A shorter version of this essay appeared in Varieties of Conservatism in America, Peter Berkowitz, Ed. (Hoover Press, 2004) ISBN: 4572-5; 167 pages. $15.00 Individual chapters can be downloaded as PDFs from Hoover Press.
In the years following the Second World War, a group of writers emerged who became known as America’s “New Conservatives,” prominently including Richard M. Weaver, Peter Viereck, Robert Nisbet, and Russell Kirk. In this case, “new” did not merely indicate a generational transition; these thinkers did not represent a simple return to the conservatism of the 1930s following the emergency of world war. Instead, the New Conservatives articulated ideas and concepts that were unprecedented in American intellectual history. They took their political bearings from a quite novel set of intellectual authorities. Most striking of all, at the very moment of America’s historic victory over the most potent totalitarian threat of the century, their writings were redolent with sometimes sweeping doubts about the “progress” of the Modern Project – and about the individualism at the heart of liberalism’s liberty.
Central to the conservatism of the 1930s had been intransigent opposition to the “socialism” of Roosevelt’s New Deal on the part of various Republican-leaning social groups: East Coast financiers, Midwestern manufacturers, Chamber of Commerce types, the more prosperous farmers. Centralized bureaucratic administration of the economy was resisted by the possessing classes in the name of an older form of liberal capitalist social order. Among intellectuals, articulate conservatism in the 1930s had been represented by such men as H. L. Mencken, George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, and Albert Jay Nock. With the partial exception of Santayana, each may be said to have subscribed to some version or another of classical liberalism or libertarianism, emphasizing something resembling Mill’s individuality as against social conformity. Without exception, their worldviews were markedly elitist and sharpened by a waspish religious skepticism. This last could be seen in Santayana’s genteel atheism, in Mencken’s noisy contempt for American Bible thumpers, in Nock’s preference for the most coldly rationalist of French freethinkers, and in Babbitt’s quest for wisdom in Hinduism, having dismissed his Puritan ancestry. In other words, these pre-war conservatives connected not at all with the lived traditions of the vast majority of the American people, except on the single point of the tradition of liberal individualism, whether rugged or not.
Kirk, of course, quickly became the leading figure of the New Conservatism – a position which later received the appellation of “traditionalism” or “traditionalist conservatism.” While he himself was influenced by some of the currents of thought in the 1930s, and while The Conservative Mind purported to be a “recovery” of a pre-existing Burkean tradition in American political and social thought, it is difficult to deny that there was also a large element of invention in Kirk’s account of the conservative tradition. Kirk’s “canons” of conservatism begin with an orientation to “transcendent order” or “natural law,” a view that political problems are at bottom religious and moral problems rather than the other way around: whereas the libertarian conservatives of the 1930s usually understood themselves as heirs of various enlightenment dissenters from Europe’s Christian civilization, Kirk is a dissenter from dissent, striving to learn from the sidelined champions of orthodox religion. Kirk therefore rejects rationalism, utilitarianism, and egalitarianism. He ties freedom to property-holding, but there is no discussion of the “magic of the marketplace” or interest in economic efficiency. He is hostile to the experimentalism of the social scientific mind, and he defends the latent reasonableness of evolved social forms. The three evils which emerge as antagonists throughout The Conservative Mind are the French Revolution, the industrial revolution, and the bureaucratic-managerial revolution of the first half of the twentieth century. Communism is mentioned hardly at all.
Focusing on the French Revolution, Kirk states emphatically that the overarching evil of the age is “ideology,” and he claims that conservatism properly understood is “the negation of ideology.” As such, conservatism prescribes a “politics of prudence,” a cautious statesmanship founded upon a sensitive understanding of the complexities of human nature, the limitations of human history, and the capaciousness of the human good. Of course, liberalism’s ancient boast has always been that it founds itself upon, and best adequates to, human nature – once that nature is shorn of illusions and superstition. To the liberal mind, one might even say that if ideology is defined as a project to achieve a utopian intellectual abstraction, then it is liberalism that is the negation of an ideology.
From Kirk’s perspective, there is a partial truth in liberalism’s claim – which is why Kirk could find significant areas of common ground with classical liberals such as Hayek (while forcefully eschewing more doctrinaire libertarians) and later with the chastened liberals we know as neoconservatives, up to a point. But to Kirk and to the American traditionalists he inspired, liberals ultimately fail to understand the partiality of their principle. Their account of human nature excludes too much of what can be known, and is known, about the human good. Because their principle is “simple” or “reductionist,” liberals possess no “other” principle which can authoritatively limit the eventual application of their principle to all spheres of human life – this, despite their proud boast that liberalism differs in kind from all other political theories in refusing for itself a “comprehensive conception of the good.” Because, for liberalism, the public sphere is limited only by rights, which are the possession only of those great abstractions, “individuals,” the public sphere in fact extends to all human relations. The homogenization of the whole of the human world on the basis of the contract theory is the dehumanizing threat we ultimately face, made all the more dangerous by the fact that America’s political discourse has lacked any terms which would enable us to recognize the ideological or dogmatic character of liberalism.
Consequently, Kirk’s other great theme, repeated throughout his life, was an appeal to revivify the “moral imagination” through a serious engagement with poetry and imaginative literature. Such “romanticism” would seem to have little to do with the politics of prudence. But this appeal was a recognition of, and a response to, the enveloping character of liberal presumptions in the thinking of all Americans. Tocqueville had observed that censorship was unnecessary in America, because no American could imagine writing a book that would challenge the democratic regime. Kirk recognized the essential truth of Tocqueville’s observation, but considered this a stumbling block in the search for the whole truth about man rather than an indication that America was “the regime according to nature.” Kirk’s prophetic call for the cultivation of moral imagination was an attempt to free Americans from liberal ideology so that they could begin to name those “other” elements of the human good which are obscured in the liberal dispensation.
