In my view (hastily assembled) conservatism is the preservation of a shared and workable reality brought about by preferring the long established status quo to any alternative until the evidence in favour of the alternative is overwhelming. What marks current progressiveness is that it seeks to abolish every part of the long established status quo (to which the plebs to a greater or lesser extent still cleave) via a utopian vision which requires in the progressive mind a complete abandonment of objective standards , evidence based decision making and delimiting principles.
The BBC (for example) doesn't really have to change its politics, it simply needs to apply rigorous evidential standards to all claims e..g. without preconception what is the evidence for systemic racism (duly defined) and is there also evidence that this explains differential outcomes amongst groups, or without preconception what is the evidence for a gender identity etc.
Much could be achieved by the reassertion of rigorous scientific method alone.
As an urban loving conservative who eagerly embraces bicycle lanes and saving the songbirds and tree canopy, it can be quite lonely since the rules of American politics are quite clear urban lovers must be wacko left wing progressives electing politicians who refuse to arrest people for murders and crime. Oh well.
There is clearly an inherent tension in the modern world - you need conservative love and respect for tradition, order and beauty to create the great places, which in turn become dominated by the progressive lefts who do everything they can to change that place into something unlovable. See San Francisco as a great example. And the slow decline of national character in the western countries is surely changing them into something not so special any more.
Ed, I'd agree with you that all great nations and great places need a bit of mythology. When that mythology is destroyed, belief in the sacredness of the great entity will quickly disappear, and then that entity itself will also fade away. Conservatives instinctively understand this and the need to protect that mythology, warts and all, because the mythology often brings out the best in people. America is in a dangerous tipping point. Till fairly recently, American history was taught and embraced as a great mythology that brought tremendous good in terms of freedom and liberty and uplifting people, and yes, sure, there were a few warts (slavery, Indians etc) but we're working on reconciling those because the overall mythology is still great. But now? American history is taught in schools as deeply flawed and even evil, the history of an oppressor who brought no good. Some recent poll showed 40% of school kids thought the founding fathers did more bad than good. The Democratic party has now substantially retreated from a firm commitment in the sacredness of key principles like freedom of speech or press. If belief in the sanctity of the American mythology disappears, so will the United States at some point because the drive to hold the country together will no longer be there. And what replaces it or what it evolves into will not likely be as great as what it was.
That is what conservatives understand. Progressives do not.
Amazing piece Ed, really dug this one. Brings to mind one of my favorite Twitter threads which, in spite of being written by some random anime-guy anon, has shaped my view of what the Left and Right (the thread goes a layer or two deeper than Progressive and Conservative) are, and nicely tells why there are a zillion completely different Rightisms but the various flavors of Leftism are all fundamentally the same. Also worth reading just for the pointlessly-mean-yet-funny, out-of-nowhere potshot at Libertarianism: https://twitter.com/risc_mc/status/1386063035937148928
I suspect that any National Conservative movement that got going would indeed struggle to reconcile different views on economic policy - big state vs small state, etc. But I wonder how many potential supporters really want to delve into the nuances there, or place it at the top of their priority list? Right now, I'd vote for *any* party that had a genuine cultural conservative agenda - end mass immigration, restore strong national institutions, take law and order seriously, etc. I wonder how unusual that makes me - does the average voter care more about the running of the economy than the dismantling of their patrimony? For a long time politics has felt like nothing more than economic arguments, but is that changing now? Will be interesting to find out. In any case, I wish the conference, and you Ed with your contribution to it, every success - will be following with interest!
Excellent piece, but Nick Cohen does have a point when he asks "who, after National Socialism, would find the term 'National Conservatism' unproblematic?"
Great piece. This is my favorite comment regarding conservatism "If something works, don’t throw it away." Although you wouldn't know it from our media, we live in the best world to have existed so far, life expectancy, prosperity, freedom, low levels of violence, etc. The left wants to fundamentally transform (Obama's famous phrase), the right wants to allow incremental improvements.
I've really been struggling with this, and coming from a Austrian economics/libertarian tradition, illiberalism still makes my brain hurt. The libertarian answer to anything is "more markets", which is what finally drove me away. I found myself more interested in the artificial, utility maximizing, rational, Lockean, "homo economicus" model of man than I was in the real flesh and blood, sinful, faulty, fellow creatures of homo sapiens.
