Douthat on Conservatism

As you say, it’s a bit general. So far as I understand it, conservatism reflects a belief in the general competence of the public such that it can order its affairs without government supervision. This distinguishes it from liberalism, which presumes the competence of the public only to the extent that the public is allowed to choose the kind of supervision government gives it.

I just can’t wrap my head around the definite article preceding “particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States”. My complaint is of a piece with your last paragraph, but also goes to the overbreadth issue. What seems to separate liberals and conservatives in the US at many times is their visions of just what habits, mores and institutions are particular to the US, and which others are ephemeral. (Even the revolutionaries will often argue that the things they want to sweep away aren’t truly representative, and that what they’re really doing is clearing away the impedimenta that obscure the beautiful shape of the “real America”.)

If you’ll forgive a bit of self promotion here’s my attempt at defining conservativism:

Free Market Philosophy as Process

A bit for the flavor of my thesis:

What these philosophies have in common is not a belief in a set of goals or ideals but a belief in a preferred process. These Utopians are like the tenders of a giant machine whose role, they believe, is to keep it well oiled and running smoothly. What the machine makes is not of interest to them.

I’m going to call those who focus on goals “liberals” while those who focus on process are “conservatives”. You can take exception to this somewhat arbitrary terminology, but it will make a useful shorthand in what follows.

I see two problems with the conservative type of philosophy. First, there are questions about the underlying assumptions. In the real world an unfettered market is the exception, not the rule, so a philosophy which depends upon an ideal situation isn’t very useful in solving real-world problems.

Second, is the question of what goals are appropriate. If a society does not have a clear set of goals than how can we be sure that the market is going to lead to them?
…

Conservatives like to talk about things like smaller government. Smaller than what? Less taxes. Less than What? It’s all about process.

Liberals have a goal – maximize fairness and equity. Conservatives have no goal, that’s why it is so hard to define what the philosophy is about.

John,

Ross’s definition of “conservatism” as…

[a] commitment to the defense of the particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States against those socioeconomic trends that threaten to undermine them, and those political movements…that seek to change them radically in the pursuit of particular ideological goals

…is only revealed as a “complete failure” once one identifies exactly which “particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States” one is talking about. If one is selective in how one chooses between the many various mores, etc., which are out there, then it’s entirely plausible to read this as a definition of conservatism–or, at least, it probably works as well as almost any other.

Example: one can, without too much twisting of the historical record, make the case that traditional families relations, complete with patriarchal father figures and a hostility of homosexuality, were an essential norm in the development of America’s identity through the 18th and 19th centuries; hence, a certain kind of social conservatism can, in its defense of increasingly dated family presumptions, define itself as being in the business of defending the American identity, etc. Obviously, this can be critiqued in numerous ways (both in its goal and its method), but I’m not sure that you can dismiss it as complete definitional nonsense.

Now, of course, the party Ross (usually) defends on his blog as “conservative” is obviously open to just such critiques. This is highlighted when you set up your comparison of liberals and conservatives, and mention only “socioeconomic trends.” Obviously, that’s not all that Ross is talking about…and yet, it’s a completely correct point to make, as it cuts to the sick heart of what make the contemporary conservative movement so very hypocritical: between Goldwater and Reagan, self-identified conservatives mostly lost interest is actually conserving the core socio-economic necessities of the families, neighborhoods, and local communities whose defense against various “political movements” they otherwise profess deep (and sometimes authentic) commitment to. The simple truth is, you can’t have one without the other. (Christian social democracy, here we come!)

“Conservatives have the goal of letting people set their own goals”

personfromporlock, that’s not even in the neighbourhood of true. Tell it to gay people, or feminists, or black people, or immigrants.

Modern ‘conservatism’ has always seemed to me a fervent belief in what will either give them or keep them in power – linked to an equally fervent belief that these beliefs have always been the same, I.e. “Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with Bush on Telecom amnesty”

This is too confusing. In America they are all liberals, with American conservatives being, in fact, more liberal (in the classical sense) and American liberals being slightly less liberal, tilting slightly towards socialism. But they certainly don’t have the goal to maximize fairness and equity (per comment 7).

None of these definitions work as well as Galbraith’s: the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

I’d say that any definition of modern American conservatism that does not reference authoritarianism is missing the mark. When we talk about “the defense of the particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States” – umm, which habits, mores and institutions? The assumption is that there is one set which is correct and true, and invariably it is the set that upholds an authoritarian status quo.

