Hosts at the Daily Wire laid bare a division in the modern conservative movement during their analysis of the Super Tuesday Democratic election results.
The conservative commentators, Ben Shapiro, Jeremy Boreing, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and Matt Walsh, reexamined the debate on the role of government in social matters. One of the outlet’s founders, Boreing, said that the ultimate principle he wants to “conserve” is “American liberalism.”
“The thing I want to conserve is American liberalism,” Boreing said. Knowles, a commentator at the outlet, then pressed Boreing on the issue, asserting that the “wonderfully enlightened, liberal Founding Fathers” favored laws that governed moral behavior. “Morality is a cultural phenomenon,” Boreing said in response to Knowles, revealing a stark difference between the two conservatives.
Speaking to the Washington Examiner, Boreing said he believes the current political climate has fostered an “illiberal party” on the Left that forces others to adhere to a certain belief system. He wants to conserve “classical liberalism,” which deals with principles such as pluralism and constitutional governance, so that conservatism does not force others to live in an immoral fashion. “I think morality, as we commonly are discussing morality … morality certainly is a reflection of cultural mores. I think it is a real mistake on the part of today’s conservatives to believe they represent some Nixonian silent majority, where secretly most people in the county agree with us about our moral standards.”
The idea of conservatism ultimately “conserving” classical liberalism has recently been challenged by some writers. Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative op-ed editor for the New York Post, advocated for a “common good” conservatism in May 2019. In an op-ed for religious publication First Things, he wrote, “Here is the problem: The movement we are up against prizes autonomy above all, too; indeed, its ultimate aim is to secure for the individual will the widest possible berth to define what is true and good and beautiful, against the authority of tradition.” In his view, a conservatism that ultimately prioritizes classical liberalism will fail to address plights on society’s social fabric, such as a “drag queen story hour.”
In the Tuesday night podcast, the group discussed whether or not action should be taken to prohibit children from being exposed to a “drag queen story hour.”
“The parents should be arrested. I mean, if I were in charge, that’s what I would do. I would just arrest the parents. I think you’re bringing your child in to be conditioned in a very pedophilic way,” Walsh said. “If a parent did that, that parent should be carted off to jail because that is so grotesque and obscene.”
“I think it’s a very disingenuous trick that the so-called common good conservatives are playing because, at the end of the day, no conservative is for ‘drag queen story hour,'” Boreing told the Washington Examiner. “It’s just an easy way to score points for the ‘common good’ conservatives, because they know that our position on it is going to be nuanced,” he said. Though Boreing said he is comfortable with politicians using the bully pulpit to promulgate certain values, he thinks it is a dangerous precedent for conservatives to enforce their moral conceptions because the Left may do it, too.
“Common good” conservatism, as Boreing describes it, defines a certain group of social conservatives who are willing to use the federal government to outlaw certain immoral behavior.
In 2019, Walsh debated with libertarian-minded commentators on whether or not pornography should be banned. “Porn defenders essentially argue that prostitution should be legal as long as there is a camera in the room and the act is published on the internet for general consumption. I find this argument not only mistaken but bewildering in its incoherence,” Walsh tweeted.
Boering also added that certain “immoral” behavior isn’t an “inevitable consequence of liberty,” saying, “I don’t think that’s right. It’s a very specific consequence of the abandonment of the culture by conservatives. I think that whether conservatives like it or not, they’re not going to control the culture through government. That is not what’s going to happen … and it shouldn’t.”
