Solidaristic Conservatism

Description

BY PARK MACDOUGALD:

“Among conservative millennial Catholics, for instance, the free-market Catholic fusionism associated with figures such as Richard John Neuhaus is now giving way to various strands of “post-liberal” Catholicism, including the religiously inflected populism of First Things under the editorship of R.R. Reno and a revived form of integralism that calls for the state to promote Catholic social teaching.

Less visible but perhaps more important is the shift among a set of younger conservatives—intellectuals, journalists, and Hill staffers—toward what is sometimes called the “new nationalism.” What sets this younger cohort apart is a conviction that the future of the Republican Party lies with the working class and with what one of their champions, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, has referred to as the “great American middle.” They want a more solidaristic conservatism that is less libertarian, both culturally and economically, and in some ways less liberal. Speaking of his students, Ian Marcus Corbin, a writer and academic at Boston College, told me, “I very rarely encounter the kind of bow-tied Hayekian conservative that was around when I was in college.”

Of course, blue-collar cultural populism has been a mainstay of GOP politics since Nixon, and the laissez faire fire-breathing of The Wall Street Journal editorial page has not typically been the guiding spirit of past Republican administrations. Ronald Reagan raised taxes after cutting them and poured billions into high-tech defense research, while George W. Bush imposed steel tariffs and encouraged easy mortgage credit to promote an “ownership society.” These younger conservatives may share old conservative concerns, including a skepticism toward the liberationist cultural projects of the left and an emphasis on the importance of family, patriotism, and tradition. But they are more concerned than older conservatives with the problems of inequality and immobility, more attuned to the reality of class conflict, and more interested in using the power of the state to make America great again.”

(https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-new-millennial-american-right)

Discussion

The Influence of Christopher Lasch=

“One frequently cited influence is the historian Christopher Lasch, originally a socialist and fellow-traveler of the New Left who, from the 1970s until his early death in 1994, evolved into a lacerating critic of post-’60s America. Lasch argued that the “meritocracy” that had emerged from the social convulsions of the 1960s was a sham, producing an insular, culturally radical elite alienated from and contemptuous of the supposedly bigoted and backward country that it governed. This critique echoed neoconservative attacks on the liberal “new class” of academics and bureaucrats, but Lasch, ever the old Marxist, sought to tie the cultural obsessions of this elite to an increasingly globalized capitalism that had made it possible for them to break the economic, social, and cultural power of the middle and working classes. As one Republican congressional aide in his mid-20s put it to me, reading Lasch in college was “a radicalizing experience for me. Especially on the right, there’s a poverty of approaching any of this stuff from an economic perspective; of looking at class interest and how people within a certain stratum will work to pull the levers of culture to protect their own interests and status.”

The rising influence of Lasch and other communitarians tracks with a broader shift away from the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” position popular with young right-wingers during the Obama years, and toward a newfound social conservatism tied to a form of class critique. Many of the people I spoke to said they had been libertarians in college—one called libertarianism “a way of announcing that you’re contrarian and a right-winger but that you’re totally cool with the way that sex works in the American upper-middle class”—but have since moved right on social issues.”

(https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-new-millennial-american-right)

The Influence of Reform Conservatives

“A number of the D.C.-based conservatives I spoke to also cited the influence of the reform conservatives, or “reformicons.” Especially influential among this group were Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, whose 2008 book, Grand New Party, argued that the Republican Party had been unable to consolidate the Nixon and Reagan majorities because its small-government hardliners were too committed to shrinking a welfare state that most voters wanted to preserve. They counseled the GOP to abandon its panegyrics to entrepreneurs and propose policies designed to appeal to the average wage-earner. Salam was an important social influence as well; a master networker, he identified smart young conservatives with an affinity for his own reformist impulses and put them in touch with one another. (He did the same for me.)

Although none of the major reformicons supported Trump, his campaign in some ways vindicated their arguments. Douthat himself labeled Trump’s campaign message as “reform conservatism’s evil twin, since it started from a similar assumption … and ended up in a more apocalyptic and xenophobic place.” Yet the events of 2016 and after have pushed young reformicons like Saagar Enjeti of The Hill well beyond the relatively modest programs that Salam and Douthat had been advocating back in the early part of the decade. On Enjeti’s TV show, for instance, he delivers blistering populist monologues that owe as much to left-wing anti-monopoly crusaders like Matt Stoller as they do to the reformicons, and still less to Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman. This radicalization has been given a major impetus by the journal American Affairs, which over the past two years has filled out the new right’s vague desire for reform with a genuinely radical program for fixing the status quo.”

(https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-new-millennial-american-right)