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October 21, 2009
Exclusive: The Inevitability of Liberalism?
At some point, conservatives are going to have to come to grips with their schizophrenia. If they are going to preserve the principles to which they are committed, they are going to have to resolve the fundamental contradiction of their theoretical underpinnings.
The problem started at the very founding of modern American conservatism. Before the late 1940s, there was no American political project referred to as “conservatism.” Indeed, following the Civil War, the centrality of the federal government appeared settled even as many continued to cling to the founding paradigm as excluding a muscular national government. Few questioned the accretion of federal power in the early 20th century as both political parties invoked it to accomplish party goals.
It was not until the rise of communism and the dramatic spread of socialist thought across Western Europe that the beginnings of an American conservative impulse began to emerge. It was a reaction to a movement that was so foreign to American ideals, so divergent from American ideas, so contrary to the foundational American project that it reawakened a consciousness of what it was to be American. The process accelerated with the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and the effort to emulate, in its uniquely American way, the zeitgeist well under way in Europe. The unearthing of espionage and subversion conducted by the Soviet Union gave the effort immediacy and the discovery of extensive infiltration of the Roosevelt Administration by communist agents, gave it tremendous urgency.
The Second World War put some of those concerns on back burner even as the malign work of those whose loyalty ran more to the Soviet Union than to their own nation energetically continued. But by the end of the war, most Americans understood that Russia represented a much greater domestic threat than had Nazi Germany. The emergence of information of the influence of Soviet agents at all levels of government, sparked tremendous public concern as it became clear that their work had dramatically affected the direction of policy and undermined American interests. These discoveries horrified Americans. Though we had never fully trusted our erstwhile World War II ally, most Americans had been unaware that it had, all along, been working to destroy the system that had already created the most prosperous, successful and free nation in history. Deep American enmity should have come as no surprise.
Seizing the moment, there emerged a movement that defined itself as standing for American traditionalism and in opposition to the Left’s revolutionary project. Initially animated by fears over communist expansion, it brought together free market economists, social traditionalists, state’s rights advocates, libertarians, anti-communists and others concerned that the original idea that was America was being lost in the headlong rush toward the implementation of the liberal schema through a vastly empowered federal government seeking control of the levers of American life.
The crisis did not leave a lot of time for philosophical development as conservative activists concerned themselves more with a cascading avalanche of liberal programs and social activism that threatened traditional assumptions.
To give this new political movement intellectual heft, its founders needed historical philosophical grounding. In search of intellectual progenitors, early conservative thinkers settled on Edmund Burke, a statesman, rhetoritician and social critic whose ideas served as the basis for the first political movement that used the word “conservative” to define it. Burke appealed to their political principles and soothed their social vanity. But he neither defined a philosophy nor provided a series of ideas against which public policy initiatives could be measured. He provided a political approach that gives no philosophical guidance to a movement that presumed to immutable principles.
Rather than looking for social comfort, modern conservatism’s founders should have started by asking what, exactly, they sought to conserve. Had they done so, they might centered on the ideas that shaped the Founding and, having done so, discovered that there were more suitable intellectual ancestors; philosophers whose work, unlike that of Burke, actually influenced the Founders’ thought and informed founding principles.
The problem with Burke is that he provides no immutable principles; no set of ideas that can shape and guide public policy; no principled defense of those concepts that define modern conservatism. Burke’s central idea 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. It is based on the manner in which British common law develops with one concept building on another as change in circumstance requires slow, evolutionary changes in law. But it proposes no particular shape of government. Burke, himself, advocated and justified constitutional monarchy as a good model for government, something with which no American conservative would ever agree. His philosophy of accretive change, if it can, without irony, be so characterized, can justify support of the very New Deal and Great Society initiatives conservatives find so contrary to the basic idea on which the nation was founded. They are, after all, now the status quo.
And therein lies conservatism’s schizophrenia.
It is a schizophrenia that is noticed. In what is perhaps the only correct observation in his fatuous and dishonest new book, The Death of Conservatism, Sam Tanenhaus condemns what he calls revanchist conservatives who, he says, betray “authentic” Burkean conservatism. He contends that conservatives who advocate fixed principles do not understand that conservatism is the preservation of the status quo whatever that status quo is. Leave it to a liberal to tell us what to think.
In his scheme, and, frankly, in Burke’s, an authentic American conservative would, once they are adopted, support the very liberal initiatives that distinguish conservatism from liberalism. They would support a system of socialism if it were ever implemented in this country. Conservatives’ only legitimate interest is in preserving the status quo no matter how contrary to founding principles; no matter how anathema to conservatism; no matter how wrong.
He has a point. It is the same point David Brooks makes every week in the New York Times, displaying his complete lack of governing principle, and David Frum suggests in arguing that conservatives should abandon their principles to achieve electoral success. What principles, he wonders? Certainly not the Burkean principle that argues only for incremental change and not for philosophical certitude.
