The Future of Conservatism

good evening i am terry rhodes dean of the college of arts and sciences at the university of north carolina at chapel hill and i'd like to welcome you to tonight's abby speaker series event the future of conservatism the abbey speaker series is hosted by unc's program for public discourse which seeks to build our students capacities for debate and deliberation and to foster a culture of constructive dialogue about issues of national and international importance given that many americans describe themselves as conservative the future of conservatism is certainly an issue of national importance moreover the conservatism movement in america is not and has never been monolithic tonight's panel will explore both areas of consensus and areas of disagreement within american conservatism the program for public discourse has partnered with the arete initiative at duke's kenan institute for ethics to plan tonight's event the arete initiative encourages the cultivation of intellectual and civic virtues and strives to foster community across ideological divides all of tonight's panelists have been vigorous and thoughtful advocates of conservative ideas patrick dineen is professor of political science and the david a potenciani memorial chair of constitutional studies at the university of notre dame according to former president barack obama professor dineen's most recent book why liberalism failed offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the west feel issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril uval levin is the director of social cultural and constitutional studies at the american enterprise institute he wears many hats including that of scholar journalist and policy advisor dr levin is the founding and current editor of the journal national affairs he also served as a member of the white house domestic policy staff under president george w bush and was executive director of the president's council on bioethics his most recent book published last year is a time to build colon from family and community to congress and the campus how recommitting to our institutions can revive the american dream daniel mccarthy is the editor of modern age a conservative review published by the intercollegiate studies institute he also serves as the director of the robert novak journalism fellowship program at the fund for american studies and is a visiting fellow at the center for the study of statesmanship at the catholic university of america ashlane menchaca bagnulo is assistant professor of political science at texas state university she has published scholarly articles on a wide range of topics including saint augustine james madison and machiavelli professor bagnulo has also published articles for a more general audience at the online journal public discourse our moderator jed atkins is director of the arate initiative at the kenan institute for ethics at duke university where he is the e blake byrne associate professor of classical studies and an associate professor of political science an expert on greek roman and early christian moral and political thought professor atkins has published multiple books on roman political thought thank you to all of our panelists for participating in what is sure to be a lively and thoughtful discussion and finally i wanted to give a special thanks to the program for public discourses program assistance hunter matthews and jonathan nichols who have made this and other events possible this year now i will turn it over to our moderator professor jed adkins thank you dean rhodes for that kind introduction thanks too to the program for public discourse for inviting me and the other panelists to be part of this wonderful new abbey speakers series thanks to my fellow panelists for joining us into you the audience as well i'm very happy to welcome you to tonight's conversation on the future of conservatism a couple of quick details about procedure the panel will be recorded and available later on uh the program's youtube page the panelists and i will spend roughly the first 50 minutes or so in conversation and then the last 30 minutes will take questions and answers from the audience to submit a question during the talk please use the question and answer function on the webinar to enter your questions and we'll try to take as many as we can get to well let's go ahead and get started um welcome ashleen patrick you've all dan i'm really looking forward to our conversation this afternoon in order to talk about the future of conservatism i think we need to start with the present state of conservatism as on the political left so there has been rapid change on the right in recent years and one way to i think appreciate these changes that led to the present state of conservatism is to take a quick glance at recent history in 2010 uh uva political scientist jim caesar published an essay on conservatism that sought to identify the common denominator behind the different philosophies understood at the time to compose conservatism the essay is called four heads in one heart and i thought you know this would also be a perfect essay to cite on a zoom panel on conservatism featuring uh four heads um the first of these heads according to caesar was traditionalism the big name associated with traditionalism was russell kirk and a big publication the modern age which dan mccarthy who's here with us tonight now edits traditionalism focuses on preserving national and local traditions and communities local schools literature and culture it's critical of the forces that disrupt them so kirk was as critical as of capitalism as of socialism the second head was uh universal natural rights-based conservatism which caesar calls neoconservatism it upholds the wisdom of the american founding as expressed in the declaration of independence and the universality of human rights perhaps the most prominent example of the implementation of this political philosophy was the the george w bush administration the third head is libertarianism libertarians emphasize the free market and generally freedom from government interference out of a preference for spontaneous order and the fourth head according to caesar was the religious right uh the religious right first emerges of force in the 1980s and took the viewpoint that uh there was a growing political and cultural threat to religion that required believers to meet this threat with by taking political action and mobilization now political caesar's account of conservatism strikes me as a really nice taxonomy as conservative conservatism as it existed from the 1980s through uh roughly say 2015. and when i think about the current state of conservatism it's pretty evident that i think we're going to have to start moving heads around so help me with this process what should be added and subtracted from this picture uh to update it uh to fit our present situation uh you've all let's begin with you all right uh well thank you very much jed first of all for drawing this group together thanks to you and for the program of public discourse uh i i'm uh i'm very grateful to be part of a panel like this and eager to learn from my fellow panelists here you've certainly asked a very large question to start with and i'm sure it's more than than i can wrestle to the ground myself but maybe i would start by saying that these kinds of taxonomies necessarily speak to the moment they're in and i i think that uh that jim caesar's categorization certainly useful for his purpose it's a very powerful piece that i'd recommend to anyone but i don't know that it really works the description of the right over the generation or so that you suggest from the 80s to the mid-2010s say i'm not sure i see the case for separating traditionalists and religious conservatives for example except for a very particular purpose i'm not sure i see the case for viewing neoconservatives as a kind of universal natural rights champions except on a narrow set of issues maybe especially foreign policy issues um and you know that kind of neoconservative uh i don't know that there were ever more than a dozen or so of them in this country of 300 million people so i'm not sure that that classification is going to be more useful to start with than the more familiar kind of three-legged stool metaphor which divided conservatives into uh you might say market people and cultural traditionalists and anti-communists um and you know a lot of people throughout the the cold war era fell into more than one category at once that's how the movement worked really but i think the categories were very useful um obviously anti-communism which was a kind of organizing principle for the whole isn't there as an organizing principle and hasn't been now for some time and in a sense the question has been on the right what is the organizing principle that holds together market people and and cultural traditionalists um and what else as you say might be added to that list that's in a way the question we're asking now is that organizing principle something like the nation is it anti-elitism just anti-leftism um i think the right is struggling around questions like this now there's no consensus answer at this point so while we certainly have some market people and some traditionalists in a coalition together and some you might say just non-left foreign policy thinkers at this point um it's not really quite clear what it is that holds them together and i think that's the question you're getting at i would say to really answer that question you have to take a step back and suggest and and ask yourself what do conservatives believe what is an identifiable conservatism to begin with and i think that has to do with more than political issues and maybe reaches to something more like almost an anthropology i think conservatives are committed to two truths about the human person that are in tension with each other as a practical matter on the one hand we believe that the human person is fallen or imperfect or sinful or in some somehow in need of formation before being capable of freedom that that formation requires strong formative institutions and those are what we want to conserve the family the church the community the school work even political institutions that begin from the premise of human fallenness and and try to form the human person on the other hand we also believe that the human person is made in a kind of divine image and so that every person is possessed of some basic fundamental dignity equally which we can understand as equal basic rights and some of those rights express themselves as constraints on what society can do to us so the people are all equal equally endowed with rights these two anthropological premises which i think you can find at the bottom of a lot of different kinds of conservative thinking pull in different directions the one towards strong formative social institutions the other toward individual liberty and i think you always find that tension in anything that can call itself conservative thought conservatism doesn't really defend one or the other it defends the combination of the two which is the free society broadly speaking and that combination needs defending because both parts of of that combination are often under attack from the left in different ways and i think that combination means that market people and traditionalists do belong together the combination of them was not some invention of a bunch of yellies in the middle of the 20th century it's in a way of the essence of of modern civilization um it's been with us at least since uh the late enlightenment in some ways elements of it have been with us since since the classical west began but that combination is also practically incoherent in some ways so that its defenders are always struggling with each other over their identity their priorities there's often a lot of tension between defenders of community morals and defenders of individual rights and freedom um and that's what the right looks like it looks like that tension so that right now the the