To Solve the Conservative Intellectual Crisis, Return to Conservative Principles
A response to Nicholas Grossman
Nicholas Grossman, a contributor here at Arc, has recently posted a number of fantastic pieces on both foreign affairs and domestic politics. His most recent piece for Arc, a sort of programmatic map for how conservatives can readjust moving forward, contains much that is worth considering.
What I’d like to do in this piece is respond to aspects of Grossman’s article that I thought were wide of the mark.
The underlying assumption of Grossman’s article is that there is, in fact, a conservative intellectual crisis.
Yet is there a crisis?
Before we can establish that such a crisis exists we need to disentangle two distinct claims that I think Grossman conflates.
The first claim is that conservative intellectuals — understood by Matthew Continetti and Ross Douthat to be the people that make up the right-wing minority of the American elite — are in a state of exile from the Republican Party. So the assumption of crisis, understood this way, amounts to the claim that conservative intellectuals no longer control the Republican Party, or even wield the influence they once did.
The second claim is that conservative ideas are in crisis and need to be reconfigured toward pragmatic policy solutions. On this view, conservatives and Republicans in Congress should not adhere to rigid dogma but should instead pursue the sort of conservative policy objectives that are broadly palatable to Democrats across the aisle.
Grossman and others cite quite a few examples — immigration, taxes, spending, trade, criminal justice, healthcare, and more — of policy areas congressional Republicans should seek to reform along pragmatic, rather than strictly conservative, lines.
So the second claim is basically this: Conservatism — as in the governing philosophy itself — is in intellectual crisis.
Notice that these are two distinct claims. The first says conservative intellectuals are in crisis — their influence has evaporated or lessened among the base of the Republican Party and their elected representatives. The second says conservative ideas are in crisis — that truly conservative ideas, as a practical matter, are no longer worth vehemently defending.
Regarding the first claim, it is not at all clear that the solution to the diminished influence of conservative intellectuals is for congressional Republicans to compromise and work with Democrats more. Remember, the conservative intellectuals — we are talking about the elite conservative thinkers such as columnists, authors, think tank leaders, and so forth of conservative renown — are not synonymous with congressional Republicans.
It’s not immediately obvious how congressional Republicans jettisoning firm ideological principles in order to compromise with Democrats and achieve pragmatic policy solutions in any way restores or even increases the influence of the conservative intellectuals. Where is the causal connection there?
With regard to the second claim, it is not at all clear that conservatism as a governing philosophy is in crisis. Conservative intellectuals have detailed and sound policies on the full range of issues concerning Americans today, and those policies have passed and functioned with great success at the state and local levels.
Furthermore, Republicans have made huge gains in winning and maintaining seats in governors’ mansions and state legislatures across the country. At the federal level, although Democrats won the presidency in 2008 and 2012, Republicans have held majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate since 2010 and 2014, respectively. President Obama has had to work with a divided Congress for 6 of the 8 years of his two terms. However, in the current political climate, examples of passage and implementation of conservative policy proposals at the federal level remain few and far between.
G. K. Chesterton famously said “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” In many respects, the same is true of the conservative ideal in the political sphere.
To be clear, we do not have a shortage of Republicans on Capitol Hill that want to, and in fact do, compromise and work with Democrats. Republican Congressional Leadership, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner (formerly), Paul Ryan, and the rank-and-file Republicans have repeatedly compromised with Obama and the Democrats on a variety of issues throughout both of Obama’s terms in ways that violated conservative principles and went against the interests of the Republican base.
Let’s look at an example. In 2015, Republican leadership in Congress, together with Obama and the Democrats, renewed the Export-Import Bank, an obvious example of corporate welfare and crony capitalism in direct contradiction with conservative principles. How does compromising with Democrats to renew the Export-Import Bank help Republicans solve the problem of the conservative intellectual crisis? It doesn’t.
