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Archive-name: conservatism/faq Posting-Frequency: monthly Conservatism FAQ August 1, 1995 Revision This FAQ, posted monthly, attempts to deal with common questions and objections regarding conservatism. Additional questions and comments are welcome. The conservatism discussed is traditionalist American conservatism; other varieties are touched on in section 6 and their adherents are urged to draft additional FAQs. A current verson of this FAQ is available by ftp in compressed form from rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/conservatism/faq.Z. A copy can also be obtained in uncompressed form by sending the message "send usenet/news.answers/conservatism/faq" by email to mail- server@rtfm.mit.edu. A hypertext version is available at http://www.panix.com/~jk/consfaq.html. QUESTIONS 1 General principles 1.1 How does conservatism differ from other political views? 1.2 Why is tradition a source of "greater wisdom"? 1.3 Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning? 1.4 How can we know our own tradition is the right one? 1.5 What about objective truth? 1.6 Why are most people seriously involved in studying and dealing with social issues liberals? 2 Tradition and change 2.1 Why not just accept change? 2.2 Isn't conservatism simply another way of saying that people who currently have wealth and power should keep it? 2.3 Wouldn't we still have slavery if conservatives had always been running the show? 3 Social and cultural issues 3.1 Aren't conservatives racist sexist homophobes? 3.2 Why can't conservatives just accept that people's personal values differ? 3.3 Why do conservatives always want to force their values on everybody else? 3.4 What role do conservatives think government should play in enforcing moral values? 3.5 What happens to feminists, homosexuals, racial minorities and others marginalized in a conservative society? 3.6 What about freedom? 4 Economic issues 4.1 Why do conservatives say they favor virtue and community but favor laissez-faire capitalism? 4.2 Why don't conservatives care about what happens to the poor, weak, discouraged, and outcast? 4.3 Shouldn't the government do something for people for whom the usual support networks don't work? 4.4 What about welfare for the middle classes? 4.5 If conserving is a good thing, why isn't ecology a conservative issue? 5 Conservatism in an age of established liberalism 5.1 Why do conservatives talk as if the sky is about to fall and all good things are in the past? 5.2 Isn't conservatism essentially nostalgia for a past that never was and can't be restored? 5.3 What's all this stuff about community and tradition when the groups that matter these days are based on interests and perspectives rather than traditions? 5.4 Shouldn't conservatives favor well-established things like the welfare state and steady expansion of the scope of the civil rights laws? 5.5 I was raised to believe certain substantive liberal positions are the positions good Americans should hold. Wouldn't it be conservative for me to stay true to them? 5.6 I was raised a liberal. Doesn't that mean that to be conservative I should stay true to liberalism? 6 The conservative rainbow 6.1 How do libertarians differ from conservatives? 6.2 What are mainstream conservatives? 6.3 What are neoconservatives? 6.4 What are paleoconservatives? 6.5 What are paleolibertarians? 6.6 What are Frankfurt School Neopaleoconservatives? 6.7 Where do the pro-life movement and Religious Right fit into all this? 6.8 What are the differences between American conservatism and that of other countries? 6.9 What do all these things called "conservatism" have in common? ANSWERS 1 General Principles 1.1 How does conservatism differ from other political views common today? By its emphasis on tradition as a source of wisdom greater than that of any individual or faction. 1.2 Why is tradition a source of "greater wisdom"? It gives us a comprehensive and generally coherent point of view that reflects the experience and thought of other times and a collection of habits that have proved useful in practical affairs. The usual alternative to reliance on tradition is reliance on theory. Taking theory literally can be costly because theory achieves clarity by ignoring things that are difficult to articulate. Such things can be important; the reason practical things like politics and morals are learned mostly by imitation and experience is that most of what we learn consists in habits, attitudes and implicit presumptions that we couldn't begin to put into words. There is no means other than tradition to accumulate, conserve and hand on such things. 1.3 Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning? Our knowledge is partial and attained with difficulty. The effects of political proposals are difficult to predict and as the proposals become more ambitious their effects become incalculable. We can't evaluate political ideas without accepting far more beliefs, presumptions and attitudes than we could possibly judge critically. Accordingly, the most reasonable approach to politics is to take the existing system of society as a given that can't be changed wholesale and try to ensure that any changes cohere with the principles and practices that make the existing system work as well as it does. 1.4 There are lots of conflicting traditions. How can we know our own is the right one? We can't be certain. Our own tradition may lead us astray where another would not. However, that possibility can not be a reason for rejecting our own tradition unless we have a method transcending