We conservatives have confused means and ends. The market and capitalism are only good to the extent that they promote human flourishing and material prosperity. As JPII says, "man was not made for the market; the market was made for man." It appears a significant part of the GOP now agrees with this sentiment. So what do we do with it?
Enlightenment Liberalism is procedural; it cares more about "how" (democracy or markets) than "what" (human success). Maybe it's time for abstract procedural principles to give way to a decision about what is good and worth conserving. The Left has certainly done this; they posit a world of oppressor (bad) and oppressed (good) and they institutionally reward the former and punish the latter. We on the right see this as cynical -- "woke corporate HR departments are just jobs programs for useless gender studies majors" -- but what if we're the cynical ones, and they are the idealists trying to make the world "better" (by their definition.) Their goal isn't to implement procedural justice ("I detest what you say but defend your right to say it"). They're answering the first question of the Westminster Catechism: "what is the chief and highest end of man?" They're defining "good" and acting to defend it.
What does a illiberal conservatism look like? We must articulate answers the big questions: "what is good" and "what is man". Those answers certainly should be guided by the past (as Burke would say, tradition is simply the distilled wisdom of centuries) but in a post-Christian America, where most of what was worth conserving has already been lost, the answers need to be meaningful today. Like the Left, we must abandon our focus on procedural justice and instead defend what we consider self-evidently good using whatever tools and power we can muster. Then we hope that others gravitate to our definition. In practice, that means using the power of the state (the only institution we reasonably can gain control over) to hurt our Leftist enemies, and not just metaphorically. I mean economically isolating them, denying them political access, even imprisoning them. I'm guessing most readers here are instinctively repulsed by those words. I am. That's our leftover Lockean proceduralism, and it's useless in today's political reality. Screw politeness and evenhandedness and uniform standards -- we're fighting evil! Talk about illiberal... and dangerous.
Which is where I have problems. Despite my words, I hate the idea of abandoning my procedural principles, but we can't fight a theological conflict using procedural methods. Does that really mean abandoning proceduralism completely? And how do you avoid slipping into tyranny if you do? Have I just talked myself into joining Sohrab Amari and the integralists? If we're pulling up our Lockean anchor, where are we putting down a new one? Or is there a stable sea of policies that promote the common good where an equilibrium can be found without a philosophical anchor? I honestly don't know the answers to these, and I'm hoping others have thought about them and can help.
Sorry for the long comment, but Ed is talking about something so important here, and I think I'm not the only one struggling with this.
Pessimistic as you are, you may still be underestimating how much of this, all this, is the result of monumental technological, economic and social changes for which there is no turning back.
Gertrude Stein famously claimed America was “now” the oldest country in the world, in large part, because it was the first to enter the 20th Century. What if much of what its experiencing in 2023 is less a unique (and uniquely bad) response to its particular history and problems and simply a variant of what’s coming for the rest of the West?
The very notion of pernicious “ideas” may rest on increasingly anachronistic assumptions about the rigor with which people organize, understand & justify their beliefs in 2023 and the extent to which elites (or simply anyone paying attention) can supervise or even monitor their spread.
Have no fear, I’ll refrain from quoting Yeat’s ‘The Second Coming’ at this point.
I hear a lot of laments about the decline of Christianity and if we were living in 1840 I'd be with you. But Darwin happened and the evidence swung from it being likely that God exists to it being unlikely and nothing will take us back to that previous state of affairs (unless, of course, you are willing to lie to yourself, in which case anything is possible).
What is needed is the establishment of a moral framework not reliant on the existence of God and the truth of the Bible. The New Atheists thought that rationality and respect for the individual (the latter allegedly part of our genetic inheritance and thus axiomatic) could get us most of the way. That was until Tom Holland pointed out that in the West our moral axioms and intuitions are almost certainly Christian, not biological, in origin and that there is nothing inherently rational about giving a toss about the welfare of unrelated others.
Matthew Arnold thought that art and lit could perhaps fill the God-shaped hole while Roger Scruton thought beauty might do the job. I like the latter's idea of a sense of 'home'. A sense of home and being where you belong is perhaps as close as an intellectually honest modern can get to that warm feeling religion brings...Sorry, I'm riffing to myself here.