The fact is, though, that American conservatives do believe in immutable principles. They believe in strict constitutionalism and in preserving the original ideas that formed the nation as a guide to its governance. They believe in limited and small government whose duties and prerogatives are narrowly circumscribed. They believe that the original paradigm gave primary sovereign power to the states. They believe that regulation, unless constitutionally authorized, is immoral. They believe in individual freedom subsets of which are free markets and freedom of enterprise.
Accretive regulation and the modification of individual liberty by evolutionary response to changed circumstances, fully justifiable by reference to Burke’s theory, will never be acceptable to conservatives.
That is why conservatives need to read, understand and reject Burke as a guide to defining political conservatism and why they need to define their political philosophy in accordance with Founding principles. It is a critical project because failing to do so now will result in the inexorable success of leftism.
The political pendulum always swings. Liberals will, as now, occasionally predominate and will change things in accordance with their own principles. They will enact legislation that will limit individual freedom. They will subtract social choice and expand the power and prerogative of government, reducing individual liberty.
Conservatives will eventually succeed to power again. But if history is any guide, they will simply slow the pace of change. They will not undo what the left has done. They will retreat to Burkeanism and support the status quo, doing no more than preventing the left from further advancing its irresponsible agenda. Until, of course, the next time liberals seize the majority.
That is why liberalism is inevitable.
Until conservatives define their philosophy they will be left with nothing more than resistance to the long march of liberalism. Until they define that philosophy as an activist project, they will be left with no more than the sisyphean burden of holding back a constant tide that will eventually wash over them.
It must not be that way this time. There is no reason, other than tradition, for conservatism to be largely reactive. It represents a cohesive set of ideas that comprehensively describes a particular politico/governmental system. It is based on the moral principles that constituted the central organizing idea on which the nation was founded. Its theory first found governmental form at the Founding and it represented a positive program out of which grew the most successful experiment in freedom in history. It was anything but reactive. It was energetic. It inspired the world.
Conservatives must recognize this and articulate a systematic philosophy that has as its project not only the preservation but the enhancement of individual freedom. Such a philosophy will logically and inexorably lead to a methodical set of policy proposals that implement the vision that philosophy contemplates. Then they must develop an affirmative program in accordance with their principles and commit themselves to implementing that program when again, as surely they will, they succeed to power. They must pledge themselves not only to undoing what the left does in this epoch of its ascendancy but to implementing a liberty agenda that ensures it never again threatens the freedom of the nation.
Conservatives are currently arguing that the proposed federal seizure of the health care system violates every principle of freedom, every notion of free markets, and every tenet of Americanism. If it is enacted by this government, conservatives must commit themselves to repealing it at their earliest opportunity. If it is, as they argue, immoral, it is their moral duty to dismantle it. They can do it as the implementation of their notion of individual liberty.
When they controlled government, conservatives could, with a little initiative, have relieved the nation of a huge number of government programs. They could have closed the Departments of Health and Welfare, Education and Labor. They could have closed the EPA. They could have repealed wide swaths of the National Environmental Protection Act, particularly those sections providing a private right of action by environmental activists, and reformed the Endangered Species Act. They could have broadly reformed the National Labor Relations Act with an eye toward minimizing union power. They could have enacted a national right to work law. They could have adopted a flat tax or national VAT and repealed the income tax. They could have ended unfunded state mandates.
They could have anticipated the attack on talk radio and defanged the FCC, removing its rule making power and passing legislation that made impossible limitations on political content.
Conservatives will again have the power to implement the principles that define them; that define the nation. But they will never do so as long as they see their role only as one of resistance. They will never do so as long as they believe that conservatism is nothing more than support for the status quo. They will never do so until they commit themselves to undoing the destruction wrought by the current generation of liberals. And they will never do so until they recognize the transformative power of their ideas. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Conservatives must prepare themselves for power as they never have before and make ready that project will again inspire the world.
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.
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (2)
Howard is a little hard on Burke, but it's true that Burke rejected "ideology" - a set of principles - in favor of deity, presumption,and hierarchy.
I agree with Howard's selection of (innovative) Liberty and (disruptive) free markets- but in doing so we may have to scrap the appelation "conservative" (that I have never been comfortable with.)
The magnitude of importance in the power of words can be seen by simply contemplating the title of this very article, "The inevitability of liberalism"? The right does itself no favors with such an incendiary byline. Why not entitle it "A clarion call for conservatives"? And, for that matter, we do ourselves no favor by calling our Representative Republic a democracy when most know that the best definition of a democracy is the age old adage of the two wolves and one sheep deciding what's for dinner. To that end, one of our most urgent goals is the restructuring of our public education system back to the States and away from federal government control. The sooner we accomplish that goal, the better for all Americans.
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