Freedom is Not Conservative
America needs a real conservative party, and it wouldn’t look anything like today’s pro-Trump — or anti-Trump — GOP
Among the more jarring aspects of the January 6 insurrection was the frequent use — by reputable outlets — of the phrase “conservative activists” to describe its participants. Even in a nation as divided and clamorous as ours one would think we could agree that the shattering of democracy’s windows by a clueless mob muttering murder represents the opposite of conservatism.
To take them at their word the insurrectionists believed they were championing textbook Americanism, rekindling the spirit of 1776. They claimed they were fighting for freedom, as our founders did, the difference being that instead of attempting to construct a democracy on a foundation of reason, the insurrectionists were seeking freedom from the constraints of both democracy and reason. It was an anti-conservative cry for a reckless extreme of freedom coming from people who already had too much — people free to guzzle Niagaras of disinformation from social media and vomit more lies back into the stream, free to roam their cities armed as if for war, free, through the primary system, to dictate to their party what its platform would be, free to thrust upon that party a presidential nominee whose whole life was a wallow of degenerative freedom: freedom from national service, from the need to pay his debts, from the sting of legal verdicts, from the critiques of those silenced by NDA’s, from the boundaries of marriage and common decency, from anything approaching adult responsibility, freedom from the discipline and rigor of facts and evidence, including any evidence pointing to an election conspiracy, hence his summoning of the mob.
In addition to freedom the insurrectionists desired a sense of agency. They wanted more power, though the political right already has more than their share of that too. The Senate is currently split 50:50, but the fifty Democratic senators represent 41 million more Americans than the Republicans (meaning that if the Senate were converted into a small-d democratic institution it would currently comprise 56 Democrats and 44 Republicans). Meanwhile, the right-leaning Electoral College has enabled Republicans to hold the presidency sixty percent of the time this century; without it neither the witless George W. Bush nor the everything-less Donald Trump would ever have set foot in the Oval Office.
So why, with their party already swimming in excess power, did the insurrectionists feel so aggrieved? Because it isn’t their party, because its leaders don’t care about ordinary people, even white ones. Instead the leaders have been pursuing an agenda just as anti-conservative and just as much about excessive freedom as the base’s agenda, but tailored to the desires of the donor class. They’ve freed that class from much of their tax burden (which is fine until it’s taken to the reckless, anti-conservative extreme of inducing unconscionable deficits during boom times, as the GOP did in 2017), freed them from regulations (which is fine until it’s taken to the reckless, anti-conservative extreme of allowing banks to ruin themselves and the world economy, as happened in 2008), freed them from any responsibility of caring for the planet on which all life depends, and freed them to buy the Congress with infinite gobs of dark money.
… why, with their party already swimming in excess power, did the insurrectionists feel so aggrieved?
What this means is that the Party’s leaders are doubly anti-conservative. They have not only enabled reckless irresponsibility at the top; they also recklessly endangered their own party, and the nation, by ignoring the needs of their working-class base to the point that they were ready to explode as soon as an ignition source like Trump came along. The leaders ignored their base by being anti-union, anti-minimum-wage increase, anti-universal health insurance, and anti-family leave (unless you count the 2019 plan under which strapped parents could raid their own future Social Security benefits to pay for child care). The leaders also spent years abetting, rather than criticizing, the culture of greed that has astronomically multiplied the gulf between median and executive incomes, leaving workers feeling like forgotten punching bags.
The leaders thought they had their game perfectly calibrated. They’d grown accustomed to riding the wave created by right-wing media personalities who distracted the base with racist and cultural dog whistles. The white working class were endlessly told that if America didn’t feel as “great” to them as it did to their parents and grandparents, it wasn’t because they lacked unions, pensions, or health insurance; it was because Democrats taxed them too much while blacks and Mexicans sucked up all the gravy. The best way they could address their situation, then, was not to change parties but to buy a gun, which the white working class has been doing for the last dozen years at a staggering rate. GOP leaders thought they had the machine tuned just right but then the base got a little too angry — angry enough to become intoxicated by a candidate who was not merely a populist and demagogue, but a megalomaniacal, functioning psychotic.
