Whither Conservatism

We’re living at the end of an era. That reality hit me while I listened to a series of speakers at a recent conference in London. Sponsored by the Danube Institute, it took the theme of “recovering conservatism.” This way of framing discussion suggests that conservatism has been in some sense “lost”—or, perhaps better, has lost its way. How may we “find” what has been lost, get ourselves back on track?

The speakers offered a variety of insights, analyses, and prescriptions. Yet the presentations suggested a common assessment: Conservatism must shift from an emphasis on freedom to an emphasis on belonging.

Freedom, innovation, openness, creativity, entrepreneurship: These were characteristic themes in the Reagan and Thatcher years. Wouldn’t “recovering conservatism” mean scooping up this legacy and representing it to the twenty-first-century public? Belonging, solidarity, loyalty, family, nation: These themes have a very different ring to them. They strike notes of consolidation. Doesn’t a turn in this direction represent a betrayal of conservatism rather than its recovery? William F. Buckley reviled the Leviathan state and inveighed against the perils of collectivism. If he were still on the scene, wouldn’t he resist those who give priority to belonging over freedom?

I cannot tell you whether or not WFB is rolling over in his grave, but I’ll note that the impresario of the conference was John O’Sullivan, a special adviser to Thatcher in the late 1980s and editor-in-chief of Buckley’s National Review in the 1990s. I do not wish to imply that O’Sullivan endorsed all of what was said at the conference or that he would accept my formulation of the underlying sentiment. But it is telling that one of the most articulate spokesmen for late-twentieth-century Anglo-­American conservatism orchestrated a gathering in which freedom, though not denied, was sidelined, and a new ­emphasis—belonging—came to the fore.

The emphasis was the right one, because, by my reading of our current situation, we need to turn toward solidarity motifs. This turn does not “betray” conservatism. It responds intelligently to new realities. After World War II, a varied but coherent consensus rose to dominance in the West. In recent decades, that consensus has eroded, and now it is failing. For this reason, conservatism is ­changing.

The first pillar of the postwar consensus concerns political economy. The measures devised to fight the Great Depression and (even more so) the wartime mobilization of industry established institutions and expectations that moderated conflict between labor and capital. After the war, Western countries erected stable social welfare schemes funded by reliable economic growth.

Politically speaking, it was Goldilocks capitalism. The interests of labor and the interests of capital remained distinct, but they were far better aligned than they had been before the war. Within this relatively stable system, it was the job of conservatives to speak up for the interests of capital and resist the tendency of social welfare programs to enlarge the state and enervate individual self-reliance and initiative. Ronald Reagan has played such an important role in the history of postwar ­conservatism because he underscored these priorities.

The second aspect of the postwar consensus was cultural. Our elite adopted an open-society imperative. It was thought that cultural norms and traditional authorities needed to be made more flexible and less judgmental. This imperative underwrote criticism of 1950s “conformism.” It gave traction to feminism and gay liberation.

As I explain in Return of the Strong Gods, the open-­society imperative presumed a background of stable authority. To use the terms I drew from Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the last issue, the push for greater flexibility and inclusion relied upon a Party of Permanency to apply the brakes as needed. The postwar right played this role, relying on its socially conservative constituency to provide ballast in a rapidly changing society. Phyllis Schlafly’s successful mobilization of that constituency to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment offers a signal example.

Foreign policy constituted the third pillar. In order to counter the Soviet Union, the United States ­erected a global system—the “free world,” as it was known. The system was American-dominated, but it promised to provide favorable conditions in which participating nations might flourish.

U.S. military power grew to colossal proportions in order to deter communist aggression and protect the American-led system. This power was not cost-free. Throughout most of the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. was spending 10 percent of GDP (sometimes more) for defense. (Current defense spending runs at 3 percent of GDP.) It was the job of postwar conservatism to block liberal attempts to siphon funds away from defense. This task required regular reminders of the perils of communism and ongoing resistance of temptations to compromise with the Soviet Union. Here, too, Reagan is important, because he renewed these conservative tasks in a time when resolve had waned in many sectors of society.

All three pillars of the postwar settlement have crumbled, not necessarily because they were intrinsically weak, but because the world has changed. The collapse of the Soviet Union affected the economic, cultural, and geopolitical dynamics of the West. The world was no longer divided into two zones. The way was opened to globalize the American-led system. To a degree that had been unimaginable since the last phase of global commerce in the British-led system prior to World War I, commercial enterprises could leap borders. Corporations sought out countries with low labor costs in which to make goods and countries with low taxes in which to incorporate and park profits. In these and many other ways (government acceptance of mass migration, for instance), the Goldilocks economy of the golden decades after World War II was undone.