kind of struggle that we see makes sense it's it's not it didn't come out of nowhere even though this feels like an unusually divided and divisive moment on the right there's one other thing i'd say the the right in america is not just conservatives right it is sometimes dominated by conservatives not always um and i would say at this point the coalition of the right is also defined by a disaffection from an elite culture that is heavily dominated by the left conservatives are obviously disaffected from it but so are other people and the the the people whose engagement with politics is most and first and foremost moved by that disaffection with elite institutions aren't necessarily conservatives they're anti-elite they're populists sometimes they can be conservatives and sometimes not and i think that tension too has been kind of characteristic of the american right for more than half a century there is a populist strain in it that's not the same as the conservative strain and maybe that's one head that i would add to your list um so i i guess my answer to your question is that i i think something like a fusion of traditionalists and individualists is always going to be near the core of the american right it's always going to draw in some populists and that's a coalition that's always going to be tense and uneasy and yet it makes sense and so to me this moment doesn't feel totally different it's not a complete break from the history of the american right but it's a moment when those tensions are very much on the surface and have to be thought through in an unusually explicit way well as you've always uh speaking i saw some heads nodding and uh so why don't we go around sort of counter-clockwise and um uh on my screen so ashlane uh is there anything you would like to add um to what uh you've all to uh summary i thought that it was really brilliant and kind of good way of parsing out the ways that there are tensions and how there will probably always be but i think one question we have to ask is where is conservatism going to go demographically um and what the answer to that question is is going to have something to do with what conservatism begins to identify itself as publicly right now it's very reactive i know teaching um in texas i have a lot of students who are interested in conservatism they aren't necessarily conservatives but they they are recoiling from something on the left and a lot of the the profile of the right right now is composed of people who are recoiling from different things but might prioritize different things and it's really hard for us to make that coherent and i think the demographics are going to spell out the survival of conservatism but then also the profile thanks patrick yeah uh yeah i appreciate um yuval um i i i share his uh uh to a degree his uh correction to uh to our mutual friend jim caesar who you know doesn't necessarily need correction but the way in which he portrays the uh the contemporary american conservative dimension as these these four heads uh and i appreciated that he characterized it instead by talking about the again the sort of the the now somewhat uh mosaic predictable three-legged stool but it it was a uh it was a reality uh it was a reality throughout uh and following uh the cold war and in particular it was a stool that was made out of different pieces that all of which had their particular reasons for opposing communism or opposing you know the creep of socialism in the united states whether it was religious conservatives um including catholics but not limited to protestant catholics orthodox uh the kind of you know the hostility toward religion that you saw especially in the soviet union the kind of aggressive atheism uh of um of not only soviet communism but broadly uh increasingly on the left and of course not just anti-communism but i think although it was only 12 neoconservatives according to uval it was a very influential uh group of people uh who weren't merely anti-communists but really began to develop i think theories of and practices of a kind of liberal internationalism really seeing the need for um not not just um containing in a sense liberalism within one particular national tradition but seeing it as a kind of gift to the entire world and when you mention george w bush that was really the essence of his second inaugural address was a kind of evangelical form of liberal internationalism that we would spread liberalism uh throughout the world as a kind of gift to the world and um i think what we have seen in the last several years and i guess here i'll differ with you val is not the not the kind of you know return of tensions uh between the three legs but the recognition that the stool was never really all that all that stable uh that that the three legs were were held together by the external force especially the threat of communism but that at least two of those legs and the one that um uh the in particular the the two that uh of the two that you've all mentioned the libertarian economic uh strain uh and the liberal international strain uh i think would be very hard without the sort of presence and threat of communism to describe those in some ways inherently conservative uh seeking to conserve a way of life or seeking to preserve a tradition in fact they're both in kind of distinct ways anti-traditional they seek to transform the world in a direction of liberal individualism liberal freedom uh and i think what we're seeing now is more than just a kind of reiteration of of certain tensions within conservatism but a real question of whether that the form of that coalition will be able to continue we've already seen the neoconservatives effectively sort of leave the republican party uh but not just that but join quite fervently the democratic party bill you know bill crystal i think being most prominent among them that that whatever seemed to once have separated them no longer separates them uh and i and i think we're seeing you know similar kinds of transmutations happening in the economic realm as well i think certainly as a consequence of of trump's uh uh election but i think beyond that i just think that there are real tensions so i i guess i'm not as i'm not of the some more sanguine view perhaps of yuval that that the stool can be reconstructed in some form and nor do i or do i particularly think that we need to reconstruct in that form i think we're in a time a real transition to a new and different kind of set of furniture uh and the question in right now is what is what the sort of pieces of the of that furniture will look like once the once the living room is re it's sort of redesigned dan would you like to jump in yeah we've covered a lot of ground already but i think a few notes can perhaps be added to the foregoing remarks um it seems to me there's an irony because as patrick has noted uh what had been a three-legged stool that was conceived for largely defensive purposes during the cold war era especially with respect to foreign policy uh became a rather radicalized and perhaps even revolutionary agenda after the end of the cold war and into the 1990s where there really was both on the american left and on the right and in the center for that matter a belief that uh the american way of life was something to be exported to the entire planet both economically and where necessary by the use of military force and that we had a revolutionary message to bring to the entire planet and this was a message of freedom this was a message of modernity this was a message of uh development that would lead to a sort of consumer paradise for everyone and even communist china would be transformed by trade relations with the united states as a result of entering the wto and whatnot this was a very liberal agenda in the you know sort of old sense of the word liberal is also quite a liberal agenda new sense of the word liberal as well um so both culturally and economically i think it could be described as liberal it could be described also as revolutionary in terms of the effect it was intended to have on uh you know states all around the world regions of the world and yet one reason why this revolutionary liberal agenda becomes uh something that conservatives adopt in the 1990s and they stick to throughout the george w bush years is because of a sort of flawed conservatism uh the flawed conservatism i have in mind here is a psychological kind of conservatism which is simply a resistance to recognizing that circumstances have changed and therefore one's ideas and one's response to the world must change as well so a three-legged stool which i think had a very strong defensive logic and situational logic during the cold war became a kind of idol and it became a checklist and it became something that was an e-day fix for conservatives after the cold war they continued to behave as if the cold war was still happening or as if you still had the same uh need for american uh military buildups as you had during the cold war itself and similarly with uh liberal economics um it was threatened by communism during the cold war but at the after the end of the cold war there was this belief among american conservatives that there was no real need to question uh the gospel of liberal economics and to question the benefits that capitalism would bring not only to the world but of course uh to uh other americans right here at home as well so a certain kind of psychological conservatism a sheer intellectual inertia i think led to conservatives sticking with a three-legged stool which had a purpose at one time but became uh transformed into quite a revolutionary agenda after the cold war what you're seeing right now is not only a re-evaluation of all that but also a response to the failures of that three-legged stool that continued into the early 2000s and into in fact uh really up until the last four or five years that um you know in terms of our foreign policy we've been very disappointed to see that we can get into wars much more easily than we can win them or get out in terms of our economic policy and the results of globalization we've seen that uh this has been devastating for a great many communities within our country and that um you know there's a certain amount of anxiety which possesses even the winners in our uh liberal economic order and uh and of course it has not had the liberalizing effect politically and culturally upon the people's republic of china that everyone in the 1990s assumed that uh this global capitalist agenda would have and then of course in terms of our own culture in terms of the status of our soul and the virtue of our republic i think conservatives are deeply uh maybe pessimistic is perhaps putting it too strongly they're certainly deeply troubled by the tendencies they see which neither capitalism nor an aggressive foreign policy seems to be capable of countering and in fact as you know patrick dean's own works have pointed out um you know capitalism and an aggressive foreign policy might actually be exacerbating uh the moral difficulties that our country is facing so while i do agree with you all that you do have these persistent pulls in conservative thought or thought on the right uh between uh you know sort of liberty and between a critique of power and between um on the other hand uh a commitment to human nature and to uh an understanding of ourselves uh you know and our higher uh ends as well as um the tendency towards sinfulness that we all possess um even though there is that persistent tension i think the particular historical conditions we're facing right now are indeed uh more like those that um some of the others of us have mentioned in that they're leading to a fracturing that is perhaps more um pronounced than what we had seen uh in recent decades um but i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing i mean this fracture fracturing is um also very intellectually enlivening uh i i wrote an essay uh you know a few years ago pointing out uh to how uh revivified the uh conservative quarterly journal seemed to have become and i mentioned