See the thing that libertarians hate about civilized society is that there are restrictions on the “goals” that they want for themselves. The idea that there should be any constraint on their selfishness because that’s what civilization means is something they can’t abide.

Of course they believe in a strong police function so that they can hold on to their “private” property, no matter how obtained.

One needs to not get distracted by libertarian Utopia. The discussion is about “conservatism”. As I said above conservatives talk about less government and lower taxes, freer trade and the like. They don’t talk in absolutes and they can’t define what the end point is supposed to look like.

Could the libertarian trolls just bow out this time and let the “conservatives” define themselves (assuming there are any)? Thanks…

Now, of course, the party Ross (usually) defends on his blog as “conservative” is obviously open to just such critiques.

It’s worth noting that the party also defends itself as conservative. Whatever Ross’s definition is, he’s a nobody and the Republican party are the somebodies defining conservatism.

Someguy,

It seems to me that conservatives have historically generally felt that the way to conserve ‘the core socio-economic necessities of the families, neighborhoods, and local communities’ is by conserving social traditions and limiting government interference in the market place.

But you can’t–or, at least, can’t very well–conserve “social traditions” when the socio-economic structure that supports those who actually build their lives through and around those traditions evaporates due to technological change, globalization, the emergence of the service economy, etc. Obviously this is a little too pat, and there’s an element of unsustainable nostalgia to it as well, but still: for all of the rhetorical use of “traditional values” used by most of today’s self-described “conservatives,” there’s relatively little push to actually conserve the elements of that socio-economic stability. (Where’s the high levels of investment to conserve the self-sufficiency and safety of intact neighborhoods, rather than just waving happily as everyone flees to ever more distant suburbs, private schools, gated communities, etc.?)

I don’t see that changing between Goldwater and Reagan.

That’s not what I meant; I just used those two as points along a continuum that, between them, helped to chart a transformation of the GOP into a white male suburbanite’s dream. (That’s a little unfair, but only a little.)

How funny! My second asterisk was reformatted as a little white bullet!

Leaving aside for a moment the actual complex coalition of interests that calls itself conservative at the moment, and what it is up to in the bedroom, boardroom and barracks, it seems that Douthat’s definition (a) relies on some assumed definition of the ‘nation’ and its values (pace Anderson) and (b) boils down to conservatism being a brake applied indiscriminately against any design involving change. I propose the clearer term “reactionary” for this tendency.

You know, following dsquared and rick@16, ‘the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness’ is short, sweet, and (if you cite the right people from the 18th century) borderline defensible.

Switzerland must be a good showcase for conservatism. Things change very slow, you can still smoke in restaurants here – for the next two weeks anyway. Slow, boring, but reliable; it works well. Viva conservatism!

I don’t think it is possible to define a single category, like “conservatism”, in isolation from its rivals and opponents. Politics, and political philosophy, is a team sport. If one is going to organize it conceptually, assigning labels to the teams, then labels have to be assigned to all the teams playing in the league, if not all the teams and all the leagues.

A distinctive feature of Anglo-American politics is the core division between Whig and Tory, both focused on incremental institutional changes, which are modest reforms in the short-term, but add up to revolutions on a generational scale. See Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood or Richard Hofstadter. Both Whig and Tory are committed to “the defense of the particular habits, mores and institutions of the United States against those socioeconomic trends that threaten to undermine them” in the sense that neither Whig nor Tory is a slouch in using and abusing either history, or the paranoia of institutional awareness. Both Whigs and Tories are more reactionaries than ideologues, never confident enough to be social architects in anything, but the slow motion of incremental reform.

The Whigs are more sympathetic to a progress of increasing equality and personal autonomy, while the Tories are more enamoured of authority and privilege, but both regard process and principle the proper object of political persuasion and analysis, and are embarrassed by simple-minded ambition for substantive and material gain, whether by bribe or earmark. Embarrassed or not, practical Whigs and Tories have long histories in the arts of patronage and interest group politics.

It seems to me that conservatives have historically generally felt that the way to conserve ‘the core socio-economic necessities of the families, neighborhoods, and local communities’ is by conserving social traditions and limiting government interference in the market place.

To the extent that they’ve actually convinced themselves that this is a coherent program, they evidently understand absolutely nothing about how the “market place” actually affects families, neighborhoods and “social traditions”. Which is a pretty amazing level of obliviousness.

