The Birth of a New Conservative Age

The political tide is turning. Conservative parties are in power in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. There are Republican governors in thirty-one of the fifty American states. Since Stephen Harper’s election as Canadian Prime Minister in 2006, there has been a distinct lean to the centre-right in the major Anglosphere states. The political tone accompanying this has been one of caution. The mood of electorates is mixed. They lean culturally to the left; economically to the right; and socially they are torn in both directions.

Australia’s long-serving former Prime Minister John Howard was a master of negotiating the Left-liberal Right-realist electoral divide. He embraced gun control and border control. His understudy Tony Abbott could not manage the same precarious balancing act. A short two years as Prime Minister saw Abbott oversee successful free trade, border protection, anti-terrorism and tax policies. Yet he couldn’t hold on to popular support. Trailing in the polls, his party abandoned him. Abbott’s successor, Malcolm Turnbull, had previously experienced a similar fate, when his constant flirting with Left-liberalism made him unpopular with the base of his party. This remains a long-term liability for him even if, like Abbott, he proves to be a short-term electoral success.

The merry-go-round of leaders of Australia’s centre-Right has been shaped by party sentiment and electoral calculation. But something deeper also is in play. For the temper of Anglosphere electorates is changing in a conservative direction. Yet what it means to be a conservative is also changing with the change. This is because what we are seeing is not the regular short-term political cycle. In that cycle parties of the Centre-Left and Centre-Right alternate fairly predictably. Instead a deeper but also more incalculable shift is taking place. This is not just about who is in office but about the political spirit of the age. A historic re-gearing and re-sorting is under way.

The political spirit of the age is what societies broadly and tacitly agree upon. This agreement shifts at crucial historical junctures. These shifts then unfold over decades. A pivot of this type occurred in the years from 1929 to 1932. A mix of social liberalism, social democracy, Keynesian economics and cultural leftism emerged ascendant after the 1930s in most of the Anglosphere and after the Second World War in Continental Europe. Only in the 1980s was this to any degree seriously questioned. This was the era of Thatcher and Reagan. It looked for a time at the end of the 1980s that the old political consensus might collapse. There are signs now that it is in trouble again.

This does not mean plain sailing for conservatives in politics. While the social winds are moving in a loose rightward direction, political conservatives have to adjust to the imperious gusts of history as much as anyone else. The future will not see a re-run of the age of Salisbury or Thatcher, Coolidge or Reagan. History, in that sense, does not repeat. Ironically it is the Left that today is besotted with its own past. The UK Labour Party has elected Jeremy Corbyn, a 1970s throwback, as its leader. Democrat Party primary voters in the United States are semi-seriously toying with the idea of nominating a self-declared socialist, Bernie Sanders, as the party’s presidential candidate. Across the Anglosphere Left-liberals dominate public institutions and the universities. And yet every species of social liberalism, social democracy and cultural leftism is in strife. This is because the Left has run out of ideas. It recycles with ever-diminishing returns the 1930s and the 1970s.

In contrast conservatives have learnt to re-imagine rather than recycle their past. One reason for this is that there is no single conservatism. Rather there is a spectrum of conservatives. There are free-market, classical liberal, libertarian, national security, anti-totalitarian, Christian, evangelical, reform, futurist and traditionalist conservatives. A second reason is that after 1970 conservatives were excommunicated from the official public sphere. This denied them a platform. Yet it also freed them from the intellectual conformism of the age of Keynes. Most important of all for the sprouting of the conservative imagination has been the thread of “fusionism”—a term coined by the American philosopher and National Review editor Frank Meyer—that runs through much contemporary conservative thinking.

