Robert Nisbet and the Non-Libertarian Case for Decentralization

Conservatives are defenders of traditional communities, not atomized individuals fending for themselves. We do not oppose the growth of the federal government merely because it is dangerous to individual liberty, but because the bureaucratization of American society violates our conception of the human good.

The meaning of American conservatism is up for grabs.

For some decades now, the American Right has been focused on decentralizing political power. Reacting to the massive expansion of federal authority in the New Deal and Great Society, conservatives made “small government” a rallying cry. Joining with libertarians and other critics of the State, conservatives embraced free market economics championed by thinkers such as F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and above all Milton Friedman.

Of late, however, some on the Right have come to question this commitment to smaller government. They view it as inimical to the common good. In the Senate, populists such as J. D. Vance and Josh Hawley are therefore advancing interventionist economic legislation earlier conservatives surely would have castigated as “big government.” New think tanks such as American Compass and journals such as American Affairs have emerged to provide this “big government conservatism” greater intellectual heft, and old-guard institutions such as the Heritage Foundation are hopping on the bandwagon by relabeling themselves as part of this “New Right.” Broadly speaking, these groups support a federal government that is more active in the economy, and seek to put the welfare state to conservative ends rather than upend it entirely.

Although there is some diversity of thought on the “big government Right,” it seems that they all agree that libertarians have had too much influence in conservative politics. Thinkers such as Patrick Deneen and Michael Lind insist that social liberalism and economic liberalism go hand in hand. In their view, economic deregulation under Reagan morphed into a broader neoliberalism under Clinton, the Bushes, and Obama, which brought about a painful moral deregulation.

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