Reading Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, I came across this passage:
“Reformocons” believed that the GOP domestic agenda had been formulated in the 1970s and 1980s as a response to the crises of that era: inflation, bracket creep, stagflation, crime, welfare dependency. That agenda, the Reformocons continued, had solved these problems by lowering taxes, changing policing strategies and incarcerating criminals, and introducing work requirements into social programs.
But Republicans had not kept pace with the times. They were either ignoring or failing to respond to the mounting challenges of the early twenty-first century. Reformocons wanted to apply conservative principles to contemporary realities.
I respect and admire the Reformocons Continetti mentions — people like Ross Douthat, Ramesh Ponuru, and Yuval Levin. But it was misguided to believe that the Reagan revolution and its immediate aftermath had solved permanently the problems that roiled 1970s and early 1980s (a bit like the left-wing’s triumphalist “arc of history” cant). The traditional conservative mindset counsels against this sort of thinking.
The left never gives up. Thanks in large part to its policies, and in part to conservative complacency, inflation, stagflation, and crime are back with a vengeance. The sharply rising crime rates are particularly galling because conservatives, by supporting leftist criminal justice reform proposals, truly took their eyes off the ball in this area.
There’s nothing wrong with applying conservative principles to address new issues that have come to the fore. Indeed, that’s a good and necessary thing to do, assuming the principles applied truly are conservative.
But a main objective of conservatives should have been to conserve the hard-fought gains of Reaganism and the policies that secured them. A main object now should be to restore the gains though these or similar policies.
It’s always tempting to declare the work of one’s predecessors complete — to say, in effect, that the house is in good order and then move on to the exciting work of building another one or adding a wing. Keeping the old house in good shape is boring by comparison.
Abraham Lincoln recognized this. He revered America’s founders, but some say he was frustrated by the lack of heroic new work to be done. Some revisionists go further and claim he wanted a great crisis of the Union so he could perform that work. (I’m no scholar of Lincoln, but it seems to me that the former view of Lincoln is plausible and the latter view manifestly is not.)
The Reformocons want, in effect, to add a new wing to the traditional conservative house. Some on the right want to abandon much of the house altogether.
My understanding is that they see this as imperative in part because contemporary leftism poses a unique challenge — one that traditional conservatism is inadequate to combat and may even have contributed to. In the words of John Marini (quoted by Continetti), they “believe America is in the midst of a great crisis in terms of its economy, its chaotic civil society, its political corruption, and the inability to defend any kind of tradition — or way of life derived from that tradition — because of the transformation of its culture by the intellectual elites.”
But these words could easily have been written in the 1970s, before the Reagan revolution. On the other hand, some on the right might say that the Reagan revolution, with its emphasis on free markets and individual liberty, never dealt with the most fundamental of these ills.
That debate is best left to another post, and perhaps to a more learned poster. I’ll say only that, whatever new battles may need to be fought, conservatives must recommit to combatting the reemerging ills of the 1970s and early 1980s, and that the best means for doing so are those that worked in the 1980s and 1990s.