, and order preserves stability.
Maybe you can see the tension starting to emerge. The “weakest and most vulnerable” are the people on the bottom of these hierarchies. Any attempt to uplift them upsets the hierarchy, and initiates disorder, which conservatives fear will devolve into chaos. This tension comes up again and again in American politics — disadvantaged groups win new rights, conservatives feel order threatened and fight back.
It might be obvious to you that these disadvantaged groups include non-whites, women, and the poor. But most conservatives don’t want to think of themselves as racist or sexist. So how is this tension resolved? Compassionate conservative types usually end up deciding — against all evidence — that these groups are not, in fact, disadvantaged. This taps in to a very long history of American thought that began with arguing that African slaves were lucky to be brought to the South (this claim persisted in mainstream thought well into the 20th century), but remains with us today, for instance in insistence that stop-and-frisk policing policies are actually good for minorities. You can see this thought too in the conservative claims that Obama “divides America” by advocating tolerance and social justice. In the compassionate conservative mind, America is already tolerant and just.
But for some conservatives, the threat of chaos is itself enough to outweigh any other factor. Defending the hierarchy that keeps chaos at bay is therefore defensible on its face. This is the side of conservatism that Trump represents. It seems more and more that this was the dominant strain of conservative thinking all along, but is only now becoming more open:
It’s not necessarily wrong to be afraid of change. The incrementalism of Obama that frustrates so many progressives derives from the same instinct. But within the Republican Party, maintaining order has come to dominate all other considerations.
The truth is that the kind of conservatism that Gerson laments is at an ebb — embracing “limited government” and a “rational temperament” — never had much of a constituency. That’s why as soon as Bush got into office he began expanding government and promoting scientific ignorance. That Gerson’s conservatism is at its nadir while Trump’s Republican Party is at its zenith is not a coincidence, but a necessity. Gerson and the Heritage crowd might value freedom and “the equal value of every life” above all else. The typical Republican voter values order.
