Below is an essay I wrote after attending the Conservative Political Action Conference in an attempt to better understand part of the conservative movement of today.
If you followed the press coverage earlier this month of the Conservative Political Action Conference, you would think that the entire event was a never-ending parade of 2016 Presidential candidates. Outside the view of the news cameras, however, were the most important characters at CPAC: the hundreds of conference-goers, representing the conservative rank-and-file, whose passions and choices will determine the future of the movement.
I arrived at the Gaylord National Convention Center on a mission to see them. Specifically, I had come to CPAC to talk with them about issues where the Left and the Right could converge. I was hoping to see if — at a frequency below the carnival barks broadcasting from the Palin wannabes on stage — there were, among the conference-goers, some seeds of potential for progressive-conservative alliances that could be fostered to break through Washington’s partisan gridlock.
After speaking with dozens of the conference-goers and spending the subsequent weeks exploring the mantras and media that they had made reference to in our conversations, I have four conclusions to report back to my fellow progressives.
1. The conservatives represented at CPAC fall into two main political communities: The Young Professional Right and The Old Heartland Conservatives.
The largest community at CPAC was what one might call the Young Professional Right. These were the 20-something young guns working for — or, in the case of the sprawling job fair at CPAC, aspiring to work for — the dozens of right-wing institutes bankrolled by the conservative one percent. Young Americans for Freedom, Generation Opportunity, The Leadership Institute, Turning Point USA: the conference was bursting at the seams with well-organized, big-tent organizations meant to attract students and recent graduates to this Young Professional Right.
These clean-shaven greenhorns often spoke of the “spiraling national debt” as their millennial convening issue — “because, you know, we’re in charge of paying it off in the future” — though I doubt any of their blood is actually boiling over the debt as a generational self-interest issue. What seemed to really drive these right-leaning yuppies was economic libertarianism, an ideology which provides them many benefits: it enables them to participate in a self-described insurgent movement; it allows them to be “conservative” while still participating in the modern liberal culture they learned to love at college; it is a worldview to which only they, with their economics degrees, can hold all the intellectual keys; and, of course, it opens doors to the most lucrative political jobs.
The other community — one might call them the Old Heartland Conservatives — is different. They are the older heads of families from outside the beltway. At CPAC, they were the midwest grandmas huddled around the “Draft Ben Carson” table and the 40-something small business owners from the exurbs dragging their kids to the NRA booth. They talked about the “spiraling national debt” too, but unlike their young libertarian counterparts, they spoke of the economy in moral terms: less “the incentive effects of marginal tax rates” and more “self-responsibility.” They are also more ideologically diverse: while the the young libertarians I spoke with were one trick ponies — “liberty, liberty, liberty!” — the Old Heartlanders had room for guns, God and glory in their ideological repertoire.
2. The Young Professional Right’s libertarianism presents an opportunity for convergence, but their abstract carelessness gets in the way.
For the Young Professional Right, divisive social issues have receded to the background, creating an opening for convergence on issues where good governance meets libertarianism. Take corporate welfare, for example: libertarians and progressives both have reasons to oppose federal subsidies to Big Oil and Agriculture. Or campaign finance reform: libertarians and progressives both have causes — tax reform on the right, safety and health regulations on the left — that have been squandered by the distorting influence of money in politics. When I raised these issues with the young libertarians at CPAC, they always nodded their heads in agreement, giving me a sliver of hope that such openness could be tapped for convergent action.
Unfortunately, a certain abstract carelessness among the Young Professional Right stands in the way of convergence with progressives. I mean “careless” precisely here: many of the millennial conservatives I spoke with at CPAC simply did not care that certain concrete problems existed in the world. To the young conservatives, if a problem could not be solved by freeing markets, it was not a problem worth thinking about.
Take the 20-something at the Right to Work booth, for example. I asked him, “okay, I totally get the argument for Right to Work, but given that unions are in decline, how do we ensure fair wages in the service sector?” He responded, “you know I haven’t really thought much about that.” This is what I mean by carelessness: a guy who spends his whole day professionally thinking about labor policy while having no opinion about the declining wages of millions of his neighbors.