yuval 11's uh national affairs is one key instance of that uh modern age under my predecessor's uh uh editorship was another example and it seems to me there's a bit of an intellectual renaissance right now on the right and among conservatives even as there is this great anxiety about the political future of uh conservatism well um in addition to uh changing our metaphor from uh heads to stools uh you all have given us plenty to talk about i think for the next 40 minutes or so and maybe just one observation that i'll make uh at sort of a larger level that has already come out on the table is uh whether or not uh conservatism in its different forms is primarily sort of a a negative sort of reaction against uh liberalism um uh which you might think you know i'm thinking of ashlyne's anecdote about her students or you know responding to something in the culture or uh patrick's point about um you know the neo-conservatives sort of leaving uh you know the republican coalition or or whether there's uh you know yuval uh points out conservatism is for something and he sketched out sort of an anthropo a certain uh anthropology uh so even now i think you know there's there's uh some differences that are uh emerging i want to move on though and i want to stay actually with uh you know uh with with dan uh because one term that is sort of a new term uh that uh uh has been sort of introduced into the political lexicon of uh conservatism is national conservatism and so i wonder if you could help us understand national conservatism and how does it relate to if we want to use caesar's term which maybe we don't anymore but traditionalism um you know and in particular how why does national conservatism matter uh you know sort of for everyday americans as we try to understand uh the conservative uh political landscape well national conservatism is a new label but in some ways it is drawing upon uh tendencies which had been developing long before donald trump emerged on the political scene so part of national conservatism is indeed what you would call nationalism and a concern with national borders a concern with uh citizenship a concern with america's role in the world whether it should be more of an internationalist kind of liberal international order preserving role or whether it should be something that is focused on a you know more narrow national interest for the united states itself and in terms of economics too there is the question of whether our economy is a national economy that shouldn't serve our own citizens first and foremost or whether our economy is devoted primarily and overall to freedom and to whatever results freedom might produce which may be uh great benefits for wall street for perhaps uh setbacks for main street and uh perhaps you know uh growing power for um uh china in the world and uh you know perhaps a less of an economic role in the world for the united states which we're not quite there yet but it's certainly where the the tendencies are going so national conservatism has that element of nationalism in it and in some ways that was prefigured by people who were called paleoconservatives back in the 1990s and someone like pat buchanan for example stands out as a sort of um a prophet of this forthcoming conservatism you could also however look at someone like ross perot in the 1990s as also being uh you know a kind of early uh instantiation of a kind of nationalist conservatism but the second uh kind of national conservatism which is somewhat related to the first but is you know quite distinct in its own right is um what many of its own adherents call the new right and this is a rather youthful intellectual movement that believes that uh that uh conservatism should not be afraid of the use of government power and including uh federal government power so a number of these national conservatives uh are much more um favorably disposed towards for example uh pro-family uh economic policies at the federal level than the conservatives who had preceded them and that was even true uh you know that's a difference in fact in some ways with the traditionalists of a past era because traditionalists like russell kirk were also very skeptical of federalist programs uh federal programs just as libertarians were and the the concern back then was always that uh a federal program would lead to centralization it would lead to a corruption of the very institutions it was trying to support this is something you find not only in russell kirk but also in figures like robert nisbet as well who said that the idea of a kind of uh national bureau for communities would be a contradiction so there's a little bit of a tension between the old traditionalism and the new national conservatism with respect to the the role for the federal government in trying to support these lower levels of uh our communities and our culture uh including the family itself then finally i would say there's also a small element in national conservatism which is an attempt to revive uh the kind of mid 20th century uh american national spirit uh that might be personified by someone like jfk and my friend frank buckley for example who's written a number of books about conservatism uh you know in the 21st century uh will often look back to jfk as opposed to ronald reagan as an example of um the kind of uh ethos that conservatives today should embrace again it's one that's less hostile perhaps to government power but it's not primarily defined by government power so much as it is an idea of an america that has a bright future that is combining both uh economic freedom with a certain amount of you know government policy that is designed to create mobility for everyone as opposed to having a system that tends to favor wall street and the most uh financially advanced interest so i'd say those three elements together compose national conservatism and how they're going to um balance one another in the future and which of those tendencies will be dominant is something we'll find out i think in the next four to ten years thanks and you know i mean one sort of element of that maybe the first element that you know you mentioned sort of pat buchanan and um and i grew up in in central pennsylvania where you know in the in the the late 80s early 90s there were quite a lot of buchananites and those buchananites typically turned into trump voters and so so on one hand we have would you say sort of a populist wing of uh sort of national conservatism and then perhaps the second branch that you mentioned uh you called sort of the new right based uh upon um i i think you sort of sort of respect for the institution of uh the family and it's very interesting i'm thinking of you know joram hazoni's book on um on uh on on an important book on nationalism and i think he's part of this movement you know he begins by by emphasizing that the important institution is the family not the individual uh which is you know the end focus on the individual sort of a liberal internationalism um so so it seems like we have sort of a populist wing and then maybe a wing that that is not so sympathetic to populism is that uh generally right well i i think there's a lot of crossover between the two wings and as far as populism goes i'll maybe add a footnote to what yuval had said um it seems to me that there is this question of the integrity of our national institutions the institutions that should be forming us as people and if those institutions have taken a turn toward revolutionary ideology then one would expect to see conservative attitudes towards those institutions change instead of being defensive attitudes they would now become critical attitudes and i think that explains uh certainly the intellectual populism that you see among many national conservatives they see the institutions such as our universities and our major media outlets as being fundamentally corrupted and turned in a revolutionary direction that wants to transform uh ordinary american public life and so uh those conservatives who are concerned about this see um a certain affinity or have a certain affinity with um sort of grassroots populists who may simply have a more emotional rejection to uh the kind of leadership that our elites are providing so i think in general um there is actually less tension right now among national conservatives along lines of populism or you know sort of technocracy then one might expect and in fact it's surprising but you know many of the leading political figures who are identified with a kind of populist insurgency on the right uh in fact have ivy league degrees and uh they're certainly their uh you know senate staff and white house staff are people who are very well educated and um who uh you know in many ways resemble the very class that they're fighting against the college educated uh sort of a liberal elite yeah so now we've gotten uh thanks daniel we've gotten populism on the table and and that's obviously uh an important development and thinking about politics both on the right and the left and um since this is a panel on conservatism let's stay with the right and uh so how do we account for the rise of populism especially right populism connected uh uh to trump can can you be both a populist and a conservative um ashlane can we maybe start with you for this i think the answer to whether or not you can be both a populist and a conservative is going to end up being answered by the question of what we decide the nation is because one of the sort of elusive things i think in the conversation that we're having is that whatever shape uh conservatism is going to take it's a realigning moment and there needs to be some sort of shared consensus and i think when i think about the sort of reactive nature or the fractured nature of different parts of the right presently i think what they share actually is a sort of longing for something that is whole something that they belong to and something that they can share among themselves but i don't think that they have defined that yet and the problem with populism um and defining that i think is that you have to have a coherent idea of who the people are um and you can do this on demographic lines you can do this on economic lines which would overlap with demographic lines that think along or you can do it sort of based around i think this kind of nostalgia for the past which has been what i think is motivating a lot of um the movement that we've seen since 2016. but we don't really have a shared narrative of the past and we don't have a coherent identity about it i don't think even if you you just put aside the 1619 project which is on the left on the right you're going to have all sort of internisting debates that go back to buckley and the john birch society infant buckley himself was said that you know in the south it was better for what he called the more advanced race to have more political power so if you're going to talk about populism as conservatism you have to talk about what we are sharing and logging for and who the we is um i think for me at least it seems like there are so many variables in how this could go and it has to do with what opinion leaders get out in front um and it has to do with what sort of slogans really touch people i think when we looked at the cpac um poll that came out this year um the priorities were very different than they were even four years ago um the pro-life priorities were lower the second amendment priorities were higher anti-immigration higher right so um i'm not even sure in the long run that we would be conservative in the sense of conserving something that actually exists patrick um yeah same question uh for you um what accounts for the rise of populism and can you be both a populist and a conservative yeah yeah i mean uh i'm hesitant to invoke the name of edmund burke with uh with yuval sitting there he wrote the book although i was the dissertation one of the advisors so i guess i can speak on it i in a way i think um i think the you know the rise of what what we often describe as populism as a conservative uh phenomenon is more a return