By ISI Archive

This is the seventh contribution to ISI’s symposium Conservatism: What’s Wrong with It and How Can We Make It Right?

Modern conservatism in America suffers from a number of maladies that have stunted its thought, dimmed its vision, and caused it to become an ideological cause instead of the temperament and philosophical persuasion that it needs to be. The most harmful maladies that afflict conservatism at present are: 1) its preoccupation with political activism, 2) the tendency to impose artificial ideological uniformity that discourages inquiry and intellectual curiosity, and 3) excessive enthusiasm for nationalism and national “greatness” that find expression through unnecessary foreign conflicts. Each malady is the product of placing excessive importance on goods that conservatives should value, and it can be cured or at least ameliorated by the moderation of those excesses.

The first malady is the tendency to treat conservatism as the ideology of a political movement, whose content will then be dictated by the needs of the moment. That makes it little more than a tool for mobilizing and misleading supporters. Treating conservatism as an ideology reduces and distorts it, ripping it away from its proper role as a philosophical persuasion and a temperament, and it compels conservatives to become obsessed with political activism to the detriment of the much more enduring work of building the culture that they want for themselves. Conservatism has always been concerned with political life, as any tradition that seeks the common good must be. However, constant attention to political activism crowds out all other kinds of thought and frequently defines conservatism not by the goods that it seeks to preserve but by how much power self-described conservatives happen to hold at a given moment.

Another unfortunate effect of conservative preoccupation with political activism has been a tendency to shut out or ignore inconvenient or contrary evidence that doesn’t suit our political preferences. This distorts how many conservatives see the world and contributes to sloppy and unpersuasive arguments. This is certainly not unique to conservatives, but it is a lazy and destructive habit that needs to be fixed. At the same time, the pursuit of ideological uniformity that political activism encourages breeds hostility to different ideas for renewing conservatism and resistance to the acknowledgment of past errors.

When that happens, conservatism has become just another programmatic agenda to be carried out by party-political activism, which entails professing devotion to that agenda and party-political goals on pain of being denounced. This habit of denunciation stifles healthy dissent and stymies fruitful, creative thinking that addresses changed circumstances with originality—originality here meaning remaining faithful to the originals, to borrow the words of Zissimos Lorenzatos. If conservatism is in reality the negation of ideology, conservatives must become at once more empirically-minded, and more interested in renovation and dissent from their colleagues. To do this, conservatism will have to rediscover the importance of the principles of restraint and moderation that inform the moral order that conservatives seek to preserve or, when lost, re-establish.

One of the chief maladies afflicting conservatism today is American nationalism and its distorting effects on both policy and political culture. When I say American nationalism here, I am referring specifically to an Americanism dedicated to the maintenance of global “leadership” in the service of an America that is itself treated as an ideological project. This nationalism feeds off of patriotic loyalty, but it is far removed from patriotic love for our country. As G.K. Chesterton wrote in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, “the patriot never under any circumstances boasts of the largeness of his country, but always and of necessity, boasts of the smallness of it,” and this form of American nationalism is defined by boasting about the country’s “largeness” in the world. The future of American conservatism depends greatly on challenging this nationalism on both a cultural and a policy level and cultivating instead a deeper respect for both localities and regions on the one hand and foreign nations on the other.

One of the contradictions of conservative political thought over the last few decades is the tremendous rhetorical emphasis we have placed on local control, states’ rights, and decentralization of power while embracing all those policies pertaining to trade, domestic economy and foreign affairs that have only eroded local and regional economies and cultures, intruded on matters previously reserved to the states, and centralized power in the nation’s capital. The more obvious contradiction has been the largely rhetorical rejection of government activism at home combined with an unrestrained appetite for such activism overseas. The strong nationalist strain in American conservatism is responsible for much of this, as the celebration of the nation-state and the subordination of all other goods to its claims work to make conservatives hostile to rooted communities and to blind them to the injustices perpetrated against other nations in the name of well-intentioned intervention.

Contrary to everything in the political tradition from which modern American conservatism derived so many of its ideas, conservatives have instead allowed themselves to become defenders or enablers of economic and political centralization that works to the detriment of all those small towns and poor states from which they receive disproportionately great support. Contrary to the old traditions of republican non-intervention, most conservatives today are still the most ardent advocates for aggressive, forward policies around the world. Self-congratulation has trumped humility in the name of American exceptionalism, overconfidence has destroyed respect for limits, and pride has blinded many conservatives to the corrupting influence of global hegemony on the national character and the integrity of our political institutions. As a result, political conservatives have failed to recognize that the very Americanism they celebrate as the solution to everything from immigration to global governance has led conservatives to give priority to the nation-state at the expense of the interests of their homes and all of the intermediate institutions that are necessary for the preservation of a way of life with broad and equitable distribution of wealth and power.

Temperamental and philosophical conservatism is most in keeping with a federal system and a preference for devolving power to the most local authority capable of exercising it appropriately, and does not seek to reduce the political diversity of America or of the world to a single model and a single standard. Conservatives should view skeptically all universalist pretensions to having answers to every other society’s problems, and should resist the temptation to use our national power to attempt to address every crisis around the globe.

Healing these maladies will require conservatives to do several things. First, inasmuch as this is possible, they should delve into the wealth of the Christian and Western intellectual traditions to immerse themselves in our broad cultural inheritance, and then compare the richness of those traditions with the poverty of ideological slogans. This should not only make conservatives more alert to the distorting effects of ideology, but it will also prepare them to cultivate and pass on these traditions to their inheritors. Conservatives will also need to redirect most of their political energies to their own cities and towns first to sustain and build local institutions, but more important they need to create flourishing local economies and communities so that their descendants will have incentives to stay and continue that work in the decades to come.

As part of that effort, however, there is still some need for conservatives to remain engaged in national politics. Conservatives need to become much more vigilant against concentrations of wealth and power wherever they happen to be, and they should seek to constrain or break up those concentrations whenever feasible. Broadly distributing wealth and power will be a check against private injustices, and it will also protect representative government against more powerful interests. Related to that, conservatives must become much more wary of the exercise of government power overseas, and they should constantly be on guard against U.S. involvement in foreign wars and entanglements that continue to serve as justifications for the increasing power and intrusiveness of the state.

Conservatives should be as skeptical of government claims about foreign threats as they are about all other government claims, and they should always avoid exaggerating and overhyping those threats. More than anyone else, conservatives should appreciate the wastefulness and upheaval of war, and should be most reluctant to favor military action unless self-defense or the fulfillment of treaty obligations requires it. No matter why it is being fought, preventive war should be abhorrent to conservatives, as all unnecessary wars should be. Conservatives should also recognize the difference between an understanding of American exceptionalism founded in respect for our political principles and history and one invented to justify frequent armed intervention in other parts of the world.

The remedies to these ills exist, but they will take a considerable amount of time and effort. Each of the maladies outlined here is a long-ingrained habit that is continually reinforced by conservative media and activists. Changing those habits will require conservatives to rely less on what contemporaries tell them conservatism is and more on the received wisdom of the traditions that conservatism exists to defend.

Daniel Larison is a senior editor at The American Conservative, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and is a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Dallas.