In the Agora: The Pedigree of the Conservative Mongrel

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October 11, 2007

The Pedigree of the Conservative Mongrel

The debate over what is wrong with conservatism has a lot to do with the complete mess wrought by the national Republican Party, but as we've noted before, the conservative label has been broken for a long time -- the current troubles are only the latest consequence of that confusion.

The key to understanding the Right is to recognize that conservatism exists on three tiers. The first one is the dispositional conservatism David Brooks brings to light. The second is the ideological conservatism, of which there are different -- and sometimes conflicting -- kinds. The third is identity conservatism, which is perhaps the real source of our current woes.

Contra Brooks, the story begins not with Burke but with Kirk, or at least the mid-20th-Century writers who sparked the conservative movement. The goal at this early stage was to simply give intellectual heft to conservative dispositions (for which Burke was rediscovered and recruited). These dispositions are relatively modest, and Russell Kirk identified "six canons of conservative thought" in his 1953 work The Conservative Mind:

belief in a transcendent moral order, based on divine intent or natural law
social continuity, with value given to the gradualness of change
prescription, faith in tradition and a consciousness of the limits of reason
prudence, a recognition of the complexity and fragility of society and the disastrous consequences of seeking to construct society anew
variety, a respect and appreciation for the differences in men and societies and a deep distrust of the uniformity of equality
imperfectability, the acceptance that the imperfect nature of man necessarily leads to an imperfect society and so the impossibility of utopia on earth

In a way, these canons are descriptive of natural temperaments one might find in anyone, regardless of their political stripe. Many people feel an instinctual assent to these canons, and the writers of the 40's, 50's, and 60's sought to validate those instincts, thitherto dismissed as archaic or worse.

The intellectual descriptions by those early conservative thinkers paved the way for the ideological prescriptions of the emerging conservative movement. In an article I linked to two years ago, Austin Bramwell (incidentally, one of the trustees of National Review) elided the canons and equated conservatism with these ideological doctrines: "limited government, anti-utopianism, free-market economics, patriotism, traditional morality and religion, federalism, anticommunism, and belief in 'absolutes.'" The distinction is an important one, as Daniel Larison points out in his response to Bramwell. These tenets may be an extension of conservative temperament, but they aren't the necessary manifestations of it. The result is that Bramwell and other conservatives are mistaken about the foundations of conservatism -- the dispositions, not the agenda, undergird the movement.

Of course, those doctrines Bramwell identifies are only the most broadly-accepted. Unmoored from the canons, a variety of ideological prescriptions have fallen under the label conservative. Sometimes these different platforms war with each other, if not over the label then over the priorities of the Republican Party, the party of conservatism.

In the practical realm, ideological conservatism can largely ignore dispositional conservatism, for two reasons. First, few remember dispositional conservatism (which is why Brooks can wring a column out of simply bringing it up). I marvel that there was once a time when the classic works of the mid-Century thinkers were pored over by university students; my own experience was that a College Republican was considered well-read if he surfed NRO. The GOP has no need to appeal to the ancients in any substantive way because so few of the activists within the party demand it. Second, even if dispositional conservatism is remembered, it has no apparent utility. This is part of what Bramwell describes as Holy Grail thinking:

Each conservative writer claimed to have uncovered the Holy Grail -- the argument or principle that would expose the errors of liberalism (and communism, socialism, feminism, etc.) once and for all . . .

Most [conservatives] simply assume that the Grail has already been found. Thus, they breezily dismiss liberals with some of their favorite epithets . . . Never mind that liberals, nonplussed by the vituperative quality of right-wing thought, themselves reject these labels. Someone out there has already proved that one or another will stick.

Indeed, the more a right-winger exalts one set of ideas, the more marginal he becomes; by contrast, the more foggy he remains about what the Holy Grail is, the more influence he can have. Thus, on the one extreme, the votaries of Ayn Rand refuse to talk to right-wingers who do not take Rand's works as gospel; somewhere in the middle, "Claremont conservatives" sometimes castigate those who do not share their enthusiasm for the Declaration of Independence, yet stop short of trying to expunge them from the movement; finally, intellectual omnivores such as Buckley never allow themselves to be identified with one conservative theorist or another. In the end, nearly all the competing schools of thought manage to co-operate.