Kirk’s traditionalism quickly met with, and has long labored under, the accusation that it is, in effect, “un-American.” The American tradition of political thought has always proceeded within the terms of the Constitution and the Federalist papers – evidently liberal documents. As Louis Hartz so famously argued, America is the Lockean country par excellence, with an aboriginal condition (or original position) closely resembling Locke’s state of nature, and a founding compact reflecting Lockean principles. Consequently, there never has been, nor ever could be, a genuinely conservative party – in the European sense – in American life. Of course, in order to make such an historical claim, Hartz found it necessary to exclude the South, and the Civil War, from American history. But as the South was particularly embarrassing to non-Southern Americans in the mid-1950s, no one, certainly no one on the Harvard faculty, was much bothered by such an omission.
Another important academic response to the New Conservatives was a 1957 article in the American Political Science Review by a young Samuel P. Huntington. In attempting to come to terms with the quite unexpected emergence of a post-war American conservatism, Huntington engaged in an exercise in definition, considering three possible ways in which conservatism might be understood. The first alternative would be to follow the Marxist critique of ideologies. From such a perspective, ideologies are superstructural rationalizations of the political power exercised in the basic struggle of socio-economic classes. Emerging after the French Revolution’s destruction of Europe’s ancien regime, conservatism would then be the apologia for the rule of the feudal nobility. Since there was no feudal class in America’s thoroughly bourgeois history, yet there were self-described American conservatives in the 1950s, an “aristocratic” account of American conservatism was unpersuasive.
Second, Huntington considered whether conservatism might be understood as an “autonomous” body of ideas, in some sense a political theory on a par with liberalism or socialism or Marxism. Kirk’s list of conservative canons was duly noted, but Huntington dismissed these, for he believed the range of ideas brought together in The Conservative Mind was too diverse to form a coherent philosophy in any way analogous to the “great” (or academically respectable) ideologies. Of course, as we have seen, Kirk himself would not have disagreed with the contention that conservatism is not a member of the genus, modern ideology. But whether by that fact conservatism relinquishes all claim to an “autonomous” grounding of its ideas is another matter.
Finally, Huntington settled on a “positional” understanding of conservatism, an attitude toward change which endeavors to defend the institutional status quo, whatever the status quo may be. Conservatism “properly understood” would thus emphasize organic development and guard against the revolutionary transformation of any given regime. Such a conservatism would be legitimately Burkean, at least with regard to process if not principles. In America, authentic conservatism would be the conservation and consolidation of the progressive liberal tradition. Adlai Stevenson might serve as the exemplar of such a conservatism. Anything else would be “reactionary,” and thus “un-American.” In many ways, contemporary neoconservatives occupy the role that Huntington prescribed for American conservatives. Huntington’s critique of any political tendency “more” conservative than this has been reprised by contemporary neoconservatives as well. Most recently, it is Adam Wolfson who has intimated, with sensitivity and generous regard, that Kirkian traditionalists wander dangerously close to un-American activities.
But as we have seen rather pointedly by placing Kirk in contrast to the pre-war libertarian conservatives, there are several ways in which Kirk was actually quite close to the values and aspirations of common Americans untutored in political theory. Today’s traditionalist conservatives continue to be closer to average Americans on religious and moral matters – and on what we might call the “national question” – than are either libertarians or neoconservatives. Traditionalists can be understood as “un-American” only when America is understood definitively as the abstract embodiment of liberal theory. A younger Samuel Huntington thought in such terms. Behold, with his latest book, Who Are We?, it would appear that Huntington has matured – into a traditionalist.
In his recent article, Adam Wolfson observes that traditionalists are animated by wistful memories of “an America of small towns and close-knit communities….” He intimates that while such nostalgia may be charming, there is something fundamentally unreal or impracticable in the traditionalist worldview: we are all cosmopolites now. Another neoconservative author once boasted that what neoconservatism had signally added to American conservatism was a concern for culture. When it was pointed out to him that the writers of the traditionalist pantheon were to a man concerned with cultural questions above all else, his response was that the traditionalists were concerned with the wrong sort of culture: they championed anachronistic, vaguely aristocratic litterateurs whereas what was needed was attention to the cultural supporters of America’s bourgeois democracy. Claims concerning “historical availability” are prominent in neoconservative criticism of traditionalism.
Both these objections to traditionalist conservatism help illuminate a significant point of disagreement. In his article, Wolfson claims Tocqueville as the neoconservative patron, in contrast to the traditionalists’ Burke. But most traditionalists would contest this claim, wanting to view Tocqueville as one of their own, as Kirk himself did by including the Frenchman in his genealogy of the Anglo-American Burkean tradition. After all, Tocqueville viewed the emergent modern regime with distinctly mixed feelings, and he sought to mitigate democracy through the preservation and cultivation of “aristocratic” inheritances. One such inheritance in America is local government (“small towns and close-knit communities”); another is the “aristocratic” education of American lawyers, who appear to occupy a position not unlike that of the old noblesse de robe. Among the other “aristocratic” inheritances that Tocqueville seeks to foster in America are the family and the Christian religion.
