An Important Debate for American "Conservatives"

Everybody (well, no, not everybody, but a lot of the people who make noise) has been talking about Tucker Carlsons's infamous "soliloquy." Since he is not someone I am in the habit of watching or listening to, I only gradually became aware of what Carlson had said, as more and more outraged "conservatives" came forward to defend the sanctity of their beloved "free market" and "personal responsibility" (the latter applying more often than not  mainly to the poor and middle classes but not to the high-roller recipients of federal bailouts in 2008 and other forms of government largesse over the years).

Actually, however, the contretemps Carlson initiated is important. It highlights the longstanding cleavage in American "conservatism" that has finally borne fruit in the Trump phenomenon. For decades now, "conservatives" have advocated and the Republican party has attempted to implement policies that have supported and reinforced the privileged status of those in society's upper reaches, usually at the expense of those below them in the social and economic hierarchy. Since such a program is hardly ever likely to appeal to any normal electoral majority, its proponents have had to appeal precisely to many voters who are definitely downscale in the social and economic hierarchy, appealing to them on "cultural" issues, appeals often tied to racial and religious resentments. As David Frum famously wrote: "The Republican party was built on a coalition of the nation's biggest winners from globalization and its biggest losers. the winners wrote the policy; the losers provided the votes" (Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, Harper Collins, 2018, p. 36) .

In important respects, the Trump victory could be interpreted as the "losers" overthrowing the "winners." In Frum's picturesque portrayal: "While the party elite coalesced upon more immigration, less secure health coverage, and one more Bush, the rank and file were frantically signalling: less immigration, better health coverage, and no more Bushes."

As the Republican party has been forced to rebrand itself as a Trumpist populist party, some "conservative" spokesmen have inevitably paralleled the process on the idea side. Hence Tucker Carlson's "soliloquy." What was significant about Carlson's speech - and what has provoked so much "conservative" angst - was his expansion of his cultural critique into an explicitly economic one, somewhere "conservatives" and Republicans more commonly resist going.. A Ross Douthat write in Sunday's NY Times, Carlson went "from a critique of liberal cosmopolitanism into a critique of libertarianism, from a lament for the decline of the family to an argument that this decline can be laid at the feet of consumer capitalism as well as social liberalism."

Now such arguments are not new, of course, not new at all. They have been a staple of old-fashioned, "romantic," traditionalist, "Tory," and often Christian conservatism, which typically laments these developments. And they have been inherent as well in Marxist analysis, which generally applauded such developments as sweeping away older restraints on the way to ultimate human liberation. What is unusual is hearing such arguments in the context of American market-oriented "conservatism" (which is, of course, an American adaptation of what is more commonly called classical liberalism). Seeing a certain type of American "conservative" arguing as Carlson has - or being forced to respond to him - is refreshing. 

If nothing else, this argument is voicing and translating to a more serious venue some of the concerns that lie at the heart of contemporary "populism" - both in the U.S. and elsewhere. If those concerns are ever to be adequately addressed, and if the movement that has voiced them is ever to be a positive force, as opposed to becoming mainly a vehicle for racism and bigotry, then more "conservative" thinkers need to preoccupy themselves with those concerns. And the existing "establishment" of "conservative" thinkers needs, therefore, to recognize that the 1980s are long gone and start re-thinking its inherited agenda.  

Just as the American Left has had to come to terms with the fact that there are actual problems that public policy and government action cannot completely resolve, likewise the existing "establishment" of "conservative" thinkers needs to recognize at long last that public policy and government action are absolutely necessary to address successfully American society's social, economic, political, cultural, and moral wounds - and will be, if anything more necessary in the aftermath of the Trump era.