The interests both of conservatism as a philosophy and the voters’ pragmatic concerns would have been better served if congressional Republican leadership opposed renewal of the Export-Import Bank rather than compromise with the Democrats to ensure its renewal. Yet they pushed for it anyway and got it done.
Conservatives ought to push for policy outcomes that are actually conservative.
Conservative policy outcomes are sometimes achieved by affirmatively implementing sound conservative policies. Other times, they’re achieved by blocking passage of damaging, non-conservative policies. Good governance is not simply about “getting things done” but also about blocking bad things from happening, especially during those times when conservatives and Republicans are operating as an opposition party and truly feasible affirmative conservative outcomes are few and far between. In a piece entitled “Only Gridlock Can Save America Now,” The Federalist’s David Harsanyi explains:
From a conservative perspective, surely even a timid Congress is more useful than one which ‘fixes’ Obamacare and overturns the Hyde Amendment and passes anti-gun legislation and revisits cap and trade…
I want to be clear that this is not an argument for petty brinkmanship or mere political grandstanding. Congressional Republicans need to be strategic, learn how to pick their battles, and spend their political capital wisely. For example, as the Democrats have recognized, Supreme Court appointments are absolutely worth expending political capital, while low-level cabinet appointments may not be. The reason is obvious: Supreme Court appointments can have significant ramifications for decades.
When the Democrats were the opposition party to Republican presidents, they spent political capital to try and obstruct Supreme Court nominees that were unfavorable to them (see the nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas). Republicans do not need to go so far as to bork Democratic Supreme Court nominees, but they should not act as a mere rubber stamp either.
When congressional Republicans voted 60 times to repeal Obamacare and held other similar opposition votes that had no chance becoming law, these were not examples of a legitimate conservative opposition or a failure of conservatism as a governing philosophy. More often than not, these opposition votes function as nothing more than kabuki theater; Congress performs these show-votes precisely because they have zero chance to impact actual public policy.
In the current climate, Congressional Republicans repeatedly work with Democrats to make sure elite Washington’s bipartisan agenda moves forward without any vulnerable members having to be on record as fully supporting it, regardless of whether this agenda actually represents conservative principles or enjoys support from congressional constituencies. Another example: In 2014, Republican Leadership in the Senate secretly supported raising the debt ceiling without extracting any spending concessions from the Democrats, but wanted to be on record as opposing it. So, they attempted to reduce the 60-vote threshold normally used for a debt ceiling vote to a 51-vote threshold. However, due to a filibuster by Sen. Ted Cruz designed to expose this theatrical gimmick, Republican Leadership was forced to vote on the record that they actually supported raising the debt ceiling without spending cuts along with the Democrats.
In my view, Continetti’s account, as previously referenced, demonstrates that the conservative intellectual crisis is not populism per se, but the problems that emerge when populism becomes unmoored from conservative political philosophy. As Berny Belvedere has pointed out in a piece entitled “Trump, Evangelicals, and Megachurches”:
Although it might be jarring to hear Trump’s army of deplorables likened to a movement in which a ‘variety of opinions and practices are tolerated,’ the reality is that Trump’s populist-flavored magnetism has always subordinated ideology to attitude.
The true conservative intellectual crisis is that the Republican Party’s long-standing principles of constitutionalism, limited government, the rule of law, economic freedom, personal responsibility, strong national defense, and so forth have been totally displaced by the interests of the big government elite on the one hand, and the populist, cult of personality of Trumpism on the other hand.
Conservative principles and policy ideas have taken a backseat to Washington special interests and the substance-free, populist attitude of our public discourse. Specific conservative values and ideas no longer matter to many Republican power players and no longer matter to many Republican voters.
The solution to that crisis is to strive for a return to conservative principles. Conservative intellectuals can play a role in this effort by providing robust advocacy of conservative principles and applying those principles to specific policies. Given this intellectual support and the political will in Washington, conservative ideas and policies can earn broad popular support in the marketplace of ideas and produce successful results for the American people.