Conservatism has reached an unacknowledged consensus about the outcome of the theoretical debates of the '50s and '60s. The consensus holds, first, that someone has discovered the Holy Grail that will vindicate conservatism once and for all, otherwise why be a conservative in the first place? Second, it holds that, whatever the Grail actually is, it does not do any good to describe it with too much specificity. These beliefs contradict each other, yet the conservative consensus has proved remarkably stable.

The impetus to resolve this conflict waned even more with the political ascendance of the conservative movement in the 80's and 90's. Surely, victory affirmed that the Grail had been found. No need to retrace how it was found -- or even, as Larison laments, whether Grail-thinking is even conservative. Thus, Bramwell's thesis that modern conservatism has been dumbed-down.

So long as electoral outcomes were fruitful, the coalition of the three major kinds of prescriptive conservatism, i.e., social conservatives, business interests, and small-government types, could get along without bickering over limited political capital. In these times, that resource has become scarce, and the bickering has flared. The Economist blames the woes of the GOP on the crack-up of this coalition. Brooks blames them on the tension between the temperamental conservatives and ideological conservatives in general. Both of these analyses ignore the major source of the current conservative crack-up: identity conservatives.

Patrick Hynes identified them when he declared, "let's be clear, American conservatism has devolved from a movement into an identity group." An identity group is blind to their own faults, hostile to even constructive criticism, unflaggingly loyal to the ingroup, disinterested in philosophy, and devoted to power as an end unto itself. This thirst for power, combined with assurance that conservatism, whatever it happened to be, was right, led to all sorts of mischief: the exploitation of wedge social issues, abandonment of fiscal responsibility, disastrous foreign policy, hypocrisy, incompetence, and corruption. And still, there are die-hard partisans, and they are the face of the conservative movement, probably because everyone else has left (or was thrown out).

And here is where I will concede what every other commentator has said about Brooks: he's half right. To some degree, the awful policy prescriptions of ideological conservatives have offended the latent temperamental conservatism of many Americans. But the real heat, the real outrage, has come from the disasters the identity conservatives have cheered and abetted, and this, I think, is what John Cole is on to:

For starters, people got tired of being associated with these drooling retards. Then, when they realized that these drooling retards had ideological allies running the show in the Bush administration and then began to experience their idiotic policies, they moved from disgusted to outright hostile.

Like me. It had nothing to do with Burke, and everything to do with what the party had become. A bunch of bedwetting, loudmouth, corrupt, hypocritical, and incompetent boobs with a mean streak a mile long and no sense of fair play or proportion.

Seriously -- what does the current Republican party stand for? Permanent war, fear, the nanny state, big spending, torture, execution on demand, complete paranoia regarding the media, control over your body, denial of evolution and outright rejection of science, AND ZOMG THEY ARE GONNA MAKE US WEAR BURKHAS, all the while demanding that in order to be a good American I have to spend most of every damned day condemning half my fellow Americans as terrorist appeasers.

And that isn't even getting into the COMPLETE and TOTAL corruption of our political processes at every level.

(hat tip: Doug Masson)

The current conservative movement is broken because temperamental conservatives and ideological conservatives who aren't vulgar and crazy have been marginalized, almost hidden from view, partly because there are so few of them and partly because they find it so difficult to distinguish themselves. That leaves the identity group, a pack of conservative mongrels, unprincipled and Chauvinistic, tearing at the scraps.

Posted by Zach Wendling at October 11, 2007 07:30 AM

Comments

2. social continuity, with value given to the gradualness of change
3. prescription, faith in tradition and a consciousness of the limits of reason
4. prudence, a recognition of the complexity and fragility of society and the disastrous consequences of seeking to construct society anew

It occurs to me that these features of conservatism are in tension with, and perhaps completely incompatible with, a modern technological/capitalist society. Capitalism fosters rapid technological advancement, and new technology inevitably changes society. Rapid technological change = rapid societal change.

If that's correct, then conservatism is an endangered species, maladapted to modern society and probably doomed to extinction. On the other hand, libertarianism might be more like a brown rat: not very elegant but good at adapting to change.

