The future of conservatism in an age of alienation: A short-read Q&A with Yuval Levin

After 100 some days of the Trump presidency, the Republican Party and the conservative coalition, broadly understood, are still in flux. Was this election a Pyrrhic victory? Is that even the right question to ask?

Yuval Levin writes in a new essay, “Conservatism in an Age of Alienation”, that “… the problems exposed by this election year call out for a modernized, self-critical, twenty-first-century conservatism—a conservatism that is uncertain if this election has marked a victory or a defeat, and is therefore both aggressive in pursuit of opportunities and alert to dangers.” We discussed this, the future of the movement, and much more. Check out the podcast episode over on Ricochet, the lightly edited transcript below, and the long-read version here.

Yuval Levin is the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and editor of National Affairs magazine. He’s the recipient of the 2013 Bradley prize for intellectual achievement, and he’s most recently the author of “The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism.”

In this essay, you write that while the Republican party may be up, conservatism may be down. I think the phrase is: “This doesn’t feel like winning.” Why doesn’t it feel like winning?

Well, I think that the past year and 2016 election year was a time that would have to force conservatives to search our souls some. The Republican party ended up doing well in the election at all levels, and, of course, winning the presidential election. But it did so in the course of also opening up some distance between the Republican party and conservatism that I think is greater than the distance we’ve seen any time since the 1970s. And Donald Trump simply didn’t run as a conservative, didn’t really pretend to, and in many ways ran over a lot of conservative sacred cows on the way to the presidency.

Conservatives need to think about the fact that even though Republicans won this election, the past year’s revealed there’s some serious weaknesses in what conservatives are offering the country—especially at the level of agenda, of policy, where it seemed like the 15 conservatives that ran against Trump for the Republican nomination couldn’t get the attention of Republican voters in making the case for a conservative policy agenda. Instead, Trump got their attention largely by attacking that case and that agenda and by making a very different case, by making an appeal to a very different set of concerns and a different set of issues than conservatives have tended to argue for. So the guy saying that we need lower taxes just isn’t enough. I think that should lead conservatives to think about what it is we need to be for today, what it means to be a conservative in contemporary American politics which can’t start in policy; it has to end in policy. It has to start in the sense of how we understand the country’s problems, how we think about the role of the government in politics and solving problems, and then what that should mean for public policy.

Why is alienation so harmful to conservatism, or why does it undercut conservatism?

You know, there are a ways of understanding alienation that are uglier than others. It’s a term that’s come to be associated over time with Marxism among other things. The way I use the term in the essay I tie it to a definition by Robert Nisbet who was here at AEI among other things, a great sociologist in the middle 20^th century. I think of alienation as a sense of detachment from one’s own society. It’s looking out at the society you live in and thinking, “That’s not mine” and feeling no connection, no links—seeing it as distant, as hostile, even seeing it as boring. We should never underestimate the power of boredom in social life. That kind of alienation was very much on display in the last election and in some people’s—especially early on in the Republican primaries, in the most devoted Trump supporters—there was a sense that “This society isn’t ours. We have got to blow this up and try again.” I think that’s dangerous in general, but it’s particularly dangerous to conservatism because conservatism in a sense is a sense of attachment and ownership and defensiveness of one’s own society. It certainly can see problems and is inclined to be rather depressed about things most of the time. But that follows from a sense of loss, not from a sense of alienation. It can lead, therefore, in its most constructive forms to a determination to revive, revitalize, recapture institutions, rather than to this sense that “it’s all over” or “the only option we have left is a Hail Mary pass.”

I think that the sort of alienation that was evident in some of Trump’s supporters is very dangerous for the American right because it tends to make the right less conservative. And to make the right hostile to its own society. First of all, I think America doesn’t deserve that. We have a lot of problems, our institutions are in real trouble, but things are not nearly as bad as the way in which Trump described them. Just think about the convention speech and, in some respects, even the inaugural. This describes an America that is much darker than reality and when you do that, it doesn’t leave room for thinking about solutions. It doesn’t leave room for thinking about how to come back.

Later on in the essay, you become a little more solution-oriented: “We need to fight alienation by putting power a little closer to the interpersonal level and making the social order seem a little less distant. What we need, in other words, is precisely what conservatism at its best might stand to offer.”

