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.

Turning back the clock

In the last six weeks I’ve read three different books that all makes disparaging reference to “turning back the clock.” By disparaging I mean that they repudiate the usual use to which the cliché is put. Noticing the shared rhetorical move between these works, spread across about four decades in the first half of the twentieth century, made me wonder how common a trope this is for Christian and especially conservative writers in the last hundred or so years. Do share if you know some other ones.

Here’s the first. From G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World (1910):

There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

Next comes C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1941–44; rev. 1952):

You may have felt you were ready to listen to me as long as you thought I had anything new to say; but if it turns out to be only religion, well, the world has tried that and you cannot put the clock back. If anyone is feeling that way I should like to say three things to him.

First, as to putting the clock back. Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be and if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. We have all seen this when we do arithmetic. When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start over again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

Finally, Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (1948):

Whoever argues for a restoration of values is sooner or later met with the objection that one cannot return, or as the phrase is likely to be, “you can't turn the clock back.” By thus assuming that we are prisoners of the moment, the objection well reveals the philosophic position of modernism. The believer in truth, on the other hand, is bound to maintain that the things of highest value are not affected by the passage of time; otherwise the very concept of truth becomes impossible. In declaring that we wish to recover lost ideals and values, we are looking toward an ontological realm which is timeless. Only the sheerest relativism insists that passing time renders unattainable one ideal while forcing upon us another. Therefore those that say we can have the integration we wish, and those who say we cannot, differ in their ideas of ultimate reality, for the latter are positing the primacy of time and of matter. And this is the kind of division which prevents us from having one world.

Now the return which the idealists propose is not a voyage backward through time but a return to center, which must be conceived metaphysically or theologically. They are seeking the one which endures and not the many which change and pass, and this search can be only described as looking for the truth. They are making the ancient affirmation that there is a center of things, and they point out that every feature of modern disintegration is a flight from this toward periphery. It is expressible, also, as a movement from unity to individualism. In proportion as man approaches the outer rim, he becomes lost in details, and the more he is preoccupied with details, the less he can understand them. A recovery of certain viewpoints associated with the past would be a recovery of understanding as such, and this, unless we admit ourselves to be helpless in the movement of a deterministic march, is possible at any time. In brief, one does not require a particular standpoint to comprehend the timeless. Let us remember all the while that the very notion of eternal verities is repugnant to the modern temper.

I imagine there are many, many more where these come from. Anti-modern, conservative, and reactionary writers adore Chesterton, Lewis, and Weaver. Perhaps someone else has already collected the further quotes and riffs they spawned. I’ll be keeping my eye out for more.

Lightspeed politics

I’m just about finished listening to the audiobook version of Charles C. W. Cooke’s 2015 book The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future. Cooke is a writer and editor for National Review who leans libertarian. Like all his writing, the book is lucid, witty, substantive, and focused in earnest on what matters most. I’m not a libertarian, and I think Cooke is wrong in significant respects, but I regularly read him both for instruction and for pleasure—and, occasionally, to listen to the most eloquent representative of views I oppose.

But I’m not here to talk about that. Rather, I want to share why listening to the book has caused me a fair bit of political whiplash. It was written around 2013 or so, at the height of Obama’s national unpopularity and the Tea Party’s ascendancy. Cooke adroitly saw a window for the proposal of a new vision for the GOP: fiscally conservative and socially liberal, with an emphasis on limited government and classical liberalism. And listening to him read the book, you can understand why that proposal appeared plausible at the time. And yet, in hindsight, nothing could have been less likely either for the GOP’s rank and file to get behind or for the GOP’s electoral prospects at the national level. Trump comes along just a few months after the book’s publication and torpedoes the whole project. More than that, the proverbial “quadrant” of fiscally conservative and socially liberal is the polar opposite of the most nationally popular but under-served voting bloc in America: socially conservative but fiscally liberal. Bracketing the merits of the proposal, at the level of strategy it is dead on arrival.

Elements of the book also capture, as though in amber, a moment in political time that seemed, then and there, to be perennial, even eternal, but was finished within mere months—or, at most, by the next election. One reference in particular, to Glenn Beck, reminded me of a similar moment in Ross Douthat’s otherwise outstanding book Bad Religion, published in 2012. There Douthat uses Beck to open the book’s eighth and final chapter, framing the argument that follows. Now, neither Douthat nor Cooke is especially enamored of Beck; they aren’t enlisting him in a joint cause. But they permit themselves somewhat spellbound rhetoric to describe the “phenomenon” of Beck and his “extraordinary” popularity “outside” the media “mainstream.”

