Conservatives Against Capitalism

There is space for conservatives to embrace social-democratic economic policies in service to traditionalist and conservative ends, like the family and local community.

Since I first became aware of politics, one of the major criticisms of conservatives I heard was of their callousness to economic suffering, especially among the poor and working classes. If conservatives opposed the welfare state in favor of private charity and individual self-improvement, progressives prided themselves on a concern for the downtrodden, with a social safety net provided by the government. Of course, conservatives have not succeeded in dismantling the welfare state since the New Deal and the Great Society, but a continued conservative suspicion of government aid has fed the narrative that conservatives are callous to those suffering economic deprivation.

At the same time, conservatives were criticized for being on the side of large corporations, increasing the profits of the already very wealthy, and counting on “trickle-down economics” to take care of the less well-to-do. The free-marketeer argument is that GDP increases most as markets are left free to do their thing, and the whole population benefits from cheap consumer goods and a general rise in the standard of living.

In that light, those who criticize conservatives will be pleased to hear that political conservatives have begun to turn on capitalism. Conservatives have begun to question whether the Republican party is not too beholden to large corporate interests, whether government regulation might be necessary in a variety of areas of the economy, and even whether the New Deal order might have been the foundation of the widespread prosperity of the mid-twentieth-century.

Strikingly, the responsibility for this turn on the right is inescapably that of Donald J. Trump. While to many left and right and center, Trump represented a terrible turn for the American right, in terms of economic policy, Trump’s influence has been to moderate Republican economic thinking. Trump’s refusal to cut government benefits, his support of the American working class, and his questioning of free trade all have had the effect of making conservatives rethink whether economic liberalism (libertarianism) is really the central pillar of American conservatism.

In particular, Sohrab Ahmari’s recent Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—and What to Do About It represents a reversal of conservative economic thought. While the central pillar of the Buckley-ite conservative movement was opposition to the New Deal, Ahmari’s critique of the American market and workplace leads him to propose a return to the New Deal order as a plank in a conservative platform.

Ahmari’s book launch yesterday featured Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who recently authored a report, “The State of the Working (and Non-Working) Man.” (Aaron Renn summarizes and explains here.) I highly recommend several of Ahmari’s recent interviews in order to hear a summary of his main lines of thought and examples of real problems in the American market and workplace.

What I want to spend this post doing is articulating the philosophical shift from a conservatism founded on free-market individualism to a social-democratic conservatism, which is, to many ears, a contradiction in terms.

Conservatism Is Not Libertarianism

I was first made aware of the possibility that free-market thinking and conservatism could come apart on reading Roger Scruton’s The Meaning of Conservatism. While a staunch opponent of Soviet and Cold War Communism, Scruton had reservations about the free-market thinking of Margaret Thatcher (his own prime minister) and Ronald Reagan. Scruton spent much of the seventies and eighties intervening in Soviet-bloc states of Eastern Europe, teaching philosophy and the liberal arts in underground universities. However, he warned in his 1980 book that free-marketeer ideology was ultimately a form of liberalism, which in political philosophy is not a slogan for the political left, but for individualist ideology of either right or left.

Scruton argued in that book and throughout his work that conservatism was more about the individual finding a home within the world, including the natural environment, the aesthetic and architectural environment, and within a local and national community. His thinking has fed into the post-Trump intellectual movement of so-called “national conservatism,” which gives the nation and community importance as giving meaning to the individual. But he also questioned pure free-market thinking, focusing on things that are sacred that we keep out (or should keep out) of the marketplace (bodies and sexuality) and other places where “market solutions” fail. In The Meaning of Conservatism, he defended the welfare state not from justice but from care, arguing that relations of love and care among even the citizens and the state itself obligate and motivate such provision.

The Critique of Meritocracy

Another step in moving my mind on free-market thinking was the critique of meritocracy I found in two authors, Alain de Botton and Michael Sandel. Much of American free-market thought, especially at a popular level, holds up the ideal of the self-made man and judges each individual on the basis of their performance in the game of individual capitalist achievement in the marketplace. While this results in high praise for those who succeed by that standard, it results in the designation of “loser” for those who fail, without consideration for why they have a low level of economic attainment. A more merciful time considered such people “unfortunates,” revealing recognition of the role of fate or providence in human events. In a kind of denial of God and fate, Americanism considers each man’s fate to be in his own hands. This way of thinking can be inspiring, but it is also dispiriting to all of us when we face obstacles beyond our own control. Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety is a beautiful antidote to the cruel judgment of meritocracy.

