In December 2018 -- now three years ago -- I attended a Niskanen Center conference in DC entitled "The Center Right After Trump''. The panels were sprinkled with conservative luminaries like Bill Kristol and David Frum. I recall the general view concluding that, after Trump, the social conservatives would come crawling back to their center-right masters, pundits like Kristol, Frum and the Niskanen staff of experts.
I disagreed, saying that I believed the median voter boundary had shifted, and that the communist-era center-right was now structurally on the center-left. There would be no return of Republicans to the sort of leadership espoused by, say, the late Bob Dole, Gerald Ford or the elder George Bush. Instead, the Republican Party would become either nationalist or populist, and viably so. This was greeted with incredulity. Nevertheless, my view has held up, and the balance of the moderate Republicans have since been purged from the Party. Even Niskanen was forced to take notice, and this past June began to confront reality with a tele-conference entitled "A Time for Choosing: The Center-Right’s Three Options for Saving American Democracy." One option called for fiscal conservatives to remain in the Republican Party and fight for its soul. Another called for the establishment of a third party. The final option, presented by Liam Kerr of the Welcome Party, called for formerly moderate Republicans to join the Democratic Party. In unsettled times, the traditional center right is trying to find a home.
Democrats are facing the mirror image of the same question. How should they treat the classical liberals -- the fiscal conservatives, libertarians, the independents and suburban moderates? The Republicans do not want them and do not need them. The Democrats do not want them, but they certainly need them.
I will argue that the dynamics we see today are the culmination of changes driven by the fall of communism in the early 1990s. We are gradually completing a historic, but entirely foreseeable, return to the political alignments of the pre-communist era. The strategies of both the Republicans and Democrats are driven by this ideological shift, and they revolve around the future of the classical liberals, independents, and the suburban moderates.
******
On the Republican side, the divorce of the social conservatives from the fiscal conservatives should come as no surprise. It is the marriage which was the anomaly. Historically, the fiscal conservatives -- the classical liberals and libertarians -- have lined up on the political left, not the right. Indeed, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes liberalism and socialism as conservatism's "anti-traditionalist rivals". Not allies. Rivals. Fiscal and social conservatives are not on the same side at all. So why the marriage? It was a forced union in response to the rise of communism. In the US two-party system, the dynamics of a three ideology world -- egalitarians, liberals and conservatives -- do not correspond one-for-one with political parties. One party will ordinarily house two distinct ideologies. The question is where the ideology in the middle -- the classical liberalism of the fiscal conservatives -- lines up.
To better illustrate the dynamics, we can look to Britain, where the three ideologies have all had their own parties for more than a century.
As the graph below shows, until the establishment of communism in the Soviet Union, the UK Labour Party played a minor role in British politics, with the Liberal Party holding the left as the primary opposition to the conservatives. However, with the rise of communist Russia, Labour overtook and ultimately eclipsed the Liberal Party, which in turn was shunted to a minor role. Thus, the political left in Britain came to be -- and still is -- equated with the Labour Party. Historically, however, the Liberal Party dominated the left of the political spectrum.
Fig. 1: Share of UK House of Commons Seats by Party
Source: UK House of Commons Library
These changes were less visible in America's two-party system. Nevertheless, the rise of the Soviet Union also catalyzed left politics in the US, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt establishing the modern welfare state and co-opting the term 'liberal' after 1932. The classical liberals were accordingly squeezed out of the political left. Indeed, this can be seen in the rise of the term 'libertarian', brought into popular usage by the writer Dean Russell in 1955:
Many of us call ourselves “liberals.” And it is true that the word “liberal” once described persons who respected the individual and feared the use of mass compulsions. But the leftists have now corrupted that once-proud term to identify themselves and their program of more government ownership of property and more controls over persons. As a result, those of us who believe in freedom must explain that when we call ourselves liberals, we mean liberals in the uncorrupted classical sense. At best, this is awkward and subject to misunderstanding. Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trade-mark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word "libertarian."
The term stuck because those who had considered themselves liberals had lost control over the substantive meaning of the word as the egalitarians took over the political left in the US. While the term retained its political meaning as 'left of center', 'liberal' was stripped of its ideological connotation with individual liberty and rights.
