Taking Conservatism Seriously

​A basic thesis I’ve been arguing for a bit now is that conservatism is basically a rotten worldview, as it is fundamentally about protecting traditionalist hierarchies of privilege, generally along race, gender, class, etc. lines.  As this is an immoral desire, it must resort to illiberal epistemologies to justify itself, because liberal knowledge-making requires methods and values contrary to its purpose.  This is essentially a framework for fascism: the domination and subjugation of others based on a framework of justified superiority.
However, this is a big lift.  The biggest problem is how much it relies on an accusation of unconscious motivation.  While the far right is more comfortable being explicit about its hateful and domineering motivations, and one can easily point to conscious illiberalism, centrist conservatism has always maintained distance from its more odious bedfellows.  When accusations of illiberalism are made, it takes great offense, sufficiently such that it has become a standard talking point to throw the accusation back at the accuser.  Terms such as the “race card” or “reverse racism” or “race hustler” are all indicative.
But members of protected classes – historically marginalized groups that have been the subject of hate by those who would seek to exploit or otherwise oppress them – have always known the psychological games of the oppressor.  They will smile with perfidy and deny their actions just as they are doing them.  This form of gaslighting is merely another form of abuse.  And it is especially effective on members outside the protected class who do not possess direct experience of the abusers’ actions, or who have not taken the time to learn the history.  Without this context, the abuser is able to use polite manners and gentile language to hide their true motivations.
And yet, here we still must parse a deeper dilemma – the fuzzy line between conscious and unconscious motivation, or the degree to which there exists an integrity between one’s self-conceived values and one’s actual actions.  This is a universal human flaw.  We all imagine ourselves as somehow more aligned with who we wish to be than who we really are.  After all, most of our day is spent in the hustle and bustle of performing the various demands of life: taking care of ourselves, our families, our relationships, working, engaging in hobbies, etc.  How much time do we really have for self-reflection?  And when we have world-views that happen to misalign with reality, this presents a cognitive strain.  When we believe the world is – or should be - one way, and yet we see or are shown that it is another, what are we to do with this information?  What if accepting it means creating friction in our social relationships with friends and family?  What if our very identity is threatened?
I believe that this is what happens in the minds of conservatives, who by definition hold to a worldview that is epistemologically constipated and leads to a sort of Irritable Cognition Syndrome, where one must develop coping mechanisms to reduce this friction between belief and reality to protect the cohesion of one’s ego narrative.  Returning to the examples above, if one holds a belief or acts in a way that is aligned with their conservatism, and yet is demonstrably racist, they can either go through the laborious process of learning and changing – which is definitionally not conservative, they can live with the friction – which is uncomfortable and confusing, or they can soothe themselves by shifting the blame back on to the accuser and thereby distracting themselves from their own incoherence.
So, the problem with all of this is that is can feel very hand-wavy.  When you lay it all out, when you look at the history, the context, the patterns, the social and psychological theory it is quite well grounded in evidence.  But it feels almost ad hominem – that the problem with conservatism isn’t a particular belief but an individual psychological problem.  And yet, I would argue that is both.  It is a system of belief that creates psychological problems.
Secondary to this cognitive issue relates directly to its belief in power, and that is capital accumulation.  Conservatives know that money equals power, and that the more money one has, the more power one has.  The narrative they wish to tell about their worldview is one of “freedom” and “limited” government”, that a government system in which an economy is allowed to flourish with as few regulations as possible will allow individuals to maximize their potential to apply their time and effort so as to amass wealth and prosper, and in this environment with all other individuals being free to do the same society as a whole will grow rich together.  Only those who do not apply themselves will be left out of the bounty.
The problem of course, is that while there is some truth in this, it is a simplistic fairy tale that leaves out many very real contingencies of how societies work, not the least of which being the fact that power is frequently zero sum, and the more an individual accumulates, the less another individual has.  Democracy is quite literally a mechanism designed to, if not prevent this problem, ameliorate it.   I won’t bother going any further into grand critiques of capitalism, as the history of left wing thought has done that quite well. 
 
Instead I will return to theme.  Imagine you are a conservative who truly believe capitalism is all – or let’s say mostly - rainbows and puppies.  At the very least, tinkering with it too much would be a road to tyranny.  And yet you are shown evidence that currently, and historically, generations of many millions of people are being exploited under this system, while generations of others are doing the exploiting.  The obvious answer is that you come up with excuses and rationalizations, as we discussed above.  Now, this is by no means something that only happens on the right.  The left experiences cognitive dissonance and makes rationalizations too!
 
But what does it do about it?  Let’s zoom way out to the institutional level, because I think here this is helpful to see the larger dynamic.  Modern liberal democracies rely on universities and journalism as foundational epistemic pillars for democratic knowledge-making.  What contributions has conservatism made to academia?  Apart from a handful of quality scholars generally squirrelling away on a few narrow topics, they are simply absent from the vast majority of disciplines.  So it goes for journalism and media.  Where are the news outlets doing the hard-nose work of investigating the systems and structures, the relationships of power in society?  The vast majority of them are essentially partisan propaganda machines pumping out fodder for ideologues to clap along to.  We might as well add the arts to our epistemological foundation here as well, as literature, visual arts, music all have their place in bringing human expression to the demos.  Here too, of course, conservatism hardly musters more than tasteless and tired facsimiles of popular commercial products.
 