Wolfson says that in the collapse of ancient opinions and rules of life, “neoconservatives seek democratic substitutes for these older modes of living.” While Tocqueville did advert to the democratic “substitutes” Americans had deployed in the absence of aristocratic inheritances – notably, of course, the associations – he did not pre-emptively presume that ancient rules of life were untenable at the first questioning. And while Tocqueville appears to have recognized the superior justice of modern democracy in comparison to older forms of political rule, one must be blind not to see his sense of sorrow at the loss of the human goods known in “aristocracy.” In fact, Tocqueville’s peculiarly expansive definition of aristocracy as the universal form of pre-modern life in contrast to the modern regime of popular sovereignty or democratic consent constitutes a theoretical foundation for the universal or “autonomous” character of traditionalist conservatism – contra the young Samuel Huntington.
The traditionalist conservative’s first feeling, the intuition that constitutes his moral source, is the sense of loss, and hence, of nostalgia. Those who are secure in the enjoyment of their own are often progressives of a sort, so confident in the solidity of their estate that they do not shrink from experimenting with new modes and orders. This was true, for example, of the French nobility of the ancien regime, who were often avid readers of the democratic theories of the philosophes and who in practice rejected their traditional patrimonial duties for the novelties of the Court. This was true also of the planter class of the antebellum South, at least in the 1840s, whose writings are filled with an exuberant modernity. The conservative spirit, as such, arises only when loss is at hand, or, probably more frequently, when loss has occurred. Consequently, there is always a “reactionary” dimension to such conservatism; the conservative typically arrives “too late” for mere conservation.
While in possession, we take our good for granted and, so, often fail to recognize it. But in the face of loss, the human good is vividly revealed to us. We lament the loss of goods, not the loss of evils, which is why lament illuminates. Is it not striking that whereas antebellum Southern writers championed both the economic and moral superiority of the “peculiar institution,” post-bellum Southern conservatives typically did not lament the loss of slavery, but rather lamented the loss of gentility, gallantry, domesticity, and the virtues of yeoman agriculturalists? While it may be true that nostalgia views the past through “rose-colored glasses,” such a criticism misses the point. To see the good while blinkered against evils is, nevertheless, to see the good. This is a source of knowledge, as well as a moral source. And here we may begin to glimpse facets of the human good beyond social functionality or mere utility, beyond all our theorizing.
So drenched in the progressive spirit is American political discourse (how could it be otherwise in the novus ordo seclorum?) that the backward glance is usually rejected out of hand, and with the most facile of arguments. Ever since Burke’s solicitous phrases about “Gothick” and “monkish” traditions, traditionalist conservatives have notably looked to the Middle Ages as a source of inspiration. In doing so, one is met with a rejoinder of the sort, “But would you really want to live in an age before modern dentistry?” Southern traditionalists who speak well of the antebellum South almost always stand accused of being racist defenders of slavery. But why should such rejoinders count as definitive when the Modern Project, which is usually understood to have begun in the Renaissance, took as an inspiring model Athens – a society which had no access to modern dentistry and a society which depended upon slave labor? What is more, those lumiéres suffering from polis-envy also tend to edit from their own “golden age” another salient fact of ancient Greek life: the ubiquitous threat of total annihilation in the event of military defeat.
The point of this exercise in comparative nostalgia is not to score debater points, but rather to achieve some clarity. Traditionalists do not wish to “turn back the clock” to pre-modern dentistry, any more than the lovers of Periclean Athens wish to restore a slave economy. Polis-envy in the Renaissance and among some of our contemporaries serves as an indicator that a thinker is attracted to an ideal of political participation, as well as literary and philosophical originality, and perhaps, of leisure, that he believes is unavailable or frustrated in the present. The traditional conservative’s kind words about medievalism indicate that he is attracted to forms of communal solidarity, friendship, leisure, honor and nobility, and religious “enchantment,” that he believes are unavailable or frustrated in the present. As Tocqueville helps us to understand, this list is not idiosyncratic or contingent, but rather corresponds in its particulars to the universal effects of the modern regime.
For as conservative thinkers over the generations have intuited, and as Pierre Manent has argued so persuasively in An Intellectual History of Liberalism, the dominant political tradition of modernity did not simply discover a pattern laid up in heaven to contemplate. Rather, Enlightenment liberalism was a project that set out to transform the world. Moreover, this multi-generational project was aimed against a particular enemy – namely, the Church, and with it, the social world that Christianity had brought into being in Europe. Thus, the famous “state of nature” which grounds liberal argument is a cunning substitute for the Biblical account of Eden. The bourgeois virtues of the commercial republic, in turn, are meant to supersede the classical and Christian virtues, which in some cases now assume the character of vices. The sovereignty of the people as the sole legitimating principle of the liberal regime places in question the sovereignty of God.
The construction of the modern liberal democratic regime has followed a circuitous path amidst many, usually unacknowledged contingencies. In different times and places the partisans of liberal progress have sided with enlightened monarchs, with parliaments, with executive agencies, and lately with constitutional courts. (Both Samuel Huntington and Stephen Holmes object that conservatives have defended so wide an array of institutions in various times and places that conservatism cannot be said to have a fixed or “autonomous” character. But if conservatives have changed their defensive front over the decades, so too have liberals changed their mode of attack.) Still, there are permanent features to the world remade by Enlightenment, and conservative “medievalism” is a catalog of the consistent and pervading sense of loss brought on by the achievement of the modern regime. Wherever there is a sense of loss, the conservative knows that there lies an indicator of the human good.
