Conservatives Without Conscience

A prisoner, a parricide, a man who has committed sacrilege is tossed to [the hangman]: he seizes him, stretches him, ties him to a horizontal cross, he raises his arm; there is a horrible silence; there is no sound but that of bones cracking under the bars, and the shrieks of the victim. He unties him. He puts him on the wheel; the shattered limbs are entangled in the spokes; the head hangs down; the hair stands up, and the mouth gaping open like a furnace from time to time emits only a few bloodstained words to beg for death. [The hangman] has finished. His heart is beating, but it is with joy: he congratulates himself, he says in his heart “Nobody quarters as well as I.”…Is he a man? Yes. God receives him in his shrines, and allows him to pray. He is not a criminal. Nevertheless, no tongue dares declare that he is virtuous, that he is an honest man, that he is estimable. No moral praise seems appropriate for him, for everyone else is assumed to have relations with human beings: he has none. And yet all greatness, all power, all subordination rest on the executioner. He is the terror and the bond of human association. Remove this mysterious agent from the world, and in an instant order yields to chaos: thrones fall, society disappears.[3]

Conservative scholar Peter Viereck examined authoritarian conservatism in his work Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill, in which he analyzed the “rival brands” of early conservatism, dividing them into two founding schools: that of Edmund Burke and that of Maistre.[4] Viereck characterized Burkean conservatism as “the moderate brand” while Maistre’s as “reactionary.”[*] Burkean conservatism was not authoritarian but constitutionalist, while Maistrean conservatism was “authoritarian in its stress on the authority” being granted to “some traditional elite.”[5] Although most conservative scholars choose to ignore Maistre, treating him as an unwelcome member of the family,[6] his work is significant in that it suggests that authoritarianism was an integral component of conservatism at the time of its founding. Authoritarian conservatism had subsided by the time Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, and in the ensuing years (literally from the age of Jackson until recently) it was quiescent.[7] Today, however, a neo-Maistrean brand of conservatism is on the rise.

Dunn and Woodard paused in their study of the American conservative tradition to compare authoritarian conservatism with libertarianism and traditional conservatism. They provided an illuminating contrast.