Re-Imagining Conservatism in the Age of Trump

Questions for the Long Run

Editor’s note: This is a lengthy except from my conference paper presented on January 31 at Villanova University. I have omitted a very long section on legal and constitutional issues, and may offer it separately at a later time.

—Steve

In typical contrarian academic fashion, I want to begin by resisting the title and premise of this conference—“Re-Imagining Conservatism in the Age of Trump.” First, the term “re-imagining” is a distinctly post-modern term, reinforcing the progressive trait that our social structures are mostly a matter of will and applied power rather than emerging from human nature and adaptive experience. It is perhaps significant that when Russell Kirk decided to write a substantial response to Lionel Trilling’s famous curt dismissal in The Liberal Imaginationthat there was any body of conservative thought worthy of consideration, Kirk did not call it The Conservative Imagination, settling instead on The Conservative Mind.^[1]

Second, though Donald Trump’s effect on the entire world right now is overpowering and significant, it is important to take the long view beyond Trump and our “populist moment.” If the varied and often quarrelling varieties of conservatism are united by any single common proposition, it would be stated as the search for the unchanging ground of changing experience. Or to invoke Kirk again, it ought to begin with the “permanent things” as the anchor or safe harbor from which to launch.

Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk

Whatever terms is preferred, however, the principal task is to understand. As Lincoln put it, “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.” While we should aim to look beyond Trump, we do need take stock of the political conditions that have propelled him and similar “populists” to the fore around the world. There are multiple reasons, but two stand out: the incompetence of contemporary government at all levels, everywhere, and the cultural stratification perhaps best summarized stylistically by David Goodhart’s typology of “somewheres” versus “anywheres.”^[2]

Start with the first point: Anti-establishment populism is surging almost everywhere in part because of the growing incompetence of the modern state. Governments are proving themselves increasingly incompetent at basic tasks, like preserving social order, preventing crime, defending borders, or building public works projects (like California’s high-speed rail, to pick a spectacular example of incompetent excess), while thinking they have the competence to control the planet’s temperature, and make everyone equal by controlling language and setting up endless official ministries of equity.

Even when governments attempt to deal with real problems and not the pet causes of vocal elites the result is still more incompetence. In the U.S. and elsewhere efforts to reform health care systems end up with higher costs, worse service provision, and increased public unhappiness; every attempt at education reform increases spending while delivering still more deterioration in student achievement. And this doesn’t begin to consider some of the most extravagant promises of the last epoch, such as the “war on poverty” whose planners in the 1960s confidently predicted would eradicate all poverty in the U.S. within ten years, or the recent multi-billion-dollar spending to deal with the “unhoused” population, with almost no tangible results, except ever-growing budgets for the problem, and a larger homeless population. And needless to say, the government response to the Covid pandemic was not a ringing success for the reputation of government sagacity, transparency, and public trust.

Conservatives will say that this is the result of “big government,” and there is something to this. It is not a new thought. Macaulay put it simply almost 200 years ago that “It may be laid down as a universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.” But the counter-productive extravagances of current progressive policy are not necessarily or inherently ideological. We should recall that liberal governance in America was once capable of delivering results. One thinks of the major public works of the New Deal and early post-war era. The California of my childhood, for example, saw the rapid expansion of major public works projects under Governor Pat Brown, an old New Deal liberal, including vast water projects, dams, highways, public schools, universities, and basic infrastructure to accommodate a thriving private sector and fast-growing middle-class population. Nationally America saw the build out of the interstate highway system, the expansion of higher education opportunities through the GI Bill and similar efforts, substantial progress on the overdue imperatives of civil rights, and the fresh memory of a government that prosecuted a world war to complete victory in less than four years, which contrasts sharply with every other American military intervention of recent decades. It might be called the era of “can-do” liberalism (some histories refer to the orientation of this period as “growth liberalism”). The transition to what might be called today’s “can’t-do” liberalism is beyond the scope of this essay, but suffice it to say that contemporary liberalism is still very good at spending large sums of money, but not getting much for it anymore.

