I first picked up F. A. Hayek sometime around 2010. Everyone was doing it; it was the right’s Hayekian moment. I had not had occasion to read Hayek, having written my dissertation on Scholasticism. I was unable to find a Latin translation of The Road to Serfdom, so I had to settle for reading it in my native language, but I still managed to capture a bit of the heady sensation of stepping into a different world. Hayek introduced me to the logic of limited government. I still think he is as good an introduction as one can find, at least for readers too mature to be delighted by John Galt.

We are now living through a profoundly un-Hayekian moment on the right. The battle between liberals and post-liberals rages on with no real sign of abating. The Road to Serfdom turned 80 this year, and Hayek’s fans noted the occasion, but much of the right today has become accustomed to talking as though Hayek, and classical liberalism generally, is archaic or discredited. The Hayekian moment feels like ancient history. 

It’s not, though. Hayek used to be cool. Today my enduring fondness for him marks me clearly as a rotting-flesh Reaganite, but in fact, I originally cracked the cover only to please my populist interlocutors, years after Reagan was cold in his grave. It really makes one think about the dizzying progression of fads American conservatism has been through in the twenty-first century. The volatility is depressing, and yet there is an interesting sense in which conservatism has been mapping the road to serfdom, exploring its highways and byways by aggressively testing the limits of Hayekian reasoning. I’m not sure we’ve found them yet, but we may have learned some things along the way. 

Discrepancies in Diagnosis

Hayek was an incisive thinker, who understood that state programs could do tremendous harm to civil society by undermining more organic patterns of social order. His explanation of the knowledge problem is one of the best and most influential essays ever written in economics, while Road to Serfdom is an elegant work showing how the costs of state interference go far beyond the economic realm. The political, moral, and even spiritual state of a society is fundamentally changed when government assumes core social functions. People are fundamentally changed, because they learn to reorient their prudential reasoning around the tortuous and highly artificial logic of the ever-expanding state. Instead of building, exploring, and aspiring to excellence, they learn how to flatter bureaucrats and write grant applications. They are habituated in dishonesty, mediocrity, and a tortuous patronage system that inevitably favors the corrupt.

It’s a devastatingly plausible diagnosis of modern societies. Hayek has the soul of a humanist, and a deep appreciation of the link between human dignity and human freedom. Aristotelians like me, who are largely repulsed by Ayn Rand, can still be profoundly moved by Hayek.

For all these strengths, his read on how state intervention would hollow out civil society was not always prescient. It would be unreasonable to condemn him too harshly for this, given that very few people foresaw the real problems of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Hayek recognized that the modern administrative state would undermine work incentives, but didn’t see how much it would undermine people’s incentives to marry, procreate, go to church, or even just make friends. It turns out that the barriers against totalitarianism are a bit more robust than he feared, while our social fabric was more fragile than he (or anyone) expected. Americans today don’t worry about dying in concentration camps, but they do worry about dying alone, and that may be the scourge that has left us vulnerable to shills and demagogues. 

Hayek understood how government programs infantilize people, sapping the energy and entrepreneurial drive that motivates us to achieve things. Having witnessed the rise of the Nazis, he was keenly conscious of the possible pathway from redistribution to totalitarianism, and he knew that petty tyranny and cronyism tended to metastasize. By libertarian standards, though, Hayek was reasonably open to recognizing exceptions to his warnings against state interference. He was prepared to accept some level of state-supplied disaster insurance, for instance, and a minimal social safety net. Offering citizens a cushion against life’s harsher misfortunes seemed appropriate to him. He reflected far more on paid labor than on natural family or community formation. He did not, for instance, reflect much on the issue of caretaking: who should do it, why, and under what conditions. 

Again, this is understandable. Hayek worried a great deal about the situation in which prime-aged or able-bodied people came to rely on a paternalistic state. If the people who should work aren’t working (or are “working” in jobs that aren’t really productive), things fall apart. On the other hand, how much does it matter whether a 90-year-old is supported by the state or her grandchildren? The latter situation is more heartwarming, but she’s not going to start a Fortune 500 company in either case.

