Scouting report

FreeCons analyze the factions that make up the nationalist-populist Right

Why do you keep criticizing leaders and institutions on the Right? Why can’t you focus all your fire on the Left? Why can’t the Right form a united front? Why can’t we all just get along?

In recent years, Freedom Conservatives have gotten used to fielding such questions from people who say they agree with us on most matters — or that they used to agree with us but now find our resistance to the nationalist-populist Right to be ill-advised, frustrating, or infuriating.

We FreeCons do, in fact, continue to devote lots of critical attention to the political misfires and policy mistakes of progressivism. It is true, however, that we do not focus exclusively on the failings of the Left. Nor can we afford to.

Freedom Conservatives believe that the principles of limited government, individual liberty, competitive markets, free speech, free trade, federalism, and the rule of law are essential guides to sound policymaking.

FreeCons also believe that strong families, congregations, and communities create an essential layer of civil society between the state and the individual. We believe such classical virtues as prudence, temperance, courage, and justice are essential to human flourishing. And we believe such practices as honesty, transparency, civility, and responsibility are essential for making politics endurable and self-government enduring.

In the American context, at least, these beliefs place us on the Right. American conservatism, properly understood, seeks to conserve the classical liberalism and civic republicanism exemplified in the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, our other founding texts and cherished traditions, and the best efforts of past generations of Americans to deliver on their promise.

In today’s politics, some who consider themselves to be on the Right reject many of the beliefs just articulated. They wish to draw more power to Washington. They exhibit little interest in balancing budgets or reforming entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (it’s impossible to do the former without the latter). They disdain the classical liberalism of free markets and individual liberty as well as the civic republicanism of mixed constitutions and limits on executive power. Some go further by trafficking in bigotry or crankery.

Who are the rivals to Freedom Conservatism?

One faction calls itself National Conservatism. As the name suggests, National Conservatives believe the nation-state is the fundamental building block of a properly ordered society. In contrast to FreeCons, NatCons are hostile to free trade, religious pluralism, and the decentralization of power across states, localities, private entities, and individual citizens.

Another faction, Post-Liberalism, believes the American Founding was flawed from the outset. Some advocate an explicit integration of church and state, either along Catholic or Protestant lines, while other PostLibs even flirt with such un-American notions as monarchy, aristocracy, or authoritarianism.

The Populist Right contains other factions, as well, often with less-consistent ideologies than those of the NatCons and PostLibs. Many follow the lead of podcasters such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owen, and Nick Fuentes in employing antisemitism, anti-capitalism, or other conspiracy theories to explain conditions in the modern world — or in their personal lives — that disappoint, distress, or anger them.

To succeed, American conservatism must be broad. But if it’s broad enough to contain these factions, it will fail and collapse. As FreeCon signatory David Harsanyi put it in the Washington Examiner, their inclusion will doom the American Right and its political champions.

“The white-collar worker living in the suburbs, like most people today, isn’t preoccupied with bringing back widget factories from Malaysia and banning drag queen library story hour,” Harsanyi wrote, “though social corrosion isn’t unimportant. Without affordability and jobs, you’re not winning elections. If you’re not winning elections, you’re not conserving anything.”

Today, we feature the work of FreeCons pushing back against the NatCons, PostLibs, and Populist Right.

Built-in dynamism

Corbin K. Barthold is Internet policy counsel at TechFreedom and a FreeCon signatory.

A former litigation counsel at the Washington Legal Foundation at partner at Browne George Ross LLP, where he engaged in high-stakes complex litigation, Barthold writes frequently for such publications as Law & Liberty, The Bulwark, and RealClearMarkets.

In a recent City Journal piece, he discussed a potential alliance he called “technological conservatism.”

“Technological progress will continue,” Barthold observed. “Like so much else, liquid modernity is a matter of trade-offs. Conservers of tradition can no longer simply hand down ‘the way things are’ to subsequent generations; they must continually rebuild the link between past and present. Family, education, community, gender roles, rites of passage, work–life balance — all must be adapted to modernity without succumbing to it.”

“American conservatism has this dynamism built in,” he continued. “It does not serve a landed gentry, an established church, or a senatorial class. It conserves freedom, carrying forward the principles of a revolution and the instincts of a pragmatic, mercantile, frontier people.”

Barthold argued that post-liberal thinkers such as Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen “disdain this distinctly American conservatism. They deride those who uphold the ideals of the Declaration of Independence as ‘right liberals’ peddling ‘Zombie Reaganism.’

“Whatever this stance may be, it is hardly conservative. In seeking to upend the balance between freedom and virtue that has defined American conservatism, the post-liberals do not conserve; they aspire to remake the world.”

Rebranding integralism

James M. Patterson is an associate professor at the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee’s Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

Author of the 2019 book Religion in the Public Square and coauthor of the forthcoming Why Postliberalism Failed, Patterson is president of the Ciceronian Society and a contributing editor at Law & Liberty.

In a recent Law & Liberty essay, he explained that for many thinkers and activists, their preferred term of “post-liberal” is “really a rebranding of Catholic integralism.”

