Where Conservatives Go From Here

“While it may seem strange to some to see people on the Right express skepticism—and even disdain—for the free market, it is increasingly common.”

There used to be a line that separated modern conservatives. On one side of it, there were the libertarian-leaning or liberal conservatives, as they would be identified in the United States and elsewhere respectively. On the other side there was the more traditionalist faction. For essentially all of the 20th century, they coexisted without much trouble operating with a broad consensus of free-market economics and various degrees of social conservatism. But now this line is turning into a rift, and the peaceful coexistence is morphing into a struggle for the future of the conservative movement, as a recent piece in Vox explains. The split recently received some increased attention because of a kind of (mostly one-sided) feud between New York Post op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari and other members of the traditionalist faction and National Review contributor David French.

The traditionalists, like Ahmari and Ross Douthat (a New York Times columnist), believe that social conservatism has been deeply hurt by, in some sense, outsourcing all of its economic policy to the libertarian leaning faction, as J.D. Vance, author of A Hillbilly Elegy, put it. The traditionalists’ primary issues are social ones like the family or religion. In that sense, they tend to be less enthusiastic about laissez-faire economics and, in fact, many of them are not at all opposed to economic populism. While all these figures are American, the broader issue is not limited to the United States, and elements of this new populist right can be seen elsewhere. Not only are they not hostile to economic populism—in many cases they consider it a viable alternative, more in line with their social traditionalism, while identifying free market capitalism as one of the key factors in the dissolution of these traditional community and family values.

This presents what I think is a rather interesting paradox. In many ways, this is nothing more than a conservative spin on the classical Marxist analysis of the interplay between the base and the superstructure. Yet, the conclusions that this faction of the conservative movement has come to are far removed from Marx’s own, and in fact, by their own admission, they do not have much in the way of concrete ideas to fundamentally change the situation that they correctly, in my opinion, identify. I believe there are several reasons for this, which I want to explore. It seems to me, however, that it comes down to the fact that conservatism (of either variety) is, by its nature, fundamentally unequipped to deal with such cases.