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The Conservative Movement is Dead; Long Live the Conservative Movement
“Only a few prefer liberty — the majority seek nothing more than fair masters.” Sallust, Histories
I have been thinking about what went wrong with the Conservative movement and why in a year where the Democrats nearly handed us the election we failed to capitalize yet again. It dawned on me that so much of the commentary focused on the Republican Party, conservatives in general, the failure of our gatekeepers, our “betrayal” by the establishment, and the inadequacies of the various candidates. What I want to do is look at the Conservative movement and see how it is doing.
The first question I want to answer is what the Conservative movement was and then I want to make the case for why it died and why we need it again. William F. Buckley is widely and, I think, correctly seen as the founder of the Conservative movement. He started the movement in reaction to the progressive consensus of the time that we had moved past the founding documents of America and that we had the capability of remaking society. This progressive consensus was that we could retain democracy and some of the rights promised in the US Constitution but, at the same time, we needed to abandon the restrictions on our power that the Constitution had put in place because we knew so much more than before and there was so much more that we could control. In other words, Liberty was not an important value when it was possible to know what was best for people and we had the ability to guide people to good outcomes.
Buckley famously wanted to “stand athwart history, yelling stop!” Which was the right attitude to take since the people he was dealing with in the 1950s were part of the intellectual consensus but culturally had grown up in a time of Classical Liberal values and believed in them. There had not been a successful defender of our classical liberal order since Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s and the crisis of the Great Depression and then World War II had muted all ideological disputes for more than 12 years.
To tap into this cultural conservatism of the people the people had to realize that there was a disconnect between the liberal intellectual consensus and the people’s felt classical liberal values. Buckley founded National Review to provide that intellectual framework. Not only would they defend classical liberal values of limited government, federalism, personal liberty, and Judeo-Christian values, they would form a consensus on the right bringing together different streams of the conservative intellectuals together through fusionism. All of this succeeded and key to its success was the rise, less than a decade after the founding of National Review, of the movement of the New Left.
The New Left undermined the connections between the progressive consensus and the felt classical liberal values of most the people. The dominant political consensus came under attack from the Right and the Left and the progressive liberals were the ones without the intellectual firepower to fight and win either battle. More on the Progressives and the New Left in another post.
Buckley’s Conservative movement succeeded in disrupting the consensus of his time, something any movement must do to succeed, and in providing an intellectual framework for changing the direction of the country. This was key because once a consensus is disrupted people need to see a way forward or the support they feel for the new movement fades and they can even turn on the new movement for leading them down a blind alley. It is far easier to destroy an old order than it is to replace that order with something new. That is why revolutions that truly bring about something new and unknown to a country usually fail, while things like the American Revolution succeed because they are trying to restore or protect liberties that are known to the people.
Back to politics. As the conservative movement got going, it needed a vehicle and the Republican Party needed issues to win back power. Because of FDR, the Democrat party was the beneficiary of the political Consensus which was, to simplify greatly, a belief that instead of a focus on negative rights and individualism, the government would focus on providing for the common good even if that meant trampling on some individual rights and liberties and especially if that meant on removing or weakening checks on government power. The conservative side of the consensus was to preserve, even if primarily through hypocrisy, a certain kind of social conservatism. Since the Republican Party was on the outs of this they needed issues to use against the Democrats because you could not always run a war hero in every presidential election. The Conservative movement provided such issues and the movement began to grow in the Republican party.
American Political History, in Brief
American political parties were not primarily vehicles for ideology for most of American history. American politics primarily served to mediate between the different economic interests of different regions of the country and local politics were decided on issues of competency, political corruption and reform. Whigs and Democrats and then Republicans and Democrats switched positions in local politics all the time. The great thread that was close to an ideological divide was the Civil War and Segregation. But since that also was a regional issue it fit very well with over political class. FDR and the New Deal changed everything because of the extended amount of time and opportunities that Great Depression and World War II offered. Though it needs to be mentioned here that FDR’s overwhelming desire for complete power, his savior complex and his desire to throw out American’s republican traditions, like serving only two terms as President, and his incredible political skills all played an important part in the change as well.
