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Conservatism: An Abstract Philosophy or a Mode of Governance?
There is no question that the rise of Donald Trump has created a schism on the right. I’ve certainly had my run-ins with folks here on Ricochet, most notably @garyrobbins and @georgetownsend. While I vehemently disagree with these gentlemen on a lot of things, arguing with them has had its benefits, namely that they have pushed me to constantly refine, redefine and clarify my beliefs.
In a recent lengthy back-and-forth they provided me with this question on the state of things in the post-Reagan era: Is Conservatism just an abstract utopian philosophy, the inverse of theoretical Communism, or is it an actual and practical mode of governing?
If it is an abstraction, this explains the Progressive Lite ways of the national GOP. They can give lip service to the ideal (especially when raising funds and campaigning) while still governing in opposition to those ideals simply because they are impractical.
Many here, including the aforementioned gentlemen, insist that Conservatism is indistinguishable, even 30 years after the fact, from Reaganism. Is it? Or has that been abandoned?
I have constantly issued the call to examine whether American conservatives are indeed committed to fulfilling Reagan’s dream. To this end, I spent time rereading President Reagan’s re-election platform. As in all political manifestos there are a lot of vague “we encourage this” and “we urge that” and a lot of “we embrace the idea of” platitudes that are not easily translated into specific political action. I have identified a list of 32 concrete actions that the Reagan Administration told Americans they wanted to accomplish in regards to domestic policy in a second term. (By all means, please read the document and see what I may have missed.)
The third item on this list, the line-item veto, was accomplished yet struck down by the Supreme Court. It was asserted by the Court that it would be permissible if pursued through the amendment process.
Are these still goals of Conservatives or are they obsolete? And if they are obsolete what does it mean to call oneself a Reaganite in the 21st Century?
I fear that Conservatism has become nothing more than catchphrases, things said religiously by rote instead of through critical thinking. What does it mean to say “Government shouldn’t pick winners and losers” without acknowledging that even policies advocated by Conservatives do just that? And how do you change things so that it no longer happens?
What does it mean to say, “Never blame your troubles on someone else?” Does that suppose that all government action, whether from the left or right, is benign? (I’d say that’s just demonstrably wrong.) And isn’t pointing to specific policy far different than the Left’s ethereal bogeymen of racism, sexism, ageism, and a plethora of “phobias?”
If Conservatism is no longer a mode of governance but merely a theory, something that can only be accomplished in an ideal world then we need to re-exam it and ourselves, especially if the governing class is playing a giant game of bait-and-switch with the electorate. If we are to go forward Conservatism can’t be a mile wide and an inch deep.
Published in Domestic Policy
How is unilateral disarmament in trade smarter than unilateral disarmament in military weapons?
Grain of salt time. Part 1:
This is my favorite Democratic anti-Trump/Republican never-Trump moment (there is no real difference between the two). It happened immediately surrounding his inauguration. There is a lot of slurring of quotes, it happened so quickly and I’ve never seen it, not looked for it, since, and because it doesn’t really matter, having been lost to media minds long ago, yet still remembered and distorted by never-Trumpers today.
It was the morning of Trump’s inauguration. Wolfe Blitzer faced the camera, his eyes wide in the concern of a surprising new thought, his lips pursed in caution and concern as he asked the question of his interviewee: What would happen if, oh, no, I am almost crying at the thought, but if Trump were to die – heaven forbid!, be killed, assassinated – before his inauguration, and oh, what if something were to happen to Mike Pence, if he were to die also, and if Paul Ryan didn’t want to serve, that… that would… that would make John Kerry the president, wouldn’t it?!
Later after the shock of his revelation wore off he was heard to say, of course we don’t want this to happen and it would be a tragedy, and we don’t advocate it – at all – but it would certainly fix things for the nation, wouldn’t it? (I exaggerate here a good bit but his was the overall tone and import of what he said.)
He was fantasizing about Trump’s death in the minutes leading up to his inauguration! Never in my life have I ever heard a TV news anchor, apropos of no factual occurrences, fantasize about a president’s death. This was a first.
Grain of salt time. Part 2:
So I’ll go full fantasy here to characterize the interview with Jake Tapper and Kellyanne Conway.
