The uses of conservatism

In the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks back Barton Swaim wrote a thoughtful review of two new books on political conservatism, one by Yoram Hazony and one by Matthew Continetti. The first is an argument for recovering what conservatism ought to be; the second, a history of what American conservatism has in fact been across the last century.

Swaim is appreciative of Hazony’s manifesto but is far more sympathetic to Continetti’s more pragmatic approach. Here are the two money paragraphs:

The essential thing to understand about American conservatism is that it is a minority persuasion, and always has been. Hence the term “the conservative movement”; nobody talks of a “liberal movement” in American politics, for the excellent reason that liberals dominated the universities, the media and the entertainment industry long before Bill Buckley thought to start a magazine. Mr. Continetti captures beautifully the ad hoc, rearguard nature of American conservatism. Not until the end of the book does he make explicit what becomes clearer as the narrative moves forward: “Over the course of the past century, conservatism has risen up to defend the essential moderation of the American political system against liberal excess. Conservatism has been there to save liberalism from weakness, woolly-headedness, and radicalism.”

American conservatism exists, if I could put it in my own words, to clean up the messes created by the country’s dominant class of liberal elites. The Reagan Revolution wasn’t a proper “revolution” at all but a series of conservative repairs, chief among them reforming a crippling tax code and revivifying the American economy. The great triumph of neoconservatism in the 1970s and ’80s was not the formulation of some original philosophy but the demonstration that liberal policies had ruined our cities. Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 and again in 1972 not by vowing to remake the world but by vowing to clean up the havoc created by Lyndon Johnson when he tried to remake Southeast Asia. George W. Bush would draw on a form of liberal idealism when he incorporated the democracy agenda into an otherwise defensible foreign policy—a rare instance of conservatives experimenting with big ideas, and look where it got them.

The three sentences in bold are, I think, the heart of Swaim’s point. Here’s my comment on his claim there.

At the descriptive level, I don’t doubt that it’s correct, if incomplete. At the normative level, however, it seems to me to prove, rather than confound, Hazony’s argument. For Hazony represents the conservative post-liberal critique of American conservatism, and that critique is this: American conservatism is a losing bet. It has no positive governing philosophy. It knows only what it stands against. Which is to say, the only word in its political vocabulary is “STOP!” (Along with, to be sure, Trilling’s “irritable mental gestures.”) Yet the truth is that it never stops anything. It merely delays the inevitable. In which case, American conservatism is good for nothing. For if progressives have a vision for what makes society good and that vision is irresistible, then it doesn’t matter whether that vision becomes reality today versus tomorrow. If all the conservative movement can do is make “tomorrow” more likely than “today,” might as well quit all the organizing and activism. Minor deferral isn’t much to write home about if you’re always going to lose eventually.

Besides, in the name of what exactly should such delay tactics be deployed? Surely there must be a positive vision grounding and informing such energetic protest? And if so, shouldn’t that be the philosophy—positive, not only negative; constructive, not only critical; explicit, not only implicit—the conservative movement rallies around, articulates, celebrates, and commends to the electorate?

Swaim is a prolific and insightful writer on these issues; not only does he have an answer to these questions, I’m sure he’s on the record somewhere. Nevertheless in this review there’s an odd mismatch between critique (of Hazony) and affirmation (of Continetti). If all the American conservative movement has got to offer is the pragmatism of the latter, then the philosophical reshuffling of the former is warranted—at least as a promissory note, in service of an ongoing intellectual project. That project is an imperfect and an unfinished one, but it’s far more interesting than the alternative. Whether we’re talking politics or ideas, we should always prefer the living to the walking dead.