The loneliest generation needs a new style of conservatism that emphasizes compassion over Gordon Gekko-ism, community over isolation, and love over hate.
Conservatism as a political movement must offer more than platitudes about liberty and the dignity of hard work; it must be a prescriptive and practical ideology that can provide Americans—particularly young people, the loneliest generation—with ethical grounding and a blueprint for how to live a fruitful and meaningful life.
In a recent 60 Minutes interview, former Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, perhaps unknowingly, laid the groundwork for a kind of conservative movement that can speak to the despondency that so many Americans feel, without whipping them up into a populist frenzy. Sasse—who is battling stage-four pancreatic cancer and has a visible facial rash from his experimental treatment—made some of the shrewdest observations I’ve heard from an erstwhile swamp creature. “People,” he remarked, “are incredibly rich at a material level statistically, and yet we're pretty impoverished spiritually and communally."
This is absolutely true.
"We don't know our cousins,” he continued, “we don't know the people who live two doors away from us, and we don't feel like we're in a common cause with people right now."
Studies have found that adults under the age of fifty are markedly lonelier than their older counterparts. What’s more, well over half of Americans have reported feeling a lack of belonging in their workplace, country, and local community. Increasingly, we are untethered, unmotivated, and unenthusiastic about our prospects in life.
If conservatism is to be a viable and enduring ideology, it must address these inconvenient truths about the sorry state of contemporary American culture. No longer can we run off the old, pre-Trump playbook of GOP establishment-approved shibboleths.
In response to a derivative and cliché-ridden ad from Senator Tim Scott’s failed presidential bid in 2023, Josh Hammer, the thirty-seven-year-old conservative firebrand and senior editor-at-large for Newsweek, wrote: “I propose a new term for this kind of zombie Reaganite BoomerCon catnip political messaging: ‘American Dream-ism.'”
Say what you will, but Hammer is right: The rugged individualism of the 1980s and ’90s no longer has the political cachet that it once enjoyed; people today yearn for something much deeper and more attentive to their needs.
In the early aughts, President Bush and his ilk were onto something when they promoted “compassionate conservatism,” a sort of rebranding of the GOP’s market-centric Reaganite strain. It was an attempt to demonstrate to the American electorate that the Republican party cared about more than just material wealth; they also cared deeply about the cultural and spiritual health of the country, as well as helping the needy.
In a 2000 article for the Hoover Digest, Bush’s former domestic policy adviser Stephen Goldsmith wrote that while compassionate conservatives recognize the merits of trade liberalization and free enterprise in the economy, they also acknowledge that “the prosperity created by the marketplace has left many Americans behind and that government has a responsibility to reach out to those who are at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.”
Years ago at a private dinner with some New York City-area politicos, I got into something of a tiff with a prominent figure in the libertarian movement. Our disagreement was over Trump’s tariffs and the shortcomings of decades of trade liberalization. Free trade, I told him, had, along with other factors, hollowed out many of the flyover states, which increasingly resemble Aleppo more than they do America. His retort, which I fully expected, was that, while our manufacturing base may have been reduced by free trade agreements, our consumer goods are cheaper, and we are more materially well off than we’ve ever been before. I firmly believe that this line of thinking is perhaps willfully oblivious of deaths of despair and our waning sense of purpose as hardworking Americans.
The rhetorical compassionate conservatism of Bush’s first term was, undoubtedly, a break from this kind of cold and unforgiving fiscal conservatism and supply-side superiority.
Unfortunately, as Patrick Brown writes in Politico, the compassionate conservatism of the Bush-era was “mostly style and little substance.”
But, while this ideology failed to take root in any meaningful way, that doesn’t mean that we should abandon the project in its entirety.
While Trump himself probably hasn’t read much Marvin Olasky, he has, as Brown noted in the aforementioned article, ushered in a new brand of culture-centric conservatism. Brown writes that “both efforts demonstrated a skepticism toward the party’s Wall Street wing and broke with economic orthodoxy to advance its vision of what society should look like.”
Thanks to Trumpism, Republicans no longer recoil at the idea of child tax credits or industrial policy. The ground is fertile for a new, communitarian strain of conservatism that can attract younger voters who are disillusioned by the Boomer-conservatism of “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and supply-side economic theory.
Sassism, for lack of a better term, more than the personality-driven realpolitik of Trumpism, might just be the best way forward. That is, a conservatism that emphasizes compassion over Gordon Gekko-ism, community over isolation, industrial policy over no-questions-asked fiscal libertarianism, and, most importantly, love over hate.
The old Washington consensus, while perhaps not totally shattered, has taken a hit. The new generation of conservatives is ready for a common good-style conservatism that emphasizes civil society. The question, then, is: who will take the reins and lead the way? Per my last article for this very publication, illiberal forces on the dissident- and alt-right are waiting in the shadows, with a perverted, faux kind of compassionate conservatism. They are paternalists, not believers in civil society. Thus, it will be up to the likes of figures such as Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and other representatives of post-Boomer conservatism to carve out a third way.