But beside the example of a past liberalism that worked, there are additional caveats that ought to be registered. I frequently show students the time-series public opinion survey data, beginning in the late 1950s, showing that public trust or confidence in our national government has gone steadily down, from nearly 80 percent in the late 1950s to about 15 percent today. It is perhaps significant that the only sustained reversal of this long-term trend occurred in the Reagan years, perhaps because the government promised less but delivered more, though that is contested, and in any case public confidence didn’t return anywhere close to where it had been in the 1950s, and resumed its secular decline by the early 1990s. You can observe this same decline in confidence in national governments in opinion surveys of nearly all other democracies around the world.

But keep going with these trends in public opinion, and you see that public esteem for large institutions of all kinds—public and private—has seen a similar sharp decline. In other words, it is not just large central government that has lost public esteem. This may be a secular trend against large institutions and their necessarily bureaucratic character—the kind of secular trend Winston Churchill had in mind when he penned his prescient essay “Mass Effects in Modern Life” back in 1931. Surveys do show higher public esteem for local government, and small institutions closer to where people live and work, which are more easily knowable.

The rising public distrust of large institutions of all kinds points to the other non-ideological factor in the present scene, which is best revealed by comparing Britain and Canada just now. In Britain, the Conservative Party was recently turned out of office in its worst showing in 200 years, a mere five years after its largest landslide in 100 years. The reason is simple: the Tories did a terrible job of governing. But its Labour Party successor is floundering already, with the worst public approval ratings for a new government since polling started 70 years ago. Despite its huge majority in the Commons, there is real doubt that the current government will make it to the next general election.

Meanwhile, in Canada the always formidable Liberal Party is about to get wiped out in the next election by a resurgent Conservative Party, for the same reason Britain’s Tory Party got turfed out—the Liberals have done a terrible job of governing. The fact that most of the current populist insurgencies are from the right maybe coincident with the fact that most incumbent governments are dominated by center- or center-left parties (or feckless center-right parties in a few instances), much more vulnerable to populist attack from the right than from the left. And there is good reason to be skeptical that conservatives in power can make large government more competent that the incumbent parties currently in power (see again Britain under Boris Johnson).

The circumstances in the United States differ somewhat from our European peers on account of our lack of a multi-party parliamentary culture which is less accommodating to protest voting. Our heterogeneous two-party system seems stable on the surface, with our seemingly 50-50 nation for the last 30-plus years experiencing fewer lurching changes in total vote outcomes. But below surface appearances there are significant changes afoot, to which the obvious exception of Trump’s elections to non-consecutive terms should alert us.

American political parties are always changing their character by degrees sometimes fast and sometimes slow, assembling new coalitions of voters in search of a durable majority. Political scientists and historians like to speak of “realignments,” in which one party displaces another in decisive elections and establish generation-long governing majorities. Political scientists have contested or confounded this popular theory, in part because it doesn’t focus enough on how parties can be said to realign themselves internally. America’s two parties don’t just change place with each other as majority and minority parties for long intervals; they change places on issues, too. The proverbial time traveler from as recently as 1990 would be baffled and confused at the spectacle of the Republican Party making strong claim to be the working class party, while the Democratic Party has become the party of the highly educated, and preferred by most billionaires and most of Wall Street.

Do parties change their issue positions to attract voters, or do voters change their party preferences because of issue positions the parties espouse or emphasize? In some respects the parties are rotating back to some long-ago positions, such as protectionism, limiting immigration, and foreign non-interventionism among Republicans (not to mention a quasi-agnosticism on abortion, which was the default GOP attitude before the mid-1970s), and socialism or at least aggressive regulation among some vocal and influential parts of the Democratic Party.