With nowhere else to go, the classical liberals, now libertarians, joined the social conservatives as part of the anti-communist coalition. Thus was born the term fiscal conservative to denote the political affiliation of classical liberals with the conservative right while signaling distinct ideological roots. And the fiscal conservatives were needed. After 1932, even without their traditional libertarian allies, Democrats dominated the House of Representatives. From 1932 until 1994, the Democrats held a majority in the House for all but four years. The egalitarians had taken full control of the left. The classical liberals were neither wanted nor needed there.
Fig. 2: Democrats’ Seats in the US House of Representatives
Source: United States House of Representatives, Princeton Policy forecast
This lasted until the Soviet Union disintegrated and communism collapsed in the early 1990s. The changes were slow to be appreciated in the west, but they were immediately apparent in eastern Europe, notably in Hungary, where I spent the years of transition. In May 1990, just a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hungary held its first truly free elections in fifty years. The Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF), a conservative Christian party, and the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ), a classically liberal party, took the lion's share of the votes, with the Socialists effectively excluded from parliament. The MDF formed the government and, interestingly, the Free Democrats (SZDSZ) went into opposition on the left. Thus, following the collapse of communism in Hungary, the classical liberals -- core members of the anti-communist coalition -- promptly took up their position on the left in opposition to the conservatives.
At the time, this did not seem so unusual. Four years later, it would prove shocking. By 1994, the Hungarian public had tired of the hardships of transition and voted the Socialists back in with a majority of seats in parliament. To the public's surprise, the Free Democrats joined the government coalition, a shock considering that those very socialists had been persecuting Free Democrat politicians just a few years before. Bewildered conservatives took it as a betrayal. Nevertheless, from that date forward in Hungary, the classical liberals would cohabit on the left with their recent enemies and historical partners, the socialists.
The change was also visible in the US if one cared to look. After 1994, the Democrats were no longer the natural majority in Congress. If we assume the Republicans retake the House in 2022 -- a pretty safe bet -- the Democrats will have held the majority in the House for only eight of the thirty years since the mid-1990s. And even these eight years are anomalous. Four of them came in the wake of the Great Recession, an economic trauma which upset the natural political order; and another four as a reaction to the presidency of Donald Trump, who also upset the natural political order. In other words, a Democratic majority in the House is an anomaly in the post-communist era. Even in the 2020 elections, one in which half the country loathed Donald Trump and the Republicans, the Republican Party managed to add thirteen House seats. The current composition of the House can therefore be taken as a floor for the Republicans and a ceiling for the Democrats. Conservative Republicans are now the natural majority in the House.
This brings us then to the civil war and strategy in the Democratic Party. Just as the remainder of moderates are being expelled from the Republican Party, the Democrats are arguing about whether they should give the independents a new home, that is, whether the Democratic Party is to be moderate or progressive. The progressive wing of the party -- the Squad -- has argued that moderates should toe the progressive line. Others have worried that positioning the party so far left will alienate moderate voters.
If we take the view that the collapse of communism has led the white, non-college educated working class to abandon the left and join the right, then the left will require at a minimum independents, classical liberals and suburban moderates to ally with the egalitarian wing of the Democratic Party in order to counter Republicans at the polls. But then who sets the tone, the branding, of the Democratic Party? If the Democratic Party is to be a far left party, the moderates will stay away. This is exactly the outcome seen in Virginia and New Jersey in the November elections. The Republicans swept Virginia and the Democrats retained New Jersey by the narrowest of margins. Therefore, the far left of the Democratic Party is insufficient to hold even Democratic strongholds like the eastern coastal states. The Democrats positioned as a progressive party could accordingly expect to be obliterated come next fall, as I have written earlier. This is the fate the Labour Party has suffered in the UK, where Labor's share of the seats in parliament is a miserable 31% -- 202 seats -- the lowest since 1944. Indeed, but for the moderate (classically liberal) Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 1997 to 2010, Labour would have been out of power for the last forty years. A hard left Labour Party in the UK would rate as no more than a historical curiosity or electoral footnote. The Democrats are staring into this same abyss come next November, a loss of 50-65 seats, which would bring the party to its lowest representation in the House in ninety years, analogous to the UK Labour Party's current standing.
