The Right’s Retreat from Market Fundamentalism

President Trump delivering remarks at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee Conference in March 2019. Photo by The White House.

In his 1989 farewell address, former President Ronald Reagan summarized modern American conservatism with a single quip: “As government expands, liberty contracts.” This belief, that the government should remove itself as much as possible from the presence of American lives, has long been the rallying cry of the conservative movement. The 2016 Republican Party platform maintained that “When political freedom and economic freedom are separated—both are in peril; when united, they are invincible.” On the other side of the American ideological spectrum, political liberals have long argued that too much individual freedom can damage the national welfare, and that too free a market promotes greed and hurts America’s most vulnerable citizens. 

But in our contemporary political moment, the liberal side no longer holds a monopoly on critiques of unfettered capitalism. Over the past decade, there has been a rise in conservatives who reject market fundamentalism, and who are unafraid to flex the power of the government to realize their social vision. While no particular ideology binds these conservatives together, all of them can be said to be “anti-liberal,” which may sound trite. But, the ideology that these conservatives oppose is not only the progressive liberalism of the Democratic Party, but also classical liberalism—a philosophy which advocates for the free markets and personal freedoms that the Republican Party has stood for since Reagan. These new forces on the American right reject liberalism of all kinds, and seek to establish a new and robustly conservative political order.

Many of the ideological tenets of the new right are captured in University of Notre Dame political science professor Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book “Why Liberalism Failed.” In it, Deneen does not argue against New Deal liberalism or the current Democratic party platform, but the very foundations of Western liberalism dating back to the 17th century. He argues that liberalism’s ultimate goal of creating a society of choice relieves people from personal obligations and duties, creating depersonalized societies in which individuals live dull, meaningless, and directionless lives. Abetting this loss of societal obligation is the global capitalist order, which has replaced a communal market of engagement and association with the faceless, online, and impersonal markets of today. In contrast to the conventional belief that our liberal world has succeeded with its high standards of living, low levels of violent crime, and record-breaking literacy rates, Deneen argues that liberalism has failed “because it has succeeded.” For instance, he argues that liberalism’s success in ousting the old aristocratic order has simply created a new group of elites, the technocrats, who now control an unprecedented share of the country’s wealth, and whose fortunes are becoming increasingly inherited. Deneen also believes that liberalism’s celebration of cultural differences is in effect what he calls an “anti-culture,” where no particular cultural traits are emphasized other than openness and tolerance, leading to a “flattening” of our cultural landscape. Because Deneen believes that liberalism’s goals were flawed from the beginning, he argues that the realization of its goals, and the negative consequences these triumphs brought, show the impossibility of a liberal world succeeding.

However, Deneen’s flavor of anti-liberalism is mild when compared to some of the other forces of the new American right. While Deneen advocates for conservatives to retreat from society and live in small, tradition-based communities, some other elements of the new right, like the integralists, are not content unless all of America comes with them. Broadly speaking, integralism is the belief that society is best served without the separation of church and state, and that the religious sphere should be intertwined with the political, social, and legal institutions that dictate our way of life. In the United States, almost all leading integralist figures, like Gladden Pappin and Matthew Schmitz, are Catholic, and as such, most of their writing is hard to get through without a strong background in Catholic doctrine. But behind their Latin phrases and discussions of papal history is an endorsement of Catholic government, Catholic courts, and Catholic laws. 

The darling of Catholic integralism is Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a frequent contributor to First Things, the nation’s leading religious conservative journal. After graduating from law school, Vermeule worked as clerk for conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but Vermeule today is far from acting as Scalia’s protégé. While Scalia was a famous advocate of judicial originalism, Vermeule sees originalism as a barrier towards achieving his vision of a Catholic America. In a recent article that has shocked both conservatives and liberals alike, Vermeule argues that originalism does not effectively promote conservative interests and has “become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.” Instead of a primarily text-based focus, Vermeule advocates for what he calls “common-good constitutionalism,” which would focus legal interpretations towards an integralist vision of the common good. For Vermeule, this vision calls for respecting rulers and the rule of law, supporting what he considers legitimate social hierarchies, and perhaps most importantly, embracing a “candid willingness to legislate morality.” Critically, he believes that the shift from originalism to common-good constitutionalism will “give way to a new confidence in authoritative rule for the common good,” with a powerful president and bureaucracy guiding our country towards an integralist future. Unlike other conservative jurists who ground interpretation in a neutral or objective methodology, Vermeule takes a fully ends-based approach, using the law as a tool for realizing his integralist vision.

