Nowadays, in startling contrast to my youth, it’s very
fashionable to claim to be a conservative. Back in the Sixties,
conservatism was still rather a fugitive thing, and the fashion
was liberalism or even radicalism. By the late Eighties,
liberal had become “the L-word,” and liberals
were looking for a less alarming euphemism, such as
progressive. As I say, the change is startling.
But have things really changed that much? Or is the change
really superficial? I’m afraid the latter is the case. The
airwaves are clogged with the clamorous voices of talk radio, or
“squawk radio,” as I like to call it — people
claiming to be conservative, though they don’t sound much
like the great conservatives I grew up admiring: Bill Buckley, Frank
Meyer, James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, and Barry
Goldwater, to name a few.
In fact many of today’s so-called conservatives
seem to me to be liberals without knowing it, no matter how much
they say they detest liberalism. Rush Limbaugh, to name only the
most audible of them, seems to have no real philosophy, no
awareness of conservative literature outside journalism. His
premises are hard to distinguish from liberalism’s.
Apparently he equates favoring war with conservatism. He likes
big government just fine, as long as it’s shooting
something. He says the Republican Party will save Social Security
and Medicare, huge liberal programs which a real conservative
thinks shouldn’t have existed in the first place.
Sometimes, after listening to him for a half hour, I want to beg
him, “Rush, how about equal time for real
conservatism?”
Well, just what is “real” conservatism? This is
an old question, much debated. Dictionaries define it in such
terms as “preference for tradition” and
“resistance to change,” but these are too general to
take us very far. After all, nearly everyone wants to preserve
some tradition and opposes some kinds of change, and people we
call conservatives often want to do away with certain traditions
and bring about important changes.
And all of life is in flux at all times. You can never conserve
everything. We are forced to face the question of which things we
should conserve, which we should discard or even destroy, and
which we should let pass away. When a house catches fire, we
may have to decide very quickly what we can rescue from the
flames and abandon all the rest.
And conservatism isn’t just passivity. It’s
active maintenance. An old house needs repair and painting, a
garden needs weeding, trees and shrubs need pruning. To
conserve is to renew. Conservatism can’t mean neglect.
And conservatism varies from place to place, from people
to people. The great Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
even under the Soviet regime, wanted to preserve tsarism and
the Russian Orthodox Church. Islam is in many ways deeply
conservative, but we have also seen it take radical and
revolutionary forms. Mormonism was once seen as radical, but
today it seems a very conservative religion. The same might be
said of Christianity in various forms. And as G.K. Chesterton
says, “It is futile to discuss reform without reference to
form.”
The word conservatism came into general use
after the French Revolution of 1789, its first and most eloquent
spokesman being Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the
Revolution in France. Burke argued for the traditional
liberties of the English against the “abstract” Rights
of Man advocated by the revolutionaries, predicting correctly that
such abstract rights, with no force of custom behind them, would
perish in a reign of terror. The revolutionaries, he said, were so
obsessed with man’s rights that they had
forgotten man’s nature.
History has vindicated Burke’s warning, but many
have doubted that his kind of conservatism fully applies to
America. We don’t have the sort of history England and
France had, a feudal ancien régime with a social hierarchy and
inherited status. It is even argued that our only tradition is a
liberal one, of legal equality for everyone. After all, we are not
divided into peasants versus noblemen, or anything of the sort.
We even take pride in our social fluidity and more or less equal
opportunity.
This brings us to a paradox. The most eloquent of our own
Founding Fathers was Thomas Jefferson, who welcomed the
French Revolution and had no use for Burke. Yet most American
conservatives look to Jefferson as their intellectual patriarch, he
who wrote the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed that
“all men are created equal.”
Today conservatism has become a confusing term.
It can refer to a Jeffersonian vision of limited government and
strict construction of the U.S. Constitution, or it can be equated
with President Bush’s militarism and what has been called
his “big-government conservatism.” And of course
the title is also claimed by “neoconservatives” who
share Bush’s enthusiasm for war and are, when it comes
to social policy, more like liberals than Jeffersonian
conservatives.
Both Bush and the “neocons” favor an
undefined war and speak of a “global democratic
revolution.” But what is conservative about war and
revolution? It has often been pointed out that this sort of talk is
more akin to Leon Trotsky than to Edmund Burke. Bush even
speaks of eliminating tyranny from the face of the Earth —
a neat trick, if you can do it.
Here I think we should keep in mind Burke’s
distinction between “the abstract rights of man”
and man’s actual nature. Conservatives tend to believe in
Original Sin, or something like it, that will forever prevent man
from achieving perfection. This attitude produces a disposition
that tends to be both skeptical and tolerant, deeply dubious about
overhauling society. Societies and traditions can’t be built
from scratch; as Burke said, we must build out of existing
materials — that is, real human beings and their habits,
rooted in history.
