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One of the recurring themes here at Precipice is the attempt to get a suitable handle on just what conservatism is.
As I’ve said before, over at Late in the Day, my old-school blog, I used to rely on my own formulation of the three pillars, or legs of the stool, that first took shape in Frank S. Meyer’s fusionism theory and was crystallized by Ronald Reagan. (A very shorthand way of presenting it would be: free-market economics, traditional values, and a foreign policy based on resisting totalitarian collectivism.) But since the end of the Cold War, the foreign-policy component can no longer be couched in terms of “anti-communism.” True, some of the West’s enemies still have communist governments, but in the last thirty years, jihadism of both Sunni and Shiite varieties has been added to the mix. Maybe the most suitable way to frame it as being based on Western nations (in particular, the US) forming their most important alliances with other nations with whom they share the most values and interests.
Which leads to some questions about the “traditional values” pillar. Just what are those, and how did we arrive at them?
The broad-brush answer might go something like “the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the Great Commission and the fruits of the spirit per Galatians 5.”
But one of the greatest Christian apologists of all time, C.S. Lewis, started from a wider scope in getting to such an answer. He asserts a basic sense of what’s right, just and humane that people of all cultures have at least intuited in their dealings with one another:
Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?' -- 'That's my seat, I was there first' -- 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm' -- 'Why should you shove in first?' -- 'Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine' -- 'Come on, you promised.' People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the 'laws of nature' we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong 'the Law of Nature', they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law-with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own.
In the book from which this is excerpted, Mere Christianity, he does arrive at a demonstration of why this universal sense that humans have finds its unavoidable resolution in Christ.
But a key point about this is that it demands from us that objectivity be foremost in our attitude toward making sense of life. Feelings don’t count for much unless they’re in line with this externally-imposed way things are.
It’s important to be accurate about this pillar, because the others depend on it. The free market only ennobles us if we’re pursuing virtue as well as profit. And we need an objective basis for an inner compass that will allow us to apply the smell test to developments on the world stage.
A couple of indispensable book-length looks at the evolution of how we view conservatism are George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, first published in 1976 and revised a few times since, and The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism by Matthew Continetti, which came out in 2022. The movement’s twists and turns have required a few purges over the years, such as when William Buckley served notice to the John Birch Society and the Ayn Rand bunch in the 1950s that they weren’t welcome in the enterprise, or around the most recent turn of the century, when Pat Buchanan and, a little later, Ross Perot, were distinguished as populists and therefore not on board with the the project.
And now, we have this phenomenon called Trumpism. For some of us, we smelled a clown show in the summer of 2015. For some, it took longer. In some cases, it took January 6, 2021 to get the not-totally-ate-up to part ways with the Very Stable Genius. That’s the inner compass at work.
At this point, I’m inclined to go with the explanation that conservatism is more a sensibility than a platform or checklist of principles.
But how can it defend against, and hope to persuade the populace to view warily, the progressive agenda? Let’s remember that we have the prioritization of objectivity on our side. We’re after what’s true and right. And what’s right is not a matter of subjectivity.
It’s pretty easy to construct a rundown of why the Harris-Walz ticket is a non-starter for conservative voters. (I must state here that, although Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, George Will and Evangelicals for Harris have come to a different conclusion about what’s called for in the fall of 2024 than have we who inhabit the Narrow Sliver of Terrain, I still harbor great respect for them, given that I share their understanding of what a danger Donald Trump is to the nation and world. And, again, I don’t put Principles First or The Bulwark in this camp, because they have embraced elements of progressivism in their effort to distinguish themselves from the - what? - I guess the term is “New Right.”)
Anyway, here’s that rundown:
Abortion - or, as the Left terms it, “reproductive rights.” Actual conservatism starts with the properly absolutist position that a soul enters the material realm at the point of conception, and therefore the same kinds of steps must be taken to ensure his or her well-being as we’d take for a person in any other stage of life. From that premise, we may have to swallow occasional tactical compromises. Polls show that most Americans are currently okay with at least early pregnancy termination. There’s an objective reality we must take into consideration. But we never lose sight of the truth at the core of the debate.
Prices - Boy, did the recent back-to-back hurricanes give Harris a juicy opportunity to preen about “price gouging.” Look, Madame VP, there’s no such thing as price gouging or “corporate greed.” Greed instantly prices itself out of the marketplace. A producer/seller can’t charge more than at least somebody is willing to pay. A spike in bottled-water prices after a hurricane is perfectly natural and to be expected. But what also happens is that private-plane pilots in unaffected areas of the country ferry loads of water to the disaster site as soon as is feasible, at no cost to anyone but themselves and the retail supplier donating it. The above mentioned virtue essential to a worthwhile free market in action.
