Why conservatives in the US today are really libertarians – Business Insider – Business Insider

It was 65 years ago that National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr, in a mission statement defining his new conservative magazine, argued that conservatism "stands athwart history, yelling 'Stop,' at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it."

Buckley's call to arms has always struck me as both untenable and strange. You can't stop history, after all, and merely saying "no" isn't a functional political position. But Buckley's National Review certainly set the tone for the Republican Party over the next handful of decades. The rise of Ronald Reagan codified within the party what was once a fringe philosophy: Except in the case of national security, any amount of government is too much government.

Reagan established trickle-down economics with its anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-worker ethos as the sole guiding economic principle of the Republican Party. And the next forty years of Republican leadership turned trickle-down into a religion. Grover Norquist encouraged a generation of Republicans to sign a pledge vowing to reject every single tax increase that comes across their desks, with no exceptions.

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Through their obstinance, Republicans essentially trained a generation of Democrats to become what we now call neoliberals. As Democrats tried to negotiate in good faith with inflexible Republicans, their policies and proposals moved further and further rightward.

Donald Trump, with his nationalistic, trickle-down-on-steroids economic agenda, could represent the culmination of that rightward economic tilt. When one entire political party believes that anything to do with government is by definition bad, is governance even possible? Can Republicans find a new economic ideology that doesn't result in a blanket rejection of everything that makes a society function?

In the latest episode of Pitchfork Economics, Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein interview Oren Cass, the domestic policy director for Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign and the executive director of a new think tank called American Compass. In his work with American Compass and in his book "The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America", Cass is attempting to find a new way forward for American conservatism.

"I think the important starting place is to recognize that what we casually call 'conservative' in America today is, for the most part, not conservative at all it's libertarian," Cass explained. "And what I mean by that is it places almost absolute priority on free markets to the exclusion of a lot of other things that are really important to human flourishing and a prosperous nation."

"The free market is a wonderful thing," Cass said, "but we don't serve it it serves us." Prioritizing unregulated commerce above virtually every other aspect of American life has left the two national political parties without any common ground.

"Having a successful system of market capitalism isn't simply a matter of getting everything else out of the way," Cass said. Conservative economics must make room for "healthy institutions" that are necessary for America to continue, like "strong families and communities" and "education and infrastructure." Those institutions have largely been abandoned by the libertarian right.

Conservatives must find some way to reincorporate the fact that rules are necessary to keep the market running efficiently and "to channel competition in productive directions," Cass argued. To do that, a conservative political party with national appeal must support an economic platform that is "heavily dependent" on "a system of labor that ensures that workers are well-represented and can look out for their interests."

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"We've converted our high schools, basically, into college prep academies. So we almost make sure you don't learn too much useful in high school besides how to pass tests to get into college," Cass said. This leaves the huge number of Americans who don't go to college unprepared for the workforce.

By instituting educational programs that would prepare high school students to enter the workforce on graduation, and by subsidizing employer-led training for recently graduated students, Cass believes you could create "more good jobs for people without college degrees." Private enterprise would still lead the way, but it would be guided by government policy.

A progressive might argue that giving businesses tax breaks to train their ideal workforce is hardly an ideal economic scenario for Americans who choose not to go to college. But at least that argument would be happening outside the intractable libertarian frame that American politics has been locked in for most of my lifetime.

The point isn't to achieve total agreement between the conservative and liberal side of the spectrum, Cass argues it's to get back to a place where conversation and compromise is possible. After the bitter partisan civil war of the 2020 elections, a reasonable economic discussion between two opposing parties about the future of the nation sounds downright heavenly.

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author(s).

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Why conservatives in the US today are really libertarians - Business Insider - Business Insider