From this discussion we can discover something else about the traditionalist’s “method.” The philosophes cast doubt on the universal applicability of Christian “morals” in light of the diverse folkways of “natural men” whom European explorers had discovered (or claimed to have discovered) in their voyages. A common trope of the French Enlightenment was to question even the incest taboo as an unscientific “prejudice” of Christian civilization. But the Enlightened builders of the liberal regime were quite certain that they had discovered principles of political right that were universally applicable – and which in time might be applied beyond politics to the sphere of morals. Burke in contrast was guided by a kind of certainty in (traditional) morals, by an immediate intuition of the human good, while he viewed with the deepest skepticism speculative theories of political right. Whereas the Enlightenment “builds down” from politics to morals, the conservative “builds up” from morals to politics. Perhaps it would be fair to say that the liberal tradition even today has not yet generated a credible account of moral life. Perhaps it would be similarly fair to say that the conservative tradition has not yet generated a credible account of political life.
Viewed in this way, it might be said that traditional conservatism is not yet a political theory, but rather, a tradition of social criticism which is working its way to a political philosophy adequate to its deepest moral intuitions. There is nothing extraordinary in such a view when we remember that the liberal tradition first reached something like a comprehensive theoretical articulation only in Locke, nearly two centuries after its moral rudiments came to light in the Renaissance and Reformation. We are only little more than two centuries on from conservatism’s birth in the reaction to the French Revolution. Thus, the specifically political teaching of traditional conservatism remains provisional.
With this caveat in mind, one must nonetheless observe that traditional conservatism occupies a middle ground. On one side stand what we might call compleat liberals, who hold that some form of the principle of consent and the natural rights of individuals is justice, simply. And what is more, justice has primacy over all other dimensions of the human good. Any deviation from this principle is ipso facto illegitimate. Justice demands that this principle, where hitherto held in abeyance, must be pressed forward to completion. Anything, any human institution or rule of life, which we have hitherto valued which cannot stand under the conditions of justice has no “right” to exist; the failure of any human institution when exposed to liberal principles is prima facie evidence of the prior existence of injustice in that institution. Thus, nothing genuinely just, and so, nothing genuinely good, has been lost in the progress of the liberal regime: there is literally no cause for lament or nostalgia. “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.” I take it that libertarianism is the compleat liberalism of the right.
On the other side are compleat reactionaries, such as Maistre and Bonald, who entirely reject consent as a political and social principle and whose hatred for the modern regime knows no bounds. The ancien regime must be restored in every particular, and there must be no concession on monarchic absolutism. As in the Garden, liberalism is grounded in a choice to traduce “the rights of God.” Bonald’s rallying cry was, in effect: “Monarchy, monotheism, monogamy: three great things that go great together.” Maistre was driven in the end to writing obscurantist hymns of praise for the joys of abject obedience, the salutary effects of human sacrifice, and the central role of the executioner in the upholding of civilized order. The great Tory Samuel Johnson, while far from a French retrograde, nonetheless could say with heartfelt vehemence, “The Devil was the first Whig.” (And indeed, must we not admit there is something of Milton’s Satan in the liberal account of human virtues?)
It has long been conventional for political theorists to observe that Burke was, after all, a lifelong Whig. Since Locke was the political philosopher of the Whig settlement, and since Locke was the founder of the liberal tradition, Burke must be understood, in strong contrast to the continental reactionaries, as having no genuinely fundamental hostility to the modern regime. Perhaps, indeed, he might be thought of as the first neoconservative: if not a liberal, then at least a friend of liberalism. But as Kirk noticed in The Conservative Mind, Burke in fact – in the Reflections and afterward – “disavowed a great part of the principles of Locke.” To take just one example, Burke deployed Lockean language about the “contract” of society only in an effort to explode that language’s Lockean meaning. According to Kirk, conservatism after Burke owes “almost nothing” to Locke.
I believe it is wrong, therefore, to understand the Burkean tradition as a sort of “old-fashioned” liberalism – or, a sort of classical liberalism with some romantic literary doo-dads tacked on. And it is wrong to read the Burkean tradition in so strong a contrast to the continental retrogrades. If neoconservatives are aptly described as “conservative liberals” – as I believe they are – perhaps we can best understand the Burkean tradition as “liberal conservatism.” Is this a distinction that makes a difference? I believe it does.
Liberal conservatism recognizes many of the practical advantages of liberalism, but in also recognizing the goods lost in the modern regime, such conservatism remains open to, and in search of, a revised theoretical account of political justice as such. Liberal conservatism does not dogmatically reject the role of individual consent in politics, but nevertheless retains a conviction that the human world cannot be wholly reconceived or reconstructed on that principle. Practically speaking, this means that liberal conservatives approach the notion of rights with great wariness, precisely because rights are “trumps.”
Characteristically, liberal conservatives tend to reify social institutions, seeing these as possessing a species of subjectivity in their own right and so not wholly comprehended by a term such as “voluntary association.” The traditional common law is held in high esteem by liberal conservatives because its complex balancing of principles adequates rather well to the whole truth about man; modern American jurisprudence is seen as a fantastic simplification of law to fit an ideological abstraction rather than real human beings.
Neoconservatism, or conservative liberalism, also occupies a middle ground. Unlike libertarians who seek aggressively to expand the principle of consent through all spheres of human interest, neoconservatives are the prudent or responsible liberals who understand that the tendency of liberal regimes to totalize their central principle constitutes a danger – for the liberal regime itself. They tacitly admit that the liberal regime depends upon a social capital that it does not itself generate. They therefore seek to restrain the liberal principle in select circumstances in the hope of “saving liberalism.” But it is just here that the conservative liberal and the liberal conservative part company. For it would appear that the neoconservatives, when all is said and done, are convinced that the liberal account of political right is in fact final, and their political activity is undertaken on liberalism’s behalf. For the traditionalist, the question of political right remains open, and their political activity is undertaken to defend – for their own sake – human goods that are considered exogenous in liberalism. In other words, traditional conservatives endeavor to correct liberalism, not to save it. That is not to say that traditionalists yearn in any way for the “new gods” of post-modern paganism. Quite the contrary, the traditionalist’s touchstones for the human good all lie in the past, not in some glorious visionary future. When confronted with the ideological monstrosities of our time, neoconservatives and traditional conservatives are certain allies. But until an account of political right appears which does justice to that which liberalism neglects, the traditionalist’s allegiance to the liberal regime remains decidedly grudging.
