The book is called Conservatism: An Introduction to the Great Tradition, and it’s by arguably the most acute conservative thinker of his generation, Roger Scruton. It’s a slim, concise monograph, and it begins with the truth that conservatism is a branch of liberalism, and not its enemy. It is the branch that tries to conserve the liberal democratic state against the corrosive effects and flaws of liberalism itself (not to speak of leftism and reactionism, which seek to overthrow liberalism entirely). More to the point, it does not defend liberalism as a function of natural rights, or of human rights, or self-evident truths, but simply as the inheritance of a particular place in a particular sliver of human history: the Anglo-American world in the last two and a half centuries.
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Conservatism began then as a defense of America and a critique of France — which is the essence of Edmund Burke’s formative argument. He saw the advent of democracy as a challenge — which demanded acute attention as hierarchies collapsed, and society changed, in order to ensure that too much of value wasn’t thrown away. And so it emphasized the importance of a vibrant and autonomous civil society (independent of government), the centrality of federalism, local community, and voluntary association of the kind that Tocqueville marveled at and saw as the indispensable complement to the atomizing, destabilizing forces that America had also unleashed.
Conservatism’s defense of the free market and free trade was therefore never absolute. In fact, there’s more protectionism in conservatism’s past than many would like to admit. But these market mechanisms were nonetheless the least worst way to discern the value of things traded and sold, and were never supposed to be ends in themselves or to be advanced regardless of the impact on society. In fact, for conservatism, society is for no end and no purpose; it is valuable simply in itself, as the combination of traditions, landscapes, communities, and customs that define a nation, bind us together as citizens, and make us feel at home.
And yes, that feeling of being at home is nebulous. It is in many ways sub-rational. Ask ordinary people to describe it and they will often not be articulate. Sometimes, it manifests itself as bigotry, yes. Most of the time, it is about loss, and mourning it, while understanding that change is inevitable. Burke famously saw society not as a contract between individuals, but as a contract between generations: to pass on to the future the good and viable things we inherited from the past. This emphatically does not mean resistance to all change. In fact, it understands some change as critical to conservation. And perhaps that’s where American conservatism began to go wrong. The goal is not to stand athwart history and cry “Stop!”, as William F. Buckley put it. It’s to be part of the stream of history and say: slow it down a bit, will you?
In Scruton’s account, the list of conservative intellectuals is long and distinguished. The respective geniuses of Burke and Hume and Hegel are integral to its formation; they were succeeded by the Romantic era that urged a corrective to mass industrialization, and a hedge to the Enlightenment’s preference for theoretical reason over the practical wisdom that works, as Adam Smith saw it, as an invisible hand in guiding society. Tradition, conservatives believe, is a form of collective knowledge. It can contain wisdom that reason simply cannot grasp.
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This is a man and a party that has such disdain for conserving anything that it is actively despoiling our landscape, enabling a climate catastrophe. It is a party that has generated crippling and everlasting debt — even in good economic times — in a way that makes a mockery of any compact between generations. It is a party that actively endorses cruelty as a policy tool, deploys fear as its prime political weapon, and insists that the opposite party has no legitimate right to govern at all. It is the party of torture, the absolute nemesis of the liberal inheritance, the party of corruption, propaganda, vote suppression, and barely masked bigotry.
I despise it because I am a conservative. I don’t believe that conservatism can be revived on the right (it has been thankfully sustained, by default, by the Democrats in recent decades) until this hateful philistine would-be despot and his know-nothing cult is gone. And by revived, I do not mean a return to neoconservatism abroad or supply side crack-pottery at home. The 1980s and 1990s are over. I mean a conservatism that can tackle soaring social and economic inequality as a way to save capitalism, restore the financial sector as an aid to free markets and not their corrupting parasite, a conservatism that will end our unending wars, rid the criminal justice system of its racial blind spots, defend liberal education and high culture against the barbarians of postmodernism and the well-intentioned toxins of affirmative action, pay down the debt, reform the corruption of religious faith, protect our physical landscape, invest in non-carbon energy, and begin at the local level to rebuild community and the spirit of American civil association.
- Andrew Sullivan
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Conservatism began then as a defense of America and a critique of France — which is the essence of Edmund Burke’s formative argument. He saw the advent of democracy as a challenge — which demanded acute attention as hierarchies collapsed, and society changed, in order to ensure that too much of value wasn’t thrown away. And so it emphasized the importance of a vibrant and autonomous civil society (independent of government), the centrality of federalism, local community, and voluntary association of the kind that Tocqueville marveled at and saw as the indispensable complement to the atomizing, destabilizing forces that America had also unleashed.
Conservatism’s defense of the free market and free trade was therefore never absolute. In fact, there’s more protectionism in conservatism’s past than many would like to admit. But these market mechanisms were nonetheless the least worst way to discern the value of things traded and sold, and were never supposed to be ends in themselves or to be advanced regardless of the impact on society. In fact, for conservatism, society is for no end and no purpose; it is valuable simply in itself, as the combination of traditions, landscapes, communities, and customs that define a nation, bind us together as citizens, and make us feel at home.
And yes, that feeling of being at home is nebulous. It is in many ways sub-rational. Ask ordinary people to describe it and they will often not be articulate. Sometimes, it manifests itself as bigotry, yes. Most of the time, it is about loss, and mourning it, while understanding that change is inevitable. Burke famously saw society not as a contract between individuals, but as a contract between generations: to pass on to the future the good and viable things we inherited from the past. This emphatically does not mean resistance to all change. In fact, it understands some change as critical to conservation. And perhaps that’s where American conservatism began to go wrong. The goal is not to stand athwart history and cry “Stop!”, as William F. Buckley put it. It’s to be part of the stream of history and say: slow it down a bit, will you?
In Scruton’s account, the list of conservative intellectuals is long and distinguished. The respective geniuses of Burke and Hume and Hegel are integral to its formation; they were succeeded by the Romantic era that urged a corrective to mass industrialization, and a hedge to the Enlightenment’s preference for theoretical reason over the practical wisdom that works, as Adam Smith saw it, as an invisible hand in guiding society. Tradition, conservatives believe, is a form of collective knowledge. It can contain wisdom that reason simply cannot grasp.
[---]
This is a man and a party that has such disdain for conserving anything that it is actively despoiling our landscape, enabling a climate catastrophe. It is a party that has generated crippling and everlasting debt — even in good economic times — in a way that makes a mockery of any compact between generations. It is a party that actively endorses cruelty as a policy tool, deploys fear as its prime political weapon, and insists that the opposite party has no legitimate right to govern at all. It is the party of torture, the absolute nemesis of the liberal inheritance, the party of corruption, propaganda, vote suppression, and barely masked bigotry.
I despise it because I am a conservative. I don’t believe that conservatism can be revived on the right (it has been thankfully sustained, by default, by the Democrats in recent decades) until this hateful philistine would-be despot and his know-nothing cult is gone. And by revived, I do not mean a return to neoconservatism abroad or supply side crack-pottery at home. The 1980s and 1990s are over. I mean a conservatism that can tackle soaring social and economic inequality as a way to save capitalism, restore the financial sector as an aid to free markets and not their corrupting parasite, a conservatism that will end our unending wars, rid the criminal justice system of its racial blind spots, defend liberal education and high culture against the barbarians of postmodernism and the well-intentioned toxins of affirmative action, pay down the debt, reform the corruption of religious faith, protect our physical landscape, invest in non-carbon energy, and begin at the local level to rebuild community and the spirit of American civil association.
- Andrew Sullivan
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