Justin Amash and the Poverty of ‘Principled Conservatism’
In his defection from the Republican Party, Rep. Justin Amash falls back on an all-too-familiar narrative that obscures the broad unpopularity of the conservative agenda.
In a July 4th op-ed in the Washington Post, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash declared his independence from the Republican Party and implored readers to join him in giving up “partisan loyalties and rhetoric that divide and dehumanize us.”
Amash’s decision to leave the GOP did not come as a huge surprise. Back in May, he made another major declaration, this time through Twitter, that he believed President Donald Trump should be impeached based on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the investigation into the president and his election campaign. Less than a month after his Twitter post, Amash resigned from the House Freedom Caucus he co-founded, and he will face at least two pro-Trump challengers in next year’s Republican primary.
In his op-ed, Amash blamed partisanship for a host of problems in Washington, namely Congress’ unwillingness to do its constitutionally-mandated duty to serve as a check on the executive branch or to adequately represent the interests of the public over those of party leaders:
True to [George] Washington’s fears, Americans have allowed government officials, under the assertion of expediency and party unity, to ignore the basic tenets of our constitutional order: separation of powers, federalism, and the rule of law. The result has been the consolidation of political power and the near disintegration of representative democracy.
These are consequences of a mind-set among the political class that loyalty to party is more important than serving the American people or protecting our governing institutions. The parties value winning for its own sake, and at whatever cost. Instead of acting as an independent branch of government and serving as a check on executive branch, congressional leaders of both parties expect the House and Senate to act in obedience or opposition to the president and their colleagues on a partisan basis.
Amash concludes that the two-party system must be done away with in order for a real representative democracy to take shape. “I’m asking you to believe that we can do better than this two-party system and to work toward it,” he says. “If we continue to take America for granted, we will lose it.”
It’s unclear from the op-ed what sort of political system Amash would like to see in place of the two-party system. But if it’s anything like the parliamentary systems in other western democracies, such a system would not prevent the rise of divisive leaders or quell the party factionalism he abhors, as the ongoing battle over Brexit has shown.
As a congressman who rose to power through the Tea Party movement, the right’s “resistance” vehicle to government spending increases under President Obama, Amash has cultivated a self-righteous aura that is similar to that of Bush-era “compassionate conservatives” who are now fervently anti-Trump. This aura is based on their seemingly steadfast commitment to conservative principles, which Trump notably does not have.
As an opposition strategy, the rhetoric of principled conservatism helped Republicans unite behind a single protest identity that would bludgeon much of the Democrats’ mandate for change following their sweeping victories in the 2008 general election. It would also mobilize Republican voters at the ballot box two years later, ushering in what was to become a near-decade of Republican minority rule.
But as policy agenda, principled conservatism isn’t really what voters are pining for in the face of an ideologically unmoored President Trump. Amash only chooses to locate Washington’s problems in partisanship because admitting to the real culprit — Republican-driven asymmetrical polarization — would also mean admitting his core value system as a conservative, however principled it might be, is itself the problem.
A Familiar Retreat
The belief that mainstream Republicans lost elections as a result of the party having lost touch with its conservatives principles is nothing new. Back in 2008, when Democrats gained the White House and a near-supermajority in Congress, Republicans blamed the move toward “big government conservatism” under President Bush for their losses.
The resurgence of anti-Washington conservatism in the 2010s— some adherents branding themselves as Tea Party patriots or constitutional conservatives —quickly morphed into the Republican Party’s answer for all its electoral problems. It appealed to anyone who wanted to oppose President Obama’s economic recovery agenda by ringing the alarm bells over the national debt, the expansion of government-subsidized healthcare under Obamacare, or even the costs of the president’s golf trips.
But the retreat to principled conservatism only revealed that conservatives have no real answers for some of the biggest problems facing the country. Amash and his colleagues in the Freedom Caucus could rail against the Affordable Care Act and the evils of “socialized medicine” all they wanted — their “principled” opposition to government exercising any sort of power to lower the costs of medical care for most Americans meant doing nothing within their power to change the status quo.
