Liberty Expose: Dispelling The Illusion of GOP Liberty Talk
Klaus Vedfelt
Much has been written on the Republican Party’s abandonment of coherent conservatives principles for some time. Having witnessed the spectacles of the past decade—from the Tea Party movement and the obstructionist “pragmatism” of Mitch McConnell, to the rise of Trump and the persistence of sultanism and factionalism in the Party establishment—it is not surprising, and wholly appropriate, that even leaders on the Right have identified the regressive tendencies of the Party and expounded on its slow spiral downward.
Whether you’re a constitutional conservative concerned with the preservation of our system’s integrity, a proponent of the new right calling for a platform that prioritizes families over GDP, a federal nationalist that sees the necessity of robust state action, or just a freedom-loving patriot that believes in letting people direct their own lives, the obfuscating, myopic, and self-destructive behavior of the GOP probably strikes you as simultaneously confusing and disappointing—and it should.
A number of solutions have been put forward by conservatives in an attempt to chart a new direction for the GOP, and these competing attempts have inspired a lively debate about the very meaning of conservatism and how it ought to reorient itself. Some call for a return to the fusion of order and liberty that characterized the conservative renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. Others see more viable prospects in the reclamation of the federalist tradition, with its affirmation of energetic government and a unified national project with British constitutional origins. Still less hopeful commentators insist on the refurbishment of an energetic national government, but see conservatism as a limiting paradigm that ought to be abandoned if the failures of neoliberalism are to be properly addressed. At this point, the direction we will take remains open and up for debate.
No matter which direction the younger generations ultimately end up taking, the task of undoing the damage of so many years of willful deceit and chronic abandonment by the Republican oligarchy will prove unavoidable. New political messages charged with real emotional resonance, tied to the actual struggles of most Americans, will be needed to disentangle the web of lies and rationalizations that have for so long sustained a Party whose interests stand leagues apart from those of its electorate. Thus, the task of disentangling these webs and crafting new political messages should proceed in earnest, for it is unlikely that solid ground will be made on the intellectual front until new paths are charted hand-in-hand with the electorate itself.
The First And Hardest Step: Dispelling The Illusion Of GOP Liberty Talk
The first step in articulating a new conservative answer to the 21st century is inconveniently the hardest one to make because it unsettles the conservative narrative on liberty—one of its most central values. To dispute the conservative ownership of liberty is to invite political marginalization and dismissal by Republican voters because so much of Republican identity is wrapped up in it. As things stand, this strategy seems like political suicide. Yet the dignity of our people, the degree of their willful abandonment, and the force of our national errand compel us to do what we can to make inroads on this daunting task.
And the message is this: the liberty talk of the GOP serves as a guise for an agenda concerned only with the liberty of a moneyed elite, not the felt freedom of working and middle-class Americans. Theirs is a liberty to aggrandize the wealth and political control of an elite few, at the expense of the liberties of most Americans. Yet many Americans are erroneously led to believe that when Republicans speak of liberty, or freedom, they mean the liberty of Americans like themselves: the liberty of the people, from whom the legitimacy of government is derived.
Republican voters have already demonstrated a willingness to reject the Republican establishment. The rise of conservative populism, which fueled and unfortunately got channeled towards anti-democratic ends by Trump’s presidency, stands as a pointed indictment of the Washington establishment. Though grounded in a false promise, Trump’s call to “drain the swamp” struck a chord with Americans who understandably could no longer expect Washington, with its chronic inaction in the name of deregulated “liberty,” to address their concerns, from growing job displacement due to automation, to the stagnation of real wages for 40 years. Trump spoke to these pains by ditching the classic platform of deregulation and budget balancing in favor of a strong nationalist vision that would restore American greatness through bold government action.
Conservative voters need to channel their justified frustrations and yearning for national restoration into a sustained populist movement grounded in concrete economic demands. But in order to do this, they must recognize that the liberty talk expounded by Republican leaders often serves as a sleight of hand method for galvanizing their votes. The “liberty” of the Republican Party does not mean the liberty of self-employed independence, but the abdication of government’s role to mediate the nation’s balance of power, which effectively means the “liberty” of elites to run the government in their favor.
This sleight of hand is nothing new. During the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, the rhetoric of “liberty” was leveraged by corporate interests to block the kind of labor and regulatory reforms that we now take for granted, all in the name of a faux “liberty” of individuals to establish their own employment relations. As independent farmers and artisans lost work due to competition with large farms and factories, they were pushed into wage labor in urban settings, only to find their legitimate yearning for liberty met with the false promise that corporate deregulation would somehow restore the freedom they lost to corporate aggrandizement in the first place. Republican opposition to the New Deal proved a clear sequel of the same tactic.
True liberty of the kind originally conceived by Jefferson and his agrarian inheritors aligns with what most Republican voters, as well as new immigrants, ultimately want: the chance at achieving a self-directed life of independence through modest property accumulation and self-employment. Liberty does not mean the unfettered rule of corporate power, or the defiant pursuit of individual advantage at the expense of the community, but the consolidation of one’s independence as a self-employed, self-possessed being—one capable of meeting the future on one’s own terms, whether that means supporting a family, or pursuing crafts that reflect one’s character and creativity.
That the Republican Party activates this quintessential American aspiration in order to covertly pursue an oligarchic agenda constitutes an affront to the freedom-loving patriots that make up the backbone of the country—and these patriots should call out this sleight of hand when it occurs.