Or take another millennial at a booth promoting an app that helped you avoid patronizing companies that had donated to liberal causes, like “environmentalism.” I asked what he meant by “environmentalism” and he said, “you know, crazy tree huggers, like Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund.” What? Boycott Coke because they donated to The World Wildlife Fund? This assuredly smart graduate had clearly never cared enough to think hard about the concrete reality of the tradeoffs of industry and conservation, let alone the history of conservatives in the conservation movement.
These young libertarians illustrate what George Will once called “pitiless abstracting”: letting abstract slogans and ideologies — the type of abstracting that conservative icons like Michael Oakeshott have argued is anti-conservative — get in the way of seeing the concrete suffering in your midst. The Young Professional Right can only converge with progressives if they can move down the ladder of abstraction to a shared concrete reality– a reality with more available solutions than just “lower taxes, reduced spending and less regulation.”
3. The Old Heartland Conservative’s commitment to moral values and a producerist ethic could be tapped to rein in corporate power, but only if progressives are willing to tap it.
When I asked about potential for Left-Right convergence, the Old Heartland Conservatives were much more skeptical than their younger counterparts. However, two trends in the Heartlanders’ rhetoric set off my ideological diplomacy receptors.
The first was their emphasis on moral values in the public sphere. Many Heartland Conservatives spoke of their worries that we have become a society without a moral core, as well as of their anger at Hollywood and the courts for pushing moral values out of our public culture. Some liberals might see this sentiment as a trojan horse for mixing Church and State and pushing anti-gay and anti-feminist policies. But I see it another way: it’s an opening for convergence over the immoral excesses of corporate capitalism.
Without a shared moral language in the public sphere to draw on, we have no recourse against those who assert their power in the vacuum of morality. For example, in an earlier time, if a corporation were to advertise sugary drinks to children, we might have been able to shame them by drawing on the shared moral language of public responsibility. If greed was rampant in a community, we could call for “Prudence.” The corporate-funded cult of economic absolutism thrives on today’s vacuum of neutrality in the public sphere. The only counterweight to it’s relentless expansion is our collective moral indignation.
On this issue, it is young progressives who seem to create the roadblocks to convergence with the Old Heartland Conservatives. How many millennial liberals are asking critical questions about public morality: Are celebrities using their platform to make us better or worse souls? Are public school classes helping students grow up to be Good citizens instead of just “career-and-college-ready” individuals? Are politicians challenging us to have higher, civic interests, or just pandering to our current self interests? The Old Heartland Conservatives are asking these important questions better than we are. If we stopped disparaging the houses of their moral values — their churches — and took time to listen, perhaps we could converge on revitalizing a moral force to counter the corporate libertarian agenda.
The opportunity for convergence around moral values is closely tied to a second hopeful trend among the Old Heartland Conservatives. I finally put my finger on it while talking with Buck Allen, a country singer who was plays Tea Party-themed songs with lyrics such as “Don’t tread on me, I’m American free, you’re not gonna take it away!” I asked him about how he made a living and he talked with pride about his 28-acre farm and the need for people “to produce things again, not just consume things.” If a Tea Party member talking about anti-consumerism is not a sign of potential convergence, I don’t know what is.
In fact, Allen’s “producerist ethic” was present in many of the conference-goers stories. This idea of “Producerism” — the belief that producers of tangible wealth should be valued and that citizens should work to produce more than they consume, give back more than they take — is an old one, having originated in America among laborers, artisans and farmers in the nineteenth century. The worst, untempered edge of Producerism has been visible on the Right in recent years. It is present in the accusations that 47% of the country are “takers,” that those on welfare are “leeching” off of the system, and that the poor are not just economically poor, but morally poor. But, underneath this vile co-option is the original Producerism: the ethic that originally challenged those on all sides of the economic spectrum — especially wealthy financiers — to work to not leech off the system; the ethic that says we should reward the sweaty creators of America, not the tidy aristocrats; the ethic that reminds us that more joy comes from making things than from consuming them.
