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Path: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!nntprelay.mathworks.com!news.eecs.umich.edu!panix!news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) Newsgroups: alt.society.conservatism,alt.revolution.counter,talk.politics.theory,alt.fan.rush-limbaugh,talk.politics.misc,alt.answers,talk.answers,news.answers Subject: Conservatism Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Followup-To: alt.society.conservatism Date: 1 Oct 1997 05:43:22 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 905 Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.EDU Expires: 1 Nov 1997 00:00:00 GMT Message-ID: <60t5vq$4ve@panix.com> Reply-To: jk@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Host: panix.com Xref: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu alt.society.conservatism:100586 alt.revolution.counter:9364 talk.politics.theory:170198 alt.fan.rush-limbaugh:669367 talk.politics.misc:859117 alt.answers:29295 talk.answers:2480 news.answers:113504 Archive-name: conservatism/faq Posting-Frequency: monthly Conservatism FAQ October 1, 1997 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 version of this FAQ can also be obtained 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. For further discussion and relevant links, see the Traditionalist Conservatism Page at http://www.panix.com/~jk/trad.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 What's the difference between following tradition and refusing to think? 1.4 Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning? 1.5 Why can't tradition be an accumulation of ignorance, error and vice as easily as of wisdom? 1.6 How can anyone know his own tradition is the right one? 1.7 What about truth? 1.8 There are conflicting traditions even within a single society. Which gets treated as "ours?" 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 What are family values and what is so great about them? 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 Aren't conservatives racist sexist homophobes? 3.6 What happens to feminists, homosexuals, racial minorities and others marginalized in a conservative society? 3.7 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 Why are most people seriously involved in studying and dealing with social issues liberals? 5.5 How can tradition do anything but endorse the way things happen to be? 5.6 Can conservatism do more than follow historical movements with a lag? 5.7 Shouldn't conservatives favor things that are as well-established as the welfare state and steady expansion of the scope of the civil rights laws?? 5.8 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 that goes beyond what can be made explicit and demonstrated. 1.2 Why is tradition a source of greater wisdom? Tradition is a network of commonly accepted attitudes, beliefs and practices that evolves through strengthening of things that work and rejection of things that lead to conflict and failure. In the course of time it comes to comprise a collection of habits that have proved useful in a huge variety of practical affairs and a comprehensive and generally coherent point of view that reflects very extensive experience and thought. 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 experience and imitation is that most of what we need to 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 What's the difference between following tradition and refusing to think? What's the difference between relying on one's own private opinions, or changing with the times, and indifference to truth? The truth, after all, has no special connection with the times or one's private views! Thought must be based on something; to accept that fact is not to give up on thought but only to recognize that there is no perfect method for arriving at truth. The conservative method in thinking is to emphasize tradition rather than other things. Since conservatives view tradition as a necessary setting for thought that in our time is undervalued, they hope to think better by re- emphasizing it. 1.4 Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning? Our knowledge of things like politics and morality is partial and attained slowly and with difficulty. We can't evaluate political ideas without accepting far more beliefs, presumptions and attitudes than we could possibly judge critically. The effects of political proposals are difficult to predict, and as the proposals become more ambitious they become incalculable. 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. 1.5 Why can't tradition be an accumulation of ignorance, error and vice as easily as of wisdom? Since tradition is a human thing it may reflect the weakness as well as the strength of human nature. The same, of course, is true of rejecting tradition. In this century, anti-traditional theories supported by intelligent men for reasons they considered noble have repeatedly led to the murder of millions of innocents. The issue is not whether tradition is perfect but its appropriate role in human life. To the extent our most consistent aim is toward what is good, and we err more through random ignorance and oversight and conflicting impulse than coherent and settled evil, tradition will benefit us by linking our thoughts and actions to a steady and comprehensive system in which they can correct each other. It will secure and refine our acquisitions while hampering antisocial impulses. To the extent we consistently aim at what is evil, then tradition can not help us much but neither can anything else short of divine intervention. 1.6 How can anyone know his own tradition is the right one? Possibly no one can be certain. Our own tradition (like our own reasoning) might lead us astray where another's would not. However, such concerns 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 most situations there is no such method. If experience has led us astray it will most likely be further experience that sets us right. The same is true of tradition, which is social experience. 