The civil war among conservatives that began with Tucker Carlson’s interview of Nick Fuentes isn’t over yet. At the Heritage Foundation in December, Ben Shapiro gave a fiery speech taking on the decision of foundation president Kevin Roberts to defend continued partnership with Carlson. Just before Christmas, at TPUSA’s Freedom Fest, Vice President J.D. Vance addressed the proverbial elephant in the room after Shapiro repeated his challenge to exclude Carlson from the conservative movement. In his opening remarks, Vance stated that “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests.”
The controversy is ostensibly about whether Carlson or his erstwhile associates, such as the podcaster Candance Owens, should have good standing in the movement. Beyond the particulars, though, lie questions that have long bedeviled American conservatism–who is a conservative and what makes conservatism American?
In his speech at Heritage, Shapiro used the metaphor of “open borders” to argue that a “conservative movement without a border is no conservative movement.” If American conservatives are committed to protection of the American border and enforcement of immigration law, why would they wish to render their own movement borderless? Proposing a more internally consistent disposition, Shapiro calls for “ideological border control”. Reading from Heritage’s founding statement, he suggests that those who oppose the definition of conservatism as “free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional values, and a strong national defense” definitionally oppose American conservatism and should be left on the other side of the border. Shapiro’s TPUSA speech sounded a similar tune, tethered to the fusionist line of social conservatism mixed with free-market economic policy.
By acknowledging the necessity of limits, Shapiro’s speech identifies a problem in the current understanding of free speech. With the loss of gatekeepers and increased democratization of speech in the age of social media, we risk the sort of chaos and anarchy associated with an open physical border. As a result of that vacuum, Shapiro believes, the conservative movement is in danger from charlatans acting to undermine the movement and its principles. He lays out five obligations he believes anyone who speaks to the conservative movement has to their audience: a duty to truth, a duty to speak out of principle not personal feeling, a responsibility for what one says and does, a duty to provide evidence of any claims made, and a duty to propose solutions.
Shapiro errs in his reading of history and his chosen metaphor. He presumes that one of the primary objects of the conservative movement is to purge because in the past, that was one of the reasons for its success. As Dan McCarthy has persuasively shown, the most common perceptions about William F. Buckley Jr.’s purges of the Right–both their frequency and the extent of those purges–tend to be overdrawn by those using it as a tool to defenestrate their “New Right” enemies.
Vance is not wrong, then, for being reluctant to embrace an impulse to exclude that led the conservative movement on a liberal course following earlier purges. But his basis for doing so is both unconvincing and, paradoxically, liberal. Vance’s position—that anyone who “loves America” and wants it to be richer and stronger can be part of the Trump coalition—invites its own tension. By emphasizing loyalty to the nation and attachment to its material prosperity, Vance elides the question of what we should be conserving and what kind of speech contributes to that purpose.
Too many on both sides of the current divide on the Right have an essentially libertarian view of free speech that severs means and ends inconsistent with the original meaning of the First Amendment. In his TPUSA speech, Vance emphasized that the Trump administration does not censor. Instead, it promised to be a “government to protect your free speech, whether it’s on college campuses or in the digital marketplace of ideas.” Vance may be opposed to purity tests, but it doesn’t seem that reason is to advance substantive conservatism. Instead, Vance appeals to the same abstract principles as many of the would-be purgers.
Traditional conservatives would have been confused by this position. They would have no qualms about arguing that conservatism did not require “platforming” subversives or those with viewpoints outside the proper bounds of public discourse. This was not because they claimed to uphold free speech per se. It was because they knew that some figures and ideas do nothing to promote conservative ends but instead threatened the very public order and civilization conservatives aimed to defend.
Willmoore Kendall put forward one version of this argument with his defense of “public orthodoxy”. To Kendall, public orthodoxy meant a set of goods that societies value more than “openness” for its own sake. Rather than embracing Vance’s defense of free speech, Kendall would agree with Shapiro that conservatism—and American society as a whole—needs boundaries because it is not or should not be an open society. Yet, he would assuredly disagree about where those boundaries should lie, preferring to bring the fight to the Left rather than conducting defensive purges.
Another way to consider the problem is through a long-standing traditional conservative argument that the crisis of the West is a result of Christianity ceasing to be the dominant cultural strain, replaced by individualist neo-paganism. L. Brent Bozell Jr.’s Triumph magazine, founded sixty years ago in September, took this tact to counter the libertarian, rights-based order that they believed to be suicidal.