That’s all fine and good. But does a serious (however popular) work of intellectual history really need central casting to call in a shock jock conspiracy theorist for the concluding discussion of (in this case) American nationalism? Both authors write about Beck the way all journalists did at the time: with a mixture of repulsion, admiration, and envy.

And yet, just as the libertarian moment vanished in a puff of smoke, so Beck’s ubiquity died away without anyone really noticing. He’s still out there—I checked so you don’t have to—but he’s no longer Part Of The Discourse. His time has passed. His presence in these two books, however, written around the same time, testifies to an important feature of our politics as well as how it is observed and chronicled by our journalists in real time.

That feature is this: Politics moves at the speed of light. But while you’re watching it, it seems somehow unchanging, even atemporal. The result of this combination is that nothing is so dated as the verities and common sense of a particular slice of political time, especially when it is caught and put into words immediately, illic et tunc.

For us today, who have lived through this radical, perhaps epochal, set of changes in only half a decade, this is a worthy reminder of two things. First: What seems fixed and permanent in politics in the moment is far more likely to be the opposite: wholly malleable and subject to rapid and profound variation. Second: Politically speaking, what appears impossible is probably anything but.

That said, it takes imagination to cast the truly transformative vision and to find the means of making it a reality. Preferably, though, the right imagination.

Political spectrums

I live deep in the heart of red state Texas, which means I regularly find myself trying to expand the political imaginations of my students. Not, that is, to switch their allegiances from one color to another, but to redraw the map they've inherited; to place a question mark next to its self-evident obviousness, which they treat as if it were the periodic table of elements (with only two to choose from!).

So I've come up with a heuristic that is meant to help students in my context. Mostly I want them to see the array of combinations, both of political first principles and concrete policy convictions, beyond lining up the GOP's national platform versus the DNC's. So, e.g., I want them to be introduced to (the concept of) Catholic Communists and Pro-Life Progressives and Democratic Socialists and Communitarian Conservatives and so on.

What follows is the set of spectrums, eight in all, that I've conjured up in order to help them in this process. I would be very interested in learning about other examples of this sort of thing, either in print or in the classroom. Here's mine, with brief of explanations for each, mostly in the form of questions.

1. Secular———————Religious 

The question here is not whether one is individually religious. It is whether and to what extent one believes the governing authorities ought to be religious in character. The extremes here would be laïcité versus integralism; less extreme: separation of church and state versus established religion. Appeal to common faith or to Scripture as public norms, or practices like prayer in public schools, are litmus tests for where one stands on this spectrum.

2. Individualist—————Communitarian

Is the fundamental unit of society the individual, the family, the extended kin network, the neighborhood, the town, the city, or other? What is privileged in law and social mores? Is it plausible to treat groups as units irreducible to the individual—or no? Why or why not? Can such units be neither familial nor racial but, e.g., religious? This spectrum helps to answer such questions.

3. Democratic—————Aristocratic

How should the policies that govern and order society be decided and enacted? Who has authority to say so and power to make it so? Should any and all laws be put up to a direct vote by "the people"? Should adults be legally required to vote? Should one's vote ever be taken away? Should any processes of policy deliberation and creation be delegated to representatives? If so, ought those representatives to do what they deem the wisest course, or ought they to do whatever (the majority of) their voters say they want? Does society inevitably have a "ruling class" of "elites"? If it does, should this tendency be curtailed, indeed resisted, or should it be cultivated toward the common good? How "mixed" should government be, and what norms or laws, if any, militate against 50.1% majoritarian rule?

4. Liberal———————Illiberal*

What is "freedom," and how should it be protected or encouraged by the governing authorities? Does freedom pertain to individuals or communities? Is it purely negative (i.e., freedom from interference) or also positive (i.e., freedom to do, be, or say X or Y)? What may or must society "enforce" in the lives of its citizens? Are there moral or legal norms beyond the harm principle? How may they be adjudicated? Are the liberties properly sought or secured in society a creation of said society, or do they antedate their own formal recognition? What is their metaphysical status, in other words? Are they necessarily connected with "rights," or are "rights" as a concept unnecessary in a free polity? Are there "freedoms" or "rights" it is better not to permit, legally or otherwise, given the consequences for the common good? What are they, how can they be identified, and by what measure are they judged good or bad for society?

