RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/10/can-conservatives-still-win

Editors’ note: The following essay forms part of “The new conservative dilemma: a symposium,” a special section on the challenges facing conservatism today.

On translating popularity into policy.

Conservatives enjoy popular support on the vast majority of current issues. But that does not necessarily translate into winning presidential elections, which is of course the only sure way of enacting conservative political agendas. Yet victory is possible for conservatives, as long as they learn from the past.

Take the potpourri of current controversies over illegal immigration, rising crime, fossil-fuel independence, the economy in general, and an array of cultural concerns—from the indoctrination of the dogma of diversity, equity, and inclusion to the fact of transgendered men participating in women’s sports. In these hot-button-issue debates, the conservative side usually wins the support of the American people, at least in opinion polls.

Surveys do not translate into presidential votes.

Even in these culturally liberal times, a recent Gallup poll noted that more Americans (38 percent) voiced that they were very conservative or more conservative on social issues than at any time since 2012. In contrast, those identifying as having liberal social views dipped to just 29 percent—fewer even than those describing themselves as moderates (31 percent). Moderates and independents have become terrified of the hard-left takeover of the Democratic Party and the neo-socialist agenda that ensued, which has altered their very way of life.

Of course, surveys do not translate into presidential votes. Events can transcend current ideological controversies and disrupt political debates. They often alter national congressional and presidential elections, prompting both forced and unforced errors from once-popular conservative presidents. Recent examples of these unforeseen crises include the 2008 financial meltdown, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the covid epidemic and subsequent lockdowns, and the George Floyd–related riots. All wrecked the reputations of formerly successful administrations.

George H. W. Bush’s convincing win in 1988 (53.4 percent of the popular vote) was in a mere four years reduced to a losing 37.5 percent of the vote, in part due to the unexpected third-party candidacy of Ross Perot and an overhyped recession. George W. Bush’s popularity after September 11 reached the highest on record at 85 percent approval—only to crash to a record 22 percent low after the September 2008 financial-system meltdown and the continuing violence in Iraq. The trifecta of the covid pandemic, national lockdown, and George Floyd riots sank what likely would have been a Trump 2020 popular-vote win.

But even granting the role of scandal, foreign misadventures, and economic downturns that sink presidencies, conservative presidential candidates should have been able to react to these unexpected calamities just as well as liberals—despite the partisan nature of the mainstream media. Yet in recent times they have not. The Republican Party, remember, has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections: 1992 (37.5 percent), 1996 (40.7 percent), 2000 (47.9 percent), 2008 (45.7 percent), 2012 (47.2 percent), 2016 (46.1 percent), and 2020 (46.8 percent), after winning it in five of the prior six elections: 1968 (43.4 percent), 1972 (60.7 percent), 1980 (50.7 percent), 1984 (58.8 percent), and 1988 (53.4 percent).

In sum, Republican candidates have not garnered 51 percent of the popular vote since George H. W. Bush’s 53.4 percent 1988 victory over Michael Dukakis—engineered by the late Lee Atwater. He, remember, was severely criticized ex post facto for running a campaign that did not follow the usual Republican adherence to the Marquess of Queensberry Rules of campaigning etiquette.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/21/the-abnormal-as-the-new-normal/

For many decades now, conservatives in the United States and elsewhere have faced a dilemma. By disposition, conservatives are inclined to endorse precedent. But since the dominant culture is liberal, conservatives must make their peace with progressive policies or find themselves accused of abandoning the central conservative principle of supporting established precedent.

As James Piereson noted in these pages in 2009, “conservatives, if they wished to maintain that designation, . . . were obliged to endorse all manner of liberal reforms once they were established as part of the new status quo.”

For example, it was said that “conservatives who attacked the New Deal were not acting like conservatives because they were in effect attacking the established order—and, of course, ‘real’ conservatives would never do that.” This embarrassing gambit was applied all down the line. If you opposed a liberal or progressive policy that had become established, you were not acting in a conservative manner but in an extreme or radical manner. “Conservatives, moreover,” Piereson pointed out,

could have no program of their own or, at any rate, any program that had any reasonable chance of succeeding, because any successful appeal to the wider public would turn them into populists and, through that process, into extremists and radicals. Not surprisingly, they viewed a popular conservatism as a contradiction in terms. Conservatives, in short, could only win power and influence by betraying their principles, and could only maintain those principles by accepting their subordinate status. Thus, in the eyes of the liberal historians, conservatism could never prosper in America because, if it did, it could no longer be called conservatism.

This last formulation recalls an observation by the Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harington: “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason?/ For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.” Mutatis mutandis, conservatism doth never prosper, for if it does, none dare call it conservatism.

This surreal situation was the result of an inexorable process of one-way ratcheting. Progressive ideology makes continuous inroads, gobbling up one institution and one consensus after the next. Any occasional pushback is weathered as a temporary squall, after which the work of expanding the progressive envelope proceeds apace. Last year’s extreme outlier becomes this year’s settled opinion. To oppose that is evidence not of conservative principle but reactionary, even (as we have lately been told) insurrectionary, stubbornness.

The fate of this dialectic has depended upon a certain friction in which conservative conviction appealed to a fund of traditionalist sentiment even as it acceded to ever more extreme moral and political positions. Over the past several decades, however, this dialectic has lost its ballast as the entire apparatus of government has been colonized by an extreme progressive agenda.

In the past, conservatives had been able to regard the fundamental institutions of society—the family, the churches, the military, the corporate world—as natural allies. This is no longer the case.