Ideal Conservatives, Real Conservatives, Authentic Conservatives

I find the quotation to be wildly inappropriate, and will be reporting you to Anthony Comstock.

There’s an echo in your criticism of what Sullivan says of Cory Robin’s wider critique of the Conservative movement (ie that it has *never* really been conservative in the ‘prudently keeping things as they are’ sense of the term, so much as fiercely and radically counter-revolutionary).

I’ve always figured that the comfort with inequality was a sort of collateral damage in a “prudently keeping things as they are” conservatism (to quote 6). I think Sullivan is coming to the conclusion that not doing anything about growing inequality is more dangerous (and therefore less prudently conservative) than the sorts of mitigations liberals might consider these days.

But maybe the key difference is whether you view “true” conservatism as a cautious skepticism about the possibility of successful change (while sympathizing with the desire for change), which seems to be Sullivan’s view or whether it is an active defense of the status quo (even if change were possible, it wouldn’t be desirable) or the status quo of an earlier era, which seems the more common view.

An aristocracy that serves. Anything but itself, that is. Despite the fond recollections of conservatives, this has always been a rare bird indeed. Which is probably why the Tea Party’s definition of elitism is so telling. By their lights, a person who tells you you’re wrong is an elitist. A person who tells you to put your back in it or feel the lash is just doing what they would do if they’d had a bit of luck.

That’s also a terrible etymology. What if I were to say that liberals seek social structures and institutions fit for LIBERI, while conservatives want social structures and institutions fit for SERVANTS?

What’s the optimal joke in this title?

Something like…

An authentic conservative conserves tradition.
A real conservative conserves his interests.
An ideal conservative conserves the space in his burial plot.

Enoch Powell, a very high Tory, once said that every political career ends in failure

Like most things he said, this is much less interesting than it sounds. Every political career ends in failure, because failure is what ends political careers.

I don’t know anyone on the left who doesn’t actually approve of personal responsibility

Well no, but a lot of us are habituated to the assumption that anyone talking about “personal responsibility” is bullshitting.

I always thought Melbourne’s sayings that ‘I wish I was as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything’ and ‘Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from some strong principle’ are as succinct definitions of conservatism as I could find.

In the United States, conservatism has gotten all mixed up with capitalism and libertarianism, even those three ideologies don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. Among non-rich white people in places like the south and the midwest, the sort of conservatism that is common doesn’t really have anything to do with class (I don’t think). I think a lot of them have an idea of the rugged individual, working hard and practicing self-reliance. They don’t view natural hierarchies as an important part of conservatism.

The elephant in the room here is the industrial revolution. What Holbo is calling for is a kind of Young England agreement between agrarian conservatives of the genuinely nasty variety, and the worker’s movement. But that’s complete bullshit: That todays politics is a choice between 1798 and 1917 is a good thing: it means that everyone is arguing about freedom and history rather then other things. (If of course there was a left).

Sebastian: “Let’s make this easier: Conservatives seek to CONSERVE the existing social structures and institutions. ”

Which is odd, because the people who call themselves ‘conservative’ in the USA are all about tearing down large swathes of existing social structures and institutions.

“Maybe I’m naive but I see very few reasons why conservatives could or should not be our natural allies at this particular historical moment ”
Canada used to have a species of conservatives known as Red Tories who would seem to fit this mold. They are sadly extinct these days.

“I read your post and the one before as calling for conservatives to embrace tradition over freedom.”
Where on earth did you get that from?

William Timberman @ 12: By their lights, a person who tells you you’re wrong is an elitist.

I’d emend that to “a person who tells them they’re wrong is elitist.” They’re perfectly happy, I think, to tell others they’re wrong, and presumably would have no problem with someone like themselves saying they’re wrong. I wonder what would happen if they were put, say, some kind of anonymous situation, where they didn’t know who they were telling off and didn’t know who was telling them. Presumably hilarity would ensue.

