The Problem with Conservatives

A conservative is someone who helps disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies. —Mencius Moldbug

The American right wing, which is basically the only viable right wing in the Western world, has a problem: it is too easy to make fun of. I find myself making fun of it fairly often, and I have nothing but sympathy for it, and no love whatsoever for its enemies. Precisely for that reason, I do not wish it to become a victim of those enemies, or worse, a tool. Allow me, therefore, to present this little address to the movement.

American conservatism has plenty of problems, but the worst, probably, is that it accepts naïvely all the premises of its enemies, then attempts to reject their conclusions. The American conservative has drunk almost all of the Kool-Aid, but his tolerance regimen has somehow been flawed, and he retches up the last bit. In a world in which all respectable intellectual and cultural institutions are completely dominated by progressives, the conservative is perhaps best understood as a malformed progressive. Indeed, this is precisely how progressives see him, and treat him. Which is utterly inexcusable—but perhaps not for the reasons he thinks.

Ten years ago, Mencius Moldbug, a reformed progressive turned reactionary, could say: (American) conservatism is useless. In fact, it is worse than useless. It exists within a system (democratic politics) designed by and for its enemies, and serves only to shield them from scrutiny. Even worse, because progressive beliefs are transmitted via the educational system, conservatism is most common and effective among the uneducated. “The entire political structure of the American populist tradition,” he says, “is set up to select for ignorance and stupidity … and even those of us who, like myself, sympathize with it to a considerable degree are often slightly relieved to see it lose, as it always does.”

Until, of course, it did win. Which does not invalidate Moldbug—on the contrary, he has never been more popular—but does make the fatal flaws of the American right vastly more concerning.

One of the most obvious of which is that American conservatives have a terrible understanding of the conflict they’re a part of. Specifically, they see themselves as the defenders of liberty against tyranny. The problem is, the left see the conflict in the same terms—but they put tyranny on the right and liberty on the left. Both views, of course, can’t be right. And since the left has taken the name “liberal”, while the right has had to express basically the same idea with the made-up word “libertarian”, it’s clear that the leftist version of the narrative is older. Although clearly no longer accurate in many ways.

It is, however, still accurate for certain values of the word “liberty”—values which most self-described conservatives find perverted and disgusting, but their children will consider perfectly normal. This has been the normal state of affairs for at least the last fifty years, if not the last five hundred, and is no longer questioned even by those who deplore it. How could it be? When both sides claim to be the defenders of liberty, the argument from none-of-your-business is always effective. By the time it becomes your business (bake the cake, bigot!), it is almost always too late.

Which side is more liberal, in the classical sense? Surely there is a point along the left–right axis where coercion (specifically, organised coercion) reaches a local minimum. In fact, because organised coercion is pretty nasty, especially to the people being coerced, almost all political parties claim to be moving society toward this point. All of them are lying, but some are—well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

We’ve deliberately avoided asking where, relative to the current Overton window, this point of minimum coercion lies, because we don’t need to. What we can observe is that all societies that have undergone large political changes pass through it, if only for a nanosecond. In fact, usually only for a nanosecond. This point, despite apparently being universally attractive, is highly unstable. Of course it is: it’s highly unattractive to those capable of organised coercion, who by definition are in power. In a democracy, this includes anyone in the electorate whose socio-economic standing is below average—who, the Pareto distribution being what it is, are always a majority. Liberalism is an excellent strategy for attracting supporters who have no power, but a terrible strategy to keep them once you do. Therefore it persists briefly—at best.

Therein lies the difference between the left and the right. The left invented liberalism to attack the ancien régime, which it has now completely destroyed. To maintain its reason for being, it has slowly progressed to attacking reality itself, which can plausibly be represented as attacking the ancien régime, will never succeed, and creates an enormous number of problems that can be blamed on someone else—ensuring power and employment for leftists, forever. From a Machiavellian point of view, this is a brilliant strategy. The amount of “organised coercion” that it requires is completely lost on its proponents.