But if Vemeule’s ideas on jurisprudence sound radical, his political beliefs are an even more extreme vision of what an integralist America would look like. On immigration, Vermeule supports prioritizing confirmed Catholics for entry into the United States, hoping that many will convert to gain admission. Since this policy would favor heavily Catholic regions like Central Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia, he mockingly writes that any opposition towards his policy reflects “racism and classism infesting whoever voices that opposition.” And despite the fact that Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution bars any religious test for public office, Vermeule believes that atheists should not be able to serve in government, nor believers of any religion besides Catholicism. Less concerned with grassroots activism or national politics, Vermeule and other integralists seek to infiltrate elite universities and bureaucratic systems, hijacking their operations to steer them towards a Catholic vision of the public good.

Interior view of St. Andrew’s Catholic Church in Roanoke, Virginia. Photo by Joe Ravi.

It is true that for now, most anti-liberal and integralist thinking on the right remains concentrated in academia and conservative Catholic journals, with conservatives in government by and large still favoring free market capitalism and individual autonomy. As of late, however, some younger Republican leaders seem to be breaking from the prevailing conservative dogma on market fundamentalism. Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri and youngest member of the Senate at 40, has few qualms with enlarging the government’s role to advance his social vision. Hawley has been one of the most adamant supporters of regulating the tech industry, with calls to ban unlimited scrolling on social media platforms. Despite widespread conservative support for free trade, Hawley has defended new tariffs as part of President Trump’s trade war with China. Additionally, when debating government responses to the coronavirus shutdown, Hawley proposed that the government not just provide emergency loans to small businesses, but that it should also cover payroll for all employees up to the median wage. Hawley is not the only Republican senator that calls the merits of unregulated free markets into question. 2016 presidential hopeful and Florida Senator Marco Rubio has called for conservatives to embrace what he calls “common-good capitalism,” criticizing the growth of large corporations and lambasting the bloat of the financial sector. In a Catholic University of America speech peppered with words from former popes, Rubio argued that businesses have an obligation to reinvest their profits for the “benefit of the workers and the greater society”—even criticizing the relentless pursuit of economic growth which he believes leaves millions behind without dignified work.

Even if these new developments in American conservatism are confined to small areas on the right, they should not be underestimated. Many ideas in the political mainstream started as academic debate—free market capitalism itself was the realm of economic theory and philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries before it was accepted by mainstream politicians and the public. Perhaps, the small but growing popularity of these new conservative views in academia will soon translate over to Republican politicians and their political base. If these beliefs do catch on in the mainstream, however, it will not simply represent another shift in political orthodoxy. America has undergone massive political transformations, from antebellum federalism to New-Deal-style bureaucracy to the current liberal democratic order. Conservatives have always pushed back on these systems, but rarely to the point where they threatened to push us off the path of the liberal tradition. From John Locke in the 17th century to the founding fathers in the 18th century to John Dewey in the 20th century, liberalism has become the central governing ideology of our modern world. Perhaps this new right ideology will sputter out in its infancy. Perhaps it will follow the path of fascism and communism, which both for a time contested liberalism until they were soundly defeated. Only time will tell if the new right will grow to be a formidable challenger to the 400-odd-years old liberal tradition. But in the coronavirus outbreak, several writers have pointed out that “there are no libertarians in a pandemic.” Perhaps then in this time of heightened support for growing governmental powers, the new right will emerge stronger than ever.