Let's start with the definition provided by Conservapedia. Since they exist to recast the history of the whole world from a conservative viewpoint, they must have some insight to offer, how else could they function?
A conservative is one who adheres to principles of limited government, personal responsibility and moral virtue. A conservative would likely agree with the statement in George Washington's Farewell Address that "religion and morality are indispensable supports" to political prosperity.[1] Conservatism arose in the 19th century as a response to liberalism, particularly as manifested in the French Revolution.[2]
Not really satisfactory. Instead of a definition, we get a laundry list that could apply to a lot of people who are not conservative. Liberals believe in limits to government, personal responsibility and being moral/virtuous too. They perhaps define those things differently, but as a definition we are clearly far from getting at the essence of what conservativism is. It is as if we have defined a tiger as "an animal with fur, claws and teeth." Sure, we've narrowed the field a bit, but if you had never seen a tiger, this wouldn't really tell you how to identify one. The other items in that description are really non-sequitur and even less helpful in defining conservativism (and their take on the origins of conservatism is just wrong but too big a digression to address here).
You may accuse me of being facetious or unfair for starting with Conservapedia. Don't worry, we're going to get to some more respected conservative theorists and philosophers, and the problems will be much the same here. What is remarkable is that none of the big brains of the right do any better than Schlafly's minions.
Self described conservative John Dean actually spends some time on the topic of how conservatives have failed to define their beliefs in his 2006 book Conservatives Without Conscience. His findings?
conservativism cannot be meaningfully defined [...] even leading conservative intellectuals acknowledge that trying to define conservativism is a futile and not particularly useful exercise. (p2)
To address their difficulties in reaching a definition, some conservative scholars have tried to explain the problem away like so:
"Leading conservative scholars reject the notion that their thinking or beliefs can be described as an ideology. For conservative scholar Frank Meyer, for example, it is heterodoxy to conclude that the 'American conservative movement' is anything but just that, 'a movement.'" [...] "Similarly, conservative intellectual icon russel Kirk has [...] [refused] to classify conservativism as an ideology. [...] Michael Oakenshott, another prominent conservative political philosopher, has remarked that 'conservativism is not so much an ideology as it is a disposition to enjoy the fruits of the past and to distrust novelty.'" (pp4-5)
You can see Kirk's thoughts online:
Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries.
Not an ideology? Dean again:
[...] asserting that conservativism is not an ideology is, of course, sophistry. (p5)
The recent debate on ideology online should have at least made clear that a defition of "ideology" that excluded conservatism would be patently absurd. Little more than another attempt to coopt "realism" or "pragmatism" as concepts somehow isolated and distinct from foolish ideology and give conservatism a definitional advantage: Conservatives believe in proven ideas, while ideology is about experimenting with untested notions. No, conservatism must be an ideology or the word has no meaning.
Kirk further changes the subject to define conservatives instead of conservatism:
[...] It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such.[...]
In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy "change is the means of our preservation.") A people's historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude.
Without rebuting this in detail, resorting first to a change of subject and then coming up with a self-referential definition should highlight how tricky a problem this has proven for conservative scholars. After all, one can reasonably define Christianity without worrying about who Christians are. Even if your definition of Christianity is self-serving, you at least have one.
It turns out the notion that conservatism is not an ideology is not widely accepted among conservative thinkers, Dean again:
National Review, The American Spectator, Human Events, The Weekly Standard and the American Conservative have all called conservativism an ideology. (p6)
The picture so far is that conservatives know that conservatism is difficult to define. They tried to hand-wave that away, but found that effort not satisfactory. So they are forced to accept that some definition must exist, and look for it. What did they find?
Goldwater via Dean:
Goldwater's refined definition from The Conscience of a Majority (1970) "the solution to the problems of today can be found in the proven values of the past." (p17)
Which values? How were they "proven"? And what are the "problems of today"? Goldwater has simply dodged the question. Even in 1970 this definition is poor. By 1970, Social Security had been operating successfully for 35 years. How is it not a "proven value of the past" then? How old does the proof have to be before conservatives would accept the New Deal and adopt it into conservatism? If that isn't an old enough example, 1970s conservatives were still battling the Declaration of Independence:
"[George H.] Nash admits that the Declaration was 'troublesome' for the early conservatives, and reports that one scholar suggested conservatives should claim that, in fact, the Declaration's egalitarian ethos had not been carried over to the Constitution; rather, that the Declaration was just that, a declaration and not a governing document." (p13)
Any claim that conservatism is about using well established ideas and rejecting new and untried things is problematic. Contemporary and past conservatives have been battling some ideas that are centuries old for a very long time with no signs of stopping.
The efforts to define it only get worse:
Jonah Goldberg "has acknowledged the contradictions within modern conservativism. [...] 'The beauty of the conservative movement is that we all understand and accept the permanence of contradiction [in thinking]' (p28)
Horowitz says "conservativism [is] an attitude about the lessons of the actual past. By contrast, the attention of progressives [is] directed toward an imagined future. Conservativism [is] an attitude of caution based on a strong sense of human limits and what politics [can] accomplish" (p34)
Safire admits he has five different republican "factions" in his head and admits it causes him "cognitive dissonance" and says he experiences "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.' (p19)
Even the vaunted Buckley provides no relief:
National review editor Johan Goldberg hinted that Buckley has made a career of looking for a definition of conservativism but has not really succeeded (p3)
Where does this leave us? If you are looking for conservatives to tell you what conservatism is, you will evidently be waiting a long time. They either don't know, or don't like the answers they find and search vainly for more flattering answers. While the former is perhaps the answer conservatives would prefer as an explanation, it is not really reassuring. Some may be tempted to resort to tu quoque and claim that liberalism has the same definitional problems.
Firstly, I don't think that's true. However since I am not attempting to spell out that definition here, let's assume it is for sake of argument. Aside from the weakness of dodging the issue through an ad hominem argument (you are no less a criminal if another thief points out your crimes), it is a bigger problem for conservatism to lack a definition than liberalism. Conservatives believe in rigorous, bright line black and white thinking. They reject relativism and other forms of "mushy" distinctions. Thus, if they accept that conservativsm has no coherent definition, they are adopting a liberal intellectual stance to resolve this. Liberalism accepts quandaries, paradoxes and no-right-answer scenarios. Liberalism may not have a coherent definition either, but then, liberalism may not even require that it does. Are conservatives really going to seek refuge in post-modernism? How Zen. Finally, since conservatives are so convinced they have the superior methodology and proven ideas, it should worry them that even they are unable to explain what the method really is or which ideas were proven. This may leave them no-worse than liberalism, but open to attack from Marxists or even Objectivists who have no problem defining what they believe in a finite space.
If we want answers about what conservativism is, we will have to look elsewhere. I hope to shed some light on this, and also address what I think Liberalism is really about too. |
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