It is not necessary for us to await the inconclusive and usually incomprehensible researches of the regression modelers to answer this chicken-and-egg question. The changes among the intellectual and organized activist class on the right are jarring and specific. Today’s populist political conservatism is not your father’s Reaganism of the 1980s, or your grandfather’s “fusionist” conservatism of the 1950s. Donald Trump’s heterodox positions have caught on and find a significant constituency among right-of-center intellectuals and activists, which means Trump’s heterodoxy is likely to outlive his tenure in office. Trade is the most conspicuous issue: tariffs and the skepticism about, if not opposition to, liberalized trade would have been unthinkable as recently as the 1990s. Add to this a conspicuous sympathy for industrial-age labor unions (if not the New Deal itself^[3]), once anathema to conservatives let alone Republican electoral interests, and even industrial policy, which conservatives equated with socialism when Walter Mondale proposed centralized industrial policy in the 1984 election cycle. Many conservatives have embraced the (mistaken in my view) liberal narrative of the role of finance capitalism in the housing and financial crisis of 2008, and there is conspicuous contempt for GOP tax cutting orthodoxy among many of the self-styled National Conservatives.^[4]A striking example is Tucker Carlson proposing to ban the development and use of self-driving cars and trucks, because of their likely effects on job prospects for working class men. “Neoliberalsm,” an academic term that exploded into use chiefly by the left in the late 1990s as a pejorative for the political economy of the Reagan-Thatcher-Clinton-Blair years, is now employed frequently on the right, against the same targets and with the same purpose as the left. The disposition of the NatCons might be regarded as a paraphrase of Herbert Croly from the Progressive Era—exploring how to use national government power for conservative ends, in particular helping to promote traditional family formation, fixing health care and education, remediating the stagnant economic conditions of the working class, drawing back from military interventions abroad and the “entangling alliances” that have led to a large U.S. global footprint, and above all repudiating identity politics. This represents a departure from the old dominant purpose of shrinking centralized government, if not explicitly sidelining libertarianism and free market principles.

Beyond these specific policy ideas is the more fundamental thought that we have entered a “post-liberal” era. This concept has at least two parts, one of which is harmonious with older conservative views, and one of which is less so. For more than a century at least, conservative thinkers have criticized the liberal individualism that arose from the Enlightenment and modern social contract theory. While conservatives agreed with John Locke’s defense of property rights and constitutional government based on consent, there was concern that radical individualism combined with unregulated markets would undermine tradition, community, and ultimately individual happiness itself. Leo Strauss famously wrote that Lockean liberalism sanctified hedonism, and would result in a “joyless quest for joy,” while Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, and Roger Scruton—to name only a few others— arrived at similar conclusions, harkening to Edmund Burke’s warning: “The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.” (Keep in mind that Burke once referred to Locke’s Second Treatise as “the worst book ever written.”)

The revival of these old conservative doubts about the liberal tradition manifests itself in a second way: American conservatism has usually been considered a part of the enlightenment liberal tradition,^[5] but these dormant peripheral challenges to that standard view are now gaining a new and wider hearing. Suddenly John Locke is no longer undisputed as “America’s philosopher.”^[6] Starting again on the surface of things this new turn against Lockean liberalism by figures such as Patrick Deneen and Yoram Hazony appears to be a revival of an old argument, between those who see America from its founding as a “creedal” or “propositional” nation (with that creed being overwhelmingly Lockean), and those who see the American founding as more of an amalgam of religion, our British heritage, and other strands that run back to antiquity. Margaret Thatcher perhaps unwittingly came down on one side of this difference with her short formulation that describes the debate succinctly: “Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.” The view of America as a “creedal” nation rooted in political philosophy finds its most formidable contemporary champion in Harry Jaffa and his allies, while the more historical orientation finds several different and sometimes incompatible versions such as Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, Barry Shain, Forrest McDonald, or Gordon Wood and the “civic republican revival” school.

