The point I was making was that, one could take the conservative notion of a free market to an extreme to where one argued there should be no government intervention at all. I also pointed out how foolish it would be, but said it would be hard to say the position wasn’t a “conservative” one in a broad sense, albeit extreme. ~ Dan Riehl

Such a position would indeed be foolish and extreme, but in fact it is not at all hard to say that it would not be conservative in any significant sense. Depending of course on how one defines intervention in the market – as things stand, the “conservative” view is that funneling hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars annually into the military-industrial complex does not count as such an intervention, but of course such a claim has no basis at all in principle – the position Riehl is hard-pressed to identify as unconservative would be best describable as anarchy, which of course would not be an especially conservative state of affairs at all. Moreover, what is clearly overlooked in such an equation of free markets with freedom from government intervention is the fact that real freedom requires oversight and intervention, though perhaps of different sorts than the ones we usually see.

Riehl goes on:

All much theoretical crap takes is for someone to write the book. It’s lost on Conor that that’s precisely what Dreher has done. It doesn’t make it worth considering as a practical political position. The ultimate point was that between no intervention and total control there were a host of positions an honest group of conservatives might come together around, but now we were leaving the realm of the theoretical to enter the political debate. And if anyone was being asked to not identify as conservative, it is politically, not theoretically.

This emphasis on concrete policy issues is all fine and good, but it overlooks the fact that in practice (!) the “conservative” positions in our political debates tend to revolve exclusively around the hodgepodge of policies embraced by, or deemed to be in the best interests of, the Republican Party, with precious little attention given to the question of whether those policies or interests are ultimately in the service of genuinely conservative ends. Questions of that latter sort are ones for which attention to “theoretical crap” is simply indispensable, and while one might think – as I’ve explicitly argued in the case of Rod’s book – that certain such positions have been worked out less than perfectly, it remains an essential part of serious political thinking.

That remark of Pat Buchanan’s that I quoted some weeks ago – “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket” – has got a lot of truth in it, and while self-styled reformists and theoreticians can obviously contribute to such a trajectory in their own ways, it’s important not to dismiss their ideas simply because they might seem bad for business. That’s how rackets happen.

ADDENDUM: In a similar vein, H.C. Johns is spot on:

If the meaning of “conservative” is to be explicitly political, and any variance from that political definition is duplicitous, then the door is closed, not only to political reform, but also to the broader cultural sensibility  that supposedly underpins the political dimension.  That kind of small “c” conservatism, the conservatism that calls our attention to the small inescapable givens of life, must of necessity have a larger field than politics. This is because there is no simple political answer to the questions we face daily, be it how we treat ourselves, our families, our surroundings, our traditions, or those we are in community with.  Conservatism at its best is about how we square these questions with the big picture, but denying their complexity by over-politicizing them them drains the politics of ideas and the ideas of vibrancy.  This all but guarantees a hidebound ideology, not a vital force in the culture.

     Filed under: conservatism, politics