I guess I do not understand the centrality of Edmund Burke whenever a discussion arises concerning the meaning of conservatism. Maybe it is because I am much more interested in the meaning of Republicanism than any malleable ideological underpinning. As I see it, in a country with a basic two-party structure, there will be one party that caters primarily to the workers and wage earners, and one party that caters to the employers and financiers. And, in a representative system of government, the employers and financiers will always be outnumbered, which means that they will always have to divine some strategy for peeling off a significant subset of the workers and wage earners.
I guess I should amend this construct to take into account our country’s history of regional factionalism. For most of our history, for example, the South has operated with a one-party system rather than a two-party system. From the Civil War until the Civil Rights Movement, the South was monolithically Democratic, not because it took the side of the workers and wage-earners, but because it opposed black autonomy and equal citizenship. More recently, it has been monolithically Republican because it opposes the federal government’s role in protecting black civil rights and in redistributing wealth to the minority underclass.
But this phenomenon is precisely what the employers and financiers took advantage of in building the modern conservative movement. It is the melding of the anti-regulatory and anti-tax interests of the employer class with the anti-federal government sentiments of the embittered South that has given the Republican Party the numbers it needs to be a viable national party. What put them over the top was their ability to extend the Embittered Coalition to include white working class voters outside of the South. The only other part of the coalition is the high-paid white collar workers who are not technically employers, but who feel themselves to be part of their class.
So, for me, conservatism isn’t some coherent ideology that cares about tradition so much as it is a conglomerate of interests cobbled together to make a majority. What is going on right now is that the Embittered Caucus is asserting itself and taking control of the Republican Party at the expense of the financiers who put the coalition together.
Conservatism is basically a construct rather than an ideology, but insofar as it has a mind of its own and real interests, it is not wedded to any particular political party. When its interests were best served in a monolithic southern Democratic Party, that is where it stayed. When its interests were better served by joining itself by the hip to Wall Street, it moved over to the GOP. It is the latter condition that we understand as the modern Conservative Movement. It’s a mistake to think of conservatism as something that applies to the employer class, except as the employer class binds itself to conservatism to advance its interests.
If the conservative id actually succeeds in capturing the Republican Party from the financiers, that will be a new development, because the Republican Party, since its inception, has always been the vehicle for advancing the interests of the financiers. If they lose their vehicle, they will either move over to the Democrats or be forced to build a new vehicle.
In any case, discussion of Edmund Burke just strikes me as impertinent.
Why?
In two words: William Buckley
Trying to put erudite lipstick on the McCarthyist pig.
The current crop apparent cite Burke without ever having read him.
I think my message was a little muddled, probably because of multiple interruptions while I was writing this.
To be clear, I am distinguishing conservatism from the Conservative Movement. Conservatism exists independent of the Republican Party or the Movement. Until maybe today, the interests of financiers have never existed independently from the Republican Party.
The Movement is the wedding of the two, and if they get a divorce, then the GOP will morph into something new.
Political philosophy is great for the classroom, and for examining large societal trends across decades. It’s pretty useless when talking about actual politics in action.
I always find Sullivan’s reverence for Burke hilarious. He always talks about Burke’s conservatism in terms of slow, sober, carefully considered and managed changes through society, but then he goes chasing after the latest shiny scandal (“Obamacare is the biggest disaster evah! Obama is dooooooooomed!!!!”) like a small yappy dog treeing a squirrel. Talk about not practicing what you preach…
Prior to the Civil War effectively there was only one party after Jefferson took office, the Whig burp notwithstanding. But that party was very fragmented and often ran more than one candidate in an election (as they did in 1860).
The intellectual pretensions of “modern conservatism” are a pose more than anything else. The CPAC convention tells the truth about conservatism. And all of the GOP elected officials go there and toe the line.
Not just anti-black–also anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-gay. And for some anti- just to be anti- and act out an internal anger.
You’re dead-on about CPAC telling the truth about conservatism.
But to hear Andrew Sullivan tell it, a conservative is “above all, an anti-ideologue” who is “a patriot, but not a nationalist” and “should not be implacably hostile to liberalism.”
What the fuck is he talking about?
Maybe he thinks Nelson Rockefeller and Poppy Bush were conservatives?
My friends who act that way move in circles in which not to be self-identified as a “conservative” means excommunication.
Sullivan hasn’t recognized that he has outgrown a “phase”.
CPAC is full of reactionary proto-facists, theocrats and grifters, which doesn’t strike me as particularly conservative. On the onther hand, since that is what the conservative movement IS in this country it’s justified to call them conservatives. However, it’s a little like calling what the DLC practiced “progressive.”
So, for me, conservatism isn’t some coherent ideology that cares about tradition so much as it is a conglomerate of interests cobbled together to make a majority.
Truer words have never been spoken.
