The American conservative movement has been a lively conversation for many years between groups with different goals, objects, and ways of approaching politics and culture. National conservatism is a new strain that aims to join this conversation.
On one level, the national conservatism group makes an important contribution by highlighting that the nation is the precondition of the gifts constitutionalism, rule-of-law, citizenship, economic prosperity, and other principles. The American nation offers us historical memory, land and borders, as well as law that has governed and settled the country.
The nation offers us something greater than our individual self-interests and desires, and requires our loyalty and devotion. These truths are reminded by the national conservatives, and it is why we must uphold the American country.
The fight against identity politics and critical race theory is where the national conservative voice has been more prominent and needed. It deserves to be commended for their work. However, you must not forget to take the rough with the smooth.
National conservatism, I believe, also means to open previously closed questions and use the federal government to free us from the prison of autonomistic individualism and fading family structures and declining manufacturing work. This can be done by instituting or revitalizing private sector labor unions, industrial policy, and manufacturing work. Single-income families can also be helped. This list could go on.
My feeling is that most of these policies would fail or produce suboptimal results if they were implemented for the reasons conservatives have argued for decades, even centuries.
In his book “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in American Since 1945,” George Nash reflects on five groups that compose postwar conservatism: libertarians, traditionalists, anticommunists, neoconservatives, and religious conservatives. These groups were formed in response to threats to American constitutionalism and emergencies. Some qualities are considered essential to the defense of America’s political order by their leaders.
What does seem to unite the first three groups is the belief that President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal is the beginning of a profound departure from American constitutionalism on dimensions of federalism, separation of powers, executive power and the bureaucratic state, economic liberty, and the belief that the state in many ways replaces civil society and business in guiding the direction of the country toward the end of economic equality.
The anticommunists were concerned that America, led by progressives, was not capable of facing the Soviet communist threat. They wrote to summon it. The neoconservatives mainly focused on the disastrous policy results of the Great Society, which prompted their shift from center-left politics towards their unique form of conservatism.
For the religious conservatives, their opposition to Roe v. Wade, secularism, and the unsettlement of the family caused by sexual liberation produced an aggressive activist style. Their fear was that loss of personal responsibility because of progressive court decisions would slowly undo the family and community and turn America into a cultural wasteland—and much of this has come to pass.
Mainly, though, the key for American conservatism has been to contest, with intellectual and political labor, this progressive Constitution—a project that for most conservatives continues to this day. Does the national conservatism’s foundational project postwar conservatism still hold true? It’s an open question, I think.
National Conservatives’ Mission
What questions are the national conservatives trying to answer?
Are the national conservatives truly a new, sixth subgroup of conservatives bringing a fresh and needed approach to undoing the progressive Constitution? Or do they seek to coopt progressive constitutional norms and revise and revive progressive policies in their pursuit of an “America First” economy?
The desire to use the federal government in order to reshore American manufacturing jobs is perhaps the best example of national conservatism right now. Is this so called industrial policy realistic given the international and domestic economic constraints?
Manufacturing jobs represent 8% of the current labor force. What would it take to increase this type of employment in a significant way? What would the cost to consumers of such policies?
What would happen to the average wage in manufacturing if America lost large numbers of manufacturing jobs? Doesn’t it decrease? This is unless the federal government raises the wage by imposing costs on all the economy to support manufacturing.
What does it require about knowledge and federal bureaucrats? Who will make these decisions? And with what information?
The national conservative approach to foreign affairs is associated with realism and maybe trends toward isolationism. What is the difference between liberal internationalism, isolationism, and second-wave Neoconservatism?
Angelo Codevilla, a leading authority on international relations, suggested a better approach. He argued that it was possible to focus on the country’s concrete interests and needs and to protect the constitutional republican regime in foreign policy. This could require a variety of statecraft methods.
Understanding the ideologies of different regimes is essential to understanding how they seek to undermine America. So that is something more than realism proper, at least as it’s defined by international relations academics.
National Loyalty
The first step is to focus on the statecraft and regime styles of other countries with reference to ours. This includes avoiding any grand moral style in foreign policy. But I don’t think retreating behind our walls is a policy option.
We will and must engage with leading a large collection of nation-states, antiauthoritarian for most of the part, that actively challenge the absolutist power regimes headed by China.
Our national future will continue to be marked by America’s being a leader in international politics, according to the vast and strategic interests we have.