“Historically speaking,” Patterson continued, “Catholic integralism was a product of nineteenth-century France, attracting traditionalists who worried that the Church was growing too soft on modernity. From the beginning, its ideology was deeply antisemitic.”

In contemporary discourse, he wrote, the Catholic integralism of Patrick Deneen and Vermeule has a “different valence” but still “relies on a story that our social and political life has been secretly molded by a small group of nefarious elites, even if they wear the innocuous moniker ‘liberals,’ where previous generations of integralists would have blamed Jews or Masons.”

Inviting chaos and bloodshed

Gregg Nunziata is the executive director of the Society for the Rule of Law. He’s also a FreeCon signatory.

Nunziata previously served as chief nominations counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, policy counsel to the Senate Republican Policy Committee, attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, and litigator in an international law firm.

In a recent piece for the Democracy Project, he argued that American conservatives must defend the constitutional order and liberal democracy from their adversaries, be they on the ideological Left or Right.

“Conservatism has always cautioned against those who would tear down institutions, promising ‘golden ages’ to come, but inviting only chaos and bloodshed,” Nunziata wrote.

He observed that Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, warned against violent rupture with the past and reminded us that society is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

“For Burke,” Nunziata continued, “the task of conservatives was to tend this inheritance, not to squander it. Our American inheritance is liberal democracy — imperfect, often frustrating, but the only political order that has delivered stability, freedom, and prosperity across generations.

“Too many on the Right have forgotten this. They speak contemptuously of norms and traditions. They express frustration with the rule of law and the separation of powers. Some romanticize strongmen abroad as they succumb to authoritarian temptations at home. They openly talk about the need to seize the power of the state, in response to crises, real and imagined, to destroy the Left.

“This isn’t only not conservatism; it imperils all that we, on the political Right, value.”

No to tribalism

Thomas D. Howes is a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University and a FreeCon signatory.

Co-host of the Reagan Caucus Podcast, Howes is also the co-author, with fellow FreeCon James Patterson, of the forthcoming book Why Postliberalism Failed.

In a recent piece for Civitas Outlook, he explained the populist fascination with work of German jurist and philosopher Carl Schmitt, who played an early role in the rise of National Socialism.

Among other positions, Schmitt argued that politics is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy. “The practical use of Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction from his essay The Concept of the Political is almost always to rationalize tribalist politics,” Howes wrote.

Schmitt “does not argue that liberal-democratic politics, which tries to limit conflict, is impossible” he continued. “He thinks it will have a tough time defending itself against internal and external foes (a doubtful empirical claim). But even if it were to succeed, Schmitt would still oppose it, because its success would make politics less meaningful.

“Those who share his inclination for tribalist politics, perhaps also implicit in his desire to be subject to a personal sovereign, find this compelling. The rest of us do not.”

In the mix

• FreeCon signatories Avik Roy and Brian Blase have been offering proposals for health care reform to leaders on Capitol Hill.

“Republicans should pair a short-term subsidy extension with far-reaching, premium-reducing deregulation of Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges: specifically, restoring a 5:1 ‘age band’ and installing reinsurance,” wrote Roy, founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP).

“These two changes will address Obamacare’s two worst regulatory flaws. Only when there’s a functioning market for individually-purchased health insurance can we eventually have a truly market-based health care system.”

Blase, president of Paragon Health Institute, urged lawmakers to embrace a policy framework from Sens. Mike Crapo and Bill Cassidy that would restore the Affordable Care Act’s original payment structure, broaden access to high-deductible catastrophic plans, and funding health savings account contributions for enrollees choosing catastrophic or bronze plans on ACA exchanges.

The Crapo-Cassidy bill “avoids the worst policy mistake Congress could make (extending the COVID subsidy boosts), takes reasonable steps to reduce distortions, strengthens program integrity, and shifts resources toward people rather than insurers.”

• In Arena magazine, FreeCon signatory Judge Glock dispelled persistent myths about the stock market of the 1980s and its implications for finance and economic policy.

“If the eighties were the ‘decade of greed,’ as the New York Times still calls it, then Wall Street was the representative of everything that went wrong in those years,” wrote Glock, director of research and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

“In reality, Wall Street was a great symbol of things going right. American outsiders challenged the old ways, got rich, and in the process made the country, and the world, better off. We should be so lucky to have another such era.”

• At Reason magazine, FreeCon signatory Ed Tarnowski argued that the free market is connecting rural America more effectively than is the federal government’s costly Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program.

“Just five years ago, direct-to-consumer low-Earth-orbit satellite service was only an idea,” wrote Tarnowski, a senior contributor at Young Voices and a policy and advocacy director at EdChoice.

“Today — built and scaled overwhelmingly through private investment rather than being dependent on federal broadband deployment subsidies like BEAD — Starlink reliably connects millions, and with additional and higher-performing satellites coming, it is set to expand in quality and reach.”

“New entrants also underscore that this industry is steadily advancing. While fiber-based, last-mile broadband infrastructure will remain part of the solution, the federal government should steer clear of tilting the playing field and let innovation lead.”