Posted by: Nick at October 11, 2007 09:17 AM | permalink

Logic chopping is rarely correct but perhaps a better way (since you went back to 1953) would be to look at Burnam's analysis found beginning on page 125 of his Suicide of the West. He is discussing then what he perceived as liberal beliefs, "But, in order to know what a thing is, we must understand what it is not." He then tosses off 19 elements of the liberal syndrome and we can imagine that conservatives then and now would not partake of them.

Posted by: Anonymous at October 11, 2007 09:13 PM | permalink

Logic chopping is rarely correct

By that comment, Mr. Anonymous, did you logically chop ideas into those that logically chop and those that do not.

Posted by: Dave S. at October 11, 2007 10:34 PM | permalink

I add a lamentation to Zach's depressing column:

Why did the foam at the top of the conservative wave yield such a horrible mess of a Presidency and Congress?

Posted by: Dave S. at October 11, 2007 10:38 PM | permalink

Those are some very good principals. I would suggest that they may have been misapplied a few times. It has been the thankless job of conservatism to temper aspects of our groundbreaking national experiment since its inception. But conservatives fell down on the job when they embraced Wall Street/Corporate America instead of small business/family farms, and liberal intervention/American Empire over the Republic. They veered from America First to accusing Truman and the Democrats of not being ardent enough in their attempts to thwart Communism abroad and build a National Security State at home! (Eisenhower saw what was happening and warned against it, but that went nowhere.)

Conservatives did take a principled and brave stand against the (popular) welfare state and the hippie/drug culture. They were less than successful, and that may have led to a lot of anger and bitterness on their part. Less principled and brave has been their support for inequality for blacks, women, and gays. (Some of Bill Buckley's early writings in defense of racism/segregation are shocking by today's standards.) And that has perhaps led to a lot of anger and bitterness on the other side.

That's my 2 cents. Anyway, it's good to see the soul searching going on.

Posted by: JohnS at October 12, 2007 07:10 AM | permalink

This is good stuff Zach.

Re: Nick's point about the incompatability of conservatism and capitalism, my Marxist grad school buddies made that point all the time. They're probably right about absolute libertarianist free markets, which knows no loyalties to family, place, culture, or tradition, but I think capitalism tempered by conservatism can serve the public good.

Or, to paraphrase Jesus, free markets were made to serve man, not man to serve the free markets.

Posted by: DMD at October 12, 2007 10:09 AM | permalink

With respect to number "5" I note the following quote from the Chicago Times regarding Lincoln's Gettysburg address:

"How dare [Lincoln], then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government? They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that Negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges."

I have a somewhat natural tendency to agree with all six of the "canons of conservative thought." And yet I recognize that through Christ, God seeks to bring radical change and to create society anew.

I would suggest that movements to end segregation, to give women the right to vote, and to extend the franchise beyond property owners were ideals founded in truth that would trump the general logic of numbers "two" and "four."

The idea that there is neither "gentile nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female" certainly doesn't comport to "gradual change." Nor does the truth that there is neither "circumcision nor uncircumcision." Or that "the first shall be last and the last first."

At its broadest, number "one" is turned by many conservatives from relating to God's purposes to a simple restatement of "survival of the fittest" in which the notion of "agape" is tossed aside.

Posted by: Joel Betow at October 13, 2007 02:23 PM | permalink

Responding to Joel's comment (the beginning of it, anyway, where he quotes a response to the Gettysburg Address), I think that conservatives need to adopt a clear, uniform understanding of what is meant by "equality," or at least an awareness that there are many definitions in use. I have never met a conservative in real life who claimed to disagree with the Gettysburg Address version of equality, but many conservatives (apparently including Russell Kirk) criticize a different kind of equality, without distinguishing what they are criticizing from the Gettysburg Address version. It should be no surprise that conservatives would disagree with a more socialist definition of equality, but it has to be made absolutely clear to other conservatives and to non-conservatives that we agree with the kind of equality that includes political equality, equality in the judicial system, equality in treatment by the police and all government officers, and that rejects social inequality based on race. (Actually, what I just described is two different understandings of equality that we should support simultaneously.) If we assume that someone who claims to support "equality" believes that a CEO and a janitor should receive the same pay, we will be speaking a different language from a lot of people -- we won't understand them, and they won't understand us.

Posted by: Karl at October 15, 2007 09:14 AM | permalink