Common Good
Further Thoughts
John Puri has a good article up at National Review Online. I like Puri. He’s young (as far as I can tell), but he’s a talented writer and he knows his beat. Refreshingly, he’s a young conservative who isn’t sold on the New Right and he often aims his punches at the New Right or Donald Trump.
In a recent column, Puri demonstrates that the “common good” that the New Right so often claims to want has been undermined by the very “common good” policies they like. In housing, healthcare, and education, for instance, twentieth-century anti-market policies designed to ensure a particular vision of American community life set up the very disasters we see in those sectors today. By subsidizing demand and restricting supply, the government made healthcare, housing, and higher education unaffordable for average Americans. The solution, then, is not to double down on these policies, but to undo them. The New Right loves to claim that the free market undermines the common good, but the truth is closer to the opposite.
In the course of making these points, Puri points out that FDR was one of the original “common-do-gooders.” Progressives, rather than conservatives, made the arguments in the twentieth century that the New Right is making today.
Perhaps Puri isn’t aware that the New Right doesn’t consider this a strike against them. Probably he is. I don’t know.
Many on the New Right like FDR. Their project is one of redefining left and right, progressive and conservative, so that they can solidify a political coalition that lumps together the groups and policies they support and exiles the groups and policies they don’t.
This reminded me once again that the New Right of today is really a warmed-over version of an older left-wing faction. Some New Righters were left-wingers of yesteryear, and now claim to represent the “true” right despite not having changed many of their positions. Michael Lind comes to mind (12-15 years ago he was calling himself a progressive, and as best I can tell his positions aren’t much different). As does Paul Kingsnorth (who converted to Christianity, but retained his anti-trade environmentalism).
The New Right of today are the heirs to the paleoconservatives of 1991, a group which I’ve long held was partly a collection of ex-Democrats who just wanted to conserve racism and antisemitism. Not that all paleocons were racists or antisemites. Nor is the New Right today defined by bigotry. What I mean is that this is a political coalition which was essentially driven out of the left and has been struggling to find a foothold in politics ever since. There was a time when socially-conservative Democrats were common. Not anymore. These days, the various splinter groups which make up the New Right have nowhere to go except the GOP (although some of them still hold out hope for some kind of third-way coalition between populist, moderate Democrats and populist Republicans).
The New Right is a big tent and the above doesn’t hold true for all of them. The monarchy-fetishizing, theocracy-curious medievalists aren’t ex-Democrats. But there are a lot of ex-Democrats in the New Right, along with people who define themselves by statements such as, “I would have been a Democrat forty years ago, but today I’m a Republican.” Forty years ago, Reagan was president. I would have a been a Republican.1
This big tent includes both the post-liberals who seem to hate America and nation-states, and also the nationalists who sometimes like America (at least fried chicken and football, if not our Founding) and revere the nation-state.2 To the extent that the post-liberals take after Alasdair MacIntyre, they’re still leftists heretics who have been exiled to the right and just don’t know it yet. To the extent that the nationalists see their project as anti-imperial and anti-colonial, they’re borrowing from the left, too.
Some amount of intellectual argumentation is jockeying for position. Intellectuals try to redefine the terms of debate in ways that will help their particular ideas and groups to break in and define the conversation. There came a point in the 20th century when the loose set of ideas, or the spot on the political spectrum, which defines what we today know as the New Right became impossible to reconcile with the rest of the leftist project. For a long time, people who held these idiosyncratic views were in the wilderness. Today they think they’ve found a home in the GOP, which they seek to remake in their own image.
But I still wonder whether their true home is in the Democratic Party. The Democratic coalition which ruled American politics for much of the twentieth century broke up, and ever since neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have managed to establish dominance. Under Trump, intellectuals associated with the GOP have tried to steal away factions which used to be associated with the Democratic Party, but which for various reasons can’t be anymore. But this project hasn’t been entirely successful. The GOP hasn’t been able to establish itself as a majority party.
Reagan didn’t ask the GOP to give up on free markets and hawkish foreign policy. Instead, he persuaded a large majority of Americans to see things his way, at least temporarily. This, to me, is the way to win. Not to offer what the Democrats already do, just with some social conservatism and weird views about the Middle Ages.
It will take some doing to convince a majority of Americans of the virtue of free markets. But I think it can be done. The work of persuasion is long and hard, but it is what leads to lasting majorities and successful political coalitions. Right now, neither party is trying very hard.
I would have been a Republican in 1865, in 1925, in 1955, in 1995, etc. The only Democratic president I would have crossed over to vote for was Grover Cleveland.
Although some of them are willing to put aside these differences, because they see it as necessary to defeat the woke left, the libertarians, and the Reaganite conservative right. And there are even some on the New Right who admire both post-liberalism and nationalism at the same time.
After the midterm of 1894, resulting from the panic of 1893, 103 "Bourbon" Democrats, out of a total Congress of 335, lost their seats. The Democratic Party of the late 1800s was states rights, small government and anti tariff. They then went into a pupae stage of populism under William Jennings Bryan before emerging fully progressive with Wilson. Wilson would look at DSA and go "right on" whereas Cleveland would look at DSA and go "Egads!"