The Republicans resisted and made real progress in the Truman administration, which is what gave birth to the new political consensus. With Eisenhower, both parties were basically in service to this political consensus. Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon and Carter were all part of the general liberal/progressive Consensus politics though they empathized different parts of the Consensus and had different priorities. The people backed the Consensus politicians too. Nixon’s second term reelection landside was due in part to the fact that people perceived Nixon to be a champion of the Consensus politics and opposed to both the Conservatives and the New Left.
Carter won after Nixon to reform the Consensus politics and put it on more virtuous footing. However Carter’s only plan for how to do this was to act, in his own estimation, virtuously. So no matter how many virtuous decisions he made, by Carter’s own lights, the rest of the world did not care and spun out of control. Since the problem of the Consensus politics was not that they needed a virtuous man but that they no longer worked so Carter’s presidency failed.
The Reagan Effect
Then came Reagan. He was a movement Conservative and had fully developed his ideology but he felt and looked like an old familiar Consensus politicians. Reagan comes into office and immediately begins to apply conservative principles to the problems of the day and give answers to the problems the public perceived to be problems. One of the hurdles that he had to overcome was the natural Republican tendency to think that you don’t need ideology to win and maintain power. Political operatives can often be frightened by a strong ideology because it can box you in and trap politicians in positions that aren’t “winning” and politics is about winning power and the mediating problems peacefully. This led traditional Republicans to fear and mistrust Reagan but it also allowed Reagan to see and exploit the weaknesses in the Democrats and exploit them. In the end Reagan’s mix of practical political competence, ideological clarity and his success in fixing the things public thought were wrong with the country made him untouchable and made Republicans that wanted to win to be like Reagan. Many politicians that became Conservatives did it as a political tactic though and not as an actual change of heart. Reagan’s success also killed the Conservative movement as a movement and welded the movement to the Republican party. Reagan showed us the way to further our goals and the movement Conservatives took the path of growing and controlling the Republican party. What was not clear at the time was the fact that the Republican Party was much bigger than the Conservative movement.
During the Reagan-Bush years the Democrats were in disarray as old Democrat Consensus politicians unsuccessfully tried to harness the New Left and failed at that spectacularly. What Conservatives needed to do was maintain power and to maintain our position in the Republican Party and the whole country would begin to return to the Classical Liberal principles and cultural norms that we knew were essential to a successful country. At least that is what Conservatives hoped. Reagan, when he left office, was old and that was a big weakness because the next President would be the de facto leader of the Conservative movement. The leader that Conservatives got was Bush who was a wonderful man in many ways but was a Consensus politician by instinct who wanted to do his job with great competence and professionalism. What he wasn’t was a leader for Conservatives and his presidency by any measure was highly competent and successful and he secured several of Reagan’s victories like winning the Cold War. What the people needed from him however was to see where Conservatives would go from here. What was our next move, what would a new Conservative political consensus look like? George Bush was not capable of answering these questions and so he lost to Bill Clinton and Ross Perot who were both perceived as offering answers to these questions. More on both them in a following post.
When Clinton betrayed his small government rhetoric, people responded by getting on board the Gingrich revolution and putting Republicans in charge of the legislature. Gingrich could have become the Conservative leader the movement needed but he was not stable enough. Dole ran against Clinton and he was as far from a Movement Conservative as you could get promising to be Reagan if we wanted him to be. Meanwhile Conservatives began celebrating their massive victories but doing what all movements do when they get power they began refining their message and writing people out of the movement in effort to have more success and to avoiding having to make so many compromises. The 1990s is where the term “RINO” becomes popular and the Republicans begin to rid the party of old Liberal Consensus politicians. Also the “Fusion” part of the movement begins to fray and break apart as different factions of party began to demand their spoils. Pro-lifers needed more out of Republicans, libertarian economic conservatives wanted to end socially minded tax breaks, Christian conservatives needed cultural change and, as pay offs were demanded, unity was undermined. Meanwhile, in the public mind, politics had turned back to compromise as Republicans and Democrats were working together and passing Welfare reform and balanced budgets.
