What Do Conservatives Believe?
If you start telling people your hobby is politics, they’re going to ask you tough questions. Right now, in America, the question “What do Conservatives believe?” is one of the toughies.
Why is that — well, the conservative movement has gone through many mutations as it has tried to find a way of competing with its more popular liberal opposition. It’s hard to figure out exactly what it stands for at this point.
Historically, Conservatives originated in the ancien regime — the old way of doing things that had worked for thousands of years. This meant an artistocracy, a caste but not class system, a feudal approach to wealth, a unity of religion and science, and so on. When you read about medieval Europe, ancient Rome, ancient Greece or ancient India, you’re reading about this type of society (Plato addresses this in his cycle of civilizations under “Aristocracy.”)
American conservatives tend to define themselves by the oldest regime that country has, which happens to be what in European history would be seen as liberal, just like the French Revolution was. Our Founding Fathers were radicals of the time — Deists not Christians, hell-bent on autonomy of the individual, believers in free speech and No Kings. They weren’t liberals, however, in the modern sense. They recognized that most people shouldn’t have the vote, saw differences between genders and races, did not trust atheism and disliked social welfare. They were a hybrid of the European liberal, the homesteader and the old Conservatives.
The root of the term “conservative” means to conserve, and originally, that included the environment. Usually, it is applied to cultural values, as in conserving the family, the sanctity of marriage, and so on, because in a pluralist society anyone who has a strong values system that isn’t all-inclusively cool with “just do whatever you want man” is at a disadvantage. This applies to both conservatives and, when they demand we take hard action on the environment, liberals, because at that point each group has started demanding individuals sacrifice personal autonomy for collective action. But that’s another story.
Breed conservatism with anarchy and you get libertarianism, which is a type of Social Darwinism that believes that if we just let the markets regulate everything, there will be no need for government. Their critics point out that every single inch of the earth will be covered in advertising at that point, so it’s definitely an issue with two sides.
Today the lovely people at the Republic of Texas, who I’ve been interviewing about beliefs and the direction they’re taking their secessionist movement, sent me a document about the balance between “freedom” and “self-responsibility,” and this is what I think characterizes third-generation American conservatism: an emphasis on the values of the founding fathers with the methods of successful resistance to pluralism, which is a “don’t make me pay for the mistakes of others” attitude derived from libertarians.
The document is linked below.
So there you have it, folks… Conservatism is conservation, which right now means anarchy plus capitalism plus defensive irresponsibility in the name of freedom. If that seems baffling, consider this: conservatism, like extreme liberalism, is incompatible with the “do whatever you want, man” attitude of pluralist societies. Would Stalin or Lenin have agreed to that, either? No, of course not.
And this article is short, and only covered the moderate conservatives. The far-right — are they conservatives? That question in itself is too deeply entrenched to provide anything but “yes and no” right now, but it’s a fascinating one, since when you stop seeing the far right as conservatives, you see the essence of their periodic social appeal — and their willingness to do what conservatives are afraid to say they’d like to. (To be fair, the left has the same affliction, but that’s also a much bigger issue.)