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May 6, 2009
Exclusive: Are Conservative Principles the Foundation of American Liberty?
Conservatives are in a muddle. Recognizing that their ideas would have no practical impact in the crucible of politics unless sponsored, they aligned themselves closely with a political party that had as its sole mission the winning of elections. Identifying their set of ideas with the very practical project of electoral politics set them on a predictable collision course between electoral success and their values.
Having won the soul of the Republican Party, conservatives went to the American people with a philosophy of government as compelling as it was familiar: freedom, individualism, small and limited government. The philosophy resonated with voters because it was one they instinctively recognized as that of the very founding of the nation. It is those ideas conservatives seek to conserve. Conservative candidates were rewarded with trust and with votes. With those votes and that trust the Republican Party succeeded in gaining political power and, eventually, primacy.
The seductive gifts of power, though, result in an unattractive pragmatism that inevitably leads away from principle. In making their political calculations, Republican office holders engaged in a breathtaking cynicism that was not lost on the people. Republicans thought the people would not notice they had abandoned conservative principles and, worse, thought they could rationalize the abandonment of the ideas that brought them to power to begin with. To preserve party unity, they supported a president who was never a conservative, though he claimed to be, and who had no governing philosophy. This allowed him to pursue policies completely at odds with the organizing principles of conservatism. Where conservatives had championed the ideas of fiscal restraint, minimal and shrinking government and financial prudence, President Bush, with the support of a pliant Republican majority in Congress, abandoned all fiscal prudence and presided over the greatest expansion in government and spending in history, dwarfing even irresponsible Johnson Administration initiatives. Party loyalty is fine when it does not compromise core values. But when it does, it becomes hypocrisy and office holders lose the trust of the people.
The people noticed. The result was electoral defeat for Republicans and intellectual bankruptcy for conservatives. Republicans wonder, now, how to win elections and conservatives wonder how things could have gone so wrong. Some Republicans argue that they lost favor for too close an adherence to conservative principles; conservatives that it has been for the abandonment of them. As Republicans worry about how to regain the votes of the American people, conservatives reevaluate their core ideas. Some self-styled conservative intellectuals like David Frum and David Brooks suggest a new conservative paradigm – one rooted in English conservatism – that argues that if conservatives are to win elections they must act more like, well, liberals. Their idea is for a robust government that does what liberals argue it should, just not as much.
But there is nothing like American conservatism anywhere else in the world because there has never been a nation before or since that was founded on the premise of the sanctity of the individual and whose government’s specific reason for being is to preserve liberty. The founding premise of all other national governments is in governing people. Ours is in preserving individual freedom. There is no constituency in Europe or England for small government. The Left and Right in Europe both believe in big government. They disagree only on what big government should do. The Left believes in activist government that does for its citizens and the Right in activist government that controls its citizens. The idea of basing a new American conservatism on any European model ignores history, the basic differences in our founding principles and is simply absurd.
So, where do conservatives go from here? Perhaps the best place to start is to give some thought to what is wrong with conservatism as a political movement. The problem, as I see it, is that conservatives see conservatism as a lifestyle rather than as a political philosophy; less a theory of governance than a way of life. The seeds of this conservative muddle were sewn virtually at its founding. But to succeed as a political movement, conservatives must articulate a governing philosophy and should not reflect, much less enforce, social predispositions.
Modern conservatism grew up as a reaction to the New Deal, the advance of socialism and the rise of Communism. Though it was much more complex and nuanced, the political contest before FDR was, primarily, between supporters of unfettered business enterprise and those who believed government had a muscular role to play not only in reining in its excesses but in providing social support for its citizens. In the first third of the 20th century, no one articulated a return to founding principles as a coherent political theory.
Modern conservatism began to come into focus in the writings of Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley and several others in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. Kirk, especially, provided intellectual heft to what had been a sort of uneasy feeling that things were going wrong and traditional values lost. He posited Edmund Burke as the intellectual founder of modern conservatism. Burke’s ideas are based firmly on religious sensibilities and can be boiled down to the concept that since we have always done things a certain way perhaps we should continue doing them that way. That is not a philosophy, it is a social conceit.
