Nineteenth-century liberals offer lessons for today. Thirty-one> years ago, a mass gathering in front of an important government structure signified the high-water mark of the American conservative movement.
It was November 9, 1989. Harald Jäger, an East German border officer, had watched a confused member of the Politburo announce that the border between West and East Germany was now open. East Berliners, hearing the same news, gathered at the Berlin Wall, demanding permission to go over to the western side. Jäger, unsure of what his superiors wanted him to do, agreed to open the gates. His decision liberated 125 million Eastern Europeans in one peaceful stroke.
The triumph of the West over the Soviet Union could not have happened without the post–World War II conservative movement built by William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan. The vindication of their principles was so total that a State Department official, Francis Fukuyama, described it in The National Interest as “the end of history as such: . . . Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Bill Clinton dedicated much of his presidency to consolidating the Reagan Revolution, enacting welfare reform, presiding over federal surpluses, and proclaiming in his 1996 State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over.
But today, as we reflect on the record of the conservative movement after the end of the Cold War, the triumphalism of 1989 seems mystifying.
Today, it’s the era of small government that’s over. In 2020, for the first time since World War II, the size of the federal debt exceeded the United States’ annual economic output. Indeed, recent Republican presidents have overseen greater increases in the national debt than have their Democratic counterparts. You have to squint really hard to find the political constituency — in either party — for limited government.
Moreover, conservatives have failed to persuade the broader public to return to pre-1960s social mores. While Trump overwhelmingly won the votes of white born-again or Evangelical Christians, 76 percent to 24, he lost the votes of everyone else by a margin of 62 to 36. That second group — the non-Evangelicals — represented 72 percent of the electorate in 2020 and will claim an even larger share in future elections. Thanks to the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, pro-lifers may finally get their chance to overturn Roe v. Wade. But what other possible victories for social conservatism lie on the horizon?
While everyone focuses on the events of the last three weeks, it’s the last three decades that demand our attention. For if conservatives can’t shrink the size of government, and if conservatives can’t convince young people to live like their grandparents, what is it that conservatives exist to do, other than shake their fists at their televisions?
What realistic policy goals should conservatives strive to achieve in the 21st century? Can timeless conservative principles adapt to the way rising generations actually live their lives today, and will live their lives in the future? If so, how? Over the last four years, these deeper questions about the conservative mission have gone unanswered.
The end of the Trump presidency is an ideal time to take stock: to refresh our thinking about American self-government, and to expand the coalition that yearns for it.
In 1950, Lionel Trilling famously described conservatism as a set of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Trilling was wrong back then. But doesn’t the Capitol mob prove him right today? For years, cable news and social media have fed us a steady diet of PC outrages, while fewer and fewer conservatives take on the unglamorous work of developing policy ideas that can attract broad public support.
If you think I’m being uncharitable, ask yourself this. Over the last 25 years, outside of tax cuts, what transformative pieces of pro-liberty legislation has Congress passed and the president signed into law? Bills as impactful as, say, Obamacare or Dodd-Frank?
Do you know which reforms conservative politicians will try to enact if they have a chance to run the government in 2025? Your guess is as good as mine. And even if conservatives do get together and develop a policy agenda that you feel you could rally behind, could it gain enough public support to actually become law? To overcome a filibuster? How much would you bet on that outcome?
Most important, would that policy agenda make Americans better off? Ronald Reagan succeeded because his policies improved the livelihoods of people in every state. After 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the opioid epidemic, and COVID-19, more and more people are losing confidence in the fairness of our economic system. As Charles Murray documented in Coming Apart, people without a college degree have experienced declines in their relative economic standing and social capital. Tens of millions are one missed paycheck away from insolvency. Tens of millions more lack supportive communities of neighbors, families, and friends.
Modern American conservatism is at a dead end because both its intellectual and its political coalitions have unraveled.
In the 20th century, conservatives liked to talk about the “three-legged stool” of libertarians, social conservatives, and anti-communists. But the dissolution of the USSR knocked out the most important leg of the stool, the one that persuaded everyone else to subsume their differences to fight the Soviet threat. As George Nash observed in The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, attempts at “theoretical harmony” between libertarians and social conservatives after World War II were “immensely assisted by the cement of anti-Communism. . . . Nearly all conservatives were bound together by consciousness of a common mortal enemy. The threat of an external foe . . . was an invaluable source of cohesion.” After Harald Jäger unlocked those East Berlin gates in 1989, that cohesion began to weaken.
