NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE C ourtesy of Avik Roy and Michael Brendan Dougherty, we now have dueling op-eds about dueling manifestos. Yet it remains a bit obscure whose honor we are fighting over.

I was happy to sign Roy’s “freedom conservative” statement, agreeing as I do with the points it made, but if asked I would have been willing to sign the “national conservative” statement, too, with just a few modifications and clarifications. I can endorse almost everything in each group’s statement because neither engaged in negative generalizations about the other. Each statement reminds us of some important truths without providing enough grist for a factional dispute, let alone for a complete political platform.

Roy, speaking for himself in his op-ed, has now fleshed out some of the differences he sees between the two groups. I can’t endorse that op-ed as wholeheartedly as the statement.

Roy criticizes some comments made and positions taken by various NatCons outside their manifesto. I generally agree with his criticisms. But it’s worth noting that those positions and comments weren’t part of the NatCon manifesto, which presumably means that the NatCons either could not generate an internal consensus behind them or consider them important enough to include. A NatCon could just as easily find statements from signatories to the freedom-conservative manifesto — some Ayn-Randian rhetorical flourish, perhaps — to condemn.

He holds the NatCons’ omissions against them, noting the absence from their statement of any concern about the national debt. If we hold statements to such a severe standard, neither one of these deserves support: They say nothing directly about the sanctity of human life, which some of us regard as central to any humane politics.

Roy also takes ambiguous statements that are in the NatCon manifesto and puts a negative gloss on them. That manifesto endorses energetic national action “to restore order” in places where it does not reign — which could simply mean calling out the National Guard when appropriate. Ignoring that the comment is presented as a qualification to the NatCons’ endorsement of federalism, Roy views it as an unconstitutional attack on state and local governments. I doubt it was intended as such. A NatCon looking at Roy’s statement with the same critical attitude could easily read some of its passages, such as the one about the need to undo the effects of slavery and segregation, in a similarly expansive way. (“They’re endorsing reparations!”)

Since the NatCons don’t need me to defend and clarify their views, I probably wouldn’t be writing this post at all if not for the question of immigration. Here the statements have some significant overlap. Quick, which one starts this way? “Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations.” It’s the NatCon one. The FreeCon one, for its part, ends with an endorsement of sovereign nations’ right to set policies that serve their citizens’ values and interests.

The NatCons’ statement treats immigration policy as a question of prudence and judges the balance of considerations today as tilting toward more restriction. That’s my view as well. Roy objects both to the statement’s positive mention of a complete moratorium on immigration as something that “may sometimes” be necessary and to some NatCons’ criticisms of legal immigration.

I’m not for a moratorium and think it was a mistake for the NatCon statement to include even that qualified reference to one. On the other hand, Josh Hammer’s comment that too many Republicans have adopted the thought-stopping slogan that legal immigration is “good” and illegal immigration “bad” (a comment that is one of Roy’s targets) seems to me to be simply correct. We set limits on legal immigration, and almost everyone believes there should be limits on it, because we don’t actually believe that it is always good. That “we” includes the FreeCons, whose own statement, again, says we should “design a rational immigration policy” rather than simply throw open the borders.

We should debate our differences, sometimes sharply, but we need not magnify them. And we should not define factional lines in a way that puts a sensible immigration policy further out of reach. It would be better, under the circumstances, for conservatives to fire into the air and await cooler heads.