JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON Op-ed: Conservatism’s ‘Three-Legged Stool’ Has No Legs Left

BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON | APRIL 26, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/26/conservatisms-three-legged-stool-has-no-legs-left/

JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON

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Maybe you saw a recent clip-on X from conservative talk radio personality Erick Erickson criticizing what he calls a “weird movement within conservatism” that questions things like “limited government” and “free markets,” principles long associated with the conservative movement.

If you haven’t seen the clip, take a look. It’s like watching someone talk about the state of conservatism halfway through Obama’s first term, when Republican leaders were vowing to repeal Obamacare and inveighing against Democrats for violating the Constitution with a “socialist” health care scheme. (Obamacare was of course never repealed and is now, all these years later, a permanent feature of America’s health care system.)

A growing number of individuals and groups on the right are turning their back on conservatism without giving up the label. They have abandoned the three-legged stool of fiscal conservatism, traditional values, and a foreign policy approach of peace through strength. Instead,… pic.twitter.com/Ddv6i7vKxG

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 23, 2024

Erickson’s point, which he also made in a post for National Review, is that the Republican coalition for decades was built on the “three-legged stool” of fiscal conservatism, traditional values, and a peace-through-strength foreign policy. This is what won the Cold War and unleashed prosperity at home. I’m sure you’ve heard the story.

The problem now, he says, is that some people on the right (whom he doesn’t name) are calling into question these orthodoxies, especially free markets and limited government. They aren’t fighting to cut the size of the government but are instead working to gain control of it and wield power to achieve their preferred outcomes.

Erickson thinks this is bad, a betrayal of the old three-legged stool of Reaganite conservatism. After all, he says, if you use government power when your side is in control, the opposing side will use it against you when they’re in control. And we don’t want that, do we?

It’s hard to overstate how out-of-touch this way of thinking is, as if the past 15 years simply never happened, to say nothing of the past 50. 

Consider the three legs of the stool. On fiscal conservatism, we’re swimming in an ocean of debt that grows no matter which party controls Congress, while inflation is killing middle- and working-class families. On traditional values, we legalized gay marriage and then quickly moved on to normalizing transgenderism and acquiescing to so-called “gender-affirming care,” even for minors. On peace-through-strength foreign policy, we lost the War on Terror and are now funding multiple wars all over the world as part of a crumbling global imperium. The stool has no legs left.

As for limited government, we saw how much the GOP cared about the former during Covid, and even recently when it refused to do anything about our intelligence agencies routinely spying on us and censoring disfavored speech online. And free markets, although fine in theory, have in practice served as a permission slip for massive corporations to hollow out America’s industrial base and ship jobs overseas, enriching the upper and managerial classes while everyone else struggles.

In other words, the conservative movement as its currently constituted has stood athwart history yelling stop, and history has ignored it. Conservatism as Erickson understands and articulates it has not only failed to conserve anything, it has also turned out to be a shell game. Republicans would raise money on promises to repeal Obamacare or restrict abortion or secure the border, but never follow through once in power. They would rail against fiscal profligacy but always end up passing massive budgets with no real reforms or cuts. A strong foreign policy now looks more like a corporate welfare program for Pentagon contractors in a world that’s anything but peaceful.

Now, you could look at all this and dismiss it by saying a failure of Republican politicians to stand up for conservative principles doesn’t mean the principles are bad, it just means we have bad politicians. And that’s true up to a point. But such a critique fails to acknowledge two crucial things.

First is the incompatibility of an American global empire with the notion of “limited government.” After the Allied victory in World War II, and especially after the Cold War, America was never going to have a limited government. Or rather, our ability to limit the government was going to be rather limited. We have seen this play out with our intelligence agencies and the vast surveillance apparatus they wield. That apparatus, once used to topple foreign governments by staging coups and manipulating public opinion overseas, is now being used against American citizens (and of course was infamously used against President Trump).

Second is the plain reality that we are in a life-or-death struggle against the left, and the left is playing by a different set of rules. If the right agrees as a matter of principle that it will not wield government power to achieve its preferred outcomes, but the left vows to use the government whenever and however it can, then the left is going to win every time. And that is exactly what has happened.

So what to do about this? Erickson’s admonition amounts to a posture of permanent defeat. If conservatives can’t wield power to bring about their vision of the good, of a rightly ordered public square and a prosperous society, then the leftist radicals will continue to seize power and press forward with their permanent revolution, as they have been for decades.

Instead, we need to recognize that the conservative movement has failed. It is dead; we have seen it die. The fusionism of the Cold War era, when libertarians and social conservatives made common cause against communism, is finished. So too is the GOP establishment whose first priority was always corporate welfare at the expense of everything else.

As I wrote in these pages nearly two years ago, we have to stop thinking of ourselves as conservatives and start thinking of ourselves, and our movement, as restorationist and counterrevolutionary. In a very real sense, we have to re-found our country, and to do that we will have to seize power from the left — and use it.

It’s understandable if that makes some conservatives uneasy. After decades of repeating the phrases “limited government” and “free markets,” it’s a sobering thing to realize they were just empty slogans, at best just means to some other, higher end.

But the situation is what it is. Following Erickson’s advice, eschewing power because of allegiance to a political fantasy, means certain defeat. It means permanent dhimmitude for conservatives in a country run by people who hate them and are determined to destroy them and their way of life. The other option is to fight back, establish a beachhead, and use whatever power we can marshal to push back the left in hopes that future generations of Americans can live in true peace and prosperity. 

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John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.