MAGA Didn’t Push Policy Rightward

By John Hood

RALEIGH — One of the most-compelling parts of Stephanie Slade’s invaluable new book Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right is her discussion of J.D. Vance’s political transformation.

In his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, published in 2016, Vance reflected on the experience of his family and others in his Ohio hometown and dismissed the common explanation that their plight was the result of heartless companies, clueless politicians, and disastrous free-trade agreements. “I once held this opinion myself,” he wrote, “and I very desperately wanted to believe it during my youth.” But experience changed his mind. Self-destructive decisions and financial irresponsibility were the real problems, he concluded in the book, and weren’t “created by governments or corporations.”

Once he entered electoral politics, however, J.D. Vance changed his tune. Personal responsibility was out. Protectionist economics and conspiracy theories were in.

Slade’s magisterial work describes the creation of modern American conservatism during the 20th century and the philosophical insight at its core — that our republic cannot survive without a strong commitment to both liberty and virtue. “Both are necessary to human flourishing,” she argues in Fusionism, with the former being the proper object of political power and the latter of civil society.

“Questions about the pursuit of virtue — about what it means to live well and do right — ought to be decided by individuals and families and communities with the help of religious and social institutions,” Slade writes. “They ought not be decided by the state, which in a well-functioning society has a narrower mandate of protecting basic rights and liberties.”

Over the past decade, an American Right once committed to limited government, free enterprise, the rule of law, and the separation of powers has lost ground to a rival movement she calls the Dissident Right. Some are National Conservatives, or NatCons, who seek to draw more power to Washington, embrace stiff import taxes and industrial policy, and routinely transgress traditional and constitutional safeguards. The other two components of the Dissident Right, in her telling, are TheoCons (who focus primarily on social or moral concerns) and the neo-reactionaries (who focus on “the need for ruthlessness in response to aggression from the Left”).

I particularly appreciated the distinction Slade makes in her book between messaging and substance. When leftist or centrist critics complain that Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have shifted American politics rightward, this longtime conservative can’t help but gnash my teeth. If one’s definition of conservatism is rhetorical excess, boorishness, and cruelty, the claim is perhaps defensible. But what kind of definition is that?

In the American context, the job of conservatives is to conserve the principles of the Founding. These include the classical liberalism of individual freedom and legally enforceable rights as well as the classical republicanism of representative bodies, checks and balances, and civic virtue. An American Right seeking to conserve and apply these principles to modern-day problems would shrink deficits, not expand them; free the economy, not attempt to steer it; devolve power, not centralize it; and combat the grievance politics and other worse tendencies of modern progressivism, not mimic them.

The Dissident Right and its MAGA acolytes “certainly have adopted a rhetorical extremism” to “whip their base into an emotional froth,” Slade writes, but on substantive policy issues, they are “supremely flexible, even mushy.” On economics, foreign policy, and the constitution, they are certainly to my left, not my right.

Can the American Right recover its fusionist core? I think so. That’s why my colleagues and I founded the Freedom Conservatism project. Slade agrees. She argues that among the causes of the Dissident Right’s rise to prominence is that conservative politicians, activists, and intellectuals spent so much time on electoral tactics and policy detail that they neglected to renew the philosophical case for conservatism. “As ever,” she concludes, “it will be up to future generations to make the defense of liberty and virtue their own, finding new words through which to express a timeless American idea.”

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy with American history (FolkloreCycle.com).