Fig. 3: UK Labour Party Share of Seats in the House of Commons
Source: UK House of Commons Library
Given that President Biden has enabled the rebranding of the Democrats as a hard left party, a wipeout next year may already be set in stone. To the extent such a fate is to be avoided, the Democrats must swing hard to the center. In this world, the fiscal conservatives will control the left, just as they controlled the right during the communist era.
This may seem odd, given that classical liberals typically constitute only 13-17% of the electorate. How can they wield such power? Median voter theory provides the critical insight: that policy will tend to be decided around the tastes of the median voter. In a three-ideology, but two-party, system, one ideology will fall off the median voter boundary. During the communist era, the social conservatives found themselves marginalized with RINOs running the Republican Party. In the conservative era, the social conservatives will straddle the median voter boundary on the right. The fiscal conservatives -- to the extent they are in the Democratic Party -- will line up immediately to the left of the median voter boundary and set the tone and policy for the Democratic Party. Thus, we can speak of 'dominant' and 'recessive' ideologies, with the ideologies on the median voter boundary counting as dominant and decisive in setting policy. The adherents of the recessive ideology, in this case the progressives, will spend a lot of time complaining, mostly about DINOs.
We can see this specific dynamic at play in the Democratic Party. The progressive faction of the party has proposed a vast social welfare bill. It has been held up — now killed — by a single moderate Senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia. At the end of the day, the bill would only be as extreme as Manchin's tastes dictate. Progressives will vote for everything Manchin will support, for example, some form of paid family leave. By contrast, Manchin will not support everything the progressives want, not by a long shot. Therefore, legislation will only pass if it commands the median vote, in this case, Manchin's. In this way, median voter theory dictates that the ideologies near the center will determine the feasibility of a given initiative. The progressives can find wins at the margin, but in the future, legislation will tend to be either fiscally or socially conservative, notwithstanding the noise from the far left.
Fiscal conservatism has been the recipe for success for post-communist left administrations. For example, President Clinton raised taxes, reduced spending and balanced the budget. The economy boomed. In fiscal terms, Clinton would have qualified as the best Republican president since Coolidge. Similarly, no less than The Guardian noted that Labour leader Tony Blair built on the economic foundations of Margaret Thatcher’s economic reforms. Labour had the longest run in government with the greatest number of seats in the Commons under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. In both the US and the UK, a moderate positioning of the left led to historically successful administrations. That model is still valid today, as November's election results in Virginia and New Jersey demonstrate. A Democratic Party positioned to the hard left will be obliterated. To win in a conservative era, Democrats must hold the moderate center, those suburban independents who will support conservatives if the left is presented as stridently socialist.
But domination by the classical liberals is a hard pill to swallow. I above noted that Liam Kerr of the Welcome Party sought to recruit moderate Republicans to the Democratic Party. He did so by offering to moderates that "you'll have a voice." What Kerr should have said is, "You'll have the deciding voice in the party." This is the issue to be negotiated, and it can only be decided in favor of the classical liberals if the Democratic Party is to retain national relevance.
For the Democrats, the strategy is clear. The moderates like Joe Manchin and Amy Klobuchar — and most importantly, President Biden — must stand up and claim the party as centrist. Failure to do so will spell electoral disaster next November and thereafter.
The Importance of Roe vs Wade
While we are discussing the impact of the fall of communism on the political divide, a word about the Supreme Court is also in order.
On the graph below, we can see the ideological balance of the Supreme Court measured as the number of conservative justices less the number of liberal justices. As the graph shows, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed liberal judges, transforming a formerly conservative court into one with a liberal balance. His successor, Harry Truman, appointed more conservative judges, but subsequent presidents tended to appoint liberal judges, such that by 1968, liberals outnumbered conservatives by seven votes. That proved the high-water mark for liberalism, and the court has trended conservative since 1980. As with Congress, the Supreme Court turned majority conservative in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union and has remained conservative since. Indeed, the court has become more conservative in recent years and is now the most conservative since the Truman administration or perhaps even earlier.
