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America’s founding doctrine is properly understood as classical liberalism — or until the progressives stole the label, simply “liberalism.” Until socialism burst on the scene in Europe, liberalism was universally understood as the opposite of conservatism. That’s because European conservatism sought to defend and maintain monarchy, aristocracy, and even feudalism. The American Founding, warts and all, was the apotheosis of classical liberalism, and conservatism here has always been about preserving it. That’s why Friedrich Hayek, in his fantastic — and fantastically misunderstood — essay “Why I am Not a Conservative” could say that America was the one polity where one could be a conservative and a defender of the liberal tradition.
It’s also why I have no problem with people who say that American conservatism is simply classical liberalism. As a shorthand, that’s fine by me.
But philosophically, I’m not sure this does the trick. There are many, many, rooms in the mansion of classical liberalism and not all of them are, properly speaking, conservative. Anarcho-capitalists are a blast at parties and Randians always make for an interesting conversation if you sit next to one on a flight, but they are the first people to tell you that they’re not conservatives. John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith were among the founding fathers of classical liberalism, but there are plenty of libertarians who don’t share their piety or reverence for tradition.
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I think this is because conservatism isn’t a single thing. Indeed, as I have argued before, I think it’s a contradictory thing, a bundle of principles married to a prudential and humble appreciation of the complexity of life and the sanctity of successful human institutions.
This reminds me of one of my all-time favorite meditations on conservatism from my friend Yuval Levin:
To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.
Gratitude captures so much of what conservatism is about because it highlights the philosophical difference between (American) conservatism and its foes on the left (and some of its friends among the libertarian camp). The yardstick against which human progress is measured shouldn’t be the sentiments and yearnings that define some unattainable utopian future, but the knowable and real facts of our common past.
So-called liberals love to talk about how much they just want to do “what works,” but it’s amazing how often “what works” doesn’t. Even more remarkable is how the mantra of “what works” is almost always a license to empower the “sophisters, calculators, and economists who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs.”
In contrast, the conservative belief in “what works” is grounded in reality, not hope.
Gratitude is just one facet of love, which is why conservatism is so inextricably bound up in patriotism. To be patriotic, one must love one’s country for what it is, not what it can be if only the right people are put in charge and allowed to “fundamentally transform” it. We love people for what they are, not what they could be. If you think you love someone or something not for what it is but solely for what it could be, that’s not love, it’s lust.
Comfort with Contradiction
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Man is flawed. This world is imperfect. Youth is fleeting. Life isn’t fair. Conservatives are comfortable acknowledging all of these things. That doesn’t mean we are complacent or opposed to change. But we are humble about the kinds of change that are possible and grateful for the progress we’ve already achieved.
Liberals love to talk about diversity, but they are constantly at war with any meaningful forms of diversity that conflict with their worldview. As I keep saying, “right-wing” has simply come to mean “non-compliant.”
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Everyone March in Step
Yuval Levin notes that all of Edmund Burke’s metaphors about politics are about space while Thomas Paine’s (the progenitor of American progressivism, according to Levin) are all about movement. This strikes me as a really brilliant insight into the philosophical differences between Left and Right generally. The Left wants us all to march together towards its collective understanding of happiness.
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Freedom for Me & Freedom for Thee
Conservatives champion the idea enshrined in our founding document that we have an individual right to pursue happiness. This isn’t mere rhetoric. The pursuit of happiness isn’t possible collectively, because one man’s joy will always be another man’s misery. Similarly, one community’s definition of the good life will necessarily be another’s definition of tyranny. Conservatism — or at least my brand of it — is not only comfortable with this kind of contradiction, it celebrates it.
In my book, conservatism is simply a partial philosophy of life that describes how the system should be set up for humans to flourish within it. That flourishing requires freedom, including the freedom to be wrong. Which reminds me of this line from Michael Oakeshott in Rationalism in Politics:
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What about the Market?
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No conservative worth the name would say that every product of the free market has been an advance for humanity, but we understand that a free society isn’t free without a fundamentally free market. Liberals resent the free market and are constantly trying to argue that free enterprise isn’t a freedom like, say, free speech (not that they’ve been too keen on free speech either of late). The reasons for this animosity could fill libraries, but among them is the fact that free markets must generate material inequalities and material egalitarians think that’s a crime. Conservatives are for the most part comfortable with material inequalities — so long as the system that produces them is fair and open — because we understand that’s how life works. Indeed, it’s how life should work. If you put in the work, if you have the great idea, you should do better than someone who doesn’t. We’re comfortable with this contradiction.
Philosophically and psychologically, this fact is offensive to the socialist mind. Philosophically, because it seems unfair. Psychologically, because it is un-fun. In a socialist economy, the socialist intellectuals and bureaucrats have the power (and, truth be told, the wealth). In a free economy, the socialist intellectual is a performance artist and the socialist bureaucrat has to work for a living.
“No political philosopher has ever described a conservative utopia,” Samuel Huntington writes. That’s because there is no such thing as a conservative utopia — because there’s no such thing as a utopia (the very word means “no place”). The socialist cannot accept this and he spends his days arguing that it is better to constantly try to kill the two birds in the bush with one stone than to be grateful for the one bird he already has in his hand.
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- Discussion
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I think is one of the more interesting attempts at defining American Conservatism I've ever read. https://t.co/3P0H1s7rEC
— Dustin Anglin (@dustinanglin) November 26, 2017
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