Liberals, on the other hand, speak freely of
“ideals,” imagined perfections that we can achieve if
only we have the will. “I have a dream,” as Martin
Luther King said. Hence liberals typically talk of abolishing evils
— “eliminating poverty,” “eradicating
racism,” “doing away with prejudice,”
“ending exploitation,” and so forth. This usually
means strenuous government action, massive coercion and
bureaucracy, because these things don’t just evaporate of
themselves.
Conservatives don’t speak much of
“ideals.” They think, more modestly, in terms of
norms, which are never perfectly realized, but only approximated
by sinful man. Consider homosexuality. Whereas the liberal wants
to impose “gay rights,” by law and coercion, the
conservative sees homosexuality as a defect, which to some
extent can and must be tolerated, because it can’t be
“eradicated,” but it can’t rationally be exalted
to the plane of normality; and he knows that all talk of
“same-sex marriage” is nonsense, like trying to
breed calves from a pair of bulls. But to the liberal, the only issue
is equal rights; human nature and normality have nothing to say
to him. What the conservative sees as life’s mysteries,
the liberal sees as mere irrationality.
One word is notably absent from the liberal vocabulary:
enough. For the liberal, there is hardly such a thing as
“too much” government. There is no point at which
liberals say, “Well, we’ve done it. We’ve
realized our dreams. We have all the government we need, and we
should stop now.” No, they always want more government.
There is no such thing as enough government.
Again, Chesterton sums up liberalism in a phrase:
“the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the
normal to the abnormal.” We see this again in the grisly
business of abortion. To the typical conservative it is an ugly
thing, something that may not be entirely
“eliminated” but must be contained, condemned, and
above all must never be accepted as normal. But to the typical
liberal it is a right — even “a fundamental human and
constitutional right”!
The role of Lincoln
Consider Abraham Lincoln, claimed by both liberals and
conservatives. Most Americans consider him our greatest
president — a view I emphatically reject. But both sides
have a point in claiming him. In some respects he was rather
conservative — for example, in his willingness to
compromise on slavery before the Civil War. He doubted that he
had the constitutional authority to issue the Emancipation
Proclamation, which he finally justified only as a wartime
measure, applying only to the seceding states.
But he finally became an all-out abolitionist, and he had a
radical dream of colonizing all free blacks outside the United
States; in his 1862 State of the Union message, he called for a
constitutional amendment authorizing such colonization! In
addition, Lincoln was a high-handed centralizer of power, who
suspended habeas corpus and crushed freedom of speech and
press throughout the North. Like most liberals, he talked of
freedom — “a new birth of freedom,” in fact
— but the reality was power. Under the Constitution, he
insisted, no state could withdraw from the Union for any reason.
This was a view Jefferson did not share. The United States had
begun in secession. Lincoln himself had once called secession
“a most sacred right, which we believe is to liberate
mankind.”
A more recent conservative, Willmoore Kendall, who died in
1967, argued that American conservatism is rooted in its own
constitutional tradition, best understood in the light of
The Federalist Papers, where the limits of the
Federal Government are clearly set forth. As far as I can tell,
Lincoln was entirely ignorant of The Federalist
Papers, as well as of the Articles of Confederation
— a point I’ll return to.
An even more recent conservative, Michael Oakeshott, who
died in 1990, was English rather than American, but he had much
to teach us. Oakeshott, like Burke, decried “rationalism in
politics” — by which he chiefly meant what we call
liberalism. He observed that some people (liberals) see
government as “a vast reservoir of power,” to be
mobilized for whatever purposes they imagine would benefit
mankind. By contrast, Oakeshott argued, the conservative sees
governing as “a specific and limited activity,” chiefly
concerned with civility and the rule of law, not with
“dreams” and “projects.” I consider
Oakeshott the most eloquent expositor of conservatism and the
conservative temperament since Burke.
I have already said that Lincoln was poorly acquainted with
the Founding Fathers. By contrast, Jefferson Davis was
thoroughly familiar with them, and in his history of the
Confederacy (too little read nowadays) he makes a powerful, I
would say irrefutable, case that every state has a constitutional
right to withdraw — to secede — from the Union.
In the North, secession is still seen as a regional
“Southern” issue, inseparable from, and therefore
discredited by, slavery. But this is not so at all. At various times,
Northern states had threatened to secede for various reasons.