The Conservative movement was not served very well by the next Presidential candidates either with Bush being a kind of Conservative but being judged by foreign policies, war and crisis management. Who in the public’s mind was really elected with a mandate to continue the Clinton politics of compromise while leaving Clinton’s gross personal weaknesses behind. McCain was nearly a pre-Reagan throw back and Romney famously spoke Conservatism as a second language. What was worse than the politicians not providing the leadership the movement needed but the Conservatives stopped being a movement. This happens to movements of many kinds, when leadership changes direction and vision can be loss while it is important to remember that while the Conservative movement dominated in issues and policy ideas, the Republican party was always bigger than the Conservative movement. When the Movement lost momentum and vision it was always possible that a different faction of the Republican coalition could assert itself and the Republican party was not going to resist that takeover. Republicans are about winning elections and beating Democrats, not advancing an ideology.
Let’s sum things up. The Conservative Movement was founded by William F Buckley and others to disrupt a Progressive/Liberal Consensus that emerged after the Great Depression and World War II. In this, the Conservative movement succeeded. In doing so, they gained a dark mirror image and rival known as the New Left. That rivalry lasted through the first aborted efforts to take over the different political parties and, against all odds, the Conservative Movement won that race and took power with President Reagan.
Since that massive victory and all the other victories that Reagan’s presidency made possible, the Conservative Movement stopped being a movement and became the dominant faction in the Republican Party, but represented only one part of the larger Republican coalition. The last two years of the Bush administration and the Obama administration made people doubt what Conservatives could do and different factions in the Republican Party decided that Conservatives need not lead their coalition. They found a champion in Trump and the rest will soon be history.
How can the Conservative movement reconstruct and invigorate itself in our current environment and not only bring the Republican Party back on board but see new growth in the movement? That’s for my next post.
Published in Culture, Politics
Wonderful post.
VERY well written. Better, by far, than all of the other “Ok, GOP, here’s how we get past Trup!” pieces I’ve read this silly election season.
Rod Dreher has a crackerjack piece out today that compliments your (also crackerjack) article.
You are making the same point I was making in the OP but you took the time to more fully explore what I did not have the space to cover in the OP. But just to show we are the same page, more or less, from the OP…
Many politicians that became Conservatives did it as a political tactic though and not as an actual change of heart. Reagan’s success also killed the Conservative movement as a movement and welded the movement to the Republican party. Reagan showed us the way to further our goals and the movement Conservatives took the path of growing and controlling the Republican party. What was not clear at the time was the fact that the Republican Party was much bigger than the Conservative movement.
I will say I don’t think that it was a failure of Reagan to put more Conservatives in charge of the Republican party but that the Conservatives simply didn’t have the manpower to control something as huge as the Republican party. However Conservatives were able to pretty much shut out other voices and politicians in the Republican party had to show and demonstrate they were Conservative to survive. So we were a titular head of the Republican party but we were never really in control of it.
To quote from the opening bit of the Flagship podcast, “I don’t understand why you think that is funny.”
Thanks for the compliment and the link!
@jamielockett Ok I can check that off the my Ricochet bucket list, Jamie Lockett called my post wonderful! Check. Thanks I really respect your opinion (even when we disagree) and appreciate the compliment.
I really respect when people put a lot of work into their posts and add real value to the conversation. This post did so in spades.
@brianwolf
I’m not so sure Brian. Look who the Republican Party ran for President since Reagan. Point to the Conservative (not a hyphenated Conservative ) … Bush1, Dole, Bush2, McCain, Romney? The only Conservative on the National stage in recent memory was Ted Cruz. Even though Trumpers and the GOPe ostensibly despise each other, they did manage to make common cause to destroy Cruz.
After Nixon, a Republican should have been unelectable for 50 years. But Conservatives saved the Party. Movement Conservatives. Reagan’s “kamikazee conservatives”. We are now strangers in the house we saved….and have been since 1988.
Yes your last paragraph is true. I think it was a matter of numbers the Republicans were just so much bigger than the Conservatives we did not sink in deep enough roots in time. Even Reagan can only do so much in 8 years. But want I am talking about is how every candidate had to go on and on about how they were conservative and how they got it and how conservative principles guided them. That was real. How many candidates had to make endless references to Reagan?
Do you see what I mean?
