Forthcoming Ideological Battle on the Right?
The American Enterprise Institute’s Michael R. Strain has written a thought-provoking article placing in print what is on the mind of every right-of-center intellectual today. He titled it: The Battle for the Right’s Post-Trump Future Has Begun. And it deserves a respectful but critical analysis to understand the forthcoming ideological battle.
Strain’s general game-plan is well thought through.
What are conservatives to do? First, recognize that those of us who prioritize individual liberty, limited government, free markets, personal responsibility, economic opportunity, America’s “credal identity” and U.S. global leadership are a faction on the political right, and not the whole of the right. Second, conservatives must push the broader political right to enforce ideological borders against extremism. Third, conservatives must resist the ascendant effort to redefine American identity as blood-and-soil nationalism. To be clear, the broad political right should be a big tent featuring substantial internal disagreement.
His tent would include different economic and social conservative factions, and, he adds, the tent should even “defend the rights of the racists, bigots, sexists and antisemites to hold and express their appalling and dangerous views.” The tent should “engage with” them but “not enter into a coalition with them.” That would violate the credal “inherent dignity of each and every human being,” which Strain then traces back to the broad rights stated in the Declaration of Independence. “Conservatives have long viewed the centrality of the American creed as one of the most important things we seek to conserve.”
Yet in building his future conservative coalition, Strain argues that Progressives have also “ground their views in the aspirations of the Declaration,” as self-evident truths, although they do differ “over which parts of the broad American creed to emphasize” But, still, those common values — presumably on the nature of equality — should be “where the debate over the conservative future must begin,” welcoming progressives in as part of the discussion.
The common adversary of both is said to be the “ascendant movement on the political right” that “now seeks to push that creed aside by defining American identity through race and lineage” rather than rights. Strain identifies that common enemy with Vice President JD Vance, who teaches that “America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” This, Strain argues, may be “defensible in a vacuum,” but those beliefs can be interpreted as prejudicial against minorities and immigrants, and so such beliefs must be placed beyond the pale.
So, Strain’s plan is to bring pro-Declaration progressives into a new post-Trump conservative coalition and exclude that long-time Right faction that has operated under titles such as populism and nationalism.
So, Strain’s plan is to bring pro-Declaration progressives into a new post-Trump conservative coalition and exclude that long-time Right faction that has operated under titles such as populism and nationalism. And the fact is that that faction has won the contest among the wider Right for the Republican party presidential nomination now three times in a row. And its faction leader, Donald Trump, has three more years to set policy as president. But what has that faction produced that would require creating a coalition with Left Progressives? (RELATED: Has President Trump Ended or Extended the Conservative Era?)
While there is much that one can disagree with in a number of Trump’s policies, the balance of them has actually leaned toward the traditional Right. Economically, he has radically turned U.S. energy policy from obstructive to actually acting as a free market institution with its enormous DOE deregulation. The Environmental Protection Agency, too, has implemented similar degrees of reform, drawing back from decades of excessive and harmful climate regulation. (RELATED: EPA Retires Its Crystal Ball, Lets America Exhale (Carbon Included))
On social policy, the Department of Education just issued a regulation titled “Concrete Steps to Return Education to the States and Empower Parents in Their Child’s Education,” which an opponent explained as “an executive order to dismantle the Department.” At the Department of Labor, excessive wage and hour penalties have decreased by 94 percent. Workplace health and safety penalties have dropped 45 percent. Government Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion and related “woke” regulations have been reduced substantially in almost every domestic department, with all government agencies averaging 10 government regulations cut for every new one added.
On the other hand, Trump’s trade policy has not met market ideals or even Supreme Court standards. Even so, the pre-court results have turned out significantly better than the initially extraordinarily high tariff rates, thanks to cabinet and conservative pressure. Net tariffs worldwide have probably been lowered, and Trump has even suggested new tariffs could replace the income tax. Immigration policy, too, has been less than ideal, with local deportation enforcement often excessive, but illegal border crossings have been reduced basically to zero, a position conservatives long encouraged. (RELATED: Tariffs at Work: Historic Gains Amid Media Skepticism)
In my personnel management area of specialization, Trump has actually essentially returned to the political control of the bureaucracy management model implemented by Ronald Reagan. There is more to disagree with in areas like what is now called “lawfare,” which clearly has been politicized. But given how lawfare was first so abused by the Department of Justice, the intelligence bureaucracies, and media against Trump in his first term and under President Joe Biden, one cannot be too surprised by tit-for-tat.
Foreign and defense policy has been complex, but the president promised he would “clean house” to reform the bureaucratized military and procurement processes, which were confirmed in massively reducing the schedule for weapons deliveries, and in Iran and Venezuela, although it is too early to evaluate Iran. Greenland first appeared as overreach, but turned out to be merely a classical Trump “Art of the Deal” first bid. (RELATED: From Outrage to Agreement: Trump’s Greenland Gambit)
There has been much discussion on the Right that Trump has upset the constitutional balance between the executive branch and the Supreme Court and Congress. But, in fact, conservatives have long held that the last half-century has been dominated by an active judiciary rather than the president or Congress. Balancing power for the executive branch was overdue. True, Trump clearly has not been able to challenge the most serious internal threats to the nation — like entitlements and uncontrollable debt, the dangers of a fiat money system, or too much remaining governmental centralization. Nor has he been able to fix a social order in decline. But these fundamental reforms require a legislative, judicial, and popular support that does not exist.
Of course, for many or most critics, it is not really Trump’s policies. It is his personal attributes. But after a year of his policymaking, centrist Joseph Epstein says it is time to face the fact that Trump is not pure evil but merely a “slick and aggressive salesman.” And when one accepts that reality, he says, it “clears away, at least for me, any remaining aspects of Trump derangement syndrome.”
So, does the Trump record require excluding MAGA populism from the Right coalition — a factional difference Strain himself concedes is defensible, if only in a vacuum? And his alternative coalition would require accepting a Progressivism where equality becomes the end rather than the means to good government. Indeed, that Progressive position has long been the unifier for the whole Left coalition and is more likely to subsume any newly added Right faction rather than vice versa.
Strain’s basic argument that no single political faction can rule by itself is sound. But as the Civitas Institute’s Richard Reinsch argued, “What the conservative movement could never afford is a sectarian impulse that insists on rigid orthodoxy and isolates the different groups. Such a spirit would be divisive, bigoted, exclusivist, and dismissive.” Instead, a successful modern conservative coalition must be open to decent “broad church” MAGA supporters.
As important as the Declaration is in the conservative hierarchy of principles, it is not sufficient. As Ohio Northern University’s Pettit College of Law professor Bruce P. Frohnen noted in a recent Law&Liberty review of a book with a similar singular dependence upon the Declaration, conservatism requires more than the high values of the Declaration. It must also include synthesizing those ideals with the real-world social reality that is the U.S. Constitution.
Old-time Ronald Reagan Center-Right fusionist-conservativism has long argued that both Declaration ideals and a Constitutional separation-of-powers institutionalized freedom were both essential. Indeed, this earliest vision of modern conservatism under Reagan has been the only really successful Right political coalition in modern times. Any future political success will require all the old-Right factions to be on board, including those factions that are not our own.
READ MORE from Donald Devine:
Has President Trump Ended or Extended the Conservative Era?
Bad Presidents or Bad Government?
Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles, and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.
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