Has collectivism poisoned the well of American conservatism?

After liberalism For Pilkington, Marxism is the outgrowth of liberalism because free-market capitalism generates intolerable inequalities. Classical liberalism is criticized because it supposedly destroys organic structures such as communities and families. The author conflates classical liberalism (which would correspond to today’s European liberalism and libertarianism) with modern liberalism (a more social-democratic and progressive vision endorsed by, say, the Democrats in the U.S.). In doing so, he, however, totally ignores the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, which promoted modern liberalism, and the opposition from the Austrian school of Mises and Hayek. “Neoliberalism” is attributed, wrongly, as having basically been generated by Thatcher and Reagan. Pilkington shows a great interest in the Chinese economic development engine. Indeed, China’s hybrid system between capitalism and statism appears to have allowed the country to become a rival of the U.S. economically. And this might be true up to a point. However, would any decent American or Canadian truly wish to choose the path of an authoritarian state that controls most aspects of the lives of its citizens? The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries are generally presented, unpersuasively, as an alternative to the liberal order. Moreover, the book also tends to overestimate the real military capacities of Russia, which remains mired in the fourth year of its three-day invasion of Ukraine. While some of the issues the author addresses are real, such as the trend of low natality, the solutions he presents always come back to more government intervention. But the province of Quebec provides a telling example of a jurisdiction that went all-in with a host of government interventions aimed at increasing the birth rate, with very little to show for it in the end. I do, however, see one redeeming quality in this book: its harsh and sometimes witty criticism of what has become, in essence, an ecological religion. That being said, this green discourse cannot seriously be considered a classical liberal byproduct. It is more a new form of collectivism, especially when one considers the alliance of the European Greens with Marxists and post-modernists. The road to crony capitalism In the second book, Cass and his collaborators have a vision of conservatism that diverges from a conservatism rooted in classical liberalism. He focuses on the importance of institutions as guardians of a minimal state. Yet, interventionism is presented as a tool to strengthen the economy and the power of America. According to Cass, the market economy should be constrained by the power of the state. The author calls this system a “bounded market,” the flows of which would be controlled by politicians and bureaucrats. The author wants a more social capitalism, one less financialized and more oriented toward the strengthening of families. But this idealized vision of government intervention totally misses the fact that it invariably ends up fostering crony capitalism. China is seen as an outright threat by Cass. Unlike Pilkington, he doesn’t display any appetite for mimicking the Chinese model. In some respects, his book is a reaction to the growing influence of China in the global economy. And this may be one of the reasons these two authors have lost faith in the classical liberal approach. But these types of doubts existed during the Cold War with the USSR. The technological advance of the Soviets in the early stages also created concerns about the capacity of the Western liberal democracies to win the race. But as we all know now, the West survived and won a decisive victory. The part of the Cass book in defence of American labour appears to be a bit more liberal (in the classical sense) as it is based on economic prosperity, limited government, and strong communities. What comes next? In conclusion, both books promote a model which appears to be a conservative mirror of progressive interventionist policies. Indeed, both traditional leftists and post-liberal conservatives promote an approach under which the state should shape society (leveraging, of course, their values and world views). In 2024, Americans voted against the progressives’ statist policies, but did they want to replace them with their conservative counterparts? Will this post- or anti-liberal type of conservatism in the end be just a fad, or has it poisoned the ideological well of conservatism for the ages? Time will tell. Both books at least have the merit of providing the reader with a representative sampling of some of the key ideological foundations of Trumpism.