Provisionally, therefore, one might describe the traditionalist conservative’s political project as one of “containing liberalism” – or, to put the point as alarmingly as possible, of “boxing in liberal justice.” As the conservative movement in America attempted to congeal in the 1950s and 1960s, a large, rather impressive, and decidedly understudied body of literature developed on the question of “tradition.” In retrospect, we can now see that “tradition” was a word deployed to indicate those “moral contents of life” which are eroded under liberalism; these studies were undertaken in an effort to understand the prerequisites for the persistence of those moral contents, so that policies and jurisprudential concepts could be developed to safeguard those social structures in which the moral contents of life naturally arise. Emphasis was placed on “society” – but not on what we know as “civil society.” That is, emphasis was placed on elements of Gemeinschaft rather than Gesellschaft. Conservatives have sought to “make room,” both conceptually and practically, for the flourishing of Gemeinschaft. Hence, the frequent invocation of Burke’s “little platoons,” as against the modern “grid” which reduces everything to the superintendence of the equal-protection state and the free market. Put another way, the political goal of traditional conservatism might be to keep the “public” realm small – but not in the liberal way, which makes the private, i.e. individual, realm large. What is wanted is a large “social” realm.
The provisional nature of traditionalist conservatism’s political principles and its wariness of “ideology” often lead to tentativeness in addressing disputed matters of public policy. There is also a strong element of “organicism” in conservative thought – as opposed, it is said, to “mechanistic” liberal social engineering. Gardening provides an apt metaphor for the traditional conservative’s approach to statesmanship. Thus, such conservatives often act not so much to “achieve” certain ends, as to create the conditions in which social goods may (or may not) flourish according to their nature. What is more, the traditionalist conservative appreciates that all political “solutions” are partial or temporary. There are no final solutions to the human predicament, and there will be no end of history.
Today, we often find that practical political advocacy reflecting a traditionalist perspective takes place in institutions with the word “family” in their titles: Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, various state-based think tanks such as the Pennsylvania Family Institute, the well-respected newsletter Family in America. While many of these are relatively new institutions, traditional conservative concern about the family is not. In his “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly” (1791) Burke wrote: “As the relation between parents and children is the first among the elements of vulgar, natural morality … Your masters [the Jacobins] reject the duties of this vulgar relation, as contrary to liberty; as not founded in the social compact; and not binding according to the rights of men.” Burke had already seen that the cult of “rights” would be deployed not to shield citizens from obligations to the state. Rather, rights would serve as an engine to break down the intermediate associational life of society, including even that primordial social building block, the family.
The contract tradition’s reduction of human beings to autonomous individuals fosters a self-conception that destabilizes the marriage bond; the welfare state then “lubricates” exit from marriage with various substituting benefits. Love, it has been said, is the willingness to belong to another. There is really no place for such love in a world of autonomous individuals bristling with rights – the world which liberalism understands as “natural.” The popularity of a therapeutic language of “fulfillment” in contemporary America only exacerbates the weak institutional support that liberal jurisprudence provides for marriage. Traditional religious marriage ceremonies often included a prominent discussion of sacrifice, not a concept with ready appeal to autonomous individuals.
Traditional conservatives tend to see marriage as entering into a status, rather than concluding a contract, and they would like to see this reflected in culture, law, and public policy. Thus, they look with approbation on movements such as Promise Keepers which work to shape popular culture in a family-friendly way. They would repeal the no-fault divorce revolution if they could – and indeed, some Catholic traditionalists would prefer the laws of marriage which prevailed until recently in several Latin American countries where divorce was effectively impossible. The experiment with “covenant marriages” is viewed as a step forward, but a very small one. Traditionalists also favor significantly shifting tax burdens from families to the single and childless. Again, Bush’s increased child tax credits are a small step forward.
Traditionalists believe that what liberalism views as “natural” is largely a fiction. They note that labor force participation by married women with children under age six is much lower than is commonly believed – about sixty percent, a sizeable percentage of which are only part-time. There is more of the “traditional family” intact in America, even at this late date, than the media typically report. Thus, they suggest that finding ways to support mothers of small children staying at home ought to be the norm for public policy, rather than facilitating their return to the workplace. After all, quickly returning to the workplace is not so terribly appealing when one’s “career” is waitressing, data processing, or factory line-work. Traditional conservatives also favor repeal of various anti-discrimination laws which rendered it illegal for businesses to recognize the differential burdens of (male) heads-of-households through the provision of a “family wage.”
The more hard-nosed of traditionalists criticize those policies by which the welfare state comes to stand in loco patris, believing that husband-fathers would “naturally” be retrieved among the underclass in the absence of an alternative. There are even some who would entirely overhaul current law concerning child-support awards following divorce. The common law tended to tie together the obligation of support with the right to control a child. The current near-universal practice which grants mothers custody (control) and assigns fathers with financial obligations yields precisely the opposite result. Here again, the state comes to stand in loco patris, though it finances its role through garnering a father’s wages rather than through general taxation.
The currently controversial question of gay “marriage” is the reductio ad absurdum of the liberal conception of marriage – marriage, as Kant put it, as a “contract for the mutual exercise of the genitalia.” But the bundle of legal “benefits” (and encumbrances) to which gay couples say they seek access were never legal recognitions of “love.” Rather, these features of traditional marriage were accommodations to the “facts of life,” the fact that it is from the union of a man and a woman that new life arises – and the recognition that children are best reared to responsible adulthood in the setting of a stable, well-capitalized household with a mother and a father. Marriage is naturally about children.
