William Kristol, Michael Barone, and Marvin Olasky are among the experts who tackle the topic, The Future of Conservatism: Conflict and Consensus in the Post-Reagan Era, in a new book of essays.
Among the more interesting discussions is Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield’s assertion that: “Above all conservatives must defend the liberal form of government that makes liberal politics possible.” What? Conservatives defending liberals?
Don’t worry. He’s not talking about conservatives drinking the collectivist Kool-Aid. He’s talking about the classical liberal principles imbedded in the Constitution.
The interest of a liberal regime is in the defense of the forms of the Constitution; this is what defending liberalism means. Those forms put obstacles between the people’s will and the government’s actions so that the people’s will has to be expressed constitutionally. This means, for example, that an unpopular government has to be voted out of office; it cannot, it should not be shamed into retirement by low ratings in the polls. Government is withdrawn from the people for two opposite reasons: so that the people are forced to act on their own and so that the government can act on its own. The people acting on their own are in voluntary association (the good sense of populism) rather than resting inactive as consumers, clients, or dependents of Big Government. If the people are dependents, they have too strong an interest in continuing the dole they live on. They cannot imagine living otherwise and are difficult to rouse from complacent acceptance of what seems to them costless. Their energy declines as they turn their attention away from the public to the private affairs of themselves and their intimates. True populism, however, avoids dependence on Big Government and manipulation by demagogues. A healthy democratic people does not wait for things to be done for it but organizes its affairs, not of course without prompting from its leaders, in associations of its own makings. This is the democracy Tocqueville found in America.