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 large parts of a different one. 1.7 But what about truth? Most conservatives are confident comprehensive objective truth exists, but not in the form of a set of propositions with a single meaning equally available and demonstrable to all. We apprehend truth largely through tradition and in a way that cannot be fully articulated, and cannot do otherwise. The world is too big for us to grasp as a whole, and in a clear systematic way. 1.9 There are conflicting traditions even within a single society. Which gets treated as "ours?" Any collectivity capable of deliberation and action has a tradition -- a set of commonly-held habits, attitudes, beliefs and memories that is reasonably coherent over time -- that enables it to do so. A society consists of those who at least in general terms accept the authority of the society's traditions. "Our" tradition is therefore the tradition that has guided and motivated the collective action of the society to which we belong and have given our loyalty. It is worth noting that no society is perfectly unified; each has elites and subordinate societies with their own traditions and sphere of action. A society may also harbor resident aliens and dissident or criminal groups. Which groups are treated as subordinate societies legitimately belonging to the larger society and which are treated as resident aliens, criminals or outside oppressors is itself determined by the traditions that define the society as a whole and make it what it is. 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? Changes have always involved resistance as well as acceptance. Those that have to make their way over opposition will presumably be better than those that are accepted without serious questioning. In addition, modern conservatism is not rejection of change as such, but of 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 Marxism and liberalism. 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 (typically phrased as a demand for the elimination of sex roles and heterosexism and the protection of children's rights) is different in kind from anything that has happened in the past, 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 particular 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 become intensely elitist because the more comprehensive and abstract a 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? Experience suggests otherwise. Slavery disappeared in Western and Central Europe long ago without need for self-conscious attempts at social reconstruction. It lasted much longer in the new and less conservative societies Europeans founded in America. While conservatism as such doesn't guarantee there will be no gross oppression, neither does the ideal of autonomous rational thought. It has been under radical and not conservative regimes that brutal forced labor and other gross forms of oppression have made a comeback in recent times. Indeed, radicalism is far more compatible than conservatism with tyrannical institutions because by overemphasizing the role of theory in politics it destroys reciprocity between the ruling theoreticians and those they govern. Conservatism is not a formal rule, and would be useless as a guide to action if it were a rejection of all change. It recognizes that moral habits evolve with experience and changing circumstances, and that social arrangements that come to be too much at odds with the moral life of a people change or disappear. It arose not from a desire to freeze everything exactly as it is, but from recognition of the difficulty of forcing society into a preconceived pattern and the importance of things, such as mutual personal obligation, for which ideologies of the Left have trouble finding a place. 3 Social and Cultural Issues 3.1 What are family values and what is so great about them? They are values that promote and maintain a society in which people's most basic loyalties, and the relationships upon which they rely most fundamentally, are relationships to particular persons rather than to the state. Family values are basic to moral life because it is primarily in relationships with particular persons that are taken with the utmost seriousness that we find the degree of mutual knowledge and responsiveness that is necessary for our obligations to others to become realities for us. To the extent the necessity of practical reliance on particular persons is viewed as something oppressive and unequal that the state should remedy, family values are rejected. Conservatives oppose such rejection. 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; if public attitudes presume that it is the man who is primarily responsible for family support they favor the latter at the expense of the former, while if they fail to make that presumption they 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. For example, 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 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. Even Libertarian Jerry might have some problems with _Heather and Her Whole Family Organize to Fight for Daycare and against Welfare Reductions_. There is no obvious reason to consider one more tolerant than the other. The issue of social tolerance comes up most often 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. 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 theory and formal decisions, 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 expectations for what government can achieve. 