Come on Ed, surely conservatives can do better than believe that in the absence of organised religion a country is likely to go to hell in a handcart? Surely the evidence is totally the opposite. Look at countries with the lowest belief in God like Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and Japan. Lovely civilised places to live with very moral people and very high social trust. Compare and contrast with Iran, Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, Christian countries with higher levels of belief in Europe like Poland.
What is Pabst talking about when he denies any biblical support for the nation? It's not like the family, part of the created order. But doesn't the fact that God used a particular people, Israel, as a vehicle for his revelation in the OT give the nation some legitimacy? Also check out Genesis 32v8, 'When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples etc.' Doesn't that suggest, along with the regular judgements in the OT against particular nations, eg Isaiah 10 v5, 'Woe to the Assyrian,' that people groups and nations are an assumed and legitimate part of historical and providential reality? Of course nations are constructs which can change and decay and even cease but they are meaningful, and they should matter if we want to have societies where people are citizens and not just consumers and where a passport is more than a credit card. Why do dysfunctional liberals hate the nation? Wasn't Mandela head of the African National Congress? Didn't Byron die for Greece? Should Poland, Italy, Hungary etc return to Impe
I'm always looking for a simplification of ideas that are too complicated for me to visualise all at once; a sort of E=MC² of politics. A few days ago I heard Konstantin Kisin say he'd be a progressive in Russia because so much there needs to change, and a conservative in Britain, where things are more right than wrong, despite what some foolish progressives might believe. I liked that idea. Then whether you call yourself a conservative or a progressive depends on where you happen to be. But then again, perhaps that idea itself is a rather conservative one i.e. going with what works rather than sticking ridgedly to your ideological principles.
Another beautifully written piece.
In my view (hastily assembled) conservatism is the preservation of a shared and workable reality brought about by preferring the long established status quo to any alternative until the evidence in favour of the alternative is overwhelming. What marks current progressiveness is that it seeks to abolish every part of the long established status quo (to which the plebs to a greater or lesser extent still cleave) via a utopian vision which requires in the progressive mind a complete abandonment of objective standards , evidence based decision making and delimiting principles.
The BBC (for example) doesn't really have to change its politics, it simply needs to apply rigorous evidential standards to all claims e..g. without preconception what is the evidence for systemic racism (duly defined) and is there also evidence that this explains differential outcomes amongst groups, or without preconception what is the evidence for a gender identity etc.
Much could be achieved by the reassertion of rigorous scientific method alone.
As an urban loving conservative who eagerly embraces bicycle lanes and saving the songbirds and tree canopy, it can be quite lonely since the rules of American politics are quite clear urban lovers must be wacko left wing progressives electing politicians who refuse to arrest people for murders and crime. Oh well.
There is clearly an inherent tension in the modern world - you need conservative love and respect for tradition, order and beauty to create the great places, which in turn become dominated by the progressive lefts who do everything they can to change that place into something unlovable. See San Francisco as a great example. And the slow decline of national character in the western countries is surely changing them into something not so special any more.
Ed, I'd agree with you that all great nations and great places need a bit of mythology. When that mythology is destroyed, belief in the sacredness of the great entity will quickly disappear, and then that entity itself will also fade away. Conservatives instinctively understand this and the need to protect that mythology, warts and all, because the mythology often brings out the best in people. America is in a dangerous tipping point. Till fairly recently, American history was taught and embraced as a great mythology that brought tremendous good in terms of freedom and liberty and uplifting people, and yes, sure, there were a few warts (slavery, Indians etc) but we're working on reconciling those because the overall mythology is still great. But now? American history is taught in schools as deeply flawed and even evil, the history of an oppressor who brought no good. Some recent poll showed 40% of school kids thought the founding fathers did more bad than good. The Democratic party has now substantially retreated from a firm commitment in the sacredness of key principles like freedom of speech or press. If belief in the sanctity of the American mythology disappears, so will the United States at some point because the drive to hold the country together will no longer be there. And what replaces it or what it evolves into will not likely be as great as what it was.
That is what conservatives understand. Progressives do not.
