I've chosen not to describe the politics of this blog (and blogger) as conservative because the word has been transformed beyond recognition by self-described American conservatives. One example of their silliness is the notion that, after a Republican electoral defeat, there needs to be a meeting of conservative minds to determine the forward march of conservatism. This notion is one of the least conservative ideas that I have ever heard of.
In so far as conservatism is anti-ideological (and its traditional Anglophone meaning has been just that), then setting out an abstract roadmap for conservatism in the future is oxymoronic. Of course, herein lies the problem. American politics is played out almost solely in the language of abstraction, and it has been this way since Mr. Jefferson made those ridiculous comments in the first paragraph of the Declaration. You can't get a purchase on the American polity without a program. Thus, from the beginning, the American conservative movement has been programmatic, ideological, and rationalist in the worst (i.e. Oakeshottian) sense of the term. Irving Kristol, in one of his rare moments of lucidity, said that the US was an ideological state, like the Soviet Union (an odd way of thinking about a supposedly conservative political community). Nonetheless, material success and military power can neither prove nor disprove the validity of abstractions.
Instead of focusing on what the essence of conservatism is (by the way, there is none) these jokers should worry about winning elections. That is, after all, the purpose of political parties.
If they want to think in more grandiose terms, they might consider first and foremost the inherent limitations of practical activity generally and political activity specifically. Then, perhaps, they wouldn't have misconceptions about remaking the world in their image or making housing affordable for everyone or nationalizing major American industries so that no one is allowed to suffer for their own mistakes. Alas, a pipe dream in every connotative sense of that phrase.
EPISTEME: December 2023
2 days ago
4 comments:
I wonder how it is possible to speak of conservatism as a concept without an essence. You also seem to imply that conservatism is inherently incompatible with America's democratic polity. And yet you want conservative politicians to win elections... doing what, then, exactly? I'm puzzled. Isn't the problem with the type of conservatism which you espouse that it essentially puts limits to means while necessarily taking its bearings from something outside itself? Or is that not a problem? Do the inherent procedural limitations provide a de facto range of acceptable bearings (I think that's possible, but not very inspirational, certainly not in a democracy)?
Conservatism is an historical concept, not a theoretical or metaphysical one. Thus, it is best considered as an identity in difference. As an historical concept, it is also best understood by an analysis of what conservatives have said and done. (Even considered theoretically, it is most adequately conceived in the Oakeshottian way as a disposition, not as a set of abstract propositions meant to answer policy questions.) As such, I would follow Elie Kedourie in associating any account of political conservatism first and foremost with the Conservative party in Britain. The Conservatives were (but perhaps no longer are) a party of political skeptics. Their ancestors were Hume and Halifax, not Bolingbroke and James I. Burke, remember, was a Whig, but he was a skeptical Whig. His primary contribution to the vocabulary of conservatism was his repudiation of armed doctrines (i.e. ideological or dogmatic politics).
Is conservatism incompatible with the American political tradition? I would answer by saying that the American political tradition has always seemed to me to be a bit incoherent. Americans have almost always spoken in an ideological idiom while engaging in generally conservative politics (there are exceptions to this description of their actions, of course, but most of them are of recent vintage). So, I think that it is now and has always been very difficult for an overtly authentic skeptical statesman to attain any sort of power in the US. There are some exceptions like John Adams (the late version), Calhoun, Quincy Adams (in certain moods), and Grover Cleveland, but, for the most part, to win elections one must spout the same inane shibboleths about natural/human rights, American messianic exceptionalism, and (at least since the age of Jackson) the glories of Democracy (with a capital D).
I would like to see genuine political skeptics win power, though I have no interest in a party of such individuals. Contemporary political parties, after all, are intentionally ideological and programmatic. For skeptics to win election, there would have to be a substantial alteration of the way that most people think about political life, and so I’m not holding my breath.
I’m not sure that I understand the last two or three questions concerning limitations on means and their genesis and the relationship between limitations and proceduralism. Could you flesh them out for me a bit?
I understand the notion of conservatism as a disposition. I do not understand what it means to say, as you do, that a concept cannot be theoretical. That strikes me as a contradiction in terms. Thus, to say that conservatism is "best understood by an analysis of what conservatives have said and done" begs the question.
Defining conservatism as the party of skepticism makes sense, however. That very much seems a metaphysical concept, however, and a very plausible one at that.
Concerning American politics, it seems to me that the things you ridicule about it (and in particular the teaching of the Declaration) are precisely what has provided shelter for America's skeptical, conservative politics. That shelter has been further buttressed by the prevalence of Christianity: by providing metaphysics in the private sphere it allows for skepticism in the public sphere. The Obama cult is a disturbing exception to this. The Obama phenomenon is unAmerican, and Europe in particular, which does not have the "metaphysical shelters" America has in the Declaration and in Christianity, has a history of political utopianism, rather than of skepticism. The EU/welfare project is the latest variant.
I'm still not clear, though, what a skeptical political program would actually look like other than the limited government platform the GOP used to stand for. But the GOP could only do that because it had a broader story to tell -"morning again in America"- that made use of the metaphysical shelters I mentioned, which you reject. Absent those shelters, I don't think a skeptical politics is possible, or perhaps even desirable.
My last questions in my previous posts intended to refer to this point. That is to say, once a skeptical politics has limited the political agenda to what is possible, the polity still needs to be inspired to do something - to choose amongst what is possible and to pursue it. Skepticism cannot tell it how to do that.
Anon, I will address your questions in a post in the next day or two. I think that they are central to what I am wanting to get across so I'll put them out on public display.
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