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My Conservatism

I was recently invited to address the question “Are We Conservatives?” before an audience at the Heritage Foundation. The very posing of the question tells us something about contemporary conservatism. I could no more have put the question “Are We Progressives?” to a comparable gathering of the left than I could ask a crowd of citizens “Are we Americans?” To raise such an issue to those audiences would be to question an identity and the foundations of a faith.

Conservatism, then, is not an ideology in the sense that liberalism is, or the various forms of radicalism are. It is not an “identity politics” whose primary concern is to situate its adherents in the camp of moral humanity and thus to confer on them the stamp of History’s approval. Conservatism does not have a party line. It is possible for conservatives to question virtually any position held by other conservatives including, evidently, the notion that they are conservatives at all, without risking excommunication, expulsion, or even a raised eyebrow.

Conservatives do sometimes claim religious principles as the basis for their convictions. But it is not a religious commitment that makes them conservatives. There are radicals and liberals who have similar commitments and make similar claims. What makes an outlook “conservative’ is that it is rooted in an attitude about the past rather than in expectations of the future. The first principles of conservatism are propositions about human nature and the way human beings behave in a social context; about limits, and what limits make possible. This practicality, this attention to experience, to workable arrangements, explains why the conservative community can be liberal and tolerant toward its members in ways that the progressive left cannot.

In contrast to the conservative outlook, liberal and radical ideologies are about the future, about desired outcomes. The first principles of the left are the principles of politically constructing a “better world.” Throughout the modern era, the progressive future has been premised on a social contract that would make all of society’s members equal—or at least provide them with equal starting-points.

Since ideologies of the left are commitments to an imagined future, to question them is to provoke a moral rather than an empirical response: Are you for or against the equality of human beings? To dissent from the progressive viewpoint is not a failure to assess relevant facts but an unwillingness to embrace a liberated future. It is, therefore, to will the imperfections and injustices of the present order. In the current cant of the left, it is to be “racist, sexist, classist,” a defender of the status quo.

That is why not only radicals, but even those who call themselves liberals, are instinctively intolerant towards the conservative position. For progressives, the future is not a maze of human uncertainties and unintended consequences. It is a moral choice. To achieve the socially just future requires only that enough people decide to will it. Consequently, it is perfectly consistent for progressives to consider themselves morally and intellectually enlightened, while dismissing their opponents as morally repulsive reactionaries, unworthy of the community of other human beings.

While the politics of the left is derived from assumptions about the future, its partisans are careful to construct a view of history that validates their claims: history as a narrative of progressively expanding human rights. Thus the revolutions of the 18th century institutionalized civil rights of free speech and religion, and a government of laws for white property-holding males. The 19th century extended the rights of suffrage and the political base of freedom, ending slavery and establishing the equality of individual males as participants in the political process. The 20th century’s task, and now the task of the 21st is to extend the same rights to women and other minorities, while adding social and economic rights to education, health-care, material wellbeing, and equality. This is the revolution for “social justice,” which, of course, is the socialist revolution that has failed, but that the left will not give up.

Modern, or post-modern, or better still post-Communist conservatism begins with the recognition that this agenda and the progressive paradigm that underpins it are bankrupt. They have been definitively refuted by the catastrophes of Marxism, which demonstrate that the quest for social justice, pressed to its logical conclusion, leads inexorably to the totalitarian result. The reason is this: to propose a solution that is utopian, in other words impossible, is to propose a solution that requires coercion and requires absolute coercion. Who wills the end wills the means.

Post-Communist conservatism, then, begins with the principle that is written in the blood of these social experiments. “It is just not true,” as Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty, “that human beings are born equal; . . . if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position; . . . [thus] the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are, therefore, not only different but in conflict with each other.” (my emphasis)

In other words, the rights historically claimed by the left are self-contradicting and self-defeating. The regime of social justice, of which the left dreams, is a regime that by its very nature must crush individual freedom. It is not a question of choosing the right (while avoiding the wrong) political means in order to achieve the desired ends. The means are contained in the ends. The leftist revolution must crush freedom in order to achieve the social justice that it seeks. It is therefore unable to achieve even that justice. This is the totalitarian circle that cannot be squared. Socialism is not bread without freedom, as some maintain; it is neither freedom nor bread. The shades of the victims, in the endless cemetery of 20th-century revolutions, cry out from their still-fresh graves: the liberated future is a destructive illusion. To heed this cry is the beginning of a conservative point of view.

The conservative vision does not exclude compromise; nor should it condemn every attempt, however moderate, to square the circle of political liberty and social welfare. A conservative view does not require that all aspects of the welfare state be rejected in favor of free-market principles. After all, conservatives are (or should be) the first to recognize the intractable nature of the human condition. The perfectly free society is as untenable as the perfectly just society, and for the same reason. We would have to rip out our all-too-human hearts in order to achieve it.

The Hayekian paradox—the point from which contemporary conservatism begins—is an understanding shared by the architects of the American republic. It is no accident, as Marxists would say, that Federalist #10 describes the Constitutional arrangement as a design to thwart the projects of the left—“a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.” A conservative is thus a conserver of the framework of the American Constitution.

But are we really conservatives? Well, yes and no. The principles of the American founding are, of course, those of classical liberalism. The fathers of modern conservatism—Locke, Burke, Madison—were classical liberals, anti-Tory architects and defenders of the great liberal revolutions of their time. But while modern radicals have failed in their efforts to expropriate the means of material production, they have succeeded in appropriating enough of the means of cultural production to hijack the term “liberal” for their own anti-liberal agenda, and to keep it there.

The radical wolves in sheep’s clothing fall into two categories. First are the Crypto-Marxists, calling themselves radical feminists, post-structuralists, post-modernists, or merely progressives, whose agendas remain totalitarian. Then come the Fellow-Travelling Liberals, who acknowledge the bankruptcy of socialism and make a grudging commitment to free markets, but who still do not want to give up the agenda of “social justice”—the idea that government can arrive at a standard of what is just, and that the state can implement such a standard without destroying economic and political freedom.

The liberal ascendancy that dominates the current horizon is a popular front of these two groups. Their victories are visible all around us. Under the banner of expanding rights, they have transformed the idea of America from a covenant to secure liberties to a claim for entitlements. They have expanded the powers of the state and constricted the realm of freedom. They have eroded the private economy and stifled individual initiative. Through race-based legislation and the concept of group rights, they have subverted the neutrality of the law and the very idea of a national identity.

So ingrained have the premises of the Old Left become in their new “liberal” clothing that in post-Cold War America, conservatives are now the counterculture. That is why we must think in other-than-conservative terms when confronting the challenges that face us. We must think of ourselves as heirs to Locke and Burke and Madison, who faced a similar challenge from the leftists of their time. And with them we must proclaim:

We are the revolutionaries demanding a universalist standard of one right, one law, one nation for all;

We are the champions of tolerance, the opponents of group privilege, and of communal division;

We are the proponents of a common ground that is color-blind, gender-equitable and ethnically inclusive—a government of laws that is neutral between its citizens, and limited in scope;

We are the advocates of society as against the state, the seekers of a dramatic reduction in the burdens of taxation, and of redress from the injustices of government intervention;

We are the defenders of free markets against the destructive claims of the socialist agenda; and

We are the conservers of the Constitutional covenant against the forces of modern tyranny and the totalitarian state.

This was published in Heterodoxy magazine, January 1993.