tradition for determining when that has happened, and in general there is no such method. Putting issues of truth aside, the various parts of a particular tradition are adjusted to each other in a way that makes it difficult to abandon one part and substitute something from another tradition. A French cook will have trouble if he has to rely on Chinese ingredients or utensils. Issues of coherence and practicality accordingly make it likely that we will do better developing the tradition to which we are accustomed than attempting to adopt a different one. 1.5 But what about objective truth? Comprehensive objective truth exists, but we cannot have it in the form of a set of propositions with the same meaning for all. We apprehend truth largely through tradition and in a way that cannot be fully articulated, and cannot do otherwise. 1.6 If conservatism is so great, why are most people seriously involved in studying and dealing with social issues liberals? Conservatives do not believe it is possible to define the considerations relevant to social life clearly enough to make a technological approach to society possible. They accordingly reject efforts to divide human affairs into separate compartments to be mastered and dealt with by a comprehensive plan for the sake of goals such as economic well-being or equality of condition. Academic and other policy experts are defined as such by their participation in just such efforts. It would be surprising if they did not prefer perspectives that give free rein to efforts to design and implement social policy, such as welfare-state liberalism, over perspectives that are suspicious of such undertakings. 2 Tradition and Change 2.1 Society has always changed, for the better in some ways and for the worse in others. Why not accept change, especially if everything is so complicated and hard to figure out? Change has always involved resistance as well as acceptance. Changes that have to make their way over opposition will presumably be better than changes that are accepted without serious questioning. In addition, modern conservatism is not resistance to change as such, but to intentional change of a peculiarly sweeping sort characteristic of the period beginning with the French Revolution and guided by Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism. For example, the family as an institution has changed over time in conjunction with other social changes. However, the current left/liberal demand that all definite institutional structure for the family be abolished as an infringement of individual autonomy is different in kind from past developments, and conservatives believe it must be fought. 2.2 Isn't conservatism simply another way of saying that people who currently have wealth and power should keep it? The adoption of any political view will promote the particular advantage of some people. If political views are to be treated as rationalizations of the interests of existing or would-be elites, then that treatment should apply equally to conservatism and all other views. On the other hand, if arguments that political views advance the public good are to be taken seriously, then the arguments for conservatism should be considered on their own terms. It's worth noting that movements aiming at social justice typically turn out intensely elitist because the more comprehensive and abstract the political principle, the smaller the group that can be relied on to understand and apply it correctly. 2.3 Wouldn't we still have slavery if conservatives had always been running the show? Why? Conservatism is not rejection of all change; moral habits evolve with experience and changing circumstances, and social arrangements that grow to be too much at odds with the moral life of a people change or disappear. The conservative outlook emphasizes community and mutual obligation, both of which slavery denies. Slavery disappeared in Western and Central Europe long before the modern revolutionary age. In modern times brutal forced labor has been far more characteristic of radical than conservative regimes; the reason is that radicalism, by overemphasizing the role of theory in politics, destroys reciprocity between the ruling theoreticians and those they govern, and so is far more likely than conservatism to lead to gross oppression. 3 Social and Cultural Issues 3.1 Aren't conservatives racist sexist homophobes? That depends on what those words mean. "Racist"--Conservatives consider community loyalty important. The communities people grow up in are generally connected to ethnicity. That's no accident, because ethnicity is what develops when people live together with a common way of life for a long time. Accordingly, conservatives think some degree of ethnic loyalty and separateness is OK. "Sexist"--All known societies have engaged in sex-role stereotyping, with men undertaking more responsibility for public affairs and women for home, family, and childcare. There are obvious benefits to stereotyping, since it makes it far more likely that individual men and women will complement each other and form stable and functional unions for the rearing of children. Conservatives see no reason to struggle against those benefits, especially in view of the apparent consequences of the weakening of stereotypical obligations between the sexes in recent decades. "Homophobes"--Finally, sex-role stereotyping implies a tendency to reject conduct and patterns of impulse and attitude that don't fit the stereotypes, such as homosexuality. 