Trumpism, Conservatism, and the Republican Party (II)

In my last post, I talked about how Trumpism is best understood as a manifestation of white ethnic nationalism, and how this has replaced small-government conservatism as the motivating force in twenty-first century Republican politics. In my next posts I want to dive a bit deeper and examine in brief the history of these competing ideas, beginning here with small-government conservatism.

The US version of conservatism traces its intellectual roots back to two men: Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson. Burke was an Irishman who famously wrote about the French Revolution which it turns out he was no big fan of. And for good reasons; for all of the problems inherent under the French monarchy, the Revolution was often a grisly, brutal affair. And while Burke was sympathetic to the goals of the French revolutionaries, he was repulsed by the result.

Hence conservatism, which in its Burkean conception calls for change to happen slowly (when it happens at all) and emphasizes intellectual humility and the dangers of the unknown. In this sense there's a lot to like about conservatism. Of course there's also a more cynical take on conservatism, that it represents an intellectual justification and defense of the existing social order. The best description of this I've come across comes from Corey Robin, in a book he wrote several years ago: conservatism is "... a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back."

Regardless of your level of cynicism, twentieth-century conservatism bears little resemblance to the Burkean ideals of intellectual humility and slow, careful change. Rather, early conservative intellectuals like William F. Buckley viewed conservatism as being primarily about low taxes (especially on the wealthy) and minimal government interference in the economy. "Small government," was the main ideological guidepost and in this sense the twentieth century conservatism seems quite a bit closer to Corey Robin's interpretation.

With regards to Jefferson: of course he needs no introduction. First as Secretary of State and then as Vice President and then President he was an advocate of a small central government with limited powers, which advocacy makes him a popular figure among the right. This view of the role of the federal government was dominant through early US history and was embodied in the politics of the Democratic-Republican and then Democratic party. That said, despite Democratic dominance, the government did steadily increase its reach of the course of the antebellum period (for an excellent history of this time you could do a lot worse than Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought). The key thing I want to focus on here is that during the antebellum era, the Democratic party did not advocate for limited government out of some abstract principle. Rather, the pursuit of limited government power was in the interest of defending the existing social and economic order. To wit: plantation slavery.

The United States of the antebellum period was unique in that it really was two distinct nations stitched together. North of the Mason-Dixon line was a more-or-less modern industrializing state. Subsistence agriculture was being replaced by wage labor, especially in factories. There was a nascent financial system developing in New York City. The northeastern part of the US represented contemporaneous England far more than it did the South. And as for the South? The economy was based on plantation agriculture and the growth of cotton. In this it resembled contemporaneous Brazil far more than it did the north.

And of course the South bitterly opposed the extension of government power. It did so for rational reasons. Southern plantations were tremendously profitable at the time only due to the violent expropriation of the labor of millions of black persons. Southerners such as Jefferson viewed a strong central government as a threat to slavery. They also rightfully feared industrialization and wage labor. As Sven Beckert makes clear in Empire of Cotton, cotton planters were everywhere destined to be the lowest rung on the ladder in terms of the global cotton industry; squeezed by financiers, merchants, and (much later) retailers. The South's opposition to large government was not out of some abstract Burkean principle; it was out of simple survival instinct: across the world muscular governments were a force for industrialization and the commodification of labor.

The question of slavery was settled by 1865, and it's worth noting that by then the question of the scope of government was also settled, at least for a few generations. Through the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the United States developed as a major industrial power; by World War I it was the equal of England. And as with England, this process of industrialization was accompanied by a dramatic expansion of the reach of government.

And so rather than being an extension of the Jeffersonian tradition (which was fundamentally a defense of plantation agriculture), twentieth-century small-government conservatism as practiced by the likes of Reagan is a relatively modern idea. As recently as the nineteen-fifties, Republicans did not oppose the existence of the welfare state erected in the wake of the Great Depression; they ran elections on being more competent stewards of that state. It wasn't until the Goldwater nomination of 1964 that small-government conservatism stepped onto the main stage of US politics, and of course in that initial outing it was soundly rejected. Richard Nixon was of course no conservative (he was largely uninterested in domestic politics; his passion was in the global chess match that was the Cold War). It wasn't until Ronald Reagan in 1980 that conservatism found its footing in US politics. And of course Reagan rose to power (as I will write about in my next post) by exploiting the politics of racial backlash.

My next post will examine in brief the history of white ethnic nationalism, which I view as a modern manifestation of the centuries-old idea of white supremacy. I will show that in contrast to the relatively new ideology of small-government conservatism, white supremacy has been a powerful and enduring current in American politics, and today it is expressed in the politics of Donald Trump and his supporters.