toward the original um form of conservatism that was you know developed in a different direction as a consequence in particular in the american experience as a consequence to the cold war in just the terms we were talking about several minutes ago so that the the traditional form you could say the original form of conservatism is in particular um a arises out of an experience of it's going all the you know going back to the french revolution um and in various uh moments since then in which a leadership class an elite um operates as a kind of revolutionary force in society and something that dan was speaking eloquently to uh that it operates as a revolutionary force that um succeeds or attempts to upend the traditional forms of life of of ordinary people that it uh that not only does it uh seek a kind of revolutionary movement in um in in society but it actually holds those traditional forms of life with a kind of disdain and uh regards them as as backward and needing to be extirpated as uprooted uh and this was of course this was uh burke's exactly burke's argument in his um uh in his um thought considerations on the french revolution which was a defense of the sort of ordinary virtues of everyday people that accumulate sort of uh through a kind of process of sort of temporal sedimentation over time that have a certain kind of wisdom inherent in those practices uh simply by a kind of trial and error of people living over a long period of time in particular places and with particular ways of life and obviously this can lead to you know just the kinds of of of injustices that ashley rightly highlights but at the same time it leads also to forms of stability and order and expectation and a sort of generational continuity that when you're not wealthy when you're not um you know well equipped for the global international economic order those are those are the best um forms of support that you have as ordinary people just the continuity of place of tradition of community and things that yuval writes eloquently about those kinds of institutions i think that what we think what we see today as a rise of populism is a reassert older kind of conservatism now it's a conservatism and we need to be clear about this that has been in some ways uprooted and destroyed or it's a reaction that's been uprooted in which the conservative impulse or way of life has been uprooted and destroyed it's not coming from a place of health it's not coming from a place where they have you know the people today have those traditions really intact in lots of healthy ways in fact it's coming almost as a kind of plea for help this revolutionary economic order this revolutionary social order has upended everything that we know about the world it's difficult for us to form families it's difficult for us to hold down jobs it's difficult for us uh to have the kinds of forms of stability and order in our community life you know i live in this part of the world in the midwest and you see it so vividly just in the places where you travel these towns that were once flourishing that are just shells of of what they were just 50 100 years ago so it's it's a kind of i would say that it's a it comes from a kind of place of a conservative impulse but in the wake of the devastation that's been wrought by these revolutionary forces uh and i think it's i think it's incumbent on a leadership class today on an elite class today to address this in a way that's not merely condescending and dismissive but supportive of the needs of ordinary people to have the kinds of institutions to have the kinds of practices that allow them to flourish even if they're not getting degrees from the ivy leagues and the jobs on wall street and unless we do that uh i fear that we're in for you know for some extremely turbulent times that you know i mean we've only begun to see the beginning of we may look back to the last four years with nostalgia uh if the leadership class doesn't uh begin to really clue into i think what's what's really happening uh out there today well you've all patrick has has mentioned your name a couple times in in his his answer and um and and um you know you've just written a book um it's been out you know number of months but in the last year it's been out a book on the lack of trust in american institutions called a time to build um and it would seem that populism would be at least of a sort would be a particular threat uh to the stability of institutions and so i was wondering if you could speak to this question within the context of the account of institutions and the threat uh to institutions now that you defend in that book well thank you i i i would certainly associate myself with a lot of what's been said by the other three here i i think that there i i think that a conservative populism is not a contradiction if it arises in the face of a revolutionary establishment which is what we've seen um and so one contradiction begets another it is true it seems to me that populism is unavoidably threatening to institutions and so is in some tension with conservatism on its face but it shares with conservatives in this moment a critique of a kind of elitist progressivism that is using the power of institutions to revolutionize our social order um and so it has some common cause with a genuinely tradition-minded conservatism conservatives have sometimes squared that circle over time by opposing not the institutions but the elites who run the institutions even by opposing those elites in the name of those institutions so if you think about god and man at yale uh william f buckley's first book it's basically an argument for defending the university from the professors um i i think that that makes a lot of sense and in a way it's a kind of it it's a it's a it's a it's the form of a lot of conservative resistance to the rise of a fundamentally progressive elite in america over the past two or three generations it's a way of saying to america's elites that they're not living up to their institutional obligations and so to their obligations to our larger society there are ways of course in which today's right-wing populism is closer to actually rejecting the institutions themselves or to concluding that they're just too far gone to be saved i think that is a threat to what conservatives can offer society though it's understandable i mean looking at the institutions it isn't hard to see why we might need to conclude that they can't be saved but i don't think that's ultimately right and i don't think that's ultimately the right way to think about the obligation that conservatives have to the next generation it's a reaction to the power of the left into the way that the left uses that power so again it's entirely uh understandable i just think that it leads us toward a kind of despair that it isn't ultimately the way for traditionalists to think about our role in society we start with low expectations so we should expect to have to do the work of of fighting for the space for moral formation in every generation that's how we should approach the challenge of the present not with despair not by telling the rising generation that the west is lost that they're inheriting a pile of garbage that's just not true we have faced bigger problems than this in the past and we will face these problems that we have now and can sustain the space for another generation to do the same after us and that's ultimately all we can hope for in this world anyway and we should try to do that with gratitude and with dignity and with good cheer and with hope but it's not easy and i don't think we should dismiss the populist impulse which speaks as patrick suggesting his dance suggested as well to a very real problem that needs to be addressed in a real way not just in the abstract and not passively the the defense of the future of the west requires a fight for the institutions as well as a fight against them and i think that's what conservatives now are called to do we have to do that in ways that keep in mind what we're protecting and conserving and we don't always manage that but there's no avoiding that fight it seems to me thanks and i want to before i shift the the conversation away from this topic i i do want to come back and touch base very quickly with patrick patrick's uh wrote a very important book a few years ago that was uh as we heard in the introduction uh um uh commended by uh president barack obama and uh why liberalism failed and um and and the answer that you give in that book patrick um for why we have a widespread distrust in american institutions of the sort that the trust that your ball is talking about uh huge disparities in income equality uh americans foreign policy failure the rise of populism are fraying social fabric comes from a fundamental problem that's deep rooted in the american political tradition perhaps even back to the very founding of our country and you identify the philosophy behind this problem as as liberalism and and and you have you're speaking of something that is a particular sense of liberalism that you're not meaning sort of left and right you think liberalism is a problem for you know as many self-professed conservatives as you do as uh progressives and so could you just very quickly um uh say what liberalism is and um and maybe just give one quick practical critique sort of implication for this discussion for conservative politics from that first book sure uh or from that last book rather you have many many books yeah that's okay it's the only book that matters apparently uh uh well i mean obviously this it's a it's a term that has uh such a variety of meanings and people will define it in in all kinds of different ways but one way i think of thinking about and i think a really essential way of thinking about liberalism is to think about the word of course liberty and the particular way that i think the sort of architects of the modern form of liberalism uh really think about liberty and and you could say it comes out of it comes out of it's not it's not evil it comes out of a noble impulse which is that people should be free to define the kind of lives they they want to lead that they shouldn't be forced into roles and positions and a status and a profession and a place uh and um a religion and so forth you know against their choice and against their will and so it was you know it was proposed in a society in which you could say it was heavily constrained that the choices of individuals was was heavily constrained by all of the kinds of institutions uh that we're today seeing in kind of disarray and disrepair uh so you could say that the liberal form of freedom which is you know the ability to define yourself who i am not to be defined by any inherited role any inherited status or definition of who i am according to my place i mean think of all the names that are the older names that have the you know alexis de tocqueville right uh which you know means that he's from a particular place and of a particular family uh or in my tradition if your name begins with the letter oh your last name begins with letter o it just told you who you were from o'connor o'callaghan so the world was one in which those aspects of your identity were defined and in many ways liberalism was the effort to allow people and to permit people to create a society which people could pursue a form of self-identification but you could also say it becomes the kind of project where it's not just a permission to do that but it becomes increasingly in a sense mandatory uh that one do that that that the society has to be shaped and formed in such a way in which there's no obstacle to self-definition so that um a kind of you know what what some scholars call a kind of choice architecture is created in which in which one only has choices uh in which there is no in a sense given uh in which exceedingly few institutions that once would have been thought of as deeply formative now have to become not just optional uh but increasingly to be seen as um likely to be oppressive likely to be uh to to limit the kinds of