As I said, Hofstadter claimed that liberal Democrats, staring with Adlai Stevenson, were the true conservatives, and quoted Stevenson to more or less that effect. He called Joe McCarthy a pseudoconservative and apparently borrowed the term from Adorno.

Rossiter and Hofstadter’s dream, as far as I can tell, was to have the professoriat and the highbrow media to function as a wise elite. Various radicals have also wanted to use the university as a power base, and look how that turned out. Actual conservatives always had some sort of power base — landed property, the state Church, and the military. Without a power base conservativism is just wishful. Where propertyownership is an absolute value unrestricted by anythin and where the political system is partly majoritarian what the power base would be.

No true Scotsman.

Can there such a thing as powerless conservativism? Is conservativism just a cluster of sentiments? It would seem that by definition it is not; how can you conserve from a powerless position? So where would the powerbase be?

I was mostly thinking of Hofstadter, with whom I am more familiar. But Rossiter as summarized seemed much the same except that Rossiter was more insistent. Hofstadter wanted intellectuals as such (which he distinguished from experts) to have an important and essentially conservative political role, with the New Deal synthesis being the thing conserved.

Where else would it have been? You had various power bases in American society at that time, and none of them were conservative except some of the Republicans and the white supremacists. Perhaps the cold war military and intelligence services were candidates. Big business and finance worked with Roosevelt during the war, but that was a very fragile alliance that started to disintegrate immediately.

It was a wartime alliance, though, and not completely voluntary on the part of business. Roosevelt and Truman’s war powers gave them a lot of leverage, and business still remembered the organized agitation of the 1930s.

Business’s natural ideology is McKinley Republicanism, except for the switch to free trade.

bianca steele @ 32

I could have been clearer, yes, but I find that really hard to do when I’m pissed off. The point is that the authoritarian sadomasochism indulged in by most in the U.S. who call themselves conservatives these days does respond much more negatively to condescension than it does to outright oppression. I’d like to think that this has more to do with a guilty conscience than the subtleties of dialectical materialism, but frankly, I think both are involved.

The signals sent by the educated, and despised by the good burghers of the Tea Party are, I suspect, a consequence of the fact that our educational system has preserved the vocabulary and some of the mannerisms of a vanished aristocracy well past their sell-by date. A real bourgeois kingpin, like one of the Koch brothers, has no need to pretend to any distinction other than those which are a direct result of the power he wields. This was best summed up for me by an interview with a Texas oil wildcatter who had been remarkably successful in actually finding oil, rather than drilling dry holes, and had become a billionaire in record time as a result. The interviewer asked him if he’d ever regretted not getting a degree in economic geology, or whatever it it that you’re supposed to know about to find oil successfully. His response: Why, hell no…if I wanted a PhD, I’d hire one.

No doubt the Tea Partiers would love to have a beer with this very regular guy. With John Holbo, not so much.

I haven’t read the whole exchange between Antonio C. and John H. yet (I tend to think AC often makes quite a lot of sense), but I thought of this while I was driving: I tend to think of “liberalism” as the ideology of professors and thinkers. There’s something called “philosophical liberalism,” for example, which is I think not exactly coterminous with unphilosophical liberalism. But it’s also true that liberalism existed befor professors started describing it. If that’s the case, for professors and the media to function as a wise elite, doesn’t mean they’re the touchstone of liberalism. It means they’re criticizing liberalism, or drawing people away from liberalism and toward something else.

From the OP:

The point is: a high degree of indifference to, or at least complacency about, inequality is a hallmark of conservative thought, going back at least to Burke.