Time has shown us the weakness in this reasoning. It seems people really do give up on human relationships to an appalling extent, once they’ve stopped worrying about their material well-being. Loneliness, fragmentation, and declining marriage and birth rates have followed in the wake of the welfare state, to an extent our very recent forebears would have found astonishing. Technological advancements have undoubtedly worsened the problem, but when people are regularly choosing the company of anonymous strangers on the internet over their nearest neighbors and kin, it’s clear that the social problems run deep. Hayek understood that state interference changes people, but in some respects, he underestimated the problem. 

Pondering the strengths and weaknesses of Road to Serfdom, it becomes easier to understand the right’s insane vacillation between an extreme and unnuanced embrace of limited government principles, and a total rejection of them. We do recognize that state programs have changed us, including in ways that affect our human relationships, and those arguments were made in the Tea Party era. Unfortunately, the path from limited government to cultural rejuvenation was never sufficiently clear. Religious conservatives, in our time, are far more worried about empty cradles and emptying churches than they are about looming totalitarianism. Some people are willing to go to anarcho-capitalist extremes for the sake of an organic community, but most people find that too radical, and it seems politically unworkable anyway. More moderate applications of limited government principles are certainly possible, but it’s far less clear how they address the problems religious conservatives find most pressing. 

Is it possible to draw religious conservatives back towards a more liberal perspective? If we juxtapose Hayek’s theorizing against the recent trajectory of the American right, some interesting insights may emerge. As a rule, traditionalists do not live and die by liberal principles. They care about God, family, and culture in that order. But thinking back on the (very recent) Hayekian moment, we might feel a flicker of hope: it is sometimes possible to persuade traditionalists that liberal principles can help them protect the things they love. Sometimes liberal apologists make the mistake of giving up halfway, contenting themselves with a “freedom and prosperity” pitch instead of following the argument all the way to faith, family, and tradition.

A Long and Winding Road

How does one do that? First, we should get a sense of the landscape. There is, indeed, a certain melancholy fascination in paging back through religious-conservative enthusiasms of the past twenty years. It’s been a bumpy ride. 

Twenty years ago, religious conservatives were still largely united against the Axis of Evil. Neoconservatism was enjoying some waning hours in the sun. Change was in the air though, and many of the same people who railed against Saddam Hussein would soon break out their Gadsden flags and start protesting in colonial costume. The immediate provocation for that, of course, was the 2008 bank bailouts, though small government conservatism also got a nice rush of oxygen from the schoolmarmish scolding of Barack Obama, the nuttiness of Occupy Wall Street, and then Obamacare. After the decadent Bush years, there was a general sense that it was time for some slimming. We canceled Big Bird and reminded the world that we did too build that. Of course, like all populist movements, the Tea Party had its excesses. I find it strangely nostalgic now to remember getting pilloried in a right-wing forum, sometime around 2011, for arguing that it was probably fine for the government to go on cutting the grass in Arlington Cemetery.

As the Tea Party shaded into a new kind of discontent, there was another brief chapter worth remembering, focused around Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. In this strange interim moment, the frustrations of the Obama years inspired a clarion call for a full-on retreat. Our culture had passed the tipping point. We’d have to hide out in our sanctuaries, finding solace in beautifully tended gardens and mugs of home-brewed beer until the madness passed. It was an understandable sentiment after the exhaustion of the Obama years, but perhaps we overindulged in the homebrew, because BenOp quietism rapidly transmogrified into a roaring triumphalism as soon as Donald Trump stepped onto the stage (or escalator). Soon the right was teeming with aggressive new culture warriors: National Conservatives, neo-integralists, and a host of dark-web revanchists with legions of youthful followers. They disagreed on most substantive questions, but aligned on at least one point: rejecting limited government. That era, they insisted, was over. It was time to seize the levers of power and remake America in their own image.

Undoubtedly, Trump was the major catalyst for this last transition. His unlikely 2016 victory persuaded many traditionalists that “with God, all things are possible.” Even without him though, we would likely have seen some sort of renewed culture-war initiative. The progressive left strong-armed its way into a position of cultural dominance, but Americans were still deeply conflicted about this, and as the initial sugar-high of leftist “resistance” wore off, the left descended into its own internecine wars. It looked vulnerable. In any event, withdrawal only works when others are willing to leave you alone, and even Skellig Island isn’t nearly as isolated as it used to be. If the right has lurched wildly between “all is lost” and “all can be ours,” that partly reflects how genuinely difficult it is to find a reasonable balance between cultivating intentional communities and pursuing attainable political goals. 

