Conservatism and Its Absence of Contents

Jacob Levy thinks he has a problem: he cannot present conservatism attractively in his classes because there are no attractive modern conservatives:

Jacob T. Levy: Tyler Cowen... makes the insightful point that "none [of the 20th century American conservatives] have held up particularly well, mostly because they underestimated the robustness of the modern world and regarded depravity as more of a problem than it has turned out to be."

It's a real problem--one I've often talked with people about in a teaching context, because there's no modern work to teach alongside Theory of Justice and Anarchy, State, and Utopia that really gets at what's interesting about Burkean or social conservatism.... The problem isn't... that the conservative temperament isn't easily reduced to programmatic philosophical works.... One of the problems is that history keeps right on going--and so any book plucked from the past that was concerned with yelling "stop!" tends to date badly to any modern reader who does not think he's already living in hell-in-a-handbasket. This is a particular problem because of race in America--no mid-20th c work is going to endure as a real, read-not-just-namechecked, classic of political thought that talks about how everything will go to hell if the South isn't allowed to remain the South.... Oakeshott has his own version of these problems; doesn't "Rationalism in Politics" end up feeling faintly ridiculous by the time he's talking about women's suffrage?...

I don't see any great answers in the comment thread yet. I guess I might say Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, and Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, but the former isn't really distinctively conservative enough and I'm not sure the latter is a classic.

I say cut the Gordian knot. THERE ARE NO ATTRACTIVE MODERN CONSERVATIVES BECAUSE CONSERVATISM SIMPLY IS NOT ATTRACTIVE. DEAL WITH IT!!

You can see this most clearly if you take a close look at Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke does not believe that Tradition is to be Respected. He believes that good traditions are to be respected. When Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France makes the argument that Britons should respect the organic political tradition of English liberty that has been inherited from the past, he whispers under his breath that the only reason we should respect the Wisdom of the Ancestors is that in this particular case Burke thinks that the Ancestors--not his personal ancestors, note--were wise.

Whenever Burke thought that the inherited political traditions were not wise, the fact that they were the inherited Wisdom of the Ancestors cut no ice with him at all. It was one of the traditions and institutions of Englishmen that they would conquer, torture, and rob wogs whenever and wherever they were strong enough to do so. That tradition cut no ice with Edmund Burke when he was trying to prosecute Warren Hastings. It was one of the traditions and institutions of Englishmen that all power flowed to Westminster. That tradition cut no ice with Burke when he was arguing for conciliation with and a devolution of power to the American colonists. It was one of the traditions and institutions of Englishmen that Ireland was to be plundered and looted for the benefit of upwardly-mobile English peers-to-be. That tradition, too, cut no ice with Burke.

Even in Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke doesn't argue that Frenchmen should build on their own political traditions--the traditions of Richelieu and Louis XIV, that is. He argues--well, let's let him talk:

Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France: We [in Britain] procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age; and on account of those from whom they are descended.... You [in France] might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution... suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. ... In your old [E]states [General] you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed; you had all that combination, and all that opposition of interests, you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe.... Through that diversity of members and interests, general liberty had as many securities as there were separate views.... [B]y pressing down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy, the separate parts would have been prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places.

You had all these advantages in your antient [E]states [General].... If the last generations of your country appeared without much lustre in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom.... Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the French as... a nation of low-born servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789.... [Y]ou would not have been content to be represented as a gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage....

Would it not... have been wiser to have you thought... a generous and gallant nation, long misled... by... fidelity, honour, and loyalty... that you were not enslaved through any illiberal or servile disposition... [but] by a principle of public spirit, and that it was your country you worshipped, in the person of your king? Had you made it to be understood... that you were resolved to resume your ancient [liberties,] privileges[, and immunities]... you would have given new examples of wisdom to the world. You would have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed despotism from the earth...

Burke's argument is not that France in 1789 should have followed its ancestral traditions. Burke's argument is, instead, that France in 1789 should have dug into its past until it found a moment when institutions were better than in 1788, and drawn upon that usable past in order to buttress the present revolutionary moment. This isn't an intellectual argument about how to decide what institutions are good. It is a practical-political argument about how to create good institutions and then buttress and secure them by making them facts on the ground.