I’ve seen quite a few definitions of liberalism being passed off as conservatism here (sam c, I’m lookin’ at you). What is striking about Douthat’s definition is that his purported waryness of staying away from ideology, which is an idea based on ideology.

As to Holbo’s comment, it would seem to me that a reasonably fair test of liberal versus conservative is to find two people who agree that segregation was wrong and then ask them if busing was wrong.

I think most conservatives would answer that busing was wrong and most liberals that it was not.

On the other hand, I don’t think that you could ask people that think homosexuality is wrong and then ask them if anti-sodomy laws are wrong and divide the liberals from the conservatives on that basis. There are many conservatives that don’t want to legislate bedroom behavior but do want to be able to use private acts like job or housing discrimination to discourage certain sexual behavior.

As for the selfishness definition, the relatively higher levels of charitable contributions for conservatives would seem to argue against conservatism being the justification of selfishness unless one is going to go so far as to include charitable contributions towards “people like us” as part of selfishness. In my book group selfishness isn’t selfishness but that may be my conservative bias.

I also think the authoritarian definition of conservatism goes too far if it includes all scepticism of equality as being inherently authoritarian.

I think comfort with the justice of inequality is a primary feature of conservatives. There was a recent study that showed conservatives are happier because they don’t care as much about the world being unfair. This is not simple selfishness. Poor conservatives just don’t feel as much pain about being on the bad end of the stick and likewise rich conservatives don’t have a guilty conscience about their good fortune.

Musa, I don’t follow you. I quoted PersonfromPorlock’s proposed definition of conservatism, that “Conservatives have the goal of letting people set their own goals”, and suggested that this was much more like traditional liberalism (Kant, Mill, Berlin) than anything I’d call conservatism. That is, I was disagreeing with PfP on intellectual history grounds. What did I ‘pass off’?

Mpowell at 33 has it right. Whatever conservatism may be is just about wholly irrelevant to understanding contemporary American politics. No philosophy whatever informs or guides the contemporary Republican Party. It is nothing more dignified — nothing at all — than an agent of the wealthy. (The Democratic Party is very little more but it’s a slightly bigger tent.) A detailed look at the policies pursued during the Republican ascendancy — 1994 to the present — reveals no pattern except a fanatical determination to subsidize some industries (energy, defense, agrobusiness) and remove any and every obstacle to the profits of others (Wall Street, credit, insurance, pharma, telecommunications). And this not for philosophical reasons but because, given the structure of electoral financing, members of the legislative and executive branches are simply the employees of these industries.

Really, I don’t see any reason to indulge the efforts of people like Ross Douthat, who apparently lack either the brains to recognize or the courage to acknowledge this state of affairs, to distract everyone else with blather about the influence of political philosophy on American politics.

“I think of conservatism as the idea of not upgrading to Vista (or whatever) until the service pack 2 is out. Saves a lot of pain and frustration.”

I think I like this definition.

An ideal type off the top of my head –

‘An ongoing and evolving protect to ensure the survival of a mythical construct of the past, that tend to synthesis collective identity and social norms, a social ‘meritocracy’ informed by those norms and a form of national exceptionism’

To unpack –

‘An ongoing and evolving project’ – Conservatism cannot stop change, it has to adjust. So in the 50-60s, a certain level of state provision was excepted by certain Conservatives as neccessary to stop the atomising influence of economic breakdown. A similar instance to Tory paternalism. For instance the reverse racism argument trotted out over positive discrimination.

‘a mythical construct of the past’ – in true Burke-ian fashion, what survives works, society, however injust is strucutre like that for a reason. The base of this forgotten land to be conserved is of course mythical, actual 18th century Britain, 16th century France or 1840s America were not static, anodyne places, they were not a-historic steady states, brutally corrupted by innovation. The construct is myth, yet dynamic over time as a recently pasted era provides a new template

‘collective identity and social norms’ – Conservatives are fans of collective identity, just one formed by the attitudes they devine from their mythic construct. Thus Children know their place, Wives their Kitchen and Men their role, Blacks their cabin, gays their closet and heretics their exit visas. Collective identity as such provide a counterweight to atomising change. Such identities and norms create a veneer of social peace, unity and stability.