If politics is the art of compromise then political imagination is the virtuosity of fusion. John Howard, who had a touch of political genius about him, forged an effective liberal-conservative party alliance in Australia during four terms in office. David Cameron has done the same in Britain. But no fusion lasts forever. Cameron is perhaps smart enough to understand that his political synthesis has a limited shelf-life. He is not going to seek a further term in office. His successor will need a different, probably more conservative, blend. But what that might be is necessarily an open question, for there is no “true” conservatism. There are just conservatives; each one offers a more or less successful fusion. If you doubt that then consider this: the Ur-conservative Edmund Burke was a Whig in politics. Of course, not all fusions work. Tony Abbott tried to mix a strain of social conservatism derived from Australia’s old Democratic Labor Party with John Howard’s liberal-conservative model. On Abbott’s part the meld was authentic and deeply felt. Yet it failed because it was also awkward. It lacked fluidity. It didn’t fit together elegantly. As a result Abbott’s prime ministerial public persona was stilted. Watching him on television set the viewers’ teeth on edge. Even his strong supporters felt this.

The American political cycle

Fusion is a difficult art. But difficulty rewards. Fusion has given present-day American conservative thought a fertile and energetic quality. It mixes, merges and melds a wide range of contrary Centre-Right ideas. One of its notable off-shoots has been a rich re-imagining of public policy. Conservative commentators today produce a regular stream of high-quality meditations on public policy issues. In recent times we have had James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus’s America 3.0, Newt Gingrich’s To Save America, Thomas Sowell’s Wealth, Poverty and Politics, Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and By the People, Kevin Williamson’s The End Is Near and It Is Going to Be Awesome and Charles C.W. Cooke’s The Conservatarian Manifesto, to name a few. Even the usually tedious by-the-numbers campaign book genre in the hands of conservatives today turns out to be quite interesting. Marco Rubio’s American Dreams is a very thoughtful diagnosis of public policy. Carly Fiorina’s Rising to the Challenge vividly highlights the drag of bureaucracies on economy and society.

Something must be up if campaign literature is worth reading. In the last century pretty much only Churchill and Reagan had anything interesting to say on the hustings. So what is going on? Ideas—as distinct from clichés—only appear in democratic politics when a deep shift is under way. There is thus reason to think that we might be in the midst of such a shift. A compelling argument for this is presented by James Piereson in Shattered Consensus. Piereson’s book offers a brilliant insight into America’s post-war political consensus and its break-up.

The pivotal section of the book is the author’s chapter on America’s Fourth Revolution. In it Piereson outlines a cyclical model of American politics. A Democratic-expansionist regime dominated from 1800 until 1860. It collapsed because of the slavery-and-secession crisis. A Republican-capitalist regime dominated from 1865 until 1930. It was brought down by the Great Depression. A Democrat-welfare regime was hegemonic from 1932 until the present. Its future is now in question. A fourth tectonic shift in American politics beckons. Quite possibly today we are teetering on the edge of a second Republican regime.

Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (1888–1965) introduced the idea of cycles into the study of American politics. The country, he proposed, is subject to tides in national politics. It oscillates between liberal and conservative eras. Piereson deftly reworks this theme. The Jefferson–Jackson Democrat regime promoted local democracy and westward expansion. This involved a series of conflicts with France, Spain, Great Britain and Mexico. Slavery proved its undoing. Lincoln’s Republican regime achieved the industrialisation of the nation. This was built on the precepts of economic liberty, the tariff and the gold standard. This idea mix collapsed as the Great Depression began. The Roosevelt New Deal Democrat regime followed. The regime was characterised by social welfare and government spending. It has endured to this day. The Whigs held office in the age of the Democratic frontier. Likewise there were Democrat presidents in the ascendant Republican era and Republicans have frequently held office during the age of big-government liberalism. America is a two-party republic characterised by sequential one-idea regimes. Political opponents may come to power but the policies they enact rarely run against the grain of the prevailing consensus.

As frustrated conservative voters often today complain, simply electing a George H.W. Bush or a George W. Bush makes little difference to the way government functions. What matters is the regime that is in place. A big-spending regime begets big-spending Republicans just as much as big-spending Democrats. Centre-Right populists point to the spiritual corrosiveness of Washington on Republican elites and the party establishment. The donor class, the consultants and the Congressional leadership all bend to business-as-usual. Business-as-usual is defined by the regime of the era. It is very difficult to shake. It permeates all institutions of state. It infuses the attitudes of intellectuals, academics and the media. It soaks public opinion. It is commonplace, unstated and often unconscious. It is the wisdom of the times. However, the wisdom of the times periodically changes.

