I will be very interested to see how conservative intellectuals respond to the widespread repudiation of the party most of them have supported in the last thirty years. Conservatives like Sullivan and Larison caught on earlier, but others are catching on now, that whatever is principled and valid in conservative thought has been contaminated by its association with the agenda of the far right. People like Dreher still think of Reagan as their ideal and for some reason seem incapable of seeing how Reagan was a front man for this far-right agenda and that the seed planted in 1980 has produced the bitter fruit we are all eating today. The naivete or blindness of so many conservative intellectuals sometimes just takes my breath away. So now the more honest of these conservatives are going through their King Lear moment. It will be good for them to have everything stripped away so that they will see themselves more clearly, even if what they see is hard to bear, but they will learn what and who is worth loving and what never was.
I think that conservatism in this country is largely inspired, not by a positive, creative impulse, but by a rejection of secular liberalism, and I sympathize. And while I understand conservative concerns about statism, I think they exaggerate the dangers posed by New Deal-style social democracy. Nevertheless, to have allowed these legitimate concerns to have driven them enthusiastically into the arms of the people who have crafted the GOP agenda over the last thirty years is at best stupid and at worst an unconscionable refusal to see what was always in plain sight.
A litmus test for me for such unconscionable stupidity would be whether or not such a conservative intellectual voted for Bush in '04. I think the blindness is rooted in a deep-seated aversion for everything they see as the evils of Liberalism that they associate with the Democratic Party, and they could not, and in some cases even now cannot, bring themselves align themselves with that. They see the many dust motes in the eyes of Liberal Dems, but not the logs in their own. So this Lear moment will be clarifying in that regard–at least for honest conservatives.
I have often described myself as temperamentally conservative. I like small, human-scaled things. I prefer things to move slowly rather than too quickly. I think the great traditional religions are an essential resource for the flourishing of human culture. I think there is much about modernity that directly follows from the rationalist assumptions of the Enlightenment that has produced the soul crushing world in which we now live, and I think that for all we've gained in the last five hundred years, we have lost more. I think that conservatives have always been partisans of don't-let-them-take-away-even-more.
But who is responsible for the taking away? Liberals? Yes, if you want to count among them those thinkers who embrace unencumbered free-market capitalism. But who are they except the most persistent drivers of the agenda in the Republican Party since after the Civil War. Social Democracy arose to fill the vacuum created when traditional ways of finding a social balance were destroyed by capitalism.
This is what I see as the fundamental flaw in most conservatives' thinking–they simply don't recognize that they embrace precisely that which has destroyed what they seek to conserve. I'm told Larison is an exception here, but then Larison has distanced himself from the GOP. Other conservatives seem not to realize that that cultural liberalism didn't destroy the traditions, local community life, age-old mores they value so much–consumer capitalism did. Cultural liberalism would be an impossibility if it were not for capitalism. To resist one is to resist the other. And a subsidiarist social democracy is the only effective political structure for resisting an authoritarian or oligarchically structured political sphere.
So that's why I'm not a political conservative. Resistance to certain kinds of historical forces is futile. Better to accept historical reality as it presents itself to us and work diligently to manage it, to hold it accountable, and even in some instances to make it serve virtuous human ends. So I am open to be corrected, but most everything I have read in conservative thought pretty much seems incoherent to me, if a part of coherency requires that one's thought line up with the reality of the world as it presents itself to us. Conservative thinking simply does not line up with the world that, at least, presents itself to me. I'll get hold of Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 that Dreher recommends in the post excerpted above, and I will read it with an open mind. But I doubt I am going to find the fresh exciting ideas that someone like Dreher finds there. That being said, I do want to seek common ground with discerning conservatives who might now, after this Lear moment, begin to think of themselves as Larisonians.
Let me come at this from another angle: The kind of visceral conservative that I am thinking about is the one who would if he lived in Spain during the thirties sided with Franco because the Republicans were allied with the Communists. Some conservatives might argue that it was a hard choice, but at least the Church and a respect for tradition aligned more with Franco. I'm a Trinitarian Christian–a Catholic even; I am by no means sympathetic with communist ideology–I am a subsidiarist who rejects the top-down statism of socialism, but I would have fought with the Republicans because fascism as a form of zombie traditionalism in Spain at that time was a far worse evil than the abstract threat posed by communism. It needed to be opposed–as does any conservatism that seeks to animate dead forms with dark will.
Maybe there are those at NRO who if forced to make the choice would chose to live in Franco's Spain rather than in Spain's post-Franco social democracy. But can such a position be taken seriously? Most of what you read in NRO these days is an exemplary form of zombie traditionalist conservatism. It's dark and creepy. If conservatives still don't see that, they have a serious discernment problem, and I have nothing much to say to them. So I reject the kind of conservatism that refuses to recognize that the old thing died, that we are walking in its ruins, and that there is nothing to preserve but sherds and seeds. I recognize the legitimacy of a conservatism that wants to preserve the sherds and seeds, and which is patient to wait for the time when those seeds can be planted and flourish, or when the sherds can be used to build something new that might have a chance of standing.
It's just gone. Maybe it was necessary for the old thing to be destroyed; maybe we could have moved forward without destroying it–I don't know. But it is destroyed. We need to sift through the ruins and find what's worth keeping and then, when the time is right, use what we have found in the new thing we build or grow.
So I understand the conservative problem with statism, but in the kind of complex, globalizing world that defines our social and political reality, the state is here to stay and social democracy is its best form, so rather that work with the forces that seek to dismantle it, it makes more sense to work to manage it and demand that it be held accountable. And then focus on building or growing something new in the cultural sphere where expression of spirit, not the wrangling of politics, should be the primary concern.
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UPDATE: Even Christopher Buckley is voting for Obama. He says his dad, William F., tried to separate himself from the the kooks on the right, but WFB is one of those conservatives who defended Franco. He might have been able to develop more sophisticated arguments to justify his positions, but those positions were first cousins with the kookiness his son now wants to distance himself from. I don't think WFB was a monster, but he was the Dr. Frankenstein that played a major role in creating one, and NRO is one of its uglier tentacles.
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