The point can be reframed in more Hayekian terms. The bank bailouts, Obamacare, and Occupy Wall Street were all quite reasonably viewed as evidence that an oversized state was metastasizing into something malignant. But we weren’t on our way to fascism or Mao-or-Stalin-esque collectivism; even if there had been an appetite for it, our political institutions were too sclerotic and unwieldy to coordinate a Cultural Revolution or Kristallnacht. The administrative state had habituated us poorly, but we were trending towards the whimper, not the bang, as technology and the welfare state between them reduced productive citizens to atomized, alienated loners with no meaningful life pursuits. It is tragically unsurprising that opioids were the scourge of the next decade. 

When the right assumed power again, it had plenty of righteous rage but little appetite for Hayek. The fears of the Tea Party in retrospect seemed overblown; big government hadn’t created another Third Reich. Tea Party-era conservatives did discuss the ways in which big government had contributed to ground-level social breakdown, but that conversation was largely sidelined as the right became more desperate. Hayek didn’t anticipate that problem. And he certainly didn’t offer any plausible solutions. 

Hayek’s remaining conservative fans face a major challenge here, insofar as the state programs that most undermine our social fabric (welfare, elderly entitlements) are also the ones it’s hardest for us to imagine living without. We need people to need each other especially in hard times, because that deeply felt interdependence is part of the glue that holds families and communities together. But for obvious reasons, it’s hard to generate much enthusiasm for reforms that withdraw support from the poorest and most desperate people, while facilitating the thriving of the already-prosperous. A limited government platform that’s moderate enough to command broad appeal probably won’t do much to change the relationship between citizens and state in a way that helps regenerate organic community. So, instead, many people on the right changed tacks and started lobbying for handouts and industrial policy. Those measures might in fact make the problem worse, but at least people can see a connection to the goals that really matter to them.

In this respect at least, the right has closely followed the path Hayek described. The Road to Serfdom discusses the way in which state interventions can seem absolutely necessary when a social problem has no other evident solution. Over time, a solution quite likely would be found, but people are impatient and politicians cater to that impatience. Once a state program is created, natural incentives to look for better and more organic solutions largely disappear.

Is limited government really over on the right? It might be, but not necessarily. Responses to Covid policy proved that the impulse is not truly dead. Social conservatives have been fickle with Hayek, but perhaps they could still be persuaded that classical liberalism (or a fusionist approach that incorporates it) is the most promising path forward. I have three brief suggestions as to how that might come to be. 

Hayek for the Twenty-first Century

The first is the most ruthless. This problem will get easier if and when conservatives shift their attention to younger generations. Tea Party conservatism floundered in part because the right-wing base was too old for it. Older voters wanted reassurance that no one would ever, ever, ever touch their entitlements, and Trump was happy to give them that promise. It was inevitably difficult for the Hayekian moment to survive those headwinds.

The second is only moderately ruthless. Hayek, like most people, failed to foresee the extent of social breakdown because he assumed that people, being social animals, would mostly choose to stay close to their friends, family, and communities generally. It’s obvious that jobs can be burdensome. It takes a bit more reflection to recognize that human relationships can also be burdensome, and people often need to be habituated or incentivized to stick with them. Now that this has become more evident, we might be able to address the problem more deliberately. 

The third point is positively benevolent. Compared to previous generations, young people today don’t take human relationships for granted to anything like the same extent. They know that loneliness and isolation are endemic modern problems. Might they be open to an argument for limited government that is premised, not on a Randian-type argument for commutative justice, but rather on the claim that human beings need to need one another in order to be happy? It might be worth a try.

Classical liberals are perpetually fighting an uphill battle, in the sense that their solutions to problems are generally diffuse and confusing in comparison to the statist alternatives. Nevertheless, skilled apologists like Hayek, Milton Friedman, or Thomas Sowell can sometimes overcome those obstacles. We need that now, and in particular, we need the sorts of arguments that might speak to the same sort of person who was moved by The Benedict Option. The right has been on a long, winding road to somewhere. Let’s hope it’s better than serfdom.