Is there a future for a conservatism skeptical of capitalism as practiced in Silicon Valley?

In a WaPo article, Greg Jaffe takes note of tech billionaires worried about the future of capitalism:

For decades, Democrats and Republicans have hailed America’s business elite, especially in Silicon Valley, as the country’s salvation. The government might be gridlocked, the electorate angry and divided, but America’s innovators seemed to promise a relatively pain-free way out of the mess. Their companies produced an endless series of products that kept the U.S. economy churning and its gross domestic product climbing. Their philanthropic efforts were aimed at fixing some of the country’s most vexing problems. Government’s role was to stay out of the way.

Now that consensus is shattering. For the first time in decades, capitalism’s future is a subject of debate among presidential hopefuls and a source of growing angst for America’s business elite. In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart.

Predictably, Jaffe made no effort to talk to conservatives. Instead, he spoke to a Democratic Congressman (Ro Khanna), talked about Democrats (Warren, Sanders, etc....), and focused on Silicon Valley tycoons who tend to run liberal or libertarian in their politics.

Any serious consideration of the state of capitalism in this country, however, is going to have to confront the long tradition of conservative skepticism about capitalism. In my essay, Conservative Critiques of Capitalism, I reviewed Peter Kolozi's book, Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization, which discusses the long tradition of skepticism about—and sometimes outright hostility to—capitalism among important strains of American conservative thought. Kolozi takes a chronological approach focusing on key thinkers representative of the prevailing conservative school of thought in each of six periods: John C. Calhoun, James Henry Hammond, and George Fitzhugh representing the antebellum defenders of slavery; Brook Adams and Theodore Roosevelt of the Progressive Era; the Southern Agrarians; post-war traditionalists such as Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet; Reagan-Bush era neoconservatives; and paleoconservatives such as Patrick Buchanan and Samuel Francis.

In it, I argue that:

In endorsing the need to “humanize the economy,” Russell Kirk cited with approval Orestes Brownson’s view that Catholic social thought could “work within and through the established political institutions of the United States” to do so. Kirk’s political economy in fact had much in common with G. K. Chesterton’s distributism, which in turn was rooted in Catholic social teaching.

Likewise, Southern Agrarian political economy and Catholic social thought both supported private property and markets, while opposing the rise of a global market in which “human relations themselves are treated as commodities.” Indeed, there was much commonality between the views of the Southern Agrarians (especially in the mid-1930s) and Catholic social thought at the time with respect to issues of economics and social justice.

The point is not that conservatives need to embrace Catholic social thought unmodified, even if they could. There are serious conflicts between Catholic social thought and the post-Trump populist base upon which the conservative movement seemingly must rest. To cite but the most obvious of examples, the Tea Party and paleoconservatives have been consistently hostile to immigration and the so-called undeserving poor.

The point is simply that conservatives must begin breathing new life into the traditions to which Kolozi has so usefully drawn their attention. The search for a practical and achievable economic order that balances productivity, growth, community, tradition, and human decency needs to continue.