‘a social ‘meritocracy’ informed by such norms’ – contentious I know, but hear me out. In the Conservative weltanschauung, status is earnt, but in a differing way to that of Liberal or Socialist schema. Those of good blood deserve their wealth as they are the scions of good successful and respectable families. Hard working Prols who doff caps and practice safe ‘self-help’ can be released from their origins via their surrender to ‘moderate’ society. Good Blacks or Hispanics can rise if they internalise the norms of ‘ggod’ society and behave.

‘National Exceptionalism’ – A term that comes from a sense of national identity, closing class lines. It can be isolationists or belligerant depending on the context, yet ‘us above others’, be it culturally or ethnically based is paramount.

A true conservative, surely, wouldn’t venture to produce a new definition when he could simply block-quote something Michael Oakeshott once said. (And better.)

Not saying anything much different from others, but I don’t really see a problem with Douthat’s definition (minus the parentheses). The difficulty is that it doesn’t really identify any particular political tendency in the US. As Douthat himself says, the Republican party and the so-called conservative movement is dominated by radicals. By comparison, Democrats and liberals look conservative, but an unwillingness to tear up the Constitution doesn’t really amount to a commitment to preserve the status quo.

Let’s leave aside the issue of their being a parasite on the rest of the world that props up evil everywhere, from your garden variety wealthy Burmese family to your African kleptocrat ruler to your upright US GOP voter

yes, do let’s. Neither the US nor the UK has any high, or even firm, ground to stand on as far as that’s concerned.

Churchill, in a letter to his Mother once described his conservative philosophy as: “Look before you leap, and don’t leap if you can find a ladder.” I lately read an update on this which avers that: “one should ascertain what kind of liquid is in the pool before jumping off the high dive.” Lincoln (our first Fascist according to Gore Vidal) once described the purpose of Government as being: “To do for those who cannot do for themselves or cannot do so well as with the help of others.” I guess this is the “conservative with a conscious” Fascist. All of this comes very close to abby1s’ “service pack 2.0 approach. And
approach is the operative term it seems to me.
Conservatism is more of a state of mind, or common
sense approach to the task at hand.

This world is littered with numerous idealistic liberal/progressive-derived Great Society-like programs of every stripe gone terribly wrong. At its best, conservatism would trust the people to create their own “Great Society” one person at a time–and live with the consequences.

‘This world is littered with numerous idealistic liberal/progressive-derived Great Society-like programs of every stripe gone terribly wrong.’

This world, especially in the Middle East, is also littered with numerous not-so-idealistic reactionary derived Bush-like programs of every stripe that have gone terribly wrong.

Second, is the question of what goals are appropriate. If a society does not have a clear set of goals than how can we be sure that the market is going to lead to them?

Well people within this society may well each have individual, opaque goals, and in this case the market may well lead to them. Let us imagine a world in which I have a vague goal that I should get a university degree. I don’t really have an idea of exactly which degree, or why I want one, but I feel that I should get one. Let us also assume that I have enough money to pay for this goal. In this case, there is an incentive for a university to offer the chance to get a degree, and make reassuring comments that I can start off doing a BA, and I can specialise later, or not at all. (The university I did attend did in fact offer this, though I had a much clearer goal set). Or let us imagine that I have a vague goal that I’d like a different look to my house, but no ideas what. A market can supply interior decorators, who come up with a design for my house. If I have a vague goal that I wish in someway to express my contempt of mainstream society without giving up any of my creature comforts, the market can provide me with lots of black clothing, nose-rings and emo music.

Markets don’t need society to have a clear set of goals. They cope rather well with vague aspirations, drifters, and unactualised feelings.

The thing is, though, the SP2 approach only works when everything works reasonably well; then – yes, by all means: don’t fix what’s not broken, resist the change, ignore the fad.

When, however, as others said above, the socio-economic structure starts crumbling due to various uncontrollable factors, one, obviously, has to adjust, adapt. The sooner you catch early signs of the upcoming change, the easier it will be to adjust painlessly and gradually, fix a little here and there, without a revolution. For chrissake, let the women vote (if that’s what they want) before they refuse to milk the cows. That’s why, I think, for conservatism to function well it, in fact, needs a much better feed-back mechanism (aka ‘grassroots democracy’) than any other approach. No ‘leadership’, please.