What are good institutions? Burke sounds like Madison: checks-and-balances, separation of powers, rights of the subject, limitations on the state. Burke's views on what good institutions are Enlightenment views--that branch of the Enlightenment that took people as they are and politics as a science, that is, rather than the branch that took people as Rousseau hoped they might someday be and politics as the striking of an oppositional pose. Because he finds that the English past is usable as a support for his Enlightenment-driven views, Burke makes conservative arguments in Reflections. But whenever conservative arguments lead where Burke doesn't want to go--to Richelieu or Louis XIV or the plunder of Ireland or the Star Chamber or Warren Hastings or imperial centralization--Burke doesn't make them and they have no purchase on him. England's inheritance of institutions and practices is to be respected wherever it supports Burke's conception of properly-ordered liberty, and ignored wherever it does not. For Burke, conservatism is a sometimes useful rhetorical weapon, not a set of principles.

Comments

[R. Vangala]

Well said. I have often wondered what conservatives are talking about when they refer to a venerable tradition of conservative political thought. Burke is not philosophically a conservative, as you argue here, and Hayek and others are basically libertarians prejudiced against certain liberalizing tendencies of their time. To the extent that one finds arguments in Hayek, for example, these are libertarian arguments. The rest is just a sort of "yuck" reaction to the times, which I should point out does in fact characterize a lot of modern conservative 'intellectuals', but which does not constitute a tradition of philosophical thought. It is no accident that when surveys of academics are taken, all but a few label themselves either 'liberal' or 'moderate', because, well, there just isn't anything very intellectual about conservatism. What little there is is some libertarian afterthoughts, together with certain excuses for hating on progress being made during some given period.

[anne]

I say beyond being treated to lunch by them, which I always welcome, I find contemporary conservatives filled with ideas that are astonishingly empty of content, and those are the gentle tempered ones, not the crocodile smilers but the genuinely gentle tempered who I appreciate even beyond lunch though lunch helps since I am genuinely expensive when treated.

[sm]

"The rest is just a sort of "yuck" reaction to the times, which I should point out does in fact characterize a lot of modern conservative 'intellectuals', but which does not constitute a tradition of philosophical thought."

Does Plato count as an intellectual? Plenty of "yuck" in the Republic.

[Neal]

The Telegraph did their list of the 100 most influential conservatives in America at

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/exclusions/uselection/nosplit/uscons1-20.xml

The top 20?

From the top--Rudy Guiliani, David Petraeus, Matt Drudge, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, Robert Gates, John Roberts, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Condi Rice, John Bolton, Paul Gigot, Laura Ingraham, Haley Barbour, Frank Luntz, Glen Beck, Mike Pence, Ed Gillespie.....

By the way, GWB is 21.

Looking through the entire list, I am hardpressed to see any that have contributed to the ouvre of "enduring" conservative literature.

"Conservative" has become such a chameleon word where anyone, multiple whackos included, can claim the title of conservative and be supported by all of the others in the same ward, as long as they don't pee on the carpet.

What is the defintion of "conservative"? I think the word has been repeated so often and so inappropriately that it has lost all real meaning, certainly it has lost the traditional meaning of the word.

It seems that the leading "conservatives" of the day are busy creating a world that never was--not buttressing the world that was.

[Charles]

How could Tyler have missed it so utterly?

Judging from the newspapers, conservatives find depravity very enjoyable.

Take a look at Neal's list above and tell me which of these has not publicly engaged in what the right calls depravity.
* Rudy "Drag queen" Giuliani?
* Matt "the Eggman" Drudge?
* Newt "Blowjobs while the kids are away" Gingrich?
* Rush "Pills" Limbaugh?
* Laura "Pubcrawler" Ingraham?

There are some on the list who I don't know for a certainty have engaged in behavior that conservatives claim to hate,but really-- if this is the party of virtue, give me the party of sin.