Piereson, in Shattered Consensus, points out that shifts in the prevailing American consensus have occurred three times in American history. In these decisive moments, everything changes. A sudden deep-going swing occurs. What was true yesterday is no longer true today. These momentous shifts are marked by re-alignment elections.

There is a considerable academic literature on these elections. Thomas Jefferson’s victory in 1800, Abraham Lincoln’s in 1860 and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s in 1932 each signified a deep shift in voter sentiment. A Democrat consensus formed. It was followed by a Republican one and then a Democrat one. American politics echoes the cyclical concept of the Greek historian Polybius. Each of these long cycles or regimes is split in two; a partial re-pivoting occurs mid-cycle. Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 marked the Democrat turn to westward expansion. William McKinley’s 1896 election signified the turn of the Republican regime from isolationism to internationalism and the rise of the progressive strain in American politics. Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election signalled the beginning of the end of the classic industrial era of American political economy and its pivoting to a hyper-regulated post-industrial education-health-and-public-sector-driven economic model.

Nixon is a classic example of the way American regime politics works. He was both an anti-communist nightwatchman and a pioneer of big-government regulation. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, many Republican politicians were model liberals. They adapted to the tenets of the New Deal. Many Democrats likewise reciprocated by adapting themselves to Cold War-era anti-communism. This period was the high point of the liberal consensus. As Piereson notes in Shattered Consensus, intellectual figures like Harvard’s Louis Hartz argued that America was built on liberal-Lockean assumptions and lacked a viable conservative tradition. The Left-liberal historian Richard Hofstadter insisted that American conservatives were anti-intellectual and paranoid. Many American liberals today still believe this. Their ignorance of their political opponents is astonishing.

The irony of Hartz’s and Hofstadter’s dismissive views was that, as they made these claims, an incipient conservative intellectual flowering was under way in the United States. It began with Russell Kirk and William Buckley in the 1950s. Buckley’s magazine National Review attracted distinguished writers, many of them ex-leftists like James Burnham and John Dos Passos. This was followed by the neoconservative wave in the 1970s. The generation of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz fled the Left and the Democrats. The first rifts in the American liberal regime appeared in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan. Reagan did not undo big-government liberalism. But he did slow down its expansion for a time. This began the polarisation of American liberal and conservative voters. It is also triggered a polarisation of conservatives and liberals in the Republican Party.

The American liberal consensus was vigorously enforced in the universities. Over time, conservatives in universities were marginalised and shut out. In the 1950s one in two academics voted Republican. Today the figure is one in ten. The consensus view of American politics left no room for conservative dissenters on campus. Many decamped to policy bodies like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. The few that stayed were often financed by conservative foundations. Piereson has interesting observations about the role of the Centre-Right foundations. He himself was Executive Director of the John M. Olin Foundation from 1985 to 2005. Notably, the libertarian Volker Fund underwrote Friedrich Hayek’s appointment as professor of moral science on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and Ludwig von Mises’s appointment at New York University. Volker and other funds also assisted Milton Friedman’s Chicago school of economics and James Buchanan’s public choice school of economics at the University of Virginia.

Conservative intellectuals in America make up a broad spectrum of types. A lot even pointedly insist, like Hayek, that they are not conservatives at all but classical liberals. But nonetheless they all stand definitively outside the Left-liberal consensus as Hofstadter and Hartz defined it. They are loathed by their liberal academic peers who believe that conservatives are devils incarnate. Intolerance on American campuses is intense. American Left-liberalism is exceptionally illiberal. Those who step outside the consensus are routinely excommunicated. The irony is that it is not conservatives who suffer the most from this but liberals. Liberals now only talk to liberals. They communicate in an echo chamber. This means they have no way of testing their ideas. As time passes, the quality of those ideas drops. As a consequence liberals now produce little of intellectual note.

