The 40-Year-Old Conservative

A generational divide drives “the policy war in Washington”

On Sunday morning, the Wall Street Journal published an in-depth analysis of the “Policy War in Washington” between “old-school conservatives” and the “New Right.” It has lots of great color; you should read the whole thing. My favorite part was Grover Norquist telling the reporters he never thinks about American Compass, right after the paragraph about how he sends his staff to stand outside our events on Capitol Hill distributing anti-Compass flyers.

While the story never makes this point explicitly, its central theme—and the key to understanding what’s happening on the right-of-center—is a generational divide. Roughly speaking, people born before 1980 overwhelmingly adhere to the old-school market fundamentalism that emerged from the Reagan revolution. People born after 1980 overwhelmingly reject it and want to rethink the application of conservative principles in the 21st century.

I’ve always been particularly cognizant of the divide because I sit near the seam and have worked with many people on both sides. Born in 1983, I was five years old when Ronald Reagan left office. People just a couple of years older than me can tell you where they were when the Berlin Wall fell, or at least they remember the reactions of their parents. My first political memory is watching fighter jets launch from aircraft carriers on CNN during the Gulf War.

Conservatives my age or younger were raised at the end of history, with market democracy the only option. Our idea of a Democrat is Bill Clinton, declaring the era of big government over. The global vision we saw American leaders pursue was not the epochal defeat of communism but the foolish embrace of China. Our experience of American foreign policy is repeated failure, in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and Libya, Crimea and Ukraine. I was fortunate to enter the labor market in 2005, when the economy was performing well, but most people in their 30s who earned college degrees graduated into the Great Recession and the painfully slow recovery thereafter.

For older conservatives, the triumph of Reagan’s tax cuts and deregulation over 1970s stagflation is the dominant economic narrative. In finance, in technology, in health care, America was a nation ascendent. When younger conservatives think “economic boom,” we are more likely to think of the late 1990s. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were a squandering, not an achievement. Our crises are the rapid offshoring to China, the Wall Street meltdown, and the opioid epidemic; skyrocketing student debt and declining family formation.

We take the computer and the cellphone for granted and have experienced Silicon Valley’s innovation mainly as the proliferation of rent-seeking corporations pursuing monopoly, abusing their market power, and disseminating corrosive social media apps. Intel is a floundering company that gave away American leadership in cutting-edge technology. General Electric is a cautionary tale of MBA mismanagement. Boeing is an embarrassment that somehow lost the ability to make reliable airplanes.

Thus, rejection of the old guard’s conservatism is not some generic case of the young whippersnappers rebelling against their elders. Today’s problems are ones to which the prior generation’s solutions are entirely unresponsive. Often, today’s problems are the direct result of that which the prior generation insisted on doing long past the point of diminishing returns. That the old guard continues to propose doing yet more of the same looks outright disqualifying. How can anyone propose yet another tax cut when the last three have sent us into a fiscal crisis and delivered none of the promised growth? Are we really supposed to let the model that gave us free trade with China guide our economic policy going forward?

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn introduced the concept of a “paradigm shift.” Rather than advancing steadily through incremental progress, scientific knowledge experiences long static periods when a community of researchers works mostly to validate their existing paradigm, punctuated by short periods of disruption when an old paradigm fails and a new one emerges. Scientists tend to cling to their existing paradigm and accept new frameworks grudgingly. As the physicist Max Planck observed, “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Or, more colloquially, “science advances one funeral at a time.”

We need not be quite so morbid to recognize the parallel process in politics. The divide in the conservative movement is between an “old guard” still celebrating its victory in the Cold War and a “New Right” figuring out how to apply conservative principles to the challenges that have emerged over 30 years of post–Cold War mistakes. We should be grateful that our political system retains the openness for such conflict to emerge and the flexibility to accommodate change. It is useful, necessary even, for a generation that can see the battles ahead more clearly to supplant one still reliving the glory of battles won long ago.

In this instance, it has also become inevitable. The transformation is already complete in the younger ranks of even the most established old-guard institutions. In the senior ranks, it is well underway. Elected officials will always be the lagging indicator, but in emerging leaders like Senators Josh Hawley (age 44) and JD Vance (age 40), the trajectory is clear.

The Journal concludes with an anecdote about old-guard Senator Cynthia Lummis meeting with one of her former staffers, now spreading the old gospel for the old-guard Americans for Prosperity, and I can do no better here:

Whatever happens in November, change is afoot, Sen. Lummis said after the meeting. “I think there is a subtle transition going on between the more-establishment Republicans and whatever you wanted to call it—the ‘New Right’?” 

Oren