The longer I ponder these things it seems to me that, whatever it might have been before, conservatism, in its present form, is nothing more than a rear-guard action against the inexorable
workings of the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy being at best slowed, but never frozen, let alone reversed. Slow, however, is better than fast in this mugs game. Consider the perils of today’s Mothers trying to raise a child in a 24/7/365 500 ch, Times Sq Jumbotron, porno-saturated world. Ask HER about the unalloyed joys of progressive liberalism. (on the other hand
ask a black if he prefers the present or the days of Jim Crow). Life is indeed dynamic, and various facets of society do indeed advance and decline at the same time. Can societies survive this bifurcation? Yes, but not forever. A house divided, and all that. Which brings us round to the Golden Mean. Perhaps Aristotle was the first conservative–nothing to excess. Like the song “Love is Like Oxygen,” whose lyrics include: “Ya
get too much, you get high, not enough and you die.”

“I do give Douthat points for something he says in the follow-up. Tyler Cowen proposes an emendation. “I believe he would prefer a modified definition to allow some of those habits and mores to be judged. Ross circa 1958 for instance need not defend segregation.” Douthat rejects this, suggesting the right thing to say is that conservatism in 1958 was in favor of segregation. That is, conservatism was wrong.”

Maybe he should read Derrick Bell

The choice is between a social model based on convention or one based on desire. Douthat, and liberals both try to frame this as left and right, Bell gives a “conventionalist” defense of patience and hard work towards necessary change, as opposed to revolutionary hope and good intentions. Liberalism is opposed to convention as such. A left wing conservatism assumes that convention should be the norm [a left wing realism says it always is: desire is not logic] but is interested in fostering more just conventions. The rule of law is the rule of convention. The rule of reason is the rule of desire.
The logic of reason It ends with the “New” atheists and Posner’s “pragmatism.” Individualism, rationalism, assumptions of intentionality et. al. optimism, These are liberal tropes. Neoliberalism was implicit in social liberalism. And Cowen’s libertarianism is no more or less than Social Darwinism defended impersonally by a smiling computer geek.

part of the basis of conservatism is that we are here, so obviously we survived what we were doing before, and so we KNOW it wasn’t impossibly bad

ie. it hasn’t killed us….. yet.

“It hasn’t killed us yet. It killed a lot of _them_, but that’s a feature, not a bug!”

Brett: “here, so obviously we survived what we were doing before, and so we KNOW it wasn’t impossibly bad”

Engels: “ie. it hasn’t killed us….. yet.”

Not to mention that it’s usually said by people who imagine that they would *not* be one of those crushed and broken under the old system.

I maintain the Douthat’s definition is merely a less-well-put version of Bierce’s.

“Conservative: a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.”

My favorite quote from an old family friend, and one of the early leaders of the ACLU: “The ACLU is a conservative organization.”

“As the mother of a 5-year old girl, I’d take progressive liberalism over many aspects of the conservative past.”

You don’t live in the US, you live in a country with at least some remaining ties to social democracy. I’d tell the author of that line above to move to Sweden or France or somewhere in the EU. My niece was born and raised in the UK. I know plenty of people who would never a child in this country for just those reasons the quote outlines. Still, on the question of “liberalism” and France:

Perhaps more than an ambiguity, it was an irony of history. The real legacy of May ’68, as we see in France today, is individualism, the rejection of civic sense and ideology, the rehabilitation of the idea that personal and financial success is a worthy pursuit — in short, a revival of capitalism. To borrow an expression of Lenin’s, we were useful idiots. Indeed, the uprising was more a counterrevolution than a revolution.

The same was true here. The most politically grounded actions of the sixties were those by members of the black lower-middle class and their clergy, and were not grounded in individualism but community.

Ironically the definition of conservatism as a defense of the particular habits, mores and institutions is a much more apt description when applied to Europe rather than the US, since in the the latter case it has always taken a back seat to the revolutionary forces of capitalism.

novakant: I should have added that the main point of Schumpeter is that Capitalism destroys those very habits of mind and social systems that gave rise to capitalism in the first place and thus holding that the long-term prospects do not bode well for the continued acceptance of this form of economic/political social ordering, as no one will be left to love it and intellectually understand it except those relatively few most directly engaged in the enterprise–the process by which it’s material benefits are produced being intellectually hidden from an unsympathetic majority even as they enjoyably partake of the output capitalism produces.

Reflecting further, it is probably no small accident that critiques of capitalism and antisemitism often go hand in hand insofar as there is a long tradition, as propounded by Schopenhaur, for example, of viewing the the Jewish materialistic basis of earthly hear and now utopianism a crass adventure compared to the Christian Aryan-Vedic based theme of spiritual self knowledge and control.

