Path: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!nycmny1-snh1.gtei.net!news.gtei.net!panix!news.panix.com!panix3.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 Jul 2001 19:39:47 -0400 Organization: Institute for the Human Sciences Lines: 961 Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.EDU Expires: 1 Aug 2001 00:00:00 GMT Message-ID: <9hocc3$sfr$1@panix3.panix.com> Reply-To: kalb@aya.yale.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: panix3.panix.com X-Trace: news.panix.com 994030788 15817 166.84.0.228 (1 Jul 2001 23:39:48 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 1 Jul 2001 23:39:48 GMT X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.6 (NOV) Xref: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu alt.society.conservatism:303426 alt.revolution.counter:12198 talk.politics.theory:225582 alt.fan.rush-limbaugh:1597607 talk.politics.misc:1823105 alt.answers:56362 talk.answers:5337 news.answers:210450 Archive-name: conservatism/faq Posting-Frequency: monthly Conservatism FAQ July 1, 2001 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.freespeech.org/antitechnocrat/consfaq.html. For further discussion and relevant links, see the Traditionalist Conservatism Page at http://www.freespeech.org/antitechnocrat/trad.html. Questions 1 General principles 1.1 What is distinctive about conservatism as a political view? 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? 3.8 And justice? 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 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? 5.7 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 What is distinctive about conservatism as a political view? Its emphasis on tradition as a source of wisdom that goes beyond what can be demonstrated or even explicitly stated. 1.2 Why is tradition a source of greater wisdom? It 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. It therefore comprises 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. Through it we know subtle and fundamental features of the world that would otherwise escape us, and our understanding of those things takes on concrete and usable form. The usual alternative to reliance on tradition is reliance on theory. Taking theory literally can be costly because it achieves clarity by ignoring things that are difficult to articulate. Such things can be important; the reason politics and morals are learned mostly by experience and imitation is that most of what we need to know about them 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. Other considerations also support the wisdom of relying on tradition, if not specifically of tradition itself. For example, tradition typically exists as the common property of a community whose members are raised in it. Accordingly, it normally unites more than divides, and is far more likely than theory to facilitate life in common. 1.3 What's the difference between following tradition and refusing to think? One might as well ask what the difference is between following one's own opinion and indifference to truth. The goal of thought is truth, after all, and truth has no special connection with one's private views! Accepting tradition is not abandonment of thought but only recognition that a man's thought is not self-contained. The goal of thought is something outside itself, and it must be based on something. Further, much of what it is based on we necessarily pick up from other people. Conservatives are therefore skeptical of the autonomy of thought. They believe that tradition can guide and correct it and so bring it closer to truth. While truth is not wholly out of reach, our access to it is largely indirect and necessarily incomplete. Since it can not be reduced wholly to our possession, conservatives are willing to accept it in whatever form it is available to us, and to recognize the need to rely on the unarticulated truth implicit in inherited attitudes and practices. Today this aspect of our relationship to truth is undervalued; conservatives hope to think better and know more truly 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 their effects 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 vices as well as the virtues of human nature. The same, of course, is true of relying on autonomous reason. In this century, anti-traditional theories supported by intelligent men for reasons thought noble have repeatedly led to the murder of millions of innocents. The issue is not whether tradition is perfect but its appropriate place in human life. To the extent our most consistent aim is toward what is good, and we err more through ignorance, 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 There are lots of conflicting traditions. How can anyone know his own is the right one? Certainty is hard to come by. Our own tradition (like our own reasoning) might lead us astray where another's would not. However, such concerns can not justify rejecting our own tradition unless we have a method transcending it for determining when that has happened, and in most situations we do not. 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 and 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 demonstrable to all. The world is too big for us to grasp as a whole in a clear systematic way. We apprehend truth largely through tradition and in a way that cannot be fully articulated, and we cannot do otherwise. Even if some truths can be known with certainty through reason or revelation, their social acceptance and their interpretation and application depend on tradition. 