A pair of articles consider where conservatism has gone in the last half century. Or hasn’t, as the case may be.
Written by a professor at Patrick Henry College, “hands-down the worst of the right-wing religious ‘colleges,'” a friend observes, a Real Clear Politics column offers conservatism a path to redemption. She found the piece both “wonderful” and “terrifying” that there was so much to agree with in it.
Mark T. Mitchell writes about revitalizing conservatism as an agent of stewardship. His soothing tone is enticing, as is much public-facing conservative scholarship, especially in an age when conservative policy-making has been dismissed, replaced as an animating force by culture-warring.
Mitchell calls for conservatives to turn from the dark magic of Trumpism (what he calls Trump’s “strange magnetism”) back to righteousness, to actually conserving:
To be sure, some conservatives might claim that they are interested in conserving traditional values or American hegemony or perhaps some abstract notion of freedom. But even when these things are named, the language and the disposition are less about conserving and more about fighting. Saying, “We’re going to fight for family values” is not the same thing as doing the hard work to cultivate the practices and institutions necessary for thriving families.
In short, the language of conserving — of stewardship — is foreign to many conservatives. Thus, we have a significant group of people who call themselves conservative but who have lost the inclination (as well as the practice) of conserving. Recovering this disposition is a key component to revitalizing American conservatism.
Conservation, stewardship of the natural world should be a conservative cause. “Callous disregard for the natural world represents a moral failing, and chanting ‘drill, baby, drill’ suggests an appalling disregard for the natural world and a petulant demand for a way of life that is, in its present form, not sustainable,” Mitchell writes.
I feel my defenses lowering.
“We have inherited many good things,” Mitchell intones. “To despise one’s inheritance – as is the current fashion – is a profound act of hubris and ingratitude,” he continues, slowly waving an open hand.
You don’t need to confront the sins of the past. These aren’t the issues you’re looking for.
Mitchell wants conservatism to return to its small-government faith, to see “concentration of power in any form — political or economic” as dangerous, but without addressing the imbalances of both that are the legacy of centuries. Conservatives should embrace “local culture, local food, local democracy, and local economies” the way Wanda and Vision inhabit their own Westview, New Jersey. Conservatives should strive to eliminate the welfare state. They should “reduce barriers and create opportunities for the working poor to acquire real property and enter the middle class.” Give them just enough property not to notice they remain economically and politically disempowered and how hard conservatives are working to keep them that way.
It is seductive and meant to be. One message for the public and a subtler one for believers, as Rick Perlstein and Edward H. “Ted” Miller of Northeastern University explain at The New Republic.
“The Republican Party is facing what many observers are describing as a William F. Buckley moment—a make-or-break opportunity to purge the racists and conspiracy theorists,” they begin. Butt the racists and conspiracy theorists never left. Buckley never did except by dying.
In Ronald Reagan’s statements one may hear Robert Welch and the John Birch Society:
Such evidence of Welch’s influence on Reagan tells a truer story of how the modern right evolved. Its founding act wasn’t purging the extremist conspiracists like Welch. Instead, the far right better represented the “mainstream” right’s vanguard, according to the organizing metaphor of a forthcoming book from John S. Huntington. Or it was, to borrow the title of a groundbreaking Princeton dissertation by David Austin Walsh, but one component of the “Right-Wing Popular Front.”
To take one crucial example, it is generally agreed that the transformation of Sun Belt states like Texas into Republican bastions was a key driver of the ideological shifts that led to the presidential election first of Richard Nixon in 1968, then of Reagan in 1980. And in Texas, according to a forthcoming study by historian Jeff Roche, it was Birchers as much as establishment Republicans who drove that shift.
Roche’s book is called The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right. That term, “New Right,” refers to the key addition to the conservative coalition that made Ronald Reagan president, whose signature innovation was aggressively prospecting for new social issues, enraging ordinary citizens on the ground, and turning them into vectors for recruiting the otherwise apathetic into electoral politics. That was a method the John Birch Society mastered before the New Right even earned the name.
From sex education to abortion to feminism to homosexuality, Birchers saw creeping communism everywhere and in each a new cause célèbre. When Reagan won the presidency, “the only thing that changed was the people around him worked harder to keep his wackiness from the public.”
Conservatives learned to speak to two audiences at once, Perlstein and Miller write. The extremist fringe shops around “fantastical horror stories about liberal elites” in hopes they might find their way (in Overton Window fashion) into mainstream dialogue and enlist new recruits. QAnon today functions similarly, setting up tables downtown “urging none-the-wiser citizens to fight the scourge of global sex trafficking.” Rush Limbaugh turned telling daily horror stories into a decades-long career. Rupert Murdoch turned them into a media empire.
Conservatism reconstructed along Mitchell’s born-again-stewardship model might indeed be more marketable, even successful, my friend suggests. But not now and not soon. And not while actually purging itself of its animating dark magic. They are still busy trying to harness it.
(h/t SR)