It is not surprising that when liberalism attempts to think about marriage it characteristically forgets the children. In the great pre-modern works of political philosophy, an educational program for rearing the young lies at the heart of the account of the res publica. Indeed, the proper education of the young is the political problem for both Plato and Aristotle. But education is not considered in Locke’s seminal Second Treatise – the children are “left behind” in the First Treatise’s demolition of Filmer’s Patriarcha. Children are originally absent from the state of nature; the reproduction and rearing of citizens is, in effect, presumed as an externality. Liberal theories operate on the conceit that we can presume the existence of rational adults. Such theories seek to do these adults justice by respecting their autonomy. However it is no exaggeration to say that liberalism, by itself, has no idea what to do with children – naturally dependent, naturally unequal, and naturally only potentially rational human beings, who naturally belong to their parents, who in turn naturally belong to them.
This lacuna cannot easily be remedied, for liberalism’s boast is that it chastely denies to itself any thick theory of the Good, and thus uniquely does not need to indoctrinate its citizens with controversial orthodoxies. But when the liberal state appropriated to itself the business of education with the advent of the “common school,” it seized the responsibility of soulcraft – without really admitting to that fact. Education is in its nature value-laden, never merely a matter of scientific facts, historical dates, and arithmetic sums. Liberalism’s principled refusal to speak in teleological terms of a summum bonum therefore renders it an awkward and much-abashed patron of education: for as every parent knows, children ask Why?, and continue to ask Why?, until they come to the end of the matter. A consistently liberal schooling must always stop short of that end, satisfying no one. For most of American history, the common schools surreptitiously reflected shared local values, and the central organs of government looked the other way, a reasonable strategy for muddling through a theoretical inconsistency. Lately, however, courts have insisted on enforcing liberal norms on the schools, engendering a demoralization of society from the roots up. If in the past the schools stood in loco parentis, reflecting the values and exercising the discipline of parents in the domestic sphere, today the schools represent an ever-earlier exposure of children to the rights-bearing and market-choosing of the public sphere.
The general traditionalist response has been to encourage experiments in alternatives of all kinds that might allow schools to reflect comprehensive conceptions of the good. (Traditional conservatives are largely unconcerned about the diversity of such comprehensive conceptions – even the worst-case scenarios of Islamist or Wiccan schools. They tend to the view that parents overwhelmingly hope to prepare their children for social success, and so the prospect of genuinely anti-social educational programs is largely a canard.) A tuition tax credit, enabling the growth of an alternative, fully “private” system, was long the conservative goal; vouchers now seem a more politically feasible goal – though vouchers also raise anxieties, since nothing yet has escaped the control which accompanies state “help.”
Traditionalists furthermore take hope from the burgeoning growth of home-schooling in our time. As recently as the 1980s, it stirred media comment when a home-schooler would gain admission to an elite university. Today, many university faculty report that their best students are usually the home-schoolers, and that there are more of them each year. A cohort of well-mannered, morally serious, intellectually curious, and patriotic young people is a gift to the country in its own right. But traditional conservatives also hope that as we absorb in our social imagination the fact of widespread home-schooling, we will begin to recognize something that was obscured by the progressive ideology of the common school. Namely, that a public school is not an arrangement between the state and students, but rather between the state and parents: schools are best understood as providing one way (and not the only way) to serve, or even merely to supplement, the primarily parental office – simultaneously an obligation and a right – of educating one’s own children.
As Samuel Huntington has argued in his most recent book, through most of our history America was appropriately understood as an Anglo-Protestant nation. A flexible, low-church Protestantism provided the “sacred canopy” for most Americans – though not, of course, or at least not completely satisfactorily, for Roman Catholics, Jews, and the irreligious. For the vast majority of ordinary people, it is religion which provides a comprehensive conception of the good, and so liberalism’s attempt to prescind from thick theories of the good issues, practically speaking, in the effort to insulate the organs of state power from religion. Since in an advanced industrial society the state is nearly ubiquitous, this insulation has a broader secularizing social effect. But this project only really got off the ground with the Supreme Court’s incorporation doctrine in the first half of the twentieth century: after all, the actual language of the Constitution’s First Amendment was carefully crafted to protect state-establishments from the threat of federal disestablishment. Incorporation effectively voided the original meaning of the Amendment.
The watchword of the courts through much of our recent history has been “neutrality,” first among denominations, later between religion and irreligion. But the practical difficulty – not to say impossibility – of real neutrality amidst all comprehensive conceptions of the good soon became apparent. Consider, for example, the Supreme Court’s school prayer decisions. In its decisions, the Court examines with great sensitivity the subtle psychological pressure that public prayer might impose upon impressionable youngsters who may not share the faith reflected in the prayer; formal prayer would not be neutral. But these same opinions insist that in eliminating public prayer from the schools, the rights of a religious child are in no way infringed, for the child is “free” to undertake devotions privately. Thus, simultaneously, some children are presumed to be vulnerable, conformist, incompletely formed egos – and others are presumed to be confident adults, prepared and equipped to cleave to their faith and religious practice regardless of the pressure of indifferentism communicated by the secularized school environment.
