Well, it’s official. Conservatism – at least its American version – is as dead as a coffin nail.
Which in no way means that self-identifying ‘conservatives’ in America will cease to trumpet the supposed benefits of limited government and the free market. Expect that to go on for some time yet. But conservatism as a coherent political force, as a motivating philosophy for the Republican Party and its major think tanks and big donors, is sliding drearily into an open grave.
It’s an epochal moment. One of America’s two major political parties now lacks a governing philosophy. Where, until very recently, a coherent ideology existed to bring together various groups of voters that supported the GOP under a common umbrella, there now exists a vacuum.
As any sane person knows, that vacuum has been temporarily filled by a political cult under the name of ‘MAGA‘ or, to put it more simply, ‘Donald Trump’. But that won’t last. All men are mortal. What matters is the direction the Republican Party will take once Mr. Trump has left the scene.
The purpose of this post is not to chart out the various possible courses the GOP might follow in the coming decades. That will have to wait for another post. Rather, my intention here is twofold: First, to explain why American conservatism is, indeed, finished and second, to lay out the broader implications for American politics and society of the ‘Death of Conservatism’.
A quick side-note. Greymantle was originally going to title this post ‘Anglo-American Conservatism is Collapsing’ with the intent of including a discussion of conservatism’s flagging fortunes in other parts of the English-speaking world (e.g. the UK, Canada and Australia). Given my less comprehensive knowledge of developments affecting the (ostensibly) conservative parties in the above countries, I eventually decided against that approach.
Nevertheless, it does seem like many of the same forces that dragged the GOP into the arms of populism are equally influential elsewhere in the Anglosphere. A commentator better informed of goings on in Australia, Canada or the UK should feel free to hold forth.
THREE SIGNS OF CONSERVATISM’S DEMISE
Some readers may be skeptical that conservatism is on its way out.
Aren’t six out of nine Supreme Court justices legal Originalists? Don’t 34% of Americans describe themselves as being ‘conservative’ or ‘very conservative’? Isn’t Donald Trump polling nearly even with Joe Biden nearly one year out from the 2024 election?
To which my reply is: those narrow facts don’t matter much to the overall health or influence of the conservative movement. Conservatism was an influential philosophy when it could draw upon the sincere allegiance of large numbers of Republican and Independent (and even many Democratic) voters.
The key phrase here is ‘sincere allegiance’. What’s missing now are both sincerity and allegiance. The latter implies loyalty, rather than opportunism.
The evaporation of sincerity is the main cause of conservatism’s decline. Its departure is rooted in a combination of increased fear, choosing to obstruct versus to govern, and the triumph of spectacle over persuasion among the Republican caucuses and political class. People are unable to sincerely align themselves with any set of principles if they live in a state of fear and prefer spectacles and obstruction to the pursuit of policy goals.
To put it simply, if voters who self-identified as ‘conservative’ in prior decades were brides, then Conservatism as a philosophy was their bridegroom. Conservative voters were much enamored of, and faithful to their bridegroom.
But since the 2000s decade, conservative voters have fallen for another beau. No, not Donald Trump. He’s standing in at the altar for the actual bridegroom, who is too amorphous an entity to draw cheers and fan letters. Fear is the new lover’s name. But you can’t vote for fear. You have to vote for the man or woman who can channel fear. And that’s exactly what Trump does.
SIGN #1: FEAR TRUMPS HOPE
A frightened man has no time for philosophy. Fear has a singular power to trash reason and blur facts together into an undifferentiated mass. Frightened people can’t think clearly — they panic.
Greymantle traces the decline in American conservatism to the year 2001 – the year of 9/11. While other posts on this site have traced the growing radicalism of conservative voters and the GOP since the 1980s, this post is less concerned with the embrace of radicalism than it was with the abandonment by many of these same voters of ‘traditional’ conservatism.
How does one define traditional conservatism? That’s easy enough to answer. The old-school conservative believed the U.S. constitution to be sacrosanct, limited government interference in private affairs or business to be a good thing, private enterprise and the free market to be a godsend, and sound and respected institutions to be essential to good government.
Pre-2001 conservatives wanted to shrink the welfare state, lock up criminals, censor graphic sex from television and movies, and respect the role of religion in public life. They had a strong belief that the United States could survive any challenge. In other words, they were self-confident. And while they feared communism, their general posture was one of confidence, not cringing.