Fig. 4: Ideological Balance of the US Supreme Court (Conservatives minus Liberals)
Sources: Michael Bailey, Martin-Quinn Scores, author’s calculations
The preponderance of conservatives means that long-standing liberal rulings may come up for review, with Roe v Wade leading the way. Roe was always terrible jurisprudence, so the court has reasonable cause to reverse the ruling. For our purposes, however, abortion is not the central issue. Rather, the broader question revolves around the classification of rights as pertaining to the individual or to the group. As readers will recall, we define liberal as pertaining to the individual and conservative as pertaining to the group (and its members). In overturning Roe, the court will be reclassifying a right earlier deemed constitutional and intrinsic to the individual to one subject to public tastes and majority views. This is the central theme of evolving conservatism as we see it: greater weight put on societal norms and tastes at the expense of the freedom of the individual. It is this principle which will likely set the tone in the future.
Further, society is likely to continue to become more conservative for the next two decades. Ideology and demographics are closely linked. The young appreciate freedom; the elderly seek security. US society will continue to age through 2040. Politics and the composition of the Supreme Court may be expected to follow these trends in a more conservative direction. Indeed, if ideology follows the pattern of Hungary, conservatives will straddle both sides of the median voter boundary. Put another way, the overturn of Roe v Wade opens the door for Republicans to challenge long-accepted conventions and become a truly radical party.
Nationalist or Populist?
For minorities -- blacks and Hispanics in particular -- the question is whether the Republicans evolve as nationalists or populists. Nationalism is built around race and religion and is fascistic in nature (keeping in mind that we define fascist as 'discrimination by a group or its members based on an individual's unalterable characteristics, typically race or religion'). Nationalism has emotional appeal, but it can be extraordinarily adversarial and destructive. Blacks and Hispanics have little upside in this vision of the future. Nor is nationalism an easy long-term strategy in a country where whites are steadily shrinking as a share of the population.
Alternatively, the Republican Party may become populist. Populism is principally about class and income -- it is in effect a Marxist construct. As such, it is not primarily concerned with race and religion. We can see some movement in this direction, notably, working class blacks and Hispanics drifting towards the Republican Party, just as working class whites have over recent decades. One key to a populist strategy would be the resolution of illegal immigration, thereby removing the primary source of friction between Hispanics and whites.
Ideology, Affiliation and Identity
I would like to close this analysis as I opened it, with the Niskanen Center and, indeed, with my friends at the Cato Institute.
That the anti-communist coalition should fracture after the fall of communism is not a terribly deep insight, nor is it new. I first wrote about it twenty years ago. Nor is the communist-era migration of the classical liberals to the right obscure. I read about it on Cato's website fifteen years ago when I first researched this topic. So why then the difficulties? Why are Niskanen and my friends at the Cato Institute still twisting in the wind and hoping to remain on the center right?
Well, switching sides is about more than ideology. It is also about identity and affiliation. Those on the center right are used to thinking of themselves as being on the center right and enjoying status with the Republican elite. But the ground has shifted beneath their feet. It is like a man living in the Sinai who, upon that desert's return to Egypt, went to bed an Israeli and woke up an Egyptian. The fiscal conservatives’ self-conception and philosophy have not changed, but they are now on the other side of the divide. Emotionally, they struggle to digest that they went to bed Republican elites and woke up Democratic elites.
Affiliation also matters, both for think tank funders and for political allies and colleagues. The natural impulse remains to hold on to established networks and professional friendships, even if these may no longer be quite applicable to new circumstances. This is not an easy, and perhaps not even feasible, transition for mid-career professionals.
Nor should ideology be fully discounted. Fiscal conservatives have always loathed socialists, and they still do. Cohabiting on the left can look distasteful. But that is the bride on offer, the ex-wife from earlier times. And of course, the decisive question remains who rules the house. If the progressives set the tone, they cannot count on liberal support.
And finally, there is the question of comfort. The melding of fiscal and social conservatism is a cozy intellectual and emotional fusion, where both self-interest and social obligation can be combined in one political home. Doing good and doing well are manifest in a single party. That is no longer true. Today, one's self-interest and one's social interest are split between two parties. To put it another way, the organic left-right divide does not run through groups of people, it runs through the individual. It is duty versus desire. For the center right, it means they can't have it all, that the future of the political divide will force them to choose and offers a lesser world than the one they used to inhabit. From a psychological perspective, if the future is less than the past, why rush to embrace it?