This is an area ripe for Left-Right convergence. One roadblock, though, is the fact that liberal economic policy often focuses only on the consumption side of the economy: more wages, more equitable incomes, more employment. Where are the popular progressive policies about more worker ownership and worker cooperatives? Or about access to productive resources for starting one’s own business? If progressives started talking more about this production side of the equation, we might be able to bridge the divide.
The Old Heartland Conservatives need to play their part in convergence, too, though. Despite all the talk about “job creators” and “risk takers,” the Republican Party has yet to put forth a program that seriously supports entrepreneurial dreamers, artisans and makers in the Heartland. Yet, the Heartlanders never punish them for it at the ballot box. Despite all the Tea Party talk about how they are against Wall Street fat cats as much as they are against Washington bureaucrats, their shouts of “taker” are always louder when directed at poor individuals than at rich corporations. Convergence will only be possible when they see the sizeable coalition that could be made from joining with progressives to both rein in the corrupting power of corporate aristocrats and open access to more productive resources for small producers.
4. Conservative leaders have a choice between fortifying the roadblocks to common ground or sowing the seeds of Left-Right convergence.
The “leaders” at CPAC — the ones at the podium in front of the cameras — are roadblocks to convergence for both groups of conservatives. In the CPAC ballroom, the respective flaws of the Young Professional Right and the Old Heartland Conservatives — doctrinaire insensitivity to serious problems and improperly-directed scorn — were fertilized by a bevy of speakers who pandered to the attendees, uninterested in leading them to higher levels of informed and productive conscientiousness. As a result, the Palins, Cruzes and Rubios laughed their way to the headlines, the Young Professional Right got their high-paying jobs at the K
och Institute, the Heartland Conservatives learned new slogans of indignation to bring home, and no one in the ballroom was left making progress towards convergent coalitions that could actually ameliorate their public dissatisfaction.
Away from the cameras though, tucked in the corner of the convention hall, was real convergent leadership for the Right. When I came across the “Right on Crime” booth, three men present were talking to conference-goers about their convergent initiatives in Texas. “Hey, we believe in limited, efficient government,” one said. “And yet our prison system is bloated and inefficient — something had to be done.” They have spent the past years organizing a Left-Right coalition to develop reforms to the criminal justice system to save money and decrease recidivism. With their help, Texas has strengthened alternatives to incarceration for adults and juveniles over the past years, achieving significant reductions in crime while saving taxpayers $2 billion. At the end of the day, they partnered with progressives to achieve success without sacrificing their conservative commitment to limited government.
Here’s to hoping that by next year’s CPAC, the Palins are tucked in the corner and convergers like “Right on Crime” are center stage.
Civic engagement is not going to be engaging if it’s treated as a set of personal “service hours” that you have to clock in alone.
mize money and all will be okay; maximize stability and all will be okay; maximize experience 
1960’s counterculture — the push for individual authenticity and broad-based political participation — by dropping acid at Woodstock. Ralph Nader did it by founding public citizen groups that wielded facts, beat the system, and saved tens of thousands of lives. He’s in a category with Fred Rogers, who took the call for more authentic lives in the 1960’s and founded a television show that helped children develop in a healthy and natural relationship with their own feelings. These are my heroes: those with radical lives, not just radical lifestyles.
path of life better than Pete Seeger, who wielded a banjo, a voice, and a song in the struggle for justice for almost a century. The New York Times obituary laid out Seeger’s theory of mixing craft (folk) and cause (justice) perfectly: “For Mr. Seeger, folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action.”
This is all without mentioning that Seeger built his own cabin (which he lived in for half a century), wrote the definitive book on how to play the banjo and dropped out of Harvard because his sociology teacher said that you can’t change the world.