Friday Interview: Uniting Conservatarians Around Common Goals | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: This post was created by the staff for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

National Review’s Charles Cooke details elements of new Manifesto

    RALEIGH - Conservatives and libertarians often serve as allies in public policy debates, but they tend to diverge on some hot-button issues. Charles C.W. Cooke, writer for National Review, hopes the two camps can find more common ground in the future. He sets out one potential course in his book The Conservatarian Manifesto. Cooke explained key themes from the book during a recent speech for the John Locke Foundation. He also offered details during a conversation with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Head to http://www.carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)

    Kokai: First of all, let's define the term. What's a "conservatarian"?

    Cooke: Well, it's not my term. It's a term I started seeing, probably from 2007 onward, at the end of the [George W.] Bush administration, among people who were disappointed with the Bush administration and some young people who didn't quite find themselves in line with traditional conservatives, but weren't libertarians either.

    These are people who will say to you: "When I'm around libertarians, I feel conservative. When I'm around conservatives, I feel libertarian." The gist of it is: They're with the libertarians on gay marriage and on the legalization of drugs and on federalism, but they're with the conservatives on immigration and on foreign policy and - mostly - on abortion.

    Kokai: And you decided that this group needed a manifesto. Why?

    Cooke: Well, yes, and, of course, this is my attempt. This is not the last word. I'm sure I shall continue to get letters. But they are going to increasingly affect the Right because younger people, for example, are in favor of gay marriage, are in favor of marijuana legalization. Even if they call themselves a Republican or a conservative, they're in favor of those two things.

    That's going to cause the Republican Party some problems in the near future because older conservatives are not in favor of those things. And so what I try to do is to look at how can we move forward on the Right and try to accommodate all of the various factions, not just libertarians and conservatives, but younger conservatives and older conservatives as well. And I hope what I've done is given a blueprint, a road map, for that that also works - doubles, perhaps - as a road map for how to fix a divided country.

    Kokai: Now one of the things that people involved in public policy debates hear quite often - and you alluded to this, as well - is people who say, "I'm fiscally conservative but socially liberal." Your book sort of takes on that notion and says, well, it's not quite that easy to break it down exactly that way. Why not?

    Cooke: For a start, because the term "social issues" doesn't really mean anything. This is a lazy shorthand. It's an umbrella term that we use to aggregate a number of questions that really - electorally speaking and intellectually speaking - have very little to do with one another.

    The question of gay marriage is a question of which of civil society's institutions will the state recognize. The question of abortion is at what point is a life a life, and who should defend it, if at all. The question of drug legalization is at what point should the state intervene in the market - the market for drugs. These really don't have much to do with one another intellectually. One can come up with different answers to each and stay intellectually consistent.

    But electorally they are different as well. Younger people are more pro-life than they were 20 years ago. In fact, they are more pro-life than any generation except the oldest. But they are in favor of marijuana legalization, and they are in favor of gay marriage.

    So I think it's too easy to say, well, Republicans need to become more socially liberal. We need to define what we mean. We also need to remember that there are an awful lot of older Republicans who vote for the Republican Party precisely because they're socially conservative. You cannot just jettison them overnight and expect to win elections.

    Kokai: You brought up a very important point. If the Republican Party is going to be changing, or if the conservative movement is going to change, to deal with these changing attitudes among the younger folks, how does it do it without alienating people who will be turned off by this different type of message?

    Cooke: The road forward, I think, not just for the Right but for America, is to return to a more robust federal system. Now that is, of course, not a radical new idea. That is a radical old idea. That is the way the country is set up. The Constitution is an explicitly federal document.

    Back in the 18th century, there was a genuine worry as to whether the Quakers in Pennsylvania could co-exist in a federal union with slave owners in South Carolina and Virginia. And so there was a degree of leeway permitted. The states created the federal government, not the other way around.

    We now need a return to that arrangement because people in Mississippi and people in Brooklyn have very little in common with one another. It's not just libertarians and conservatives.

    My proposal is that if the federal government would get out of a good number of these questions, then you can allow older people and younger people - hipsters and religious conservatives - all to thrill to the American flag, all to thrill to the notion of being an American, without being at each other's throats.

    If you don't like the way people live in Mississippi, live somewhere else. There's no need to litigate everything nationally. I think creating a little space between the old and the young will allow people to live their consciences.

    Kokai: In addition to federalism, are there any other basic animating principles that you think the Right needs to hold to moving forward?

    Cooke: I think it needs to mean what it says. One of the reasons that conservatarianism has popped up, one of the reasons the Republican Party is in a difficult place, I think, is that the Bush administration was a disappointment. The Republican majority between 2000 and 2006, along with the president from 2000 to 2008, they did some good things, but they also spent too much, and they spied too much, and they controlled too much. And they were not localists in the way they promised they would be.

    To truncate this point for time, I need mention only No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D, both programs that today probably would cause an outrage within the Tea Party, and rightfully so. Well, those were deliberately inflicted on the country by Republicans, who had the chance not to do them.

    Kokai: Looking forward, you mentioned the problems created by the Bush administration - the disappointment. Are there any political figures, either among those who are White House aspirants or those outside that group of people, whom you see and say, "This person gets it - he or she kind of understands this conservatarian trajectory"?

    Cooke: Not especially. My presumption here is that politicians will never relinquish power and that those who seek power are unlikely to immediately decline to exercise it. If I am right in my book, if the predictions that I am making, if the road map that I have drawn up, come to be traveled, then we will see an upward push.

    We'll see a push not just from the Right, but often from the Left, perhaps from those in Washington state or Colorado who have pushed through marijuana legalization who are unhappy with the fact that overnight [U.S. Attorney General] Loretta Lynch could wake up and decide to use federal power to shut them down.

    We will see conservatives, as we have done in Texas and in Florida and in a good number of other Republican states, who say, "No, we do not want the Medicaid expansion that the federal government is pushing [on] us. And we won't support anyone for federal office who endorses it."

    I don't think this is going to come from the top down. I think this is going to come from the bottom up. And it will be a reaction among presidential aspirants or [from] the next president rather than a positive agenda.

    Kokai: That sounds like a good thing, perhaps.

    Cooke: Absolutely, not least because if we had a president, for example, who had read my book and ingested it whole, he would only be there for four or eight years, and then what? You need a systemic structural change that makes it incumbent on Democrats and Republicans - and anyone else, for that matter - to relinquish power and allow people to live how they see fit.