Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Michael Brendan Dougherty, the nicest and best dressed paleocon out there, comes to the realization that conservatism probably can’t sustain people getting rich.

I’d like someone out there to list for me the conservative cultural accomplishments that can be credited to electing Thatcher and Reagan. I can’t think of any. In fact, we may soon find more conservatives arguing that the type of market reforms initiated by these regimes did much to erode traditional norms and expectations. I doubt many on the right will defend the managerial economies of the 60s and 70s. But did the reforms of the 80s do anything to enhance the economic independence of the average family? Or did these reforms just enhance Wall Street profits while at the same time discouraged what we now call “family formation”? Is integrating more families into the investor class a solution?

Now, conservatism is two things. The “conservation” of a certain traditional social structure, and the opposition to liberalism. It’s this dual nature, combined with the GOP’s cohabitation with business interests, that lead to these not every conservative structural changes in the 80s. As Marx pointed out, economic dynamism is hardly a conservative or reactionary force, it’s instead a liberalizing, liberating progressive one (in general). Why then did conservatives support an agenda based on dynamism?

It’s because, somewhat contradictorily, as people get richer, in general, government gets bigger. The expansion of government under Johnsnon in the 60s was closely connected with the liberalization and expansion of deliberative and substantive freedom for blacks, as well as the advances under civil rights law for women. Conservatives, of course, were not all too happy about Great Society liberalism, and sought to overturn the “managerial” state, or at least hold it back, under Reagan. Expanded government spending and power in the service of liberal social ideas is any good conservative’s worse nightmare, so it had to be attacked by any “conservative” administration. But after Reagan, the democrats (at least for the 90s) absorbed the conservative critique of massive, managerial government but kept on keeping on with liberalizing social norms, making no efforts to stop it. And so, we have the Bush administration, too far removed from the horrors 70s style paleoliberalism to have the same energy as the Reaganites and too enthralled with preventative war to follow up on the reformist undercurrents of his first campaign.

Conservatives are coming around that all the Reagan and Bush presidencies have given them is lower taxes and greater familial insecurity and instability. Though the Sam’s Club Republicans are promising, as long as big business and reflexively anti government Norquist types remain a large, influential constituency in the GOP, its back to the dark ages for “conservatives.”