[kharris]

As a practical matter, doesn't conservatism serve as a brake on the implimentation of new ideas? That can be either a good or a bad thing, depending on the new idea, but the point is conservatism operates mainly as an argument against something - which may be why there is so much "yuck" in conservatism - and is for something else as a default. It is a strong human response to newness (and not just human) which has been gussied up with claims of intellectual content.

We are going to have an urge for change and newness and an urge to reist change and newness. It's just who we are. We need to understand how those urges evolve and interact, but we don't need to take for granted the intellectual claims wrapped around either urge.

[jimbo]

These days the word 'conservative' is used primarily as a euphemism for 'racist'. It's really that simple.

[Matt]

I'd say that Alisdair Macyntire, John Finnis, and Robert George are all contemporary conservatives with significant intellectual fire-power who do not suffer from the obvious draw-backs suggested above. They do present positions, however, that you really pretty much have to already be a conservative Catholic to find in the least bit convincing. This is the most so for George. For the latter two their views are also pretty deeply offensive and unlikely to appeal to anyone who didn't already accept the conclusions. But, they are smart and don't have these obvious flaws.

[hcg]

I think there is an even more basic question here: is there any intellectually honest conservative? More, is it possible for a conservative to be intellectually honest? Seems not.

[robertdfeinman]

Conservativism is concerned with process not goals. For example "free trade" is a process, where it is supposed to lead is undefined. "Lower taxes" are a process, no goal is specified. "Trickle down" is a process, which will lead to better outcomes for those at the bottom - eventually - when is not specified.

The true goals of conservatism are so unpalatable in a democratic society that they are never explicitly stated. Simply, they are the preservation of privilege. Bill Buckley not only started the present movement, but he was the perfect example, a person born with a both a silver spoon and a forked tongue in his mouth. He managed to make his contempt for his "inferiors" into a national movement, while pulling many of these "inferiors" into his camp.

That's being a tactical genius, but there is no conservative philosophy behind it, just the desire for those at the top (in terms of wealth and power) to stay that way.

On the other hand the goals of the "liberal" philosophy can be easily stated: "all men are created equal." Everything else is implementation.

[Paul G. Brown]

I never thought it would come to this, but I'm going to take serious exception to some of Brad's characterization of modern 'conservatism' here.

These people are not conservatives. They are either reactionaries, or else shills for the monied and the powerful. There is no other explanation for the brazen mixture of opportunism and bad faith that permeates their work.

Modern American 'conservatism' is actually modern American 'liberalism', which (as kharris points out above) is the political force acting as a brake on the implementation of 'change' (not 'new ideas' - simply 'change'). There are small 'progressive' splinter cells here and there, but their collective impact is tiny.

Reactionaries and professional liars are unattractive.

[airth10]

Conservatism is a hand-maiden to liberalism. What conservatism does is solidify and protect the best of what liberalism devises. For instance, human rights, originally a liberal issue, is now a conservative issue.

Conservatism has another job, to tone down and rein in the over exuberance of liberalism. Nevertheless, liberalism determines the path.

I like the idea mentioned by Tyler Cowen that conservatives have underestimated the robustness of the modern world. That is why conservatism will always place second fiddle.

[airth10]

Two areas we could have used more conservatism is in banking and the Federal Reserve.

[MattF]

I think Mark Lilla's recent essay in TNR (yes, TNR) distinguishing between 'conservative' and 'reactionary' is important here. Burke was a conservative, but not (except, maybe, in that famous passage lamenting the mistreatment of the Queen of France) a reactionary.

[seth edenbaum]

The arts and literature are Burkean by default, as at the same time they are liberal also by default: they negotiate the contradictions between instrumentalism and introspection. Intellectual liberalism as a political and philosophical program does not do this.

Academic Platonism says the instance is the vulgarization of the general, that the idea is truth. This is where right and left rebel against utilitarian liberalism -the generalized idea of the individual- in defense of actual individual experience. If the experts work as hard as they should to be objective then actual individual experience is irrelevant. BDL's anger is most often at members of the press who fail at that goal.

[Bruce Webb]

"Does Plato count as an intellectual?"

