So who are today’s conservatives, and what do they believe?
“Principled Unprincipledness”
On his first page in Up from Liberalism, Buckley warned of the danger that “comes when a distrust of doctrinaire social systems eases over into a dissolute disregard for principle.” Well, then, what principle do all the various conservative factions share? What single idea would distinguish them, as a group, from non-conservatives?
It is an enduring indictment of the movement that nearly a half-century since Buckley acknowledged conservatism’s intellectual drift, no one has yet provided a clear answer. Those on the right who have tried to get a grip on the defining principle of conservatism have approached the subject warily, only to retreat empty-handed.
“So what is a conservative?” asked Jonah Goldberg, an editor at National Review Online (NRO), in his May 11, 2005 column. “I’ve been wrestling with this for a long time and I don’t pretend to have a perfect or definitive answer. . . From the beginning, American conservatives have been trying to answer this question definitively to almost no one’s satisfaction.”
One would think that the godfather of modern conservatism himself might shed some light here. John Dean, former White House counsel during the Nixon years, recalls a segment with Buckley on Chris Matthews’s Hardball television show. According to Dean, Matthews asked for a definition, and Mr. Conservative uncharacteristically stammered, “The, the, it’s very hard to define, define conservatism.” Buckley then retreated to his more characteristic linguistic impenetrability, quoting a University of Chicago professor: “Conservatism is a paradigm of essences towards which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation.”
Yes. Of course. That helps.
A survey of conservative literature does not offer illumination, either. In fact, conservative thinkers are much more forthcoming about what their “ism” is not than what it is. This is no accident, for many of them seem to take pride in their hostility to coherent, systematic philosophical thinking.
Writing in The Conservative Tradition (1950), scholar R.J. White described conservatism as “less a political doctrine than a habit of mind, a mode of feeling, a way of living.” Similarly, conservative organizer Paul Weyrich, in an August 15, 2005 column, echoes the anti-ideological rhetoric of Buckley, White, and others:
If there is one clear lesson from the 20th century, it is that all ideologies are dangerous. As Russell Kirk wrote, conservatism is not an ideology, it is the negation of ideology. Conservatism values what has grown up over time, over many generations, in the form of traditions, customs and habits. Ideology, in contrast, says that on the basis of such-and-such a philosophy, certain things must be true. When reality contradicts that deduction, reality must be suppressed.
Leaving aside the falsehood that systematic philosophy must necessarily try to impose itself on reality—a claim that would have raised the hackles of Aristotle and all those in his system-building tradition—Weyrich nails it when he describes conservatism as “the negation of ideology.” Humanities professor Wilfred M. McClay, writing in January 2007 on Commentary magazine’s website, affirms that…
…conservatism in American politics is less an ideology than a coalition. It has many different flavors and strands, and there is no sense in pretending that they do not occasionally conflict with one another, or tug at the fabric of the whole. As in any coalition, not all of the pieces fit together coherently.
This is always frustrating to those who want their ideology neat and pure. But show me a political movement that has a clear, crisp, unambiguous, and systematic philosophy and I will show you a movement that will lose, and will deserve to lose.
McClay goes on to cite the views of another conservative, prominent blogger and author Andrew Sullivan:
“The defining characteristic of the conservative,” Sullivan asserts [in The Conservative Soul], “is that he knows what he doesn’t know.” This stance of systematic modesty, or principled unprincipledness, undergirds the way Sullivan himself, an avowed if unorthodox Catholic, proposes to understand politics, culture, society, and religion itself.
“The negation of ideology.” “Principled unprincipledness.” Surely, no one can seriously accuse contemporary conservative leaders of valuing philosophic consistency and integration; what is astonishing, however, is how many of them tout their quest for intellectual incoherence as a virtue.
Conservatism may be incoherent, but it is not entirely vacuous. The stew that is today’s conservatism does contain a number of ingredients: a lumpy, indigestible assortment of premises, attitudes, and values meant to satisfy the diverse tastes of those who bear the movement’s label. Among these ingredients: traditionalism, irrationalism, pragmatism, altruism, tribalism, and—clashing with all the rest—individualism.
The factionalism on the right can be understood by the differing emphases that various conservatives place on these elements.
Traditionalism
For “cultural,” “social,” “paleo-,” and “religious” conservatives, preserving “traditional values” lies at the heart of their concerns and interests. Traditionalists lean heavily on the presumed “authority” of what was said and done by others in the past.
In his influential little book The American Cause, traditionalist conservative author Russell Kirk stressed the “Christian principles which sustain American society,” behind which “is a great weight of authority and tradition and practice.” According to the online Wikipedia, the late paleoconservative writer Samuel Francis “defined authentic conservatism as ‘the survival and enhancement of a particular people and its institutionalized cultural expressions.’ Roger Scruton calls it ‘maintenance of the social ecology’ and ‘the politics of delay, the purpose of which is to maintain in being, for as long as possible, the life and health of a social organism.’”