choices i can make about about my self-definition so that it's ideal to raise a child without any religion increasingly without any sense of you know who they are in the world without any sense of what place they might want to or ought to live in uh without a sense of a history or a culture or a tradition that this is the sort of liberal freedom you could say we create a world that's not unlike the world of the state of nature or the individual uh that exists in the state of nature a person without a place without a history without a culture without a religion without any kind of definition of who who they are who they might understand themselves to be and that what's needed is to create a kind of massive architecture to create the conditions of this free human being and those two forms of architecture we've in some ways we've talked about an increasingly revolutionary economic structure a foreign a market that now transcends any political unit uh it's no longer as the market as a place within the city as it would have been in athens the market encompasses all cities it transcends any political boundaries and borders and defines not just who we are spatially but it defines almost every aspect of our lives uh the market the sense of market choices sort of buries itself deep into the human psyche so that every aspect of our life is in a sense turned into a set of market transactions i mean you watch students you know on tinder or something of swiping left i i understand that much that you know the partner they're going to have potentially you know what was at least supposed to be a life partner is is somebody that i shop for uh and and therefore marriage and relationships begin to take on that kind of form of market mentality and then in the sort of social sphere the kind of revolutionary social world that we live in today in which you know all of those traditional institutions of family church religion uh community and so forth are increasingly under attack as recidivist as uh oppressive institutions that need to be redefined if not outright eliminated and therefore we shouldn't be surprised that it's especially those people who don't thrive in a kind of world without boundaries uh in a world without any kind of sense of who i am and where i am and the kind of world and the place that i come from uh that it's these people in particular uh who have suffered the most under these conditions of borderlessness of limitlessness of a kind of la sort of absence of of defined forms what top they would have called the forms that we need as human beings and have challenged both the economic openness borderlessness of our world uh as well as the kind of um social limitlessness of the world in very incoherent forms in forms that are not uh it seems to be well very well developed and well defined and here again i'll just echo what i said earlier which is that i think one of the ways that we're going to see you know in precisely the way that i think dan was discussing this ferment of a kind of intellectual vibrancy on the uh in the conservative world something people on the left think is a contradiction in terms is is precisely uh what um you know what kind of world without overthrowing a world in which people have the opportunity to define the kind of human being they're going to be nevertheless that they'll have in some sense the kinds of places and the kinds of forms that allow them to develop the personal capacities to flourish even if they're not going to be one of the winners in our economy or they're not going to be one of the the people who glide above uh sort of the consequences of a globalized world and i think they're there you know exactly you're seeing the discussions that a generation ago you wouldn't have seen do we need governmental support for families uh do we need um support for communities are there ways that the public sphere can assist the civil sphere uh and i think that those are questions that a generation ago would not have been on the table in the conservative world and you're seeing them increasingly uh vividly in discussion and debate thanks patrick and and you know i think sort of continuing on this line and now i i want to bring in ashleen um because uh you know sort of in thinking about um you know you might say um you know creating opportunities within conservatism athlean ashley and you've written i think powerfully on the need for conservatism to be more welcoming to women and racial minorities uh so how in your view has the conservative movement fallen short in these areas i think that one of the tensions actually it comes out of what uh professor janine was saying which i think is right which is we we have this past where there was a metaphysics that would at least help to create roles for the structuring of society and your nation your race your birth your sex would be a part of this and then this kind of all comes apart at a certain point for different reasons and i think what you find in modernity is that humans need something like that so one thing that's been interesting for me studying racial minorities is that even though they have higher rates of maybe different types of um social economic struggles uh comparatively they have a lower suicide rate and one of the things that people have suggested is that they have a lower suicide rate because they have something like what that i think the the term is familialism where they can think of themselves as moving to a role that they're connected to by birth and so the challenge i think presently is once that we've seen that a lot of what we used to think about the differences between men and women for example didn't have to do with capacity like it didn't have to do with how smart i was or it didn't have to do with um especially as we're more technological right how strong i am because i can do different things on the computer right i'm not necessarily doing things with my hands um when you enter into that sort of space then i think everyone feels like there is no identity there is no role and so what i think we need to do is to look at the sources where we can have roles and this is part of why i think the conservative movement has failed with regard to minorities and with regard to women a lot of times the way that it was pitched to me growing up i remember is that you need to stay home and raise a family and that's very honorable and i have respect for people who do that um but i didn't need to do that as my life has turned out to show and um i think there there are going to be people who hear things like that and they can't they they see a role for them and it's like too tight of a box i think it's over definition on the part of conservatives and then sometimes i think they over define um themselves or they out define themselves out of appealing to minorities because the obvious appeal to minorities is religion the rates religiosity are far higher among black americans and latino americans than among the general white population and so in a lot of ways their rhetoric should be an easy fit but they they they shoot themselves in the foot they don't they don't have the broad enough understanding of who their audience might be to be able to appeal to minorities more so like an example would be i followed with interest the nationalism um movement and the sort of conf the major national conference that took place there and i remember you know there were times where people made some people not everybody there um made it sound like we just need immigration from countries that are white because those are the countries that are most like us but if you look at what the nation actually is you will see that latinos and african-americans and all kinds of people have contributed to this thing we now have so when conservatives speak about the nation for example that's the platform they should be speaking and it would be much easier i think than to slip in sort of naturally and say hey you know we we see that you value the family and we see you have high levels of religiosity they're also going to be more socioeconomically i guess populist for for lack of a better word so if we are moving that direction they are already there um so i think in the long run it's going to take the imagination of people who are at the heads of conservative movement to familiarize themselves with the kinds of communities they have in their country be it with regard to women or race and what the realities of those people's lives are i i think you know when you're talking about the family um you you know sometimes when i hear the family talk about on the right it's like the nuclear family but a lot of latinos for example have a nuclear family but it's nested in a generational family and so this sort of image of what we're aiming for and in the working class right which i think is the right place to move to is not reflective i think of the people who could be in your working class coalition i'm thanks and you know it's it's sort of interesting sort of as i listen to your answer i mean in some ways you sort of anchored your you know sort of account of of what the uh future could be and let's say uh a multi-ethnic sort of working-class coalition in some of the categories um that were already put out on the table but but but i'm going to be more precise or accurate or true sort of understanding let's say of the nation um so that was quite quite interesting it seems like you're suggesting that perhaps conservatism has within itself sort of the resources to let's say you know promote a better uh racial equality is is that is that fair it it it depends on who gets the ball but yes and i think we have we don't have a very good understanding of identity politics i think we're too dismissive of it um if you look at white hegemony in the past like caldwell has this great book uh about um the age of entitlement but he describes the american south as being democratic even when the black population was not enfranchised and there's no way that that can be described as democratic unless you're going to be willing to say that huge parts of the nation that you're supposed to be you know in solidarity with didn't deserve to have some sort of role in in the police or in the community and i think the there are there has to be a sort of reckoning with the the history of america not just since the founding but actually since reconstruction um and i think in reconstruction you see the pitting against each other this is what the dubois says of the white worker and the non-white worker so that they don't align with each other so that they cannot actually have some sort of standing against the property class they see each other as enemies right so if you look at that era in american political development i think we see the fruit of that now and there are parts of conservatism that have held on that too much but what conservatism does well i think and does better than the left is identity politics is too flat um identity politics is not able to for example explain why cubans were voting for trump or latinos mexican-americans where my family's from on the border of texas are voting for them they're voting for him actually for different reasons than each other and it would be interesting to compare the cuban and the mexican-american here but i think on the left there's not any capacity to see a difference in latinos or flats right or then to see a um to ask themselves where those differences originate and there's a sort of pejorative um attitude towards things that they tend to value like the family or like religion and that's the part that's strong for the conservatives that's where they can do the pooling is is in that area um and i think it's a natural fit but it will require a sort of reorienting of the self thanks ashleen and we've we've gone we've gone a little bit past 6 30 and so now let's uh transition and start working in some questions from uh the audience and um i may withhold a question about sort of the prediction of the future of conservatism sort of for the very end of this time but but the first question i think is