Conservatism and the Problem With Power

An increasingly prominent opinion on the right is that conservatism’s liaison with libertarianism is dead. And while not everyone is ready to bid riddance to fusionism, many of the right’s rising stars are fully willing to reassess conservatism’s previous commitments to small government and unlimited personal freedom. Those notions, these figures argue, ignored the truth that government has a cultural duties, and the consequences of that failure are seen now in the dilapidated state of American culture. If the old consensus on government power was wrong, then the way conservatives can win the culture war is by beginning to wield that power with an eye towards conservative ends.

There is much truth in this position, and its benefits are plain to see. The differences between the old right and the new right (old and new being relative terms) can be summarized by comparing the policies of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, whose taking the fight to the left is well-documented, and those of former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson. Hutchinson, who in 2021 vetoed legislation that sought to ban gender reassignment surgery for minors, justified his position by falling back on vaguely libertarian platitudes about the proper role of government. That he immediately became the darling of left-wing media outlets shows the futility of Hutchinson’s approach, while the left’s view of DeSantis as something approaching Satan is also revealing, as was his crushing reelection last November. Putative conservatives who flinch at using legitimate government authority to defend civilization and protect the vulnerable from its degradation are not worthy of the label, while those who recognize that prudence and virtue sometimes require an alteration to policy are conservatives in a fundamental sense.

Still, it is possible to overestimate the utility of government power, and to forget that suspicion of power is a foundational tenet of conservative political theory. While the temptation to overreact to the depravity of our age (and to scorn the cowardice of those who prefer the relative comfort of hackneyed sloganeering) is understandable, this temptation has to be rejected by authentic conservatives. This is even more true of the suggestion that politics can be reduced to a winner take all battle between inveterate enemies. What is needed is a correction to libertarianism’s malign influence on conservative politics, not an over-correction. But for too many disillusioned conservatives, the current tendency is precisely towards over-correction, which merely substitutes leftist influences for libertarian ones, leaving the resulting approach no more obviously conservative than the previous one was.

But what considerations, if not libertarian, should conservatives undertake to determine whether an exercise of government power is appropriate? I can think of four (which does not, to be clear, mean that there are only four).

First, is an exercise of power prudent? Politics has famously been described as “the art of the possible,” a phrase which recognizes that in a world of limitation, trade-offs are almost always necessary. Now, prudence requires wisdom (which is one reason why so many of the people who today advocate the use of political power should never be trusted with it), because the wise man is able to see whether a goal is attainable - or at least how much of it is attainable - and if the methods proposed are likely to succeed. And on this score, the utility of political power seems limited.

To be sure, political power on cultural matters does have its place, especially when culture is being led astray by a radical elite claiming to speak for the people. George Kennan was right in his observation that “what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular governments is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities - politicians, commentators and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent.” The views on sex and sexuality, for example, that prevail in teacher’s unions and corporate boardrooms are not shared by the average American, though in time citizens may come to adopt them if government does not step in and prevent the elite’s ideological indoctrination. In this instance, political power is a necessary counterbalance to other powerful entities. Indeed, the use of government authority in such circumstances is the positive responsibility of representative government, a fact which Ron DeSantis understands and Asa Hutchinson doesn’t.

But beyond this, it’s not clear that culture is as responsive to political action as the power advocates wish it was, and the law of unintended consequences still prevails. As a result, not every potential use of government in the culture war meets the requirements of prudence.

Second, does an exercise of power tend to diversify or centralize the sources of power in society? We should remember Robert Nisbet’s statement that “The state becomes powerful not by virtue of what it takes from the individual but by virtue of what it takes from the spiritual and social associations which compete with it for men's devotion.” One of conservatism’s most consistent arguments against all forms of liberalism is that they have, intentionally or not, divested all sources of authority except the state of power, and have consequently weakened society and made the people within it vulnerable. The conservative view of power must take this problem into account. Again, this does not mean that political power is useless, but it does mean that any conservative exercise of it should have the ultimate re-empowering of the family, the church, and lower levels of government as one of its primary objectives.

Third, and connected to this, does an exercise of power have the peaceable sharing of a common society, rather than just political victory, as its aim? The bitter disputes of the modern world notwithstanding, seeing politics as a battle of friends to be rewarded versus enemies to be vanquished is not the traditional way that conservatives have viewed the matter. Edmund Burke, the closest thing conservatism has to a founder, wrote that “All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights that we may enjoy others; and we choose rather to be happy citizens than subtle disputants.” From Burke’s day to ours, this sentiment has been part and parcel of conservative politics. Roger Scruton, one of Burke’s best modern interpreters, criticized the kind of man who would “set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise and debate, and against the legal and moral norms that give a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary person.” Such a man “will set about destroying the enemy, whom he will conceive in collective terms…” Scruton had in mind the kind of resentful figure the modern left succeeds in creating, though his description’s applicability to some figures on the right is suggestive of the non-conservative origins of their views.

It must be admitted, of course, that even in compromise there must be moderation. To compromise on first principles for the sake of getting along, as would seem to be the approach of conservatism’s old guard, would be as unconservative as attempting to found politics on enmity. And we certainly are confronted today with the problem of widely varying first principles among the various factions seeking for control of government. But such a situation is not likely to be improved by one group merely acquiring power and then attempting to enforce their point of view. What prevents compromise and agreement today is not the lack of power, but the lack of shared values, which makes a shared culture impossible, and which casts the possibility of a shared government into doubt. Politics is not entirely powerless to address this state of affairs, but political power alone cannot remedy it.

Fourth, and finally, does an exercise of power display a proper attitude towards political power? It would be wrong to think of all conservative suspicion of power as originating in libertarianism. Russell Kirk, who wrote stinging criticisms of libertarians, argued that “Intelligent conservatives, from Burke and [John] Adams to our time, have looked upon power as a most dangerous thing; for though unchecked power means complete freedom for the powerful man, it means abject servitude for his neighbors; and where power is triumphant, justice cannot abide…” Conservatives, Kirk wrote, have “sought to hedge about power with strong restrictions, and to divide authority among among many groups and institutions, that concentrated power may reside nowhere,” because he “knows the proclivity of human nature toward sin; and he knows that the form of sin to which the stronger natures are prone is the lust after power.” For these reasons, conservatives believe “that wherever these walls and barriers to restrain power are cleared away…power proceeds to make short work of all the elaborate structure of private and public rights which have been developed, through compromise and experience, in the course of history.”

Any suggestion that the acquisition and use of political power poses no dangers to speak of, much less that political power should be sought and used for its own sake, is not conservative. Not only is the preservation of our historic rights and freedoms a conservative endeavor, but those rights and freedoms developed out of the constellation of influences that are unique to Western Civilization. They are, in other words, a product of the culture that conservatives wish to preserve. It is certainly true that classical liberalism, libertarianism, and modern leftism have combined to corrupt the meaning of freedom. But it is no less true that discarding traditional safeguards against power would be to surrender a key aspect of conservative thought to the left. Rights and freedoms, properly defined, will always be worth defending.

Those who argue that conservatives should reject fusionism, that to foster renewal they must be willing to use government power in ways different from recent generations, are surely right. In so arguing, they are merely articulating an older view of conservative governance. But conservatives must guard against expecting too much from political power, or using it immoderately. Government exists to protect and enable civil society. With the right policy, it can do a great deal more good than libertarians give it credit for. But political power is not a panacea for our social ills, and the temptation to view politics as a path to salvation risks blazing a trail to yet another ideological dead end.