The 9/11 attacks and the Bush II Administration changed all that. Post-2001, Republican voters became much more fearful. Whereas they once feared the possible emergence of a police state in the U.S., after 9/11 they seemed to embrace many elements of such a state: surveillance of citizens, state pressure on legal rights, the use of torture against suspected terrorists, etc.
If liberals or Democrats (interchangeable terms to them) objected or stood in the way, then they were ‘almost as bad as America’s enemies’. The concept of the ‘loyal opposition’ began to fade. Noone who believes his political opponents are enemies of the state can long remain hopeful about the future. And when hope and trust fade, they are most commonly replaced by fear.
SIGN #2: OPPOSITION IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR GOVERNANCE
Conservative voters and elected leaders took another turn in 2010 and 2011 when the Affordable Care Act (i.e. ‘Obamacare’) was being debated and passed by Congress. Fear-mongering and misinformation began to crowd out a measured debate concerning the new law. Knee-jerk opposition to ‘the federal government’s takeover of the health care system’ soon became a virtue.
After winning both houses of Congress in the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans governed as a party of opposition, rather than setting its own agenda as the governing party. Even with healthy majorities in the House and Senate and a generally sympathetic and conservative-leaning Supreme Court, GOP leaders continued to view themselves as an embattled opposition to the ‘party in power’ represented by President Obama and his administration.
The GOP’s oppositional mentality led it to engage in a number of policy stunts as a substitute for the pursuit of effective governance. The famed 2011 Debt Ceiling Crisis – the first of several sparked by Republicans’ refusal to raise the U.S. debt limit – was notable in that it spoked the most chaotic days in global financial markets since the 2008 crisis and led ratings agency Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the U.S. federal government’s debt rating to ‘AA+’ from ‘AAA’.
House Republicans led by Speaker John Boehner triggered a second debt ceiling crisis in 2013 in connection with a dispute over the Affordable Care Act’s implementation. Coming in the same year as the ‘Taper Tantrum”, the 2013 Debt Ceiling Crisis resulted in more stock and bond market turmoil and the blocking of subsidy payments for Build America Bonds trading in the U.S. municipal bond market, leading to a loss of confidence in taxable munis that has never been undone.
The common thread in this behavior was the GOP’s failure to propose a positive agenda for governing the country. Instead, the main priority of self-identified GOP conservatives, e.g. members of the House ‘Freedom Caucus’ was to derail implementation of the ACA, force the Obama Administration to cut federal spending through brinksmanship over the debt limit, and generally to behave as obstructionists.
These tactics were popular with much of the GOP base, particularly the 35% or so of conservative voters who would later become the core ‘MAGA’ bloc that supports Donald Trump. However, their posture had little relationship to the priorities or ideas of traditional conservatism, which could conceive of government services positively provided they could be paid for without incurring large fiscal deficits or limiting citizens’ rights under the Constitution.
The GOP characterized its opposition to ‘Obamacare’ as principled, arguing that the ACA was tantamount of a huge expansion of the federal government, involved infringement of basic rights, and would lead to a sizable growth in the federal budget deficit. Their tactics, Speaker Boehner and others argued, were motivated by a desire to prevent the aforementioned outcomes. Conservative talk radio shows and other right-leaning news outlets echoed those talking points.
In the early days of the 2010-2013 period, when the ACA was first passed into law and implemented, these objections were not entirely unreasonable, on a theoretical basis. The problem was that Republicans tended to ditch all nuances and counter-points when they argued against the ACA on the airwaves and the campaign trail, treating the ACA as if its adoption represented the beginning of the end of America. Their rhetoric did not just ‘verge on hysterical’, it was, in fact, hysterical.
Once adopted, the ACA resulted in moderate increases to the federal deficit. Increased deficit spending in 2013-2016 was mild compared to deficits occasioned by the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession that followed, which pushed the national debt up from 56% of GDP in 2007 to approximately 85% of GDP in 2010. The deficit then tracked in the 90% to 97% of GDP range for the middle of the decade.
For all the white-hot rhetoric and fear-mongering, the GOP had few policy victories to boast of during President Obama’s second term in office. But the behavioral shift Republican House and Senate members underwent during the Obama Administration left a lasting mark. The role of opposition ‘spoiler’ is now the natural posture of Congressional Republicans.
