THE PARTY OF LIBERTY, NOT FREEDOM:

Trump's candidacy is also useful to the extent that is has brought to light another very important phenomenon, one perhaps related to the first: the moral bankrupcty of a certain kind of contemporary intellectual conservatism. His electoral star might burn out, as his rivals hope, but for the time being, it sheds light on the inadequacies of not only conservatism's men of action but also its men of reflection.

We encounter such a morally vacuous conservatism in the recent remarks of George Will, one of America's most celebrated conservative commentators and one of Trump's most vigorous critics. Reacting to Trump's economic nationalism, Will declares that Republicans must be "the party of growth, or they are superfluous." Democrats, he suggests, exist to redistribute wealth--"allocating scarcities" through the "administrative state." In contrast, Republicans should avoid such thinking and instead simply focus on growing the nation's economy.

In Will's view, apparently, the Republican Party should have no domestic policy agenda beyond an economic one, and that agenda should involve nothing beyond promoting economic growth. This, surely, is the import of his use of the word "superfluous," which implies that in the absence of an economic growth platform there would be no important difference between the Republicans and Democrats. This in turn is as much as to say that the only real political issues are economic issues.

Will's vision is utterly unworthy of a great political party and wholly inadequate to the politics of America or any other nation. It is a vision on the basis of which no party could successfully govern or even win elections in order to get the chance to govern. The basic purposes of a political party are to win power and then use that power with a view to the common good. A party that followed Will's advice would be able to do neither.

Democrats' calls for redistribution of wealth may be misguided. They may in some cases even be cynical--mere means of appealing to the self-interest of voters under a moralistic guise. Such calls do, however, require the Democrats to make appeals to essential public principles such as justice, and the obligations of the citizen to the community and the community to the citizen. Will's approach, on the other hand, eschews such principles entirely. This is a strange approach for a conservative, since questions about these principles--and the moral vision of politics on the basis of which such questions can arise--have been characteristic of the politics of all civilized communities.

A party single-mindedly committed to Will's politics of growth would not even be adequate in the realm of economic policy. Anyone can see that economic growth, which is certainly to be desired, may not benefit the whole community. A nation may enjoy even very robust economic growth while some regions or classes of people continue in a state of economic backwardness, stagnation, or decline. No decent or competent ruling political party would ignore such phenomena and boast that its economic policy was a pure success merely because the economy of the whole had grown. In general, economic growth, while important, is a rather lowest-common-denominator way of measuring a country's well-being. Communist China, for instance, has enjoyed impressive economic growth over the last thirty years.

A political party concerned only with economic growth would have nothing to say about the great moral questions that have agitated American politics for years. What is marriage? What lives should be protected by law? No country can ignore these questions, nor can it answer them with reference only to their impact on economic growth.

Pressed on the deficiencies of a shallowly materialistic politics of economic growth, Will might respond that his public philosophy's moral content is supplied by the principle of personal autonomy or individual liberty. Thus Will denounces the Supreme Court's rulings upholding the Affordable Care Act, but embraces the Court's decision to redefine marriage for all fifty states. More recently, Will has come out in favor of a "right" to physician-assisted suicide. Will, once the most traditionalist of all conservative commentators, is now simply a libertarian ideologue. This is a remarkable transformation for the popularizer of Burke who once wrote a book to instruct conservatives that "statecraft" is and must be "soulcraft."

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