Moreover, for whatever influence Burke had in the shaping of conservative thought, he qualifies less as a philosopher than as a rhetoritician and he provided no organized, systematic philosophical grounding for a comprehensive system of thought. His rejection of rationalism, for example, leaves any complex of ideas based on his writings completely rudderless lacking, as it would, a consistent means of drawing conclusions based on new facts. Indeed, Burke’s reliance on a sort of inchoate emotional impulse provides no cognizable, determinable epistemology on which to determine fundamental truth, much less to derive a consistent set of principles for governance.
To the extent that Burke articulated a system of thought, it would seem to be more an articulation of a conservative social impulse than a description of a philosophy of government. As such, it is useless in providing a systematic approach to statecraft. Conservatism must be an intellectual process not a social predisposition. If it is not, it cannot be consistently applied because it cannot be consistently determined.
That is the problem with conservatism as it has evolved. It encompasses too much to be a viable political philosophy, long term. It is that breadth, combined with party loyalty, that has discredited conservatism and dissipated it as a political force. It attempts to be too much to too many. In doing so, it runs headlong into its own fundamental principles.
The way forward, therefore, is to define political conservatism as that: political conservatism. It must start with the most basic principles of the founding: the right of the individual to freedom and the responsibility of government to secure it. From that concept, conservatives can begin to redefine conservatism primarily as a political philosophy; a philosophy of government and statecraft. Not a social attitude. Not a religious sensibility. Conservatism as a political philosophy should not encompass social or religious theory. Social predisposition and religious sensibility, so central to the definition of self, are guides to personal conduct, not political philosophy. Personal morality is a matter of individual choice not of political principle.
If the bedrock principle of conservatism is individual freedom, it cannot be a social theory because social theory as political philosophy requires adherence to inherently subjective impulses. One may be politically conservative and socially conservative but one does not necessarily follow the other. Those who are politically conservative in the white community, for example, generally hold conservative social values. But in the black community where conservative social values widely adhere, political conservatism is largely absent.
One cannot, at once, assert freedom as a fundamental value and, at the same time, enforce social or religious orthodoxy. That is why conservatives should define political conservatism as a philosophy of government divorced from social and religious sensibilities. The founding principle was liberty. The sanctity of the individual. Individual initiative. Individual responsibility. Those are the core principles of conservative political philosophy. They cannot be squared with the enforcement of orthodoxy. Conservatives found support because they said they were for individual freedom. That meant individual autonomy, limited government, minimal government intrusion on everyday life and less confiscation of individual wealth through taxation.
Religious and social choices should not be the subject of political speculation, a precondition to political support or the subject of political debate. Social sensibilities are matters of personal predisposition; religion a personal choice. When political movements, let alone political parties, attempt to enforce social and religious orthodoxy, it is anti-freedom.
Conservatives lost support because the people came to believe conservatives had lied to them with respect to spending and the growth of government and because conservatives attempted to enforce, through politics, a social agenda that put the government at the center of impinging on individual prerogatives. America is about freedom and an appeal to the inherent sense that freedom is our birthright and conservatism its modern guardian is one that will resonate with something primal in American voters.
The way forward is a conservatism based on first principles; one committed to the fundamental preservation of freedom and defined as a philosophy of statecraft. If conservatives insist on making it a social or religious movement, their time in the wilderness will be long indeed.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor John W. Howard is a lawyer, specializing in corporate and business litigation who also founded a non-profit, public interest law firm specializing in First, Second and Tenth Amendment issues. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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Thank you for such a reasonable and clearly stated article. I think this would go a long way in explaining basic principles to a confused and dispirited people. Write a book!
posted by: NancyM
Sunday, April 11, 2010 at 10:26 AM