The modern right, therefore, is basically the coalition of all ordinary, decent people who recognise that the left is attacking reality, and are horrified. The problem is that they perceive this attack primarly as tyranny, i.e. coercion, and so their goal is to push the left back to the point of minimum coercion, and no further. Which means that even if they succeed, they will be unable to consolidate their victory, and in fact will attack any in their ranks who suggest such a thing. Their faction will disintegrate, and their best people will be seduced by the left—which, after all, still exists. Most likely, this will happen a long time before they achieve their goals—as it did to Reagan and Thatcher, who were not exactly libertarians.

The actual defeat of the left—which would entail the restoration of the ancien régime—cannot plausibly be represented as the establishment of liberty, the way the left’s attacks on the right can. So some on the American right have adopted the opposite position: representing the establishment of liberty as the restoration of the ancien régime! This is the basic position of the American Constitutionalist: that although the Founding Fathers were considered left-wing in their own time, the order they created is the foundation of America, and therefore, American conservatives should seek to conserve it, just as European conservatives (where they still exist) seek to conserve the order that the Founders rebelled against. The US Constitution, a perfect and infallible document, was bequeathed by God to the Framers for the government of His chosen people, who were given liberty and therefore raised above the pathetic Europeans, who were destined to remain slaves to their monarchical masters.

(The religious imagery in the last sentence is mere mockery, of course—although it is basically the position of the Mormons, as expressed on canvas by Jon McNaughton.)

The fallacy in this, even the non-strawman version, should be obvious. By this definition, in the Soviet Union, communism would be conservative, since the Soviet Union was founded on communism. Obviously this is absurd—there was no such thing as a Soviet conservative. There were conservatives (or, more accurately, reactionaries), but they were Russian conservatives—patriots of the country that was there before the October Revolution, and has since returned. Or at least attempted to return.

America is not the Soviet Union. But like the Soviet Union, it was founded in a revolution; and like the Soviet Union, there was a country here before. A European country, in fact. (A European country that had already suffered two liberal revolutions—but this is another matter entirely.) I am a patriot of this country, insofar as it still exists. Which, mostly, it does not; it was a backwater while it did. Nonetheless, it did not stand alone. It was a part of a worldwide empire, which survived into the twentieth century, and was never even remotely a backwater. Yet if you have read any political author from this vast global civilisation, I would bet he was a Whig. At least the Soviet conservative had heard of the Tsar.

Anyway, enough of patriotism, which ought to have nothing to do with politics at any rate. Let’s return to that pesky subject: liberty. To recap, basically: to the modern right, the left is evil because, under the guise of attacking the ancien régime, which no longer exists, the left forces people to live in their version of reality, which bears little resemblance to the real thing. The right is the coalition of all ordinary, decent, honest people resisting this tyranny. Because the left requires force to enforce their narrative, they are obviously wrong, and doomed to lose.

The problem with this narrative is that the ancien régime itself, which didn’t give a shit about “liberty”, saw the “liberal, free-thinking” left of its day in much the same way modern conservatives see the “authoritarian, censorious” left of today: as a violent assault on the natural order of the universe. Well, it was certainly violent. But was it an assault on the natural order of the universe? Well, you say, of course the people benefited by that “natural order” would have liked us to think so! But you have to admit it makes some things much simpler. At what point, for example, did the left finally go to far? When did it defeat the evil, tyrannical ancien régime and move on to feast on the dear, sweet natural order? You can pick a date—but so can anyone else. What makes you right, and them wrong? If it is just your opinion, why do you believe it at all? Whereas, if the ancien régime and the natural order have actually been the same thing all along, everyone’s line is the same—the rightmost endpoint of the axis. Which may be a little difficult to define, but definitely exists. (Once again, asymmetry. Is there a leftmost endpoint? You wish there were.)

This assertion, that the ancien régime was, in fact, the natural order of civilisation, is a monumental thing to prove. It may not even be true. But everyone agrees that a natural order exists. (George Orwell, one of the most famous critics of government redefinition of reality, was a socialist—apparently he thought socialism was the natural order.) And this natural order provides us with a way to redefine the problem: simply make the natural order, whatever it is, one endpoint of the axis. Unlike the liberal–authoritarian axis, this axis has no local extrema, and the ideal point is perfectly stable and universally desirable—no matter how awful reality may be, surely a government that attempts to violate it would be worse.

Where is this endpoint? We will try to find out—later. But don’t forget that a thousand years ago, before anyone had ever even heard of an “ideology”, everyone already thought he had it figured out.