The value of free speech in a Christian culture is vastly different from one in a neo-paganist, individualist and hyper-democratized culture. In the former, the purpose of any political right is not to merely protect the individual from the state and allow for individual choices that do not harm others. If truth is essentially ontological, defined eternally by God, and is something to be discovered and defended by just societies, there can be no indefinite, relativistic search for truth. Speech has a telos that is synonymous with the common good and preservation of the moral order and public truth. Thus, the purpose of speech in a Christian culture is to facilitate the good of public truth and to bring individuals towards their proper end and to make them more virtuous.
In the open society of an individualist and democratized culture, by contrast, the purpose of speech is what John Stuart Mill suggested when referring to the “absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral or theological.” Millian liberalism treats the central problem of any civilized society as whether or not there can be any limits on the communications process and concludes that the only accepted ethical answer is that “any doctrine however immoral it may be considered” is entitled to discussion. As Kendall observes, the difference for traditional conservatives is they believe Mill operates under a false understanding of human nature which ignores social reality–that societies cherish a “whole series of goods–among others, their own self-preservation, the living of the truth they believe themselves to embody already.” The predicate to any tolerance in pursuit of truth, in other words, is a society that values truth itself.
Ultimately, then, the discussion on both sides of the debate is unsatisfactory. It leaves one with the impression that far too few voices on the Right today think much about the purpose of freedom. Compared to Vance, Shapiro is firmer ground in highlighting the need for moral judgments. But he also misses the objective goods that freedom is directionally purposed towards.
To be fair, Vance is likely thinking about the demands of maintaining a coalition which elected President Trump to office a second time. Yet, even descriptively, the argument that being a patriotic American who wishes to defend the country and improve it is necessary but insufficient. Although patriotism is declining among Democrats, many Americans of a left or progressive bent still genuinely believe that their policy aims and beliefs will improve the country. Vance seems aware of this, stating “We don’t persecute you for being male, for being straight, for being gay, for being anything. The only thing that we demand is that you be a great American patriot. And if you’re that, you’re very much on our team.”
Vance’s suggestion is not only liberal in the sense of embracing a broad liberality in building a coalition, but resembles a theoretical rejection of objective morality in favor of individualism or even antinomianism. Taken literally, the idea that we don’t persecute you for “being anything” is based in a moral framework that sees freedom as primarily about autonomy and choice. That may be perfectly defensible for libertarians, but it has not historically been a conservative view. Twentieth century conservatives disagreed on the proper ends of political society generally, but they all understood that liberty was not a matter of individual choice but was directed towards moral ends in a particular moral order.
Vance does not completely ignore this theme. He asserts that America is and remains a Christian nation, as the “only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been, and by the grace of God, we always will be, a Christian nation.” Vance calls Christianity America’s creed, correctly and powerfully arguing that, “our understanding of natural law and rights, our sense of duty to one’s neighbor, the conviction that the strong must protect the weak, and the belief in individual conscience” all stem from Christian concepts.
In fact, the second half of Vance’s TPUSA address is stridently Christian. He not only discussed his personal attachment and experience with faith, but argued that moral truth and Christian values must be at the heart of a proper understanding of governance. Yet there is an unresolved tension between this argument and Vance’s earlier appeal to absolute free speech and a “liberal” coalition. Vance appears to understand what that objective good is, but he wavers in applying that morality to enforce what it means to be a conservative.
Shapiro, on the other hand, understands the need for moral judgments and a more closed definition of conservatism. But the substantive definition he prefers is rooted in a liberal understanding of both the American founding and the purposes of freedom. Ironically, in the fight for the control of the conservative movement and who fits inside its “big tent,” the primary actors are, for all their apparent disagreement, two sides of the same coin.
The best alternative, then, is a return to the sort of traditional conservatism that Kendall, Bozell, and others like Russell Kirk envisioned many decades ago. Their conservative imagination accepted and argued for the need for boundaries but one attached to a genuinely conservative understanding of the political and moral order. For these conservatives, the purpose of freedom and thus the freedom of speech was not to protect the autonomy of atomized individuals in an open society, but to cultivate virtue and to seek the truth embodied in the orthodoxies of our civilization. Defense of our traditional order, thus, will require a rejection of the liberal subjectivism of moral judgments amid competing notions of the good in favor of assertions of the particular goods which made the free and virtuous society possible. Such conservatism will not be borderless, but will be bound by the precepts of the American political tradition and its root in Christian civilization.
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