The Conservative Identity Crisis

Waiting for the conservative base is the campaign-trail version of Waiting for Godot. Confusing plot, but audiences still find it gripping. For months we’ve heard that Mitt Romney, a former governor of liberal Massachusetts, could not win the Republican presidential nomination because the conservative base would rise up to oppose him. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania promised to deliver the CB after the Iowa caucuses. Instead he lost three primaries in a row. Newt Gingrich’s thunderous win in South Carolina seemed to herald the CB’s arrival. Nope. Now Romney has survived another existential crisis by sweeping the Florida primary on Jan. 31. And we’re still waiting.

Like Samuel Beckett’s audiences, we begin to wonder if we’re waiting for something that doesn’t exist.

According to polls, conservatism is the most popular political philosophy in the U.S.: 2 in every 5 Americans say they embrace it, according to Gallup. That’s twice the number who say they are liberal. Yet the image of a party’s “base” suggests a solid foundation, and the Republican race has revealed some deep cracks in the conservative movement–dividing antiabortion social conservatives and live-and-let-live libertarians, separating the isolationist heirs of Robert Taft from the nation-building heirs of George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda,” culling the pragmatists at the Chamber of Commerce from the ideologues of talk radio and distinguishing country-club insiders from Tea Party outsiders.

Some of these cracks are almost as old as the movement itself. Modern conservatism was born in the early 1950s after the extraordinary 20-year reign of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his chosen successor, Harry Truman. Conservative economics had been blamed for causing the Great Depression, and conservative isolationism for inviting World War II. Amid the rubble of a discredited ideology, a young writer named Russell Kirk unearthed a rich philosophical tradition going back to British writer and politician Edmund Burke; Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind was a sensation, influencing a generation that included William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Kirk’s was never the only brand of conservatism, but his ideas were like a magnet pulling others toward them, and steadily, a coalition of the right was formed. Kirk emphasized the religious roots of society, which spoke to the rising Christian conservatism of the 1970s. He counseled slow and orderly change rather than radical or utopian schemes; this made his movement a welcoming home for Americans unnerved by the social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s. He held that individual property is the root of freedom, which rang a bell with the free-market economists of postwar London and Chicago, disciples of Austrian Ludwig von Mises. And he cherished traditional values and local institutions rather than shiny new ideas from central headquarters, which made his philosophy a comfortable place for the inevitable backlash against Washington and the New Deal.

If that sounds tidy, it’s because it’s all compressed into one paragraph. In the long run, some of these alliances became quite messy. For example, the individualism nurtured by the Austrian school of free-market economics was a prickly match for Kirk’s ideal of ordered, traditional authority. Even the conservative hero Thomas Jefferson, with his capacious mind, had trouble reconciling “Don’t tread on me” with “Thy will be done.” By 1963, the free-market individualist Willmoore Kendall had made a “declaration of war” on Kirk’s movement with his own book, The Conservative Affirmation.

This division endures in the determined fragments of the GOP devoted to the devout Santorum on the one hand and renegade individualist Ron Paul of Texas on the other. Yet for some 40 years, a common enemy welded the strands of conservatism together: Soviet communism. The imperial ambitions of Lenin’s descendants posed a mortal threat to Kirk’s philosophy and Kendall’s too. Communism was radical rather than gradual, central rather than local, utopian rather than humble, atheistic rather than religious, classless rather than ordered, totalitarian rather than free. The longer the Soviet Empire went on, the stronger the conservative movement grew, until ultimately Ronald Reagan became the only President since Roosevelt to not only be re-elected but also pass the office to his chosen successor–a rare feat of political strength in American history.

Since the end of the Cold War, conservatism hasn’t enjoyed such unified power. The strands are still out there and going strong, but no one has been able to tie them all together. Despite serving two terms, George W. Bush was by one measure the weakest twice-elected President in history: he alone never managed to win at least 60% of the electoral vote. By the end of his presidency in 2009, the awkward alliances within the conservative movement were badly broken.

Today we have a figure like Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, whose budget proposal galvanized the right in 2011, extolling author Ayn Rand–whose views were, according to Kirk, “as alien to real American conservatism as is communism.”

The split is just as wide over foreign policy. During the early 1970s, the rise of the antiwar movement inside the Democratic Party drove a band of so-called neoconservative hawks into the Republican coalition. As former New Dealers, the neocons never shared the small-government orthodoxy of Kirk or Kendall.

Their influence was enormous during the Bush years. They funneled their leftover anticommunist energies into the war on terrorism, never blinking at Big Government expansions like No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D. By 2006, when the Democrats recaptured Congress, neocon was a dirty word not just on the left but on much of the right as well.

Even the splinters in the conservative base are splintering. According to some polls, young Evangelical Christians are drifting away from the social agenda of their parents, especially over issues like same-sex marriage.

So it should be no surprise that the Republican field has been a mosh pit of fracturing and forming and refracturing alliances, hoisting one candidate after another to the top of the polls. Republicans have been yearning for someone to catalyze the old coalition. Romney appeals to a shared desire for victory, Gingrich to a shared set of grievances, Paul to one brand of ideological purity and Santorum to another.

This same yearning helps account for the rosy nostalgia for Reagan that has been the hallmark of this campaign. He was the high-water mark of the coalition’s power; now he is the face of lost unity. Not even the Gipper, though, has sufficient star power to fill the conservative big tent today. Young libertarians are increasingly immune to his charms. Listen to the influential writer Nick Gillespie as he opens up on Reagan–an “FDR Democrat,” he says, who “saved entitlements for the old and the relatively wealthy by jacking up payroll taxes on the young and relatively poor.”

So the CB has been onstage all along. While the world has waited impatiently for the grand arrival of a god throwing thunderbolts, sweeping in from stage right to settle matters in the final act, the fragments of the old movement have been busy battling among themselves. The question of 2012 is whether they will resolve their feuds long enough to beat Barack Obama in November. That’s the plot of another drama.