We Have A Country

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We Have A Country

Toward a Civic Conservatism (and away from Trump)

by Pete Spiliakos

http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/06/we-have-a-country

It was never about small government. That is the bitter lesson many conservatives have learned, as they have seen Republican-leaning voters opt for a candidate who promises mass deportations and protectionism. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that, when conservatives were winning, they were winning less on the basis of small government than on the basis of effective government—limited government that enforced civic obligations. If conservatives want to crawl out of the present disaster, they should look to welfare reform—their last major policy win—and Lawrence Mead’s understanding of a politics of civic obligation.

Writers such as Ross Douthat and Michael Brendan Dougherty have written about the phenomenon of working-class Trump supporters. These people’s lives aren’t a total mess as of yet, but they see social disintegration below them and indifferent elites above them. As families disintegrate, addiction levels rise, and the disability rolls increase, what has this class been offered by the major parties?

The Democrats offer increased government benefits (and implicitly the higher taxes to pay for them), the destruction of energy-sector jobs, and a vast immigration increase in precisely those sectors of the labor market where workers and families are most troubled. The Republicans have offered what Henry Olsen has called a policy of giving the boss lower taxes and more leverage over workers in the hopes that the factory will close a few years later—or maybe the factory will close now, anyway.

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Trumpism has been called nationalistic and xenophobic, and there is some truth to that. But Trump is filling the vacuum left by the lack of a civic conservatism. The Republican Party can choose the path of civic conservatism, combining effective and responsible government with lower taxes and spending (lower, that is, than the Democrats might prefer). The alternative is the party’s present condition: a civil war between those who use small-government rhetoric to push a narrow business class agenda and a white-identity-politics–tinged nationalism that is led by charlatans, even as it recognizes the need for effective government.

This should not be a tough choice. But if the recent past is any indication, we can expect that the Republicans will choose poorly.

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