Any regular reader of Vox Nova (who can tolerate me!) knows that I get irked by the frequent use of lazy labels like “liberal” and “conservative” given that these terms are typically devoid of all meaning. With that in mind, I enjoyed Sam Tanenhaus’s recent essay entitled “Conservatism is Dead”. It’s worth a read, and you find echoes of what I and others have been saying all along about the modern American pseudo-conservative movement. Tanenhaus’s basic argument is that what Americans deem conservatism has become completely unmoored from the traditional understanding, and that:
“What passes for conservatism today would have been incomprehensible to its originator, Edmund Burke, who, in the late eighteenth century, set forth the principles by which governments might nurture the “organic” unity that bound a people together even in times of revolutionary upheaval. Burke’s conservatism was based not on a particular set of ideological principles but rather on distrust of all ideologies. In his most celebrated writings, his denunciation of the French Revolution and its English champions, Burke did not seek to justify the ancien regime and its many inequities. Nor did he propose a counter-ideology. Instead he warned against the destabilizing perils of revolutionary politics, beginning with its totalizing nostrums.”
Tanenhaus argues that what calls itself conservative in the United States today is replete with these very “totalizing nostrums”. Burke and his followers did not believe in a static society, but in progress guided by prudence, and specifically that “governments were obligated to use their powers to meliorate intolerable conditions”. Tanenhaus appeals to the experience of Benjamin Disraeli who “became an innovative reformer, partly to outflank the Liberals, partly to keep the Conservative party viable in a time of dynamic upheaval, but also because he came to see that, in the modern age, conservatism required an activist government that guarded the interests and needs of the entire population”. (In Ireland, Disraeli took an approach called “killing home rule by kindness”– the meaning here is pellucid). One of the people who noticed this American disconnect from an early stage was Arthur Schlesinger who pointed out with great insight that once:
“they [Kirk and others] leave the stately field of rhetoric and get down to actual issues of social policy, they tend quietly to forget about Burke and Disraeli and to adopt the views of the American business community….Disraeli with his legislation on behalf of trade unions, his demand for government intervention to improve working conditions, his belief in due process and civil freedom, his support for the extension of suffrage, his insistence on the principle of compulsory education! If there is anything in contemporary America that might win the instant sympathy of men like Shaftesbury and Disraeli, it could well be the school lunch program. But for all his talk of mutual responsibility and the organic character of society, Professor Kirk, when he gets down to cases, tends to become a roaring Manchester liberal of the Herbert Hoover school.”
Schlesinger hits the nail on the head, and what he says rings as true today as in the 1950s. For the American pseudo-conservative tradition is really just another branch of liberalism, rooted in the American constitutional tradition, and imbued with aspects of cultural Calvinism. The free market is deemed to inculcate moral virtue, and political strategy is crafted in an “us versus them” mentality that appears peculiar even in democracies with greater internal divisions than the United States. Here is Tanenhaus again:
“Many have observed that movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy–“statist” social programs; “socialized medicine”; “big labor”; “activist” Supreme Court justices, the “media elite”; “tenured radicals” on university faculties; “experts” in and out of government.”
Tanenhaus argues that this is due to a Marxist influence as many who traveled the path toward pseudo-conservatism started out as Marxists:
“In place of the Marxist dialectic they formulated a Manichaean politics of good and evil, still with us today, and their strategy was to build a movement based on organizing cultural antagonisms.”
I think this argument is a little un-nuanced, for I believe the dualism comes more from the very American culturally Calvinist and/or Gnostic religious traditions that paints the world in stark “us versus them” terms. For Americans tend to see themselves as standing apart from other democracies, somehow above them, somehow more virtuous and “free”. Too many Americans see the role of the American military machine as imposing its own particular values on the rest of the world, blind to any historical or cultural context (from Wilson to Dulles to Bush). The pseudo-conservative movement has imbibed this way of thinking, from economics to foreign policy. Conservative, it is not.
But Tanenhaus is right to draw parallels with Marxism, and these parallels seem almost eerie today. The “movement” that Tanenhaus studies has now taken complete control of the rump Republican party, and this group seems to be adopting a Leninist strategy of destroying the system from within, a strategy that is the very antithesis of true conservatism. We have Republicans talking proudly about adopting the tactics of the Taliban, and Rush Limbaugh expressing his hope that the fiscal package will fail in the midst of the most profound economic slowdown in seventy years (I will stop taking Limbaugh seriously when the movement stops doing so). In other words, he sees a catastrophic economic calamity as the price worth paying for a return to power. And nobody says a word against him. This is the ethos of revolution, very Marxist in tone.
There is certainly a place in the American polity for an authentic conservative movement, one guided by prudence and sobriety, one that makes judgments based on expected outcomes rather than ideological preconceptions (especially with regard to the free market and necessary government interventions). Twinned with this would come respect for subsidiarity, the natural law, and the role of religion in the public square. It would not be afraid to push for “big government” in certain areas–both social and economic–while stepping back from other areas, again social and economic. Prudence over ideology. Respect for knowledge over populist nostrums. There is an opening for such a movement, though perhaps it is too “utopian” to wish for such a thing!
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