3.2 Why can't conservatives just accept that people's personal values differ? Both liberals and conservatives recognize limits on the degree to which differing personal values can be accommodated. Such limits often arise because personal values can be realized only by establishing particular sorts of relations with other people, and no society can favor all relationships equally. No society, for example, can favor equally a woman who primarily wants to have a career and one who primarily wants to be a mother and homemaker. Institutions that accept the general validity of traditional sex roles will favor the latter at the expense of the former, while institutions that reject sex role stereotypes in favor of individual independence will do the reverse. 3.3 Why do conservatives always want to force their values on everybody else? Conservatives aren't different from other people in that regard. Anyone with a notion of how society should work will believe that other people should follow the program he favors. If Liberal Jack thinks the government should be responsible for the well-being of children and wants to support the arrangement through a tax system that sends people to jail who don't comply, and Conservative Jill thinks the family should be responsible and wants to implement that responsibility through a system of sex roles enforced by informal social sanctions for violators, each will want what the public schools teach to be consistent with his program. Both will object to a school textbook entitled _Heather Has Two Mommies Who Get Away with Paying No Taxes Because They Accept Payment Only in Cash_. Liberal Jack will object to the book _Heather's Mommy Stays Home and Her Daddy Goes to the Office_, while Conservative Jill will object to other well-known texts. Why should one be considered more tolerant than the other? The issue of social tolerance most often comes up in connection with sexual morality. For a discussion from a conservative perspective, see the Sexual Morality FAQ, available at http://www.panix.com/~jk/sex.html (hypertext version) or http://www.panix.com/~jk/sex.faq (plain ASCII version). 3.4 What role do conservatives think government should play in enforcing moral values? Since conservatives believe moral values should be determined more by the feelings and traditions of the people than by formal decisions and theory, they typically prefer to rely on informal social sanctions rather than enforcement by government. Nonetheless, they believe that government should be run on the assumption that the moral values on which society relies are good things that should not be undercut. Thus, conservatives oppose public school curricula that depict such values as optional and programs that fund their rejection, for example by subsidizing unwed parents or artists who intend their works to outrage accepted morality. How much more the government can or should do to promote morality is a matter of circumstance to be determined in accordance with experience. In this connection, as in others, conservatives typically do not have high ambitions for what government can achieve. 3.5 What happens to feminists, homosexuals, racial minorities and others marginalized in a conservative society? The same as happens in a liberal society to religious and social conservatives and to ethnics who consider their ethnicity important. They find themselves in a social order they may not like dominated by people who may look down on them and in which it may be difficult to live as they prefer. In both kinds of society, people on the outs may be able either to persuade others to their way of thinking, to practice the way of life they prefer in private, or to break off from the larger society and establish their own communities. Such possibilities are in general more realistic in a conservative society that emphasizes federalism, local control, and minimal bureaucracy than in a liberal society that idealizes social justice and therefore tries to establish a unitary and homogenous social order. For example, ethnic minorities in a conservative society may well be able to maintain themselves and thrive through some combination of adaptation and niche-finding, while in a liberal society they will find themselves on the receiving end of a comprehensive campaign to eliminate the public significance of their (and every other) ethnic culture and the other things that constitute them as a separate people. An important question is whether alienation from the social order will be more common in a conservative or a liberal society. It seems that it will be more common in a social order based on universal implementation of a bureaucracy's conception of social justice than in one that accepts the moral feelings and loyalties that arise over time within particular communities. So it seems likely that a liberal society will have more citizens than a conservative society who feel that their deepest values and loyalties are peripheral to the concerns of the institutions that dominate their lives and so feel marginalized. 3.6 What about freedom? Conservatives are strong supporters of social institutions that realize and protect freedom, but believe such institutions attain their full value as part of a larger whole. Freedom is fully realized only when we are held responsible for the choices we make, and it is most valuable in a setting in which goods can readily be chosen that add up to a good life. Accordingly, conservatives reject perspectives that view freedom as an absolute, and recognize that the institutions through which freedom is realized must respect other goods without which freedom would not be worth having. In addition, conservatives believe there is a close connection between freedom and participation in government. Since how we live affects others, an important aspect of freedom is taking part in making society what it is. Accordingly, the conservative principles of federalism, local rule, and private property help realize freedom by devolving power into many hands and making widespread participation in running society a reality. 