And following the inauguration, CNN showed a picture of the Mall with three lonely trashpickers huddled, hunched moping from cigarette butt to Starbucks cup on the green and declared, Not much of an attendance out today for Mr. Trump’s inauguration (as Wolfe Blitzer can be heard muttering off-camera into a hot mic, “but if he should die before he is sworn in, you know,” or somesuch…)
To this Trump tweeted Biggest inauguration ever! Hundreds of thousands of people showed up. Probably millions, and from all over the world! They were as innumerable as the hosts of heaven, more than the grains of sand in the sea!
At which, a sincerely offended Jake Tapper took umbrage with Conway, asking how she could defend his obvious, “lies” and his “lying,” about such obviously lied-about numbers. Conway said, lawyerly, there are alternative facts to choose from you know.
Conway said the picture of the three men was taken long before people started showing up, and Tapper kept saying These are the facts! Trump is lying! How can you defend him?!
And if I recall Tapper called into question how Trump could speak of heaven since no one’s ever come back to describe it and it is technically unknowable to fallen human minds, and more importantly how can he make such a lying claim about sands of the sea, when everyone knows, no one has ever officially counted the grains of sand in the sea! You can’t have any clearer examples of lies!
Back to facts:
Never have I ever heard a network news anchor before, or any reporter call a president a liar (maybe it happened to Nixon, but I don’t remember it). After “I never had sexual relations with that woman”; after “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq”; after “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,” this was the first time anybody ever called a president a liar; no professional journalist nor politician in my lifetime or probably in the whole of the 20th century, in a public national, let alone world-wide, transmission. Over attendance numbers at an inauguration. A new thing happened that day. This was another first.
This is never-Trumperville.
And by the way, Trump is doing the best job of a non-politician president ever.
Rebuke from the master?
Because simply living a conservative way of life is under attack from the left. They view conservatives as forcing “normality” on them . . .
As to this article I disagree with the title. A political ideology can be both practical and abstract. That is kind of the whole purpose of politics, affecting the abstract into reality. As @midge noted the abstract are your goals. You won’t know how far you have gotten if you don’t have a metric.
But as to the talk of a schism I find that claim quite hilarious. A schism requires two factions within the party having actual strength and vying for direction. In this case the author makes the claim and he has repeatedly stated his support for the President and a belief that he has somehow “disrupted” the dreaded “status quo”, so perhaps he wants it to be that way (even though it isn’t).
As @mendel loves to note not a single Republican incumbent lost a primary, and few were challenged in the primaries. And these are the same allegedly progressive-lite characters that the voters have rebelled against by electing Donald Trump according to those who believe he is a “disrupter”. Remember that these voters have had 2 elections to do this so far, in both 2016 and 2018, and yet they haven’t done squat to remove them. Why? If what the Trump supporters on Ricochet typed was true then we would have seen Republicans being primaried left and right by the true conservative “Trump” candidates.
Look at legislation and executive policy you see the same case. The traditional Republican goals, espoused for decades, remains the only things being accomplished. A tax cut bill, deregulation, and conservative judicial nominations. Who comprised the White House staff that worked on these issues? Again more establishment figures that had been in the GOP for decades or had come from connected families in the party. That is where the expertise for these changes come from. Trump has not changed that.
So I ask what schism is here? The dreaded establishment has retained its power and has used Trump to further their goals and Trump does not complain about their accomplishment, but rather gloats on them. Has Trump been co-opted by those dastard globalists? Maybe Trump’s “disruption” was abstract and not practical, serious but not literal.
It’s true, I swear. I think I heard Jake Tapper refer to him as Gozer the Destructor just this morning.
Also, Trump-deniers refer to him as Gozer (Gozer the Gozerian, Gozer the Destructor, Gozer the Traveler, Volguus Zildrohar and Lord of the Sebouillia).
:)
That is a mighty assertion to state that all criticisms of Trump are irrational and based on a cartoonish interpretation of what a president should, not must, be. Here’s a criticism of Trump from a “never-trump Republican” that doesn’t mention his poor character. Donald Trump failed to take the repeal of Obamacare seriously. He out-right failed, he did little to nothing to move popular opinion or to lobby the legislature. In fact his criticism of the attempts to repeal, calling it too mean, only hindered the efforts of Congressional Republicans.
Re-read what he said, because that ain’t it.
Basically, it’s true. Fundamentally all criticisms of Trump other than policy decisions are exactly extensions of this new, and overriding and cartoonish sentiment of what a “president” is and should be. Outside this characterization, he is “unfit”. The best ratio I’ve seen yet, is one policy objection to every three smears on him, as being for example, unlearned, unwilling to learn, ignorant, illiterate, literate but refusing to read, puppet, treasonous, Russian and … Orange.
