The Next Conservative Movement

from The Gray Area:

There are certain assertions in this article that I do not agree with, but, overall, this concept makes a lot of sense. It has the vision that an effective GOP should have been promoting over the past 50 years. Instead, the GOP has fumbled away every opportunity, except 1980, which happened in spite of the GOP. We now may be faced with a last resort.

After Trump’s demagoguery, Republicans can revitalize their party by offering bottom-up solutions suited to the diverse, dynamic society America has become.

The American right is in crisis. This year’s presidential race, however it turns out, has revealed deep fissures in the Republican coalition. A third to a half of Republican voters in state after state have given their backing to Donald Trump, a divisive demagogue whose case for himself has essentially nothing to do with conservatism. The rest of the party has been left baffled—wondering what has happened to the Republicans and where American politics might be headed.

To answer those questions, we need to see that they are not one and the same. The Trump phenomenon can help us to grasp what has happened but not what is coming next. Mr. Trump marks not the beginning of a new phase in American politics but the end of an old one—the exhaustion of a mid-20th-century model of national politics that can no longer meet the needs of 21st-century America. Mr. Trump disgorges an angry aggregation of failures and complaints, but he offers no solutions and no way forward.

Understanding the roots and appeal of his message can help us to understand how our politics has changed in recent decades.

[Mr. Trump] taps into a powerful, widely shared sense that the U.S. has lost ground—that we have fallen far and fast from a peak that many can still remember. Both Democrats and Republicans often appeal to such a sense of loss. For Democrats, the peak came in the 1960s, when cultural liberalization seemed to coexist with a highly regulated economy. For Republicans, it came in the 1980s, when economic liberalization was accompanied by a resurgence of national pride and a renewed emphasis on family values. By now, American politics is largely organized around these related modes of nostalgia, and the two parties address voters as if it were always 1965 or 1981.

In its less cartoonish forms, today’s nostalgia is understandable. The America that our exhausted, wistful politics so misses, the nation as it first emerged from the Great Depression and World War II and evolved from there, was (at least for its white citizens) exceptionally unified and cohesive.

But almost immediately after the war, that consolidated nation began a long process of unwinding and fragmenting. During the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the culture liberalized, the economy was deregulated to keep up with rising competitors, and an exceptional midcentury elite consensus in politics gave way to renewed divisions. In time, this fracturing of consensus grew from diffusion into polarization—of political views, economic opportunities, incomes, family patterns and ways of life. We have grown less conformist but more fragmented, more diverse but less unified, more dynamic but less secure.

All this has meant many gains for America: in national prosperity, personal liberty, cultural diversity, racial inclusion, technological innovation and more meaningful options and choices in every realm of life. But it has also meant a loss of faith in institutions, a loss of social order and structure, a loss of cultural cohesion, a loss of security and stability for many workers, and a loss of political and moral consensus. Those losses have piled up in ways that to some Americans now often seem to overwhelm the gains and have made 21st-century American politics distinctly backward-looking and morose.

Conservatives and liberals stress different facets of these changes. Liberals treasure the social liberation and growing cultural diversity of the past half-century but lament the economic dislocation, the loss of social solidarity and the rise in inequality. Conservatives celebrate the economic liberalization and dynamism but lament the social instability, moral disorder, cultural breakdown and weakening of fundamental institutions and traditions. Part of Mr. Trump’s appeal has been that he basically laments it all—and thus unites the anxieties of those who see no real upside for themselves in the evolution of modern America.

The greatest challenges that America now confronts are the logical conclusions of the path of individualism and fracture, dissolution and liberation that we have traveled since the middle of the last century. And the greatest resources at our disposal for tackling those challenges are the products of our having traveled this path too. We face the problems of a fractured republic, and the solutions we pursue will need to call upon the strengths of a decentralized, diffuse, diverse, dynamic nation.

For all the GOP’s troubles, it will actually be easier for conservatives than for liberals to see their way toward such a forward-looking politics. For one thing, conservatives can much more clearly see the bankruptcy of a nostalgic politics. Many liberals still cling complacently to the anachronism of social democracy as their vision of the future.

Some traditional conservative priorities—especially an emphasis on economic growth—remain vital to any such forward-looking politics. But that can only be a start. Beyond growth, a modernized conservative policy agenda would seek to use the very diversity and fragmentation of 21st-century America to meet its challenges.

In health care, for instance, … the new conservative approach would liberate insurers and providers to offer many different models of coverage and care, empower consumers to choose (including through financial assistance to those unable to afford insurance) and let their choices matter—making the system more efficient from the bottom up.

Or consider primary and secondary education, … the new conservative approach would instead direct its resources to let parents make choices for their children and allow the education system to take shape around their priorities and preferences.

… a bottom-up approach has long been championed by conservatives in some arenas, albeit with limited success against an entrenched progressive welfare state. A welfare system that could better address the problems of those left behind by the global economy or mired in inter-generational poverty wouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all bureaucratic regime. Rather, it would empower local problem-solvers to mix resources, advice, experience and moral leadership in a continuing process of bottom-up experimentation.

The work of government more broadly—especially at the state and local levels, where most government happens—should abandon the model of the centralized, technocratic industrial economy in favor of today’s decentralized, consumer-driven, postindustrial economy, using public resources to encourage constructive experimentation with public services rather than to impose tired dogmas from above.

That is how a traditionalist moral minority can thrive in a diverse America—by offering itself not as a path back to an old consensus that no longer exists but as an attractive, vibrant alternative to the demoralizing chaos of the permissive society.

In the crisis of this election year, the right has been brought face-to-face with the bankruptcy of its version of nostalgic politics. The conservatism that follows Mr. Trump will need to confront the genuine public concerns into which he has tapped, about trade, downward social mobility and diminished opportunity. But conservatives will need to offer an approach far more constructive than Mr. Trump’s vulgar and abusive demagoguery.

The right’s decentralizing mind-set, disposition toward community and innate skepticism of technocratic government will serve them well—and leave them far better equipped to address America’s modern problems than liberals who have yet to confront the exhaustion of their own political vision.

For the right, Mr. Trump marks the disastrous end of an era. But beyond the crisis that he embodies beckons the prospect of a revitalized conservatism and a revitalized America.

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