A Plan for Reassembling the American Right

There is a natural unity between national conservatives and classical liberals, and a new political fusionism will expand liberty to solve major problems national conservatives rightly identify.

While the political Left has engaged for several years in a politically damaging slide to the radical left and the destruction of its slightly less radical “moderates,” the rise of Donald Trump has foregrounded a long-brewing conflict on the political right between Reagan-style conservatives and the populist New Right, with many self-professed conservatives going so far as to join the Dark Side and become Democrats.

Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash

Although Trump’s political success has kept the two factions from fracturing entirely, the tensions are powerful. “National conservatives” argue for varying amounts of government intervention to reverse some clearly deleterious macroeconomic and cultural changes of recent decades, whereas classical liberals warn against these proposals as potentially massive increases in government power.

The conflict, in my view, is based on a fundamental misconception on each side. National conservatives put excessive faith in government, and classical-liberal conservatives are reluctant to address problems generally (though incorrectly) attributed to market freedom. The central problem is that the social and economic ills the national conservatives worry about were overwhelmingly caused or greatly exacerbated by government, but those problems are real, and to deny or downplay them is either self-deception or gaslighting.

The obvious way to reach common ground, then, is for both factions to recognize that the U.S. government and a variety of co-conspirators and shock troops have torqued the nation so far away from true freedom and market economics that it is not clear what a free America would look like, and that the solution is an honest, fundamental review of the current state of individual liberty, freedom of association, property rights, and economic freedom, followed by concerted actions to restore those rights. That will necessarily take the form of a great decrease in the size and reach of government, which classical-liberal conservatives want, while redressing the ills the national conservatives have observed.

Texas A&M University professor James R. Rogers sees a way to reach this highly desirable consensus, writing at Law & Liberty:

The policy argument on the American political right these days between postliberals with (some) populists, on the one hand, and Reaganite and market-oriented fusionist conservatives, on the other hand, is, in essence, an argument over externalities. More particularly, the argument is over what’s included in our set of policy-relevant costs and benefits when we consider policy problems and solutions. The controversy circles around postliberals proposing the inclusion of a set of non-pecuniary costs when identifying policy problems and when considering policy change. Recognizing this means there is enough common ground for constructive debate over policy rather than each side arguing past the other.

As Rogers notes, many of the ills of which national conservatives complain are externalities, and classical-liberal conservatives acknowledge externalities as a reality that requires redress when they do harm to others:

“Externalities” are costs or benefits imposed on (or received by) people not party to a market exchange or action. The action or exchange of one set of people imposes costs (or confers benefits) on others who are “external” to a transaction. A canonical example of a negative externality is an increased probability of lung disease as a result of breathing auto emissions from other people’s cars. An example of a positive externality is those spared from contracting an infectious disease because other people got vaccinated and, as a result, did not transmit the infection.

The above are textbook examples of externalities. While rightwing postliberals (and left-wing anti-neoliberals) generally eschew conventional economic jargon, many of their criticisms of markets or market outcomes really only argue for the recognition, and remediation, of un- or underrecognized negative externalities. Postliberal arguments can be accommodated by existing market theory, albeit by that part of market theory that considers market failure.

Rogers makes a highly important point in observing that the national conservatives are greatly concerned about types of externalities that classical-liberal conservatives may often dismiss as being insufficiently quantifiable:

While these may seem like novel arguments, careful market theorists have long recognized that the idea of “cost” is broader than often conceived. For example, Harold Demsetz observed in his seminal 1967 article in the American Economic Review, “Toward a Theory of Property Rights,” that externalities can be both “pecuniary as well as nonpecuniary. No harmful or beneficial effect is external to the world.”

The fact that something is difficult to quantify does not make it any less real or its effects inconsequential, Rogers notes:

Much of the debate today between postliberals and traditional market-oriented Reagan conservatives is, implicitly, an argument over what counts as an externality; that is, what interests we recognize as belonging to people and therefore what counts as a harm when taken away.

Postliberals and (some) populists, for example, advance interests of social solidarity and the dignity of manufacturing work as elements lost with the globalization of US trade. While these may be novel assertions in the context of the sorts of values policymakers (and academics) have typically considered in recent generations, their novelty does not really present a problem for bringing those values within the traditional theoretical structure of policy debates regarding externalities.

… While there are issues of identification and measurement, that interests such as solidarity and dignity are “nonpecuniary” does not rule out recognition of their loss as externalities.

The recognition that the national conservatives have identified real ills and that classical-liberal conservatives are the proven champions of the solution—individual liberty and market freedom—identifies the grounds for a renewed fusion of interests on the political right. “The point, however, is that postliberals and traditional conservatives can have a policy debate on grounds that are recognizable in market theory,” Rogers writes.

Rogers has it right. Classical liberals, conservatives, and postliberals could rally around a full discussion of the various externalities imposed by private activities and government action alike, with all such concerns being accepted as fair game for investigation and redress via classical-liberal means. Let’s have that debate, without no more invective and dismissal of one another’s concerns.