The Problems With The Conservative Pipeline

It’s long on frivolous ‘big ideas,’ short on concrete policies

The Right apparently has a serious advantage over the Left.

According to Vox writer Zach Beauchamp, the Left fails to develop young talent like conservatives do. “What’s really missing are programs of a specific kind — ones that help college students and recent grads engage with Big Ideas and connect with Important People,” he bemoaned.

In contrast, Beauchamp argues there’s a thriving infrastructure on the Right to develop young talent and discuss big ideas:

[T]he conservative intellectual model bridges the philosophy-policy gap. It trains young people in the big-picture ideas, like conservative visions of political morality and religion, and teaches them to connect those things to everyday policy discussions. You aren’t learning about abstract ideas or concrete policy, but rather learning a comprehensive worldview that treats policy issues as downstream of specific values.

Conservative commentators had a lot of thoughts on Beauchamp’s claims. Tanner Greer (no relation to your humble author) felt the liberal commentator overly romanticized the conservative ecosystem. “[Beauchamp] takes as a virtue its most glaring failure: its inability to produce nuts-and-bolts policy expertise. Unlike their liberal alternatives, the conservative programs DO deal in ‘big ideas’ -- but big ideas are overrated,” the right-leaning writer argued.

“This is one of the reasons why the right is so consistently disappointed with the governments we bring to power: we are pretty good at the big picture stuff, but actually getting the government to do what you want is about the small details,” he added in his X thread. “I find myself increasingly suspicious of all that--the right needs people who can sprinkle their Aristotle with a good dose of econometrics.”

There’s smart points brought up here by both Beauchamp and Greer. It’s true the conservative movement has an explicitly political pipeline that the Left doesn’t have. However, it’s the result of the Left ruling most institutions–academia, media, the legal profession, etc.--where policy and public values are shaped. As Beauchamp notes, smart young liberals just go and study for a Ph.D at a top tier university or get a job at a major media outlet rather than get a liberal fellowship. This gives them plenty of opportunities to shape the country, but the liberal writer laments it doesn’t create direct connections with major political figures nor does it properly ideologize them. Those points are debatable, but that’s another matter.

Greer is right that the ecosystem is too obsessed with philosophy and less so with concrete policy. But this has a lot to do with the Right’s need to define its principles and what it stands for. Liberals have the advantage of knowing all this already. Liberalism is the standard position in academia, media, and in movies. Their first principles are taught to all Americans. There’s no need for them to learn an ideology when it’s the water everyone swims in. This allows them to draw up policy proposals without any nagging itch to argue over philosophy.

The Right fixates on Big Ideas because it’s a “counter-ideology” to public orthodoxy. You aren’t going to learn conservatism in school or from the New York Times. This is why conservatives insist on inculcating ideology to their young peers. They’re not going to learn it elsewhere.

However, the “big ideas” stressed to the youth are usually frivolous and irrelevant to our times. When I was an intern at the Leadership Institute in 2013, we were required to read Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Richard Weaver, Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, and Frederic Bastiat. We were also strongly encouraged to read Whittaker Chambers’s tale of communist subversion in Witness. Some of these writings were interesting, but most bore no relevance to the issues of the 21st century. Communism was in the dustbin of history and nominalism (Weaver’s primary nemesis) was not a real problem. Friedman was at least useful to teach some sense of basic economics, but that understanding was usually exploited to demand infinite immigration. These authors made sense for a Cold War reading list, but not for the Obama era.

The Claremont Institute arguably takes the crown for the most dedication to inculcating ideas among its fellows. Its programs are centered around the writings of Harry Jaffa, a conservative theorist who emphasized the importance of equality and the worship of Abraham Lincoln. As a student of American history I find his The Crisis of the House Divided interesting. But I don’t think he’s useful for shaping a right-wing worldview. In fact, as Paul Gottfried warns, his writings can easily be used to encourage dubious notions, such as egalitarianism.

Even though movement conservatism stresses these big ideas so often, the listeners often use them for idiotic purposes. There have been countless articles pulling out Edmund Burke quotes to make the “conservative case” for amnesty, gay marriage, gun control, and other liberal causes. These types will rely primarily on Aristotle for modern economic policy and argue over what Augustine would say about Black Lives Matter. It’s all very silly. Liberals don’t need to turn to John Dewey to figure out their views on immigration and LGBT rights. But conservatives are constantly compelled to turn to various thinkers to figure out what to believe on contemporary issues–and many times they come to wrong conclusions.

This demonstrates how the Right struggles to define its first principles. Liberals know they stand for equality and progress, and that’s good enough for them. Conservatives fumble around on this. In the Cold War, they knew they stood for the free market and liberty against communism and “big government.” With communism long gone, the American Right has quite figured out where it stands. The Right is a big tent filled with different interests and different philosophies. What unites it is opposition to the Left. That works reasonably well for elections, but not quite so much when it comes to determining first principles and crafting policy.

Attempts at articulating first principles don’t go very well. They either rely on to the conservative cliches of the past or delve into the eccentric, such as integralism and anarcho-capitalism. It’s no wonder why conservatives just stick to anti-leftism as the core ideology. There are fewer disagreements over that and it appeals far more to normal people.

When I arrived in Washington D.C. nearly 13 years ago, conservatism tried to be more policy-oriented. Libertarians, which were ascendant at the time, had several policy proposals they pushed for, but the rest of the party rejected them. The establishment had settled on what’s best described as Paul Ryan-ism, which adapted some libertarian ideas alongside a neoconservative foreign policy. Most of the policies advocated for were either terrible (amnesty) or deeply unpopular with the public (entitlement reforms). Paul Ryan-ism was rejected at the ballot box in 2012 and cast aside in the 2016 Republican primary in favor of Trumpism. Few mourn its passing. There were other attempts at making a policy wonk conservatism, such as the “Reformcons” who advocated incredibly boring ideas about fiscal matters while ignoring cultural issues.

Conservatives face a problem with its youth pipeline. The solution is to focus on teaching basic knowledge to young conservatives rather than fixating on irrelevant ideas. They should be taught an appreciation for American heritage, race realism, and the free market, as well as the dangers of the Left. They should be instructed on the basics of law, American history, economics, and politics. (None of these things are taught well in school.) Young conservatives should be grounded in reality and not spend all their time wondering what Augustine would think of sports betting apps. This would lay the groundwork for a more serious and constructive Right, one that could counter the Left’s hegemony and work towards achievable ends.

If conservatism spends all its time imagining a world divorced from reality, it’s unsurprising it fails to achieve real-world ends and gets easily blackpilled at not enacting Plato’s Republic. The Right needs to change how it operates its talent pipeline to overcome this mentality.