Well yes. But Karl Popper made a strong case in The Open Society and its Enemies that Platonic thought is at the root of the anti-democratic impulse that infuses what is now called conservatism. From Popper's perspective Plato was much of the problem and little to nothing of the solution.

Conservatism and its hand-maiden of orthodox classical economic theory grew up in a political environment where 'democracy' was quite literally a dirty word, if you had to sum up English politics in the 19th century is a single phrase you could do little better than 'Keep workers from gaining effective political power'. Conservatives and reactionaries alike were correct in fearing democracy, their fundamental position of preserving the power to control distribution of gains from productivity in their own hands was fundamentally defenseless when challenged from a Pragmatic greatest good for greatest number position. Not every conservative who opposed Womens' Suffrage was a misogynist, not every conservative who opposed a rigid application of One Man, One Vote via Supreme Court decisions in the 60's was a virulent racist, many of them simply understood that dilution of political power away from wealthy, white men might result in a new distribution of goods.

Modern conservatism is an impossible attempt to put the democratic genii back in the bottle. The open nostalgia for the McKinley era shown by people like Rove, Gingrich and Norquist is not just a wish to return to the era before the income tax and the SEC, it is a wish to return to an era where women didn't have the vote and where that right was systematically denied to most blacks. The game was openly rigged in the favor of wealthy white men and they liked it that way. Everybody knew that county road contracts were hammered out over drinks at the then segregated Elks Club, that business deals were settled over a round of golf at the segregated Country Club, and that mergers were discussed at the equally segregated Yacht Club. All of that was threatened by systematic application of democratic principles.

Since conservatives can't openly push for re-segregation and disenfranchisement they are kind of in a pickle thus leading to the current vacuity of conservative thought. Conservatism privileges open privilege, it thrives within a closed power system where its central principle of maximizing one's own self-interest can be exercised without fear of diluting the gains to people outside the system, it withers away when exposed to a truly open market of opportunity. Everything was oh so much easier when everyone knew his place and deferred to the natural order that privileged old money over new money and new money over no money. Damn democracy! It ruined everything for them.

[Roger Albin]

For instance, human rights, originally a liberal issue, is now a conservative issue...

Waterboarding, illegal wiretapping, detention of American citizens without writ of habeas corpus?

Alasdair MacIntyre - Almost impossible to classify; certainly not a conservative in any conventional sense. He went from Marxism as a young man to Thomistic Catholicism later in life without losing his distaste, hatred wouldn't be too strong a word, for the modern world, including almost everything that has occurred since the Enlightenment.

Burke was wrong about English traditions. What he saw as the result of organic, incremental change was due in good measure to revolutionary violence. No 18th century Whig oligarchy and Walpolian political stability without the Glorious Revolution. No Glorious Revolution without the execution of Charles I. No moderate Anglicanism and religious toleration with the violent Henrician subordination of the English church.

[Gareth Morley]

George Grant, Technology and Empire
Alasdir Macintyre, After Virture
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History
John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights

[Charles]

Airth 10 says, "For instance, human rights, originally a liberal issue, is now a conservative issue."

Which is why they have established a memorial to it at Guantanamo Bay.

pfft.

[seth edenbaum]

"If the experts work as hard as they should to be objective then actual individual experience is irrelevant. BDL's anger is most often at members of the press who fail at that goal."

The placement of that line in my comment was awkward. I would say the above would be BDL's argument, and it's not one I agree with. The rule of unintended consequences and arguments in literary criticism against the intentional fallacy are both arguments against the rule of experts as such. Arguments for defining the rule of law as the rule of textual interpretation rather than of unaided reason are arguments for the consideration of the most important forms of "expertise" as being those of language, history and contextualized knowledge, rather than merely technical know-how. The vulgar reality of politics as 'a popularity contest" protects us from the rule of condescending geniuses.
The rule of law is not the rule of reason any more than it is the rule of leaders, it is the rule of custom. Compared the rule of technocrats the rule of law is Burkean.

