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| Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Tucson, AZ, on Saturday, March 19, 2016. AP/Ross D. Franklin. |
The Return of “Street Corner Conservatism.” By Matthew Continetti. Washington Free Beacon, December 23, 2016. Also at National Review Online.
Continetti:
Donald Trump and the Jacksonian political philosophy of the Deplorables.
Donald Trump and the Jacksonian political philosophy of the Deplorables.
Richard
Nixon was plotting his 1968 presidential campaign when he received a letter
from a high-school English teacher in Pennsylvania. The correspondent, a young
man named William F. Gavin, wasn’t certain Nixon would run. But he sure wanted
him to. “You can win,” Gavin wrote. “Nothing can happen to you, politically
speaking, that is worse than what has happened to you.”
Gavin
cited Ortega y Gasset to explain why Nixon was uniquely suited to lead during
the violence and uncertainty of the late 1960s. “You are,” he went on, “the
only political figure with the vision to see things the way they are and not as
Leftist and Rightist kooks would have them.”
The
forceful and eloquent style of Gavin’s prose impressed top Nixon aide Patrick
J. Buchanan. Gavin soon joined the nascent campaign, beginning a career writing
speeches for the 37th president, for Senator Jim Buckley of New York, for
Ronald Reagan, and for congressman Bob Michel, as well as composing novels,
nonfiction books, and journalism. Gavin understood well the political
realignment that brought city- and suburban-dwelling white working-class
ethnics — Irish, Italians, Greeks, Pols, and Slavs — rather tentatively into
the Republican camp. “The Nixon aide who understood the Catholic opportunity
best,” Buchanan wrote later, “was Bill Gavin, who had grown up Catholic and
conservative, his views and values shaped by family, faith, and friends.”
I have
been thinking about Gavin lately because his life and thought so perfectly
capture the conservatism of Donald Trump. When you read Gavin, you begin to
understand that the idea of Trump as a conservative is not oxymoronic. Trump is
a conservative — of a particular type that is rare in intellectual circles. His
conservatism is ignored or dismissed or opposed because, while it often reaches
the same conclusions as more prevalent versions of conservatism, its impulses,
emphases, and forms are different from those of traditionalism, anti-Communism,
classical liberalism, Leo Strauss conservatism in its East and West Coast
varieties, the neoconservatism of Irving Kristol as well as the neoconservatism
of William Kristol, religious conservatism, paleo-conservatism, compassionate
conservatism, constitutional conservatism, and all the other shaggy inhabitants
of the conservative zoo.
Trump
has always been careful to distinguish himself from what he calls “normal
conservative.” He has defined a conservative as a person who “doesn’t want to
take risks,” who wants to balance budgets, who “feels strongly about the
military.” It is for these reasons, he said during the campaign, that he
opposed the Iraq war: The 2003 invasion was certainly risky, it was costly, and
it put the troops in a dangerous position, defending a suspicious and resentful
population amid IEDs and sniper attacks. The Iraq war, in this view, is an
example of conservative writers and thinkers and politicians following trains
of logic or desire to un-conservative conclusions.
Nor is
it the only example. Fealty to econometric models, Trump says, has led many
conservatives as well as liberals to embrace a “dumb market” that gives
mercantilist powers in Asia advantages over U.S. industry and labor. The rush
to pass comprehensive immigration reform as a result of the elite consensus
that immigration is an unmitigated good set the Republican-party leadership
against its own voters. The desire to restrain entitlement spending through
cuts rather than prolonging the lifespan of these programs through economic
growth demoralizes Republican voters who count on their checks to arrive each
month.
Indeed,
Trump was so at variance with the mainstream of the intellectual conservative
movement on these issues that he modified his political identity. “I really am
a conservative,” he said last February. “But I’m also a commonsense person. I’m
a commonsense conservative. We have to be commonsense conservatives. We have to
be smart.” Common sense in this understanding is opposed to the theoretical and
academic analysis that has led conservatives to nonsensical and unpopular
positions because they are beholden to speculative conclusions or to creedal
dogma.
Trump’s
politics are grounded not in metaphysics but in what he understands to be the
linguistic root of the term conservative. “I view the word conservative as a
derivative of the word conserve,” he has said. “We want to conserve our money.
We want to conserve our wealth. We want to conserve. We want to be smart. We
want to be smart where we go, where we spend, how we spend. We want to conserve
our country. We want to save our country.”
