What Should Conservative Governance Look Like?

Winning elections isn't just about implementing manifesto promises, it's ultimately about governing. Conservatives need to craft a distinct governing philosophy, not just party and policy manifestos.

Conservatism as a Governing Philosophy

Earlier this year I wrote a long essay for C2C Journal making the case for a revived Red Toryism, properly understood. It got a bit of buzz, but when I wrote it there were a few underdeveloped aspects of it I was planning on coming back to at some point, which is what I’m going to do here, and briefly sketch out a conservative theory of government.

It’s a mistake to think about political conservatism simply in terms of an electoral strategy and set of policy promises. In democratic regimes, the point of forming political parties is not just to win elections, it’s to form government. To govern. But far too often I think we fall prey to thinking about politics as just winning the next election on a prescribed list of proposals, and then see governing simply as about implementing a set of election promises. This isn’t a governing vision, and it’s short sighted.

We shouldn’t simply aspire to win elections, we should aspire to governing, and what is really needed is a vision of conservatism as a governing philosophy. But to do this, we have to think seriously about what government is, and isn’t for, and what bedrock principles conservative governance should be built around. This is about more than just implementing election manifestos. To have a coherent governing vision, we have to have a concrete framework that guides how we manage, administer, and run a government that can be applied to problems as they emerge, and make conservatism a philosophy of government, not just opposition. Conservative governance cannot be characterized by reluctant and resentful administration, it has to offer a positive vision of what 21st century government should be about.

Limited versus Small Government 

This passage is from the Red Toryism essay: 

“Modern Canadian conservatism champions “small government”, seemingly without having any theory of what the state is actually for. Absent such a framework, it is difficult to identify governing priorities let alone to develop a philosophically coherent blueprint for action. When Conservatives get elected, they often have no idea of how to achieve the “fiscal responsibility” they preach. A series of ad hoc actions and policies follow, and the predictable result is failure to roll back the state in any significant or lasting way.”

This, predictably, did not please everyone, and in a political landscape where we often still think that the divides between left and right are really about “big” versus “small” government, this was to be expected. But a conservative theory of government needs to escape this paradigm. 

While conservatism is a broad tent, one unifying feature should be a commitment to limited government. But limited government is a term that often gets conflated with ideological “small government” that sees most of the modern state as illegitimate, and would eliminate most of it and leave the state to provide just the most minimal night-watchman functions. But small government, while a valid view to hold, is not limited government, and conservative government cannot just be about small government.

Limited government means constitutional government that is accountable and constrained by the rule of law, and while there are aspects of the modern state that need to be reformed, tamed, and limited, conservative government cannot just be about trying (and failing) to shrink the state. Conservatives have too often, I think, adopted the rhetoric of small government, without actually being true believers, and in the process they find it very difficult to actually reform and shape the state because they have put little thought into what government actually ought to be about.

Let me give you an example. Recently my friend Asher Honickman and I wrote a column for the National Post calling for a “parliamentary revival.” One specific and important reform we want to see is an expanded House of Commons to 500 MPs. More MPs would make for better party, and parliamentary government. But multiple people, including well connected conservatives, privately told us that while they think this is a good idea, one reason it won’t happen is because conservatives will just look at it through the lens of more spending of tax dollars on politicians. Instead the conservative impulse is to just try and shrink the size of legislatures to save a little bit of money. 

In this case small government ideology actually gets in the way of reforms that would help make government more accountable, and limited. MPs should be held accountable and have their spending and salaries heavily scrutinized, but the cost of 150 more MPs would be nothing in the grand scheme of things.

This misses the point. More MPs would make for more accountable and better parliamentary government, and allow parliament, instead of both the bureaucracy and judiciary to increasingly take over more and more of lawmaking and governing that should be done by elected officials. The choice isn’t between more government or less government, in this case it’s a choice between who you’d rather be governed by; MPs who can scrutinize the government more, legislate with more freedom, and who you can hold to account, versus unelected bureaucrats with minimal oversight and limited accountability to elected officials. 

In short, a conservative theory of governance should prioritize limited government, but in some cases this might require an attempt to strengthen (and more spending) on certain parts of government to constrain other parts. 

Self-Government requires Limited Government 

Conservatism has to be animated by a realism and prudence that immunizes us from pie in the sky thinking. The modern state, including the administrative state, isn’t going anywhere. Instead of fantasizing about dismantling it, we should be spending more time thinking about how to reform and reorient it.