4 Economic Issues 4.1 Why do conservatives say they favor virtue and community but in fact favor laissez-faire capitalism? Doesn't laissez-faire capitalism promote the opposite? It's not clear that laissez-faire capitalism need undermine moral community. "Laissez fair capitalism" is a description of what the government does, not of society as a whole. While social statistics are a crude measure of the state of morality and community, it is noteworthy that crime and illegitimacy rates in England fell by about half from the middle to the end of the 19th century, the heyday of untrammelled capitalism. Conservatives view economic liberty as one of the traditional liberties of the American people that has served that people well, but are not fans of pure laissez-faire. Many are skeptical of free trade and most favor restraints on immigration for the sake of permitting the existence and development of a national community. Nor do they oppose in principle the regulation or suppression of businesses that affect the moral order of society, such as prostitution, pornography, and the sale of certain drugs. Conservatives particularly favor free markets when the alternative is to expand bureaucracy to implement liberal goals, a process that clearly has the effect of damaging virtue and community. They also recognize that the market reflects men's infinitely various and often unconscious and inarticulate perceptions and goals far better than any bureaucratic process could. Since conservatism is in part the belief that social life can't in general be administered, conservatives tend to prefer self-organization to central control. 4.2 Why don't conservatives care about what happens to the poor, weak, discouraged, and outcast? Conservatives do care about what happens to such people. That's why they oppose government programs that multiply the poor, weak, discouraged, and outcast by undermining and disrupting the network of social customs and relations that enable people to carry on their lives without the aid of government bureaucracy. Those tempted to attribute opposition to the welfare state to narrow self-seeking should consider the increase in charitable giving during the Decade of Greed and its subsequent decline. Moral community declines when people rely on government to solve their problems rather than on themselves and each other. It is the weak who suffer most from the resulting moral chaos. Those who think that interventionist liberalism means that the weak face fewer problems should consider the effects on women, children, and blacks of trends of the past 30 years (a period of large increases in social welfare expenditures) such as family instability, increased crime, reduced educational achievement, and the reversal in the older trend toward less poverty. 4.3 What about people for whom the usual support networks don't work? Shouldn't the government do something for them? Maybe. The issue is the practical effect of government programs on people's responsibility for themselves and for each other. It appears that in the long run a system whereby the government guarantees that no one lacks the material basis for a decent life will increase degradation and suffering by weakening self-reliance and the moral bonds among individuals that give rise to community, and could not be made to work without an elaborate system of compulsion. On the other hand, some social welfare measures (free clinics for mothers and children or measures that aid only clearly deserving people) may well increase social welfare even in the long term. Because of the obscurity of the issue, the difficulty in a democracy of limiting the expansion of government benefit programs, and the value of encouraging widespread participation in public life, the best resolution may be to keep government out of the matter and let people support voluntarily the institutions and programs they think are socially beneficial. 4.4 What about welfare for the middle classes, like social security, medicare, the home mortgage interest deduction, and so on? The most consistent conservatives want to get rid of all of them. Social security and medicare, they say, are financially unsound, and are socially harmful because they lead people capable of saving for their own retirement and supporting their own parents to rely on the government instead. They could better be replaced by private savings, prefunded medical insurance, greater emphasis on intergenerational obligations within families, and other arrangements that would evolve if the government presence were reduced or eliminated. Other conservatives distinguish these middle-class benefits from welfare by the element of reciprocity; people get social security and medicare only if they have already given a great deal to society, and in the case of the mortgage interest deduction the "benefit" consists only in the right to keep more of one's earnings. Still others try to split the difference somehow. As a practical matter, the reluctance of many conservatives to disturb these arrangements is likely motivated in part by the electoral power of their supporters. 