GOP Still Party Of Ideas

In the New York Times yesterday, occasionally conservative columnist David Brooks observes that while the GOP’s candidates largely peddled “conventional ideas” the pundit class still wrestles with big, innovative ones. His view challenges the now popular perception that American conservatism is once again intellectually depleted, running on the fumes of antiquarian angst and clinging to pre-modern prejudice.

But Brooks is certainly right that American conservatism, both before and after the election, has been and is still roiled by internecine dispute over foundational ideas. He correctly identifies many of the warring parties, though not always the most profoundly important ones: Paleoconservatives, Neoconservatives, Burkean Revivalists, Lower-Middle Reformists, and Soft Libertarians. He clings too conventionally to easily recognizable popular journalists so misses some of the brighter luminaries who labor in the bowels of some of the most fascinating philosophical controversies and some of the more important movements.

For example, there is the Post-Modern Conservatism exemplified by Peter Lawler, Ralph Hancock, Dan Mahoney and other fellow travelers who attempt to elucidate the contours of conservatism in light of the peculiar existential trials posed by the American brand of modernity. Overlapping with this crowd are the Neo-Thomists like Robby George, who often defend the positions characteristic of conservative evangelicals but in the language of rational persuasion and not merely revelatory authority. Then there is the French “Late Modern” crowd that includes philosophical heavyweights like Pierre Manent, Chantal Delsol, and Phillipe Beneton, who often, among other things, defend the inescapability of politics in a world sometimes fecklessly oriented towards utopian post-political arrangements. If Brooks had mentioned Pope Benedict XVI, maybe the most erudite conservative philosopher alive, I would have been delighted but floored. Then there is the Straussian crowd in the United States whose byzantine conjugations demand I merely refer the reader to a book length synopsis of them. Construct your own Venn diagrams.

This brief list is only a cursory gesture in the direction of a fuller account, far too complex and rich to be exhaustively presented in a short opinion piece. The point is that, contrary to the now constant train of obituaries written for conservative thought, it remains alive and lively, often pugnaciously strained by its own philosophical civil wars, and also fortified by them. If anything, part of the problem the GOP has is forwarding a platform of ideas that univocally satisfies its multiple and diverse parts.

Liberals, by way of contrast, seem ideologically ossified, both too stridently confident in themselves and thoughtlessly incapable of articulating their own animating foundations to make grand ideas a centerpiece of their efforts. Liberalism today eerily resembles liberalism of a generation ago: racial identity politics and thoughtless multiculturalism, public policy driven by stale technocratic sociology, reflexive redistributive economics promoted in the tendentious language of class warfare, unwieldy labor regulation and union patronage, trade protectionism, soft and a-political internationalism, are all bequeathed to this generation of liberals from their predecessors like dusty intellectual heirlooms.

And so Obama had one big strategic idea, which was to avoid talking about big ideas. Instead, he fanned the flames of class resentment, fomented fear over the dissipation of society shorn of unreformed entitlements, and scurrilously attacked Romney as a rapacious robber baron, who will fire you and then steal your grandmother’s pills. He started an unprovoked culture war about misogynistic conservative conquistadors who will lay waste to the rights of women and the hopes of Latinos. Liberalism today is reflexively enthralled by statism, despite its coming repudiation by the demographic future anyone can see coming, and the multi-headed patronage this commitment necessarily entails. There is not much room left for grand philosophical controversy.

Three final observations. First, it is amazing that American conservatism, or any conservatism, is as philosophically fecund ground as it is. Historically, conservative political thought has often been uneasy about the place of grand and abstruse ideas since they potentially discredit the natural and traditional bonds of attachment, the pre-theoretical ligatures that truly hold us together. But even our most persuasive Burkean conservatives, like Yuval Levin, perpetually confront and discuss mammoth ideas, even when they mean to promote a robust wariness about their proper role in any flourishing community.One captivating story embedded within modernity, unsuitable for this op-ed, is how the Left’s preoccupation with the impersonal forces of History,and the counterbalancing turn in conservatism to nature, remade the Left/Right divide as a split between ideology and philosophy, respectively. This is not merely an accommodation conservatism has made of modernity but also of American principles, which are themselves extraordinarily philosophical for the undergirding foundations of a real and not merely imagined republic.

Second, the GOP is simply lousy at transforming these ideas into politically palatable messages. There are plenty of excellent wonkish experts out there who can weave a winning campaign out of the yarn of complex policy. Over at the Postmodern Conservative blog, Pete Spiliakos is one of them. Neither our current analysts (like Karl Rove) or our deepest philosophers (like Harvey Mansfield) are going to get this done for us. The Left is simply better at campaigning because they have the rigorous excellence that comes from ceaseless exercise; they never stop campaigning, or now understand that success at governing presupposes the endless campaign. In fact, their entire political outlook, the fracturing of the electorate into balkanized parts, presupposes always campaigning to each part, promising and endlessly pandering to them. The GOP will never beat them at this game nor should they want to. They need to construct a way to candidly present the best of their ideas in persuasive and comprehensible communication.

Finally, the Left has a powerful advantage in the monopoly they enjoy over the media and the the nation’s educational system. A long ball approach aimed at generational success requires supporting alternative educational and journalistic avenues for reaching the public not already solipsistically swaddled by the warm comfort of Fox News. Right now, the GOP hasn’t even proven all that adept at preaching to their own choir, let alone reaching the unconverted masses.

The GOP is still the party of ideas but it cannot simply wait for the emergence of some great philosopher king to rescue them from their electoral woes. After all, to lose ourselves in deep intellectual reverie at the expense of neglecting political reality, however pleasurable that might be, is profoundly un-conservative. It is not enough for our ideas to be fascinating or deep, they must be winning as well. At the very least, this is the deference political philosophy must pay to political practice.

Category: Featured, Philosophical Asides