In the Amash-Ellis throwdown, a chance to get back to conservative basics

Conservatives used to stand for more than honking for freedom. (Photo by Flickr user Craig Allen; used under Creative Commons license)

There are few things more tedious than American politics today, particularly the banalities bound up with House of Representative primary races. Take, for instance, the ongoing sparring between Republican 3rd District incumbent Justin Amash and his lead challenger, West Michigan businessman Brian Ellis.

Amash, a Tea Party darling, presents himself as a Washington outsider despite the fact he’s vying for his third term in Congress, while castigating Ellis as an “establishment guy.” Why? Because Ellis once sat on the East Grand Rapids School Board? Surely Amash’s swipe at Ellis couldn’t refer to the latter’s heavy backing from business dollars, for Amash himself has enjoyed his fair share, at least until he alienated a notable portion his donor base by joining hardline House Republicans in a game of budgetary chicken, which briefly shut down the federal government last October.

All of this carping, which presents Amash as beholden to the rigorous logic of a libertarian madman and Ellis as a corporate “in-the-pocket” politician who will do everything in his (admittedly limited) power to maintain America’s onerous system of “crony capitalism” (the unholy union of government power and big business interests), does more than just reveal the deep fissures which exist within the Republican Party. It demonstrates the paucity of the American conservative imagination, one which still remains hewn to the philosophically suspect ideals of the Enlightenment while promoting, with varying degrees of sincerity, socioeconomic paradigms drawn from contestable, if not discredited, economic schools of thought.

Amash, for example, keeps photos of heterodox economists and ideological extremists such as Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand on his office wall.

None of this is to say that Ellis deserves to depose Amash. To the extent he plans to fall behind the mainline Republican platform, Ellis can be counted on to vote on the side of corporate interests while dangling pro-life, pro-family, and pro-gun carrots in front of social conservatives.

Neither man has the temerity, nor the sense, to suggest that America’s political duopoly is irreparably broken or that the style of self-absorbed individualism all “good citizens” are expected to genuflect before has gutted what an earlier generation might have called our country’s “moral outlook” and today’s sociologists label our “collective consciousness.”

If either man holds to a higher value in the public sphere, it is the value of a distorted conception of “the market” which privileges capital over labor without any recognition that the economy ought to be subordinate to a higher chain of ends.

For orthodox American conservatives, I am speaking heresy of course, but so be it. As the 3rd District Republican race well attests, the battle to be fought within conservatism today is not for the renewal of the American experiment in what the late conservative thinker and Michigander Russell Kirk called “ordered liberty, (which is) designed to give justice and order and freedom all their due recognition and part.” Rather, the Amash/Ellis race is a profane game of sound bites and cheap shots, all for the amusement of moneyed interests wondering whether a Leviathan federal administrative apparatus will or will not deliver a proper return on their campaign investment.

Amash is pitching the idea that it cannot; Ellis, the more pragmatic of the two, appears to be keeping his options open. Both are committed to the goodness – or at least utility – of the amoral market, with nary a glance toward its distributive consequences and whether the present economic order provides a head-of-household, without recourse to dual incomes, transfer payments, or usurious credit, to comfortably support a family while establishing sufficient savings to acquire property.

Such concerns are alien to the American conservative imagination, but they are not alien to the history of conservative thought writ large. The idea that the economy should be for the good of workers and families is drawn from Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), which itself rests not on Catholic dogma but rather a dictate of natural justice – a concept clouded by the contemporary conservative fetish for the “original meaning” of the United States Constitution, and an exuberance for unfettered capitalism at the expense of any higher standard.

If following the words of a Catholic Pope is toxic for some conservatives, then perhaps they can mull over the sentiments Thomas Jefferson expressed in his October 28, 1785 letter to James Madison, specifically his suggestion to use the taxing mechanism as a “means of silently lessening the inequality of property” while recognizing that “it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land” for “small landholders are the most precious part of a state(.)”

Some might object here and say that these matters are too “big picture” to think through in the context of a Michigan congressional primary race, but why? Should the conservative imagination begin to once again incorporate a thicker understanding of what it is we, as a society, ought to be conserving and promoting without recourse to shopworn Republican ideology or the barking-mad tenets of libertarianism, then there is no principled reason why it shouldn’t start in the palm of the Mitten State.

No, the Amash/Ellis campaign fisticuffs, whatever the outcome, won’t change the status quo, but the failure of both men to transcend marginal ideological quibbles while simultaneously making their ultimately low-level disagreements out to be a high-stakes engagement of diametrically opposed principles should leave all conservatives, if not all the good citizens of Michigan, longing for so much more.