From the Flicker’s fingers to your eyes.
You can go read what Gary and George wrote as well as I can. They’ve been clear and concise. You disagree with them. So what? Doesn’t mean that what they wrote is unclear, or circular.
One is able to define any word in any era using any ideas.
You are confusing semantic questions with substantive questions.
Had Trump played a more assertive role in lobbying legislators regarding repeal of Obamacare, would it have changed John McCain’s duplicitous, NeverTrump, anti-conservative, hypocritical, showboating thumbs-down “NO” vote to a “YES” vote?
I’m ashamed to have voted for John McCain, even more ashamed than I am to have voted for Ross Perot. I’m proud to have voted for Donald Trump, whose presidency is the most conservative presidency in at least 90 years.
Maybe because in its purity, it doesn’t work?
Lord knows you’ve made it clear that you can’t quote what Gary and George wrote, Spin. But you sure can apply labels.
Didn’t like 40 R congressmen “retire” whose re-election was questionable? You think new CNN commentator Flake (who saw that comin’?) would have won?
But 34 of them simply chose not to run for re-election in the House. Politicians who hate losing always choose to “spend more time with family.” In the Senate, both Bob Corker and Jeff Flake looked at their re-elect numbers and decided to bail. Corker’s re-elect numbers were at 41% among Republicans and Flake’s numbers were so far down the gopher hole he had grass stains on all of his suits.
As for the “traditional” nature of the accomplishments, that’s sort of the whole point, isn’t it? Because Trump is the president and not a dictator the folks on the Hill, those that are Constitutionally empowered with the business of writing legislation, keep on keeping on. Nothing different than what they did under both Bushes – namely not keeping to their basic promises to the electorate but sticking to tinkering with the tax code. They traditionally keep their bold thinking to periods where they either have a Democratic president who will surely wield the veto pen or when the opposition controls the other chamber where their innovative legislation will be strangled in the crib.
You can’t claim to love the Constitution and its separation of powers and complain that Trump didn’t adequately shepherd his agenda in the first two years. The GOP leadership knew what he wanted, had ample time to give it to him and failed utterly. And if you’re actively opposing a president of your own party that’s a schism, whether you acknowledge it or not.
I see your point. Let me get things started. Here is one concrete way to get universal health care done: nationalize all health care facilities and producers of drug and medical device manufacturers.
I am being ironic but not in an effort to be funny. I am just trying to make it clear that an ideology whose main tenet is
is inherently absurd.
You are right that…
…is a good idea if ‘er is a good idea. But you have to recognize that…
is a terrible idea if ‘er is a terrible idea.
Ideas have consequences. Ideas matter.
Ideas that are never implemented don’t matter a hill of beans.
Yeah, that only makes sense if we all agree on the ends.
Yes.
I am an engineer (BSEE, Tau Beta Pi*). So I feel very qualified to answer.
An engineer only needs to be able to get pragmatic results. Doing mathematical proofs was never a proof of engineering skill. Originally a good engineer was just one who knew how to get steam-powered machinery to extract a lot of coal in one day.
*Disclaimer: I only got into the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi on dumb luck. Truth is, I was a lousy student. Flunked out of Duke. Twice! Barely graduated college with a cumulative B. I just always had a knack for acing the easy courses like Organic Chem, Differential Equations, a research project on Kuhn’s theory of science, and the American Pragmatists. (If you studied the Pragmatists, you know that Peirce’s philosophy was easy because he stopped counting when he got up to Thirdness. Believe me, if he had started talking about Fourthness, I would have gotten a B+, tops.)
Evening Mark,
To use liberalism/socialism as a counter example, if one thought that the government could address economic injustice and one thought that the government could free its citizens from worrying over healthcare and housing, one could use these goals to develop an approach to taxation, property, personal responsibility. What is lacking to me is an understanding of what the goals that our conservative politicians have, or what the goals that our conservative thinkers are aiming toward. It almost seems like our conservative politicians have only one goal, to get re-elected and when that becomes to much work to land a high paying job which takes advantage of their governmental connections. Many of us have books from a number of our well known conservative thinkers, I would like to know what are their goals for society, and how to get there. This how to get there is what is so clearly missing. It is true that the liberal/socialist side is an easy case to make, that is, use the government to take care of people. And, we know that this liberal/socialist approach leads to poverty and suffering, history gives us many examples, I want the examples of conservatives using their knowledge and ability to persuade to mobilize political change in a conservative direction. We need less conservative philosophy, we need direction, or example. We had a grass roots movement, the Tea Party movement, that our “wise” conservative writers wrote off, ok, give us your path, how do we save the essential societal and government structures?