The new dimension to this revived skepticism about the liberal tradition and the place of conservatism in that tradition is a rising contempt for the American founding—whether understood as the product of history or creed—among the younger and most spirited cohort of populist (or “alt-right”) conservatives attracted to Trump. This contempt comes with a dose of steroids—almost literally true since a fascination with body-building has attained ideological status among young conservative males today. The attitude, about which I hear numerous accounts from conservative faculty, is that the current state of America, politically dominated by an administrative state, economically dominated by finance and tech oligarchs, and culturally corrupted by identity politics, proves that the American founding and our Constitution was insufficiently robust to prevent this long-term trend of decay and corruption. “The conservative movement is dead” is a popular slogan, usually prefaced by the question, “what has the conservative movement conserved?” (Another popular slogan intended as a rebuke to existing conservatism is “What time is it?”) America as currently constituted is “unreformable,” and proposals to restore the principles of the American founding are futile.^[7] Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton are no longer viewed as authoritative or admirable political models.

This generational turning represents a major challenge for any American conservatism that wishes to defend or draw upon the best of the American tradition and American political thought. And it is highly disorienting. It used to be that skepticism of the American founding or anti-American attitudes were found among young people who had marinated in Howard Zinn or, more recently, the 1619 Project. To find a similar disposition taking root among young conservatives calls into question the depth of loyalty to and patriotism for the American regime, and is therefore an ominous sign of how frayed America’s prospects have become. . .

To this sorry state of affairs younger dissident conservatives have embraced a “burn it all down” attitude, and it is hard to blame them. There is, notably, a thriving subculture of young people who generate a wry smile with the finding that many of them think “every day” about the Roman empire, but this is in part because of the supposed parallel between an ultimately collapsing Roman republic and the expected eventual collapse of the American republic more than a celebration of Roman martial virtues.

As a practical matter the recent establishment of several very substantial centers and programs for civic education on some leading universities gives some cause for optimism that a restoration may be possible. It is likely no exaggeration to say that the average high school graduate of a century ago had a better grasp of democratic principles than the average college graduate today, so the task is immense. Institutional cultures, like ocean going supertankers, are difficult to turn except on long time scales.

This may seem an overstatement, or that focusing on the growing pessimism, verging on nihilism, among the rising generation of young conservatives is out of proportion. Established liberalism in the 1960s made the same mistake about the student new left of that decade, and have arguably never fully recovered from that underestimation. Conservatives today should not repeat this mistake.

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^[1] To be sure, Kirk wanted to title his magnum opus The Conservatives’ Rout, but the publisher, Henry Regnery, thought Mind was better than Rout, and in any case Kirk preferred to think of conservatism as a “persuasion” rather than as a fully rational or schematic body of doctrine. And to confuse the matter further, Kirk titled his memoirs, his final book published shortly after his passing in 1994, The Sword of Imagination. But not re-imagination.

^[2] David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics.

^[3] Steven F. Hayward, “Grand Theft FDR: Is It Time for a Conservative New Deal?”, forthcoming TBA.

^[4] Keep in mind the salience of political journalist Robert Novak’s axiom that “God put the Republican Party on this earth for one purpose: to cut taxes. Other than that, Republicans aren’t worth very much.”

^[5] Consider, for example, Hayek’s famous essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” wherein he admits that the term “conservative” makes sense in America because American conservatives, unlike European conservatives, are defending the liberal tradition.

^[6] See in particular Claire Rydell Arcenas, America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Arcenas’s thesis is that Locke as “America’s philosopher” is ahistorical and inauthentic—a mid-20^th century contrivance in service of Cold War liberalism—“a construct that was unknown to eighteenth-century Americans.”

^[7] As I was finishing this essay, I spotted Peter Berkowitz reflecting on aspects of this problem in his latest weekly column for RealClearPolitics, “American Conservatives Should Focus on Reform and Restoration.” Sample: “New Right intellectuals mock – for, as they like to say, not knowing what time it is – Americans who cling to the path of reform. . . Some regimes are impervious to reform because of their advanced decay and are ill-suited to restoration because the social and political pathologies from which they suffer stem from inherent defects in their fundamental principles and basic institutions. . . they do not come right out and say so but indulge in extravagant rhetoric and inflammatory innuendo that excites, especially among young conservatives, revolutionary rage and stimulates ambitions for regime change.” (See: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/01/12/american_conservatives_should_focus_reform_restoration_152187.html.)