Historically speaking the concept of Democracy, per se, isn’t new but the notion of extending voting rights to everyone is. Even our Constitution was written assuming the public voters would be about 10% of the population – white, adult, male landowners. Even with that the whole structure of the document was designed to filter out the “passions” (Madison’s term) of the unwashed masses in the process of creating and administering laws.
Before the concept of broad democracy took root the wealthy classes relied on traditional methods to gain influence amongst the rulers. With broad democracy the wealthy classes found that they needed to develop methods to influence the masses. Not enough to get to 50% of the vote, just enough to be able to allow other vote-blogging and vote-rigging mechanisms to get vote count to 50%.
And of course although many methods were tried only one has proven to work time and again: Fear. This is what FDR was referring to with his famous “Fear Itself” line. Fear of other races, ethnicities, religion, youth, and change in general. Fear is always the wedge issue, although the specific details vary from situation to situation.
Conservatism as philosophy is thus the hybrid of Fear among the masses and Greed among the privileged. Unlike other political philosophies you can’t find document or set of writings outlining what conservatism is because attempts to explain it, especially by adherents, will inherently fail. It’s not for something, except additional wealth for the rich, it’s against everything else. So when a conservative writer attempts to describe conservative philosophy it cannot be in terms of lasting principles but instead in terms of current issues – thus over time the writing will seem increasingly dated and eventually irrelevant.
Politics is mostly the art of keeping disproportionate power and wealth (or helping to keep it). We are going back to historical normal.
Really a genuine progressive, egalitarian, populist move makes a wave. More often than not, progressive populist agencies are convenient surrogates.
A diary of European Tribune discusses Why Working Class Vote Conservative. My comment there brings up Graves’ value systems.
As an avid reader of Sullivan, here is his problem: he so desperately wants to identify as a conservative that he will go wits end and ignore all recent history of both the movement and the “ideology” (such that it is) to try and define it as “what Andrew Sullivan believes.” It’s almost like the Republicans who identify as independents because they’re embarrassed to self identify that way even when it’s how they vote. He has an obsession with the word, and making sure that you all know that today’s Republicans aren’t conservatives, but they’re actually Jacobins. Which is ridiculous as conservatives have always done more than yell “Stop”; they’ve always tried to tear down the established order.
So we have his stupid mushy essays of “This is what a True Conservative believes”. For whatever reason, he cannot and will not accept the liberal label. Not that he is a liberal; far from it. But he’ll frequently stake out some position that is universally (or broadly) held by liberals and try to attach the conservative label to it, because “it’s actually conservative to believe this.” He cannot stand to believe that he might hold liberal leanings on things, so he must distort what is and is not “conservative”
Also, Corey Robin already broke down Burke as the original Tea Partier. They’ve been sipping that shit from the getgo:
http://coreyrobin.com/2013/10/24/burke-in-debt/
It’s interesting to talk about political theories and classical ideologies, as Sullivan often does, but he never seems to recognize that politics doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It affects real people with real lives who don’t give a whit of what’s “conservative” or not. And like it or not conservatism has very often been the vehicle for the ugly side of humanity. Autocratic, brute power holding down the will of the people in order to conserve… something.
Also, Sullivan is from England and the right wing there is more subdued. Conservativism means a very different thing in America, and you can’t separate the ideology from its national context.
It only means something different in the context of racial politics. Everything else is the same.
But as you well know that is a huge “only.” Race is and always has been the faultline of American politics.
“Also, Sullivan is from England and the right wing there is more subdued.”
England has their royalty, which is the ancestral home of conservatism.
America’s “royalty” is the wealthy class(es), which is not so much of an exclusive club as England’s “by The Divine Right” club of birthright royalty, so it’s defended much more aggressively.
Conservatism – properly speaking – is not an “ideology” but a political attitude towards change. What we refer to in America as “conservative” is in fact an odd combo of neo-liberalism, corporatism and racism. What we refer to as “liberal” is more social democracy, maybe “Christian socialism.” The Conservative party of Britain is more liberal than the GOP, because of the relative nature of what constitutes their attitude towards change.
Burke speaks to attitudinal conservatism: a reluctance to embrace change because human have a tendency to screw things up. This sort of conservatism is – in fact – popular and explains a lot of the agita over Obamacare.
The GOP is not properly understood to be “conservative” in a Burkean sense. They are reactionary.
The entire American political system is “Burkean” in the sense that allows for only very slow, incremental change. That is in its DNA.
Nicely put. It’s also why he talks about Obama having a conservative temperament so often, incremental change.
I find the attitude to change evidenced by the Burkeans occasionally useful. It has value when it’s voiced by the loyal opposition. Makes us think “do we really want to do this?” Unfortunately most often the Burkean attitude is deployed in service of a policy that bolsters existing cruelty and suffering. Even if it has risks, if there’s a chance to make things better, it’s better to try an fail than not try.
I might add that Burke is used as a fig leaf for reactionaries. They exploit willing tools like Sullivan and Brooks to mask a far more reactionary and dangerous ideology.
