Conservatives Without Conscience

Senator Goldwater wrote a thrice-weekly column on conservatism for the Los Angles Times for almost four years.[37] He was frequently asked to define conservatism and did so over the course of several of those columns. The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) attempted to refine that definition, but it was over the next decade that he distilled it into its final form. In The Conscience of a Majority (1970) he defined conservatism as the belief that “the solutions to the problems of today can be found in the proven values of the past.”[38] (He elaborated later, saying that “in its simplest terms, conservatism is economic, social, and political practices based on the successes of the past.”)[39] As for the conscience of the conservative, he wrote that it was “pricked by anyone who would debase the dignity of the individual human being.”[40] When I asked him years later what now “pricked” the conservative conscience, he said that he should have written that the conservative conscience is “pricked by anyone or any action” that debases human dignity. “Doesn’t poverty debase human dignity?” I asked. “Of course it does,” he replied, and went on to say that if family, friends, and private charity cannot handle the job, the government must.[*] When I pressed him on conservatives being opposed to equality, he chuckled. “Those are the intellectual conservatives’, who couldn’t get themselves elected dog-catcher.”[41] (Sadly, this once may have been true, but it is certainly not the case today.)

“Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order,” Senator Goldwater wrote, and in balancing between these forces, he argued, “the conservative’s first concern will always be: Are we maximizing freedom?”[42]

I have always thought of these fundamentals—draw on the proven wisdom of the past; do not debase the dignity of others; and maximize freedom consistent with necessary safety and order—as conservatism’s “paragon of essences,” and have considered them broad enough to address a wide range of issues, from fiscal responsibility to libertarianism (toward which the senator was strongly inclined) to acknowledging the threat of communism (and today, terrorism) without getting hysterical about it. Distinctly absent from Goldwater’s conservatism was any thought of the government’s imposing its own morality, or anyone else’s, on society. In other words, the values of today’s social, or cultural, conservatism had no place in the senator’s philosophy.

Philip Gold, who campaigned for Goldwater in 1964, argued in his meditative Take Back the Right: How the Neocons and the Religious Right Have Betrayed the Conservative Movement that conservatives should have retained a covenant with the fathers of conservatism, for “continuity across generations [is] the essence of conservatism.” What has breaking that covenant, as has clearly occurred with Goldwater, meant? It is a serious loss, believes Gold, for Goldwater “cared deeply about civilization…. He also was humane, one of his party’s few who took issues such as civil rights, women’s rights and the environment seriously.”[43]

Conservatism Today: A Dysfunctional Family

No doubt the adamancy with which some conservatives insisted on their interpretations, or views, of history led to the movement’s eventual splintering into several factions. Whatever the origin of their disagreements, however, they remain a divided family. Today the Republican Party strives to contain conservatism’s constituent groups, some of whom get along and others who do not. It is not possible to identify precise divisions within conservatism, because many conservatives identify with more than one dogma. William Safire cleverly made this point when he conducted a personal “depth-poll” of his own brain to find out what held together at least “five Republican factions.” Safire, it appears, sees himself as an “economic,” “social,” and “cultural” conservative with “libertarian” impulses and the idealistic instincts of a “neoconservative.” “If these different strains of thought were held by discrete groups of single-minded people,” acknowledges Safire, “we would have a Republican Party of five warring bands.” He concedes that all these varying attitudes cause him “cognitive dissonance,” which he experiences as “the jangling of competing inclinations, with the owner of the brain having to work out trade-offs, suppressions and compromises until he or she achieves a kind of puzzled tranquility within.” Safire said his dissonance is “forced into harmony by the need to choose one leader who reflects the preponderance of” his views.[44]