3.5 Aren't conservatives racist sexist homophobes? That depends on what those words mean. They are often used very broadly. "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. Ethnicity is not the same thing as "race" as a biological category; on the other hand, the two are difficult to disentangle because both arise out of shared history and common descent. "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 such stereotypes, since they make it far more likely that individual men and women will complement each other and form stable and functional unions for the rearing of children. Also, some degree of differentiation seems to fit the presocial tendencies of men and women better than unisex would. Conservatives see no reason to struggle against those benefits, especially in view of the evident bad consequences of the weakening of stereotypical obligations between the sexes in recent decades. "Homophobes"--Finally, sex-role stereotyping implies a tendency to reject patterns of impulse, attitude and conduct that don't fit the stereotypes, such as homosexuality. For a more extended discussion from a conservative perspective of issues relating to the liberal demand for "inclusiveness", see the Anti-Inclusiveness FAQ at http://www.panix.com/~jk/inclus.html. 3.6 What happens to feminists, homosexuals, racial minorities and others marginalized in a conservative society? The same as happens in a society based on the liberal conception of inclusiveness 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 in which it may be difficult to live as they prefer. In both kinds of society, people on the outs may be able 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 homogeneous social order. For example, ethnic minorities in a conservative society may well be able to thrive or at least maintain themselves through some combination of adaptation and niche-finding, while in a liberal society they will find themselves on the receiving end of policies designed to eliminate the public importance of their (and every other) ethnic culture. 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. 3.7 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 things 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 public affairs. 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, limited government, local rule, and private property help realize freedom by devolving power into many hands and making widespread participation in running society a reality. Respect for tradition, the "democracy of the dead," has the same effect. 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? Conservatives typically are not fans of pure laissez-faire, although they view economic liberty as one of the traditional liberties of the American people that has served that people well. Many are skeptical of free trade and most favor restraints on immigration for the sake of permitting the existence and development of a reasonably coherent 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 strongly 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. Also, they tend to prefer self-organization to central control because they believe that in general social life can't be administered. They recognize that like tradition the market reflects men's infinitely various and often unconscious and inarticulate goals and perceptions far better than any bureaucratic process could. In any event, it's not clear that laissez-faire capitalism need undermine moral community. "Laissez-faire capitalism" has to do with limitations on what the government does and only indirectly with the nature of society as a whole. While social statistics are only a crude measure of the state of community and morality, 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, and that the rejection of laissez-faire has in fact been accompanied by increasing social atomization. 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 they believe multiply the poor, weak, discouraged, and outcast by undermining and disrupting the network of habits and social relations that enable people to carry on their lives without depending on government bureaucracy. Moral community declines when people rely on government to solve their problems rather than on themselves and those they live with. It is the weak who suffer most from the resulting moral chaos. Those tempted to attribute opposition to the welfare state to narrow self-seeking should consider the increase of charitable giving during the Decade of Greed and its subsequent decline, and those who think that interventionist liberalism means that the weak face fewer problems should consider the effects on women, children, and blacks of such trends of the past 30 years (a period of large increases in social welfare expenditures) 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? A general perspective on the matter is that society is basically a matter of moral understandings. The understanding on which the question appears to be based is that ultimate responsibility for individual material well-being properly belongs to a universal welfare bureaucracy. The consequence of such an understanding is that in the end what other people do, and what befalls them, is as a practical matter none of my business. That result is inconsistent with any communal understanding based on unavoidable mutual responsibility and concern, and therefore in the long run with any tolerable society. More concrete issues relate to 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 increases suffering and degradation by weakening self- reliance and the moral bonds among individuals that give rise to community, and can not be made to work without an elaborate system of compulsion. Some government 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 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 are, of course, conservative grounds for criticizing or rejecting particular aspects of the existing 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. Post-communist societies display the social consequences of energetic attempts to implement post-Enlightenment radicalism. Less energetic attempts, such as modern American liberalism, do not lead to similar effects 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? In substance, the objection is that the goals of conservatism are neither serious nor achievable. That objection fails if in the end conservatives are likely to get what they want. Conservatism involves a recognition that moral community is required for the coherence of individual and social life, and a reasonably coherent way of life is a practical necessity. Current trends toward radical individualism, egalitarianism and hedonism destroy the possibility of moral community. Conservatives are therefore confident that in some fashion existing 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 moral tradition and essentialist ties among men. The timing and form of the necessary reversal is of course uncertain. It plainly can't be achieved through administrative techniques, the method most readily accepted as serious and realistic today, so conservatives' main political proposal is that aspects of the modern state that oppose the reversal be trimmed or abandoned. Those who consider modern trends beneficial and irreversible therefore accuse conservatives of simple obstructionism. In contrast, those who believe that current trends lead to catastrophe and that a reversal must take place expect that if the conservatives aren't successful now their goals will be achieved in the future, but very likely with more conflict and destruction along the way. 