Here is illustrated the flaw, or danger, of conservatism as a defense of legitimacy. It will necessarily devolve into a defense of any institution with legitimacy [bold mine-DL]. Mr. Hammer gives us the perfect hip-hop sturm to the Hank Paulson inspired drang of “too big to fail.” The line of legitimacy runs straight and true from Marshall’s McCulloch decision to Paulson’s trillion-dollar bailout. The central banking system encrusted with monied interest barnacles is, it appears, too legit, too legit to quit—and all efforts on its behalf are, ipso facto, necessary and proper. I doubt this is the kind of conservatism Bramwell has in mind. ~Fr. Jape

Old Jape is on the right track as usual.  This was precisely my concern when I first came across the “conservatism of legitimacy” argument that he is critiquing, since it seemed readily exploitable by presidential cultists and every ally of consolidated power, but Jape goes on to outline a different argument from this.  I may return to this second part later on, but first I wanted to make a point about institutional legitimacy. 

If the language of patriotism can be abused and twisted by nationalists and ideologues into an insistence on never challenging a particular government, as it often is to shut down dissent against abuses of power, the language of legitimacy can be deployed in corrupt ways to defend the abuses themselves and to justify every excess as necessary to the maintenance of institutions.  There is a superficial similarity between a “conservatism of legitimacy” and actual legitimists from the nineteenth century and earlier, who did invest particular institutions and even particular regime types with reverence, but this similarity disappears when we look closer at the reasons the legitimists gave for their loyalty to monarchy or to a particular dynasty.  Chief among them were divine sanction and legal tradition, which are the foundations of justified resistance against usurpers and tyrants.  As I have said before, to talk about institutional legitimacy without referring to the legal and moral traditions of a people is to reduce respect for legitimacy to a subservience to power.  Legitimism rightly understood contains within it the possibility of dissent and even resistance when necessary for the sake of the legitimate government defined in tradition when that government is under assault by any given set of rulers or magistrates that happen to be in power.  This sort of legitimism is what I understand the correct conservative response to be, which may have nothing at all to do with wanting to preserve institutions or defend regimes that overthrow the constitutional tradition of the country.