GOTTA BE IN IT TO WIN IT:

Conservatives and Neoconservatives (Adam Wolfson, Winter 2003, Public Interest)

The basic contours of neoconservatism most readily emerge against the backdrop of its two main conservative rivals: libertarianism and traditionalism. (I will have little to say of religious conservatives and Straussians, since they are frequently allied with neocons and have moreover helped shape the neocon impulse.) These three conservative approaches - traditionalism, libertarianism, and neoconservatism - have distinct historical and philosophic roots. Generally speaking, traditionalists look to Edmund Burke, libertarians to Friedrich Hayek, and neocons to Alexis de Tocqueville. However, each finds its origins in something more elemental. Anyone of us can’t help but have a gut feeling about modern American life - its possibilities and limits, whether it is humane and decent or alienating and corrupting. Those of us who regret much of modern American life and find solace in old, inherited ways will cling to traditionalism. Others, who celebrate the new freedoms and new technologies, will turn to libertarianism. As for those who see in modernity admirable principles but also worrisome tendencies, their persuasion will be neoconservatism.

In the post-World War II period, a number of exceptional thinkers sought to adapt a traditionalist, Burkean conservatism to American public life. They became known as the “new conservatives.” The most prominent of them was Russell Kirk, who authored in 1953 the best-seller The Conservative Mind. An overly simple but for our purposes accurate enough way of characterizing Kirk’s achievement would be to say that he initiated a turn among American conservatives away from a bourgeois Lockean philosophy and toward a mildly aristocratic Burkean one. A typical American “conservative” in the pre-World War II period was in fact a nineteenth-century liberal - a believer in laissez-faire, scientific improvements, and progress more generally. The Burke revival that Kirk helped spark in the 1950s lent to American conservatism a very different voice. No longer would it settle for being the party of “big business” or an apologist for bourgeois society. The traditionalists joined Burke in his lament that “the age of chivalry is gone,” and concurred in his denunciations of the “new conquering empire of light and reason.” [...]

Kirk’s project was less about public policy than philosophic definition and cultural recovery. With Burke as his touchstone, Kirk aimed at explaining to an American audience what it meant to be conservative and to think conservatively. In The Conservative Mind, he surveyed a kaleidoscope of conservative thinkers, from John Adams to Tocqueville, and from Disraeli to Henry Adams. It had been a long time since Americans had been taught to take these thinkers seriously, and Kirk’s prolific writings changed the face of American conservatism. In its early years, the National Review was heavily influenced by traditionalist modes of thought, and for a while Kirk wrote a column for the magazine. The magazine’s opening statement of purpose, authored by William F. Buckley in 1955, was a neo-Burkean call-to-arms in which it was declared that the National Review “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

The desire to stop, reflect, reconsider, and perhaps go back remains alive within conservative circles. It can be seen in the conservative defense of the traditional family, and in its cultivation of the older virtues and a religious sensibility. Most practically it is evident in the traditionalist view that the federal government has usurped the prerogatives of localities. Such conservatives look back wistfully to an America of small towns and close-knit communities, and they have become increasingly critical of what they view as President Bush’s “big government conservatism.” [...]

My brief overview of traditionalism and libertarianism hardly does justice to the complexity and richness of each, or to the profound impact they have had on American public life. Yet even so the puzzle of their political alliance over the years should be readily apparent. Of course, they are both opposed to much government regulation and spending, but beyond this they might seem to share little in common. Their fundamental outlooks are quite at odds, and indeed it was the great project of conservatives in the 1950s and 1960s to find a way of reconciling the two - National Review writer Frank Meyer had called his solution “fusionism.” However, at a deeper level traditionalism and libertarianism do find common cause, and it is here where their differences from neoconservatism first emerge. For both the traditionalist and the libertarian, and in contrast to the neoconservative, politics is of secondary significance. The traditionalist believes that culture or history is the primary factor in human affairs; for the libertarian it is economics. And thus not surprisingly, they can oftentimes seem to have little affinity for modern democratic life. It is in neoconservatism’s appreciation for politics generally and the politics of democracy in particular that its unique characteristics can be seen.

Nostalgia for a pre-industrial, pre-Enlightenment past, as found in traditionalism, is largely absent from neoconservatism. It is not that neoconservatives are proponents of the unregulated market or are without appreciation for our moral and spiritual inheritance as are libertarians. Instead, the neoconservative faults Kirk’s neo-Burkean project for its sheer futility. Appeals to tradition as an authoritative guide in American life or as a brake on change and innovation are more than likely to fall on deaf ears. True enough, we have our traditions in America, but these tend to be liberal-democratic ones, such as our reverence for individual rights or our veneration of health and well-being. One need not have lived through our recent cultural upheavals to glean this truth about American democracy. From his visit to America in the 1830s, Tocqueville observed that Americans “treat tradition as valuable for information only.”