The
conservatism of Donald Trump is not the conservatism of ideas but of things.
His politics do not derive from the works of Burke or Disraeli or Newman, nor
is he a follower of Mill or Berlin or Moynihan. There is no theory of natural
rights or small government or international relations that claims his loyalty.
When he says he wants to “conserve our country,” he does not mean conserve the
idea of countries, or a league of countries, or the slogans of democracy or
equality or freedom, but this country, right now, as it exists in the real
world of space and time. Trump’s relation to the intellectual community of both
parties is fraught because his visceral, dispositional conservatism leads him
to judgments based on specific details, depending on changing circumstances,
relative to who is gaining and who is losing in a given moment.
His is
a blunt and instinctive and demotic approach arrived at after decades in the
zero-sum world of real-estate and entertainment-contract negotiations. His are
sentiments honed by immediate, knee-jerk, and sometimes inelegant reactions to
events and personalities observed on Twitter or on “the shows.” And the goal of
his particular conservatism is not adherence to an ideological program so much
as it is to prevent the loss of specific goods: money, soldiers, guns, jobs,
borders, national cohesion.
This is
the conservatism of Bill Gavin who, in his 1975 book Street Corner Conservative, gave voice to the instinctual conservatism of the
men and women who populated the Jersey City neighborhoods in which he was
raised. “They do not want to overthrow the system,” Gavin wrote. “But they are
not quite satisfied with the system either. They supported the United States
efforts in Vietnam, but at the same time deplored the strategy of piecemeal
escalation that led to such a disastrous state of affairs. They are sick unto
death with the follies and the arrogance of liberal Democrats, but they have
not quite snuggled up to the Republican Party.”
The
Queens-born Trump, like other street-corner conservatives, has never quite felt
at home in either political party. And while he went to the Wharton School at
the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate, he, like other
street-corner conservatives, lacks the graduate degrees and credentials that
establish oneself in society as a professional or as an originator and exponent
of ideas. “We were all, I am convinced, conservatives,” Gavin wrote of his
family and friends. “We never intellectually knew that we were, but
instinctively, it seems, we knew that certain people and institutions and
places have claims upon our loyalties.”
It is
this specificity of attachment rather than adherence to a program that explains
the divide between street-corner conservatives and their political brethren.
Many of the conservatives in Washington, D.C., myself included, arrived at
their politics through study or experience at university, by encountering a
great text, the coherence of natural law, the philosophy of Plato and
Aristotle, or the economics of Smith, Ricardo, Friedman, and Tullock. That is
not the case for the street-corner conservatives. Their stance, Gavin says,
“isn’t dependent on arguments from free enterprise, although most street corner
conservatives embrace free enterprise. . . . Neither is it dependent on
aristocratic tradition . . . nor a particular intellectual viewpoint.” Nor is
it “based on nostalgia for some long-gone golden age nor on some reactionary
aesthetic idea.”
It is
the gut conservatism of someone who does not want to be cheated, who wants to
live according to traditional notions of family, community, vocation, and
faith, and who reacts negatively when these notions are toyed with from above.
It is the politics of a construction worker, a contractor, a technician, a
waiter or waitress, a taxi or Uber driver, of someone who is patriotic but
skeptical of non-retaliatory and mismanaged foreign interventions, who gives
precedence to the practical over the theoretical, the tangible over the
conceptual, the concrete over the abstract. Street-corner or commonsense
conservatism is more than the set of attitudes, inclinations, reactions, and
habits of Bill Gavin or Donald Trump. It is nothing less than the political
philosophy of the Deplorables.
Street-corner
conservatism is most distinctive when set against the conservatism of the
Beltway. Economists, for example, can explain in minute detail the efficiencies
gained when the supply of labor is global and therefore limitless. They can
point to highly sophisticated quantitative models that describe how consumers
benefit from the global supply chain and from the off-shoring of low-wage
employment. It all works so well in theory. What the economists are too quick
to dismiss, however, is the first word in the old subject of political economy. They prefer not to
recognize — or, in some cases, they celebrate outright — the erosion of
nationhood by lax enforcement of border controls and immigration policy.
Unilateral
disarmament in the face of trading partners that manipulate their currencies
and maintain tariffs against U.S. products not only diminishes objective
measures of national community and sovereignty, but also carries a human cost
in workers displaced, factories moved, communities warped, livelihoods and
vocations disappeared. A street-corner conservative responds to these
dislocations with a sense of outrage, with a desire to rectify injustices that
benefit an affluent and aloof elite, and with frustration when his sentiments
and wishes and bonds are not recognized by either Republicans or Democrats.