GOP leaders thought they had the machine tuned just right but then the base got a little too angry …
The leaders of the Republican Party want freedom for the donor class, the base wants freedom and agency for themselves, and neither one of them is conservative. The leaders are libertarian. The base is simply the Old Left, the labor/economic-populist Left, and if you want proof of that, notice that you didn’t hear these “conservative” voters complaining when Trump said (for example during his September 2015 interview on 60 Minutes) that his idea for healthcare was that the government should take care of anyone who couldn’t afford a private plan. Nor did they complain when he said — repeatedly during the summer and fall of 2015 — that he was going to extract more revenue from the fat cats of Wall Street, and make sure that “the hedge-fund guys” started paying their fair share.
Once he was in office the leadership quickly chased these ideas from his head and got his signature on Paul Ryan’s establishment tax plan (the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017), the benefits of which flowed disproportionately to corporations and the wealthy. But they gave Trump plenty of leash to carry on muttering about race and the Second Amendment, which they understood as essential to the game. In Trump they had the functional equivalent of a right-wing shock jock in the White House: a situation that pushed the game’s envelope, but one they hoped they could manage. But Trump turned out to be such a heedless, hyperbolic basket case that the situation blew up on them. The GOP establishment recipe called for the base to be kept at a low simmer; Trump brought a flamethrower.
Now that the virus of Trumpism has entered the body of the GOP and is replicating, we need a new party, an actually conservative party. And when I say “actually conservative,” I mean a party that would use that word to signify what it has always signified outside of politics, namely precaution, responsibility, and stewardship. Half a century ago the Republican Party came within hailing distance of being such a party, at least in some respects; it would be great if a new party could do even better. What might that look like?
… we need a new party, an actually conservative party. And when I say “actually conservative,” I mean a party that would use that word to signify what it has always signified outside of politics …
It wouldn’t look like a game, number one. Among its highest priorities would be a reduction in the wealth gap, one of the greatest world-historical drivers of resentment, unrest, and revolution, all of which are highly anti-conservative. The gap could be reduced by making income taxes somewhat more progressive than they are now. Also taxes on capital gains and carried interest above a certain threshold could be increased, and taxes for lower-income workers could be reduced. The minimum wage could be increased, and stronger laws against employer retaliation could be put in place to protect employees attempting to join or form unions. A culture that scorns outlandish compensation for executives would be inculcated: in 1965, CEO’s received an average compensation about twenty times larger than their employees; that ought to be enough.
Members of a new, genuinely conservative party would also embrace environmentalism wholeheartedly. Even if it were true that “the science isn’t all in yet” on how much pollution the earth can handle, we must recognize the need to err on the conservative side, the safe side, given that this planet is realistically the only place we’ll ever have to live. Extraterrestrial colonies won’t be our salvation: if we don’t learn at some point to live within limits, to live like adults, no universe will ever be big enough.
A conservative party would recognize the need to nourish the economy and the citizens who make it run, and that recognition would be reflected in its approaches to infrastructure, education, agriculture/nutrition, and childcare.
Social Security would be recognized as a conservative program, as it binds us together as one another’s providers to a small degree, and protects seniors from desperate poverty without discouraging younger people from working.
Conservatism is a philosophy of “better safe than sorry.” A conservative party would therefore favor rigorous, scientific sex education for adolescents, and wide access to birth control. Conservatism seeks stability and harmony, and wants to maximize the percentage of families that are planned, harmonious, and self-supporting. It wants to minimize the number of unplanned pregnancies and the demand for abortions. Minimizing these is not only good in itself; it’s also good for keeping political temperatures from boiling over. If we were serious about the meaning of the word “conservative,” Planned Parenthood would be recognized as one of the most conservative organizations in the country.
If we were serious about the meaning of the word “conservative,” Planned Parenthood would be recognized as one of the most conservative organizations in the country.
A real conservative party would love vaccines, and love masks when communicable diseases are rampaging.
A real conservative party would not take a reactionary stance against transgendered individuals or a celebratory stance in their favor. Its approach would be informed by the voices of these individuals, their families, their doctors, and their psychologists. The lives of some transgendered people, for example, may go more smoothly if they begin gender-confirmation treatments early in life. But on the other hand only a minority of preadolescents expressing gender dysphoria still feel that way after puberty, meaning that there are risks associated with pushing for early medical intervention, and with celebrating transgenderism to the point of making expressions of dysphoria fashionable. Margaret Talbot wrote a thoughtful piece on this topic in the March 18, 2013 issue of the New Yorker. And as for transgenderism in bathrooms and locker rooms, a conservative party would encourage all citizens to be sensitive to one another’s concerns, and to work things out like grown-ups.