4.5 If conserving is a good thing, why isn't ecology a conservative cause? Conservatism is concerned more with relations among men than those between man and nature, so ecology is not one of its defining issues. Some conservatives and conservative schools of thought take environmental issues very seriously; others less so. There may also be conservative grounds for criticizing or rejecting particular aspects of the environmental movement. 5 Conservatism in an Age of Established Liberalism 5.1 Why do conservatives talk as if the sky is about to fall and all good things are in the past? People have been bemoaning the present for a long time but things don't seem so bad today. Conservatives don't predict more disasters than liberals, just different disasters. Like other people they see both hopeful and hazardous trends in the current situation. As to the particular things that alarm conservatives, post-communist societies display the social effects of energetic attempts to implement post- Enlightenment radicalism. Less energetic attempts, such as modern American liberalism, do not lead to similar consequences as quickly. Nonetheless, social trends toward breakdown of affiliations among individuals, centralization of political power in irresponsible elites, irreconcilable social conflicts, and increasing stupidity and brutality in daily life suggest that those consequences are coming just the same. Why not worry about them? 5.2 Isn't conservatism essentially nostalgia for a past that never was and can't be restored? Conservatism involves a recognition that certain trends are pernicious because they destroy the possibility of moral community. Current examples include trends toward radical individualism, radical egalitarianism, and hedonism. Since moral community is required for the coherence of individual and social life, and since a coherent way of life is for us a practical necessity, conservatives are confident that in some fashion those trends will be reversed and in important respects the moral and social future will resemble the past more than the present. In particular, the future will see less emphasis on individual autonomy and more on essentialist ties among men and on the autonomy of moral tradition. The timing and form of the reversal is of course uncertain. Because conservatives would prefer it to happen as soon and as simply as possible they are accused of nostalgia and attempts to turn back the clock. If they don't get what they prefer the reversal will nonetheless take place, but with more conflict, disruption, and unpredictable consequences. 5.3 What's all this stuff about community and tradition? The groups that matter these days are groups like yuppies, gays, and senior citizens that people join as individuals and are based on interests and perspectives rather than tradition. Can this be true in the long run? When times are good people imagine that they can define themselves as they choose, but a society will not long exist if the only thing they have in common is a commitment to self-definition. The necessity for something beyond that becomes clearest when the times require sacrifice. Membership in a group with an identity developed and inculcated through tradition becomes far more relevant at such times than career path, life-style option, or stage of life. One of Bill Clinton's problems as president is that people think he's a yuppie who wouldn't die for anything; at some point that kind of problem becomes decisive. 5.4 Many things liberals favor, such as the welfare state and steady expansion of the scope of the civil rights laws, are well-established parts of our political arrangements. Shouldn't conservatives favor things that are so well-established? Yes, to the extent they are consistent with the older and more fundamental parts of our social arrangements (such as family, community, and traditional moral standards) and contribute to the over-all functioning of the whole. Unfortunately, the particular things mentioned fail on both points. 5.5 I was raised to believe in certain substantive liberal positions (the color- and gender-blind ideal, for example) on the grounds that those are the positions good Americans should hold. Wouldn't it be conservative for me to stay true to them? Yes, if those are the views the people among whom you grew up really lived by and experience does not drive you to change them. Such a situation is unlikely to arise often. Liberal positions (affirmative action is an example) typically are devised centrally and propagated by the mass media and educational system. On the whole they are more suited to be applied to society as a whole by a bureaucracy than incorporated into people's informal day-to-day way of life, and are adverse to the connections between people that make community possible. 5.6 I was raised a liberal. Doesn't that mean that to be conservative I should stay true to liberalism? How can you feel bound to a viewpoint that does not value loyalty? If you were raised an ideological liberal, you were raised to reject tradition and follow abstract reason or current fashion. Such a view can survive only if it is not univerally accepted. For someone raised in it the conservative approach would be to look for guidance to the things on which the people with whom he grew up actually relied for coherence and stability, including the traditions of the larger community upon which their way of life depended. 