Sunday, Dec. 2, 2018 | 2 a.m.
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Not so very long ago, there was a little movement known as reform conservatism, which was supposed to supply the intellectual ballast for a normal center-right presidency, the policy ideas for a post-Tea Party GOP. I was part of this small church; you can find a larger gathering of its apostles photographed in a worthy-of-John Trumbull setting for the July 6, 2014, issue of The New York Times’ Sunday Magazine — which ran almost exactly one year before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator and ensured that no normal center-right presidency would happen this decade.
Like all small sects, reform conservatism had its share of internal divisions, but the basic idea was to claim a middle ground between left-wing pessimism about the post-1970s American economy and right-wing faith in the eternal verities of Reaganomics. The left looked at the years from Reagan to the younger Bush and saw an ascendant plutocracy and an immiserated working class. The official orthodoxy of the right — embodied most notably by the Wall Street Journal editorial page — saw a long period of solid post-stagflation growth that only lacked for more supply-side tax cuts to be truly turbocharged.
The reform conservatives aspired to a more nuanced take. Reaganomics had been a relative success in its own time, we thought, part of a necessary turn toward deregulation and freer trade and lower taxes that had pulled Western economies out of their 1970s malaise. Inequality had increased, but middle- and working-class Americans had enjoyed gains nonetheless; even when wages had stagnated, tax cuts and transfer payments had helped boost most Americans’ incomes, and they had shared in the benefits of lower prices and ample consumer goods.
So the left-wing pessimists were too pessimistic, we thought ... but at the same time, there were real problems facing the working class, a social crisis that had some link to stagnating incomes and the decline of industrial jobs, and the tax-cuts-as-panacea style of conservatism had passed its sell-by date. What was needed was not a repudiation of Reaganomics but an updating (and a recovery of some of Reagan’s own forgotten impulses), in which conservatism would seek to solidify the material basis of the working-class family and blue-collar communities — with child tax credits, wage subsidies, a more skills-based immigration system — even as it retained its basic commitment to free trade, light regulation and economic growth.
That was the story we wanted Republican politicians to tell. Instead, Trump came along and told a darker one. “Sadly, the American dream is dead,” he announced after that escalator ride, and proceeded to campaign on a radically pessimistic message about the post-Reagan economic order, in which bad trade deals and mass immigration were held responsible for what he called “American carnage” in working-class communities.
During the campaign, I called this message “reform conservatism’s evil twin,” since it started from a similar assumption (that the existing Republican policy agenda wasn’t offering enough to the American worker) and ended up in a more apocalyptic and xenophobic place.
But I could also have called it “reform conservatism’s more politically successful twin,” because, of course, Trump won — twice over, in fact, triumphing over both the Republican politicians (Rubio, Jeb!) who tried to borrow some of reform conservatism’s themes and a Democratic nominee linked, through her husband’s record, to the post-Reagan economic consensus.
And while Trump was winning, a certain amount of evidence emerged to confirm his darker view of the American situation — the surging opioid epidemic, the rise of what Anne Case and Angus Deaton called “deaths of despair” among lower-income white Americans, growing evidence that the opening to China had worked out far better for Beijing’s government than for the American worker, and more.
All of this has left conservative policy wonks, the erstwhile reformocons and others, with a dilemma. Should they defend the post-Reagan economic order against Trump’s blustering, blundering assault — defend the benefits of “neoliberalism” and free trade and global openness, warn against the sclerosis that protectionism and industrial policy often bring, champion the innovative culture of Silicon Valley against its populist despisers? Or should they take Trump’s success as evidence that even reform conservatism was ultimately too sanguine and too moderate, and that there are deeper problems in the economic order that require a more-than-moderate conservative response?
This dilemma is apparent in the vigorous intra-conservative debate over a new book, “The Once and Future Worker,” written by former Mitt Romney domestic policy director Oren Cass. In certain ways, the book is an extension of the reform-conservative project, an argument for policies that support “a foundation of productive work” as the basis for healthy communities and flourishing families and robust civic life. But Cass is more dramatic in his criticism of Western policymaking since the 1970s, more skeptical of globalization’s benefits to Western workers, and more dire in his diagnosis of the real socioeconomic condition of the working class.
Cass’ bracing tone reads like (among other things) an attempt to fix reform conservatism’s political problem, as it manifested itself in 2016 — a problem of lukewarmness, of milquetoast wonkery, that Trumpism’s more sweeping promises simply steamrolled in political debate.
But that tone, as much as Cass’ specific proposals, has divided the center-right’s wonks. There has been a lot of favorable attention for the book (including from my colleague David Brooks); at the same time, there have been sharp critiques, both from within the reform conservative camp (from Michael Strain and James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, and from Scott Winship, a policy adviser to Sen. Mike Lee of Utah) and from more libertarian or classical-liberal types (like Sam Hammond of the Niskanen Center).
The critics’ concerns vary, but a common thread is that Cass’ diagnosis overstates the struggles of American workers and exaggerates the downsides of globalization, and in so doing risks giving aid and comfort to populist policies — or, for that matter, socialist policies — that would ultimately choke off growth.
In a sense, the debate reproduces the larger argument about whether post-Trump conservative politics should seek to learn something from his ascent or simply aim to repudiate him — with Cass offering a reform conservatism that effectively bids against Trump for populist support, and his critics warning that he’s conceding way too much to Trumpist demagogy.
But the argument over Cass’ book also raises a larger question that both right and left are wrestling with in our age of populist discontent: Namely, is the West’s post-1980 economic performance a hard-won achievement and pretty much the best we could have done, or is there another economic path available, populist or social democratic or something else entirely, that doesn’t just lead back to stagnation?
A great deal turns upon the answer. Economic growth since the 1970s has disappointed relative to what many optimists imagined in 1965; at the same time, it has been stronger than what many Carter-era pessimists feared we could expect. If you emphasize the disappointment, then experimenting with a different policy orientation — be it Cass’ work-and-family conservatism or democratic socialism or something else — seems like a risk worth taking; after all, things aren’t that great under neoliberalism as it is.
But if you focus on the possible fragility of the growth we have achieved, the ease with which left-wing and right-wing populisms can lead to Venezuela, then you’ll share the anxieties of Cass’ conservative critics — who are willing to tinker with work-and-family policy but worry that to make any major concession to globalization’s critics puts far too much at risk.
Perhaps the best reason to bet on Cass’ specific vision is that the social crisis he wants to address is itself a major long-term drag on growth — because a society whose working class doesn’t work or marry or bear children will age, even faster than the West is presently aging, into stagnation and decline.
At the same time, it might well be, as some of his critics think, that the working class’ social crisis is mostly or all cultural, a form of late-modern anomie detached from material privation. In which case political-economy schemes to “fix” the problem won’t have social benefits to match their potential economic costs.
So the decision for Cass’ kind of conservative reform would be, necessarily, a real policy gamble, based on the hope that a greater human flourishing and a more mid-20th-century style of growth is still possible in rich societies like ours. And if the first iteration of reform conservatism was defined and limited by its moderation, his version 2.0 may succeed or fail based on the right’s appetite for trying something else immoderate, even radical, after the Trump experiment has run its course.
Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.