Yes. But some types of inequality have been positively promoted, not just passively accepted, by (some) conservatives. Thus it might be worth distinguishing between inequality in the sense of (1) an unequal distribution of income and/or wealth, i.e., economic inequality; and (2) a social order rooted at least to some extent in a hierarchical class system (in which the upper class is seen as having the obligation to govern and thus ‘serve’ society as a whole), i.e., a certain kind of social-political inequality. The two are related, to be sure, but not the same, and (2) has a firmer historical grounding in Britain, say, than the U.S., which is why Rossiter’s “inevitability of social classes” and esp. his “serving aristocracy” arguably don’t sound that American, so to speak, even though the title of his book is Conservatism in America.

Inequality-as-social-hierarchy, i.e. sense #2, encompasses old features of British conservatism, “ancient tenets of Toryism” as Beer put it, that survived and were adapted to the era of universal suffrage. (S. Beer, British Politics in the Collectivist Age, pb. ed. 1969, p. 94)

Of course American politicians as a group are personally wealthier than most of the population (in the case of, e.g., Romney, hugely more wealthy) and there are many “career politicians,” but the idea of a ‘governing class’ (“trained — perhaps even bred — for the task” [Beer, op. cit.]) is more British than American.

“Indifference to, or at least complacency about, inequality” assumes that inequality is not intrinsically good, whereas many conservatives think that it is. Good things about inequality: it punishes the sinful and lazy, weeds out the gene pool, motivates effort, strengthens the position of leaders, encourages humility and devotion. Less acknowledged, more primal advantages: it can give sadistic pleasure to the rest, and it makes manifest the triumph of the victors. A surreptitious whiff of schadenfreude is part to conservativism.

#Holbo: Authenticity – *true* conservatism! – equivocates between ‘most ideal’ and ‘most real’, in a confusing way, at precisely the point when we should be keeping these separate.

Exactly right. Conservatism is essentially romantic (in a pejorative sense of that word) – it’s what accounts for so much of its appeal. This kind of romanticism obviously needs very heady rationalization – the rationalization in this case being a forever churning cloud of excuses for the preservation of privilege. Sullivan is up the wrong tree insisting that conservatism is essentially practical. That is particularly what it – like romanticism generally – is *not*. There is a reason Prof. Robin referred to the *reactionary* mind rather than the ‘conservative’ one. Conservatism is and has always been about reaction, counter-whatever. It’s for its own sake.

17 – @Phil I fail to see a mention if we are all equal or not in dignity, which seems to me that by the insistence on the need of classes, we arent, in that worldview.

Phil puts his finger on the problem with the kind of ‘nice chap’ conservatism Sullivan exemplifies. The private graciousness/public beastliness split you might see in other conservatives you are considering liking, is transformed in Sullivan to a kind of ideally authentic nice-chapiness. The ideal – which plays at the ‘more authentic then thou’ game with a vengeance -doesn’t have to include equal dignity as a principle, since, as noted above, when push gets to shove, conservative values have a way of re-combining themselves depending on the day. Authenticity is a kind of Ideal-as-nostalgia, as Mr Holbo suggests; the Ideal is not a fixed thing. This is very slippery stuff!

“If you believe such things, there’s no reason why a sudden increase in inequality need trouble you, or seem like something politicians should try to do something about.”

Somehow, I tend to think that only loser liberals greet a sudden increase in inequality as something “sudden”, and not the outcome of something that politicians have been doing. A conservative, who regards the domination and exploitation of many by some, in hierarchy, as natural and desirable, may, indeed, greet a sudden increase in inequality as a good thing, but, surely, also, is likely to regard it as the natural outcome of successful political efforts to remove the leveling effects of artificial political institutions and policies, burdening or restraining, say, “economic growth”, or whatever euphemism conservatives are using to disguise their desiderata. Only a loser liberal will greet a sudden increase in inequality as some great mystery, and seek to trace its origins to impersonal forces, say, of globalization or technology, with no relation to the political agenda of conservative political movements, and then wonder aloud, whether some special type of conservative, will share his concerns, and wring hands with him, as an interlocuter — anything to avoid a respectful conservation with anyone to the Left of Brad DeLong.