Conservatives largely refused to acknowledge the way in which globalization had torn up the postwar social contract. I remember my dismay when the Republican Party featured videos of entrepreneurs touting “I built that” during the 2012 convention that nominated Mitt Romney. This slogan reflected an outdated commitment to promoting the interests of business owners against what conservatives imagined to be a “collectivist” mentality on the other side of the aisle. But by 2012 it was not clear which side of the aisle was the party of business. The richest Americans had shifted to the Democratic Party. Some of Barack Obama’s biggest financial supporters were Silicon Valley titans whose wealth rivaled that of the robber barons who bankrolled the Republican Party during the Gilded Age. Instead of balancing the establishment left, by the second decade of this century, conservatism was putting its weight behind the same interests that neo-liberal Democrats had come to support: the interests of capital.

There are two ways to sap the spirit of self-reliance. One is by seducing with government handouts. The other is by de-industrializing the economy and starving the average American of meaningful work while championing careers out of reach for all but the most talented. If conservatism is to be “recovered,” careful thought must be given to reconfiguring the rules of the free market such that a high-school-educated person “belongs” as a productive member of society. Put simply, conservatives who care about the freedom of ordinary people, understood as economic self-reliance, need to make a 180-­degree turn and champion the interests of labor. Nobody at the London conference put it so bluntly, but it was striking that some hinted at the need for such a turn.

In Return of the Strong Gods and in this column (see above), I have detailed the damage done by an increasingly dogmatic open-society imperative. Too many young people now grow up with no father at home and no Father in Heaven. They are taught that their nation is besmirched with sin and does not merit their loyalty. Gender ideology undermines their capacity to be at home in their bodies. We have lost any balance between liberation and obligation, openness and boundaries, transgression and authority. As a consequence, we have lost a great deal of what used to be “home,” a place in which we belong.

Since 1945, our liberal elites have had command over cultural policy. They sponsored the open-society imperative, which has transformed American society. In this settlement, conservatives are tasked with a largely reactive role. Their job is to temper excesses and slow the pace of change.

In the last issue, I laid out this dynamic in some detail. The gravamen of my analysis was that the Party of Change is now unhindered, leading to the culture of death I describe above. This state of affairs suggests that the open-society imperative has reached its expiration date.

The end of the postwar era means a reversal of roles. Conservatives must assume control over cultural policy. The task is complex in detail but simple in concept. What the twenty-first-century West needs is a revolution of moral re-regulation not unlike what was undertaken during the Victorian era. Conservatives need to rebuild structures of authority in which people can escape their bondage to self-love and enter into the freedom of self-possession, the freedom that allows us to belong to ourselves and those whom we love rather than to our undisciplined impulses, consumer desires, and debilitating addictions.

A revolution of authority is not inevitable, but it seems likely. We cannot live without a home, without opportunities for belonging. In that revolution of authority, progressivism and its agenda of liberation will become the secondary and reactive rather than primary and creative force in our culture. Today’s shrill accusations of “white supremacy,” “fascism,” and “authoritarianism” follow the script formulated in the late 1940s. (See The Authoritarian Personality, an extraordinarily influential work of propaganda masked as social ­science.) This rhetoric is now nearly a hundred years old. Its urgent use reflects liberal elite panic. They hope to resurrect Hitler in order to forestall the reversal of cultural power that will come with the turn toward moral re-regulation, the erection of guardrails in society.

The third pillar, the American-led system, is under stress. What made sense as an anti-communist alliance has become an empire of globalized American business interests defended by the U.S. military and legitimated by the rainbow flag. It’s not clear that those business interests align with the interests of American workers. And the rainbow flag is the progressive battle flag. It is a divisive symbol, not a unifying one.

During the Cold War, we needed strength and resolve to defend the American way of life against communist aggression. But times have changed. There are many good reasons to stand firm against Russia, China, and Iran. But conservatives should not champion strength in order to defend global business interests and the Rainbow Reich. In 2023, conservatism needs to enter into a season of reflection. What are the deepest foreign threats to the American way of life? How should American power be configured to guard against those threats? Answers are not easy, but few of the habits of mind that were formed since the end of the Cold War are likely to be useful.

Astute readers will have noticed that my three pillars echo the three elements of postwar “fusionism”: free markets, social conservatism, and hawkish anti-communism. Fusionism will endure, but it will be reconfigured to meet the actual ­challenges of this century, rather than the imagined challenges conjured by nostalgia for the last century.

The middle decades of the twenty-first century will be quite different from the postwar era. Our crises are not born of collectivism, over-regulation, or an oppressive middle-class morality. We are not threatened by a totalitarian adversary driven by a universalist creed that demands world domination. Our challenges arise because an unbridled progressivism sponsors deconsolidating, liquifying forces that insist upon their universality—and it uses American power to seek world domination.

The open-society imperative has run its course. The time has come to consolidate around a grounded- or anchored-society consensus. The speakers at the London conference suggested as much. I hope we can arrive at that consensus before the increasingly decadent, flesh-eating permanent revolution ruins even more of what needs to be rebuilt.