The Economics and Political Science Room
The Era of Limited Government Is Over presents an interesting argument that conservatism is moving away from defending community associations with limited government and toward using centralizing state power to promote conservative values.
First, the past conservatism:
And then the new conservatism:Since conservatism became a movement in the 1950s, the American right has understood itself to be defending not just the written American Constitution but an unwritten one as well — a kind of cultural or social constitution, deeply rooted in our national history, that the checks and balances of our official political system help sustain.
Under this constitution America has three branches of government but a great diversity of power centers — religious and corporate, familial and philanthropic. Under this constitution the most important institutions in our national life aren’t political ones; they’re the institutions of civil society, which have flourished — or so the conservative argument goes — precisely because government has been kept within limits, and the state hasn’t co-opted or crushed all its rivals for influence and power.
Thus when conservatives preach about the virtues of “limited government,” it isn’t just Herbert Hoover’s rugged individual that they imagine themselves defending. They envision a larger communitarian panoply — civic associations, religious denominations, charities and universities and private schools — which needs protection against the jealousy of a centralizing state. And they tend to assume that keeping the American corporation embedded in this communitarian system is a better way to balance productivity and innovation and public-spiritedness than just trying to regulate and micromanage businesses into good behavior.
Many of the best conservative books of the last decade, from “Coming Apart” by Charles Murray to “The Fractured Republic” by Yuval Levin, describe an emerging America that doesn’t much resemble the Tocquevillian family-church-community landscape familiar from past conservative descriptions of American exceptionalism. The latest example is “Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse” by Tim Carney, a mix of sociology and shoe-leather reporting that convincingly situates the rise of Trump in the context of Middle America’s communitarian collapse.
But while accounts like Carney’s acknowledge the role of economic forces — globalization, trade, deindustrialization — in the dissolution of family and community, they also tend to insist, contra liberals and our new socialist vanguard (and also contra Trump), that this cultural collapse isn’t primarily driven by economic policy decisions and can’t be reversed by public policies or programs. Instead they tend to suggest that state interventions often just replace community instead of strengthening it and cast any communitarian revival as a necessarily local project, in which government can play at best a supporting, don’t-make-matters-worse kind of role.
These kind of arguments are still in continuity, then, with the basic conservative posture of the last few generations. But there are also increasingly partisans of rupture on the right, a loose group of state-power conservatives who hint that if the Tocquevillian dream is dying then the cause of “limited government” is increasingly irrelevant — which in turn would require conservatives to become more comfortable using the power of the state, and more engaged in centralized policymaking that has specific social and cultural ends in mind.
But this is really nothing new. From its inception in the 1950s, the new conservatives were divided between those like William Buckley who believed in keeping the government limited and promoting virtue by example within various community associations, versus those like Russell Kirk who believed the centralized state should be used to promote virtue. The history of conservatism is one of shifts between these two views.
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Originally Posted by The Xl
