Defining Conservatism Away
I haven’t found the time to listen to the Riehl-Friedersdorf-Payne Skypecast on the future of conservatism, but if Dan Riehl really did say that the defining character of a conservative is favoring “an economy free of government interference”,* then Conor’s frustration is entirely appropriate. As even the most amateurish historian of the American conservative movement should be able to tell you, the intellectual mashup that we call by the “c”-word was the consequence of an unlikely union between economic and political libertarians on one side and social and cultural traditionalists on the other; and the people who formed it had no illusions about the extent to which these two sides differed. (Hence Conor helpfully reminds us that Hayek, whom Stacy McCain invokes as someone whom “dissident” conservatives ought to be reading, actually wrote an essay titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (emphasis mine).) More than anything else, it was the threat of international communism (the History which, in Buckley’s famous formula, we were supposed to stand athwart) that made this alliance possible, by providing a common enemy against which men and women from both camps could define themselves and so conveniently align their quite different goals. Now, absent such a common enemy, the old alliance has fractured, and all that is left for those who wish to hold it together in anything like its original form is to replace the spectre of Buckley’s “History” with – well, you know:
Hence witnessing such debates is strikingly similar to observing arguments between sports fans – not, however, the occasionally interesting arguments about which team of two teams is better, but rather the sixth-grade disputes over what does or doesn’t make one a “real fan” of one particular team, as opposed to a closet fan of some other. In this case, however, if “true conservative” is supposed to mean anything more than “stalwart advocate for the agenda of the Republican Party”, then Conor’s challenge is spot on:
This is the kind of incoherence that results when your impetus for branding someone a heretic is that they criticized Mark Levin, or that they think the GOP’s current electoral strategy is incoherent, or that they wrote an item at The Huffington Post, or because they raise chickens in their backyard and assert that maybe there’s something troubling about corporate farms pumping antibiotics into featherless foul stuffed into tiny cages. This is what happens when you define a good conservative as someone who is hated by liberals, or someone who goes to the mattresses for inarticulate, underqualified vice-presidential candidates because liberals unfairly maligned her… or she’s “just authentic”… or she excites people at rallies.
Am I wrong? Are there actually other standards being used to decide who must not invoke conservatism — or to determine which so-called pseudo-conservatives must not be engaged on the substance of anything, because apparently it is better to plug one’s ears and close one’s eyes when someone you deem to hold a different political ideology speaks? Is there anything beyond gut level judgments and Red Team tribal loyalty guiding these decisions? If so, please share your metrics. If not, please resign as self-appointed arbiters of that which you won’t even take the time to understand.
In any case I suppose the one hopeful thing to come out of this discussion is the fact that it’s “socialism” rather than “Islamofascism” that’s the buzzword currently defining the agenda of the anti-RINO right. Such a state of affairs is, of course, much more a reflection of contingent political priorities than evidence that the foreign policy agenda that defined the GOP of the Bush years is suddenly being abandoned, but there’s little doubting that a gradual recognition of that agenda’s widespread unpopularity is playing a role here, too. And ultimately, a group of partisan ideologues whose creed is defined by half-baked opposition to the domestic priorities of the “other side” is markedly less dangerous than one that spends its days and nights agitating for war with Iran.
Neither, though, is likely to be of much political consequence in the long run.
* I know this gloss is Conor’s, but given the frequency with which this formula is trotted out it seems worth noting that it means approximately nothing at all. Free of government interference? As in, there should be none of it? Presumably nobody would be foolish enough to think such a thing; the natural desideratum is that there be as little government interference as is reasonably possible, but put in those terms we have a position that very few people would be foolish enough to disagree with. The important disputes in this domain are over (1) the scope of the public goods that government needs to promote and protect, and (2) how these tasks can best be performed. Put in these terms, room for significant disputes over principle and practice begin to emerge; but it is just inane to think that government interference of all sorts – as opposed, say, to stupidly inefficient government interference of the “FOSC = NBS + FDIC + NCUA + SEC + CFTC + FHFA + FOMC + CFPA + Treasury” kind – is an evil to be opposed.
Filed under: conservatism, politics, war
Forget, please, “conservatism.” It has been, operationally, de facto, Godless and therefore irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God both are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson’s Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
“[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth.”
Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com
PS – And “Mr. Worldly Wiseman” Rush Limbaugh never made a bigger ass of himself than at CPAC where he told that blasphemous “joke” about himself and God.
Such a state of affairs is, of course, much more a reflection of contingent political priorities than evidence that the foreign policy agenda that defined the GOP of the Bush years is suddenly being abandoned, but there’s little doubting that a gradual recognition of that agenda’s widespread unpopularity is playing a role here, too
I would delve more deeply into this. I have a feeling that there is much self-loathing amongst the most outspoken members of the GOP. I think this is a function of apathy that dates back to the 2000 election, which forced the GOP to stand behind a candidate (GWB) and a political platform (“compassionate conservatism”) that it didn’t really want. It was an election the GOP never should have won, save for Clinton’s narcissism and Gore’s lack of a right brain hemisphere. Here the GOP was, completely unready to retake the presidency, and it fell into their lap. We all know what happened next, both in terms of uncontrollable circumstances and bad decisions.
