Can conservatism even be defined?
Maybe it's just one of those things that one knows when one sees it
The conversation about how to define conservatism, or if a definition is even possible, is probably as old as the presence of any kind of identifiable modern conservatism on. the ideological landscape.
It’s far more consequential than a parlor game. The faction that is able to convince enough of the general public - left, right, ambivalent, or merely dipping its toes in the water - that its definition has the weight of consensus behind it will have gone far in elbowing out other contenders, which may be unfortunate in the extreme if said definition is a dead end.
Should all participants in the conversation take their cue from Edmund Burke? The rejoinder that immediately comes to mind is that Burke had nothing to say about gender fluidity or what kinds of energy are proper for powering modes of transportation. But the argument, worth putting forth, but needing more space than the present discussion permits, can be made that in his comparison of the philosophical underpinnings of the American revolution and the one in France, the seeds of what have subsequently come to fruition can be detected.
Classical liberalism, the lineage that was furthered by the likes of Bastiat, Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner and Max Weber, was the form that opposition to collectivism took in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During that time, the considerations about the notion of the nation-state and about the role of Judeo-Christian morality that would later become strands in recognizable conservatism were percolating along independent tracks. Britain was tending to the responsibilities of empire against a backdrop of transitioning from monarchy to parliamentarian democracy, while America was being shaped my westward expansion and an ever-diversifying institutional-religion landscape.
In the mid-twentieth century, proponents of the notion of an inherent order - one in which hierarchy was strongly implied - such as Richard M. Weaver and Russell Kirk published their major works and garnered attention from those interested in these matters.
The figure who probably did the most to deliberately seek to tie these strands - economic liberty, a public consensus about moral order that took its cue from tradition, and a nation-state framework predicated on fostering these two elements - was William F. Buckley, Jr. His first book, God and Man at Yale, sounded the alarm about the extent to which secularism and collectivism had supplanted these strands. By the mid-1950s, he had undertaken the herding-cats challenge of gathering figures associated with each of these strands, and subsets within them, into the staff of editors and writers at the magazine he was founding, National Review. The backgrounds that James Burnham, Frank S. Meyer, Willmore Kendall and Whittaker Chambers brought to the mission to which Buckley had called them were as colorful as those of any figures in American history. They were an eccentric, contentious bunch, and there were fallings-out and bitter arguments about what was welcome in a mature conservatism and what was beyond the pale. Still, given the predominance of a left-of-center approach to politics and culture in America and the West generally, and an even grimmer version of that approach that was on the march in much of the rest of the world, this band felt compelled to press on in its quest to forge a unified foil.
Then came Barry Goldwater’s 1960 book Conscience of a Conservative, his 1964 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan’s embarking on a political career, the founding of the Heritage Foundation, American evangelicalism’s casting of its lot with this conservative side of the political spectrum, and the rightward drift of former left-leaners that formed the basis of neoconservatism.
By the 1980s, while conservatism was, upon close examination, still a delicately held-together amalgam of elements each as likely to splinter off again as to remain in the fold, an American of any stripe or no stripe at all stopped on the street would be able to look at the movement and say, “yeah, that’s conservatism.”
It was characterized, as the formulation goes, by three legs of a stool: economic freedom, Judeo-Christian morality, and a foreign policy based on bolstering alliance with at least mostly like-mined nations so as to present a unified challenge to world-stage forces that did not care for the Western vision.
As the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, no one was really completely happy with the way conservatism was playing out. Some saw appeasement in US foreign policy, others saw over-involvement in remote corners of the world. No one among politicians or holders of elected office seemed to have the courage to address the unfunded liabilities of the now-seemingly-permanent entitlement programs begun by the left-leaners of yore. The culture got weirder by the week, such that by 2015, ostensibly sane and mature people were having serious conversations about people of the same sex getting married, as well as people who declared themselves to be of the sex opposite to that which their DNA made clear that they were being accorded the respect of being able to use the bathroom dictated by their delusions. Every incident of a shooting-involved encounter between a civilian who happened to be black and a police officer who happened to be white became the catalyst for a new round of rioting in cities across the nation.
The frustration among ordinary citizens who had broadly identified as conservative reached a boiling point that found a release valve in a gauche, narcissistic, blustering, ideologically rudderless brand-hustler from Queens, who parlayed his brawler image into a Republican presidential candidacy and then into four years as president.
Most of the Republican Party has stuck with him, even as his post-presidency has gotten more ridiculous. He still claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and most of the party concurs.
There is a remnant that never got on board with his presence on the political scene, and it has made its determination to survive known through a number of opinion venues and activist organizations. Even a handful of Republican office-holders stands its ground in this regard.
But now there are signs of splintering within that remnant. Fissures between The Dispatch and The Bulwark have been noted. Evangelicals who had sternly resisted Trumpism now have to squarely face the disillusionment of deep institutional rot that leave them wondering who or what stands with them.
So, as of mid-2021, is there anything recognizable as conservatism that constitutes actual fertile soil for building anew?
It’s undoubtedly the most pressing question on the table at the moment for anyone who has really taken the measure of the array of threats to basic human dignity and an established order by which human beings might live together with some level of happiness and safety.