“The twentieth century conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character — with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.”
— Russell Kirk, “The Conservative Mind” (1953)
The inestimable D.J. McGuire comments on what plagues Virginia Republicans and the conservative movement here as a whole, and it’s worth a quiet read. His argument — that social conservatives ruin the long pole of the big tent by trading moral orthodoxy for fiscal heterodoxy — is an argument as old as the rise of Christian conservatives in the 1970s, and it bears many parallels to the inclusion of national security conservatives (or neocons) into the Republican umbrella in the post-9/11 world order… at least at the national level.
The crux of McGuire’s argument is very simple:
In fact, social conservatives who are happy to grow government are not mainstream in Virginia at all – and they’ve proven it by losing repeatedly (2001, 2005, and 2013). By contrast, social conservatives who embrace economic conservatism can win over Virginians who want to keep taxes low, notwithstanding social issue disagreements (2009).
Simple solution? Slough off the fiscally moderate social conservatives.
Problem is, that’s amputating the heart of the conservative movement, because at the very heart of the conservatism articulated by Russell Kirk, Whitaker Chambers, and William Buckley Jr. is the concept that conservatism is a governing philosophy — not the abandonment of governance.
What’s more — and this is something our more libertarian and populist friends tend to forget in the effort to call themselves conservative — is that conservatives instinctively believe lawmaking to be an inherently moral process, namely that we approve of moral laws, disapprove of immoral laws, and have the character to be able to discern between the two. Social conservatism is intrinsically bound up in ways to make the operations of governance both ethical and moral, because it is the only basis upon which to defend free markets, free minds, and a free society.
Important to the conversation is this: there is no such thing as a purely social or fiscal conservative. One is either both, or one is not a conservative.
In Virginia, this effective principle has interpreted itself in varying forms. Under George Allen’s transformative 1993 gubernatorial campaign, it used to be that “God, guns, and gays” was the magic formula — or at least, the formula of 20 years ago. That shifted to “law and order” in the early 2000s with the rise of Mark Earley’s 2001 gubernatorial bid and Jerry Kilgore’s 2001 AG and 2005 gubernatorial bids, and since the myth of the invincibility of the Virginia Republican was shattered by Jim Webb in 2006, the movement has really floundered. Despite a brief renaissance with then-Chairman Ed Gillespie in 2007 and the “McBollinelli” sweep in 2009, once the paperweights were off the table, the papers blew right off.
Republicans in Virginia work best when we have a George Allen or Bob McDonnell corralling the various factions and regions under one banner.
What has happened over the last 20 years is that the sands have shifted under our feet. What was the old Northern Virginia/Rest of Virginia (NOVA/ROVA) has steadily become the eastern/western divide (EEVA/WEVA). Those in the “golden crescent” are suburban, mostly come-heres, military families, six figures, and expect government to function.
Those west of I-95 haven’t experienced the demographic changes… so they fight along the same interior lines as 20 years ago. “Gods, guns, and gays” still matters, even if such talk is anathema to the Northern Virginia business community. Likewise, talk of transportation reform, education reform, immigration reform (gasp!), health care reform, all these things absolutely scare the hell out of Virginians south of the Rapahannock and east of I-95 — the translation is always “let’s make big government more effective” — and sound like the abandonment of principle, not the implementation of principle.
There are other layers too. Tidewater vs. Piedmont. Valley vs. Southside. “Real Virginia” west of Roanoke City (and it’s gorgeous out there, folks) vs. “His Majesty’s Colony” centered around Williamsburg that treats anything west of Richmond as “hic sunt dracones.” And yes, the part of Virginia that thinks Western Civilization stops at Quantico and its quaint outpost at Fredericksburg vs. those of us who prefer to erect watchtowers and checkpoints along the Rappahannock.
The political divides aren’t easily discernible. One will note that not a single candidate in 2013 was pro-abortion, which is amazing considering that there used to be at least one token pro-abort Republican on the hustings. Rarely will you find a Republican candidate approve of mock weddings, much less the abandonment of process AG Herring presided over to upend the Virginia Constitution.