(*Initially I had "authoritarian" here, which would appear to load the deck. If someone has a nice neutral alternative term here, I'm all ears.)

5.  Socialist———————Libertarian

What is the ideal, most practicable, or most preferable political economy? One in which private property is abolished or protected? Should workers own the means of production? Is the accumulation of enormous quantities of capital permissible? If permissible, is it encouraged or discouraged? Should the governing authorities have the authority to bestow or remove money or property to or from individuals or communities? If so, under what circumstances and for what reasons may it do so? To what extent should markets predominate in society, and to what extent, if any, should the governing authorities be able and willing to intervene in or to regulate those markets? Is political economy a matter of first principles, universal in scope and applicable to all contexts, or is it a pragmatic or prudential matter, local in scope and differentiated in application? What level of inequity is tolerable in society—if any at all?

6. Progressive——————Conservative

What is the proper stance toward the past? Should it be received as a gift to treasure and pass on to the next generation? Or is it primarily a legacy of oppression and suffering to reject and/or transform in the present, for the sake of a more just future? Where do the dangers lie—in an undue pessimism about our ability to improve our lot and the lot of our neighbors, or in an overly optimistic confidence in our capacity for radical change for the better? What is the status of moral and social mores and traditions? Are they wise, hard-earned advice handed on by the democracy of the dead? Or are they stultifying, lifeless customs holding us in the grip of a past from which we need liberation? Must social practices by "rationally" justified in order to approve of them or incentivize them in others? What is the weight of convention? What authority, if any, do parents, families, neighbors, pastors, civic leaders possess, and to what extent, if any, should deference be paid to them?

7. Internationalist————Nationalist

To what or to whom are one's loyalties properly due? Is patriotism a virtue? Is it a moral obligation? Are "nations" the fundamental macro-corporate political unit? Should they be? (What of supra-national entities? What of empires?) To what extent, if any, does one owe one's fellow citizens of a nation affection, affinity, or service beyond what one owes to persons from other nations? Does one owe "allegiance" to one's nation? Is allegiance different than love, and if so, how? Would the world be improved if nations were dissolved, or at least, if national identities were softened substantially? Is one's national identity an essential part of oneself? Should it be?

8. Globalist———————Localist

Though similar to the previous spectrum, this one asks a different kind of question: What is the proper scope or extent of the polity to which one belongs and to which one owes service? Hypothetically one could be an internationalist localist: caring little for the nation as such, but finding life beyond the "local"—defined, let us say, as the concentric circles of household, neighborhood, and town, populated at the outer limit in the tens of thousands, but smaller than a full-blown city—too large for thick membership. The localist knows the names of her neighbors, streets, rivers, trees, native fauna, seasonal weather, and so on. The "globe" is an abstraction, and "global citizen" a contradiction in terms. Whereas the globalist thinks the localist backwards, parochial, nostalgic, or doomed for extinction in the near future. Politics is top-down, and while local town councils might seem to get stuff down, the forces that determine life in the 21st century, even the lives of farming and ranching communities in rural contexts, are as macro-global as can be. Best to recognize the fact and live accordingly rather than head for the bunker, hoping for the clock to turn back a few centuries.

/ / / / / / /

So much, anyway, for the heuristic I've come up with. For my students, as I say, what I want them to see beyond is both the GOP/DNC binary and the Right/Left master-filter. There are illiberal conservative socialists, and progressive nationalists, and secular aristocrats, and libertarian democrats, and communitarian liberals, and religious globalists, and on and on. (We'll leave aside the anarcho-syndicalists for the moment.)

Hopefully my students are enabled to reflect on the complexity of their own political commitments as well as learn a less reductive lens for interpreting the commitments of others. At the very least, my hope is to engender a more productive conversation in the classroom.

Politics on the pattern of the martyrs

In my Comment essay earlier this year titled "The Church and the Common Good," I wrote the following, describing and recommending Paul Griffiths' idiosyncratic spin on quietism as the proper form of Christian political action:

"At bottom it is a radical call for epistemic, moral, and theological humility. For we cannot know either the actual or the unintended consequences of the policies for which we advocate; nor can we know those of the policies we oppose. We must assume our opponents act in good faith, even as we admit we act from mixed motives ourselves. If we fail, we may trust that providence has allowed it, for reasons opaque to us; if we prevail, we are in an even more precarious position, for we will be responsible for what results, and we will be tempted to pride. In any case, what good comes, we receive with gratitude. What evil comes, we suffer with patience.