American Conservatism as a great bulwark against neoliberalism? Where? When?

Conservatives have the goal of letting people set their own goals.

Unless they’re queer and want to get married, or unless they’re female and want an abortion. Or unless they work for a wage and want to earn more than “the market will bear”. Or unless they live in America and don’t want to go broke paying for gasoline, or unless they were dumb enough to rely on the representations of loan-sharks but don’t want to lose the house to their naïveté, or unless they were dumb enough to run for President under the auspices of the Democratic party, win, yet (despite having paltered with trouble in the shape of a busty intern) maintain a foolish yearning not to be impeached. Or unless, or unless, or unless. Take your pick.

Various levels of culpability or accountability or of what most people call “free will” attach to all of these situations, but, as you probably can tell, I don’t think that matters. What I do think, and what I’ve tried to demonstrate here, is that the Rightie notion of “having the goal of letting people set their own goals” depends explicitly (not even implicitly) on the Rightie notion of what human types count as “people” and on the Rightie notion of what qualifies as a suitable “goal”. So that the above-quoted sentence (“Conservatives have the goal of letting people set their own goals”) might more truthfully read: “Conservatives have the goal of letting those people whose humanity we recognize pursue such ends of theirs as we deem fit.” The second statement comports better with the observed behavior of conservatives during the last 28 years than the first.

In the reality people other than Virgil live in, of course, it’s the pro-business, pro-conservativism party that routinely rewards anti-Semites with high office and honors, while the slightly less pro-business party with an interest in responding to changing circumstances is the one that criticizes anti-Semitism and endeavors to help its victims find proper relief.

Thanks for the Judt link, Seth. I know that the older I get, the more insistent I am on questions of agency. “A thing is happening.” “Okay. Who is doing it?” “Nobody’s doing it, it’s just a thing.” “Who’s responsible for the conditions that allow things to just happen?” and on and on. And I notice how many things that authorities assist cannot be done for the public’s well-being are actually things they say must not be done, for reasons that boil down to not inconveniencing those benefitting from the current arrangement. Nature, however, has many more tendencies than laws, and that’s granting that there is some obligation to be “natural” in our social order.

I don’t think that conservatism (as a concept of government intervening in economic matters to preserve elements of culture, socio-economic behavior) gets a fair shake from you, guys. The fact that a bunch of reactionary lunatics and paid brainwashers call themselves ‘conservatives’ shouldn’t really carry so much weight in the discussion; after all, the Nazis called themselves ‘socia1ists’.

Bruce Baugh thinks I live in a separate reality
(well, I live in New Orleans, so perhaps I do) but I would remind him that historical “reality” shows that Conservative Republican Administrations have unhesitatingly featured Jews prominently in successive Administrations over the years. Just off the top of my head with no research, the names Herbert Stein(Head of the Council of Economic Advisers under Nixon), Casper Weinberger (Secretary of Defense during the Reagan era), and a slew of “neocon’s” (read, for the most part: Jewish, Wolfowitz et al) under Bush 43. come to mind. In fact no small part of the criticism of the Left has been the grip that this “neo-con” (read: codeword for Jewish) “cabal” had on George Bush, has it not? Further, any fair reading of the historical record shows Republican Administrations to have been far more steadfast in the defense of Israel than have Democratic ones, so I think your charge doesn’t hold water on the face of it. Most of the “high offices and honors” awarded to Jews lately have been handed out by Republicans.

As for Magistra, well, again I am rather amused. Since when have concerns about “cost” and “Liberty” become invalid? Sounds like pretty bedrock stuff to me. I shudder to think what “progressive,” “totalist” approach you have in mind for “traffic-calming.” Not enough of us on bicycles, eh? I note that two of your biggest worries are drugs and the environment. Are you to say with a straight face that our drug-addled society is the result of conservative values? Please. And while conservative solutions as have been tried have not always been well thought out, neither have those coming from the left. About “different people?” Well, if and when one of those “different people” blows up your child in the tube one day I wonder how “hostile” you will feel towards these selfsame people? And I would point out the obvious fact(reality again) that those nations with the most disasterously degraded environments are all Communist or former Communist ones, with a slew of nations in Africa and South America that have been dominated by left-wing Socialist governments (many of them single-party states) not far behind. So much for “the Right” as enemies of the planet.