When
Donald Trump and Mike Pence arranged for Carrier to retain some of the jobs it
had previously announced would move to Mexico, adherents to free-market
ideology roundly criticized the move as cronyism. But, as has so often been the
case this year, these thinkers lacked a constituency. They found themselves
defending the economic basis of Walmart rather than the livelihoods of the
people who shop there. The Carrier deal was popular not only with Carrier
employees but also with voters. It was a textbook example of street-corner
conservatism: deviation from principle in the pursuit of tangible goods.
Arguments from theory or economic calculation had no purchase because the street-corner
conservative thinks not in terms of producers and consumers but in terms of
citizens and foreigners.
There
is a similar practicality in Trump’s stated opposition to reform of Social
Security and Medicare. The street-corner conservative sees these programs not
as entitlements but as deserved benefits. He paid premiums in the form of
payroll taxes and expects a return. He believes Social Security and Medicare
aren’t undeserved welfare transfers that feed dependency and anomie but
universal programs that benefit citizens equally. And the street-corner
conservative knows that, since the Republican party has become the party of the
poor and lower middle class, cutting Social Security and Medicare today to make
actuarial tables work years from now is an attack on the GOP grassroots.
Street-corner
conservatism informs Trump’s foreign-policy instincts as well. “In our nation’s
relations with other countries we want: enough military strength to prevent
war; a rational ‘America First’ attitude avoiding the extremes of expansionist
jingoism on one hand and isolation on the other; and a cool but correct
attitude toward totalitarian dictatorships that have the potential to destroy
our nation,” wrote Gavin. The street-corner conservative is intensely patriotic
— to use Trump’s word, “militaristic” — and recoils at the humiliation of his
nation at foreign hands. For the street-corner conservative, the words America
First summon thoughts not of Charles Lindbergh but of the pursuit of concrete
and visible American interests rather than the expansive defense of the
amorphous concept of “liberal world order.” He supports overseas interventions
in response to attack or, as it initially seemed in Iraq, in the face of grave
threat. But when the rationale for intervention changes to the maintenance of
the “liberal international system” or the promotion of airy concepts such as
“human rights” and “democracy promotion” and the “responsibility to protect,”
he is far more skeptical. So is Trump.
If
street-corner conservatism is a recurrent temper in our public life, it is also
a volatile and easily frustrated one. It found expression in the majoritarian
theories of William F. Buckley Jr.’s mentor Wilmoore Kendall; the populist and
anti-establishment rhetoric of Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, Ross Perot, and
Pat Buchanan; the social conservatism of the suburban warriors who fought
liberal social policies such as the Equal Rights Amendment, busing, abortion,
and the therapeutic approach to crime, and who played such an important role in
the Reagan Revolution. Street-corner conservatism has waxed and waned, risen
and fallen, a periodic response to social disorder, economic stagnation, and
elites who forget that America is not to be ruled from above but driven from
below. Street-corner conservatism can bring you to office, but it also can turn
on you easily when it is depressed or disillusioned or, conversely, enriched
and pleased with the state of society.
Politicians
who listen to them flourish. “What is it we want?” asked Gavin.
We want a strong country, the
strongest in the world because we aren’t going to rely on mutual manifestations
of good will to keep this country free. It is a tough world. The liberals think
anyone who says that is practicing a false, twisted masculinity. So be it. We
have been called everything else by liberals; we might as well be called sexual
psychopaths. But at the same time, let’s demand that our nation be so strong
that no nation or group of nations will ever dare attack us — or even think of
attacking us. . . .
We believe this is a good
country. We believe that our way of life, our values, our adherence to formal
religion, to the family, to what Chesterton called the “decencies and charities
of Christendom” have for too long been abused or ignored or threatened by
left-liberalism. Left-liberalism is intellectually, morally, and spiritually
bankrupt. We don’t want it to be replaced by radicalism of the left or right.
We want our kids to grow up knowing not only their prayers but their philosophy,
our philosophy.
What is it that we want?
I’ll tell you.
We want America.
Bill
Gavin died of cancer last year at the age of 80.
One
week later, Donald Trump announced that a street-corner conservative was
running for president.
