Conservatism Is Not a Thing in the USA

Many like to think of themselves as "conservatives" in the US. But there really is no such thing. Why not? And what is conservatism, really?

American Progress, John Gast, 1872

62. Conservatism Is Not a Thing in the USA

Many like to think of themselves as conservatives, but for the most part, they are not. This will come as a shock to many who think of themselves as “right wing” or “conservative.” It is important for us to understand this, to recognize the degree to which all of us have been influenced by liberalism, to understand that liberalism is the default setting of our culture, and of much or our thinking and habits as so-called conservatives. All of our core civilizational myths are liberal. The main frame with which we look at every problem is through the lens of liberalism. Our whole system of thought is built around and upon liberal ideas. Liberal notions of law. Liberal notions of governance, that is, liberal democracy and the marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of ideas is simply liberal free market economics and the notions of freely entered into contracts applied to models of governance. You manage the country the way you manage the market, through discussion, negotiation, and compromise.

We generally tend to think of those who wish to recover older forms of liberty, or who champion the free market against socialism as “conservatives,” but when you bore down into the root ideas that drive the many streams of thinking in our culture from the free marketers, to those who are constitutional originalists, to those who are among the Marxist progressives, they all share the same set of root beliefs, the same “myths.” Much of the the thinking in the west is built around the big idea of “Human Progress.” In many ways, the debates we have are all centered around how best to achieve this one foundational idea.

There is the desire for scientific progress, to make new discoveries in knowledge. There is the desire to make advances in medicine and health. New surgical techniques. New drug therapies. Advances in diagnostic tools and methodologies. New medical devices. We strive for general technical advances in all things. Cars. Consumer devices like computers, smart phones, robotics and the like. We want economic progress, this idea that through the exercise of the free market expanded everywhere that we can bring ever higher levels of prosperity to ever greater numbers of people. Also, we can make social progress, ending poverty, inequality, and racism. In every aspect of our lives and society we expect to be making progress, to always be growing, always getting better, always achieving more, always moving forward.

One of our favorite authors here, Jacques Ellul, makes this observation about our culture:

“These common presuppositions of bourgeois and proletarian are that man’s aim in life is happiness, that man is basically good, that history develops in endless progress, and that everything is matter.”

Many of our political battles center around how best to achieve progress. Many frame the battle over “wokeness” in this way, accusing the “woke” of essentially corrupting and derailing the American project. What is that project? Essentially, it is the unfolding of endless progress. Those opposed to the woke accuse them of corrupting the essence of American progress and greatness by trying to bring equality for all through the managerial process. They argue that we cannot achieve American greatness without accepting that there are inequalities. If we could just get these administrative mechanisms off our back, free the best and the brightest to do their thing, and allow the market to work its magic without restraint or limits, we could once again achieve the kinds of heights we all dream are possible for our great nation. We have come to call these folks “conservative” because their arguments are generally framed in terms of recovering the original intent of the Founders and Framers for limited government. But we should more correctly think of them as the economic wing of liberalism.

On the other side of the debate are those who have embraced the notion that through education and the application of science to society that we can then engineer the social conditions such that we can achieve a society without social problems. We can overcome poverty, inequality, racism and the like. Many focus on the Marxist analysis of critical theory to argue that this is a corruption of western, specifically American values. But it must be remembered that Marx’s philosophy was centered around the movement of history towards its final end. The dialectical process would result in the fulfillment of human progress, ushered in by capitalism collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Critical theory is merely the pretense to justify technical management of social processes. This is where all the work is done. The critical theory rationales are in some way a distraction from seeing that at their heart, the idea of social management, the social wing of liberalism, is looking to achieve the same goals as those of the of the economic wing of liberalism but by different means.

Both social liberalism and economic liberalism require that we apply technical methods to organize our society. Businesses need to be managed. There is a need for infrastructure like roads, power and communication networks. Then there are the structures of law and adjudication that allow the smooth working of business relationships. There is all the background work managing currency and equities. And peaceful economic relations are backed by military power, creating a relatively stable global economic order. Economic liberalism needs the cooperation of the state as much as social liberalism needs the administrative power of state agencies and law backed by the courts and the police. Both are parts of the outworking of the same general cultural mythology and impulses. Part of why the culture war struggles to gain traction is that on the main, the dominant political parties share the same goals.