As the OP implied, and other commenters have said, conservatives regard inequality as a good thing, by definition of “conservative”, and, duh, their political agenda is aimed squarely at increasing inequality.

Historically, the wildcard is political solidarity. When the would-be aristocracy feels dependent on the masses, for productive wealth or military security, the conservative may seek a more productive order of society, topped by a competent and serving aristocracy of merit, and serving to followers in the lower levels of the hierarchy, security and paternalistic care. But, when that sense of depending on those below erodes, the aristocracy reverts to its natural role as a criminal and parasitic conspiracy to squeeze the masses. The promise of old age pensions is replaced by debt peonage imposed from adolescence. On the lee side of peak oil and global resource constraints, under a Pax Americana of drone strikes keeping the terrorists terrorized, as the pie is shrinking, the only opportunities to add to the wealth and power of the one-tenth of 1% must rest on depriving the masses, their population still growing, of their claims on the diminishing resources of the earth.

That political conservatives recognize reality and anticipate it with reprehensible policies is only to be expected. What needs commentary and analysis is the tendency of the center-left to be surprised and helpless.

A fundamental distinction, in analyzing the sources of the wealth of nations, that identifies the role of hierarchy in impoverishing the masses in an extraction economy, would seem to me to be a first step, in fully grasping the criminal and parasitic nature of conservativism in the 21st century.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/what-makes-countries-rich-or-poor/?pagination=false

@58: Jeffrey Sachs reviews Acemoglu/Robinson somewhat critically in current Foreign Affairs, fwiw. Haven’t read it closely yet.

“liberals don’t treat ‘what’s the most authentically liberal thing to do?’ as a proxy for ‘what’s the best thing to do?’”

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!

Hahahahahahaha!

Yeah, right.

Yes, I am saying I wish the center-left would reclaim the paranoid style for its own, and be quick about it.

Indeed. Nick Cohen’s What’s Left: How the Left lost its way was actually retitled for the US as What’s Left: Who the Hell is Gerry Healy and Why Should I Care?… oh, my sides. No, it was retitled What’s Left: How Liberals lost their way, which rather bears out John’s point.

We might as well view the distinction as primarily psychological, and class conservatives as authoritarians. This would explain why modern American conservatives, like their slave-owning predecessors, claim they’re defending the faith of the founders, while a century or so before they proclaimed the virtues of autocracy. The specifics of policy are largely beside the point, so long as they include piety and punishment.

Conformism is a defining characteristic of authoritarianism, and is egalitarian to the extent that it justifies whatever stratification of society happens to exist.

In this view, liberals are whatever is left over. They tend to tolerate considerable variation of behavior and belief, but it’s hard to generalize about such a motley assortment. Members of certain tribes, like academics, are most typically found in their numbers, but they are vastly outnumbered by people who, though not conformists, simply aren’t very interesting.

Psychology ought to be enough to distinguish between de Maistre and, say, Roosevelt.

My understanding is that liberalism became left in the US between 1912 and 1932, especially with the New Republic liberals. In Europe business freemarketers were also culturally liberal because they had to fight traditional forms of aristocratic, religious, and military conservativism, whereas the American tradition was already free-market. (Even the religious tradition, John D Rockefeller was a devout Baptist).

So the New Republic liberals had to find somewhere to go, and they made a sort of alliance with labor. During the New Deal FDR shoehorned a kind of weak socialism into American ideology via the Four Freedoms , which included “freedom from want” which is emphatically NOT a traditional liberal freedom. Most 19th century European liberals took a hard line against labor, and even though urban workers played major roles in the 1779, 1830, and 1848 revolutions, they were always suppressed afterward (to say nothing of the Paris Commune).

Antonio, since I have an intensely boring writing project right now, I did do some cursory searching for an answer. “Liberal” definitely did not mean “left” in America in the 1950s. American texts setting “liberal” in opposition to “leftist” are easy to find from the 50s. I found one from Arthur Schlesinger in 1956 that says outright that America is basically a liberal country, but has never had a strong left because it came by its liberalism without having a revolution.