I The GOP is deeply, deeply regretful that at these critical moments in time in our nation’s history, while they had the presidency and majority representation in Congress, they had people completely overmatched by the demands of the job. What we are seeing now are the features of denial. They simply cannot believe they had the opportunity to make a difference and boned it. People such as Conor, Rod Dreher, et al. who are now stepping up and saying “look, it was your fault” are being labeled as heretics because acknowledgement of any veracity to these statements admits guilt. This is not an exercise in defining “conservatism”; it is rationalizing away the errors of the modern GOP political platform.
Case-and-point: go back to the tapes and watch the Fox News analysis following the results of the 2008 congressional and presidential elections. Over and over again, they keep telling themselves this is a “center-right” country (straight out of Karl Rove’s playbook), when they were just handed irrefutable, quantitative evidence that it is not. The only explanation that works here – for seemingly intelligent people – is that of outright denial of their mistakes and transgressions. It continues to this day.
Good post, John. Honest, forthright, no strawmen.
Do you have any ideas about how to redefine conservatism as a political force? Or is that necessary, or even possible?
Jake
Well, that’s not really my AOS. But I do think that many of the proposals in Ross and Reihan’s book, if combined with a less belligerent foreign policy, could be politically promising. So, however, could an entirely different set of proposals like those represented by Ron Paul. Ultimately, as I’ve said, I think that time and energy is better spent at working to build up intermediary institutions, and not just trying to recapture Washington.
A less belligerent foreign policy can only be a good. :)
I keep thinking that conservatives, as opposed to Republicans, have little choice but to build up intermediary institutions. Much like progressive liberals, they hold little actual power. Do you have examples in mind of what such an institution might be?
Jake
I have in mind families, churches, neighborhoods, state and local governments, etc. The piece I wrote for TAC last year about food culture was meant to suggest the kinds of practices that are the most important.
John, one problem with government interference in the market, even if one is not a free-market ideologue, is that very little of it is authorized by the Constitution. The Constitution allows the Feds to guide tax and trade policy and not much else. Any wise interventions would have to be at the local or state level to pass originalist constitutional muster. While conservatism is not entirely equivalent to strict Constitutionalism, it is hard to accept as conservative a broad reading of the Commerce Clause for example, to allow Federal interference.
Do you believe churches should be involved in politics? Or is your intermediary power not specifically political? What kind of role would neighborhoods take on?
And state governments are every bit as reactionary and power mad as the feds. We need only look to CA to get a good look at that picture.
I read your article, somewhat quickly. I enjoyed it. I find it amusing that you eat arugula. :)
Jake
Yes, yes, and a non-political (in the non-Aristotelian sense, anyway) one.
And Red Phillips: I take all those points. My argument was only that using opposition to government interference as a defining quality of conservatism was terribly myopic; that’s not at all to say that I think such interference is usually a good (or a Constitutional) thing.
My argument was only that using opposition to government interference as a defining quality of conservatism was terribly myopic;
Not to mention we need someone to define what is and is not “interference.”
[...] John Schwenkler I haven’t found the time to listen to the Riehl-Friedersdorf-Payne Skypecast on the future of conservatism, but if Dan Riehl really did say that the defining character of a conservative is favoring “an economy free of government interference”,* then Conor’s frustration is entirely appropriate. As even the most amateurish historian of the American conservative movement should be able to tell you, the intellectual mashup that we call by the “c”-word was the consequence of an unlikely union between economic and political libertarians on one side and social and cultural traditionalists on the other; and the people who formed it had no illusions about the extent to which these two sides differed. (Hence Conor helpfully reminds us that Hayek, whom Stacy McCain invokes as someone whom “dissident” conservatives ought to be reading, actually wrote an essay titled “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (emphasis mine).) More than anything else, it was the threat of international communism (the History which, in Buckley’s famous formula, we were supposed to stand athwart) that made this alliance possible, by providing a common enemy against which men and women from both camps could define themselves and so conveniently align their quite different goals. Now, absent such a common enemy, the old alliance has fractured, and all that is left for those who wish to hold it together in anything like its original form is to replace the spectre of Buckley’s “History” with – well, you know… [...]
““an economy free of government interference”
If conor said I claimed that, as is typical, he’s misrepresenting someone’s views and creating a strawman – another typical ploy for him. We were talking theory, so I said, if one were to take some “pure” concept of a conservative prefrence for small government all the way out, you’d end up where the scenario was to support a position with no government control whatsoever. I then added that, everyone knows that is impratical, so the goal is to have the least involvement possible while realizing that the government also had a role in empowering prosperity through making commerce more viable between parties. That was all said to support the notion that there could be a host of opinions around that issue which supported more or less government involvement in the economy and they might all be argued as a “conservative” position. But now we have moved from a theoretical discussion of “what is conservatism,” to “what is the practical face of conservatism around which any so-called movement can agree”. That being a political, as opposed to an ideological discussion.
I’d suggest my point had a much finer edge to it than conor conveyed, or perhaps was even able to understand given my experience with him. Perhaps if I could say it in a quote from Kirk, he’d get it. But his understanding of much of anything doesn’t seem to stray much from what he’s read in books. Not really the best abstract thinker our boy conor.