Now that seems very modest. How significant can that be?

Well, look, I think change has to be incremental. That’s not exactly the same thing as modest. I think incremental change can be pretty dramatic.

That assumes it’s leading, that it’s one step that leads to another step.

But you know, it begins from a different understanding of how to solve problems. And to me, the understanding that we’re missing now is fundamentally experimental. It has to start from the premise that we don’t already know how to solve the problems we have. I think a lot of what we do now starts from the premise that we do and that all we need is to impose the solution we have on a system that resists it—on the left and on the right.
“Never underestimate sheer boredom as a moving force in politics. Trump was not boring, and in some ways, Trump really did speak to the problems that the others were failing to speak to in both parties. He acknowledged those problems.”

An approach to 21^st century problems that says we don’t have the answers yet; let’s empower people to try different ways of finding it; let’s empower people who suffer from this problem to tell us what’s working for them and what’s not; let’s have a system where that answer matters so that things that are failing go away, things that succeed are retained. Our politics right now is nothing like any of that—nothing happens in that way. But the institutions that are working, especially in our economy, are very much like that. I think we can learn from them. We need to have some kind of sociology of success. Some kind of looking at problems. And, you know, when you say 80% of children born in poverty will remain in poverty, what’s going on with the other 20%? Where’s that difference? We don’t do nearly enough of that now. I think an approach to public policy that would work that and understand itself to be experimental, not only as pilots to figure out what we should impose nationally, but experimental in an ongoing way would be a very, very different way—much more different than what Trump is offering or what Bernie Sanders offered. Different in a really fundamental way—I think that opens the path to a much more functional politics. So it’s incremental, but I wouldn’t say it’s modest exactly.

Is it something beyond pushing Medicaid back to the states? Medicare vouchers? Or pushing some other governmental functions back to the state and local levels? 

From where we are now, I think that’s more or less where it would have to start. Again, because it has to be incremental, I think it does need to begin from the reality where we are, which by the way, conservatives haven’t been great at either. We can’t begin by imagining a blank slate and thinking about what we would do. We have to start by seeing where we are and thinking about what a plausible step in the right direction looks like. That means a lot of the beginnings of this kind of approach would have to look like devolution, would have to look like decentralization. I do think that, ultimately, this gets you to a place where there are a lot of different kinds of solutions to public problems that coexist at the same time. We’re very uncomfortable with that in our politics. We always think of these things as trying out ways which ultimately will become universal solutions. But I think much more of a role for civil society, a role for local government—it’s not just private. There are also layers of government that are closer to the people. By the way, they tend to be a little more functional and they tend to be a little bit less disabled by partisanship—a little. A little is something you always have to say, it seems to me, in talking about politics and policy. Those kinds of incremental moves from where we are would open the paths for more and more like them. We just have to accept the fact that we don’t know what the outcome looks like. That’s very, very hard in Washington, but, you know, too bad.

The world you’ve been describing, fundamentally do you think Americans really want that? Or have they moved from the classically liberal to the progressive and now you are just trying to take off the rough edges? 

I think that gives the left much too much credit. More generally than that, I don’t really believe in final victories. I don’t think that’s how our kind of politics works. But it seems to me that a lot of the failure of both conservatism and progressivism is a failure of diagnosis. It’s been a failure to explain to people the nature of the problems as we see them in a way that actually seems to them like the realities they’re confronting. A lot of Trump’s power was the power of diagnosis. Trump spoke about problems in ways that did seem to people like something they were confronting. I don’t think he offered viable solutions, but there’s a lot to learn about the power of diagnosis.

“I think a conservatism that begins by understanding 21^st century problems in their own terms would not only be appealing to the public but would also find that it has more solutions that it now thinks.”

I think a conservatism that begins by understanding 21^st century problems in their own terms would not only be appealing to the public but would also find that it has more solutions that it now thinks. It has a lot more to say than limited government and less spending. That exactly because of the way it thinks about human beings and human institutions, it’s actually pretty well suited to thinking about 21^st century America and the problems that it has. I think conservatives have a lot more to offer than we’ve been offering lately. The question of whether the public is open to it is a question that just hasn’t been tested because what we’ve been offering the public isn’t attractive. The fact that the public isn’t attracted to it isn’t surprising.