"Quietism, in short, is politics on the pattern of the martyrs, who, like Christ, did not consider victory 'a thing to be grasped, but emptied' themselves, entrusting themselves in faith to 'the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being the things that are not.' Christ forsook the sword as a means of establishing justice in Israel; the kingdom came instead at the cross.

"Banished is every utopia, including the confident Christian rhetoric of justice in our time. As St. Augustine teaches us, the only true justice is found in the city of God, whose founding sacrifice constitutes the only true worship of God. The celebration of this sacrifice is the eucharistic liturgy. Approximations of this justice in politics are difficult to assess in the moment, not to mention predict in advance. The church therefore cannot be codependent with politics. Its hope lies in a future not of its making."

I then ask the inevitable question: "How, you may ask, is this not secession from politics, a status quo–baptizing desertion of the common good?" I go on:

"Answer: Because Christians remain as engaged as ever, even to the point of laying down their lives, only without the vices that attend a realized eschatology (activism absent resurrection): the desperate need to win, the entitled expectation of success, the assumption of God’s approval, the forgetfulness of sin, the recourse to evil means for good ends. Domine, quo vadis? Christian political witness is figured by St. Peter—the rock on which the church is built, surely an ecclesial sine qua non—following the Lord back into Rome, certain that his end is near, but equally certain that all his noble plans and good deeds are not worth resisting the call. For the End is not in his or any human hands, and depends not one iota on our efforts."

All that is by way of preamble, to make a single and simple point. This week has seen the conservative intellectual world roiled by an explosive intramural spat, sparked initially and mostly carried on by Christians, concerning their proper political witness and their prospects, and strategies, for victory.

Here is my question. Of what relevance, if any, is the witness and example of the martyrs for the way that Christians conduct themselves politically? Is "politics on the pattern of the martyrs" exemplary in some way, and thus possible, and thus a goal to strive to approximate? If so, what difference does that make for Christian theory and practice of public engagement? If not ... well, I would like to read someone make the case either that martyrdom is irrelevant to sociopolitical matters (women and men put to death by state authorities regarding their convictions or deeds) or that, though relevant, the stakes are too high to pay them heed in this matter, today, in our context.

Put differently: The martyrs teach us, at a minimum, that sometimes letting go is more faithful than fighting, dying more faithful than continuing to live. The first three centuries of the church's life attest to the vitality of this witness precisely in the arena of politics, as does the church's experience across the globe at present and in recent centuries.

The martyrs were not doormats, and martyrdom is not despair or acquiescence before evil or persecution. It is the power of the cross made manifest in the world. Surely that power has a word to speak to our moment, and to the dispute alluded to above. If we listened, what might it say?

Roger Scruton on the new divisions of class, centered on TV

"The growth of popular sports and entertainment in our time, and the creation of a popular culture based in TV, football and mechanized music, have to some extent enabled people to live without ... home-grown institutions. They have also effectively abolished the working class as a moral idea, provided everyone with a classless picture of human society, and in doing so produced a new kind of social stratification—one which reflects the 'division of leisure' rather than the 'division of labor.' Traditional societies divide into upper, middle and working class. In modern societies that division is overload by another, which also contains three classes. The new classes are, in ascending order, the morons, the yuppies and the stars. The first watch TV, the second make the programs, and the third appear on them. And because those who appear on the screen cultivate the manners of the people who are watching them, implying that they are only there by accident, and that tomorrow it may very well be the viewer's turn, all possibility of resentment is avoided. At the same time, the emotional and intellectual torpor induced by TV neutralizes the social mobility that would otherwise enable the morons to change their lot. So obvious is this, that it is dangerous to say it. Class distinctions have not disappeared from modern life; they have merely become unmentionable."

—Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 169. Originally written in 1980, the book was heavily revised for a 2002 re-publication, from which this excerpt comes. With the rise of both "reality TV" and so-called "Peak TV," this semi-Marxist, though conservative, analysis would be worth modifying and extending into the new situation in which we find ourselves, especially in the U.S. (since Scruton is British).