Did the post-Cold War period see conservatives lose their commitment to defending the nation-state properly and well? The most crucial issues are trade and warfare.
I agree with national conservatives that it is important to cultivate national loyalty. This term is better than nationalism. This nation—its borders, law, history, memories, and battles—is what drives our loyalty to country. This loyalty is not limited to legal borders. It includes feelings of sentimental loyalty and loyalty that aren’t tied to any family, tribe, religious doctrine, or individual.
Rather, these sentiments are for a country “defined by a territory, and by the history, culture, and law that have made that territory ours,” according to the late English philosopher Roger Scruton.
It is land and the “narrative of its possession” that enables the peoples of Western nations, despite their many differences, to exist side by side with one another in peace and prosperity, with deep respect for each other’s rights.
Instead of looking to goodwill and cooperation, our focus is on attachment to the territory and its laws. These shared possessions are what make us citizens of a nation.
Reintegrating Family
Did the right’s focus on free markets, low taxes, and free trade obscure or diminish the centrality of family, the working class, the community, and nation?
I’ve touched on what I think is the core of the national conservative position, which is to put the economy in the service of a socially conservative framework, and to use the federal government to achieve that.
I don’t think this works, because it doesn’t fundamentally reckon with what has pulled family apart in America—which is the split in the former Gordian knot of marriage, children, and sexuality. These things are now free to float and have predictable results thanks to sexual liberation.
If we want to have a positive birthrate, stable marriages, better homes, and a better culture, then marriage, children, sexuality, and sexuality need to be reintegrated into our culture as one. Of course, what governments—federal, state, and local—can do here is limited.
The notion that the free market is a threat to family and community has never been justified, except for the extraordinary disruptions wrought by technological innovation. I’ll note what American political scientist Charles Murray repeatedly has said: Our strongest families are in the educated upper middle class, many of them politically progressive but with sturdy family lives.
We need something old-fashioned from this group, which is the cultural exhortation for responsibility and virtue. These upper-middle and educated citizens of the educated class need to stop being progressive and live conservatively.
The Common Good
Finally, the problem of male unemployment can’t really be attributed anymore to “China Shock,” which is the view that vast numbers of manufacturing jobs were moved to China, providing an explanation for much that has befallen low-educated, working-age men. This phenomenon has been over for close-to a decade.
Furthermore, 6 million jobs were actually created even during China Shock’s time span (roughly 1999 to 2011). However, many of our economic populists miss the moment we are in.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic we had more job seekers than unfilled jobs. This situation has only increased as our economy recovers post-COVID. Two jobs are available for every person who is unemployed. Many job openings lie in the construction, trucking, or manufacturing industries, where there is real opportunity. A large number of men choose to remain idle, with 1 out 8 prime-age males unemployed.
The real problem here is not a rigged, “neoliberal” economy, but a welfare transfer-payments system that finances laziness with negative consequences in the lives of the unemployed, creating an overall drag on the economy.
What is the common good? This perennial question of politics assumes primary rank among national conservatism’s thinkers with the assertion that a libertarian-tinged conservatism or fusionism didn’t think the common good was possible without a collectivist program behind it.
I’ll note that any discussion of common good in America must acknowledge certain developments. Progressive jurisprudence has made autonomistic liberty one of the primary purposes or ends of our Constitution’s current regime. How else can you understand court decisions about marriage, speech and sexuality?
Also, we have an administrative state that is increasingly following its will and issuing guidelines documents, letters, and rules in violation of its own formal rules-making procedures. This administrative state has been created by Congress, the one body that is supposed to be the foundation of our republic, which is supposed to make law according “to the deliberate sense of the community” following debate among representatives who are accountable to structured communities across the country.
We are now removed from the center of who we are as a republic by government by judiciary and by government by administrative order.
The question of the common good should begin where the late political philosopher Willmoore Kendall left off, and that is by developing “a political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.”
Kendall’s majoritarianism was qualified by and in tune with Madisonian constitutionalism, which recovers constitutional thinking against the dominance of the executive and judicial branches through progressive ideology. Kendall’s conservative populism stressed that the American people always have had their tribune, and that is a proper understanding of our virtuous Constitution and how it shapes political outcomes.
Editor’s note: This article is based on remarks delivered by Richard M. Reinsch II at the recent spring meeting of the Philadelphia Society.
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