For all these reasons, the center right think tanks, indeed, many former moderate Republicans, are struggling with their identity and political loyalties. The result, however, is both analysis and policy proposals which are not well thought through. Niskanen is intent on 'saving American democracy', but its proposals are undercooked at best. In its conference, the first speaker suggests moderates should fight for the soul of the party. A brief review of the historical record suggests that is unlikely to succeed.
The second speaker suggests a three party system, but this is no mean feat. If the left's votes are split between liberals and egalitarians, then the classical liberals -- that 13-17% of the electorate -- will have no material representation in Congress. Just look to the British precedent. The Liberal Democrats have polled respectably in the UK over the last half century, averaging 17% of the vote. However, this has translated into a meager 4% of the seats in parliament. The outcome would be no better in the US barring a fundamental re-write of the Constitution, and that is not going to happen. Splitting the left into two parties would mean disaster for both liberals and progressives. The concept of a third party is thus either a deadly serious topic requiring deep research and analysis, or it is a throw-away. Hardly the stuff of 'saving American democracy' to just toss it out for discussion.
Figure 5: Liberal Party Seats and Share of Vote
Source: UK House of Commons Library
The last option, for moderates to join the Democrats, is the viable political solution, but it deserves much more seriousness than Niskanen's passing treatment.
*****
Conservatives are not unaware of these discussions. In their gut they know that the thinking of the center right of, say, Niskanen or Cato, boils down to the three D's: Dominance, Disdain or Desperation. I have alluded to the dominance above, that pundits like Bill Kristol and David Frum feel entitled to call the shots, and that rural, non-college educated whites should shut up and follow their betters.
This is accompanied by utter disdain for social conservatives. Those at Niskanen consider themselves on the right, but they will not talk to Breitbart or the other conservative outlets. How can one claim to be on the right and not talk to the right? It’s simple. The center right elite assume conservatives will surely give up hope and go away. No need to engage with conservatives, or heaven help us, take them seriously.
The last option is, of course, despair, that social conservatives will end democracy. That is a terrible outcome to be avoided, but apparently not so terrible as to stretch the imagination or challenge the class prejudices of the think tank elites.
The center right must therefore either win or lose. Accommodation, relationship management and constructive interaction with conservatives is off the table.
This is apparent in the very definition of conservatism. Here is how the above-mentioned Stanford Encyclopedia describes it:
Many deny that [conservatism] is an ideology, or even a political philosophy, regarding it instead as a disposition that resists theoretical expression—a “non-ideology” that attempts to avoid the errors of ideologies. Is it an ancient attitude, or one that developed only in response to Enlightenment rationality and its political products, liberalism and socialism?
Well, if conservatism is not even an ideology, then surely we can disdain and dismiss it. And this would be fine, except that half the voters are conservative, representing the dominant political group in the country. Therefore, taking the attitude that conservatives are incoherent and have no addressable ideology is a bad idea, because the left's policy options will devolve into either Dominance or Desperation. Fight or flight, that's all Niskanen or Cato have on offer today. And make no mistake. The conservatives have arrived and are getting stronger. They will be the dominant party in the House, on average, and very possibly in the Senate and carry a majority of state houses and governorships. We live in a conservative era, one which is trending even more conservative over time. If Dominance and Desperation are the only options on the menu, the left and the traditional center right had better acclimate themselves to a steady diet of desperation.
*****
The Stanford Encyclopedia notes that “compared to liberalism and socialism, conservatism has suffered philosophical neglect.” This is in fact the case. Conservatism has descriptors like “traditional”, “backward-looking”, “slow to change” and “illiberal”, but it has no agreed definition. To broaden the options, we need a coherent model of conservatism, one which allows both the left and right to take a structured and constructive view of conservative ideology. And that's what we provide. Our model has excellent explanatory and predictive capabilities. It provides clear and coherent definitions of both conservatism and fascism using a unified framework for all three major ideologies. And critically, it is compatible with neo-classical economics, a necessary pre-condition for our approach to endure and be adopted in the policy world.
When the time arrives for a serious consideration of conservatism, our model will prove the indispensable tool.