an important question to introduce sort of at this point from the audience and um and this person says we've had a very wide-ranging conversation about a lot of things and a lot of quite different uh perspectives including um i think some themes that uh that uh many people aren't used to hearing associated with conservatism and so this person asks um can we distinguish conservatism from liberalism in other words what have we said um what have you said and identified with the conservative conservatism that a liberal would reject or you would expect the liberal to reject so so they're asking us to distinguish very clearly conservatism from liberalism and and maybe a good way to do that is just by thinking about sort of the opposite what would a what would someone who you wouldn't expect to be conservative a liberal sort of reject uh that you believe essential to conservatism and uh dan um let's uh start with with you on this question sure i think uh ashlyn gave uh some indication uh where some of these differences lie that uh in talking about different groups of americans progressives tend to have a racial framework that they want to apply and uh it can be a very crude one that fails to distinguish for example between mexican americans and cuban americans the other thing too is even if we look at religion we have to keep in mind that religion is very closely tied to ethnicity and it used to be that churches in america the irish catholic church you know next door to the italian catholic church were actually quite different culturally and if you tried to approach them both using the same sort of um republican message especially if it was being related by some mainline protestant it would probably fail so you really do have to take account of this granular and historical and traditional element uh in human communities they're not just uh you know conservatives who approach them uh you know simply as consumers which i think is what you've seen many libertarians do or as people who just want freedom if you approach them simply as people who have uh you know historical grievances or historical injustices in that that they've suffered um that is that is far too crude and in fact the conservative foundations in localism and in uh you know the sort of real human existence is something that can be used very effectively by conservatives to reach out to new communities as far as the difference between you know sort of liberalism and conservatism in general is concerned i think you've all was on exactly the right track but there is a different anthropology and as patrick deneen said the anthropology of liberalism seems to come down to the idea that uh human beings are unhappy because they are oppressed by uh social institutions that have been in existence for you know any number of centuries or millennia for that matter and that by liberating ourselves from these institutions we therefore will find happiness that we've never had before and you know there are persons for whom that may be true especially circumstantially but on the other hand if you remove all of the ties to these institutions and these old identities you're actually left with a void and then the question becomes what's going to fill that void and often the answer to that is power's going to fill that void or psychopathology is going to fill that void ideology is going to fill that void a conservative i think has to be attuned enough to our human nature in general and again i commend some of the things that you've all said about this are our rights as human beings to be able to critique existing institutions and to be able to critique our traditions while at the same time being able to make a case for maintaining what is good in them and maintaining their overall form and framework and uh you know edmund burke really is a a model in this sense i mean his first uh you know sort of main published work was a vindication of natural society which on the face of it is a satire taking shots at the idea of um uh well by count bowling brook's idea that you could kind of have a get rid of established religion get rid of any kind of religious tradition uh burke then you know satirically applies that to politics as well and says well why can't you just get rid of you know all established states and have anarchy and then won't we we better be better off and in fact burke's whole career is dedicated to showing why that is not the case that the um the things we enjoy now the goods that we have in our lives not material goods but most of all civil goods spiritual goods political goods these are all things that we have attained through enormous amounts of work enormous amounts of shared striving and uh to write them off because of the you know sort of horrors of the past would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater would be an absolutely tragic and irrecoverable mistake and i think liberalism is in danger of doing that because while it does you know have a you know some truth to the critique it makes of american history the fact is so much of the rest of the world not only historically but even now is much more radically hostile to and you know dangerous to uh liberalism and to minorities wherever they might be than the united states is and we have to be sure that in justly critiquing ourselves we are not losing a sense of you know the the world stage and the historical stage and that uh we're in grave danger if we you know simply tear down our own ethos our own institutions our own past and uh leave ourselves vulnerable to uh whatever waves of power might be emanating from other societies which have in many cases records that are far worse than our own yeah so i mean to summarize this really i mean in some ways you're saying you know there's sort of a negative answer and that's going to ashlane there's a certain account let's say of of identitarian sort of politics that conservatism rejects and then also a positive sort of anthropological sort of account that you've all had let out laid out earlier that conservatism is for um uh patrick and you've all you indicated you wanted to add would you uh do you want to add in no you're good you've all no well sure i i think i i think what dan said was just beautifully stated and i wouldn't want to take away from it by trying to uh simply repeat it i i do think that there's also a way to understand that in terms of um what it is that how it is that left and right tend to understand political questions i think precisely for the reasons that dan laid out the left tends to approach political questions in terms of oppressor and oppressed to think about who is pressing down on whom as a reason for thinking about why there are problems in the world conservatives tend to think about the world in terms of order and disorder we think there are problems when there are failures to establish some kind of social order and we think that our social institutions can establish that order and therefore in a sense liberate us whereas progressives tend to think our social institutions oppress us and that difference between a politics of oppressor and oppressed and a politics of order and disorder i think it counts for a huge amount of the talking past each other that happens between left and right and it's rooted in precisely the set of differences that dan so beautifully got at um which really runs very deep i mean it is anthropological in a sense it does it does require us to make an assumption about what the human person needs in order to thrive and flourish thanks javal and i i think we can um i mean that's um you know very nicely summarized both of you and why don't we go ahead and move on to the next question uh and the next question is um uh uh well i think it's a maybe a question maybe a rhetorical question but the question is how can conservatism of any type survive with media big tech and educational institutions taking sides um patrick why don't we start uh with you on this i i'd i'd like to know the answer to that too actually uh it is i think it's you know maybe the the one of if not the biggest question and the most difficult question to grapple with it's certainly among them uh so i mean we've been talking a lot about disintegration of of sort of the lives of average americans and um you know how the how the effects especially of a kind of a kind of revolutionary uh both you know sort of economic order and a social order uh has uh really uh deeply i think um and and uh profoundly and perhaps you know i don't want to say irretrievably but um uh close to irretrievably uh damaged uh the prospects for a renewal of culture renewal of um the stability and order that um that that uh dan and uh and yuval were talking about i think though the um the more malevolent form that this revolutionary elite today takes uh is precisely in those areas uh big tech a kind of you know kind of a unholy alliance in a way between big tech uh contemporary media uh and the institution i'm you know spent my adult life in higher education completely dominated by uh fairly like-minded people a kind of professional class we call it today the meritocracy uh and i think the i i think they you know they're they're on the one hand they've accumulated such massive forms of concentrated power i mean obviously in the case of big tech uh literally you know as close to sort of a modern form of 19th century monopolies as one could as one could imagine today uh and uh the the way in which uh the the world view of the those who run those corporations today is now largely echoed and supported by the institutions that might once have been those that would have criticized this accumulation and centralization of economic power in particular media and universities or higher education or education more broadly that there's a kind of consensus view uh and world view that's shared across these various uh institutions uh i i do think that uh in this almost brings in your last question there are ways in which i i i tend to think that the future of conservatism if it is to be a viable political movement in the united states in a weird way is actually going to look a lot more like an older democratic party uh it's going to be uh economically what we would call economically more liberal and it's particularly going to be suspicious of and even hostile to concentrated forms of economic power in a way that in a previous generation conservatives were concerned with and hostile to concentrated forms of political power and if you look at the landscape today it's it seems to me it's much more concerning the concentration of economic power especially if you're a conservative looking at the power of big tech to come in and bully sovereign state legislators and governors uh in terms of what their policies will be and which we've seen time and time again my own state of indiana being bullied by the likes of apple and amazon uh in recent years over questions of religious liberty and we just saw this happen with the ncaa uh in south dakota in just the past several days i think there's going to be a lot more appetite for the use of political power national political power to begin to exercise sovereign authority over these tech industries and at the same time i think you're going to see without necessarily destroying the institutions of higher education i think that there's going to be a concerted effort among conservatives to lessen the power of especially elite educational institutions um uh perhaps going after or in some way constraining the use of of endowments or forcing the use of endowments to support more more tuition and more equalized or let's say more tuition for students who might not typically be able to attend ivy league schools but i also think it's very likely something i would personally like to see is a lot more public support for trade schools for schools that that foster skills that i think we're going to be in desperate we already are in desperate need of uh for people to become much more economically self-standing uh in in a world in which being able to be your own boss in a profession that can't