Rockefeller ran as a “liberal” Republican against Goldwater in 1964. As late as 1980, Ted Kennedy ran on being a “liberal” against Carter, and credibly avoiding any strong leftist associations.

“Pinko-liberal” goes back at least to the 1920s. It’s been used in some sectors as a leftist epithet since before the New Deal. I note that people dragged up before HUAC would deny they were Communists or leftists of any kind, but quite ready to claim to be liberals. The kinds of institutions that had a lot of “liberal” supporters and denied any “leftist” connections tended to be things like the NAACP, the ACLU, the B’nai B’rith… Josh White’s HUAC testimony gives a whole list.

My provisional thesis is that “liberal” and “left” only became seriously associated in America through opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, and had taken root in Nixon’s “Silent Majority” between 1950 and 1980 because of their opposition to liberal social reforms.

At first glance, it only seems to have gone mainstream after the 1980 election because it was something Reagan kept pushing. By 1988, the elder George Bush – who was very much from the self-described “liberal” wing of the Republican party and had run credibly on his liberal credentials in 1980 – was clearly trying to recast himself as a conservative. And Reagan seems to have started seeing liberal as a sort of feeble communism in the early 1960s when he was the frontman for the anti-socialized medicine forces. He was very fond of misquoting Norman Thomas as claiming that America would happily adopt “socialism” as long as it was called “liberalism”.

In short, it may be opposition to things that are actually liberal that turned the word into an epithet in America. But its association with the left may be mostly due to Ronald Reagan.

So would all the commentators arguing for a metaphysical difference care to explain why the two candidates will both cut Social Security and Medicare spending despite such huge differences? It seems that the people we are talking about here are quite powerless.

We might as well view the distinction as primarily psychological, and class conservatives as authoritarians. […] The specifics of policy are largely beside the point, so long as they include piety and punishment.

Very well put.

The fallibility and potential tyranny of minority rule, though, is of scant concern for conservatives.

Just as every majority is a coalition of people with varying interests, so is every minority. Minorities are just smaller coalitions. The idea of protecting minorities as such is as incoherent as the idea of majority rule. What you can do is protect certain designated minorities against all other minorities and all majorities. Or you can protect every individual against certain kinds of things from whatever source.

The only relevant minority in the Constitution is propertyowners, and the majority they’re being protected against is the propertyless.

The Constitution did not protect black Americans, native Americans, or (after the Mexican War) Mexican Americans. It did protect slaveowners, though, who were a class of propertyowner and a minority both in the South and, even more so, the nation as a whole.

To be clear, obviously, it means something more like centrist, and these days, now that “liberal Republican” is once and for all an oxymoron, it means left-center. But the usage is still unexceptionable that makes “liberal” a respectable synonym for “left” (similar to how “pink” has changed).

No takers for my characterisation of Randianism as nihilistic when scaled up, and hence quite genuinely not a true conservatism?

This yet again comes back to the problem that no one resides in Scotland anymore. In the US, currenntly the most visible poster child for Randianism / Objectivism is Congressman Paul Ryan, who is also the Republican vice-presidential candidate. Very few Republicans or other American conservatives would suggest that he is somehow not a true conservative.

Granted, the US scene skews this somewhat, as Ryan and most of his fellow American Rand fetishists adhere to a bizarre fusion of Objectivism with far-right religosity. So I suppose one could still say that Rand’s actual atheistic philosophy would scale up into something other than true conservatism. But the bulk of American right-wing Christians are already sort-of nihilistic due to their Dominionist or premillenial dispensationalist strains, and I don’t think we can safely write them out of conservatism on those grounds.

Antonio:
Well, certainly, round about 1900 or so a German or Austrian liberal wanted to expand the suffrage a bit more drastically than a US liberal did. Not sure how that helps. I’m pretty E.M. Forster and Karl Marx had a lot more influence on how Americans used “liberal.”