@brianwolf. I see what you mean. But Because we lacked a grip on the Party machinery, all they had to do was to talk the conservative talk. Most never walked the walk nor had any intention of doing so. And paid no political price for not doing so. I’m afraid that to an entire generation, ‘conservative’ means Bush/McConnell/Boehner/Graham
Yes. That is something that I will address in my next post as well. This is big problem for us and the very reason that we got Trump as our nominee this year. It has been a long time since people saw real conservatives at work and succeeding at things outside of the State level where there are real Conservatives making real changes. The problem is that often what people see in their State conservatives are not reflected on the national party level. @ekosj
First, thanks for your efforts in the original post — thoughtful and controversial — and your responsiveness and happy warrior tone in the thread.
Re the above: While this is theoretically true of the Democratic party and practically true in a broken clock sense occasionally, I really can’t think of any truly concerted Democratic Party contribution to constitutional conservatism since Grover Cleveland.
I’d like to think I am being too summary and unfair, but I am afraid I am not.
Yes, I agree with you. But your charge is not quite true JFK, Truman, Lieberman, Moynihan, Scoop Jackson and others have advanced Conservative causes in part. What I am really saying is that the end goal of a Conservative movement is to have the 1924 election all over again where two Classical Liberals ran against each other one as a Democrat and one as a Republican. That would be grand. Will it happen any time soon? I doubt it but that should be our goal.
I will talk in my next several posts where I think a Conservative movement could crack Democratic support off from the Progressives and while, in the short term, it might strengthen some Democrats in the long term it will make the country more Conservative over all.
Again, all of these men were essentially liberals, though some were more pragmatic and less dogmatic about their aims, typically quite commendable, than others.
Yes, there was a winning consensus on Communist expansion, Kennedy’s tax cuts and businesslike liberalism and Lieberman’s fundamental decency and clarity about Israel.
Yet none really contributed to Movement Conservatism. Lieberman and Moynihan were really our favorite liberals. Lieberman was more deserving of our respect and occasional support.
I am younger than the conservatives who periodically swooned over Moynihan. Sure he was a more critical supporter of the welfare state (“benign neglect” and all) and an effective supporter of Nixon’s centrist detente foreign policy. But let’s face facts. After his primary run against Ramsey Clark, Moynihan was never even faintly conservative again. Conservatives looked for him like we look again and again at that space where we parked the stolen car.
Yet Moynihan, like the stolen car, was never there again.
Agreed. In cases like this Movement Conservatives need to use the liberals for who and what they are then drop them.
For instance if a school choice voucher program was up in a state and opposed by the Democratic party and local Democrat councilwoman was for the proposal because of how it would help African American children. I would want to support her on that issue. Not just in rhetoric but really support her. The more we worked together on the issue the more trust we would build with each other and the deeper I would get into this community. Perhaps I will meet and make contact with a Pastor in the community that is quite conservative on Abortion issues. Perhaps I manage to connect him to our broader pro-life efforts. Through the Pastor I meet a couple of local business owners that are conventional liberals but are fire breathers about over regulation of their businesses. All of them see me working with the Council woman on one issue, the Pastor on another and the business owners on another. On all these issues we are opposed by the Democrat party.
Can you see making some head way here for the Conservative Movement? Even though by winning on the Voucher program I might help guarantee the re-election of a Democrat Council woman?
So on the local organization level there is a lot of room for expansion but that will take time to have any impact on a the national scene but is the kind of thing we need to do.
Great post.
I think we should recognize that conservatism at its peak of influence was not as powerful as we think.
The line in the single Carter versus Reagan debate that is routinely mentioned is “There you go again.” This was Reagan’s response to Carter’s accusation that Reagan wanted to cut Medicare, the large Great Society entitlement program that provided health insurance to senior citizens.
This line probably helped Reagan win the election against Carter, but it exposed a weakness in conservatism. Reagan proved in 1980 that a conservative could only win if he promised to leave large social-welfare programs untouched.
I cringed when I watched Paul Ryan in his 2012 vice presidential debate with Joe Biden as Ryan tried to persuade viewers that he wanted to preserve and protect Medicare. If this country were truly a fiscally conservative country, neither Reagan nor Ryan nor any other Republican politician would have to blather constantly how “I would never do anything to Medicare that would hurt my Mom, who relies on Medicare.”
