Conservatives are generally interested in conserving. Defenders of liberal democracy are busy defending. Guardians of the postwar liberal world order spend their time guarding. As they all should.
Indeed, as they all should now more than ever. Against a mindless progressivism on the left and a reckless populism on the right, conserving, defending, and guarding are worthwhile, even noble, enterprises.
But of course, they’re not enough. The founder of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr., famously announced in the mission statement of National Review: “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”
But in the same statement, Buckley makes clear that any serious political effort can’t merely be about yelling Stop. It can’t mostly be about playing defense. And so, a few paragraphs later, Buckley exuberantly goes on the offensive, claiming the mantle of freshness, embracing the novelty of his enterprise:
Buckley was proud to yell Stop. But he was also proud to be championing “a position that has not grown old,” indeed is “the hottest thing in town.” Buckley understood that all politically serious conservatism is in a sense neoconservatism, that conservatives need to steal the march, not simply man the barricades.
Before Buckley there was Edmund Burke. Burke is widely considered the patron saint of modern conservatism. Burke was a great defender of what deserved defense. But he was also a great reformer. As he wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve.”
Everyone has the sense today, in 2017, that liberal democracies need to change in order to preserve what is most worth preserving. We live in a new moment. At home, the forces of technology and globalization have changed the economic landscape. The various cultural revolutions of the last half-century have changed the social landscape. Changes in policy, demography, and economy have altered the political landscape. Abroad, it’s a quarter-century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. History, once allegedly ended, has restarted with a vengeance. New thinking is surely needed to deal with threats quite new.
Has either conservatism or liberalism met the challenge of these new conditions? No. Why did almost half the participants in the 2016 Republican primaries vote for an authoritarian populist demagogue? Why did almost half the voters on the Democratic side cast their ballots for an unreconstructed socialist demagogue? Demagogues gain traction when movements stagnate. Demagoguery becomes plausible when stability becomes immobility. Demagogues appeal when the sober becomes soporific.
So Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were wake-up calls. And have we awoken? Not yet. Reacting to the prospect and reality of a Trump presidency has taken a lot of time and effort. It will continue to do so. But there is politics beyond Trump; a nation and a world beyond Trump.
And the Republican health care bill, after all, can’t be blamed on Trump. It pre-exists him. Yet it shows little in the way of fresh thought. To take one example: Republicans are in favor of repealing Obamacare. The passage of Obamacare involved levying about a dozen new taxes on the American people to pay for the new benefits and structures. Republicans have been committed to repealing that tax burden.
But how does the GOP bill do this? It repeals exactly those taxes that Obamacare levied or increased. It takes no account of the fact that years have passed, that circumstances have changed, and that the taxes that should now be repealed or reduced need not be an exact mirror image of those that were increased years ago. The failure to adopt a Burkean attitude toward their task means that Republicans—after a seven-year stretch in which investors have done well and capital has prospered, after an election in which their nominee prevailed by promising to help Main Street rather than Wall Street—have in their first major piece of legislation advanced a tax proposal that mostly benefits the wealthy investors of Wall Street.
It’s not Trump’s fault that the Republican party is trapped in this kind of zombie conservatism. Indeed, it may precisely be Trump, unconstrained by previous allegiances, who will have the wit and the sense to rebel against this case study in dubious economics married to disastrous politics.
But whatever Trump does, whatever the fate of this particular piece of legislation, we can surely find our way through to positions that have not grown old. New means are required to attain conservative ends. Now is the moment to steal the march on the progressives and the populists, to say nothing of the dictators and the fanatics.
