The Article below was published in Vol. 136, Issue 2 of the Lake Forest College Stentor on October 16, 2020.
By Nathaniel Bodnar ’21
Staff Writer
President Trump is not a conservative. He routinely rejects the fundamental underpinnings of the American experiment and has little to no philosophical coherence.
Conservatism is not a universal or timeless philosophy. To be a conservative is to conserve the foundations your country was built on. In America, conservatives are often not conserving because they believe that conserving is intrinsically good, but because they believe in the founders’ values. American conservatives in other environments, places, and times may be considered revolutionary. At its core, American conservatism has two core pillars; American exceptionalism and classical liberalism.
American exceptionalism does not mean America is necessarily better than any other country. The United States merely is different or the “exception.” From our founding, we set out on a bold experiment to be a democracy. We put our faith in our people, not in a king or God. We gave localities the ability to govern themselves. To believe in American exceptionalism is to believe that the United States is different from all other countries. A policy that works in Europe is by no means guaranteed to work in the United States and vice versa. Donald Trump explicitly rejects American exceptionalism through his “America First” foreign policy scheme. The “America First” scheme envisions the United States as just one country amongst many. The United States, like all other countries, uses foreign policy to advance its immediate interests. This view is an utter rejection of the idea that the United States of America is in any significant way “exceptional.”
The United States was founded on classically liberal principles. It is impossible to cover the entirety of the philosophy. Instead, I shall show that Trump’s smartest and most prominent supporters support Trump because he rejects classical liberalism. The magazine First Things drafted a letter called “Against the Dead Consensus,” in which they made the case that there was no going back to pre-Trump conservatism. According to First Things, classical liberalism’s belief in individual autonomy had led to terrible outcomes, like conservative Supreme Court justices supporting the legal right to abortion. Free trade and small government through classical liberalism had become dogmas for American conservatives. As a result, they neglected essential questions on how those values worked out in the real world. Importantly, those who signed onto “Against the Dead Consensus” felt that Trump’s election was a sign that a large portion of Americans also rejected the classically liberal values that conservatives often defend. As the editor of First Things, R.R Reno said: “Something else is needed, something other than our liberal tradition.” In 2019, Fox News host Tucker Carlson most explicitly rejected the classically liberal economic assumptions that dominate the right, that often praise things “free markets” and “free trade.” Carlson said: “She [Elizabeth Warren] sounds like Trump at his best.” Carlson believes that the right must move beyond the economics of classical liberal figures like Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek.
Trump is not a conservative. His best defenders defend him because he rejects the intellectual history of American conservatism. Trump instead offers a new path for the GOP to travel. I stand at the last precipice before the word “conservative” becomes taken over by Trumpism, if it has not been already. It was not too long ago that F.A. Hayek wrote that soon the word “liberal” would mean an ideology utterly opposed to his own liberalism. I stand at that same point for conservatism. I suppose that we will always be “old whigs.”
