The American Right has spent years warning about the dangers of concentrated government power. Republican lawmakers and pundits have rightly decried Democrats’ race toward socialism this election cycle. Yet, which of these heralds will turn the party’s scrutiny toward its own embrace of that power?
Growing acceptance of tariffs, deficit spending, and top-down mandates impacting education and families shows post-liberal conservatives are embracing centralized authority — provided it is wielded in the service of “conservative” ends. The Commerce Department’s recent disclosure of six more planned corporate equity stakes, on top of dozens already in the federal portfolio, is only the latest example of Republican-led government policy conservatives would traditionally condemn as creeping socialism.
This is more than political inconsistency. It reflects a deeper disagreement about what conservatism is supposed to conserve.
Classical liberalism is increasingly at odds with the post-liberal ideology dominating the New Right, not because its critiques of contemporary American life are always wrong, but because its proposed remedy threatens the very institutions that have historically enabled American liberty.
Traditional conservatism understands concentrated state power as a necessary evil. For civil society to flourish, government must protect life, liberty, property, religious freedom, and equal rights under law while being constrained by constitutional limits, federalism, and the thick network of voluntary associations that Alexis de Tocqueville observed in early America.
Townships, churches, families, civic organizations, and voluntary associations stood between the individual and the centralized state. They cultivated habits of responsible self-government and built institutions through which Americans could solve problems rather than simply demand solutions from government.
Tocqueville understood something that is easy to forget: liberty depends on more than the limits placed on government. It depends on citizens who have learned how to govern themselves and institutions that allow them to do so.
That is precisely where this post-liberal project presents a problem. Its thinkers have identified genuine weaknesses in contemporary American society: economic stagnation, cultural fragmentation, rootlessness, declining family and community ties, and the inability of a purely procedural liberalism to satisfy our deepest human needs. But the solutions post-liberal conservatives reach for to address these concerns come straight from the progressive playbook.
Post-liberal conservatives seem to be setting the tone for the Republican policy agenda. At least for the moment, this means that both parties accept the premise that the state may use its coercive power to impose a comprehensive vision of the good life. In turn, government has become more polarized. Every cultural dispute is a battle for control. Losing elections no longer means losing a policy argument. It means living under the opposing side’s conception of the good life — and waiting for the next election to reverse it.
This is not ordered liberty. It is a permanent struggle over who gets to wield the state.
Post-liberal conservatives argue that the stakes are too high to leave these matters to markets, civil society, or constitutional proceduralism. But this misunderstands the classical-liberal case that the state cannot produce all that makes a society good.
Those things emerge from families, churches, schools, neighborhoods, and voluntary associations. They are taught by example and sustained through relationships. They cannot simply be legislated into existence.
A government can mandate a curriculum; it cannot make a child love learning. It can subsidize marriage; it cannot make a husband faithful or a wife devoted. It can regulate corporations and universities; it cannot make them virtuous. It can promote a particular conception of national culture; it cannot manufacture the habits of character, trust, and responsibility on which a free society depends. When it attempts these things, it destroys their natural incubators.
Conservatives should not become liberals in reverse by defending the administrative state when it advances conservative goals while condemning it when progressives control it. Nor does this mean that government has no legitimate role in defending the moral order. There is a genuine difference between protecting the conditions of liberty and using government to engineer a particular conception of virtue.
That distinction matters.
TRUMP AND XI BRING COMPETING AGENDAS TO SUPERPOWER VISIT
The classical liberal alternative is less dramatic and therefore perhaps less politically satisfying. It is to rebuild the civic institutions between the individual and the state. It is to restore federalism and constitutional limits. It is to recognize that a free people must possess the habits of self-government necessary to sustain freedom.
The temptation to seize the machinery of government may be understandable. But conservatives who use the state to accomplish what Tocqueville believed civil society must accomplish are ultimately paying lip service to Tocqueville while abandoning his most important lesson.
Greg Schaller is director of the Centennial Institute, the conservative think tank of Colorado Christian University.