Sandel is a thinker of the left who recognized, after Trump’s election, the role that disregard for working people by elites played in the support of Trump. His book is The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? A moral philosopher, Sandel details how the two prominent philosophers of right and left on economic issues of the late twentieth century, liberal John Rawls and libertarian Robert Nozick, both denied that economic distribution should be or is based on merit. Rawls, reflecting a hold-over of his Barthian Calvinist days, denied that any of us merit our condition in life since even our quantity of willpower and motivation is the result of a distribution of natural qualities and abilities. Nozick argued for the justice of free markets and private property, not because of individual moral desert but efficiency and procedural justice.

As I was reading these thinkers, I found myself autobiographically in an intense status hierarchy, academia, which is also not a very lucrative one. I began to recognize that a perspective that views us as having merit to the degree that we climb certain status hierarchies or perform work that is economically profitable disregards a lot of what is most valuable in life, including philosophy and family. And while capitalism per se is not equivalent to the meritocratic view of people, in practice, the two are often tied together: “‘The American Idea,’ as [Paul] Ryan put it in a 2011 speech at the Heritage Foundation, is ‘that justice is done when we level the playing field at the starting line and rewards are proportionate to merit and effort.’”

Aristotle’s Conservative Anti-Capitalism

Another source of my turnabout on capitalism was the great Aristotle. During the years between my master's degree at the University of Chicago and my Ph.D. here at St. Louis University, I had the privilege of teaching a course called “Ethics of Cinema and Computer Games” at DePaul University. The students were mostly majoring in video game programming, animation, and film, and I began the course with a pretty dour view of these activities. However, wary of denigrating the way these students spent their time and energies, I opened my mind to the possibility that these activities, video games in particular, might be more than just a waste of time.

I found the key in Aristotle’s philosophy of work and leisure. Against the Puritanical work ethic of Plato’s utopian Republic, according to which all activities should be measured by their utility, Aristotle argued that work was a means to an end. All of life, according to Aristotle, could be divided into work and leisure. Work was a means, leisure an end. Work was instrumentally good, leisure good intrinsically. Accordingly, Aristotle lamented a life given entirely to work, getting money and sustenance, and doing activities that we don’t want to do only in order to continue to live. At the far end of the spectrum, such a person was a slave (and perhaps by nature). However, in our society, Aristotle would have found much labor, even middle and upper-middle-class work, to be purely instrumental and lamentably slavish.

On the other hand, Aristotle’s philosophy was designed for those who had the leisure, usually through wealth, to do with their time what was good for its own sake. The free man, according to Aristotle, was not one who was free to trade in the marketplace without government coercion, but rather one who was free to use his time to do acts of both private and public good, of intrinsic value.

Ironically, this meant that my students were most free when playing video games. For them, that was their break from the world of instrumental work, their opportunity to seek pure enjoyment and intrinsic good. The further question, of whether there was a better use of their leisure remained. But this Aristotelian judgment challenged some American and capitalistic priors.

The American capitalist vision, that freedom is found in work that is not politically coerced, turns out to fall short of the Aristotelian vision of freedom, happiness, and flourishing. All work that we do, not for its own sake, but in order to make money and provide for ourselves and others, is undertaken under necessity, physical and financial. This is not a knock against its value, but merely a recognition that the real questions of life lie in a further question: What are we to do with the means of life, with the fruits of our labor, and with the brief time afforded us when our work is complete?

The Way Forward

Where does all this leave conservative economic policy?

Unsettled. The sense of legitimacy of the outcome of the free market comes to a great degree from the idea of equality of opportunity and meritocracy. When we see that the good life is found in individuals and communities being free to do those things that are intrinsically good, and not entirely motivated by the need for sustenance, then meritocracy seems like a cruel game. While the economic objections to the strictest forms of socialism and communism remain, the basically libertarian sense that markets must be entirely left alone loses its legitimacy.

Of course, it will not be possible to make leisured aristocrats out of the entire population. What is needed is a healthy balance of work and leisure and of individual achievement with community participation. There are major policy questions about what actually will serve these ends, and conservatives remain skeptical of certain of the left’s solutions.

But interestingly, Sohrab Ahmari basically endorses the New Deal as contributing to the health of the American middle class and the strength of the family in - you guessed it - the 1950s. There is space for conservatives to embrace social-democratic economic policies in service to traditionalist and conservative ends, like the family and local community.

The contrast with the progressive solution that Ahmari identifies is that, while the left seeks for one side in the class warfare to win, conservatives are happy with what is called “class compromise.” Instead of trying to flatten the entire economic distribution, conservatives are happy with imperfect solutions that allow different economic classes to live side by side with a sense of belonging to a shared community, instead of merely being winners and losers of a cruel meritocratic game. While much more remains to be said, that seems like a goal worth pursuing.