In short, big-government liberalism has run out of ideas. As Piereson points out, what Left-liberals command now are organisations: courts, universities, centres, international bodies. In this, liberals are well ahead of conservatives. American liberalism’s long march through the institutions was successful. Take the case of foundations. Liberal foundations spend $1.2 billion annually compared with conservative foundations, which spend $100 million. Instead of ideas liberals have causes. Their aim is to get the self-righteous language of these causes embedded in law and policy. New Deal liberals looked to big government. The radical liberals of the 1960s went a step further. They changed the ends of American government. No longer, in their eyes, was government tied to the natural ends of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What mattered rather were the ostentatious imperatives of over-weening moral activism. Feminism, affirmative action, race justice, gay marriage, environmentalism and disarmament were adopted as the kitsch ends of American political society. Histrionics replaced debate. Every liberal cause was a response to a breathless crisis. Each crisis was manufactured. In place of ideas, liberalism turned to advocacy. It sequestered itself in a bubble. It turned to lobbying, rent-seeking, resource-petitioning, urging, promoting and pushing. Grievance, complaint and accusation became its default language. Its time is up.

The pendulum is swinging

If it is correct that Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election was the pivotal mid-point of the American liberal regime, then 2016 will be a realignment election. Of course, such a thing is unpredictable—and the dating may well be wrong. The long-term cyclical ebb-and-flow of American politics, though, is palpable. The regime does change.

So what suggests that a major pendulum swing is about to happen? Piereson’s argument is that the existing American consensus is broken, the polity is deeply polarised, and intense polarisation is a predictor of a regime change. The schism in the body politic is evident. The era of Orrin Hatch–Teddy Kennedy chumminess is over. President Obama is filled with contempt for his Republican opponents. The underlying regime template that previously made procedural devices like the filibuster in the American Senate work is badly torn. Establishment and insurgent forces in both political parties are at war with each other.

The shattering of consensus has strong historical precedent. It is ultimately rooted in the mid-point pivot of each regime cycle. The mid-point unites forces that eventually fall out, which triggers the end of the cycle. Jacksonian democracy united the westward movement of Americans looking to settle on free soil with pre-modern Southern plantation slavery. This contradictory combination couldn’t last. The union of Gilded Age Republican free-market individualism and progressive Protestant small-town moralism in the 1890s similarly collapsed in the 1930s, superseded by the era of the large bureaucratic organisation. Bureaucracy promised liberal security in place of market liberties. The 1970s melded New Deal industrial-era social security with post-industrial public sector bureaucracies and media moralism. That union is now coming apart.

Piereson details the most obvious symptom of this. Government spending is out of control. Nineteenth-century budgets serviced a limited nightwatchman state responsible for law and defence. The New Deal changed that. Government became responsible for social security. Post-industrial politics changed that again. Spending on regulatory, education and health bureaucracies swelled. Government spending is possible on one, even two, but not on the three functions of policing, social security and post-industrial administrations. Accordingly the historic Democrat consensus is now very brittle. Voters will say that they are in favour of defence, welfare and education—as long as these are presented to them as motherhood items. Yet a consensus for the omnibus defence-welfare-education state has disappeared. Or rather it is no longer coherent. It is not possible to fund police, pensions and low-productivity paperwork together without trillions of dollars of unsustainable debt. Something must give.

Accordingly American public opinion is sharply polarised. Liberals robotically defend big government. Yet only 24 per cent of voters identify as liberals; 38 per cent identify as conservatives. Opinion is split. The pendulum has not yet tipped. But tension is high.

Might the pendulum tip in the 2016 election? The hyper-liberal Obama was re-elected President in 2012 although with fewer votes than he received in 2008. In theory the Republican candidate Mitt Romney was well positioned to win the 2012 election. In practice he did not because of turn-out. Many Republican voters were unenthusiastic about him. Similarly the lack of voter approval of Obama in his second term is significant. It means that it is improbable that a Democrat will secure the presidency on Obama’s coat-tails. Lack of Republican enthusiasm and turn-out is unlikely to apply in 2016. This year 24 million viewers watched the first Republican primary debate on television. This was four times the viewership of the most-watched Republican debate in 2012.

