ADPblog

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

A clearer statement of conservatism

Conservatives! Who are the conservatives? What does it mean to be conservative? Most people understand their conservatism from the experience of daily life. They don’t have to read a book to tell them what conservatism is.

Conservatism is a way of viewing the world that manifests a high regard for tradition and a realization that progress starts from the bedrock of tradition. It is a tested way of living, and therefore the safest.

The conservative view of the world believes that the order of things arrived at over time is a wiser foundation than a proposed order that has been arrived at by committees or assembled in the minds of the most creative individuals, say a Marx or the philosophes who planned a revolution in France that ended in a reign of terror.

The American midwest is known for its conservatism, even though at times of great suffering such as in the Great Depression those in rural areas became quite radical.  But even then one could say that their radicalism was an attempt to preserve their traditional way of life and save their family farms and their communities.

Written defenses of the traditional way of life have appeared over the centuries, but none provides a clearer statement of what conservatism is than the works of Edmund Burke, an Irish member of British Parliament during the time of the American Revolution.

Burke’s highest ideal was liberty.  He said that liberty can never be achieved through revolution, but only through the slow evolution of custom.  He saw tradition as a sacred bond between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born.  He recognized that society changed, but changed for the good through the moral imagination, creativity grounded in a moral order.  He saw religion as a necessary dimension of society.  And similarly, in social class, he saw a hierarchy of social ranking emerging over time as part of a natural order.

Our vocabulary has changed considerably since Burke’s era, so his ideas can be more clearly understood in the works of modern followers and interpreters of Burke.  Recommended highly are the works of Russell Kirk and Peter Viereck.  Kirk, generally regarded as the Father of American Conservatism, died in 1994, and Viereck continues to speak out at age 89.

Neither of these men was a political activist.  Quite the opposite.  Both retreated from political activism nationally and in academia.  Both moved to rural areas after World War II and wrote literary works as well as political philosophy.  Each emphasized that conservative thought was not the property of either political party, and both were independent of any political party line.

Viereck’s independence was emphasized in the fifties in his attacks on Joseph McCarthy, who he identified as a radical, a loose cannon little influenced by conservative thought.  Attacking McCarthy, Viereck found himself in opposition to establishment Republicans such as William Buckley, who continues to this day to defend McCarthy.

Russell Kirk, an admirer of Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater, referred to himself with pride as a “paleo-conservative”, a person who trusted the small town values of middle America as against a behemoth bureaucracy in Washington.  He revealed his independence of thought in 1989, attacking the senior Bush’s Gulf War.  He was also a passionate environmentalist, citing President Theodore Roosevelt as an exemplar for modern conservatives.

Kirk emphasized Burke’s ideal of prudence, that is, a political frame of mind that reflected care, caution, and wisdom.  The last book Kirk wrote was entitled The Politics of Prudence, written in the early nineties and remarkably prescient, especially the chapter that reflects his wariness of Neo-Conservative expansionist ideology.

Looking at the current administration in Washington from the perspective of Burkean values, we see, unfortunately, little that is authentically conservative.  We see little that is fiscally conservative, but something quite the opposite, a reckless disregard for monetary stability in policies that have produced the largest national debt in our history, increasing year by year and funded not by American bond holders, but to the contrary with money from foreign economies, from nations with which we have a very precarious relationship, most notably China.

There is nothing prudential, nothing that reflects care, caution, and wisdom in an enormous expansion of the federal bureaucracy with a drug bill that few seniors want, a program that increases the debt and cannot be supported in years to come.

Starting a war based on clearly unreliable intelligence, ignoring established procedures of diplomacy, proceeding without legitimate allies, and failing to consider the long range outcome are not examples of prudence.  We all agree that we are in a quagmire and must work together to disengage in an honorable manner.  But we must not forget the dreamy and unfounded aspirations of this administration claiming that they could in short order implant American notions of democracy in places where there is little in local tradition to support it and, even worse, trying to impose it with military force.

Russell Kirk in his classic, The Roots of American Order, bases his work on the principle that there can be no liberty without order, emphasizing that order is customary and exists in thought as well as behavior.  Those who value tradition, custom, and order, who support prudence in government policies, cannot feel comfortable in this era of created instability.

One might ask where does one find authentic conservatism in this day, or is it all made up as we go along?  Yes, a lot of it is made up by Limbaugh-like propagandists identifying policies as conservative that were never seen as conservative in the past, even though the past is what conservatism is about.  Americans who enjoyed the moderation of an Eisenhower or a Ford can feel little comfort in the reckless adventurism in fiscal and foreign policies of the current administration.

Conservatives of moderate means know, as Burke did, that all parts of society are interdependent and that undermining the security of the less well off destabilizes the whole society.  Conservatism recognizes social class as a natural emergence, but it is not a cover for the rich to exploit the poor.

Voters who value tradition and custom, who support care and caution in foreign policy, who support a limited government that spends what it takes in or decreases national debt, must examine carefully the records and proposals of those who seek their votes in the 2006 Congressional election and the presidential primaries of both parties.  In this day and age the record of those who call themselves conservative reveals that though they use it as a label, they have been reckless in foreign policy and short-sighted in fiscal policy, creating unprecedented national debt.  History has shown us that authentic conservatives and their radical opposites are to be found in both political parties, and that labels mean little.  Candidates must be judged by ideas and actions, for calling oneself conservative in recent years has turned out to mean very little.

Kenneth E. Moore, an urban anthropologist, now retired, served as founding chair of the Department of Anthropology and founding director of the Mediterranean-Middle East program at Notre Dame.  He is presently revising a manuscript on Dublin.



Contributed by Kenneth E. Moore on 02/22/2006
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