A professional philosophy teacher myself. Never studied Pierce more than a little. Kind of fond of Dewey. A fan of James. Taught him in nearly every course for years. Haven’t taught him at the new job in Hong Kong, although the extra Confucius has been a delight. But I just got a James-Augustine article published.
I’m going to have to disagree with the gist of what you’re saying here: Progressives are so powerful today precisely because their ideas had long-term consequences even while they had little or no power or implementation at the practical level. By the same token, it took so much longer for Leftism to fully take root in America compared to Europe due to the ideological bulwark of American ‘civil religion’, which rested on concepts, priorities, and first principles that were antithetical to Leftist worldviews.
Edit: This is largely why many of my posts for the past couple of years have revolved around cultural progressivism within the ‘Conservative’ movement, usually manifesting as the implicit (and increasingly explicit) view that ‘great swathes’ of conservative voters are, as Hillary put it, a ‘basket of deplorables’, and support for blacklisting or blackballing conservative public figures on basis that would apply to large numbers, and perhaps even a majority, of conservative voters. It is not, contrary to what some may believe, that I am simply outraged by the jerk behavior and the demonization of beliefs and characteristics that apply to me personally, but it is also because such leftist-influenced prejudices and worldviews inexorably promote Leftist ideology over the long-term.
More puerile nonsense.
Flake’s seat went to a Democrat. Perhaps he saw that in the internal polling. But talking about the 2018 election completely ignores 2016. That was a year that Trump was allegedly riding high with a primary victory. If what he allegedly represented was truly what the voters wanted why didn’t they primary those same progressive-lites in 2016? They didn’t.
But to get back to 2018 some of those retiring were doing so to run for other offices. About half of those who retired saw their seats flip to Democrats. So I find it hard to believe, giving all that background history, that they dropped out because of Trump and the threat of primary. In Corker’s case he is worth nearly $50 million and he had served for 12 years as a Senator. He wasn’t going to be hurting if he retired.
But even this completely misses the point that you have not yet shown that those who replaced the retirees and won were Trump-like candidates or that they espoused his rhetoric.
So then Donald Trump is an establishment President. At least with the Bushes they didn’t hamper conservative legislation in the Congress. Trump on the other hand did, which must make him worse than progressive-lite.
The Constitution does give the right to legislate to Congress. Where did I type that it gave that to the President? That is a red herring. Trump promised to support repealing the ACA and when the time came he didn’t support it but rather provided cover to Democrats by calling its repeal “mean”. On the note of his legislative agenda the issue isn’t that he isn’t legislating but rather that he is not politicking at all really. One massive example of this is the budget, or appropriation process, where the President has to sign off on executive department funding requests that go to the appropriations committees in both houses.
I actually work in state politics, which is quite similar to national politics in the structure and function. When a politician wants legislation to get passed they have to actually meet with legislators and legislative leadership. They have to speak to the revisors about making their idea turned into legal code. They have to sell their idea to the public and understand how interests will respond to the new legislation. That isn’t legislating, its called getting consensus. Its something Presidents have had to do since Washington was President. Trump doesn’t seem to care to do that, especially on areas he claimed to care about the most.
The GOP leadership at least tried to create ACA Repeal and have it passed. But Trump harmed that. This being completely aside from the fact that House Leadership had literally worked out the funding mechanism for his lame wall and Trump threw it aside. Trump has shown little to no desire to actually politic.
The position of schism requires a change substance, not just leadership. As I noted before Trump has only managed to accomplish establishment goals of the tax cuts, deregulation, and conservative judges (which substantively were worked out by others). It isn’t Republicans who have had to change their voting patterns, it was Trump who had to change his rhetoric in order to acquire support–like publishing the list of conservative judicial candidates he would consider nominating.
If criticism of Trump deviating from traditional GOP goals is your evidence of Schism then you have a really low bar. Practically anything is a schism then.
And Obamacare had exactly what effect on you before it’s implementation? Ideas can drive people to keep striving for power but they’re still harmless in their heads. The difference here is that Progressives don’t squander their opportunities with the same frequency that conservatives do.
Lord knows you haven’t cited anything either. Am I to just take your word for it?
I actually think you guys dont read them. But this isn’t the place to be picking on their arguments.