6 The Conservative Rainbow 6.1 How do libertarians differ from conservatives? In general, libertarians emphasize limited government more than conservatives and believe the sole legitimate purpose of government is the protection of property rights against force and fraud. Thus, they usually consider legal restrictions on such things as immigration, drug use, and prostitution to be illegitimate violations of personal liberty. Many but not all libertarians hold a position that might be described as economically Right (anti- socialist) and culturally Left (opposed to cultural repressiveness, racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on), and tend to attribute to state intervention the survival of things the cultural Left dislikes. Speaking more abstractly, the libertarian perspective assigns to the market the position conservatives assign to tradition as the great accumulator and integrator of the implicit knowledge of society. In addition, libertarians tend to believe in strict methodological individualism and absolute and universally valid human rights while conservatives are less likely to have the former commitment and tend to understand rights by reference to the forms they take in particular societies. 6.2 What are mainstream conservatives? People who mix the traditionalist conservatism outlined in this FAQ with varying proportions of libertarianism and liberalism. Rush Limbaugh is a mainstream conservatives; so in general is any conservative who gets elected. Mainstream conservatives often speak the language of liberalism, especially classical liberalism. Their appeal is nonetheless to tradition; typically, they reject political practices that have become accepted in the recent past by appealing to those characteristic of the more remote past or to social practices traditionally viewed as outside politics that now have been called into question and are seen as political. 6.3 What are neoconservatives? A group of conservatives most of whom were liberals until left-wing radicalism went mass-market in the late sixties. Many of them have been associated with the magazines _Commentary_ and _The Public Interest_, and a neopapalist contingent is associated with the magazine _First Things_. Some still have positions consistent with New Deal liberalism, while others have moved on to a more full- blown conservatism. Their influence has been out of proportion to their numbers, in part because they include a number of well-known Northeastern and West Coast journalists and academics and in part because having once been liberals they still can speak the language and retain a certain credibility in establishment circles. 6.4 What are paleoconservatives? Another group of conservatives most of whom were never liberals and live someplace other than the Northeast megalopolis or California. The most prominent paleo publications are _Chronicles_ and _Modern Age_. They arose as a self-conscious group in opposition to neoconservatives after the success of the neos in establishing themselves within the Reagan administration, and especially after the neos helped defeat the nomination of paleo Mel Bradford as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities in favor of one of their own, Bill Bennett. The views set forth in this FAQ are consistent with those of most paleoconservatives as well as many neoconservatives. 6.5 What are paleolibertarians? A group of libertarians, notably Llewellyn Rockwell and the late Murray Rothbard, who reject mainstream libertarianism as culturally libertine and often squishy-soft on big government and who ally themselves with the paleoconservatives. Their main publication is the _Rothbard-Rockwell Report_. 6.6 What are Frankfurt School Neopaleoconservatives? A group (so named for the first time in this FAQ) that has come by way of Frankfurt School cultural criticism to a position reminiscent of paleoconservatism emphasizing federalism and rejection of the managerial state. Their main publication is _Telos_, which now includes paleocon Paul Gottfried on their editorial board. 6.7 Where do the pro-life movement and Religious Right fit into all this? Like conservatism, both movements reject hedonism and radical individual autonomy and emphasize the authority of institutions other than the modern managerial state. Their general goals can usually be supported on conservative principles, but they tend to base their claims on principles of natural law or revelation that take precedence over tradition. Thus, these movements are distinct from conservatism although there is also much in common. 6.8 What are the differences between American conservatism and that of other countries? They correspond to the differences in political tradition. In general, conservatism in America has a much stronger capitalist/libertarian and populist streak than in other countries. The differences seem to be declining as other countries become more like America and as many American conservatives become more alienated from their own country's actual way of life and system of government. 6.9 What do all these things called "conservatism" have in common? Each rejects, through an appeal to something traditionally valued, the liberal tendency to treat individual impulse and desire as the final authorities. Differences in the preferred point of reference give rise to different forms of conservatism. Those who appeal to the independent and responsible individual become libertarian conservatives, those who appeal to a traditional culture or to God become traditionalist or religious conservatives. Depending on circumstances and the traditions of a people, the alliance among different forms of conservatism may be closer or more tenuous. In America today libertarian, traditionalist and religious conservatives generally find common ground in favoring federalism and opposing the managerial welfare state. --