Ideologically, we’ve become much more monolithic… but it has quickly become a contest of personalities, which if anyone wants to correctly identify the problems plaguing the Virginia GOP today, it is that and that alone. Conservatives have won the argument on the ends, but now we argue over the flavors: social, liberty, reform, Tea Party, those who ate lunch with such-and-such that one Advance back in 1997.
To a large degree, conservatives have won on the merits of their arguments, but we are sloppy beyond comprehension on our implementation. In short, we have no effective idea on how to govern… nor do we have patience with the process — or worse, we believe the process does not work (and that’s dangerous). The rise of Tea Party populism combined with the Ron Paul/Rand Paul liberty movement has edged out conservatives in a big way. Conservatives themselves, still at combat with their more centrist wing, find themselves in a pinch. The battle lines are drawn on culture, but the centrists don’t see the need for the discussion, while the populist and libertarian wings of the GOP are morally opposed to the conversation even taking place. Ergo, social conservatives go down the drain.
Hence we get to conversations over polity and constitution. I’ve argued in the past that Virginia needs a new constitutional convention for the Virginia we live in today — something that speaks to our Jeffersonian inclinations and respects the fact Virginia has changed dramatically since 1971.
Perhaps not yet, but soon… that is, if folks will respect the process (and I question whether a generation of Baby Boomers and Me First types can arrive at a polity as adults). The very problem we face is that nationally, we have arrived at our “Bastiat moment” where one half of society has learned they can poach from the other half, and use government as a means to either mooch off of the public trust on the left hand, or freeload off of a free society with the right hand.
Thus we arrive at an odd meeting place where the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement share more than folks realize in their populist sentiment. In an environment where the loudest voices in the room seem to pull apart the very fabric of society, how is anyone supposed to arrive at a new framework of governance that meets modern conditions in Virginia, much less any other of our laboratories for republican government?
Free society’s enemy — it would seem — is the dialectical materialism of the age, easily identified on the left in the form of Marxist socialism, and more difficult to pin down on the right in its more strident libertarian forms. At the same root is the emotion of populist sentiment; the infection of the French Revolution that always seems to crop up in contrast to our much more respectable American variant — even if populism chooses to wrap itself in a flag and carry a cross.
Whitaker Chambers in his conversion from communism to conservatism used to quip that he traded the winning side for the losing side. Chambers had no taste for populism much less libertarianism, and took direct aim at Ayn Rand’s apposite end of the dialectical materialist argument back in 1957:
Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc., etc. (This book’s aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned “higher morality,” which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.
Chambers effectively encapsulated what conservatives are ultimately up against: Marxist socialism on one side, and Randian libertarianism on the other. At the very core of this — it’s very essence, ladies and gentlemen — is a rejection of the moral; of God, of religion, of tradition, of sin and that great “democracy of the dead” that luminaries such as G. K. Chesterton begged us to consider in the advent of the modernist and materialist age.
Conservatism cannot slough off our social heart anymore than we can discard our fiscal thought. We have to be aggressive about the fact that conservatives seek to govern, not for its own sake, but to govern well — to keep the balance of liberty between the twin poles of tyranny and license.
In Virginia, it means to set aside the personalities and polemics and focus on the ideas, solutions, and accomplishments in advancing the cause of free minds, free markets, and a free society — and especially at a time when a lazy polity demands more of government in areas of provision, and far too less in the pillars that maintain a free society’s protections.
Human beings exist in a state of nature, free and unfettered. We create government to protect our liberties, and time and memory erode what law and tradition attempt to preserve. The task of conservatives, as Buckley admonished, is stand athwart history yelling STOP! while permitting Kirk’s cultural battle cry towards the “inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction” of a free society to flourish.
…and free society has its enemies. Sometimes from without, today mostly from within, but her defenders are legion — provided they are willing to fight for the cultural regeneration a free society constantly requires.
