Democrats Should Be Conservatives.
Liberals must now heed William F. Buckley Jr. and “[stand] athwart history yelling Stop.”
In 1955, midway through Eisenhower’s first term as commander-in-chief, William F. Buckley Jr. drafted a mission statement for National Review and the movement of conservative intellectuals he was slowly building.
Most of the four page document is mere moral grandstanding about how brave the ‘50s conservative—and, almost explicitly, the National Review subscriber—is to oppose the New Deal and criticize the “Social Engineers.” But Buckley’s description of NR’s role in American public discourse remains easily one of his most quoted lines1:
“[National Review] 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.”
At the time, few people were opposed to the incredibly successful New Deal programs. A Whiggish view of history was the status quo. And as Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs fame writes, “Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, famously declared that core parts of the New Deal reforms had built such a lasting consensus that they simply could not be undone.”
Over the following decades though, despite the stumbling blocks of Nixon’s loss in 1960 and Goldwater’s in 1964, the conservative movement, in frequent fits and intermittent starts, made progress in their fight to “repeal the twentieth century.” Beginning in 1981 bona fide conservatives had the reins of power in Washington for over a decade. By the ‘90s even the Democrats were willing to agree to work towards welfare “reform,” and snub labor by signing NAFTA.
A lot of ink has been spilled (and keystrokes entered) over the last ten years about how the American left could mimic the successes of the insurgent right. “Can the left have its own Tea Party?”, Geoffrey Kabaservice asked in the Washington Post back in 2018. More recently, many have begun to argue Democrats need to learn from Trump’s second victory by enthusiastically adopting populist rhetoric.
And the hosts of the phenomenal podcast Know Your Enemy muse every other episode about the lack of any left-wing analogue to the so-called “conservative welfare state,” the constellation of think tanks, magazines, and foundations ready to offer fellowships to any right-winger with a GPA above 3.3.
The real lesson Democrats should take from conservatives’ success is not to copy their alt-academia institution building or specific Congressional blocs though. It’s this: “Not one inch.” Do not give one single inch to the Republicans looking to remake the federal government in Trump’s image. And so far, this is a test almost every Democrat-in-office has failed.
Alabama Congresswoman Terri Sewell, who I actually canvassed for while president of the UA College Democrats, flip-flopped on the Laken Riley Act posthaste after Trump’s popular vote victory. When I reached out to her office while working on a piece for the Alabama Political Reporter, Sewell pointed to the homicide rate in Birmingham and said “undocumented immigrants who commit crimes should not be allowed to stay in our communities.” One still wonders why she felt differently just last March.
NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie and my friend and former CW takeslinger in arms Alex Jobin have both made eloquent versions of this argument. In a system where political parties were able to discipline their elected officials, you wouldn’t see unanimous support for Rubio’s ascent to secretary of state, or liberal senators wavering in their opposition to RFK Jr. (NB: Not a single one of Biden’s cabinet appointees received a unanimous vote.)
Beyond the mere tactic of intransigent opposition, a vein of conservative thought I have frequently found useful is those thinkers who become partisans of Congress against the imperial presidency. Offended by the anti-legislative sentiment of Wilson, and then the perceived excesses of (either) Roosevelt2, they’ll say that the powers of the president need to be curtailed.
For obvious reasons, these conservatives—in as much as they still exist—remain quite quiet at present. It is now time for Democrats to take up this particular torch.
In total opposition to the intent of the 14th Amendment’s Congressional supporters in 1866, the Supreme Court’s explicit ruling in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, and the plain text of the amendment itself, one of Trump’s first official acts was an attempt to abrogate a constitutional right by executive diktat. (One federal judge has since dubbed the order “blatantly unconstitutional.”)
Seemingly out of outright malice, the Trump administration has paused funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, a decades old program which has saved millions of lives for a fraction of one percent of the federal budget.
While families in California are still grieving those killed by the recent wildfires, and struggling to rebuild their shattered lives, Trump opines that he may require California to pass a voter ID law before sending out federal aid.3 (And suggests that he may dismantle FEMA entirely, leaving states on their own after horrific disasters.)