“[because of the myth of Progress, propaganda] must be associated with all economic, administrative, political and educational development…thus…the general trend toward socialization can neither be questioned nor overridden. The political left is respectable; the Right has to justify itself before the ideology of the Left (in which the Rightists participate). All propaganda must contain and evoke the principle elements of the ideology of the Left in order to be successful.”

Ask yourself, if business and the free market are “conservative,” why is “woke capital” at thing? The truth is that business and the market economy were never conservative. The push of the market is always to create ever more consumers, to continually atomize us further and further. “Creative destruction” is an essential component of economics. The old must be broken down for the new. Things are not made to be repaired and maintained for generations. They have planned obsolesce dates, after which they break down and need to be replaced for a model that is “new and improved.”

Stock ownership severs the ties between the owner and the business, the business and its employees, and the community and the moral and social obligations that exist between, owner, employee, customer and the community. Look at the words and the phraseology of our society:

• New and improved

• Updated

• Push forward

• Innovate

• Adaptive

• Forward thinking

• Relevant

• Growth

• Productivity increases

• Expansion

• New markets

When was the last time you saw a product being sold because of its “tried and true” design. Or, that if you buy this and maintain it properly, it will last for generations. There is the saying that if you are not moving forward you are falling behind or going backwards. There is this constant desire for forward momentum. Even our politics is described in terms of motion and directionality. All political currents are described as “movements.” The idea of a “conservative movement” is an oxymoron, essentially betraying that conservatism itself must become “progressive” in order to be acceptable to the broader culture. We find the idea of “stasis” almost so alien as to be abhorrent. Such a thing in our mind is not possible.

Why is Conquest’s Law a thing? Why is it so hard for institutions in our society to resist the pull of liberalism? If your organization was conceived, planned for, founded and established, taking a set of concepts and ideas that were then instantiated using a set of structures and polices as determined in the plan, your institution is built using the basic ideas of technique and technical management. Your organization may be small and the techniques simple, but if you are using computer systems, policy manuals, quality controls, and so forth, your organization is essentially running using the liberal operating system.

Everything is always impelled towards innovation, growth, productivity increases and the like. A steady consistent profit year after year is thought of as insufficient. Your business must grow. The economy must grow. You must innovate. You must increase productivity. You must increase efficiency. We must always be looking for growth opportunities. Everything must be better, faster, more powerful. But why? There is not real logic for it. Shrinking does seem bad, somehow. But achieving balance or stasis does not seem to be a goal. If you are not going forwards, you are moving backwards.

If there are tugs towards the conservative, to traditional values, to preserving what is, they always run counter to the grand movement of our society. As long as concerted efforts are made to preserve what is, this natural progressive impulse of technical administration can be resisted. But as soon as you are not intentionally and forthrightly conservative, this leftward impulse will begin to assert itself. It is born out of the desire to improve the way things are done through the use of abstraction and rationalization. What is organic, embedded, cultural and social, is examined, broken down, systematized and developed into processes that both produce better, more consistent results, but also allow you to build organizations, whether these are businesses, government or non-profits at much greater scale, efficiency and consistency. This process of abstraction and systemization, whether it is the development of a constitutional framework, a policy manual for your church, a logistics system, or accounting software, is always breaking down what is traditional, those things which are held collectively in the memory of persons and community, for the power that abstract rationalized systems give us. It is this process of breaking down the embedded and the unconscious habits of people that is inherently liberalizing.

