Stop Blaming Reagan | The American Spectator

As a longtime professor of government, advisor to presidential candidates, a Republican nominee for political office, and a conservative generally, the number one question I get these days from ordinary citizens is: Why are right-of-center groups all fighting with one another, and how should they engage the other side?

My first response is, this is nothing new. My first major campaign role was for a conservative activist who became president — Ronald Reagan, who challenged a sitting moderate Republican president, Gerald Ford. And Republican factions have been fighting ever since.

Since that time, the locus of the fight has been moving left, with every Republican nominee for president since Reagan coming from the more centrist or neoconservative moderate wings. That, of course, came to a halt with the repeated elections of Donald Trump, who came from a populist faction, sometimes named the New Right, to distinguish itself from both Reagan Conservatives and Neoconservative Centrists. New Right populists especially separate themselves from Reagan’s libertarian/traditionalist synthesis in order to emphasize how they differ from traditionalist conservatives, who they claim got us into the present calamity.

But blaming today’s problems on Ronald Reagan, as many New Rightists do, does not make sense. This old academic agrees that Republicans and many conservative organizations became part of the problem. But for Reagan himself, his prosperity lasted well beyond his two terms so that a following Democratic president conceded that the “era of big government was over.” This lasted 40 years, with Reagan-type conservative opposition remaining through this period. But it was not primarily by politicians but by popular media leaders like Rush Limbaugh and Robert Novak, in think tanks and activist organizations, and even by some intellectuals.

If a scapegoat is necessary, it is the presidents Bush. First, George H.W., who in accepting his presidential nomination, promised a government “more compassionate” than his predecessor’s. Then George W. Bush, who responded to the Great Recession with a plan called “Market Stabilization” and years of almost zero interest rates, rather than market capitalism. George W. also adopted a new entitlement program, waged losing wars, and domestic policies that led to Barack Obama, all of which led to the institutionalization of today’s failures.

But what can be done about the divisions today? Concerned about the reality of right-of-center fracturing back in 1964, Reagan-faction conservatives founded a Philadelphia Society of academics and political leaders to hold discussions debating the factional challenges of the day. The hope was to form a principled Right-of-Center conservative societal synthesis.

In that spirit, a panel at its most recent meeting discussed: “Does the ‘New Right’ Know Something that Conservatives Just Don’t Get?” New Atlantic Institute’s John O’Sullivan made the New Right case that pragmatism might be what traditional philosophical conservatives today “don’t get.” And the more libertarian American Institute for Economic Research’s Julia Cartwright responded by explaining why too much pragmatism from the New Right leads to abandoning fundamental Constitutional principles.

Christopher DeMuth made the formal case for a new right. He was one of the founding members of the rightist National Conservatism Conference, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute, and a fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He set its basic principles as: 1) Opposition to a politics that was abstract, idealistic, and virtue-signaling rather than related to actual culture and real circumstances. 2) Government is part of that reality, both national and local governments. These powers simply cannot be rejected outright, nor should a public-private distinction be made. Government and social order simply must be part of the equation. 3) Good order in the U.S. has so eroded in recent times that an active defense is required for its recovery. And, in that pursuit, practical governing cannot be neutral on culture.

DeMuth seemed so reasonable to the Reagan-conservative audience, it appeared that he was softening his position to keep the peace. As the debate’s chair, I did not think so. He actually made a case that required a serious fusionist conservative response, which he did not fully receive.

And that brings us back to the sometimes-nasty arguments on the Right today. If any right-of-center coalition is to be successful, factions must at least talk to each other. And they are not doing enough of it. As Law & Liberty editor John G. Grove explained, there are some New Rightists who have rejected the old conservatism but who also “defend constitutionalism, decentralization, and limits.” These New Rightists “have embraced radical ideas and strategies” simply “because they have seen left-wing radicalism run rampant” and correctly “blame the old right in the early aughts” for “not properly resisting this radicalism with much gusto.”

Traditional conservatives should be able to accept that latter criticism and still encourage productive political debate with those New Rightists who are still constitutionalists.

Both new and old Right should also be aware of something interesting happening on the Left, with so-called “abundance liberalism.” In their book, Abundance, self-defined longtime liberals Ezra Klein and Derek Thomson present a surprisingly positive view of economic freedom. Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein goes even further to distinguish between today’s centralizing progressivism and favors the use of the term liberalism to reflect an important distinction.

Sunstein conceded that: “Once upon a time, I regarded [F.A.] Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and the Austrians — and also Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and the libertarians — with respect and admiration, but in important ways as adversaries. They were not (I thought) on my team. I no longer think that. I think that they are on my team.” He elaborated further, “With respect to authoritarianism and tyranny, and the power of the state, of course they were right; but still, those battles seemed old. But those battles never were old.”

Sunstein does not quite spell out what he means by his greater freedom support in this On Classical Liberalism article, and, as Northwestern University’s John McGinnis noted, Sunstein’s broader On Liberalism “sometimes presents an overly romanticized version of liberalism.” But the freedom presented by the thinkers Sunstein cited concerning the power of government does represent the possibility for a productive discussion on shared ground.

What seems important for both Right and moderate Left thinking today is that the foundations of Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism are finally, after a century of dominance in the U.S., coming apart at many different seams.

Serious discussion among those who recognize that progressivism has failed in all of its forms, from liberal to nationalist and beyond, must start where progressivism began, with the idea that the old separation of powers Constitution is either right or wrong. That is a debate traditional conservatives should encourage and even lead, rather than drawing narrow boundary lines to decide which institutional faction should be allowed to share in any resulting success.

READ MORE from Donald Devine:

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Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles, and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.