1.8 There are conflicting traditions even within a single society. Which gets treated as "ours?" Any collectivity that deliberates and acts 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 accept the authority of a common set of traditions. "Our" tradition is therefore the tradition that has guided and motivated the collective action of the society to which we belong and give our loyalty. It is worth noting that no society is perfectly unified; each has elites and subordinate societies with their own traditions and spheres 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 one and which are treated as resident aliens, criminals or foreign 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 all 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 liberalism and Marxism. It is recollection that the world is not our creation, and that there are permanent things. For example, the family as an institution has changed from time to 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 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? Every political view promotes 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 merits. It's worth noting that contemporary liberalism furthers the interests of the powerful social classes that support it, and 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 oppression, neither do attempts at 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. That is no paradox. Radicalism is far more compatible than conservatism with tyrannical institutions because by overemphasizing the role of theory in politics it destroys reciprocity and mutual accommodation between rulers and ruled. Conservatism would be useless as a guide to action if it were a rejection of all change. It is not self-contained; its recognition of existing practice as a standard does not mean denial of standards other than existing practice. 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 feelings of a people change or disappear. It also recognizes that there can be corruptions as well as improvements. Conservatism arose not from a desire to freeze everything exactly as it is, but from recognition of the necessity of continuity, the difficulty of forcing society into a preconceived pattern, and the importance of things, such as mutual personal obligation and standards of right and wrong not reducible to power and desire, for which ideologies of the Left have trouble finding a place. Those recognitions make conservatives more reliable opponents of tyranny than progressives. 3 Social and Cultural Issues 3.1 What are family values and what is so great about them? They are values that 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 responsibility that is necessary for our obligations to others to become realities for us. In addition, the knowledge and habits necessary for the good life mostly have to do with the day-to-day activities of ordinary men. Such things lose coherence if everyday personal relations are unstable and unreliable, as they will be if law and expected habits and attitudes do not support stable and functional family life. 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 that rejection. 3.2 Why can't conservatives just accept that people's personal values differ? Liberals, conservatives and others all 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 there should be family responsibility supported by a system of sex roles enforced by informal social sanctions, 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 CashP. Liberal Jack will object to the book PHeather's Mommy Stays Home and Her Daddy Goes to the OfficeP, while Conservative Jill will object to other well-known texts. Even Libertarian Jerry might have some problems with PHeather and Her Whole Family Organize to Fight for Daycare and against Welfare Reductions_. There is no obvious reason to consider any of the three more tolerant than the others. At present, 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, http://www.freespeech.org/antitechnocrat/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 traditions and feelings 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. They also oppose legislation that forbids discrimination on moral grounds. How much more the government can or should do to promote morality is a matter of experience and circumstance. 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, http://www.freespeech.org/antitechnocrat/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 among themselves, 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 local control, federalism, and minimal bureaucracy than in a society that idealizes egalitarian social justice and therefore tries to establish a universal 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 an "inclusive" society they will find themselves on the receiving end of policies designed to eliminate the public importance of their (and every other) ethnic culture. One 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, freedom includes 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. Respect for tradition, the "democracy of the dead," has the same effect. 3.8 And justice? Justice between man and man is respect for concrete obligations and individual responsibility. Conservatives take both very seriously. Social justice is the ordering of social life toward the good for man. Social injustice is systematic destruction of the conditions for existence of that good. Because the good for man can not be fully known, because it includes respect for each of us as a moral agent, and because human affairs are infinitely complex, social justice can never be fully achieved, nor achieved at all through imposition of a preconceived overall design on society. Attempts to do the latter have led to horrendous crimes including, in several modern instances, the murder of millions of innocents. Since social justice must evolve rather than be constructed its furtherance requires acceptance of the authority of tradition. The two cannot be separated. Social justice is sometimes thought to mean promotion of equality through comprehensive government action. That view can not be correct since men differ and what is just for them must therefore also differ. In addition, the goods which that view is concerned to divide equally -- wealth, power and the like -- do not appear to be the ultimate human goods and therefore can not appropriately be considered the ultimate concerns of justice. Finally, a system guided by such a conception must defeat its own purpose because it puts enormous and uncontrollable power in the hands of those who control the government; possession of such power, of course, makes them radically unequal to those they rule. 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 overall administration of social life is impossible. 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 in England crime and illegitimacy rates 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 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 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 35 years, a period of large increases in social welfare expenditures, such as increased crime, reduced educational achievement, family instability, and an end to progress in reducing poverty. 