For such traditionalist conservatives, this means yearning nostalgically for past ways of doing things. Paul Weyrich writes:
I know America has always been a future-focused country. But that may be changing. . . . Even fifteen years ago, most people said the past was better than the present and the future would be worse than the present. I think millions of Americans might rally to a call to return to the ways we used to live, in many (obviously not all) aspects of our lives…. I really think that a next conservatism that included a movement to recover our old ways of thinking and living could win the culture war, which so far we have lost. . . . Bill Lind [director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation] calls it Retroculture. What it means is that, in our own lives and the lives of our families, and eventually our communities, we would deliberately revive old ways of doing things.
But why is “old” synonymous with “good”? A withering assessment of traditionalist conservatism came from philosopher Ayn Rand in her famous essay “Conservatism: An Obituary”:
It is certainly irrational to use the “new” as a standard of value. . . .But it is much more preposterously irrational to use the “old” as a standard of value, to claim that an idea or a policy is good merely because it is ancient. . . . The argument that we must respect “tradition” as such, respect it merely because it is a “tradition,” means that we must accept the values other men have chosen, merely because other men have chosen them—with the necessary implication of: who are we to change them? The affront to a man’s self-esteem, in such an argument, and the profound contempt for man’s nature are obvious.
Cultural conservatives reply that their own traditions are grounded in “timeless values” and “permanent truths.” In fact, though, their hand-me-down values, attitudes, and practices are actually rooted (if that’s the word) in cultural relativism.
Whose “old ways of thinking” are to be chosen as true and valuable? By what standard is “a particular people and its institutionalized cultural expressions” to be considered superior to all others? To simply assert, without reason, the superiority of one’s own cultural traditions to those of any other society is the height of arbitrariness. Yet that cultural relativism lies at the heart of the traditionalist outlook.
In his book Right from the Beginning, well-known conservative spokesman Patrick Buchanan provides a perfect example of his own cultural relativism. Note in the following his employment of the words “our” and “ours”:
Traditionalists and conservatives have as much right as secularists to see our values written into law, to have our beliefs serve as the basis for federal legislation. . . .[We must not stop fighting] until we have re-created a government and an America that conforms, as close as possible, to our image of the Good Society, if you will, a Godly country. . . .Someone’s values are going to prevail. Why not ours? Whose country is it, anyway?
This is not a rational voice demonstrating the validity of “permanent truths.” It is a thuggish voice whose only argument for his views is “Sez me!”—and whose only defense of his values is “…because they’re mine.”
None Dare Call It Reason
The gleeful rejection by many conservatives of integrated, coherent philosophical thinking has been noted and quoted. But that is only one symptom of their broader contempt for reason as such, for the products of human creativity, and for those eras in human history—such as the Enlightenment—when reason flourished.
For diehard religious traditionalists, the basic institutions of a free society have their basis and justification not in reason and reality, but in faith and the supernatural. The religious conservative worldview was given voice by Russell Kirk in The American Cause.
“Civilization grows out of religion,” Kirk declared. “The ideas of freedom, private rights, charity, love, duty, and honesty, for instance, are all beliefs religious in origin [emphasis added]. These ideals also are discussed and advanced by philosophers, of course,” Kirk concedes, “but the original impulse behind them is religious.”
In other words, there is little reason to be honest, or to love, or to require personal liberty; the ultimate rationale for such things can only be otherworldly.
Among the specific ideas supposedly at the foundation of American freedom—ideas that we must accept on faith, according to Kirk—are “original sin”; the view that “the world is a place of moral suffering, a place of trial”; that “perfect happiness never can be attained upon this earth, in time and space as we know them, or in our perishing physical bodies,” for “this little worldly existence of ours … is not our be-all and end-all.”
Given this lowly view of human nature, it of course follows that there could be no natural source for a conception of human dignity and worth: “The dignity of man,” says Kirk, “exists only through our relationship with God,” and from that relationship only “there has grown up a recognition of what are called ‘natural rights.’”
In short, without religious faith—specifically, Christianity, and more narrowly still, a dour, Calvinist brand of it—there would be absolutely no good reason for men to value themselves, to respect each other’s rights, or to desire liberty.
Is there any rational alternative to this malignant view of man and his potential? Conflating faith and reason, neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol dismissed “faith in the ability of reason to solve all of our moral problems, including our human need for moral guidance.” Reason, he declared in a 1992 essay, “is a faith that has failed”:
Secular rationalism has been unable to produce a compelling, self-justifying moral code. Philosophy can analyze moral codes in interesting ways, but it cannot create them. And with this failure, the whole enterprise of secular humanism—the idea that man can define his humanity and shape the human future by reason and will alone—begins to lose its legitimacy.
The logical implication is clear. Our American way of life—its freedoms, its values, its opportunities, its achievements—cannot be rationally justified. There is no reason that these values can be labeled “good” or “right,” no rational method by which they can be validated as superior to the slavery, butchery, and destruction that occurs elsewhere in the world. Reason can’t sort out the good from the bad in any of this; we must simply resign ourselves to accepting these things on blind faith.