This is why conservatism and traditional values always seem to be swimming against the main currents of our society. This process of breaking down that which is old and traditional, that which is tried and true, so that it can be brought into the general stream of human progress does not really know any limits. In fact, the traditional becomes the enemy of progress. Wanting to hold onto the old ways is continually denigrated. Even in places like churches. Once you start updating worship to “keep up with the times” what is to stop this process in regards to theology or morality? Nothing. To resist this process is to be an enemy of progress. Classical liberal. Progressive liberal. Free market liberal. They are all the same. They all embrace the essential progressive spirit of our culture. It has become so all encompassing that it is hard for us to conceive of “solutions” (which is itself a word part of the technocratic, and thus liberal, lexicon) which are not abstract and rationalized plans. The only “solutions” permitted to us are progressive, liberal and technological.

So what is conservatism? There are a couple of ways to approach this question. The first is to see the current situation, understanding it correctly. Ellul makes the observation that for all the apparent innovation produced by science and technology, the technical system itself is actually fairly conservative and rigid. It does not allow a multiplicity of approaches to problems. All problems are seen as scientific and technical, as are all solutions. Only one option is open to us. This rigid inflexibility makes the system vulnerable and fragile to situations which would require embracing answers outside those that are technical or scientific.

Additionally, the bourgeoisie, as argued convincingly by Augusto del Noce, when they faced the threat of revolutionary Marxism, neutered this threat by absorbing the revolutionaries into the system under the guise of technical progressivism. The promise made to the revolutionaries was that the bourgeoisie shared the same goals, that of equality for all, but instead of reaching this end by tearing the system down, it could be achieved through scientific management. This brought the revolutionaries on board, allowing the bourgeoisie to continue their economic dominance while satisfying the revolutionaries that Marx’s egalitarian society could be reached through instruments like civil rights legislation, government bureaucracy, the courts and administrative polices like DEI and the like. The revolutionary energy of these idealists is instead directed at the enemies of progress, those who cling to tradition and Christians with their retrograde morality. Thus, Civil War statues must be torn down and satanic shrines set up in state houses and the like. Progressivism is the method by which the regime “conserves” its own power and position. In a strange inversion, the progressives are actually the conservatives working to preserve their power and position as the ruling class of our day, maintaining the status quo of current power arrangements.

Because of the acid of liberalism, in both its social and economic streams, in regards to the ways of the past, there really is not much of traditional ways to actually preserve. Most who consider themselves conservatives, as we have mentioned, are merely trying to preserve older forms of liberalism. In this regard, most on the right find themselves in the position of embracing some form of reactionary politics. There are those who wish to take over the current technical system but use it for conservative ends. But that really doesn’t work because the system that liberalism built was fashioned for liberalism. It is an abstracted artificial system imposed onto reality. Any “solutions” that involve abstracted rational plans or policy frameworks are technical in nature and thus are attempts to use the tools of liberalism against liberalism.

So we ask again, what is conservatism? There are those, like Michael Oakenshott, who have argued that conservatism is a disposition, an attitude. There is something to this. Oakenshott emphasized that we as human beings are embedded into all manners of traditions, often without our being aware of it. Conservatism in this formulation is the bias towards what is and what has been passed onto us from the past. The problem with this today is that almost the entirety of our existence has been constructed for us as part of the modern technological society and is maintained through propaganda. You can find old threads of culture, but are they truly living threads? Or are we trying to reconstruct something once living but now dead? This is the kind of past utopianism that del Noce warns us of, the reactionary desire to sweep away the present and instantiate some past utopia, a time when we saw things as the best they could be.

So what is conservatism? I am not sure necessarily that “conservatism” is the best label for this, perhaps traditionalism is the better world, but I am becoming increasingly convinced that conservatism seeks to cultivate the very things cast aside by the technological society. The abstracted, rationalized world of technique which makes possible the liberal project, at the same time cuts us off from the real world, from the organic, the culturally embedded and the traditional. The rationalist project that is liberalism enframes us within its constructs and abstractions. Technique and technology prevent us from interacting with things as they are. Everything is filtered through layers of concepts. Conservatism is in some sense is the process of reconnecting with the real world in a meaningful way. Perhaps better, conservatism means never letting go of what is real in favor of that which is constructed. It values the embedded and the organic. It values a scale of society in which all the important things to that society can be held mostly in memory. They live mostly within themselves and resist the need to abstract themselves from their own cultural life. It is a focus on the human with all its variance and vagaries. It is comfortable with production that occurs according to human rhythms and pacing. Knowledge is embodied and can be passed on from person to person, apprenticeship style. Work emphasizes that the most important part of tools and even machines is not the machine or tool, but rather the skill and the ability of the craftsman. This would be the same with administrators and officials. They are personally responsible for their work and the quality of the administration depends upon the ability of the people doing the administrating. It resists the urge to scale up society, business or governance, beyond the point where abstract systems and techniques become necessary for its administrations.