I said that a conservative party should not take a reactionary stance on transgenderism, nor should it on any other issue having broadly to do with multiculturalism. But no party is perfect, and the go-slow, precautionary nature of true conservatism does naturally put it on a slippery slope toward reactionary anti-multiculturalism. So it’s with respect to multicultural issues — issues of tribe and identity (race, orientation, gender, immigration) that it would be useful to have a liberal, or progressive, party around to advocate for the rights of minorities, newcomers, and traditionally subjugated groups. Multiculturalism is destabilizing because it tends to make the members of traditional majority groups feel disoriented and threatened. But anti-multiculturalism can also be destabilizing if it’s taken too far — for example by completely shutting down immigration and summarily deporting anyone who’s undocumented. This is destabilizing not only because — like any extreme action — it invites a backlash, but also because it suggests that society-wide “purity,” or perfect homogeneity, is achievable and desirable. And a weary world knows where that suggestion leads.
Multiculturalism is one of the few areas where our current political usage of the words “conservative” and “liberal” actually makes sense — where it lines up with the ordinary, non-political usage. That’s not generally the case, and the issue of gun control is a good example. There our political usage is backwards: it’s actually a liberal impulse (or libertarian — here you can take your pick) that has brought us our current, wide-open gun culture, with most states not requiring background checks in the secondary market to purchase, or a permit to openly carry a gun. A real conservative party would take a pretty dim view of gun ownership outside the context of hunting and sport shooting with moderate-firepower weapons. There’s nothing conservative about filling our streets and restaurants with Glocks and AR15’s.
There’s nothing conservative about filling our streets and restaurants with Glocks and AR15’s.
From their rhetoric it’s clear that a lot of gun owners feel their culture is conservative in the sense that it is integral to a mission, or duty, of historical conservation: an older, better version of America is being lost, and they need to fight to conserve it.
But they’re not going to be able to shoot their way back to an older version of America, nor will they be able to conjure conservatism by plunking a Lexington and Concord mindset into a 21st-century setting. The policies our founders arrived at from witnessing flintlock-vs.-flintlock conflicts between yeoman farmers and tyrannical soldiers in tricorn hats have little to say about what constitutes responsible, conservative policy at today’s levels of population density and firepower. And on a more general note, our would-be “conservatives” need to be reminded that being truly conservative has nothing to do with going back in time; it has nothing to do with being “originalist,” “constitutional,” old-fashioned, or, certainly, gun crazy.
And this business of confounding conservatism with nostalgia/originalism brings us to a concluding point regarding the most fundamental tenet of today’s political “conservatism,” namely that to be conservative a government must be small. Modern “conservatives” say that because our federal government was originally small (and stayed that way until the New Deal), it would be conservative to make it small again. But this misses the point almost entirely.
First of all, though the federal government was small two centuries ago, it wasn’t all that small relative to the population or their firepower. Thus, even with no standing federal army in existence, George Washington was able to quickly assemble a large enough force of militiamen to quell the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. In other words, even in its earliest days, the federal government was large enough to behave in a way that some citizens would have found tyrannical (i.e., out of control and therefore anti-conservative).
But the larger point is this: what was truly conservative about our government as originally constituted was not that it was small, but that it gave the general population very little voice.
… what was truly conservative about our government as originally constituted was not that it was small, but that it gave the general population very little voice.
You can’t read The Federalist papers without being struck by how wary our founders were of the irrationalism, the volatility, the “passion” — as they so often called it — of the people. They were sure that if the population at large were given broad powers to select federal officeholders the whole democratic experiment would quickly go up in smoke. So not only was the vote originally restricted to white men; nine of the thirteen states joined the union with added wealth or property requirements for voting. And that was only for seats in the House; senatorial and presidential elections were far more restrictive than that. In about half the states, no citizens at all were allowed to cast ballots for presidential electors during our first decades of independence; they were chosen instead by the state legislatures. United States senators were also elected by the state legislatures — in every state — until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913. The founders didn’t want the general population to be choosing U.S. senators because, as John Jay put it in The Federalist number 64, senators were simply too important, and needed to be chosen by “the most enlightened and respectable citizens.”
The idea was to give “the people” enough of a voice to keep them from feeling the Revolution had gotten them nowhere, but not so much that they themselves became a new kind of tyrant, able to push irresponsible ideas into law or elect a despotic, populist fraud like Donald Trump. Allow the people too little freedom, or too much, and you’re going to multiply your troubles. The founders were aiming — by 18th-century standards — for a sweet spot.