Almost immediately what set apart Donald Trump’s bid for president from normal Republican presidential campaigns was his recognition of a constituency within the GOP that favored a protectionist government, whether in trade policy, in military commitments abroad, or in the allocation of social benefits. Ultimately, Trump’s explicit racism and xenophobia unmasked the racial motives behind decades of Republican anti-Washington rhetoric and helped carve out political space for the far-right to demand social benefits for people like them only.
But Amash does not hold his former party primarily responsible for the lack of progress on issues important to American voters, despite Republicans having spent the first two years of President Trump’s administration in control of all three branches of government. Instead, Amash blames both parties for congressional gridlock, for “winning for the sake of winning,” and for putting the policy preferences of party leaders ahead of those of their voters — even though polling consistently shows the public aligning with Democrats on issues like healthcare and the social safety net.
The reality is that over the course of the Obama administration, Republicans, led by people who sought to deny President Obama any sort of political victory, moved so far to the right as to alienate parts of their own base of support. Now, boxed in by their own bad-faith attacks on the Democrats’ popular policy agenda and Donald Trump’s superficial embrace of those same ideas, Republicans have once again retreated to mythical principled conservatism to set themselves apart from the more powerful populist forces in their party.
Both Sides Didn’t Break Congress
Political scientists call this unbalanced shift toward the far right in American politics asymmetrical polarization, tracing its origins back to the mid-1990s when Rep. Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House. As Norm Ornstein argued in The Atlantic back in 2014:
…Republicans united in both houses to oppose major Clinton initiatives and moved vigorously from the start of his presidency to delegitimize him…while the ante was upped dramatically in the Obama years. The fact is that it was not public divisions on issues that drove elite polarization, but the opposite: Cynical politicians and political consultants in the age of the permanent campaign…did a number on the public.
There are two fairly obvious reasons that Amash points the finger at ideologues on both sides of the political divide rather than acknowledging partisan asymmetrical polarization as a chiefly Republican elite-driven phenomenon. One is that even as he walks away from the GOP, Amash still seeks credibility as a conservative and is therefore wary of becoming a folk hero of sorts to the resistance left and the Never Trump right.
The other reason is that Amash simply doesn’t want to admit that as a conservative he has benefited far more than his political opponents from extreme polarization, most prominently in the shaping of the U.S. Supreme Court. The court’s recent ruling on partisan gerrymandering could advance Republican minority rule for decades to come.
A not-as-obvious (but more revealing) reason Amash remains silent on Republican-driven political polarization is that he believes part of being a principled conservative is to accept unfairness as a fact of life.
As Amash described his commitment to limited government in the op-ed, I recalled the exchange between former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris over federally-mandated busing in last month’s Democratic presidential debate. As Biden appeared to defend his prior opposition to busing using the logic of states’ rights, Harris responded that when states are on the wrong side of history, it is the moral responsibility of the federal government to take action. In essence, Harris asserted a key tenet of liberalism’s value system: government, as elected by the people, should be an instrument of social justice.
Principled conservatives are considered principled for holding the exact opposite view of Harris, but they will seldom admit to the real life consequences of their own thinking. That’s because their voters like the benefits of big government activism too. Trumpism succeeds in admitting government isn’t the problem, just who is on the receiving end of its support. The promise to “make America great again” is the promise to make government foremost responsive to the fears and grievances of white Christian America.
Whatever value there is in Amash’s disillusionment with the two-party system is undermined by his commitment to government not doing much of anything to improve the daily lives of its citizens. Any serious challenge to the two-party system would have to involve Congress and state legislatures backing massive voter registration and felon re-enfranchisement projects, the removal of ballot access barriers for third parties, and real campaign finance reform.
In other words, members of Congress would have to become the very sort of big government activists Amash has spent his entire career in public office railing against.