[Michael McIntyre]

I don't think there is an identifiable core conservative tradition in political philosophy similar to the core liberal tradition that begins with works on the social contract (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau - granted that the first and last are not simply liberals), works its way through the Scottish Enlightenment (Smith and Hume, of course, but also lesser figures like Hutchison and Reid), incorporates a good part of utilitarianism and marginalist economics, and continues through Rawls into the present. Say "conservative", on the other hand, and what do you have?

(1) Straussians
(2) Catholic traditionalists
(3) Anti-Keynesians: Chicago or Austrian
(4) Libertarians
(5) Carl Schmitt's children (among whom one would have to include a certain sort of IR realist)
(6) Protestant evangelicals
(7) Agrarians
(8) Covert racists
(9) Soi-disant "Burkeans"
(10) "Neo-conservatives" (more properly: latter-day imperialists)
(11) Anti-communists (though communism may be too weak a force to sustain this as a coherent group these days)

Perhaps I've missed some. But do any of them have a claim to constitute the core conservative tradition?

[seth edenbaum]

"The ACLU is a Conservative institution" Spencer Coxe

http://library.temple.edu/collections/urbana/spen-908.jsp;jsessionid=FAA9343CD70FC571F42515AF2E5A17F0?bhcp=1"

[Rickster Sherpa]

Burke was a Whig with a strong passion against injustice. It was this that made him such a strong advocate for the Americans, Ireland, and India in the British Parliament, against the majority of his colleagues in that then very oligarchic institution. Reflections is a complicated book, in which he makes statements that Conservatives who don't share his sense of justice have used to support traditions (like Slavery and the Penal Laws in his day, and segregation in the 1950s) that Burke would not have agreed with. I think it was his outrage at the injustice being carried out in the name of the Revolution, and his sense of chivalry about the Marie-Antoinette, that drove him to denounce that Revolution. And it did not turn out very well from a Liberal stand point for the generation that lived through it.

[Thers]

The arts and literature are Burkean by default, as at the same time they are liberal also by default

The arts and literature are artistic and literary by default.

Anyway, Prof. DeLong will be glad to know that Jonah Goldberg has recently considered the matter in great detail and with great care, and has decisively pronounced that Edmund Burke was in fact NOT a fascist.

(I'm not making that up.)

[seth edenbaum]

A work of literature describes the world through a variety of perspectives presented, through rhetorical slight of hand, as a unity. Any book of philosophy does the same thing. In fact any book does.

"The arts and literature are artistic and literary by default."
Every form of ignorance has its own political implications, Yours included.

[Thers]

"Every form of ignorance has its own political implications, Yours included."

Yeah, well, Mr. Touchy, Flaubert was a big ol' dope, and probably French, too.

[seth edenbaum]

Flaubert was a creature of his time, as you are, as I am and Brad DeLong too.
Delusions of free agency are common these days, in this country especially; and yes I do find it annoying.

Novelists inquire about the meanings of words: how many? how many uses? how many implications? Novelists find exceptions to rules. That's their job, and it's an important one. If all you're interested in is "ideas" and "rules" then you need to assume that the meaning if words is static. But if a moderate is standing in the middle of a boat that's drifting slowly to the right, how is he a moderate? If Clinton was to the right of Nixon (and he was on some issues) how is he a liberal? And if being a liberal means being silent while a democratically elected government is overthrown, what does that mean?
You can't assume foundation; you can't assume the ground hasn't shifted. You can't escape sensibility; you can't lens through which you see the world.
And here I am forgetting the first rule of argument: never argue with a teenager.

[ahem]

"none [of the 20th century American conservatives] have held up particularly well, mostly because they underestimated the robustness of the modern world and regarded depravity as more of a problem than it has turned out to be."

None? Really? None at all? That's a very strong claim, disprovable with a single counterexample.

Charles Murray: "Losing Ground"

[Thers]

"And here I am forgetting the first rule of argument: never argue with a teenager."

Off your meds. Sad.

[seth edenbaum]

And The Wire says nothing about contemporary culture. It's just a TV show.
Entertainment.
So you'll vote for Hillary Clinton or Barak Obomba and listen to Cop Shoot Cop to make yourself feel like a radical. A Rad liberal know-nothing.

American political thought is anti-cultural and american culture is anti-political.
Like no other country on earth.