What’s the Story?

What Shelby Steele holds in his op-ed is that liberals have a story and conservatives do not. The liberal story is an old one, in many ways a false one, but it works for them, and, as he points out, they are adamantly sticking to it. Their story—nowadays the approved word is “narrative”—is one of impressive simplicity: They hate social injustice in any form, despise capitalism for its selfishness and blame it for the despoiling of the environment and the planet generally, and cannot find an ethnic or sexual minority they don’t wish to help. Through this program, they have, or at least feel they have, cornered the market on virtue. To put the liberal story in two words: They care. This has left conservatives in the unattractive position of not caring.

Like most simple stories about the motorforce of human behavior—the class struggle, the Oedipus complex—the side-effects of the liberal story, which go unmentioned, are sometimes as pernicious as the disease. Liberals, in recent years, have a lot for which to apologize. Thus, owing to the successful attempts at implementing an essentially liberal program of diversity and giving way to every possible strain of multiculturalism, the contemporary university controlled by liberal ideas has been so badly watered down in its humanities and social sciences divisions as to dilute the quality of higher education itself, with political correctness, trigger-warnings, and microaggressions putting on the finishing touches. Thus, in their relentlessly reassuring African Americans of their continuing victim status—ignoring the more deadly tragedy of black-on-black gang murders in the inner city—the liberal program on race has ensured bad feeling all round and brought on the worst in black leadership. As Shelby Steele himself remarked some years ago, if racial progress in the country is ever admitted, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be out of business.

A liberal in good standing through my late 20s, the liberal story lost credence for me when I began to teach at a Middle Western university. There I discovered young professors, good liberals all, sleeping with their students, older professors backing down before radicals who openly proclaimed they had no use for free speech—never have I witnessed such cowardliness when there was so little to fear—and behavior so grasping (and for such very low stakes) that it made the Robber Barons look like an order of Dominicans. Liberals, as is well known, are much better at proclaiming than living up to their ideals.

If liberals frequently turn out disappointing, conservatives are uninspiring. Conservatives don’t have a story, or at least an impressive one. They are left only with their insistence on the unreality of contemporary liberalism, which when proclaimed is usually turned against them by charges of racism, blindness to the beauty of idealism and the larger project of the good of eminently improvable humankind, and insensitivity generally. Conservatives need a story of their own. But what might it be?

Economics has long been at the heart of the conservative story. Friedrich Hayek correctly held that the loss of economic liberty soon results in the loss of other, more essential liberties. The prime example here is the Soviet Union, whose leaders, having captured the means of production, for 75 brutal years promptly closed down the means of decent life itself.

Unarguably true though it is, the conservative insistence upon the importance of free markets is not necessarily useful as an arguing point for winning the good opinion of independents. The emphasis on free markets in current-day conservatism is more likely to convince them, and reconfirm liberals in their fixed belief, that conservatives merely wish to preserve the status quo—preserve, in other words, the wealth of the One Percent and all that. The conservative story ought somehow to show that conservatism itself is not identical with, is richer and more complex than, business interests. The business of America, they need to emphasize, contra Calvin Coolidge, is greater than mere business.

My friend Edward Shils once remarked to me apropos of Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Gary Becker, and their colleagues in the University of Chicago economics department that they were decent men, honorable and obviously highly intelligent, but “insufficiently impressed by the mysteries of life.” Those mysteries need to be part of the conservative story. While endorsing free markets as the most efficient arrangement known under successful capitalism, the conservative story must not allow a belief in the importance of economics to block out the more significant elements in life. In defense of his own Communist politics, Bertolt Brecht said, “first grub, then ethics.” Through an undue emphasis on economics, conservatives convey essentially the same skewed message.

As Chesterton is supposed to have said, “when a man chooses not to believe in God, he does not choose to believe in nothing, he believes in anything.” In the realm of economics, confirmation of Chesterton’s aphorism is available at Exhibit A: the invisible hand of the market.

On the subject of God, liberals and conservatives are divided. Those liberals who profess religious belief feel that their belief impels them to join the fight for social justice. Among religious institutions given over to politics, the Episcopal church, once the citadel of the East Coast social establishment, appears to have been captured by liberalism. Unitarianism has for decades seemed an appendage of liberalism. Reform Judaism, it has been said, is little more than the Democratic party platform, with holidays added. True, evangelical Christians have supported the Republican party in recent years, but they have done so chiefly because they felt their faith under attack by the social arrangements promoted by secular liberalism.

In this melee of religious passion, conservatives do well to present themselves as defenders not of the Faith, but of faith itself. (I have, in this connection, a conservative friend who calls himself a “pious agnostic.”) By this I mean conservatives ought, insofar as possible, to defend all respectable religious worship while stressing that religion is above mere politics and as such does best wherever possible to steer clear of direct involvement in political activism.

