In an age of Big Government Conservatism, American Greatness Conservatism, Christian Conservativism, Crunchy Conservatism, South Park Republicanism, and more, it may be worth another look at a great political paradigm.  Classical Liberalism awaits.

It’s been a long time since many of us in the “conservative movement” have protested that we are not truly conservatives, but are rather classical liberals.  The media refuses to pick up the distinction and the mass society doesn’t grasp the point. ~Hunter Baker

Additionally, there is the small problem that, for “many of us,” it isn’t the least bit true.  It is true that George Grant hit a lot of his contemporary American conservatives with the simple observation that they were not really conservative at all, and he was making a lot of sense when he said this.  But if we are stuck with the general Anglo-American liberal tradition, and if we lack the more genuinely conservative tradition of our neighbours to the north or our cousins in Europe, we do not have to interpret that tradition as 19th century liberals did and as some consciouly “classical liberals” do today.  Bolingbroke offers us one way out of the Lockean swamp and the dank forest of whiggery, and Burke offers us another alternative as well.  We can respect the ancestral constitution and defend our chartered liberties without taking up the unfortunate label of “classical liberal.” 

If anything, being a classical liberal is an unfortunate thing that American conservatives might have to suffer and need to overcome; it is certainly not something to embrace, much less hold up as a point of pride.  There is something dreary and sad about the explanation, “I’m not really a conservative–I’m the true liberal, and you have departed from the liberal path,” as if there were still something deeply shameful about partaking of the broad conservative tradition that stands in opposition to the false ideas of 1789.  Classical liberals do not oppose those ideas and they do not think they are false.  But the conservatives of my persuasion assuredly do oppose them and do consider them to be false to a large degree.  Given the bloody and destructive legacy of those ideas, their abstract, ahistorical nature, and their inhuman and unnatural implications, I am often puzzled by why anyone is embarrassed to bear the name of the persistent opponents of these falsehoods.  Why does anyone feel the need to run back to some brief moment around, say, 1830 or 1848 or 1867 and say, “This is what liberalism really is, and I will stick by it come what may”? 

There were very good reasons why, when given half a chance, the vast majority of men in the societies where it existed rejected what we call classical liberalism: one was its hostility to public religion, namely Christianity and more specifically Catholicism, another was its subordination to mercantile, industrial and financial interests to the detriment of agriculturalists and workers, and another was its pervasive need to regularise and rationalise procedures and laws, all of which worked against the established institutions and precedents with which people were quite familiar.  Perhaps the most powerful reason behind classical liberalism’s defeat was its extremely narrow social and economic base, as its doctrines seemed to make no sense to anyone else except the urban professionals and businessmen who cultivated these ideas.  Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries here and in Europe, men of a certain kind of temperament and a basic sense of traditional Christianity viewed these freethinkers–for indeed, that is what they called themselves in some cases–with horror and dread, and with good reason Metternich regarded liberal conspirators as the subversive enemies of decent society and international stability. 

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whose works were among the great influences on my political thinking, did refuse to take the name conservative and remained true to the Austrian liberalism of his home country, but in important respects he simply wished away the evil characteristics of that liberalism–its anticlericalism, its increasingly fanatical nationalism–as not being the “real” liberalism to which he subscribed.  Yet both of these things had been inherent in liberalism since its modern Continental birth in France, and those who want to champion classical liberalism today have to take account of its close historical ties to anti-Catholic fanaticism and nationalist extremism.  K-L himself was a complicated figure.  He was also someone who espoused monarchism and radical Catholic anarchism and urged us to fly the black banner shared by anarchism and reaction alike; no one who read his Black Banners would confuse him with the Viennese liberals of the 1870s-1890s.  We should prefer that spirit of K-L the radical to any kind of “classical liberalism.”