“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.