A Very Very Brief Intellectual Autobiography

Reading Samuel Freeman’s review of conservative philosopher Roger Scruton in the latest NYRB, I had a mini-realization about my own work on conservatism, which features Scruton a fair amount.

In the mid-1970s, conservatism, which had previously been declared dead as an intellectual and political force, started to gain some political life (its intellectual rejuvenation had begun long before). As it did, conservatism began to have an impact on liberalism. Politically, you could see that influence in the slow, then sudden, retreat from traditional New Deal objectives, culminating in the election of Bill Clinton. What that meant was a massive turnaround on economic issues (deregulation, indifference to unions, galloping inequality) and a softer turnaround on so-called social or moral issues. While mainstream Democrats today are identified as staunch liberals on issues like abortion and gay rights, the truth of the matter is that in the early 1990s, they beat a retreat on that front (not only on abortion but also, after an initial embrace of gays and lesbians, on gay rights as well).

Among liberal academics, the impact of conservatism was equally strong. Not only in the obvious sense that conservatism became an object of increasing scholarly interest, particularly among historians. But also in a deeper sense, as the categories of traditional conservative concern, like religion, came to assume a greater role in scholarly inquiry.

The impact was especially dramatic in the world of liberal political theory. Where a generation of Rawlsian political theorists had cut their teeth on the economic questions of redistribution and the welfare state, suddenly the main question of liberal democracy was how to deal with intractable differences of religion, cultural identity, and morality, whether and how men and women could argue over fundamental questions of “the good” rather than hide or subsume their disagreements under more seemingly neutral rules of “the right.”

You could see this shift most visibly in the Rawlsian turn toward political liberalism (or at least certain iterations, beyond Rawls himself, of political liberalism). In the earlier work, “difference” meant the Difference Principle, which was a Rawlsian rule about whether to accept economic inequalities in the polity and how they might be arranged. Now “difference” came to be associated with religious and cultural differences, deep disagreements over questions like sexual morality or other cultural practices that liberals had previously thought belonged to the realm of private belief and practice. As David Miller declared in the very first paragraph on the very first page of his book on nationality, which came out in 1995:

It matters less, it seems, whether the state embraces the free market, or the planned economy, or something in between. It matters more where the boundaries of the state are drawn, who gets included and who gets excluded, what language is used, what religion endorsed, what culture promoted.

It wasn’t just Rawlsians and liberals who felt the impact of this turn; so did more radical and left theorists, for whom questions of difference and deeper modes of pluralization began to loom large.

Since its inception, as I’ve argued, liberalism has always faced off against the left and the right. But throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, liberalism was pushed primarily by the left. From which we got, at least in the United States, the liberal welfare state and the Difference Principle. In the last third of the twentieth century, liberalism was pushed from the right. From which we got the DLC, the Clintons, and political liberalism. The point here is not that liberalism became conservative, though it did; it’s that liberalism’s agenda was increasingly set by conservatism.

One of the reasons I wrote my book on conservatism was less to engage with or contest conservatism as an idea—which is why some of the criticisms of the book seemed so off-base to me—than to engage and contest this turn within liberalism. In that book, I wanted to get liberals (and leftists, too) to take a step back, to show how the landscape in which they were making their arguments had been shaped, deeply shaped, by conservatism, often in ways they did not understand. Where academic liberals and leftists had accepted the simple distinction between economic and social conservatives—as did I, for a very long time—and had believed that the social conservatives were driven by moral questions of a particular sort, I wanted to show that conservatism was, yes, a deeply moral and ideological praxis, only that it rotated around a different set of principles and beliefs from the ones liberals seemed to think the right held dear.

The real axis of rotation, I claimed, was domination and hierarchy, particularly in the private realms of power, and it was that axis that united social conservatives, economic conservatives, and national security conservatives. (I had already begun to broach some of these questions of domination in my first book on fear, which tried to use the liberal interest in fear and emotion more generally as a way of inching the left toward a more robust engagement with questions of social domination in the family and the workplace, but since that was written in shadow of 9/11, these underlying themes got little traction or play.)

To be clear: domination and hierarchy are not, to my mind, non-moral issues, neither for the left nor the right. They’re deeply moral. Only they are also part of a social and material practice. We cannot and should not separate the moral from the economic in conservatism any more than we would in socialism.

While I believe my account can help us understand conservatism across the ages, it would be nice to think that it is also suited to explain the right today, not only in the Age of Trump but also in the Age of Bernie. Increasingly, we’ve seen, these questions of social domination and economic hierarchy are coming to the fore. As the left begins to move into a position where it can not only get a clear view of the ideas it is fighting against but also to take aim at them—at both the hard right revanchism of the GOP and the soft neoliberalism of the Democrats—my hope is that a generation of academic political theorists, who learned their trade against the backdrop of a certain view of conservatism, might now begin to see the conflicts of the day in a different light.

Indeed, judging from what I see among younger theorists, I believe that turn has already begun.