The attack on Big Government has long been another part of the conservative story. However high its truth factor, this, too, has a commensurately low persuasion quotient. The closer it gets to impinging on personal life—in the realms of health, setting and reinforcing social norms, and the rest—the more inept, not to say interfering, Big Government does indeed seem. Yet to be against all Big Government is to chew much more than one should bite off. The need for FEMA, the FDA, ICE, and the other of the lettered federal agencies that comprise the alphabet soup of Big Government has if anything grown greater in recent years. The conservative argument ought not to be against Big Government per se, but on the underlying assumption that government is the greatest force available for bringing about human welfare and happiness.

The insistence on free markets and the attack on Big Government and the retreat into tradition that takes the form of disparagement of advanced-guard social behavior (gay marriage, abortion, and the rest) come to little more than a melancholy and defeatist creed, when what is missing and much needed in the conservative story is an affirmative philosophy.

At the heart of the liberal-conservative argument is a dispute about human nature. Liberals find human nature infinitely malleable—“A path out of poverty and poor health” runs the happy headline to a story about a recent study conducted by psychologists and developmental scientists—conservatives view it as hardily resistant to change. Liberals see humanity as on a relentless march of progress, conservatives see civilization itself as inherently fragile, a beautiful but thin construct always in danger of tearing.

In his one strongly political novel, The Princess Casamassima, Henry James has a character, Madame Grandoni, the companion of the radically chic princess, remark in a manner to which most conservatives would, I think, readily subscribe: “I take no interest in the people; I don’t understand them and I know nothing about them. An honorable nature of any class, I always respect it, but I will not pretend to a passion for the ignorant masses.” Conservatives are not, like liberals, under any obligation to take up the cause of supposed victim groups en masse, but only that of individuals of honorable character. Hyacinth Robinson, James’s hero in the novel, a boy born poor, orphaned, and raised in the London slums, undergoes an inner revolution and gives up the outer revolution to which he had been committed, abandoning his political resentment and anger and falling in love with “the beauty of the world.” Later in the novel James remarks about the limits of politics, a limit conservatives need to make part of their story: “The figures on the chessboard were still the passions and jealousies and superstitions and stupidities of man, and their position with regard to each other, at any given moment, could be of interest only to the grim, invisible fates who played the game—who sat, through the ages, bow-backed over the table.” Such thoughts do not make for simple political messaging, but, conservative at their core, they can supply the philosophy behind a persuasive conservative story.

The conservative English novelist Evelyn Waugh once jokingly remarked that he was never again going to vote for the Tories as they had been in power for eight years and hadn’t turned the clock back one minute. Neither should American conservatives expect their political representatives to have any better luck with turning back the clock. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. held a cyclical view of American history, with liberal changes sweeping the board for a time, at which point, having exhausted itself, liberalism is replaced by conservatism. Thus do Democrats and Republicans shuffle in and out of power, though with the changes made during the liberal years generally accepted and becoming part of the status quo.

But the most recent liberal changes seem unacceptable, and not to conservatives alone. The identity politics that, along with an inept campaign, cost Hillary Clinton the presidency have also gone a long way to destroying the universities, made race relations more jagged than ever, and left American foreign policy in a great muddle of indecision. So demoralized had the nation become by liberalism that in Donald J. Trump it elected a man richly unprepared for the job whose only attraction was his promise that he could put a stop to the business-as-usual of liberal identity politics and foreign policy dithering and, you should pardon the expression, Make America Great Again.

With a good conservative story in place, the Trump presidency, with all its unnerving volatility, might have been avoided. But none of the candidates who opposed Donald Trump in the Republican primaries was in possession of that story or any other moderately convincing story, leaving them all seeming little more than men and one woman in business for themselves.

I myself do not have that much-needed conservative story, but I do have a strong sense of what its general lineaments ought to be. The conservative story ought to be respectful of business but not dominated by its values. It ought to be sympathetic to those who have fallen or are otherwise unfit to compete in a competitive society and relieve their misery wherever possible. It ought to recognize the centrality of immigration in our history and do all in its power to turn recent immigrants into true Americans, not merely people who have come here seeking work and the enjoyment of superior consumer goods. Connected with this it needs to recognize that the United States is no longer a dominantly white country, which statistically it isn’t, and to give up any false notions of our having an aristocratic class (“Ah,” said the Italian to the Englishman who was bragging about his lineage, “when your people were still painting their behinds purple and baying at the moon, in my family already we had homosexuals”). Finally, in a hard world, conservatives ought to be good-humored. As for that world, permit me to allow Henry James, in a passage from an essay on Turgenev, to have the last word:

“Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”

Nothing cheerful about that, to be sure, but it seems impressively realistic in the way that Shelby Steele called for “reality” to be “the informing vision” of conservatism and to help furnish conservatives with a powerfully persuasive story of their own.

Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author, most recently, of Wind Sprints: Essays.