Opposition is no substitute for actual governance, however. By failing to even adopt a party platform at their 2020 convention, the GOP revealed itself to be little more than a party of personalities oriented toward a posture of obstructing whatever the Democrats propose. A party dedicated solely to obstructionism cannot effectively govern.
SIGN #3: THE TRIUMPH OF SPECTACLE
Lastly, spectacle has triumphed over persuasion and debate. Conservative-leading voters are now less interested in pursuing policy victories than they are distracted and excited by spectacle. Spectacle has nothing to do with the political process. It’s merely the attitude of professional wrestling superimposed on political life. Good guys and bad guys. Insults and smackdowns. Punishments, come-backs and retribution. Those are the things that interest conservative voters now, MAGA populists most of all.
Greymantle blames this sorry state of affairs on Rupert Murdoch, Jack Dorsey, and Mark Zuckerberg. Murdoch launched Fox News and Dorsey and Zuckerberg created Twitter and Facebook, respectively. Social media has had the effect of swiftly degenerating political discourse to the level of fights for popularity among junior high school cliques. Donald Trump emerged from this morass.
There is little that I can add to what others, perhaps most perceptively, Jonathan Chait, have already written about this phenomenon. Suffice it to say that social media’s power to diminish the power of authority, shrink legitimate authority figures, and raise the profile of rabble-rousers has already been well established. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan would have observed.
WHERE DOES CONSERVATISM GO FROM HERE?
MAGA populism and Tea Party rowdiness and opposition-mindedness have clearly supplanted older forms of political conservatism in the U.S. The question now is: Can traditional conservatism make some sort of comeback? Or will it be consigned to the proverbial ‘Dustbin of History’.
Greymantle’s tends to favor the ‘Dustbin of History’ thesis.
That argument might best be summarized as follows: American voters across both the left, right and center have turned away from their old economically libertarian approach and now favor government intervention. They are less obsessed with low taxes and smaller government than they used to be. What they want is protection for government services they have come to rely upon (e.g. Social Security, Medicaid), but their chief motive is to ensure these services continue to be provided to their group, rather than to other social groups in the USA.
In contrast to commentators who focus mainly on the decline in old-school economic conservatism, however, Greymantle believes the ongoing collapse of social conservatism is at least as important as the GOP’s abandonment of William F. Buckley style ‘fusionism‘ in favor MAGA populism for considering how conservatism’s collapse will affect American society.
In the short-term, expect GOP voters in ‘red states’ to continue to reward elected leaders who push through tax cuts and prioritize economic growth over environmental protection. This pattern is not going to change for another generation or two. In fact, I would expect voters to reward effective economic managers and financial stewards handily in both ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states.
What’s going to change, Greymantle believes, is the consistent allegiance of first, a majority of voters, and then a large minority of voters, to certain socially conservative policy goals. The shift has been underway since at least 2018. Narrow majorities of voters have approved Medicaid expansion under the ACA in all but 10 states, including half of the GOP-dominated ‘red states’. Larger majorities in these same states have approved some type of cannabis legalization and, if 2022 and 2023 so far are any guide, have also approved the maintenance of some legal right to abortion.
That’s the REAL change. The country has become more socially liberal, even as ‘law and order’ and ‘anti-tax’ rhetoric and policy continue to have resonance.
AUGURIES OF LONG-TERM SOCIAL DISTRUST
The Republican Party, even in its present platform-less state, has been re-orienting itself under Donald Trump into a party that cares most passionately about restricting immigration and drastically raising the level of border security, particularly at the southern border. It has also adopted a posture that is pro-industrial policy and unashamedly nationalistic.
Minus the industrial policy piece, the anti-immigration and nationalistic go-it-alone posture more or less resemble the American ‘Old Right‘ of the 1920s and 30s that the writers at The American Conservative are so enamored with. The industrial policy piece of this new vision has been effectively co-opted by President Biden and the Democrats starting in 2021. Greymantle believes this will go far to blunt the appeal of the GOP in this regard, as the Dems will be doing the same, but doing it better. It was Biden’s most brilliant move and a check-mate to the MAGA crowd.
The MAGA phase of the GOP does contain some new features that are different from both the pre-war ‘Old Right’ and the ‘fusionism’ of the 1960s through 1990s. First of all, the new GOP is heavily anti-institutional. It doesn’t merely distrust federal government employees. It distrusts the entirety of academia, the scientific establishment, the medical community, and most of America’s huge entertainment complex – Hollywood most of all. That’s a big change, even from the mentality of the conservative Southern senators who passed the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed).
