It sure is interesting to see market-skeptical conservatives, so fond of calling market defenders tools of the status quo, favorably cited in the New York Times.
It is sometimes said by people who deserve less attention than I’m about to give them that conservatives who remain supportive of liberalized economics and believe market forces produce better outcomes on the whole than top-down social engineering are mere status-seekers. You’ve probably heard the charge before. It is the ornamental bombast that seeks to indict the “tired nostalgics, corporate shills, and bow-tie clad ‘intellectuals’ who fiddle while our cities burn” – the trite denunciation of the Georgetown cocktail party circuit’s corrupting influences from those who are most likely to be found attending such decadent soirees.
If you’re getting the sense that calumnies like this are a product of psychological projection, New York Times senior writer David Leonhardt’s Tuesday newsletter may help cement that perception. In shining the spotlight on some of the Republican Party’s aspiring populist lodestars, Leonhardt bathes the Right’s loudest market skeptics in praise. Though Leonhardt’s project is ostensibly informed by his reading of the electorate, he doesn’t disguise his support for these Republicans’ desire to anathematize the economic philosophy to which advocates of the market are supposedly predisposed.
The avatars Leonhardt selects as indicative of the populist right’s economic ascendancy don’t fit neatly into his premise. He highlights Ohio senator J. D. Vance, whose recent collaborations with Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren on economic and regulatory issues pair state intervention in private fiscal affairs with state intervention in private cultural affairs. Leonhardt also approvingly cites the work of Florida senator Marco Rubio, whose relatively recent conversion to managerialism has led him to endorse German-style efforts to inflate the rolls of labor unions (the objections to unionization among workers very much notwithstanding). But Leonhardt also sees anti-market activism in Indiana senator Todd Young’s work with other conventional conservatives in the House to restrict anti-competitive practices like contractual non-compete clauses. Leonhardt also views the national-security–related imperative of repatriating industries vital to the American defense as an attack on market economics. Perhaps the most anarchic market fundamentalism rejects defense-related priorities as a perversion of the natural flows of labor and capital, but that was never a conventionally conservative view.
As Leonhardt tacitly admits here, the populist Right’s conception of where market forces should end and state power should begin is nebulous. That’s a feature, not a bug. But this Times writer doesn’t dwell on the contradictions. He came not to define the old Right but to bury it.
Leonhardt showers praise down on the Republicans who are distancing themselves from “anti-government Republicans like Paul Ryan — and, although they won’t say so, Ronald Reagan.” Those outmoded Republicans “pushed the laissez-faire agenda that has hurt” working-class Americans. The emergence of this new center-right caste suggests the GOP is finally “starting to grapple with the economy’s true challenges.” Indeed, “the new conservative populism is an effort to show that Republicans understand Americans’ struggles and want to help.”
Simply nauseating. But the profile would not have been possible without the complicity of its subjects, particularly the thoughtful and sincere conservative reformer Oren Cass. “We really like capitalism, but we recognize it’s not working right now,” Cass told Leonhardt, which is an odd assertion to make about an instrument that no longer performs as advertised. I like my coffeemaker, but I would quickly fall out of love with the thing once it stopped making coffee. But I digress: “Capitalism,” Cass continues, “is a complex system dependent on rules and institutions.”
Well, not really. As a form of “spontaneous order,” entirely unadulterated capitalism (which exists precisely nowhere) emerges out of voluntary activities and associations predicated on individual assessments of their self-interest. Rules and institutions are necessary to prevent the people engaged in economic competition from establishing anti-competitive practices that frustrate the formation of these spontaneous associations, exploit unwitting economic actors, or conspire to enrich themselves in defiance of market fundamentals. But markets will emerge on their own, whether you like it or not.
In the effort to tame the savage marketplace, the proposals in Cass’s manifesto Leonhardt highlighted are mostly unobjectionable. Yes, they distort markets, but not much more than the preexisting social compact. The problem – and what liberals and progressives find so useful in his advocacy – is in the “New Right’s” rhetorical hostility toward markets and, indeed, capitalism itself.
It is taken as a given among those who describe America’s relative support for free markets, as well as the prosperity and innovation they encourage, as the condition of being “ruled by mercenaries” that the spontaneous capitalist order atomizes society and alienates its members. This romantic supposition is impervious to the counterevidence provided by the societies that experimented with doing away with competitive enterprise. The experience endured by those societies indicates that heavy-handed state intervention into private economic life is vastly more likely to crowd out the mediating civic institutions – churches, community centers, schools, activist organizations, and even families – that form the bonds of civil society.
The economic inefficiencies preferred by market-skeptical theoreticians don’t necessarily produce morally superior outcomes. The poor farmers who were forced to drown their chickens to comply with Nixonian wage and price controls or the British who labored under a rationing regime in support of an economic nationalization campaign would not attest to the ethical superiority of their circumstances. The most that can (and, ill-advisedly enough, often is) be said for the unfortunate consequences associated with this set of policy preferences is that we all suffer equally and in solidarity with one another.
“Capitalism” is a ripe target. It gets the blame when a train car traveling on America’s federally regulated rail lines careens off the tracks, compelling federal environmental regulators to burn off its chemical waste to not contaminate groundwater. When emerging economies experience rising violent crime rates, it’s a problem of “fledging capitalism.” Gauche displays of conspicuous consumerism are a gaudy byproduct of “late capitalism.” Taken together, these incompatible rationalizations suggest there are incentives – political, financial, or social – to apply a respectable intellectual gloss onto what is otherwise just a fashion.
“For many people, anti-capitalism is an emotional issue,” the author Rainer Zitelmann wrote for the National Interest. “It is a diffuse feeling of protest against the existing order.” But the existing order has created wonders, material benefits for both rich and poor (categories that have never been more fluid), and a stable social compact that has withstood the test of time. It’s not popular right now to say any of this, which is why it falls to conservatives to say it. It won’t get you invited to the poshest cocktail parties on the circuit, but it has the inestimable virtue of being true.