The most dramatic changes in the conservative coalition have taken place among social conservatives. It’s not just that younger voters are more secular and diverse. Social conservatism in the 1950s was itself a fusion of many different types of people: Evangelical Christians, Roman Catholics, southern Democrats, WASP elites, opera fans, and middle-class readers of The Saturday Evening Post.
Today, those would-be readers of The Saturday Evening Post — temperamental conservatives who want to fit in with the mainstream, conventional culture of their peers — identify less and less with the cultural Right. “Popular culture” is, after all, popular, and as more religious conservatives withdraw from the mainstream, that trend only accelerates. We can quantitate this shift by looking at suburban voters, who went overwhelmingly for Reagan in the 1980s but are increasingly a source of Democratic strength.
In 1955, when National Review was founded, our economic elites generally shared the cultural worldview of social conservatives. God and Man at Yale caused an outcry precisely because most Yale alumni shared Bill Buckley’s concerns that Yale no longer actively promoted Christianity. Those days, of course, are long gone. Though today’s business leaders often lead their own lives in temperamentally conservative ways, they rarely identify with right-wing culture warriors. This is especially true in Silicon Valley and New York City, the two great citadels of entrepreneurial capitalism.
The economic side of the conservative coalition has its share of problems, too. Lyndon Johnson used his landslide victory over Barry Goldwater to enact a massive and politically durable expansion of the welfare state, most notably Medicaid and Medicare. But because so many on the anti-government right insist that there is no legitimate federal role in helping the poor, conservatives have lacked a principled language that can attract public support for a more liberty-oriented approach to government aid.
Furthermore, as Emily Ekins of the Cato Institute has found, today’s Republican coalition is not uniformly conservative in the ideological, 20th-century sense of the word. Ekins identifies five core clusters of Trump voters, of which three — American preservationists (20 percent of Trump voters), anti-elites (19 percent), and the disengaged (5 percent) — lean left on economics, according to her polling. Two clusters — staunch conservatives (31 percent) and American preservationists — emphasize restricting immigration over most other issues. Only free-marketeers (25 percent) and staunch conservatives prioritize reducing the size of government.
What is the policy agenda that binds these disparate groups?
We can do our best to unite these factions — and build a larger, more welcoming, and more coherent political coalition — by drawing from leading 19th- and 20th-century classical liberals such as John Stuart Mill, Frederick Douglass, and Friedrich Hayek. These thinkers were not libertarian purists, and their departures from purism are precisely the ones we need today.
Nineteenth-century liberals differed from their 17th- and 18th-century predecessors by prioritizing equal opportunity alongside limited government. For example, hard-core libertarians oppose public education because it requires taxation and involves government institutions. John Stuart Mill, on the other hand, saw public education as the path to social mobility for the working class. “Defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them” was a proper role for government, according to Mill.
Frederick Douglass, of course, took the 18th-century liberal principles and applied them to racial equality, an area where the Founding Fathers had their inconsistencies. Friedrich Hayek, the free-market avatar, understood that government had a legitimate role in regulating monopolies. He even proposed a market-based form of universal health insurance, to protect against the “hazards of life.”
We can apply 19th-century classical liberalism to 21st-century America through three core principles: equal opportunity, personal freedom, and patriotism.
Conservatives often say, “We support equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.” And yet when the rubber hits the road, the conservative equal-opportunity agenda is thin. Imagine, instead, a conservative movement in which every promising policy idea is filtered through the lens of its impact on lower- and middle-income Americans, whom we might call “kitchen-table voters.” We’d embrace Hayek-style universal health insurance and show how private-sector competition and cost-reducing innovations can eliminate bankruptcies due to medical bills. We’d join with progressives to reform “not-in-my-backyard” zoning laws that restrict the supply of housing in costly coastal cities. And we’d think hard about how to protect public safety while also holding bad police officers accountable when they hide behind union contracts to avoid responsibility for negligent or excessive force.
