An Empty Manifesto
The Mount Vernon Statement is deeply unsatisfying. What's The Mount Vernon Statement, you ask? According to the press release, no less than a definitive statement -- signed by "over 80 leaders" representing "all major elements of the conservative movement" -- of "the principles, values and beliefs of the conservative movement." "We must be certain of our purpose," declare the signatories, "if we are to succeed in the critical political and policy battles ahead."
If so, then success will be a long time coming. The Mount Vernon Statement seems specifically calculated not to achieve certainty of purpose, if certainty of purpose means defining what unites conservatives and what distinguishes them from their opponents.
The Statement begins for example by applauding the Founders' desires "to secure national independence, provide for economic opportunity, establish true religious liberty and maintain a flourishing society of republican self-government." Are we to suppose that non-conservatives do not share these desires? That those outside the movement wish instead to serve foreign powers, deny economic opportunity, stamp out religious freedom and maintain a decaying society of monarchical government? Absurd as it sounds, that would seem to be the implication of defining as uniquely "conservative" the broad aspirations of the Founders. Indeed, four sentences later, the Statement warns that "each one of these founding ideas is presently under attack." Not only that says the Statement, but, in an apparent allusion to Obama, "some insist that America must change, cast off the old and put on the new."
I seriously doubt that any conservative worthy who signed the Mount Vernon Statement could point to a single non-fringe figure who rejects any of these "founding ideas," let alone them all. The bit about "true" religious liberty is particularly tendentious. Not many politicians or intellectuals say that they champion religious liberty, but only that of the false variety. Even Obama, for all his love of nuance, isn't that subtle.
We know of course what the Statement's authors really meant. They mean not that the founding values are uniquely conservative but that conservatives' interpretation of them is correct, while their opponents' interpretation is misguided. Thus, conservatives presumably believe that laissez-faire policies maximize "economic opportunity," whereas, to liberal economists, government needs to intervene to correct market failure. To a Rawlsian philosopher, in fact, equal economic opportunity logically entails redistribution of wealth. The notion that conservatives alone believe in "economic opportunity," however, is a serious error.
The Statement takes no pains at all to understand the other side. "The Constitution," say the signatories," is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant" -- quite an extraordinary claim to make of a nation in which, sooner or later, every controversy becomes a constitutional question. The Statement itself in an example: the core value that unites all conservatives is allegedly "the Constitution," as if the Constitution will surely settle all questions. In this country, the Constitution has probably never been less obsolete or more relevant.
Or, says the Statement, "the self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist." This is literally untrue. Not even self-proclaimed relativists today go around denying that all bachelors are unmarried. Nor have the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness waned in popularity. On the contrary, human rights are widely celebrated by all sides.
The unacknowledged though painfully obvious assumption of The Mount Vernon Statement is that the values we all share necessarily translate into the conservative movement's policy agenda, as if no additional intellectual work were needed. (You're not against "true" religious liberty are you?) Alas, however, the "the priceless principle of ordered liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution" does not imply any particular agenda, at least not in any straightforward way. That's why we still have political debate.
Contrast the Sharon Statement, which 50 years ago launched Young Americans for Freedom and to which The Mount Vernon Statement pays conspicuous homage. Disagree with the Sharon Statement if you will, at least it shows evidence of underlying arguments. When government, it says, "takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both." This is a wonderfully concise statement of the moral and economic case for the free market, made in the language of both economics and Lockean rights theory. That case may or may or not be compelling, but at least it is recognizable. The authors of the Sharon Statement were not content to appeal to some laudable but empty notion as "economic opportunity." On the contrary, they felt compelled to define what they believed.
The Mount Vernon Statement instead "unites" the conservative movement around a set of platitudes and truisms. (My favorite: Conservatism "recognizes man’s self-interest but also his capacity for virtue." Not exactly earth-shattering.) It thus unwittingly exposes as bogus the oft-heard claim that the conservative movement thrives on ideas and internal debate. By not linking broad aspirations to conservative policies in any meaningful way, as if the policies themselves could not be doubted, the Statement seeks to unite the movement behind the conviction that everything is okay, all important questions have been settled, no rethinking is necessary and anyone who doesn't like it should either get in line or get out. Perhaps 80 conservative leaders are at least inwardly embarrassed by the sheer banality of what they have trumpeted as official movement dogma. But I doubt it.