‘Conservative’ Is a Bad Label for Republicans’ Good Policies

Prevailing political mythology holds that the Democratic Party’s policies are “progressive”—meaning they promote change toward greater justice—while the Republican Party’s are “conservative”—meaning they try to slow or arrest this progressive change. As

William F. Buckley Jr.

put it, a conservative is someone who “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” In this framing, there is a natural momentum toward progress in human affairs (“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,”

Martin Luther King Jr.

said), but conservatives resist this progress out of concern for excessive disruptions or the ability of the public to adapt to change.

There are two big problems with this political mythology. First, it’s false. Each party stands for a bunch of unrelated policies that are connected only by happenstance, not philosophy. What does abortion have to do with tax rates? Ideologues are uncomfortable with the reality that each of our two political tribes stands for some policies that strike them as correct and others that seem incorrect, so they have invented grand ideological narratives about “progress” and “conservation” to give the illusion of coherence to policies that are incoherent.

Second, this political mythology inherently disadvantages the Republicans, since the narrative of progress is far more attractive than the narrative of conservation. It was progressive change that abolished slavery, gave women the right to vote, and achieved civil rights for racial minorities, so conservatives are stuck with the impossible task of arguing that these changes were somehow bad, that they were enacted too quickly, or that “this time it is different.” Technological progress is good, medical progress is good, moral progress is good, and if we don’t want to stop progress in those realms, why would we want to stop progress in politics? By characterizing their policies as “conservative,” Republicans imply that they would rather accommodate the backward and bigoted than stand up for justice and the rights of victims.

The conservative narrative might work among actual bigots or voters who don’t think in terms of grand narratives, but it will inevitably lose among cultural elites. This is the main reason academia, Hollywood, the media and tech corporations are so alienated from the Republican Party: Cultural leaders demand a morality-affirming narrative, and the story that says intellectual elites can be in the vanguard of history, leading the charge for progressive change, is far more attractive than the story in which they stand “athwart history, yelling Stop.” If we are going to bundle unrelated policies together using ex post facto stories, the “right side of history” story will always win over the “not too fast” story. And given a choice between progress and conservation, thoughtful people looking for a moral politics will, unsurprisingly, almost always choose progress.

The problem for Republicans isn’t that all of their policies are bad, but that the story they use to unify and justify their policies is bad. Why is it that unpopular and extreme measures—such as the mutilation of children under the guise of “gender-affirming care”—have become so widely accepted among cultural elites? Because the label “progressive” endows these policies with the moral force of historical inevitability.

Why is it that obvious and sensible measures—such as the freedom to cut hair without onerous licensing requirements—are somehow controversial? Because the label “conservative” associates these policies with backwardness and bigotry. It makes Republican policies seem guilty by association with evil causes such as segregation, slavery, and male-only suffrage and historical villains such as

John C. Calhoun,

Stephen A. Douglas

and

Bull Connor,

who were actually all Democrats. Republicans need to advance policies on the idea that they are right, not because they are unified by a label that has such negative associations. By acceding to the progressive-conservative framing and adopting the narrative of “conservatism,” Republicans have unnecessarily handicapped themselves.

To avoid long-term underperformance of the kind we saw on Election Day, Republicans need to jettison the conservative narrative and move beyond the idea that all their policies stand against progressive change. They should replace the morally flawed conservative narrative with a more principled, positive one that can attract educated voters. Donald Trump is undoubtedly a millstone around the Republicans’ necks, but so too is the narrative of “conservatism” that serves to repel most cultural elites except those few who prefer stasis to progress.

Mr. Lewis is a professor of history at BYU-Idaho and a co-author of “The Myth of Left and Right,” coming in January from Oxford University Press.