The non-neutrality (or unequal protection) of liberal neutrality was a major theme of communitarian critics of liberalism from the 1980s, and they won the hearing among liberal intellectuals that earlier conservatives, making similar arguments, had not. What is striking, however, is the celerity with which liberals abandoned their neutrality principle when challenged, saying, in effect: you’re right, it’s not neutral, but our comprehensive secular view has a (scientific?) right to rule, and so, therefore, do we. Previously, liberals were perhaps self-deceived; now their anti-democratic secularizing Kulturkampf proceeds self-consciously. Michael Novak sometimes waxes eloquently about the “empty shrine� at the heart of the American experiment – a poetic evocation of the fundamental liberal claim of demurral on the summum bonum. It increasingly seems as though we have an established civil religion having at its heart a “shrine to emptiness.” That religion’s sacred text is the “mystery” passage in Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).
As late as the early 1980s, the centerpiece of traditional conservative policy on religion was the call to return prayer to the public schools. (And regular polling indicates that in the more than forty years since Engel v. Vitale [1962], there has never been less than a majority of Americans – usually a large majority – who do in fact favor the return of prayer to the public schools.) But today, most well-informed observant Protestants have come to understand that the public schools are beyond “recovery.” Meanwhile, something important has happened over the last two decades. Evangelicals have founded large numbers of independent Christian schools – and other religious groups, such as orthodox Jews, have done so as well. Most of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions which restricted public assistance to parochial schools were motivated by nothing less than gross prejudice against Roman Catholicism, and these decisions were frankly popular in Protestant America. But now, schemes for the public funding of religious schools no longer can be equated with “funding the Catholic hierarchy.” The politics of this issue have been changed by the facts on the ground: what had once been Catholic “special-pleading” now is an increasingly united religious front.
This, of course, is to say that religionists in America now experience an alienation from “the American Way” which once was experienced primarily by Roman Catholics. How ironic, when we consider that Justice Brennan once wrote that “the Establishment Clause seeks that…no American should at any point feel alienated from his government because that government has declared or acted upon some ‘official’ or ‘authorized’ point of view on a matter of religion.”
Traditional conservatives have never made economics a principal area of inquiry. They have taken private property, market exchange, and the price mechanism all as something more or less natural, which is to say traditional, believing with Samuel Johnson that a man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is making money. But they have advanced no particular doctrinal commitments, and they are sensitive to the artificial abstractions of modern corporate capitalism. During the second half of the twentieth century, traditional conservatives did oppose socialism, the growth of the welfare state, and most government regulation of the economy – but they did not necessarily do so for reasons of classical liberal political economy. Their primary concern was with the culture of socialism or of welfarism. In a similar way, many traditional conservatives today have begun to voice reservations about the culture of globalizing capitalism. Two cheers for capitalism is about right.
The economic theorist with the greatest appeal to the traditionalist conservatives has been Wilhelm Roepke, one of the founders of the classically liberal Mont Pelerin Society. A German-Swiss Protestant, Roepke’s work proceeded in dialogue with the Catholic social thought tradition, especially the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno. While fundamentally a defender of the free market, Roepke nonetheless embraced talk of a “third way” between socialism and capitalism. He warned of a kind of consumer materialism and social anomie arising from the totalizing reach of market logic. He thus emphasized the need to embed the market amidst strong social institutions and structures – boxing in liberalism in its economic dimension. Switzerland’s well-ordered and often proprietary haute bourgeois economy served as a model for Roepke.
To box in the market would mean, first of all, to recognize that there are some things which should not be bought or sold because to do so would directly violate human dignity or the common good. Thus, drugs, pornography, and prostitution are appropriately controlled. So too, perhaps, various biotechnologies. In a more speculative mode, religious traditionalists even raise questions about nursing homes and day care: ought care to be placed “on the market?” To embed market logic within a strong social setting also means to recognize man as something more than a consumer. Thus, no one would disagree that Wal*Mart and free trade spell lower prices and often greater choice for Americans as consumers. But, to take the case of Wal*Mart, is there not something lost, some kind of social capital, when the proprietors of a small town’s chamber of commerce are “converted” into corporate employees – even if, as managers, they may earn a higher wage?
The limited liability corporation, of course, is one of the engines for economic growth in the modern world, a true prodigy of productivity. But is it not also something highly unnatural, which exists at all only because it is artificially chartered and regulated by government? There are no corporations in nature: they are fictitious legal persons. Unlike natural persons, they never grow old – which condition often limits a proprietor’s access to new long-term capital – and they never die – which condition exacts from proprietary families a sizeable chunk of capital in inheritance tax. Proprietors may be motivated in their decisions by something beyond economic returns: by honorable standing or gratitude in the community of his economic activity. Corporate management violates its fiduciary obligation to shareholders when it takes such matters into consideration. An economy dominated by the corporate form would seem to make all holders of capital into a version of the absentee landlords of old. What is more, the corporation is evidently more susceptible to implementing “political correct” policies, whereas proprietary concerns often exhibit more traditional domestic moral concerns. Withal, traditionalist conservatives have often written in favor of a widespread distribution of productive capital, and in favor of relatively smaller units of economic production.
One last example further illustrates the traditionalists’ approach to economic matters. In recent years, some traditionalists have expressed enthusiasm for the so-called New Urbanism, an approach to zoning codes and town planning that seeks to re-create the design principles of older communities, the classic American small towns which grew up before the age of the automobile. Libertarians see “traditional neighborhood development” ordinances as an infringement upon the operation of the free market. Often, libertarians champion suburban sprawl as “what Americans want” (although a plurality of Americans, when polled, indicate that the ideal place to live is a small town, not a suburb). The New Urbanists have brought to light the many ways in which government has either mandated or else abetted “sprawl”: this social form is far from a simple product of the neutral operation of a free market. In short, the question is not whether markets will be regulated; the question is what values shall structure that regulation.
