You can't define conservatism situationally
Principles are immutable or they're something other than principles
It’s sometimes said that conservatism is a sensibility rather than a bullet-point set of tenets. That’s an argument worth considering, but even that postulation suggests that the conservative is driven by a yearning for permanent things.
To bolster the argument, one can point to the various camps within conservatism that have arisen over the last century or so and in some cases have stood in fierce opposition to each other. What any of those camps excluded or included for the whole held sway.
There is, of course, William F. Buckley’s serving notice to the John Birch Society that it was not welcome in the effort to forge a coherent movement. Around the same time, one of Buckley’s original co-editors at National Review, Whittaker Chambers, wrote a scathing review in 1957 of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, saying that it staked out a worldview devoid of humanity.
More recently, there was the rift between Russell Kirk and the neoconservatives, principally over Kirk’s view that they tended to display something close to dual loyalty to Israel as well as the United States. He expressed it thusly: "Not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States." Midge Decter responded that the remark was a “bloody outrage” and was meant to exclude any non-Christians from being movement conservatives.
More recently still, the paleoconservative phenomenon, whose leading lights included Samuel T. Francis and Pat Buchanan, was ostracized by other tendencies within conservatism. Broader conservatism was in general agreement with its acknowledgement that human nature includes affinity to place and ethnic identity, as well as with its emphasis on moral order, but was disturbed by the paleo use of these truisms to justify unmistakably bigoted positions. In Buchanan’s case, there was the strange bond he formed with Lew Rockwell-style antipathy to national defense.
Does a look further back, toward the original shapers of identifiable conservatism, provide any help in discerning a set of systematized foundational absolutes?
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France sets forth the basic dichotomy between left and right. Its formulation of this dichotomy basically endures. The American revolution combined a reliance on the notion of an enduring moral order with a realization of freedom’s essentiality to human flourishing, something that had been maturing since at least the signing of the Magna Carta. The French Revolution, in contrast, was fueled by Enlightenment thought to the exclusion of transcendence or fallen human nature. The latter, of course, became a mob action, and once a new government gelled in the wake of Louis XVI’s deposing, it was characterized by guillotining in the streets.
Put simply. the American revolution was predicated on the centrality of freedom and the French revolution on equality. The irony is that the American view found its rationale in a tradition, a lineage, while the French view had confidence that human rationality could make up a fair arrangement for human societal organization on the spot.
Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a watershed period in that it tied together the various strands of recognizable mainstream conservatism. The result, if I’m not mixing metaphors too badly, was a formulation of three pillars.
Some years ago, I came up with an articulation of them that I think encompasses at least most of what this worldview is about:
1.) Free market economics: A good or a service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth. Period. No other entity - certainly not government - has any business being involved in reaching that agreement. Therefore, public-policy inquiries that concern themselves with macro-level phenomenon such as wealth inequality or “fair” wages are not only pointless but tyrannical by definition.
2.) The understanding that Western civilization is a unique blessing to the world: Both the Greco-Roman tradition from which the West has distilled the political structure of a representative democracy and the above-mentioned free-market economy, and the Judeo-Christian tradition from which it acquired an accurate understanding of the Creator’s nature and humankind’s proper relationship to the creator are the two most significant avenues of advancement our species has ever discovered. (And much falls under this point that needs serious discussion at this time, such as the fact that there are only two genders, male and female, and that their is no fluidity between them, and that the family structure of a husband, wife and children thereof is the overwhelmingly normal one and the one most conducive to a happy and prosperous society.)
3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature: Evil is real and always with us. A nation-state seeking a righteous world(such as the United States of America) should only form close alliances with other nations that have demonstrated a track record of common values. Regimes that are clearly tyrannical and / or expansionist should never be appeased. Indeed, foreign policy should be guided by thinking on how to at least eventually remove such regimes as problems on the world stage.
The values that give each pillar shape are indispensable. A viable free market depends on an adherence to morality as it’s been distilled throughout Western history. The security of any nation that would wish to be conservative depends on finding common cause with other nations that value the first two pillars.
The question of how human material advancement is to be juxtaposed against eternal verities arises at this point. Have migration, invention, discovery of more about how the universe works, industrialization, settling of the new world, urbanization and technological advancement subjected conservative principles to any modification?
This is no small question. If humankind has no lodestar, there is no real safety for any of us. If one cannot explain why freedom, morality and vigilance against threats to them are to be preferred over tyranny - which had been the norm for most of humankind for most of history until an inquiry into the possibility of freedom germinated - or chaos, meaning itself dissolves out of the picture.
Increasingly, since Western nations have made room for conservatism, as well as its opposite, collectivism untethered from tradition, political discourse and, in particular, election-cycle conversations have been focused on what we broadly call “issues.” We support or oppose candidates for executive or legislative offices based on where they stand on taxation, our country’s involvement in particular conflicts raging somewhere on the globe, sociocultural questions, whether government has a role in health care, and whether there’s a warming trend in the global climate and, if so, what to do about it, and so on.
I think conservatives falling anywhere within a spectrum with generous parameters would define an idea candidate thusly:
He or she would assert that a citizen’s money - earned, received as a gift or inheritance, or gotten as interest - is his or hers, and that government ought to have to exhaustively justify taking the first penny of it.
He or she would assert thatinvolvement in a foreign conflict ought to depend on whether material interests of our country, or the survival of an ally that is essential to the preservation of our values, are at stake.
He or she would assert that it’s patently obvious that there are only two sexes, that marriage, at least until the last twenty years at the outset, was between people of each of those sexes, and that the nuclear family model ought to be given policy preference, as it is the structure most conducive to a happy society.
That health care by definition cannot be a right, and that therefore government involvement in it is going to distort the market value of any health care-related good or service.
There is no conclusive evidence that the global climate is in any kind of trouble requiring humankind to urgently and massively abandon its material advancement.
The sum total of this set of assertions does not constitute a brand. Yes, it’s true that we look for candidates that most closely hew to that sum total as we winnow out the possibilities, but it’s to be hoped that a conservative sees his or her value system as something more than a tribal affiliation in conflict with others.
There’s one more element that’s indispensable in all this. I suppose that it may fall within Pillar Number Two articulated above, given that it springs from a proper perspective of one’s own place in the overall scheme of God’s universe, but it bears some discussion on its own. I speak of that set of personal traits that includes decorum, good humor, the extension of grace where possible, dignity, an appropriate humility, and a capacity for genuine friendship.
These days, that set of traits is at a premium. People tend to look at public figures - I’m principally speaking of politicians here, but also public spokespeople for one’s ideology - with regard to their scorecards. This renders them one-dimensional. It puts dragging particular policy initiatives over the finish line above being a decent human being.
How someone voted on a particular piece of legislation having to do with, say, immigration or health care, or how a president conducted policy in a particularly complex and volatile part of the world, does not confirm or disqualify him or her as a conservative. There’s more to the person than that.
If we’re ever going to see actual conservatism once again have a chance to inform the country’s sociopolitical direction, we’re going to have to become a little deeper as citizens. I’m not sure that a world in which taxes are low, originalist judges have the best shot at appointment to the federal bench, America is not involved in precarious global situations, and the GDP is robust is worth much if the backdrop is a culture in which real art and real education are dead and savagery is the order of the day in our dealings with each other.
What have we won if we’re atomized, alienated and without a common understanding what this life is supposed to mean?