Most recently, he unlawfully fired “roughly 17” inspectors general without the requisite 30 days notice to Congress. Inspectors general, of course, being the nonpartisan watchdogs tasked with preventing fraud and abuse in federal agencies under the Inspector General Act of 1978. (A piece of legislation left over from an age where Nixon was still viewed as a crook and a monster rather than a victim of the liberal media.)
Before the Trumpism boom, the more erudite conservatives used to espouse a principle entitled Chesterton’s fence, named after the following parable:
“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”
I’d like to see someone argue that the Trump admin’s ongoing approach to governance reflects this principle. (Please try.) Birthright citizenship, medicine for those stricken with AIDS, emergency relief for the suffering, and independent oversight of federal agencies are all up on the chopping block with nary a second thought. Could Trump tell us the countless benefits of PEPFAR? Why a post-Watergate Congress felt inspectors general were needed or why states can’t deal with earthquakes and hurricanes on their own?
The most the more intelligent type of reformer can say is “if some of what they do is the wrong thing to do, but they shake government up in a way and maybe even pull some stuff out, we may be able to build back things that are kind of right-sized, the right-size procedures.” (Excerpted from Jerusalem Demsas’ interview of Jennifer Pahlka.)
Almost two hundred years ago, in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln offered a moving defense of American institutions before the Young Man’s Lyceum in Springfield. His description of the “mobocratic spirit” and those who “having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, … make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations” is markedly reminiscent of recent headlines, but I’ll focus on his treatment of ambition for now.
Lincoln argued that the greatest threat to America was not foreign invasion4 but rather those who belong to “the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.” Some “Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon” who could never be satisfied by a seat in Congress or a presidency. The young lawyer explained:
“Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.”
As an advocate of a healthy welfare state and strong labor laws, I could hardly endorse the idea that there is “nothing left to be done in the way of building up” in America today, yet the general sentiment rings true. To a one ambitious and vain men, the Trump administration has begun pulling down all that has served the nation well for the past decades and centuries.
Musk wants DOGE to be his legacy, so he takes aim at the very agency that is responsible for collecting tax revenue in the name of fixing the federal budget. Ever obsessed with size and physical projection, Trump has already begun to prattle about expansionary wars in Panama and Greenland, to international horror.
The next four years, or at least the next two years, will not see any major progress at the federal level. Democrats’ goal instead must be to stop this stripping of the federal government for parts. This ongoing conversion of time-hallowed institutions into plaques and idols dedicated to the veneration of Donald J. Trump et al.
While many Americans may profess a belief the federal government should be reformed, that foreign aid should be slashed irrespective of the lives lost, Democrats must nevertheless choose to “[stand] 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.”
Well, there’s my case for a more conservative Democratic Party. Can I get my thousands of Substack subscribers and lucrative contract with The Free Press now?
My favorite articles of the past week:
Andy Craig on militant liberalism for The UnPopulist
Steve Early interviewing Dan Osborne for Labor Notes
Charles Kaiser interviewing Paul Krugman about leaving the NYT for the Columbia Journalism Review
And Andrew Fedorov’s profile of Chapo Trap House for Vanity Fair
Another thing I’ve written recently (quite a few good pieces coming in the next ~week!):
A profile/explainer of the three candidates running for Tuscaloosa’s District 1 city council seat
And the books I’ve been reading recreationally:
Harold F. Gosnell’s Machine Politics: Chicago Model
Honoré de Balzac’s Droll Stories
Personally, I’m tired of conservative myth-making and would rather some sentence from Buckley’s defense of segregation or case for forcefully tattooing those stricken with AIDS be how the nation remembers him.
The worst members of this tradition will also gripe about the excesses of Lincoln while remaining mum about the tyrannies of the American slaveholder.
As the lawyers who host the 5-4 Pod point out, it was just a few years ago that a conservative Supreme Court majority ruled that the federal government cannot “commandeer” the states.
“All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.”