Mitt Romney insisted that he was “severely conservative”. But conservative voters did not believe him. Obama calculated that voter turn-out was the key to winning the 2012 election. Romney’s problem though was that voter turn-out was not simply a matter of Silicon Valley software, helpful as that can be, but of voter motivation. He was not a re-alignment candidate. He could not answer in two sentences what lies beyond the defence-welfare-education state. Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR changed the political conventions of their day. Romney could not do so. Piereson is clear that underpinning this is the problem of political economy. The New Deal-turned-post-industrial megalith is out of steam. Its day is over. Under the surface of American society, things are changing. Voters can sense this. They also sense that most Washington insiders cannot see what is happening.

The post-industrial era is giving way to the auto-industrial era. A new wave of creative destruction is working its way through the American economy. This heralds a long-term shift that may well translate into a new American political cycle. The mid-tier of American jobs is shrinking. This has been going on since 1990, and is accelerating. White-collar jobs are disappearing, as blue-collar jobs did in the 1970s. This work is being eliminated by computers and robots. The post-New Deal big government 1970s model said, “Expand education, health and regulation to create jobs.” Creating large white-collar bureaucracies in the public and private sector expanded mid-tier employment but not productivity. Slowing productivity meant less growth and a shrinking tax base. As tax dollars dried up, deficits and debt grew along with unfunded public liabilities and fiscal pressures.

Barack Obama’s presidency was not the start of a new liberal era but arguably the end of the one that began in 1932. He got remarkably few things into law. Mainly he ruled through executive decrees, all reversible by future presidents. The items he did get into law, the Stimulus Act and Obamacare in 2009, both failed. His stimulus failed to revive the stagnant American economy. His health insurance scheme drove up insurance costs and pushed even more Americans into hospital emergency rooms to see a doctor. These were failures not just of a mediocre president but of an ailing political regime.

The problem of the American health system is not only insurance but the systemic bureaucracy that inflates total health costs. American health insurance is unreformable unless that bureaucratic regime changes. Fifty per cent of US hospital costs are tied up in paperwork, and these costs are continuously expanding. The same applies to education. Contemporary universities are the most expensive public good ever devised by human ingenuity. Seventy per cent of university spending today is on administration, including the many officious university moral bureaucracies. Moral histrionics are the flip-side of administrative vacuousness. They fuel indefatigable bureaucratic expansion. It is no accident that the golden era of American universities was the Republican-dominated age from 1890 to 1932 when administrative costs were low and intellectual activity was high. The reverse now applies.

So what might a new political consensus look like? Arguably it would strengthen the nightwatchman state. It would retain but modify social security. Above all, it would tackle the problem of liberal bureaucracy. The New Deal set in train a bureaucratic society. James Burnham saw what was coming in The Managerial Revolution (1941). The post-industrial era aggressively expanded public and private bureaucracies. The result today is that American taxpayers and consumers struggle to pay for over-priced administered goods. The industrial goods that consumers buy at Wal-Mart are cheap. Health, education and regulatory goods, whether public or private, are intolerably expensive. From green electricity to university places to health insurance, the story is the same. As mid-tier post-industrial work shrinks, these goods become ever less affordable. The American middle-class standard of living is falling. The only effective answer is to shrink the cost of public goods.

The regime of American politics is shifting. Liberalism’s outworn mix of institutional capitalism, public sector unions, big bureaucracies and insider lobbies culminated, in the Obama years, in a lethargic blend of unretired public debt, low productivity, wilting national strength, declining personal assets, increased numbers in poverty, and unaffordable public goods.

A new consensus will likely have three foundations. One is a reduction in the cost of public goods and the size of government, health and education bureaucracies. The second is higher productivity and higher growth. The third is a focus on the great American traditions of individual initiative, voluntary association and family enterprise.

Cutting bureaucracy is a key to all three. It will stimulate growth. It will reduce crusading officialdom. And it will encourage small businesses, enterprising families, sole traders and partnerships—the liveliest parts of the contemporary American economy. They represent a spark of dynamism in an age of stagnation. Over the historic long term, income from capital work has been growing while income from wages and salaries has been declining. A new consensus has to build on that. Its starting point is not liberal bureaucracy but conservative dynamism. Its energy arises from broad-based self-employment and popular entrepreneurship. In the place of a bureaucratic society the conservative future promises a world that is less administered and more energetic, with far fewer rules and many more productive purposes.