The American Conservative Movement Has Failed

Assuming the republic survives, we will have to pick up the pieces. But first we must understand who and what brought us here.

Photo by Pau Casals on Unsplash

To judge from the recent lamentations of a handful of “principled” conservatives, and reports on some “quiet conversations” in the halls of Congress, it appears to have caught many Republicans by surprise that the man and the movement that attempted a coup against America’s democratic government and then ran a textbook fascist campaign is now governing (if that is the right word) in a fascistic manner.

Of course, one wishes to welcome pro-democracy allies however and whenever they appear. But the suggestion that the corruption, chaos, and brutality coming out of this administration is just the work of one demented individual is misleading. We are witnessing a generational catastrophe. The American conservative movement has failed; it has failed spectacularly. It has failed as the direct result of its internal contradictions and beliefs and its weakness in confronting its most radical elements. Someday, assuming the republic survives, we will have to pick up the pieces. But it is important first to understand how we got to this point and who and what brought us here.

Conservatism in America has always had plenty of internal diversity, and, of course, some conservative leaders of the past have, at times, acted honorably and in the public interest. But, on balance, the movement has always returned to a few core convictions. One is that the government is always the problem. Ronald Reagan famously quipped that “the nine scariest words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Republican political activist and anti-tax fanatic Grover Norquist said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” This conviction was always a cover for those who did not want any representatives of the people to interfere with their private power and privileges. They didn’t actually want “small government”; they wanted a government that answered to their interests. The extremes of deregulation they champion do not lead to a free market; they lead to crime, kleptocracy, and misrule.

Another consistent theme of conservatism has been that “traditional values” are under dire threat and must be restored. This is the rallying cry of the Christian nationalist and New Right movements that, in recent years, seized control of the Republican Party. Exactly which values are to be rescued has always been vague (“life” or the death penalty? Hardline religion or just some commitment to “Western civilization”? “Family values” or economic policies that cause families to struggle?), as has the identity of the alleged malefactors (liberals, feminists, the “woke,” public schools, communists, HR departments, people of color, Jews, gays?). In the end, the vagueness serves mainly to camouflage the one constant, which is that America needs to “go back” to the kind of order in which white Christian males ruled and, supposedly, everybody signed up for the same code of belief. This plan has always been a delusion; there will never be a way to unify the American population under reactionary forms of “approved” religion, and those targeted for discrimination will never cease to challenge unjust treatment.

American conservatism has also held the conviction that the alternative—liberalism—represents an existential threat to the nation. The passionate loathing of the (perceived) other side has unified a movement that might otherwise have divided in countless ways. As a consequence, those conservatives wringing their hands over the outrages and atrocities of the present Republican administration have found themselves fighting for their team even as it set itself on a course for the destruction of democracy.

Although the conservative movement has often been said to have many ideas, its practical impact on American governance over the past five decades has come down to two simple tricks: tax cuts and (so-called) deregulation. The tax cuts have overwhelmingly benefited the rich and amount to an upward redistribution of wealth. The “deregulation” has meant mostly the protection of oligopolies and captured markets that happen to be of special interest to the political donor base. The result has been a defunding and degradation of public goods, including healthcare, housing, and rights for the workforce; the hollowing out of institutions; and a massive increase in inequality—not just in income but in quality of life and lifespan. Conservatism has been great for the lucky few and a terrible bargain for the rest of the population.

The conservative agenda is often said to have wide appeal among the American public, which is routinely described as innately conservative. But this is illusory. When they are explained to Americans in clear terms, conservative policies are routinely rejected. The movement has therefore relied increasingly on propaganda and disinformation to stay in power (or, in enough power to obstruct). Conservative mouthpieces have done a terrific job of framing the politics of resentment and grievance that dominate our age as a reaction to the excesses of liberalism, or what is now called “wokeism.” But that resentment is the natural outcome of the stressful, unaffordable lives that conservatism has created; it has simply been redirected at a more convenient target.

Donald Trump is the fruit of this movement. Lest it be forgotten, his political career took off in the context of the Tea Party — the product of conservative money and the politics of re-directed resentment. He was embraced and promoted by the Christian nationalist movement, which consistently aligns with hard right social and economic policies. Most of his own policy achievements, such as they are, are representative of almost everything that the movement has worked toward: even greater tax cuts for the rich, evisceration of the government’s ability to act in the public interest, and a long string of performative culture-war “victories” that make parts of the population feel good by enacting punishments on other parts.

To be sure, Trump is different from earlier conservative leaders in that he is willing to push the contradictions of conservatism to their natural destination, blowing past the guardrails. Previous conservative leaders talked a good game about government being the root of all evil. But they kept enough reasonable government in place to avoid some of the worst excesses of corruption, cronyism, and rabid exploitation of monopolistic practices. With his smash-and-grab operation, Trump has made sure that the economic consequences of conservatism will be too visible to ignore. Government of, by, and for the few has always meant picking the pockets of the many; Trump just does it out in the open.

Previous conservative leaders understood that dehumanizing “others”—immigrants, minorities, the poor—were vote-getting strategies (however disgraceful), not action plans. Earlier conservative presidents took a more pragmatic (if at times misguided) approach to foreign policy, and made some effort to disguise the economic interests behind America’s overseas adventures (anyone remember how Iraq was supposedly about building democracy?). Trump flails, and his flailing always seems to be in a direction that benefits Russian President Vladimir Putin—and himself. Trump not only announces it’s about the oil and minerals, but he also tells us he will take the money and put it in an offshore account that he controls. Previous conservatives at least pretended to tell the truth when they retailed fables about criminal-coddling liberals. Trump and his allies and surrogates lie just to get away with lies. He wants us to believe it has always been all lies all the way down, because he knows what the movement has always implicitly assumed: Truth itself is the enemy of unearned privilege.

Notwithstanding the lonely cries of the small and powerless sect of “principled conservatives,” it seems that most Republicans fail to grasp that Trump is the end state of this project. Those who believe they can “reclaim true conservatism” simply by repudiating Trump for his sociopathy and vulgarity are either deluding themselves or deceiving the rest of us. Given its assumptions and internal dynamics, this is what much of the conservative movement has been working toward for more than half a century. To suggest otherwise is to say that conservatives didn’t know what they were doing.

While Trump takes a sledgehammer to America’s international standing, its economy, and its democratic institutions, there are those who express shock and dismay and look around for someone else to blame. Who would have guessed that those who attempted a coup against the U.S. government would now behave so badly? Who would have thought that a movement that once bristled at Brown v. Board of Education and has dedicated itself to restoring the patriarchy of the past would turn out to be flat-out racist, bigoted, and oppressive? Who would have thought that a cohort so relentlessly focused on the destruction of government (or “the administrative state,” as the tie-wearing brigade of conservative nihilists call it) would actually attempt to destroy government?

Understanding this story is more than just playing a blame game. It’s about how we chart a new future for America. The world order is swiftly shifting, and none of us can know what America will look like a month or a year or a decade from now. But one day the conservative movement, in its present form, will either collapse from within or be kicked out of power. If we are going to stop this cycle of conservative nihilism, we need to undertake major reform of America’s political, economic, and civic institutions — a new kind of Reconstruction — so that this never happens again. The time to start planning is now.