Amazing piece Ed, really dug this one. Brings to mind one of my favorite Twitter threads which, in spite of being written by some random anime-guy anon, has shaped my view of what the Left and Right (the thread goes a layer or two deeper than Progressive and Conservative) are, and nicely tells why there are a zillion completely different Rightisms but the various flavors of Leftism are all fundamentally the same. Also worth reading just for the pointlessly-mean-yet-funny, out-of-nowhere potshot at Libertarianism: https://twitter.com/risc_mc/status/1386063035937148928
In a similar vein: https://twitter.com/StoopToRise/status/1386707099347046407
If you ever come to Huntsville, AL we can set you up with chainsaws and AR-15s.
"which, for want of a better word, is how I describe the modern Left’s worldview"
Wesley Yang coined the term "Successor Ideology" which I though captured the underlying aim of progressive thought: to stamp out the deplorables.
I suspect that any National Conservative movement that got going would indeed struggle to reconcile different views on economic policy - big state vs small state, etc. But I wonder how many potential supporters really want to delve into the nuances there, or place it at the top of their priority list? Right now, I'd vote for *any* party that had a genuine cultural conservative agenda - end mass immigration, restore strong national institutions, take law and order seriously, etc. I wonder how unusual that makes me - does the average voter care more about the running of the economy than the dismantling of their patrimony? For a long time politics has felt like nothing more than economic arguments, but is that changing now? Will be interesting to find out. In any case, I wish the conference, and you Ed with your contribution to it, every success - will be following with interest!
Excellent piece, but Nick Cohen does have a point when he asks "who, after National Socialism, would find the term 'National Conservatism' unproblematic?"
Great article.
Also Ed one more thing and the I promise I'll shut up until the next comment section: I was happy to see you mention post-Protestantism in this thread because I just got this in the mail yesterady. Have you ever read it? https://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Age-Post-Protestant-Spirit-America/dp/0385518811
Great piece. This is my favorite comment regarding conservatism "If something works, don’t throw it away." Although you wouldn't know it from our media, we live in the best world to have existed so far, life expectancy, prosperity, freedom, low levels of violence, etc. The left wants to fundamentally transform (Obama's famous phrase), the right wants to allow incremental improvements.
I've really been struggling with this, and coming from a Austrian economics/libertarian tradition, illiberalism still makes my brain hurt. The libertarian answer to anything is "more markets", which is what finally drove me away. I found myself more interested in the artificial, utility maximizing, rational, Lockean, "homo economicus" model of man than I was in the real flesh and blood, sinful, faulty, fellow creatures of homo sapiens.
We conservatives have confused means and ends. The market and capitalism are only good to the extent that they promote human flourishing and material prosperity. As JPII says, "man was not made for the market; the market was made for man." It appears a significant part of the GOP now agrees with this sentiment. So what do we do with it?
Enlightenment Liberalism is procedural; it cares more about "how" (democracy or markets) than "what" (human success). Maybe it's time for abstract procedural principles to give way to a decision about what is good and worth conserving. The Left has certainly done this; they posit a world of oppressor (bad) and oppressed (good) and they institutionally reward the former and punish the latter. We on the right see this as cynical -- "woke corporate HR departments are just jobs programs for useless gender studies majors" -- but what if we're the cynical ones, and they are the idealists trying to make the world "better" (by their definition.) Their goal isn't to implement procedural justice ("I detest what you say but defend your right to say it"). They're answering the first question of the Westminster Catechism: "what is the chief and highest end of man?" They're defining "good" and acting to defend it.
What does a illiberal conservatism look like? We must articulate answers the big questions: "what is good" and "what is man". Those answers certainly should be guided by the past (as Burke would say, tradition is simply the distilled wisdom of centuries) but in a post-Christian America, where most of what was worth conserving has already been lost, the answers need to be meaningful today. Like the Left, we must abandon our focus on procedural justice and instead defend what we consider self-evidently good using whatever tools and power we can muster. Then we hope that others gravitate to our definition. In practice, that means using the power of the state (the only institution we reasonably can gain control over) to hurt our Leftist enemies, and not just metaphorically. I mean economically isolating them, denying them political access, even imprisoning them. I'm guessing most readers here are instinctively repulsed by those words. I am. That's our leftover Lockean proceduralism, and it's useless in today's political reality. Screw politeness and evenhandedness and uniform standards -- we're fighting evil! Talk about illiberal... and dangerous.