The first conservative literature on foreign affairs emerged from the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. On the one hand, Burke can only be called an extremist in his rhetorically charged calls for Britain to destroy the Revolution altogether and to restore the French ancien regime in every jot and tittle. On the other hand, we find, particularly among continental conservatives, numerous attempts to defend “variety” in regimes, with Joseph de Maistre, for example, going so far as to describe each nation as willed by God in its particularity, each people (defined, for Maistre, linguistically and historically) possessing a particular Providential mission. Consequently, continental conservatives sought to restore the traditional European balance of power. Faced with the ideological claims of a kind of political religion, the traditional conservative responds with vigorous action; but the conservative also knows that a society “mobilized” for foreign wars exacts a toll on domestic social structures that cannot easily be remedied. Because both Britain and America are “islands,” they have been blessed historically not to need large standing armies, with the state aggrandizement that these entail.
In the years immediately following victory in the Second World War, American conservatives led by Senator Robert Taft originally clamored to “bring the boys home,” whereas it was liberal Democrats who seemed intent to continue America’s global role. But minds were changed by growing awareness of the threat of Soviet Communism. Communism was a universalist secular religion, a revolutionary movement recognizing no national boundaries. It was only the emergency of Communism that convinced the majority of traditional conservatives that a highly interventionist foreign policy was required. Having become convinced, they were usually among the most hawkish of Cold Warriors.
During the “roaring nineties,” the feel-good Clinton years of splendid irresponsibility, however, traditional conservatives were nearly united in their opposition to the wars for human rights in the Balkans, considering that these military actions served no national interest. The presence of evil is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the use of force. Traditional conservatives applauded President Bush’s 2000 election rhetoric about a “humble” America in world affairs. They applauded the withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty, which had, of course, never been presented to the Senate for ratification: it was interpreted a signal that a “return to normalcy” was on the cards, following the long Executive aggrandizement of the Cold War. Withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and development of missile defense seemed an admirably prudent long-term investment in national security.
And then came 9/11/01. Traditional conservatives were again virtually united on the need to “take the fight” to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But opinion became divided on the further military engagement in Iraq. Not least problematic was that insofar as many traditionalists were religious believers, the Iraq war lacked an evident causus belli – an elementary requirement of just war doctrine. (And indeed, the pre-emption doctrine articulated as America’s official national strategy seems, at the level of theory at least, impossible to square with even quite permissive readings of the just war tradition.) Most were nonetheless willing to support the war on the basis of the “clear and present danger” presented by weapons of mass destruction. Thus, the Bush administration’s failure to discover such weapons in Iraq has proven a considerable blow.
Traditional conservative confidence in the Iraq policy has not been helped by the Bush administration’s ever-more-complete embrace of muscular Wilsonian rhetoric as the justification for American action. Woodrow Wilson is not a conservative icon. Sensitive to historical limitations and understanding liberal institutions as dependent upon pre-existing forms of social and cultural capital which are not present in Arab societies, traditionalists do not believe that “democracy” – which is to say, secular constitutional liberalism – is easily exported there. This is not to say that traditionalists do not take pride in America’s having rid the world of Saddam Hussein’s odious regime, nor does this mean that they now wish to cut our losses and withdraw. To abandon those Iraqis who have – at considerable risk to themselves – put their trust in us would be dishonorable in the extreme. To retreat, moreover, may well prove worse for American security in the long run. One hopes in any event that the administration is now studying the (negative) lessons of an earlier dishonorable American experience – that of Vietnamization. The dishonor there was not in turning the Republic of (South) Vietnam over to the Vietnamese. The dishonor was in not fulfilling our promise of continuing military support for that fledgling nation when confronted with a North Vietnamese armored invasion.
The Wilsonian rhetoric of the Bush administration may reflect a calculation that it is in the nature of American society only to countenance foreign intervention when it is couched in messianic terms. But perhaps it would be easier for an American administration to transform American culture on this point than it is to transform wholesale the cultures of Arab societies far, far away.
The national narratives of most European peoples celebrate their moment of settlement into a particular place, an end to nomadic wandering and the taking up of agriculture (and Christianity). It is striking that Americans celebrate not our settlement, but rather our movement – setting off for the frontier. The liberal narrative of America as a “universal nation” corresponds to this unsettledness: to be a “universal” nation is precisely not to be a nation, a gens. Traditional conservatives have been endeavoring to “settle” America, to celebrate our arrival and not our departure, our actuality and not our potentiality, to bring Americans to see their national experience both as more particular than universal (which is to say, ideological) and as more in continuity with European precedents than in discontinuity. Hence, Russell Kirk’s effort to view the American War of Independence as “a revolution not made but prevented,” and his Eurocentric account of “the roots of American order.”
At this historical moment, with America incontestably the greatest power on earth and with American popular culture driving all before it, such a project of self-limitation may seem a fantasy. And yet it was only yesterday evening, historically speaking, that the sun never set on the British Empire. Today, the captains and the kings have long departed. In the end, it is perhaps that most eccentric of American thinkers, the nineteenth-century Catholic convert Orestes Brownson, who provides us with the intellectual tools for grappling with the American experience. As Peter Augustine Lawler observes in his exceptionally valuable introduction to a new edition of The American Republic, Brownson’s teaching is that the American regime is the greatest political achievement since Rome. But it is not the city laid up in heaven. Like every achievement within the saeculum, its justice is limited and it is mortal. The sun will set too on the era of American exceptionalism. When it does, those who have placed their fondest hopes in the promises of ideological politics may feel themselves dispossessed and demoralized; but those who have hearkened to the teachings of the traditionalists may find themselves, at last, at home.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.2.