As far as parenting standards are concerned, are you trying to argue (again with a straight face) that the public comportment of today’s youth, their level of educational attainment, the viciousness of the crimes committed by them, their general level of lawlessness, their uber levels of drug and booze usage with all their attendant social dysfunctions etc., are the product of standards in practice prior to the 60s? Again, please. To even ask such a question is to answer it. Many areas in most of the U.K’s major cities have become “no-go” zones either because of the immigrant population or crime in general. This is an improvement? The fault of conservatives? Conservatives may properly be blamed for many things, but are not those very things that might harm your children–dope, porn and Islamists–coming from people that “don’t share your values?” And do not the people behind these threats have “hostile intents?” Just how “scary” do you believe porn, dope, and Islamists to be? Or are these things mere figments of fevered conservative imaginations?

The names shift because the threat shifts. Life is dynamic. No one was flying planes into buildings or blowing up sub-ways in the 50s, but worrying about changing threats is somehow a conservative neuroses? You yourself admit that you have “genuine fears and worries.” Are not these the same worries conservatives have? As we see in the newspapers everyday “something scary out there” is indeed “coming to harm your children.” You just don’t like to be reminded by conservatives that these threats to your children are largely the outgrowth of misguided policies set in motion by your side of the political/philosophical equation.
In my city of New Orleans “the left” has controlled City Hall and the School Board for the last sixty years–the first thirty by white Democrats; the next thirty by black Democrats. And the corruption and maladministration of City Hall
and the miserable performance of the Public Schools the fault of Conservatives? And what of the mess made by “Nu Labor?” The only way that left-wing governments can get elected in either the US or UK is to run as conservative lefties–they dare not show their true colors. And conservatism has a problem?

I know that the older I get, the more insistent I am on questions of agency. “A thing is happening.” “Okay. Who is doing it?”

Both conservatives and procedural (corporate, administrative, technocratic) liberals are maddenly stubborn about refusing to assign responsibility for any mainstream disaster. (Though at the same time, they’re often willing to blame anyone who’s not pro-Israel enough for the Holocaust.)

Here’s some fun.
The wife of this unhappy landLord (that makes her the landLady) is the daughter of the Dean of Students at Columbia.

What’s “natural” engels?

A self-definition as ‘conservative’ is quite compatiable with liberal views on public policy: http://www.publicopinionpros.com/features/2005/nov/ellis.asp

Hearing conservatives talk is a bit like hearing Foucauldians: yes you should be cautious about supporting change with no thought about the costs, yes power and knowledge are interlinked; but change is often good and is all knowledge really just an effect of power relations. A lot of conservatives beleive that they have a unique methodology that exempts them from critical scrutiny.

I’d tell the author of that line above to move to Sweden or France or somewhere in the EU.

Well, we’d all much prefer a form of conservatism that didn’t involve demanding the exile of people you disagree with.

I’m sorry, but there is a lot of self-serving on this thread, and precious little else. People who call themselves conservatives say conservatism is all sorts of reasonable-sounding things, and people who call themselves liberals say conservatism is all sorts of nasty-sounding things.

I think this effort at definition is futile (and not only because of all of the self-serving). “Conservatism” is NOT a political philosophy or a philosophy of life or anything coherent at all. Neither is liberalism in the contemporary American political sense of the term. Rather they are two loose and self-contradictory groupings of cultural and political affinities and tics. No set of core principles unites the white suburban soccer mom who listens to Dr. Laura, the Straussian political scientist who reads the Weekly Standard, the bottle-blond society matron with a tiny dog and John Birch sympathies, and the Wal-Mart manager with a big SUV, a golf-club membership, and a Wall Street Journal subscription. They might all vote Republican till they die, and they might all call themselves conservatives and be filled with disdain or hatred of liberals. There is no “philosophy” there, however. No unified outlook on life. Just a set of overlapping affective investments. Engage them in conversation and you’ll probably find radically different “sticking points,” places where they will not budge and will get increasingly irate if pushed.

Same goes for “liberals.”

I have no doubt that the affective constellation of conservatives is very different from that of liberals, and there have been efforts to characterize those differing constellations. But that is not the same as a definition of conservatism or liberalism. This is the realm of descriptive sociology, not political philosophy.

the UK has seemingly seen an exponential rise in general lawlessness among both the general population and depredations of Moslem youth against non-Moslems in particular.

No. The crime rate has been falling since the early 1990s.