Liberal epistemology is designed to transcend the traps of human cognition.  Just as the scientific method relies on empiricism, objectivity and philosophic doubt, so too do liberal values rely on notions of pluralism and humanism – deconstruction, analysis, contrast, comparison, invention, reality testing.  It isn’t perfect, but this is part of the design.  When asked why, one is never allowed to say “just because.”
 
But “just because” is a powerful device.  It is a signal that the end of communication has been reached.  The end of discourse, the end of dialogue, the end of exploration, the end of learning, the end of thought.  My way or the highway.  Love it or leave it.  It is an authoritarian impulse, an implication of force.  And when combined with cultural supremacy, with a desire for hegemony, it slides into fascism.  It is a form a violence in which the physical contingency has not yet come, but waits just beyond the horizon.  It is a drawing of a line, the crossing of which blood will need be spilled. 
 
Trump has ushered in the Just Because phase of American conservatism.  This was the flight 93 manifesto, written by Michael Antonand published in the Claremont Review of Books in 2016, which analogized America has having been taken hostage by the terrorism of liberalism, and the only option left was to storm the cockpit and take the control by force.  John Eastman, who argued Trump’s 2020 election was stolen wasa Claremont Institute Senior Fellow.
 
Those arguing for a true conservatism – a “liberal conservatism”? – would say that while this element on the right has always been there, it should not define conservatism.  But is this truly the case?  There has clearly been a large (former) mainstream of conservatism that would have rejected much of what MAGA currently says and does.  But is MAGA not merely admitting openly what many conservatives had always believed, or only pretended not to believe?  Or maybe had not wanted to believe but was a direct consequence of their beliefs that were too ugly to admit even to themselves?  When they favored segregation, what was that about?  Or when they wanted women to stay in the kitchen?  Or when they believed gay men were pedophiles?  Or when we should support murderous dictators all over the world because even that was better than post-colonial citizens demanding their capital back from aristocracies and realizing communism was the only way to get it, especially when the wealthy were being backed by the CIA, also supported by conservatives?
What part of it does not just go back to protecting the privileges of existing social hierarchies, and keeping people down when they advocated for more liberty in their in their workplaces, in their bedrooms, in their bodies, in their lives?  While only the far right radicals were saying the quiet part out loud, were not the moderates quietly making excuses during polite discussions with liberals on Sunday shows and as they made mild compromises in congressional offices?  Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter whether conservatism is moderate or extreme, as this is where it has all led.  Their emphasis on  dogmatic traditionalism and propaganda, their single-minded quest for capital accumulation gave them power in the form of lobbying, think tanks, government capture, and finally the wholesale dismantling of democracy.  To not see a bright line leading in one direction over many decades would seem to require a particular historical and political, if not psychological blindness.
 
So what role is there for conservatism in a modern liberal democracy?  I say none.  If by conservative, all we mean is a pragmatic approach in which no idea is taken too easily, or no action too hastily, that is of course very reasonable.  But if by conservatism we mean “free” markets and “limited government”, we can throw both terms in the trash.  The first is incoherent.  Markets are vastly complex, requiring things like schools, roads, libraries, parks, healthcare, food safety inspectors… the list goes on.  What is property?  What is an aristocracy?  What is labor?  What is democracy in the workplace?  All of these are fundamental questions that require depth, not bromides about “freedom”.
 
The latter, “limited government”, was originally meant to simply mean a government limited in power by its citizens – democracy, basically.  It was not meant to mean “small government”, free of regulation, taxation, etc.  To suggest as such is traditionalist logic placing epistemic authority in “just because”.  If one takes seriously the notion of a government limited to rule by its citizens, the idea of regulating campaign finance and lobbying would be essential to safeguarding the citizen’s right to have their voice represented equally.  Further still, the health, safety and access to basic needs of the citizen would also seem to be a necessity for maintaining this access.  In this way, one could make a strong case that a well-regulated, socialist state that guarantees access to basic services to each citizen would meet the requirements for a ‘limited government’.
 
Conservatism was always a lie.  Maybe it was comforting, inspiring even.  But it was a dangerous distraction at best.  For those who still cling to its bloody remnants, I suggest to drop it entirely and embrace a more serious worldview, one compatible with modern liberal democracy in all its beautiful, pluralistic complexity.  Accept its fundamental humility, its decency, its respect for different cultures, its patience for inquiry.  But come to terms too with its seriousness – it’s nuanced understanding of tolerance: that discourse and behavior that serve to rationalize or justify the dehumanization or humiliation of others based race, gender, sexuality, etc. will not be tolerated.  Leaving people without medical treatment, or paying people poverty wages will not be tolerated.  Allowing some people to become absurdly wealthy will not be tolerated as it is not only immoral but a threat to our very democracy.  As the saying goes, we live in a society.  Get used to it.