Which is where I have problems. Despite my words, I hate the idea of abandoning my procedural principles, but we can't fight a theological conflict using procedural methods. Does that really mean abandoning proceduralism completely? And how do you avoid slipping into tyranny if you do? Have I just talked myself into joining Sohrab Amari and the integralists? If we're pulling up our Lockean anchor, where are we putting down a new one? Or is there a stable sea of policies that promote the common good where an equilibrium can be found without a philosophical anchor? I honestly don't know the answers to these, and I'm hoping others have thought about them and can help.
Sorry for the long comment, but Ed is talking about something so important here, and I think I'm not the only one struggling with this.
Pessimistic as you are, you may still be underestimating how much of this, all this, is the result of monumental technological, economic and social changes for which there is no turning back.
Gertrude Stein famously claimed America was “now” the oldest country in the world, in large part, because it was the first to enter the 20th Century. What if much of what its experiencing in 2023 is less a unique (and uniquely bad) response to its particular history and problems and simply a variant of what’s coming for the rest of the West?
The very notion of pernicious “ideas” may rest on increasingly anachronistic assumptions about the rigor with which people organize, understand & justify their beliefs in 2023 and the extent to which elites (or simply anyone paying attention) can supervise or even monitor their spread.
Have no fear, I’ll refrain from quoting Yeat’s ‘The Second Coming’ at this point.
I hear a lot of laments about the decline of Christianity and if we were living in 1840 I'd be with you. But Darwin happened and the evidence swung from it being likely that God exists to it being unlikely and nothing will take us back to that previous state of affairs (unless, of course, you are willing to lie to yourself, in which case anything is possible).
What is needed is the establishment of a moral framework not reliant on the existence of God and the truth of the Bible. The New Atheists thought that rationality and respect for the individual (the latter allegedly part of our genetic inheritance and thus axiomatic) could get us most of the way. That was until Tom Holland pointed out that in the West our moral axioms and intuitions are almost certainly Christian, not biological, in origin and that there is nothing inherently rational about giving a toss about the welfare of unrelated others.
Matthew Arnold thought that art and lit could perhaps fill the God-shaped hole while Roger Scruton thought beauty might do the job. I like the latter's idea of a sense of 'home'. A sense of home and being where you belong is perhaps as close as an intellectually honest modern can get to that warm feeling religion brings...Sorry, I'm riffing to myself here.
Come on Ed, surely conservatives can do better than believe that in the absence of organised religion a country is likely to go to hell in a handcart? Surely the evidence is totally the opposite. Look at countries with the lowest belief in God like Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland and Japan. Lovely civilised places to live with very moral people and very high social trust. Compare and contrast with Iran, Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, Christian countries with higher levels of belief in Europe like Poland.
What is Pabst talking about when he denies any biblical support for the nation? It's not like the family, part of the created order. But doesn't the fact that God used a particular people, Israel, as a vehicle for his revelation in the OT give the nation some legitimacy? Also check out Genesis 32v8, 'When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples etc.' Doesn't that suggest, along with the regular judgements in the OT against particular nations, eg Isaiah 10 v5, 'Woe to the Assyrian,' that people groups and nations are an assumed and legitimate part of historical and providential reality? Of course nations are constructs which can change and decay and even cease but they are meaningful, and they should matter if we want to have societies where people are citizens and not just consumers and where a passport is more than a credit card. Why do dysfunctional liberals hate the nation? Wasn't Mandela head of the African National Congress? Didn't Byron die for Greece? Should Poland, Italy, Hungary etc return to Impe
I'm always looking for a simplification of ideas that are too complicated for me to visualise all at once; a sort of E=MC² of politics. A few days ago I heard Konstantin Kisin say he'd be a progressive in Russia because so much there needs to change, and a conservative in Britain, where things are more right than wrong, despite what some foolish progressives might believe. I liked that idea. Then whether you call yourself a conservative or a progressive depends on where you happen to be. But then again, perhaps that idea itself is a rather conservative one i.e. going with what works rather than sticking ridgedly to your ideological principles.