Conservative northern Republicans and pro-segregation Southern Democrats of the interwar years may have both disliked labor unions and wanted to restrict immigration from the Soviet Union and Sicily, but they were equally proud of America’s scientific community and technical prowess. Nuclear scientists and disease experts like Jonas Salk were universally admired. At present, both group are vehemently distrusted by GOP congressional representatives and the Republican voter base.
It’s hard to see how traditional conservatism, with its strong pro-institutional bias, can make a comeback when economists, microbiologists and climate researchers are equally distrusted by the same voter base that supported Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, once upon a time.
CAN A SOCIALLY FRAGMENTED POLITY VOTE FOR CONSERVATISM?
Add to this problem the difficulties caused by America’s social fragmentation and it becomes even harder to see how 55 percent of American voters could rally around a philosophical vision of deregulation and a return to early 20th century (or at least pre-1960s) social norms. What core group of voters could commit themselves to this vision?
The elites and the masses of people have developed into socially dissimilar blocs. The elite includes plenty of atheists, Hindus, Jews, liberal Episcopalians and, yes, even a few Black Baptists. The mass of the people are now divided between a sizable chunk (about 40% of the total) of stubbornly observant evangelical Protestants and old-line Catholics, with a sprinkling of Orthodox Jews, and a smaller but louder group of white-identitarian, rural and/or ‘barstool conservative’ types who are held together by their hatred of ‘the Left’ and ‘wokism’. They have little else in common.
Mixed in between the elites and the masses are undigested chunks of secular Blacks more oriented toward hip-hop than ‘old time religion’, millions of Hispanics who may be secular, or Catholic, or even practice Santeria or some other Caribbean ‘folk religion’, Asian Buddhists, the Bah’ai, Muslims divided into Sunni and Shia, and any number of Slavic and African people.
Put simply, America is a nation without a natural ethnic, metaphysical or geographic center. What would any revived traditional conservatism be attempting to conserve? What pitch would a coterie of believers in small-o orthodox Christianity, the Western Canon, free enterprise, and ‘law and order’ politics make to such a diverse group of voters in order to unite them as an effective voting bloc?
It’s difficult to envision. In the short term, rainbow-flag waving, multi-cultural, social justice progressivism combined with effective technocracy seems the likelier ideology to weld together such a varied nation. If the progressive Democrats can keep the economy growing and state and local budgets balanced, then they can probably manage to assume and keep control, provided that crime doesn’t surge and illegal immigration slows. Greymantle would bet on it.
FINALE: IMPLICATIONS OF CONSERVATISM’S DEMISE
With the GOP and a resurgent conservatism unlikely to retake the reins of power anytime in the near future, what are the likely outcomes for American society and government?
Greymatle will dig deep into this topic in future posts, but I’m going to sketch just a few visions for the future below that I’d like my readers to play around with in their minds.
- With pretty much everything that was once forbidden legalized, remaining socially conservative social groups and individuals will take on the role of ‘conservative dissenters’ against the new social norms. They will be alternatively ignored, mocked, and clamped down upon by legal and political authorities in the ‘blue states’. This pattern has already begun.
2. The Pro-Life movement will retrace the arc of the Temperance Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries following the lifting of Prohibition in 1933. With the exception of a handful of deep red states, legal abortion through the second trimester will become the norm. The Pro-Life Movement will lose electoral relevance in 35 out of 50 states and be moribund within the blue states.
3. The technological and medical alteration of human beings within the U.S. will progress at a faster pace with the natural opponents to such processes effectively weakened.
4. Even most ‘deep red’ states will adopt more aggressive environmental controls over the medium term as the pace of climate change accelerates. All states embrace renewables by 2040.
5. Third parties become somewhat more viable as many remaining traditional conservatives leave the GOP in search of alternatives, allying with disillusioned former Dems and moderates.
6. Legalized gambling and drugs become more entrenched. Some future social movements organize against gambling, video gaming and virtual reality.
7. Progressives and the Democrats generally use the Trump phenomenon and related events as a cudgel with which to clobber the GOP and social conservatives for the next 80 years – very effectively.
There’s always more to discuss, dear readers.
Greymantle will be back after Labor Day with a post titled ‘Conservative Dissenters and the New Social Majority’ in which we explore sketch #1 above in some detail.
Until then, we hope you all have a great holiday weekend. Stay safe!
Greymantle