But any hopes of a sweet spot are out the window at this point. Trump happened, and he happened because we’ve become a liberal nation (a power-to-the-people nation) far beyond anything our founders would ever have designed. Not only is everyone free to vote for congresspersons, senators, and the president; they’re also free, as I noted at the beginning, to dictate to the parties what candidates they will run, and therefore what the parties’ philosophies will be. The primary process has replaced the judgment of party elders with a series of cattle-call popularity contests, the outcomes of which are decided by citizens whose heads are swimming with nonsense from cable infotainers and social media.
Gatekeeping, in other words — both in the news and information business and in party politics — is gone. A truly conservative party would want to bring it back. A truly conservative party would want to limit the voice of the people in the nomination process and would want to get the country on a diet of news and information that’s closer to being actually fair and balanced. (Asking media companies to keep their content free of lies and conspiracy theories is not enough. Even if they did a perfect job, it would only address the tip of the iceberg. Voters don’t need to swallow a pack of lies in order to become misguided; a steady diet of facts consistently cherry-picked from one end of the spectrum will do the trick).
But neither political nor information gatekeeping is going to be brought back. The internet can’t be cherry-picking-proofed. And more to the point, any party even discussing the possibility of limiting the voice, or the information diet, of the people would be finished before it started, written off as a party of censorship, elitism, and anti-democracy.
So, while, on the one hand, the recent downward spiral of the Republican Party (from G.H.W. Bush to G.W. Bush to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump) tells us — screams at us — that conserving democracy will require us to put limitations on freedom, on the other hand it’s obvious that no party can afford to attempt limiting the freedoms of its voters. The only alternative is for the parties and society at large to do a better job of limiting the freedoms of political candidates.
… [we have to] do a better job of limiting the freedoms of political candidates.
For starters nobody should be allowed to participate in any primary election for federal office without releasing their tax returns for the prior decade.
But the most important change would involve our press culture. To take on our new era of over-the-top dishonesty and populism, we need a press corps that is much sharper, tougher, better educated, better prepared, and better equipped to hold candidates’ feet to the fire and do real-time fact checking, than any we’ve had before. They need to get sharp enough to limit the freedom of a candidate like Trump to skirt so many questions and blow so much hot air in interviews and debates.
Journalists need to replace their dim-headed neutrality with hard-headed objectivity. They can’t allow themselves to be steamrolled. Well before the first GOP primary in 2016 the press knew how Donald Trump handled questions and criticisms. If he’d said or done anything questionable he would either deny that it had happened, or claim, contrary to appearances, that it was great, or “perfect.” Then he’d tell the journalists that they were no good, and dishonest, and unfair, and that their facts weren’t facts. Then he’d say that his opponents were the worst people ever, and then he’d change the subject, saying that the voters didn’t care about the issues journalists were raising; they only cared about the things he wanted to talk about.
That was his shtick, and no matter how many times he ran it, journalists were never prepared. He often didn’t even need to run it; he was able to stroll halfway to the presidency simply by interrupting unwelcome questions by putting up his hand and saying “excuse me, excuse me…”.
The future is likely to bring us plenty more Donald Trumps — on the left and the right — and the press needs to respond to their bluster by demanding that they demonstrate the validity of their arguments. If a candidate says he doesn’t believe a statistic a journalist has thrown at him, the journalist should be prepared to provide the source of the information, explain how it was gathered and vetted, and why the journalist trusts it. If the candidate still insists that he knows better, he’s got to show cause. He’s got to say specifically why he doubts the journalist’s sources (simply throwing shade at them for being right or left-wing isn’t good enough), identify his alternative sources and explain what, exactly, makes them more trustworthy.
Journalists should also test their interview questions, and hone their technique, with colleagues practiced at the lowest forms of political Jiu-Jitsu. They need to be ready for every evasion, lie, boast, and challenge.
The art of the live, televised face-to-face interview is taking on new importance in an era of unintelligent populism and artificially intelligent fake audio and video. Live televised conversations can not only serve to remind us what proper conversations and arguments are supposed to sound like (rather important, given that open argumentation is the foundation of democracy); they may also be our last grasp at a nationally shared reality: the one remaining thing we can all agree actually happened.
The art of the live, televised face-to-face interview is taking on new importance in an era of unintelligent populism and artificially intelligent fake audio and video.
So conserving democracy may come down to this kind of gatekeeping. Our hopes may in other words hang on the slender shoulders of a press operation that is, alas, just as much as the candidates, in the entertainment business.
