"Conservatism"

John Holbo:

Crooked Timber » » Douthat on Conservatism: Ross Douthat takes a stab at defining American ‘conservatism’.... Here it is:

A commitment to the defense of the particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States against those socioeconomic trends that threaten to undermine them, and those political movements (generally on the left, but sometimes on the right) that seek to change them radically in the pursuit of particular ideological goals.

This has to be a complete failure, but I’m not going to snark too severely... little definitional exercises are always failures... [but] instructive....

Take out the parenthetical bit and you have something that is much closer to a definition of ‘liberalism’ than ‘conservatism.’... Douthat himself... agrees with me about this:

This “revolution or bust” tendency has defined traditionalist conservatism for some time now, with an alienation from actual-existing American politics coexisting with sweeping visions for what American politicians ought to be doing with themselves instead; it’s manifested itself frequently among religious conservatives....

Liberals are more resistant to “Revolution or Bust” because they tend to be more attached to “the particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States against those socioeconomic trends that threaten to undermine them.” I don’t expect Douthat simply to agree to that. But the fact that there is considerable truth to it means that just saying the opposite will never do as a definition of ‘conservatism’....

What does Douthat’s parenthetical add?... [I]t amounts to the claim that conservatives are those who object to proposals for change from the left, on the grounds that change is bad, but don’t as readily object to proposals for change from the right, on the grounds that change is bad. That is to say, ‘conservative’ must mean right-winger with a bad conscience. As a liberal, I’m half inclined to say my suspicions are confirmed. As a conservative intellectual, Douthat can surely do a bit better...

I think John is a little too easy on Ross Douthat, largely because I do not believe that conservatism is a political philosophy. Conservatism is the practical principle that the pieces of furniture you have that suit and are comfortable should not be thrown away. And conservatism is a rhetorical mode of justification--effective on those who respect authority. But it isn't a philosophy.

I have written about this before:

From <>:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong: Jacob Levy thinks he has a problem: he cannot present conservatism attractively in his classes because there are no attractive modern conservatives.... I say cut the Gordian knot. THERE ARE NO ATTRACTIVE MODERN CONSERVATIVES BECAUSE MODERN 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

[Delicious Pundit]

I agree. The conservatism with which I sympathize is a temperament -- it is "And always keep ahold of Nurse/For fear of finding something worse." I sometimes describe myself as a Red Tory -- we need to spend massively on our inner-city public schools, so that we may properly teach Plutarch in them.

[Bernard Yomtov]

"...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...."

So Burke thought that men were entitled to reverence based on their ancestors?

[capitalistpig]

Conservative intellectual! Oxymoron anyone?

[Gene O'Grady]

Whether or not "conservative intellectual" is an oxymoron -- I tend to think that at least in theory it is not -- what baffles me is the need of the conservative "movement" to come up with intellectual forebears. It's rather like the need of ancient Greek kinship groups to invent eponymous ancestors.

[P.M.Lawrence]

But there is indeed a principle behind the body of conservative practice, Viscount Falkland's: "when it is not necesary to change, it is necesary not to change". Granted, conservatism coheres mostly in a negative way in response to exclusion from positive ideologies that cohere in their own right, much as "oil repels water" and "water repels oil" both arise from water being drawn to water rather than oil to oil, but there is still a contribution. Just as oil not seeking out water makes that work, so also there has to be the negative that conservatism does not seek change. Partly it is a reluctance to incur transition costs (which is why it is not reactionary either), and partly it is to avoid roulette strategies that are bound to lead to unanticipated failure modes in the end. That gives rise to an observable principle, even though the principle is not an ideology adopted for its own sake.

[John Emerson]

"So Burke thought that men were entitled to reverence based on their ancestors? "

A basic aristocratic principle. In an aristocratic society a man of no accomplishments and only moderate wealth can condescend to you or bully you because his great-grandfather had been the victorious commander at a famous battle. That's "entitlement". Not a subjective state, an enforced public social fact.