On one occasion, Thomas Jefferson said they should be allowed to
“go in peace.” After all, the whole point of the
Declaration of Independence was that these “are, and of
Right ought to be, Free and Independent States.” Not, as
Lincoln later said, a single “new nation,” but (to
quote Willmoore Kendall) “a baker’s dozen of new
sovereignties.”
And the Articles of Confederation reinforced the point
right at the beginning: “Each state retains its sovereignty,
freedom, and independence.” And at the end of the
Revolutionary War, the British specifically recognized the
sovereignty of all 13 states! This is flatly contrary to
Lincoln’s claim that the states had never been sovereign.
But didn’t the Constitution transfer sovereignty
from the states to the Federal Government, outlawing secession?
Not at all. The Constitution says nothing of the kind. And as Davis
wrote, sovereignty cannot be surrendered by mere implication. In
fact, several states ratified the Constitution on the express
condition that they reserved the right to “resume”
the powers they were “delegating” — that is,
secede. And if one state could secede, so could the others. A
“state” was not a mere province or subdivision of a
larger entity; it was sovereign by definition.
Claiming sovereignty for the Federal Government, Lincoln
felt justified in violating the Constitution in order to “save
the Union” — by which he meant
“saving” Federal sovereignty. One of the best-kept
secrets of American history is that many if not most
Northerners thought the Southern states had the right to
secede. This is why Lincoln shut down hundreds of newspapers
and arrested thousands of critics of his war. He had to wage a
propaganda war against the North itself.
Were you told this in your history classes? Neither was I.
We are still being told that Lincoln’s cause was the cause
of liberty; just as we are told that he was the friend of the black
man, though he wanted the freed slaves to be sent abroad,
leaving an all-white America. Lincoln had a dream too, but it
wasn’t Martin Luther King’s.
Lincoln achieved what the Princeton historian James
MacPherson calls “the Second American Revolution,”
giving the Federal Government virtually full authority over the
internal affairs of the states. Columbia’s George Fletcher
credits him with creating “a new Constitution.” A
third historian, Garry Wills of Northwestern University, says he
“changed America,” transforming our understanding
of the Constitution.
Mind you, these are not Lincoln’s critics —
they are his champions! Do they listen to themselves? They are
saying exactly what Jefferson Davis said: that Lincoln was
abandoning the original Constitution! But they think this is a high
compliment. Lincoln himself claimed he was “saving”
the old Constitution. His admirers, without realizing it, are telling
us a very different story.
Peaceful secession was a state’s ultimate
constitutional defense against Federal tyranny. Without it, the
Federal Government has been able to claim new powers for itself
while stripping the states of their powers. Lincoln neither foresaw
nor intended this when he crushed secession. But today the
states are helpless when, for example, the Federal Courts
suddenly declare that no state may constitutionally protect
unborn children from violent death in the womb. If even one state
had been able to secede, the U.S. Supreme Court would never
have dared provoke it to do so by issuing such an outrageous
ruling, with no support in the Constitution.
But Lincoln has been deified as surely as any Roman
emperor. Today he is widely ranked as one of our “greatest
presidents,” along with another bold usurper of power,
Franklin Roosevelt. And as I say, even conservatives, so called,
join in his praise. President Bush and his supporters invoke both
Lincoln and Roosevelt to justify the war in Iraq and any powers he
chooses to claim in its prosecution. In the old days, Americans
told the government what our rights were; now it tells us. And we
meekly obey.
If Bush and his right-wing supporters are conservatives,
what on earth would a liberal be like? In these last six years, the
Federal Government has vastly increased in power, with a
corresponding diminution of our freedoms. Every American child
is now born $150,000 in debt — his estimated share of the
national debt, which he had no say in incurring. And of course the
figure will be much higher when he is old enough to vote.
Meanwhile, he will go to a school, where he will be taught
that he enjoys “self-government,” thanks to great
men like Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Bush.
What passes for “conservatism” now is a
very far cry indeed from even the limited-government
conservatism of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan just a
generation ago. It is merely a variant of the liberalism it pretends
to oppose.
How do these pseudoconservatives differ from liberals?
Chiefly, for some reason, in their reflexive enthusiasm for war.
Ponder that. War is the most destructive and least conservative
of all human activities. It is big government par excellence; it
breeds tyranny and, often, revolution. Yet most Americans now
identify it with conservatism!
I am very much afraid that the next generation will have
forgotten what real conservatism means: moral stability, piety,
private property, and of course the rule of law (as distinct from
the mad multiplication of regulations).
But genuine conservatism will reassert itself, even if it has
to find another name and new spokesmen. If the Bushes and
Limbaughs have usurped and discredited the word
conservatism for the time being, we must try to take it
back. If we can’t, we’ll just have to find a label they
can’t steal.
Joe Sobran
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