4.3 What about people for whom the usual support networks don't work? Shouldn't the government do something for them? The fundamental question is whether government should have ultimate responsibility for individual material well-being. Conservatives believe that it should not; giving it that responsibility means despotism, since material well-being is a result of a complex of things that in the end extends to the whole of life, and responsibility for each individual case requires detailed control of the whole. Government responsibility for specific cases also means that what happens to people, and therefore what they do, is the business of no one in particular; if there's a serious problem, the government will take care of it. Such an outlook destroys social ties and promotes antisocial behavior. If government does things that weaken self-reliance and the moral bonds that give rise to community, and that can not be made to work without an elaborate system of compulsion, in the long run it will increase suffering and degradation. Conservatives are therefore suspicious of social welfare programs, especially attempts at categorical solutions. Suspicion has rational limits. Some government social welfare measures (free clinics for mothers and children or local systems of support for deserving people) may well increase social welfare even in the long term. However, because of the obscurity of the issue, the difficulty in a mass democracy of limiting the expansion of government benefit programs, and the value of widespread participation in public life, the best resolution is likely to be keeping central government involvement strictly limited, and letting individuals, associations and localities support voluntarily the institutions and programs they think 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. There is, however, nothing in conservatism intrinsically at odds with ecological concerns. Some conservatives and conservative schools of thought take such issues very seriously; others less so. There are, of course, conservative grounds for criticizing or rejecting particular aspects of the existing environmental movement such as overemphasis on central controls. 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, brutality and triviality 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 recognition that moral community is required for the coherence of individual and social life, and that a reasonably coherent way of life is a practical necessity. Current trends toward radical egalitarianism, individualism 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. 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 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 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 its members 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 was 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 and control the considerations relevant to social life accurately enough to make a technological approach to society possible. Accordingly, they reject efforts to divide human affairs into compartments to be dealt with by experts as part of an overall plan for promoting comprehensive goals like 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 them, such as welfare-state liberalism, over perspectives that are suspicious of them. 5.5 How can tradition do anything but endorse the way things happen to be -- which at present means established liberalism? If traditionalism were a formal rule it could of course tell us very little; the current state of a tradition is simply the current practices, attitudes, beliefs and so on of the community whose tradition it is. The point of tradition, however, is that formal rules are inadequate. Tradition is not self-contained, and not all parts of it are equally authoritative. It is a way of grasping things that are neither knowable apart from it nor merely traditional. 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. It is allegiance to something that exceeds and motivates the tradition that makes it possible to distinguish what is authentic and living in the tradition from nonessentials and corruptions. 5.6 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 comprehensive centrally managed system that is adverse to the connections among men that make community possible, and is designed to reorder society as a whole through bureaucratic decree. It is very difficult for conservatives to accept anything like such a system. 5.7 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 fundamentally not accepted by most people? For someone raised a liberal, 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. Those things will always include fundamental illiberal elements that enabled the community to function as such. 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. Some but not all libertarians hold a position that might be described as economically Right (anti- socialist) and culturally Left (opposed to what are called 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 over the relation between religion and politics) 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 on most issues share common ground with paleoconservatives. 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, rejection of the therapeutic managerial state, and (most recently) liturgy. Their publication is _Telos_, which now includes paleocon Paul Gottfried on its editorial board and publishes Chronicles editor Thomas Fleming as well as writers such as Alain de Benoist associated with the European New Right. 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 traditionally- based institutions in opposition to that of the modern managerial state. Their general goals can usually be supported on conservative principles, but they tend to base their claims ultimately on principles of natural law or revelation that are sometimes handled in an antitraditional way. As popular movements in an antitraditional public order they often adopt non-conservative styles of reasoning and rhetoric. 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. 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 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 find common ground in favoring federalism and constitutional limited government and opposing the managerial welfare state. -- Jim Kalb (kalb@aya.yale.edu) http://counterrevolution.net and http://www.human-rights.f2s.com