Personal freedom, in the context of the 21st century, requires us to be implacable in the face of cancel culture, so that Americans can speak according to their beliefs and worship according to their traditions. Personal freedom also means standing up for free enterprise, the idea that has lifted more people out of poverty than any other. It has become fashionable in nationalist circles to point to some bad economic statistic — say, the high cost of college — and blame it on “market fundamentalism.” The opposite is true: Government regulations and cronyism conspire to keep prices high, and enrich well-connected institutions, at the expense of ordinary consumers.
Conservatives have — and always should — love their country. But there are important differences between patriotism and Steve Bannon–style nationalism. In Michael Anton’s “Flight 93 Election” prose, America is under siege by “Third World foreigners” immigrating to the U.S. with “no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty.” Tell that to Cuban emigrés, without whom Republicans in Florida would be an endangered species. Ronald Reagan was a strong believer in legal immigration. He was fond of calling immigrants “Americans by choice” and understood how fervently patriotic immigrants can be: They know what it’s like to live somewhere that lacks America’s virtues.
The value of this new three-legged stool is that it maximizes the size of the coalition that supports self-government. Kitchen-table voters, suburban moderates, libertarians, and pro-market Democrats all want a country in which every American, regardless of race or ethnicity, has a fair shot at success. Not all of these voters are aligned with conservatives today, but they could be in the future. Just as we have seen with school choice, investing in the success of low-income Americans of all races can attract new voters to our cause and enrich the moral purpose of our work.
Rebuilding the conservative coalition will not be easy. It will take leaders — in particular, people running for president in 2024 — who are willing to challenge powerful economic and political interests. These leaders must recognize that every American citizen, regardless of where his ancestors were born, is a potential recruit to the cause.
We considered above the high-water mark of 20th-century conservatism: its defeat of Soviet communism. But we can’t conclude without also addressing conservatism’s low point: not the riots of 2021, but rather conservatism’s absence from the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
In the canonical account of the history of the conservative movement, Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign is described as a triumphal moment. “Barry Goldwater lost 44 states, but won the future,” says George Will, because Goldwater inspired the Reagan Revolution.
But Goldwater didn’t win the future. He lost it, by opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and severing the historic relationship between African Americans and the Republican Party. Whereas Eisenhower had won 39 percent of the black vote in 1956, and Nixon 32 percent in 1960, Goldwater garnered only 6 percent in 1964. As a direct consequence, Goldwater won only six states: his home state of Arizona and five states in the Deep South.
The 1964 presidential campaign was, unfortunately, not an isolated episode. The blunt truth is that many conservative luminaries in the 1960s opposed federal civil-rights legislation. Two future GOP Supreme Court nominees — William Rehnquist and Robert Bork — had advised Goldwater to oppose the 1964 bill. Indeed, in 1963, Bork wrote a lengthy essay in The New Republic arguing that the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act represented “a principle of unsurpassed ugliness.”
In 1960, Goldwater published his celebrated manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, with the help of Bill Buckley’s brother-in-law, Brent Bozell. In chapter four, Goldwater described the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education — desegregating public schools — as an “abuse of power by the Court” and an “unconstitutional trespass into the legislative sphere of government.” He asked Congress to propose a constitutional amendment that would restore states’ rights to segregate their schools. In 1957, Buckley himself argued in National Review that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures,” including disenfranchising black voters, “as are necessary to prevail, . . . because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
Buckley and Bork came to regret their earlier views and recanted them. But at the moments when it mattered, conservatives were not on the same side as the people fighting to end Jim Crow and government-enforced segregation. Contrary to conservative rhetoric then and now, it was the federal government that expanded black liberty in the 1960s.
The partisan realignment of 1964 went both ways; Republicans lost the black vote but gained the votes of many southern Democrats who saw LBJ’s bill as a betrayal. Even though six decades have passed, the ripple effects of that realignment are still with us. Just as an unfaithful spouse can save a marriage only through honest atonement, conservatives will regain the trust of right-leaning African Americans only by frankly and forcefully acknowledging our movement’s past mistakes.
We conservatives like to claim that our principles are timeless and universal. If they are, they don’t apply only to Americans of European descent. They apply also to “Third World foreigners” and the descendants of liberated slaves. We’ve talked a lot about the white working class over the past four years. But it is only when conservatives gain the allegiance of all members of the working class — black, Hispanic, Asian, white, and everyone in between — that we will be able to vindicate the uniquely American experiment in self-government.
Avik Roy — is the president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, is a former policy adviser to Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Marco Rubio.