be provided over a phone line is going to be an extraordinarily important skill to have uh so i see in an interesting way a conservatism that you know in light of very different circumstances we're in now will be both um thinking about the use of public power that constrains economic you know titanic economic powers but in particular for the end of supporting you know what we might today call more traditional family values or at least the kinds of the forms of stability that allow uh for the flourishing of people within uh the kinds of of institutions and forms of life uh that uh that do require stability and that do require continuity so i in an interesting way i think there's a kind of transition taking place where the revolutionary party will be the party uh you know that um uh will be consolidated in one party uh and a more let's say less we could say a less liberal party a party that's suspicious both of liberal economics and liberal sort of social movements will be more increasingly concentrated in in in a conservative party actually so i have two responses to that one is that when you're thinking about something like big tech i would focus on the medium of itself right tech so if we have this problem where we've got this sort of un um unaddressed logging right for consensus or for a role what the medium of tech does is it denatures you more so you can have different avatars of yourself in different ways and you can play different roles and then you can just drop them and so you you sort of have this impression of human nature as being undetermined and of your sort of power of defining yourself as being limitless but then in the end this leaves you more hungry more unmoored i think that the best thing that could happen right now that conservatives could do with regard to big tech is um to do a little bit of what professor deneen was talking about which is they've been obviously there's sort of this hive mind and there's this course of use of power in upper levels of society and they're going to sort of form our moral vision right but then there's this other side of it which is that the middle class is disappearing there's not a fair wage people feel like they're not going to be able to make a home for their family and that they're just going to be sort of like these peons to corporate entities so i think in addition to hitting the moral message that conservatives are hitting i think we need to hit the redistribution message really clearly um because there's no reason that we should have this sort of business structures that we do that have enabled the kinds of monopolies that you see in big tech even just in terms of natural justice i don't think that you could dismiss that much the work of a laborer um and and to have such a big gap between the people on top and the people who are sort of everyday people so in terms of how do we get out from under the monopoly of big tech etc i think you get out by having a coherent redistribution plan thanks actually well um you know this discussion is prompting lots of questions that are coming in so um i hope that our panelists and our listeners can spare another five minutes i mean we're scheduled to go past seven but if we can give us an extra five minutes and uh panelists if we can focus on being as concise as possible your answers have been brilliant um uh to this point um but you know um we can try to get as many in as possible because you all are really uh uh prompting some some good questions um um i think the next question where i want to go is uh and this has sort of come up a little bit in um uh maybe some of patrick's recent comments on ashleen's comments is um you know this questioner says you know um especially with sort of a concern of the hyper commodification um of the american uh way of life that uh that that that we're hitting on in this discussion um is there a possibility here actually for um the left and the right to unite uh here perhaps on uh on economics uh you know actually you've talked about and others have talked about uh you know the the republican party sort of moving towards sort of a multi-ethnic working-class coalition well that might be something that transcends beyond the republican party or or opens up the way uh to sort of a more inclusive sort of coalition so so i think this questioner is seeing this and so i wonder if um you know if there's a there's a possibility here uh uh for this and i um and we can certainly circle back to ashleen and uh and patrick if you want in on this but uh but dan i think you also have been hitting on some of these themes in your own uh writing and so i mean let's begin with you what are your thoughts on this well i'm skeptical of a left-right conjunction on economics in part because economics is also culture and one of the major divides that we see now is that in some ways even things like religion and ethnicity are starting to become less determinative than education level and it seems to me that um you know the sort of placeless economy the global economy uh the kind of um highly refined financial economy that we have these things are both creations of and supporters of um higher education and uh the class of americans who go through higher education and are formed by it and here's an example of a formative institution which is very powerful but it's forming people in ways that are sort of um conducive to creating an elite that is separated from the rest of the country and i think it's very hard in fact for people who go through uh a modern you know um college education not just because of its you know sort of progressive social values but also because of the way economics is taught and the way that you know questions of citizenship questions of national borders all these things are treated as non-entities in you know supposedly scientific economics i think it inculcates an ethos of disregard for your fellow countrymen and um so the class of americans who go through higher education and who then flourish in this modern economy are going to be um very difficult to reconnect with the class of americans you know of all races and of all religions who do not go through that kind of formative college experience and who are consigned to a very different kind of economy and status and so even though you may have some number of uh you know highly educated conservatives and progressives who come together in having a discomfort with this splitting of classes that we have generated through higher education i suspect that you will continue to find uh very sharp cultural uh conflicts between those progressives and those conservatives especially since so many of these economic questions and uh cultural questions wind up being things that sort of look like they translate into one another that's partly true with economic nationalism it's certainly true with immigration these are things where um you know it's very hard to say that you're simply going to adopt uh a common economic framework that is going to bring together the left and the right when there are these continuing other uh difficulties as well and i think fundamentally you are going to see a realignment uh as a result of this educational gap and it's realignment of course that one sees you know even in the even language itself right so the use of uh you know a multitude of genders the use of a term like la tinx these are things that uh you know college-educated persons white ones especially but not just white ones um seem very inclined to accept whereas i think ordinary or you know sort of less highly educated uh members of minority groups and uh and white people uh both have a you know sort of reflexive rejection of some of these more advanced and perhaps um you know sort of post-reality ideas that are coming out of higher education thanks uh patrick why don't we uh get you in on this uh and uh this particular question and then we have a particular one for you of all and then we have a one for ashley i'm i was so wrapped up listening to dan i don't even know what the question was yeah no worries yeah so let's go ahead i think yeah the question the question is is whether uh there is an opportunity for sort of collaboration on uh between the left and right uh in particular on economic issues yeah i mean i i i i just i think i'd just be echoing dan uh just i mean just one example is i think he was alluding to it but uh you know an economic policy uh that's aimed at especially defending the working class is probably going to have to look at more restrictive immigration policies now this was this was standard um left or let's say democratic um policy in the in the middle part of the century actually i can put my camera up and right behind me there is uh father father ted hesburgh uh president of the university of notre dame he led a led an immigration uh immigration commission that was appointed by jimmy carter in the in the 1980s and you could read that report and then what that report says is that uh in the name of defending uh the wages uh as well as the sense of lawfulness of um especially of the working class which you know the democratic party was closely aligned with at the time there need to be forms of restriction border restrictions on immigration so dan's absolutely right it's these kinds of what seem to be economic policies that are going to collide with what today are broadly you know you could say inextricably economic and cultural world views that in an elite institution even like the one that i teach in father ted's university i would say a vast majority of the students today would probably find that argument to be unrecognizable as a as a kind of left-wing argument left-wing argument today is that you you should be basically a borderless society so i i i have to agree with dan that uh um i think that at least it's going to be it would take a you know maybe a particular way in which a certain maybe a remnant of a kind of old left um you know a certain number of maybe bernie supporters might find their way uh to to some kind of agreement but uh it's it will be difficult you've all very very briefly and you know and this is assumption that i think a number of the panelists are making in um uh the conversation but it's uh this questionnaire sort of quotes you that you referred to an elite culture dominated by the left and and they want to know what's the evidence uh that our elite culture has dominated for the left so so very briefly what would you what would you give yeah well sure i mean obviously in some institutions you can just look at very basic measures of this when you ask college professors how they identify themselves politically those who are right of center in any way have declined over the past generation and a half from you know about a quarter of college professors to now in the single digits and in some of the humanities those numbers are literally in the single digits not of percentage but of individuals when you look at these uh when you look at these surveys they look at elite schools in particular and they say there's only three people at brown who are right of center and i think yeah i know all three of them personally um it's it's a weird situation to be it obviously in the academy i think there's a bigger story to tell which is a story of a monoculture that is unusual in american society i don't know the age of the questioner but i would just say it is it is a change even in my lifetime where it used to be that there were different elites in american life the people who ran our universities were different culturally educationally politically from the people who ran large corporations or the people who ran media companies or the people who were prominent in medicine or law or other places we had different elites in different parts of our society today we have one elite and its members went to the same set of schools they were formed in the same set of ways and that set of ways is broadly on the left so that there is not resistance to pushes to the left on issues that are genuinely controversial in the country profoundly divisive in american society