Conservatives Without Conscience

TO UNDERSTAND contemporary conservative thinking it is essential to understand authoritarian thinking and behavior in the context of traditional political conservatism, for authoritarianism has become the dominant reality of conservative thought. During its Paleolithic period, as those early days of the modern movement are now known, conservatism was easy to grasp. I recall those days well, because I signed on back then, before every schism became a new -ism, and long before authoritarians had taken control of conservatism. In the past four decades, with varying degrees of proximity, I have watched with dismay as conservatism has fallen into its present state of cluttered ideas and beliefs. It has become a potpourri of political philosophies that embrace any number of often incompatible thoughts on the right side of the political spectrum. Today’s conservatism is both complex and confusing.

National Review writer Ramesh Ponnuru, who is well versed in all matters conservative, said that many people believe that there are just “two, or at most three, kinds of conservatives.” Needless to say, there are many more. Accordingly, Ponnuru advises that before talking about conservatives one should know whom one is discussing.[1] It is good advice that can best be followed by addressing the key realities of modern conservatism. By examining them it becomes apparent how easily authoritarians have so effectively reshaped conservatism to their own liking.

Conservatism Cannot Be Meaningfully Defined

National polls today reveal that more people identify themselves as “conservative” than they do any other political outlook. Pollsters do not ask respondents to spell out what they mean, only whether they think of themselves as “conservative” or “liberal” or some other political position. Overwhelmingly, Republicans identify themselves as conservatives, although most cannot come up with a meaningful definition of the term. For almost a decade I have asked countless people to explain their understanding of conservatism, but my admittedly unscientific survey utterly failed to produce a good definition, which is not surprising, because there is none. Even leading conservative intellectuals acknowledge that trying to define conservatism is a futile and not particularly useful exercise.

Conservative scholar Russell Kirk wrote, “Any informed conservative is reluctant to condense profound and intricate intellectual systems to a few pretentious phrases; he prefers to leave that technique to the enthusiasm of radicals.” He added, “[C]onservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogmata; conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time.” Kirk offered as a working premise, however, that “the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity.” He also liked to quote Abraham Lincoln’s rhetorical question about conservatism: “Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?”[2] George Nash, another favorite scholar of conservatives, once asked, “What is conservatism?” He answered that “this is a perennial question; many are the writers who have searched for the elusive answer.” Nash concluded, “I doubt that there is any single, satisfactory, all-encompassing definition of the complex phenomenon called conservatism, the content of which varies enormously with time and place. It may even be true that conservatism is inherently resistant to precise definition.”[3]

William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of the National Review and a major force in modern American conservatism, is almost always articulate to a fault. Yet he, too, has difficulty defining conservatism. When asked to do so by Chris Matthews on NBC’s Hardball, Buckley became tongue-tied. “The, the, it’s very hard to define, define conservatism,” Buckley stammered, before proceeding to offer his favorite but meaningless definition: “A famous professor, University of Chicago, was up against it when somebody said, ‘How do you define it?’ He didn’t want to say, well, he said, he said, ‘Conservatism is a paragon of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is continuing approximation.”[*] National Review editor Jonah Goldberg hinted that Buckley has made a career of looking for a definition of conservatism but has not really succeeded.[4]

In their recent book, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, John Micklethwait (U.S. editor of the Economist) and Adrian Wooldridge (Washington correspondent) sought to explain current Republican conservatism to Europeans, if not Americans altogether. They concluded that “conservatism has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged”—especially since conservatives insist “their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed.”