If we begin with the acknowledgement that the welfare and administrative state are here to stay, what should the goal of reorienting the state towards better and more prudent ends look like? Here’s another passage from the Red Toryism essay: 

“Once elected, they could then work systematically to reorient government towards these ends. Instead of using the state simply to help individuals subsist, conservatives should use it to help individuals flourish and become self-governing. This means supporting the related enabling social institutions. A Red Tory theory of the state would empower and support civil society, not replace it.”

My proposal for a conservative vision of government is of limited government sustained by self-government that supports the social and civic institutions beyond the state that enable us to be self-governing and flourishing citizens. Conservative governance helps produce the conditions in which people can ultimately become self-governing, which doesn't happen in a vacuum. Self-government must be nourished.

The first part of this connects back to the previous section. Self-government means exactly what it sounds like: governing yourself. If someone else is making important decisions that impact your life, you aren’t governing yourself. The radical response to this is to reject virtually the entire modern state as illegitimate, but I don’t think you need to go that far, and conservatives should reject the belief that government is automatically the antithesis of freedom. Limited government can help produce the conditions that enable freedom through self-government.

If we recognize that modern government and the administrative state, are both here to stay and necessary in some basic ways, self-government can be salvaged if lawmaking is done by elected officials accountable to citizens, not judges or bureaucrats, and most importantly making sure that the unelected officials that play an important role in modern government are accountable to elected officials and parliament. This is undoubtedly an idealized picture of how representative democracy works, but it’s one we should still strive towards, and improving democratic accountability and representative government is more prudent and realistic than smashing the state. 

Self-government and Social Embeddedness 

Aspiring for limited government through reforming and taming the modern state is vital, but by itself it does not offer a positive vision of what conservative government should actually be for. The core of conservative government should be about creating and supporting the conditions that produce self-governing and flourishing citizens, and supporting the institutions and programs, which includes both state and non-state ones, that help produce self-government.

For people to be self-governing, they have to in some sense be responsible self-governors. They have to not simply be free to make decisions about their lives, they have to be able to make responsible and, yes, good decisions about their lives. The father who shirks his duties to drink himself into a stupor and neglect his parental obligations is free, but he isn’t self-governing. Any meaningful conception of liberty cannot simply be about the absence of constraints (more on this another time). This doesn’t mean expecting people to always be saints, it is instead about the morally formative, associative, and communal institutions and networks that help mould us into people that are more likely to make good decisions, and just as importantly provide networks of support and solidarity to help people out when they make bad decisions.

This is what conservatives ought to care about; supporting and sustaining a society of organic and interlocking members and associations that can, together, help provide the order and structure to the social world that enable us to live free and good lives. This sometimes gets called “ordered liberty,” but I prefer something along the lines of “socially embedded self-government.”  Self-government is not simply about liberty understood as the absence of constraints, it requires governing. This itself has to be nurtured and nourished. Yuval Levin calls this “the long way to liberty.”

But how do we do this? This is where I think conservatism needs to go back to the drawing board a bit.   

The Failures of Compassionate Conservatism 

While conservatives have long recognized these insights, they have often been misapplied. Many of us, including myself, have a tendency to treat these insights as abstract. Just as I think an overly ideological emphasis on small government hurts serious conservative governance, waxing lyrical about civil society is just as unhelpful.

Conservatives have a habit of looking at civil society and social institutions as they want them to be, not as they are, and in the process overestimate the strength or vitality of these institutions today. Let me give you an example. 

In the now classic book The Tragedy of American Compassion, published in 1992, Marvin Olasky argues that in America it was traditional and civic organizations like the church and mutual aid societies that took care of the poor. But these private and civic ways of alleviating poverty were eventually replaced by large state anti-poverty programs which were much worse at it because they are disconnected from the recipients of assistance. The book helped shape what became known as “compassionate conservatism” in America that was seen as an animating spirit of the Bush administration. 

The basic line of argument here is one you’ll find across conservatism, and it’s one I’m sympathetic to; that large bureaucratic welfare and social assistance is inferior to direct and non-state support. But where I’m less sympathetic is the argument that is often attached to this, which is that the rise of the modern welfare state destroyed traditional forms of charity and social assistance, and that if you were to hypothetically get rid of the modern welfare state the old forms of private charity and mutual aid societies would replace them again.

You’ll find all sorts of conservatives, from traditionalist conservatives to libertarian minded ones, making this argument. The problem is I don’t think it’s actually true. There’s some interesting academic research on this topic and it’s quite a complicated and sprawling debate, but I’d recommend checking out this paper by Sam Hammond, a very interesting thinker on all sorts of policy and economic questions. Hammond shows that the decline of mutual aid societies began long before the rise of modern welfare states and anti-poverty programs.