Conservatism would value that which is tried and true, verses that which is innovative and new. This is not a small thing. A conservative society recognizes that change is necessary and that sometimes even quick, adaptive change is required to meet specific challenges, but the general disposition is to enfold new things into society over time, to test their effects on people, the community and even the environment, keeping those which work and rejecting those that don’t. The rules which govern society when you are born should be the rules which govern society when you are older. This is important for a society to cultivate wisdom. It takes time to gather wisdom. A society that demands constant adaptation cannot form the kinds of judgements necessary for wisdom to form within people as they age. If you must constantly keep up with what is new, it becomes tremendously hard to maintain the sense of self required to build a cohesive and rich understanding of the world.

We should be biased towards things that can be fixed and maintained over time, things which will endure, the permanent things in our artifacts and in our values. Because of the combination of nominalism and philosophical materialism, we have been forced to develop our own meaning for a world that we are told is dead and inert, without meaning, without connections. It is up to us to provide those connections, that meaning. But in a world where meaning is given, whether it is in the created order, the structures our social nature, or the permanence of our artifacts, architecture and monuments, give our world a sense of permanence which allows us to see better and sense better the meanings and connections that exist out there in the world all around us. The “creative destruction” inherent in market capitalism constantly threatens that permanence and the stability it provides for our world.

We also recognize that the stories passed on to us, the traditions handed down to us have real power in themselves. The archetypes woven into creation and our social life are real and generative. We see what is there all around us and we unfold this reality in stories that endure over time because they adhere to reality in the material as well as the metaphysical and spiritual. These do not need to be taken apart and interpreted. They don’t need to be dissected and distilled so that their universal meaning can be uncovered and transported to the present to be used as the vehicle for relevant advice for today. They do not need to be deconstructed and reassembled in order to continually generate new and improved stories. We can let the metaphors and the layers of meaning from the old stories speak to us on their own. We can tell and retell the stories because they live within us. They do not need to be updated or modernized. The stories are part of the collected wisdom of our forefathers passed onto us. Universalizing them by trying to distill and abstract a “meaning” from them does violence to the story. Deconstructing them to fit the politics of the day is an act of vandalism on the past. Listening. Retelling. Absorbing. Meditating. Respecting. The stories of the past should live within us such that the distilled wisdom of countless generations is the thing which shapes our lives. We should become who we are, who we can be, by living into the stories. A man like David, or Achilles, or Arthur. A woman like Abigail, Mary, Jael, or Deborah even. The wise king. The noble housewife. The brave warrior. The wise farmer. The just judge. We should all strive to be masters of lore, masters of the archetypes, the stories living within us and through us.

There are not many places left where there is enough living tradition to cultivate and nurture it back to fullness of life again. One of those areas is within the Christian church. Within our communities we still tell the old stories. We live by the old stories and they shape who we are the way we think. It may be strained and stressed, and we may have to work at it harder than our forefathers did, but there are embers there that can be fanned into a full blown fire again. There are not many other places where there are living stories of the remembered history of places and people. There are pockets here and there. Not everything is dead. We have not been severed from it all. Everything has not been entirely abstracted and systematized.

This is what door number three is all about. This is what parallel communities is all about. Even talking about it here, I don’t feel like I have done it justice. It is far more than merely an attitude or a disposition. It is about God and humanity and the world and the rich treasures of meaning all around us in the things which have been passed on to us. Maybe these are the musing of man on the cusp of being old, who can finally see after all these years the things that are important. But this is the thing about conservatism, it is really is about the musings of old men who have seen things and know.