Energy - Fossil fuels have been a net benefit to humankind. Actually, that’s a pretty tepid way to put it. Fossil fuels made possible the astounding pace of human advancement over the past 200 years. Life is exponentially more safe, convenient, and comfortable than it had been for all of the previous thousands of years of our species’ existence. True, it took the extractors and refiners of petroleum some time to refine their processes so as not to pollute, but they did so. They didn’t want to live in a soot-drenched world any more than anyone else. Play-like energy forms don’t hold their own in the marketplace; they require subsidization. That’s an infringement of freedom on two levels: the distortion of what consumer choices are available, and the forcible seizure of a citizen’s money to effect such distortion.
Sexuality - Lewis’s depiction of a universal sense of what’s true and what’s not comes into play here. Yes, Genesis tells us that “man and woman he created them,” and Leviticus 20:13, Romans 1: 26-28, and 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10 tell us that men getting sexual with men and women with women is on the same level with adultery, greed, swindling and stealing. But we can look at a pretty clear pattern throughout cultures and throughout history to see that marriage has arisen as an institution so we could tell what family someone belonged to. Babies proliferating with no identification of their lineage means some entity other than the family is going to have to see to their upbringing. That generally means the state. More fundamentally, a family headed by a mother and father provides a child with a model for how a man and woman relate to each other in a healthy, tender, and mutually encouraging way. Even more fundamentally than that, common sense tells us that male and female geitalia were designed to fit together. There’s no possibility of family that comes from putting together the distinguishing characteristics of the same sex.
And the word “trans” - or the term “pronoun preferences” - didn’t enter our lexicon until five minutes ago. That’s because prior to that, anybody entertaining the notion that he or she was in the wrong body was correctly viewed as having mental health problems.
Israel (and Jewry) - If one’s inner compass is working properly, what must be done is obvious. Israel must finish off Hamas in Gaza, hobble Iran as much as possible (that is, take out its oil industry and its nuclear program, and, if possible, its leadership), and, in Lebanon, it must base its fight against Hezbollah on what Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon told the Lebanese ambassador:
addressing the acting Lebanese ambassador to the UN, Hadi Hachem, Danon said, “ I have listened to your words and condemnations very carefully, but the truth is you should be sitting next to me, not next to the Iranian representative because, whether you can admit it or not, Israel, Lebanon, and the free world are on the same side against the Islamic regime of Iran. All of us should declare, shoulder to shoulder, that Iran must keep its blood-stained hands off Lebanon.”
Then, speaking in Arabic in an appeal directly to the Lebanese people, the ambassador added, “Lebanon belongs to the Lebanese, not to the Iranians.”
And unrelenting attention to the Jew-hatred on US college campuses must continue. The encampments have taken an uglier tone than they had even last spring, now openly alleging with the jihadist position.
Now, here’s the thing. Trumpism offers no coherent refutation of the progressive position. Yes, the Very Stable Genius pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, but he’s shown his signature transactional approach regarding the Middle East, as exemplified by his lambasting of Netanyahu for congratulating Biden upon Biden’s inauguration. Also, his concern with the optics of Israel’s time frame for its mission in Gaza is characteristic with his preoccupation with looking good. And Trumpism generally, starting with vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, has such a faulty inner compass that it can’t see that the stakes are the same regarding Ukraine and Russia: It’s unacceptable for a nation-state, or a military organization that refuses the world’s terms for becoming a nation-state, to invade a neighbor and rape, pillage, kidnap and. burn. It’s especially unacceptable in the cases of West-aligned countries such as Israel and Ukraine. Abortion? One can’t help wondering if Trunp’s recent sloppiness in discussing it doesn’t have something to do with his wife’s recent public support for it. And, yes, he shepherded an excellent tax-cut package through Congress, but he simultaneously imposed tariffs on steel, aluminum and a number of other essential commodities and products, negating the tax cuts’ benefits.
I guess you’d call this the next step in feeling my way toward a unified-field theory for navigating post-American life.
The line about jazz possibly being hard to define but instantly recognizable when heard is generally attributed to Louis Armstrong, and it comes to mind in this discussion of conservatism. If one’s inner compass is working, one’s intuition - one’s sense of smell, figuratively speaking - will guide one to a conservative position on a given issue.
Do ordered liberty and acknowledgement of a transcendent order get a boost or take a hit from what is being proposed?
My inner compass tells me to stay home next month. One of my choices harbors antagonism to the natural order of things, and the other has no comprehension of what that means. Have at it, post-America. The eternal record book will show that I didn’t participate in either form of your ruin.