Mutual-aid societies were undermined not by governments, but by the emergence of commercial insurance. “Actuarial science priced risks that used to be taken for granted out of ignorance, pulling lower risk members of such societies into lower premium risk pools.” But this displacement of mutual aid societies by insurers also became unstable because of adverse selection effects (when sellers have information that buyers do not have, or vice versa, about some aspect of product quality. It is thus the tendency of those in dangerous jobs or high-risk lifestyles to purchase life or disability insurance where chances are greater they will collect on it). This contributed to a demand for social insurance schemes, and produced the modern welfare state. 

Now this isn’t to say philanthropy isn’t important or that charitable solutions to social ills are redundant. What I think we should do instead is think about how we can use accountable and limited government to support these civic and charitable institutions. The basic insight that they might be better equipped to solve social ills because they are closer to the problem is true, but it isn’t true that we could simply replace social programs with mutual aid or charitable programs. Instead we should look at what charities today are still quite good at and empower them to do it even more, which includes “ a focus on understanding and ameliorating complex social pathologies, managing common resources, and serving as flexible delivery points for publicly funded services.” 

It’s an unfortunate time to be making this argument in Canada, given what’s transpiring with WE, but we shouldn’t instantly dismiss the role that charities can play in the delivery of publicly funded programs. We shouldn’t focus on hollowing out the state and expecting civil society to fill the void. Instead we should focus on empowering civil society with limited and target state support, and take advantage of the local knowledge and embeddedness of many civic and charitable institutions to improve the state programs and assistance we now offer. 

Self-Government and Civil Society 

More fundamentally, we need to think seriously about what self-government looks like in the 21st century, and in the digital era. What we should value about civil society are the restraining, habit forming, and virtue cultivating institutions that can embed us in healthy communities and help us lead good lives. But again, we musn’t nostalgize imagined worlds. 

Many of the formative social and civic institutions that have historically done this, from families to religious organizations, have been weakened and we live in the age of atomization. Traditional civic and social networks are rapidly being replaced by digital ones. Cultivating the habits of self-government will require working with social networks and institutions as we find them, and finding ways to strengthen them and perhaps even building new ones. 

Take families, for example. It is in families that so many of the habits of self-governing citizens are formed. But this is traditionally done in stable family structures that increasingly less common today. One major shift has been in marriage. Increasingly marriage is something for economic elites, and the uncoupling of marriage and childbearing in recent decades is a significant social shift. Part of this is a reflection of changing norms, but there is also an economic story behind this.

Material conditions matter for family formation, and all sort of economic challenges, from student debt to housing challenges in major cities, play a part in this. The “success sequence” of education, marriage, then kids, encourages people to delay and often put off marriage and children indefinitely, and high levels of debt and economic precarity do seem to play a role in people delaying family formation. If we want to strengthen families and marriage, we have to recognize that there are economic disincentives and structures that need to be addressed as well. Family policy cannot just be about tax policies, it has to be about economic policy as well. More on this another time.

In short, our focus should be on producing citizens capable of self-government, which requires figuring out how to build, protect, and strengthen the social institutions and networks that do the habit forming and restraining work that produces these citizens. But we have to think carefully about what is needed in the 21st century to produce this, and recognize that there is going to be a role for government to play in doing so. We can’t rely on traditional institutions to do this work alone, they may need help, and conservative governance should be about just this.

Limited government requires self-governing citizens, but there is a role for government to play in helping support the institutions that can produce self-governing and responsible citizens. Conservative governance needs to figure out what exactly role the government can and should play in this. 

Weekly Recommendations:

• The recording of an excellent online seminar hosted by ResPublica on “The future of post-liberalism” is now available online. It was a very good discussion, and I encourage people to check it out, even if you’re not a “post-liberal.”

• How Work Became a Job - Aaron Jacob (Palladium). A really good piece in Palladium that works in together all sorts of interesting threads about consumerism, our relationship to technology, and the rise of mass scale managerialism. Got me thinking, and at some point I am going to do an issue about Arendt’s distinction between work, labour, and action.

• The Rebirth of the Left-Conservative Tradition - Eric Kaufmann (Tablet). The emerging trends on the right have lots of interesting older traditions to draw back on, like Red Toryism. Another is a tradition known as “Left-Conservatism” and this is a great introduction to it.

• The Real Class War - Julius Klein (American Affairs). American Affairs is my favourite and the most interesting journal of the heterodox right these days, and this piece is a nice supplement in some ways to my newsletter last week on elite overproduction.