Very roughly (I’ve already lost a version of this comment, it’s been a while, Wikipedia isn’t all that helpful)–also, “round about” means “+/- 20-30 years”–the Liberals were the rightmost reform-requesting party in parliaments that, when they were on, still had almost no power: liberal still meant trying to move the government to be more parliamentary. Individual members, at least, were often Anglo- or Francophilic, thus culturally cosmopolitan . Farther right than the Social Democrats or Communists, and in Marxist terms, I guess, already in power, but in context “left” and possibly even “dangerously left” (for instance, in danger of being censored).

I’d anticipate two objections: first, that I’ve gotten something wrong here, which is possible; second, less reasonably in my opinion, that the Liberals must have been some kind of right opposition, which vis-a-vis the actual government of Germany at the time, strikes me as implausible, but it’s possible I’ve gotten something wrong.

Lacking a labor party, the US still has a liberal left, so it’s still Whigs v (post-revolutionary, avowedly capitalist) Tories over there, down to the ancient, creaking electoral system and property qualification (admittedly by stealth, and with a racial animus).

Sorted.

I can’t anyone seriously who takes IQ tests seriously.

@93

The line about conservatism being “a series of irritable gestures” is from Lionel Trilling, for whom IIRC E.M. Forster was a paradigm case of a liberal. Presumably he’s had some influence over the education of young people in the past fifty or sixty years, over the media, and so forth.

My grandfather, a small businessman and first generation immigrant, idolized Teddy Roosevelt and hated Franklin. His bête noire was Woodrow Wilson. Grandpa used to say, “A liberal is a man with his two feet planted firmly in the air.”

Or so my mother told me. I confess I never heard him say this, and I was closer to him than she was, since they quarreled violently about the Spanish Civil War when she was fourteen and were never on really good terms again.

On the internet this quote is attributed to Winston Churchill, though unsourced. In my grandfather’s day one could be a conservative and still preserve some of the now apparently completely obsolete ideals of gentlemanly behavior. Grandpa was appalled by the revelations in the Watergate tapes and particularly Nixon’s vulgar language, though he had voted for Nixon and had sported flag decal on his car.

Of course conservatives don’t believe that humans are inequal by nature. Natural equality is the reason to create institutions of inequality. If you don’t have an aristocracy liberated from the need to labor, you don’t get Mozarts or Darwins or Newtons doing great things with their privilege. Nobody is so superior that he can achieve greatness without a good amount of privilege (and the more, the better). Since we can’t liberate everyone from labor (without starving — since nobody would make the bread), there needs to be inequality. The alternative is an equality where nobody is liberated. And no Mozart.

It’s true that not everyone who is freed from labor becomes Mozart. But that’s a difference within the leisure class. Nobody actually believes that the leisure class is by nature (e.g., genetically) better than the working class — as if a field-worker could produce a Mozart, if only his children had the talent. A leisure class is better than a working class because the leisure class does not have to labor, and thus can provide for its young a fuller realization of potentials.

In other words, wealth is not a product of personal merit; personal merit is a product of wealth. In this way, conservatives are correct in claiming that meritocracy exists.

But it’s certainly not leftist in the sense of having any serious ideological connection with socialism.
—

the left has given up socialism but remained sectarian – Bob Fitch, paraphrased.

liberal @ 91: “There’s not one single source of inequality, but in terms of doing meaningful normative political economics there indeed is: parasitic rent extraction.”

Henry George understood this over a century ago. It’s very strange that no one these days seems to know it.”

Indeed. Twice.

“Enoch Powell, a very high Tory, once said that every political career ends in failure, because the problems that they have solved will have inevitably ceded by then to new ones, and new exigencies and new times.”

Doesn’t this assume that the person in question is incapable of responding to new exigencies and new times? That may be true for a conservative, but it needn’t be true for everyone.