Conservatives are constantly fending off charges from the Left that they intend to cut social spending. To paraphrase George Will, conservatives are afraid to do math in public. Social Security and Medicare are going to bankrupt the country. But if a conservative like Paul Ryan proposes a reasonable reform of such a program, he is presented to the public as someone who wants to kill the elderly, pushing them off a cliff in their wheelchairs.
Wait out the collapse of the welfare state, the death of the culture and the resulting Civil Wars to weed out the insane and morally corrupt.
This election has shown that things must get very much worse before any serious reform can be done.
Yep. The Republican party is now broadly split into three mutually hostile factions, two of which are no friends to conservatives; its an unpleasant discovery, but its one that conservatives of this era will have to keep in mind and practice Realpolitik going forward.
Of course, we’re also the faction most divided amongst ourselves, which complicates matters.
Have read NR for many years and knowing their positions and how they push immigration restriction and how they defend it and debate for that position your “talk of boob bait” has no basis in reality.
I don’t think things are quite that desperate because the Left’s position and control is more precarious then we feel right and the Left wants to admit. The Consensus politics that Buckley disrupted was in a far more powerful position than Corrupt Clinton Inc. is in now.
Immigration is one issue there are other considerations in politics and the conservative movement. The Republican politician most disliked by the majority of people at NR is McCain. But losing him in the Senate in 2010 would have been bad for us over all. Paul Ryan is worthy of support on many issues his stance on immigration is a place where we must disagree. I do not support drug legalization, NR does and I support NR does that me in reality I support drug legalization or does it mean that I agree with NR on many different things but I disagree with them on drugs?
If you disagree with McCain on immigration does it mean that you had to oppose the Surge in Iraq? You have to disagree with him on foreign policy and veteran affairs? This is not how adults deal with politics.
Exactly. I would argue that it is this single issue mentality that is responsible for leading us down the garden path of nominating a supporter of single payer socialized medicine and Hillary Clinton donor for president.
Peter Brimelow would like a word with you.
I will let him talk to Mark Krikorian.
The presence of a Krikorian obviously doesn’t make the presence of a Brimelow superfluous, any more than the presence of one interventionist, for example, among the magazine’s contributors makes others unnecessary.
From Richard Spencer, in Taki’s Magazine:
As Peter Brimelow has related, much of the subsequent purges in the ‘90s centered around the then-burgeoning debate on immigration, and more specifically, the fact that Buckley’s hand-picked replacement as editor, John O’Sullivan, had brought in NR writers seriously interested in the “national question,” Brimelow and Steve Sailer among them. With O’Sullivan, NR was on the cutting edge for perhaps the last time in its history, publishing in 1992 Brimelow’s extensive 14,000-word call to “Rethink Immigration.” [which became the best-selling “Alien Nation”]
Within five years, O’Sullivan was gone, as Buckley and his second attempt at an intellectual heir, Rich Lowry, moved the magazine in a direction that made it not only more palatable with the Wall Street Journal-set but the neconons, then close to being regnant within the conservative movement.
(continued below)
As Brimelow writes:
Bartley is of course famous for, among other things, his proposed constitutional amendment: “There shall be open borders.”
Perhaps with stronger immigration reformers on board after 9/11 National Review might have been in the forefront of those opposing the doubling of America’s Muslims in the past 15 years, rather than virtually oblivious to it.
“Invade the world, invite the world.”
Seems sour grapes to me. National Review has never been for Open Borders and has written numerous editorials against such nonsense from the Wall Street Journal for years and years. National Review chose not to become V-dare and also chose to not stand against any one particular race or religious group but instead fight for secure borders and assimilation. Which, in my opinion, was a smart move.
O’Sullivan still writes for and often writes very long pieces of the magazine and NRO his problem being with the prickly Buckley not the magazine itself. As for Lowry he has fought for secure borders and positive immigration reform, meaning enforcing our laws and making it harder for illegals to find work for many years.
Ideological disputes even when primarily tactical are always bitter and vicious. I think this is an example of that.
During the President George W. Bush years, when Bush was advocating “comprehensive immigration reform,” National Review challenged the Wall Street Journal to a debate over the pending bill. So, this argument that National Review advocates open borders is completely incorrect. A figment of the Alt-Right imagination.