The fine publication First Things can do better. It has produced a manifesto of sorts for a new conservatism, supposedly making a major break from “the pre-Trump conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016” without necessarily embracing Trumpism per se.
Entitled “Against the Dead Consensus” and signed by 14 usually insightful thinkers on the Right, it makes a big to-do about fighting “those who would resurrect warmed-over Reaganism and foreclose honest debate.”
All the actual listed items of the manifesto are fine — it is a thin but valuable list of common-ground beliefs. Yet the essay falls flat in its odd, vague, haughty, and dismissive treatment of pre-2016 conservatism. It embraces weak generalities where cogent and specific critiques should be required to justify their supercilious tone.
First, let’s list their own positive specifics, adding numbers for clarity, and applaud each item without further elaboration or discussion. As noted, the list could stand to be longer and bolder, but it’s solid stuff: “1) We oppose the soulless society of individual affluence. 2) We stand with the American citizen. 3) We reject attempts to compromise on human dignity. 4) We resist a tyrannical liberalism. 5) We want a country that works for workers. 6) We believe home matters.”
There. That’s it. Read it yourself to understand how they flesh it out. All good, insofar as it goes.
What is galling is not what those who signed the manifesto are for, but what they say they are against. It’s like rock soup: a warmed-over bowl with no nutrition.
“The old conservative consensus,” the document grandly explains, “failed to retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity, and much else. It surrendered to the pornographization of daily life, to the culture of death, to the cult of competitiveness. It too often bowed to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism.”
Huh?!? In what way, pray tell, did what the writers call “warmed-over Reaganism” possibly “surrender to the pornographization of daily life [or] to the culture of death”? How did it bow to multiculturalism?
Seriously, name a single Reaganite, even one “movement conservative,” who bowed to multiculturalism. And where was the surrender to pornographization? Was it in the 2012 Republican platform? Was it in the pages of National Review? And how, in any way, is what passes for popular conservatism post-2016 a step away from such pornographization? Is it the president who pays hush money to nude models and porn performers? The first lady who posed nude? The vulgarity frequently emanating from the Oval Office?
Obviously, the manifesto’s writers are not guilty of such things. To their credit, they have records foursquare against those cultural degradations. But how can they blame pre-2016 conservatism, or Reaganism, for sins much more prevalent today than they were before Trump?
The worst and most bizarre charge that the manifesto makes against “warmed-over Reaganism” is that it has a tendency to “foreclose honest debate.” Again, how? When was the supposedly shopworn, feeble, “consensus conservatism” censorious to debate? Even up through 2016, the depth and breadth and diversity of conservative commentary was rich and varied. The American Conservative and the Weekly Standard, for example, respectfully debated foreign and defense policy, without calling each other names or questioning the other’s motives or integrity.
Now, though, the straitjackets on thought within what passes for the political Right are tightening every day. There is less intramural jousting over ideas of conservatism than ever before. If one isn’t for Trumpism now, one is a RINO or a “cuck” or a “swamp creature,” and eternally shunned.
In short, “Against the Dead Consensus” leaves me wondering what its signatories are actually burying. They have conjured up something that never lives as they now describe it.
