have broken new policy ground or changed the character of the
administrative state, and essentially none would survive the next
Democratic president.
It may seem counterintuitive, given how intense and action-
packed the last few years have felt to political junkies, but if the
Trump era ends next year, it will have changed next to nothing in
domestic policy. Its lasting accomplishments would then mainly
be the indirect consequences of Trump’s judicial appointments—
important, to be sure, but hardly on the scale of what a party in
power in both elected branches might expect.
This inaction on policy may actually help explain some of the
intellectual ferment. In some respects, the Right’s internal
debates have felt like those that might happen when Republicans
are out of power: Nothing seems plausibly achievable in the near
term, so policy entrepreneurs try to formulate what they would do
in the future if they could. Yet these scenarios are getting debated
without the living specter of a Democratic president exercising
the powers of the executive, so the Right’s arguments lack the
humility that comes with losing and the caution that comes with
a vivid sense of the harm that government power can do in the
wrong hands. Lacking both the responsibility to enact and imple-
ment policy and the burden of resisting an assertive progres-
sivism in Washington, the Right’s policy thinking has been short
on discipline and mooring, and the relationship between theory
and practice has become confused.
This lack of disciplining pressures has been particularly evi-
dent as a loss of interest in coalition-building among conserva-
tives. The Right’s internal arguments have naturally come to befocused, as they often have been over the past half century, on
a conflict between libertarian economic thought and conserva-
tive social thought. Recurring (and unavoidable) tensions
between the two have shaped the story of American conser-
vatism since the middle of the last century. But the Right has
tended to succeed when it has treated those tensions as an impe-
tus for balance and for concrete policy innovation and has tend-
ed to fail when it has let them become a source of polarizing
discord and blinding abstraction.
To close the gap between conservative policymaking and the-
orizing, it might be helpful to revisit a previous attempt to think
through what a contemporary conservative agenda should look
like. That attempt (in which we were both involved) took a vari-
ety of allied if loosely affiliated forms that came to be known as
“reform conservatism.”W
HILEreform conservatism was influenced by earlier
conservative intellectual efforts, notably the domes-
tic neoconservatism of the 1970s, it began during
George W. Bush’s second term and then developed further dur-
ing Barack Obama’s presidency. As such it had elements of theattitudes of both a governing-majority conservatism and a
defensive-minority conservatism, but it also arose out of a cri-
tique of what the Right had become since the latter years of the
Reagan era.
The central contention of the “reformocons” was that the Right
needed to update its policy agenda, which had been formulated to
address the circumstances of the late 1970s and had gradually
hardened into a set of dogmatic slogans. In part because of the
success of the conservatives of the Reagan era and in part because
of new challenges that called for new applications of enduring
principles, the Right’s agenda was no longer suited to advancing
conservative ideals and solving public problems. Republicans
were left repeating the ends of Ronald Reagan’s sentences long
after they forgot how those sentences had started, and conserva-
tive politics was losing touch with the concerns of voters.
This problem grew worse in the early Obama years, as con-
servatives were driven by concerns about the Democrats’ agen-
da into rhetoric that quickly became too Randian and
individualistic—culminating, in the 2012 presidential campaign,
in the language of “makers and takers” that sought to answer
Obama’s “you didn’t build that” and “life of Julia” progressivism.
In response to these excesses, reform conservatism asserted the
centrality of social conservatism (broadly understood) against a
lowest-common-denominator agenda of economic libertarian-
ism. Family, community, traditional religion, civil society, and
civic republicanism needed protection and support. But taking
these social concerns seriously did not mean abandoning the
Right’s affinity for market economics; it meant putting thataffinity to use in the service of empowering working families
and renewing society’s wellsprings. Roughly speaking, social
conservatism (with its emphasis on family, faith, community, and
country) would clarify the endsof politics and help articulate
some crucial problems to be solved, while the logic of the market
could point toward some plausible meansof addressing these
problems and remind conservatives of some inherent limits of
centralized knowledge and action.
This approach sought to take account of the familiar tensions
between libertarians and traditionalists on the right, but to drive
the two toward a coalition that could work to resist progressive
incursions when Democrats were in power and to advance a con-
crete agenda that could appeal to broad swaths of the public when
Republicans had the opportunity.
The prescription, in essence, was to apply conservative
insights to the challenges of our own time, rooted in a more real-
istic appraisal of the American situation. Most Americans were
neither swaggering job creators (as Republicans sometimes cast
them) nor hapless victims of fate (as Democrats did): They were
mothers and fathers, workers and citizens who were both con-
cerned and hopeful for the future of their families, the character
of their communities, their economic prospects, and the state of29The Right’s internal argumentshave naturally come to be
focused, as they often have been over the past half century,
on a conflict between libertarian economic thought and
conservative social thought.
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