but are not at all controversial at the elite levels of the american economy american culture american academy american media there is a single way of thinking about a set of questions that for the american people at large there is not a single way of thinking about so that we now have an elite in american life in a way that i think we genuinely didn't in even the middle of the 20th century a very consolidated time in our history and yet even then we had distinct elites in different parts of our society uh we now have an elite and a non-elite america and that is very distinct and i think the elite is just recognizably culturally on the left okay thanks and now we're moving on to the five-minute borrowed time that uh that i requested and that our panelists gratefully um accepted and this question is uh ashlyne earlier in your remarks you mentioned the 1619 uh project and this questioner wants to know is there a conservative response to the 1619 project there needs to be because it's a it's a lacunae that they're responding to um i was having an exchange at a conference with another um political scientist and they were talking about how we need to be stricter about tying the sort of westerness white westerness the declaration and of our early institutions to the the concept of the nation the concept of the ethnic and i said well how are any of the students who are not white going to say that they then will buy into that idea of the nation why would they want to be attracted to the declaration of independence you just said it wasn't made for them that it doesn't emerge from anything or describe anything that pertains to them and i think it's that lacunae that is where 1619 comes in and that's why they're trying to move the date back because they're trying to say look in the black american in particular we have the person who is committed to american ideals and who struggles uh throughout different eras to um obtain you know the american dream etc etc and there are problems with 1619 i think the place that conservatives need to go isn't to go back to defending 1776 um i think what they need to do is to read people like albert murray um who mcintyre says is probably the person that can give us a key to better race relations in america uh martha menchaca i think also does a great job and the the theme that they point us to is that the idea that the nation is multi-ethnic or as murray says mulatto is old it's not superimposed it's organic and so you're not going to have to say to create these new categories or bring in these new people you already have them and if that's the case then this brings us to the working class once more and then i'll wrap up the key there is labor because one of the things that you see in the story of american race is labor and putting labor into the nation right to improve it and to enjoy it and so this to me is an obvious link of where you can take the movement toward having a healthy working class and having a response to 16 19. okay thanks well we have a couple minutes left of our borrowed time and this panel is on the future of conservatism and i think in some ways your visions have all uh come out for what you hope conservatism to be but let's address this very directly so if you could also take you know just a half a minute or so and and say what are what's one central characteristic uh that you would hope conservatism uh to be about in 10 years if you had to if you had to project what conservatism would be in ten year in a decade uh so dan let's uh start with you and uh we'll work our way around well i don't want to frame this just as a hope but i think something that ashleen had brought up a few minutes ago is of vital importance which is we do live in a 21st century america we live in an america in which uh the traditional roles that uh particularly the sexes used to have have changed or have they've opened up in many respects and um you know sometimes conservatives do speak as if they imagine a reconsolidation of an older form um and that's very unlikely to happen so the question becomes how can you salvage something of uh everything that was good about the past with a present and a future that is likely to be very modern and very much um different in its foundational principles from the traditional way of life that conservatives look back upon uh with a great deal of affection and that reconciliation of these two very different ideas it's it's extremely difficult intellectually but the challenge before us is really more political than it is theoretical and while there is a theoretical component to be explored i think the question of how you simply get a an arrangement that is acceptable to a large enough number of people to stabilize the country or at least give the country some sort of um direction politically something that can then serve the different classes of the country very well that's gonna be one of the major challenges so in other words there does have to be some space for the entrepreneur there does have to be some space for the non-traditional person as well as a reaffirmation of the value of tradition itself you've all well i i certainly would echo that i i think that it is important for us to see and maybe this is ending where i began that in some ways the tensions we face are not all new and yet at the same time as as ashlynn's reminded us beautifully the it is vital for conservatives to be at home in contemporary america even as we remind our society what it is forgotten and what it's leaving behind not to be afraid of the present afraid of the future but to face it with confidence knowing that what we have to offer is going to be appealing to people who are in search of ways of flourishing so i think conservatives have to be about what we've always been about preserving the preconditions for that human flourishing especially by preserving the institutions of moral formation and working to do that as a coalition that includes people who do emphasize traditionalism and people who do emphasize the rights of the individual fighting against a kind of coercive liberationism that is what the left has become and you know i i think that that coalition makes sense but that it does have to think about its own priorities in a society where the contemporary problem is not excessively rigid institutions forcing coercion as it was in mid-century america but a failure of institutions that requires cohesion that requires solidarity and that's what we have to show the country how to find i think we have the tools to do it but we can't do it in a way that's fearful and in a way that's despairing we have to do it in a way that's confident about its ability to build the future patrick so since this is about hopes uh in in ten years we will be in the middle of the second term of president j.d vance former senator of ohio uh i see uval being looking pained there in other words yeah now no in other in other words someone who i think um understands all of the things that we've been talking about here even amid our disagreements i think a lot of agreement uh in particular the need to build a multi-racial multi-ethnic working class party so it's going to have to be someone who perhaps we're going to need a a a new departure for a political class that was formed in a different time with a set of different expectations so i really think the uh what what we have just gone through the last four years was a kind of you know the revelation that the old playbook was no longer in application that a great divide had had developed between the sort of institutional gop in washington dc and where the and where the electorate was uh and um whoever that whoever those political figures that emerge i hope it's the kind of people that can competently and articulately begin to shape a future of conservatism that speaks i think to the many many of the things that we've spoken here today the need uh for a fairer economy that may be one also that uh has to has to be um allow for the the use of political power to restrain uh the over-concentration of economic power uh that provides the kind of broad-based middle-class working-class benefits uh that that make it possible for people in a globalized economy that often displaces or is uh highly destabilizing to allow them to live flourishing lives that's a that's a that's an elite that is not hostile uh to the kinds of um institutions and ways of life that i think uh people rely upon uh without the the benefits and advantages of of um of what today's elite benefits in other words where family life uh life in a in a nice town life in a in a vibrant economic order is no longer just a luxury good uh but is but is widespread more widespread than it is today and this would require something that uh it's it's odd to say this but in a weird way it would require a kind of counter revolution because it would require the displacement of the current elite and exactly the way that uh several of us have been talking about in the earlier questions said what do you do about this concentration of elites you know that yuva was just talking about and i i think without a real imposition of a sort of political force and pressure uh that it's unlikely that those people who run the major institutions in our country today are likely to change their behavior now that has the potential of being not a very specific or easy uh transition uh or at least a kind of uh political dynamic uh so mine is a very mine let's just say this this the portrait i'm painting is a is a rather sanguine view of what things might look like in 10 years i i think it's likely to be very wrenching because people do not gladly give up power people do not gladly give up these positions of wealth and status and they don't gladly change their viewpoints uh that we've seen so deeply formed and especially elite institutions today so uh if that's sanguine it's not without a sense of of the reality that that likely we face what is going to be tumultuous and challenging ashlane there was a lot in the past four years of conservatism that i found absolutely terrifying um but there's also a lot that i find beautiful and one of the things that i think is beautiful is sort of this free commitment or attempt to articulate a recommitment to the things that make us most human right so to the things like our family like our labor like our um our role in our particular community and those are the things i think that will grab people's hearts i just i hope that they grab them in the right direction and that we can separate sort of the wheat from the chaff and wherever we are in 10 years on the right thanks ashley well i um in a couple places i remember sort of i mean by two people that aren't really thought of conservatives but uh christopher lash uh is one person and actually cornell west and one of his writings defines hope as uh the facing of the future in light of the past or the best of the past and in some ways as i've been thinking about your comments that kind of definition of maybe democratic hope uh came to mind to face the future sort of in light of the best of the past and thinking about conservatism but thank you all just for a wonderful panel and for your contributions and very thoughtful uh wide-ranging discussion and um and thank you audience for your just wonderful questions and for your patience and for um uh even going past time uh and um and hanging in with us we really really appreciate it um before you go uh the unc program for public discourse would be grateful if you respond to their brief pull for audience members so if you could if you could do that rating sort of discussion and then describe your own political ideology they would be very grateful so please do that and with that i'll wish you all a very nice evening

Channel: UNC Program for Public Discourse

Views: 2,341

Keywords: neoconservative, paleoconservative, populist right, political realignment, neocon, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, UNC Chapel Hill

Id: -kPyESv4xJo

Length: 103min 38sec (6218 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021