It’s become fashionable in certain center-right circles to argue
that small-government conservatism has gained too much power. Tea
Party economics, the grievance goes, would seismically shift our
social contract and cast everyone onto the choppy waves of the free
market. It is, therefore, little better than radicalism.
David Frum usually leads this argument and, judging by his
writings, you’d think he was practically alone, heroically steering
his starship through a Delta Quadrant teeming with Tea Party
marauders. If Frum is the captain, then New York Times
columnist David Brooks is his number one. Brooks wrote a piece back
in 2007 arguing that it was time for the Republican Party to
jettison its limited government wing. Liberty arguments, Brooks
declared, weren’t germane to the challenges faced by modern
America.
Then the economy crashed, the stimulus failed, the national debt
skyrocketed, the government helped pump up a student loan bubble,
and the technocratic calculations made in Obamacare started to
unravel. And yet Brooks is back with
another column contending that economic conservatives have too
much influence.
His thesis is that the fusion of traditional conservatism and
libertarianism has lost its stick, with economic conservatives
seizing all the power. He’s right to an extent. The right’s
small-government strain is ascendant right now, expressed most
lucidly by the Tea Party. But there’s a very good reason for that.
Today’s political challenges are primarily fiscal in nature and the
federal government is the biggest offender.
Russell Kirk rightly identified conservatism as a state of mind
rather than an ideology or set of principles. But conservatism must
also respond to the challenges of its day. Our most critical test
is the skyrocketing national debt bloated by entitlement costs and
a refusal to cut government spending. Conservatism must offer
solutions and the Tea Party has.
Brooks cites Kirk in his piece (or, more specifically, cites
Rod Dreher who cites Kirk) and outlines his version of
traditional conservatism:
Because they were conservative, [traditionalists] tended to
believe that power should be devolved down to the lower levels of
this chain. They believed that people should lead disciplined,
orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do
this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were
intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and
political order that would encourage people to work hard, finish
school and postpone childbearing until marriage.
He then contrasts this with modern conservatism in which
“shrinking government” is “the organizing conservative principle.”
“They have taken control,” he writes ominously.
Have they? Is Frank Meyer’s fusion of traditionalism and
libertarianism really coming unglued?
Let’s take a look at the vanguard of today’s shrink-the-state
movement: the Tea Party. While condensing government is the theme
at any Tea Party rally, its members are social conservatives as
well. Brooks pines for a conservatism in which individuals need
“social custom and…God.” But research shows that Tea Partiers are
more united by their common Christian conservatism
than almost any other factor.
Like any movement, the Tea Party has its sharp edges and
conspiracy theories. Its leaders occasionally quote the radical
Thomas Paine. But the group has very little in common with the
anarchic Jacobinism that characterizes many revolutions. Instead
it’s closer to the Spirit of ‘76, that rare energy that demands
established liberty rather than upheaval. Tea Partiers aren’t
trying to overthrow America’s government or desecrate its
monuments. They’re driven by a deep respect for tradition which
they believe is being trampled by an activist government. That was
the foundation for the American Revolution, supported by Edmund
Burke, the father of traditional conservatism.
Today’s economic conservatives don’t want to overthrow order,
but devolve it back to local governments and voluntary
institutions. Despite some objectivist hat-tipping, they’re much
more Friedrich Hayek than Ayn Rand; more Calvin Coolidge than Gary
Johnson.
Brooks’ mistake, I think, is to confuse economic conservatism
with a type of pure-market libertarianism unmoored from any
tradition or order. It’s a distinction recognized by none other
than Russell Kirk in his lecture
A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians:
[A] number of the men and women who accept the label
“libertarian!’ are not actually ideological libertarians at all,
but simply conservatives under another name. These are people who
perceive in the growth of the monolithic state, especially during
the past half century, a grim menace to ordered liberty; and of
course they are quite right.
That describes today’s economic conservatives. The old bonds of
fusionism have held pretty well after all.
There is, of course, some jostling within the conservative
movement today. But it’s not between economic and social
conservatives. Brooks inadvertently reveals this in a telling
paragraph:
Ronald Reagan embodied both sides of this fusion, and
George W. Bush tried to recreate it with his compassionate
conservatism. But that effort was doomed because in the
ensuing years, conservatism changed. [Emphasis added.]
Bush’s neoconservatism made no attempt to recreate fusionism;
instead it changed it. Suddenly conservatism was the ideology of a
grand, impatient project in which evil was to be ended and
democracy was to be grown in the Middle East like a plant viewed
through time-lapse photography. Meanwhile spending increased, the
government grew, and ordered liberty was disrupted as the federal
government consolidated power over education, health care,
surveillance, and much more. Economic conservatism was elbowed to
the side as Republicans learned to stop worrying and love the
feds.
This is the incompatible strain in conservative thought. It took
control during the Bush years, relegating economic and traditional
conservatism to window dressing. Its roots are not in Burke or
Kirk, but in Leo Strauss and other anti-historical philosophers.
Irving Kristol wrote that its mission was to
forcibly convert traditional conservatism.
Neoconservatism… compassionate conservatism… whatever we’re
calling it… was largely discredited when it failed to predict the
post-liberation hardships in Iraq and the unintended consequences
of its own social engineering. But now many neoconservatives —
Brooks and Frum among them — have crawled back and are trying to
crowbar off the economic wing of the movement. And they’re citing
Burke and Kirk as they do it.
Ordered liberty is maintained through voluntary organizations
like churches and community centers, as well as through a
structured hierarchy of government power. Defending that against
usurpation by the feds is as classically and traditionally
conservative as it gets.
