The Center-Right’s Long March Backward

American Thinker 

One of the few rules of politics that has held throughout history, almost without exception, is that right-liberals, in the long run, lose.  The sort of Thatcherite political coalitions that prioritize “open markets” and “economic freedom” while being indifferent to cultural affairs might win elections in the short run — often in the wake of the left severely overstepping its mandate — yet they always end up ceding more political ground than they seize.  They always finish their terms having barely slowed down the pervading leftward cultural drift they were elected to stave.

This recurring outcome suggests a structural weakness within the “fusionist” center-right: It lacks a coherent vision for social order.  Rather than functioning as a true political movement, centrist liberalism — often labeled “mainstream conservatism” in the West — operates more as a form of political escapism.  Its adherents either treat politics as an extension of market logic or attempt to minimize political engagement altogether.

Real politics concerns itself with asserting a particular social order.  Political actors seek to take control of the machinery of governance so as to write the rules of the prevailing social game.  But the center-right does not do this.  It does not seek to assert its own social order — to write the rules.  Rather, the center-right exploits the prevailing order, seeking to bend the left’s rules in its favor for short-term financial gain.  Hence, while the center-right can issue vaguely “ideological” platitudes about the virtues of the open market and entrepreneurial capitalism, it does not aim for broad-scale economic reforms that would foster a free, prosperous, and entrepreneurial social order.  Rather, the center-right constantly clamors for privileges, exemptions, carve-outs, and marginal reforms within the prevailing order.

There are two reasons for this. The first is brute, unenlightened self-interest.  Whereas the general interest would be well served by a broad program of pro-market reforms, the interests of individual rightist actors are served better still by attaining special privileges for themselves and shutting the competition out of the market.  This is why, in the center-right’s political strongholds, truly pro-market initiatives, like phasing out agricultural subsidies, reducing defense procurements, or easing licensing requirements are not only neglected, but actively suppressed.

The second reason, more damning, is that the center-right simply doesn’t think in terms of Big Political Ideas.  It does not contemplate what would be a just and prosperous social order for a nation as a whole.  It is preoccupied by the short- to medium-term business performance of its donor base.  Conservatives thus are always content with making marginal and limited gains.  Any grander agenda is outside their scope of interest.  Expecting a political bloc with this mentality to take real power is like expecting to get rich by coupon-clipping.

This nullity of vision manifests in one of the center-right’s favorite canards: upholding “individualism” over “collectivism.”  But conservatives’ panegyrics to individualism ultimately just serve to excuse the center-right’s refusal to concern itself with the social order as such.  Although it is generally good counsel for individuals to assume agency and responsibility for their own life path, this is not politics.  Politics begins where such counsel ends; it is about sustaining a legal and social environment suitable for human flourishing, setting the “rules of the road” upon which the individual can set his course.  Politics, by definition, deals in the “collectivist” dimension of human life.  The center-right’s invectives against “collectivism” as such are just another means through which it avoids any discussion about the common good — another evasion of politics.

The left, by contrast, does not suffer from any preoccupation with individual initiative or enterprise.  The left operates by cultivating all sorts of patronage networks — degreed professionals, aggrieved racial and sexual minorities, and several others — and deploying those networks to seize political power.  When they win, leftists then lavish their base with patronage — government sinecures, transfer payments, specialized loans, the works.  It is precisely the left’s discouragement of — and incapacity for — individual initiative that makes it such an effective political force.  One could go so far as to say that the left’s commercial ineptitude is its superpower; as the left can’t generate wealth, it has no recourse but to seize wealth through political marauding.

Conservatives pretend to be squeamish about this crude politicking, imagining that their scruples prevent them from getting in the gutter with the left.  The reality is that the center-right is more than willing to indulge in all sorts of graft, but its graft is transactional and not political.  What makes it non-political is that power is left out of the equation.  The center-right does not concern itself with leveraging its graft to build a political coalition or patronage network.  The mid-tier bourgeois GOP donor does not say to his employees, “Because the Republicans passed a corporate tax cut, I can now give you a $1,000 bonus” — that would be, horror of horrors, collectivist.  Rather, he keeps all the gains for himself, and then he is shocked when his entire workforce votes Democrat next term, and the corporate tax is raised higher than it was before the initial cut.

Although this is partly due to greed and short-sightedness, the more salient cause — once again — is that the center-right dislikes politics.  Conservatives simply don’t like to think about building broad popular constituencies, cultivating patronage networks, or contemplating the general social welfare.  They mainly wish politics would go away so they could just make money.  Hence, the left gets to drink the right’s milkshake by faithfully tending to a full stable of client groups and dependents, whereas conservatives must perennially entice large chunks of “swing voters” to their side just to have a chance.

Sadly for the center-right — but thankfully for the rest of us — this state of affairs is likely nearing its expiration.  The center-right’s game of playing by the left’s rules and grasping at whatever crumbs it can find is viable only so long as the left has any reason to play along.  But the political dominance of the left is approaching the point where the left no longer needs to be so accommodating.  This gives the right no alternative but to oppose the left in a serious manner.  Rather than weasel through various political nooks looking for scraps of graft, the right must finally seek to exert influence on the fundamental social order.  This means first that it must build a core patronage base that directly shares in the party’s fortunes; second, it must develop some conception of a righteous social order to entice the masses into buying into its program; third, it must follow through on pursuing that vision to earn credibility.

The fact that it is impossible to imagine the center-right even flirting with these basic prescriptions is yet another indicator of how far it is from being a real political program.  One could say that achieving this political cognizance will mark the metamorphosis of the center-right to a legitimate and long overdue right-wing.