Not from such American materials is a Burkean politics made of. Recognizing this fact about American life - that almost everything is up for grabs and in continual flux - neoconservatives believe, to paraphrase Tocqueville, that we should aim at educating and directing democracy, rather than seeking to overcome it, or just as inadvisably, as some more literary conservatives in fact do, scorning it. It was a political axiom of Burke’s that “when ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us.” This goes too far for the neoconservative. Without siding with the Enlightenment’s faith in reason as our only true compass, the neocon recognizes that in democratic times ancient opinions cannot rely on their own authority but must defend themselves in open debate, and that old rules must find some other basis than what is known as prescription if they are to flourish. The loss is, of course, considerable, but rather than retreating in defeat or condemning democracy outright, neoconservatives seek democratic substitutes for these older modes of living. Neoconservatives understand that tradition and custom, in themselves, can have little hold on a democratic people, and thus they look to other means to restrain democracy from its worst instincts.

At least here if nowhere else neocons and paleos are in partial agreement: Both share in opposition to traditionalists a sense that much of the past is irretrievable. The question is, where does one go from here? The lamentation for a lost tradition leads paleoconservatives in search of new gods, new heroes, and new myths. Full of disdain for what they consider the democratic idols of equality and commodious living, they seek not to rescue democracy from itself but to expedite its collapse, to make way for a postmodern, postdemocratic age. In contrast, neocons seek to refurbish America’s founding principles and its democratic way of life. They are aware of democracy’s shortcomings - its frequently low aspirations and dehumanizing tendencies - but they also recognize the fundamental justice of democratic equality. Neoconservatives seek to secure a genuine human freedom and dignity in the age in which we live now, the democratic age, rather than in some futurist utopia. [...]

Neoconservatives object not only to the libertarian critique of Big Government but also to its cramped understanding of liberty. Libertarians rise to the defense of every conceivable freedom but that of self-government; they typically tend to be pro-abortion, pro-drug legalization, pro-human cloning, and so on. Their goal, also ardently advanced by the postmodern Left, is the expansion of individual choice. But the “right to choose” has generally been secured in contemporary America only by enacting a judicial prohibition, one that forbids individuals from acting together to determine what laws they shall live under.

Now, neoconservatives are hardly a moralistic lot. On some of these contentious cultural issues, they are as likely to be on the “pro” as on the “anti” side. Moreover, their analysis tends toward the urbane - perhaps too urbane given what is morally at stake. Religious conservatives not infrequently become impatient with what they see as the softness of many neoconservatives on these vital issues. However, dispassion should not be mistaken for approval or naïveté about what is on the line. Neoconservatism, after all, came into its own in reaction against the Left’s nihilistic revolt against conventional morality and religion. Moreover, neoconservatives are in agreement in their condemnation of the high-handed manner in which the libertarian agenda is enacted. Democratic discussion is circumvented, and “we the people,” as the phrase would have it, are disenfranchised. To the neoconservative, the true road to serfdom lies in the efforts of libertarian and left-wing elites to mandate an anti-democratic social policy all in the name of liberty. But it is a narrow, privatized liberty that is secured. An active and lively interest in public affairs is discouraged as a result. Everything is permitted - except a say in the shaping of the public ethos. Libertarian ideology would turn citizens into foreigners who live happily, if indifferently, in their country

Maybe it's just the case that these concepts are too amorphous for us ever to reach general agreement about what neocons, paleocons, theocons, etc., even are, but there's a theme here in the contrasting of neoconservatism to traditional conservatism that it seems most of us could agree on: neoconservatism is rather urbane, in fact, rather urban--it is the kind of conservatism that one can feel most comfortable espousing in front of one's rich liberal peers in a cosmopolitan setting. Thus the "dispassion", the acceptance or even advocacy of progressivism, or at least an unwillingness to go backwards, etc.. It is precisely here though, if we accept the notion that neoconservatives are truly conservative, that we see it is a tragic flawed politics. Grant Mr. Wolfson his argument that neoconservatism "came into its own in reaction against the Left’s nihilistic revolt against conventional morality and religion" and then consider his statement that neoconservatism and libertarianism "share in opposition to traditionalists a sense that much of the past is irretrievable" and you find a paltry sort of "reaction". It seems to say: sure, the Left's assault on morality has caused sufficient damage to give rise to neoconservatism, but that's water under the bridge, let's be realistic and move on from here. No doubt that's the sort of attitude that goes down well at cocktail parties in Manhattan and Washington, but it makes it difficult to take such folk seriously.

Take three issues that seemed relatively settled in the '70s, the social acceptance and legalization of sexual "liberation", drug use, and abortion. The acquiescent, go-along-to-get-along, neoconservatism on offer here would have accepted these as fait accompli's (accomplii?). Traditionalists (it's obvious here that religious conservatives are traditionalists, not neocons) instead fought against them and the tide has been turned on all three issues. Similarly, the neocons are basically uninterested in the issue of gay marriage, but it seems quite possible that the traditionalists will prevail on this issue too. At some point, it seems fair to say that a movement that sits out the central fights on the morality of the age can not be considered conservative at all.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 23, 2003 11:06 PM