[David Lloyd-Jones]

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I used to write speeches for Brademas of Indiana, and whenever I needed a little relief -- because writing speeches you are not going to give yourself is pretty hard work -- I always took relief in one of two books, Russell's "History of Western Philosophy," and Burke's "Address To The Electors of Bristol."

That was a run-on sentence, but if you breath carefully and measure yourself, you can get it across.

-dlj.


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[robertdfeinman]

There is little value in discussing classical conservatism as relevant to the modern US movement. The original movement was based upon preserving authoritarian social structures. The specifics changed as Kings gave way to parliaments and presidents. The constant is that there are the leaders and there are the followers and the followers should know their place.

Modern "conservatism" still favors authoritarianism, but that's not its principle focus. It's principle focus is about wealth. Those that have it should keep it and those who are in the process of obtaining should have their way made easier.

One only has to look at what modern "conservatives" ask for: less government, lower taxes, and fewer social programs.

This isn't about a philosophy, it's about process. Less than what? Lower than what? Fewer than what? What is the final structure supposed to look like?

Here's my 2cents on modern conservatism as process:
http://robertdfeinman.com/society/conservative_process.html

[Hedley Lamarr]

You will notice that conservative spokemen never mention Burke to the general public. Instead, they promise lower taxes to "give the taxpayers more of their hard-earned money", and by that they mean any lower taxes will overwhemlingly favor themselves and others who have the most money. Bones will be distributed to the general public as become available.

[Matt Austern]

I think it's entirely reasonable not to mention Burke when discussing American conservatism.

First, Brad is quite right to point out that conservatism in Burke's sense is an impulse, or a tendency, or a form of rhetoric, not a philosophy or a political program. (I might add that it's a tendency I have some sympathy for. There's something to be said for the idea that we should be cautious about sudden changes and that we can't always foresee all of the effects of what we do.)

Second, and more important, that Burkean tendency has next to nothing to do with American conservatism as it actually exists. Douthat barely even tries to make the connection. His characterization of conservatism is entirely about "habits" and "mores" -- that is, a cultural conservatism that focuses on social issues. It's true that this is one of the core concerns of conservatism (especially the religious right faction of conservatism), but surely it's inaccurate to treat anti-feminism and the Moral Majority as the whole of conservatism.

[P.M.Lawrence]

Never mind Burke's "Address To The Electors of Bristol", try this. From page 93 of John Julius Norwich's "Christmas Crackers", a letter from Anthony Henley, Member of Parliament for Southampton from 1727 to 1734, to his constituents who had protested to him about the Excise Bill:

"Gentlemen,

"I received yours and am surprised by your insolence in troubling me about the Excise. You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don't know, you are now selling yourselves to Somebody Else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God's curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wifes and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrell corporation.

"Yours, etc.,
Anthony Henley"

[andres]

Brad:

"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."

But the real problem with Burke's argument is that there were many occasions when France was ruled by better men, but to go back to the time when France was ruled by better _institutions_, you'd have to go back to the Roman occupation, and maybe not even then. Recall that

(1) Until 1789, the king was always able to assert his supremacy over the Estates General, to the point that in 1788 France's only legislative body had not actually been convened since the time of Henry IV 170 years earlier.

(2) France's economic institutions up to 1788 were a combination of unreconstructed agricultural feudalism, with the French peasantry being nominally free but prevented by their poverty from being anything but de facto serfs, and Colbertiste mercantilism that systematically impoverished France's embryonic middle class.

(3) In terms of individual rights, France had no legal tradition of inalienable rights as embodied in the Magna Carta, and that England went to war with and executed its own king in the 1640's, and exiled another in 1688, only instilled contempt of England by the French monarchy.

So if Burke was arguing that France should look to its past in order to find _better_ institutions, strictly speaking there were none and it's difficult then to disagree with Thomas Paine's counterargument that the whole edifice needed to be demolished and then replaced in order to put the Rights of Man on a truly solid footing. Revolutions come about not just when nations reject their individual rulers (elections are enough for that) but when they reject the majority of their previous history. Conservatism to me is simply a visceral "rejection of the rejection" by the political and economic elites whose authority is being challenged.