A big tent still has sidewalls

Having spent most of my career building, financing, and leading conservative institutions — in North Carolina and around the country — I’ve learned many critical lessons, often the hard way. One of them is that if you truly want to persuade and influence, rather than just perform or provoke, you can’t do it alone. You must be willing to cooperate with people who may share only some of your views and goals.

Another lesson is equally important: Coalitions can also be too broad for their own good. Even a big tent must have sidewalls. Otherwise, it’s no tent at all.

Two years ago, I helped found the Freedom Conservatism project. It began as a conversation among activists, policymakers, scholars, and other leaders about the future of the American Right. We had common concerns about our movement — its intellectual rigor, its vitality and relevance to new generations, and the ways in which the rise of populism had contorted its traditional commitments to liberty and virtue. At the same time, we recognized that American conservatism has never been monolithic or monochromatic. It has always encompassed a wide variety of people and institutions as well as a broad spectrum of views on philosophical, theological, and practical matters.

Freedom Conservatism is an alliance, not a unity. We endorse a set of shared principles but not necessarily the same electoral tactics or policy designs.

For example, many FreeCons think of themselves as fusionists in the tradition of Frank Meyer; William F. Buckley; or my mentor M. Stanton Evans, former editor of the Indianapolis News, associate editor of National Review, and columnist for the weekly newspaper Human Events. Fusionists believe that the health and wellbeing of any society requires a thick layer of civil society between individuals and the state. Flourishing families, thriving religious congregations, rigorous schools, and robust neighborhood associations, athletic leagues, and arts groups — without such character-forming and soul-nourishing institutions, neither human flourishing nor self-government is possible.

Other FreeCons decline to use the fusionist label, however, and prefer to other terms and concepts to describe the proper relationship between freedom and order. While mostly in agreement on such issues as fiscal discipline, regulatory reform, decentralization, and educational freedom, FreeCons part company on some social and foreign-policy questions. We discuss and negotiate these differences respectfully while focusing primarily on our shared positions and priorities.

To succeed, any political movement must strike a prudent balance between breadth and depth. This is especially true in America, where voters aren’t particularly ideological and resist elite attempts to force them into rigid categories or to politicize large swaths of their professional and private lives. As for those Americans who are more ideological, they often disagree with those in their own political tribe — be they self-styled conservatives, liberals, socialists, libertarians, “centrists,” or something else. Without breadth, no faction can ever hope to obtain power and exercise it for long.

Take this strategy too far, however, and a movement will either collapse into chaos or become publicly defined by its kookiest elements. Among the current challenges to American conservatism is the presence of cranks and bigots.

By cranks, I mean those who embrace and peddle conspiracy theories or reject core principles of the American founding such as limited government, individual liberty, and religious pluralism. And by bigots, I mean those who traffic in racism, sexism, antisemitism, or other hateful prejudices.

Some prominent figures on the nationalist-populist right, such as Notre Dame professor Patrick Daneen and Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule, are cranks. Others are bigots. Podcaster and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has become both. Any tent big enough to encompass them is far too spacious. If that’s conservatism, it’s doomed.

To exclude cranks and bigots is not to “cancel” them. They retain the rights to speak, publish, and assemble. We conservatives are simply exercising our own rights to do the same — and to choose with whom we are willing to work to promote human freedom, human flourishing, and American greatness.

John Hood is a John Locke Foundation board member. His books Mountain Folk, Forest Folk, and Water Folk combine epic fantasy and American history.