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 men 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 then than career path, life-style option, or stage of life. One of Bill Clinton's problems as president is that people see in him a yuppie who wouldn't die for anything; at some point that kind of problem becomes decisive. 5.4 If conservatism is so great, why are most people seriously involved in studying and dealing with social issues liberals? Conservatives believe it is impossible to define the considerations relevant to social life clearly enough to make a technological approach to society possible. Accordingly, they reject efforts to divide human affairs into separate compartments to be mastered and dealt with by experts as part of an overall plan for promoting comprehensive social goals such as equality and prosperity. Academic and other policy experts are defined as such by their participation in 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. 5.5 How can tradition do anything but endorse the way things happen to be -- which at present means established liberalism? It can't if it is treated as a formal rule, since the current state of a tradition is simply the current practices, attitudes, beliefs and so on of the community whose tradition it is. However, conservatives treat tradition not as a set of formal rules complete in itself but as a way of knowing things such as the good and the true that can neither be reduced to tradition nor grasped concretely apart from it. One who accepts a religious tradition, for example, owes his ultimate allegiance not to the tradition but to God, who is known through the tradition. Conservatives therefore recognize traditions as authoritative, but not all equally and very few absolutely. 5.6 But can conservatism do more than follow historical movements with a lag, so that after a generation or two liberal positions become conservative positions? Conservatism is rarely a position complete in itself. Respect for tradition usually results from an understanding that not all truths we live by can be made explicit, and often from a belief that the transcendent has been revealed in particular episodes in the past. Such understandings and beliefs may absorb particular liberal positions, but since the tendency and interrelationship of particular positions is all-important they make of them something quite different. 5.7 Shouldn't modern conservatives at least favor things that are as well-established as the welfare state and steady expansion of the scope of the civil rights laws? 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 things mentioned fail on both points. Existing welfare and civil rights measures make sense only as part of a centrally managed system that is adverse to the connections among people that make community possible, and is designed to be applied to society as a whole by a bureaucracy rather than incorporated into informal day-to-day life. It is very difficult for conservatives to accept anything like such a system. 5.8 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 and therefore can survive only if it is generally not 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. Some writers, such as F.A. Hayek, attempt to bridge the two perspectives on that issue. 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. Any conservative who gets elected or otherwise hits the mass market (e.g., Rush Limbaugh) is likely to be a mainstream conservative. Mainstream conservatives often speak the language of liberalism, especially classical liberalism. Their appeal is nonetheless conservative; typically, they reject more highly developed forms of liberalism in favor of earlier forms that retain more traces of non-liberal traditions. 6.3 What are neoconservatives? A group of conservatives most of whom were liberals until left-wing radicalism went mass-market in the sixties. Their positions continue to evolve; some still have positions consistent with New Deal liberalism, while others have moved on to a more full-blown conservatism. Many of them have been associated with the magazines _Commentary_ and _The Public Interest_, and a neopapalist contingent (now at odds with many other neoconservatives) is associated with the magazine _First Things_. 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 Northeastern 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 in many respects share common ground with the paleoconservatives. One of their main publications is the _Rothbard-Rockwell Report_; another is _Dispatches from the Last Ditch_. 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 its 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 have strong conservative elements but are not purely conservative. It should be noted, however, that pure conservatism is rare or nonexistent and may not even be coherent. The point of conservatism is always some good other than maintenance of tradition as such, so the authority conservatives give tradition is rarely absolute. 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, while those who appeal to a traditional culture or to God become traditionalist or religious conservatives. Depending on circumstances, 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 constitutional limited government and opposing the managerial welfare state. -- Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk) "Every reform is only a mask under cover of which a more terrible reform, which dares not yet name itself, advances." -- Emerson