Burke IS reasonable. But if you really try and square the circle that revolves from Burke to Cruz or McCarthy or even McConnell, you finally just have to say, “Fuck it!” and grab a cold one.
Exactly. That cold one sounds good right around now.
To me–and I think Corey Robin might sort of agree if he thought about it–Burke is really hugely important to the resolution of a deep contradiction in American conservatism. These people claim to be patriots who revere the Republic’s early history, and yet they are in total opposition to its principles as an enlightened, revolutionary movement committed to permanent progress (because Federalists and Republicans were both progressive parties, they just disagreed on what kind of progress to emphasize).
Burke was a Whig or incipient Liberal who openly sided in Parliament with the American colonies during the revolution against the Tory war party, really kind of bravely, but 15-20 years later reacted to the French revolution with horror and disgust and developed his “conservative” views in reaction, without ever noting that he had stopped being a progressive. In this he sort of mirrored the development of the Federalist anti-French foreign policy in the later 1790s against Jefferson’s pro-French stance. He is thus the only political philosopher of any standing who can be used to make a case for America as a conservative idea (though you can only do it by ignoring his inconsistencies, something that’s not a problem for Sullivan or Brooks).
I guess I give Burke a bit of a pass on his relative stances on the American and French Revolutions. The Americans very clearly couched their revolution in terms of “English liberties” until July, 1776. Not to mention the prominence of men like Dickinson in the Congress and acts like the Olive Branch Petition showed a reasonableness that the Jacobins did not.
And after the Treaty of Paris, Americans did not erect guillotines. Mostly, this was because America was already a revolutionary society in terms of economics, class and property compared to France. The French had to erase all their institutions to create new ones. Americans only had to adapt English institutions to their local conditions.
Quite a few Americans were horrified and saddened by Robespierre, too.
And Jefferson’s failure to be horrified and saddened by any bloodshed he happened to be far away from was not very becoming either.
You are quite right on all these points. I didn’t mean to attack Burke, really, as much as articulate why the “smart” conservatives like Brooks and Sullivan think he makes such good cover for their fundamentally anti-democratic views. I still think of Burke as an early liberal in the 19th-century sense and a hero in the Warren Hastings matter.
Everything you said is right, and anyway the best 18th Century fit to the core ideology of the right is Locke and not Burke, who ended up a proud reactionary apologist for the ancien regime – the whole enchillada of monarchy and lords temporal and spiritual, with serfs, of course – and opponent of continental republicanism and its evolving liberalism, about 20 minutes after publishing his Reflections.
And yet, oddly, the conservatives have simply blinded themselves to all that and no one seems ever to have called them on it.
Very strange.
“It’s a mistake to think of conservatism as something that applies to the employer class, except as the employer class binds itself to conservatism to advance its interests.
“If the conservative id actually succeeds in capturing the Republican Party from the financiers, that will be a new development, because the Republican Party, since its inception, has always been the vehicle for advancing the interests of the financiers. If they lose their vehicle, they will either move over to the Democrats or be forced to build a new vehicle.”
You’re raising really fundamental issues here, Boo.
The essence of conservatism is something I identify with the anti-revolutionary forces in Europe, especially AFTER the French revolution. In Europe they played a tremendous part in 19th and 20th century politics.
In this country we have not had such a bloc. We had one before the revolution, but afterwards the Tories or United Empire Loyalists moved to Canada.
We were left with disparate bits and pieces. Conservative Catholics, conservative Protestants (mainly Calvinists), southern landowners. And you are absolutely right, they had no interests in common with the financiers.
In fact, from their point of view it was the wage earners, immigrants, and free Negros that had common cause with the financiers, since they represented the proletariat that depended on being employed by them.
The south has always been against the interests of free workers, but in the past the whole battle of labor vs capital meant nothing to them, since from their point of view industrial labor and industrial capital were on the same side.
Also, in this country, conservative Catholics have typically identified with the poor, with immigrants, with labor, because the great majority of Catholics fell into one or more of these categories.
But as you point out, it’s different now. Actually it’s been different for quite some time. Capitalism and conservatism began to get very cozy at least as far back as the 1920s, and this culminated in the Republican southern strategy, and the Moral Majority, which, through the issue of abortion, got Catholics on the same side as their traditional enemies (right wing Protestants). Through the issue of Israel, they also gradually captured about 25% of the Jewish vote.
This coalition has played amajor role in American politics through my whole life, and since Reagan, has been dominant, but under present conditions, it’s become unstable.
But I want to add just one thing to what you said. Not only is there no inherent reason why conservatives should be allied with big finance (which is the most revolutionary force in the world today), but through this long alliance, their conservatism has become redefined in a very narrow and superficial sense. They are willing to overthrow all the important traditions of this country and of their religion in a misguided attempt to save the very worst of their own cultural values. In many ways they have replaced conservative values with pettiness and pure spite. I think this is what the present pope is trying to tell them.
If Democrats have seemed to be allied with finance lately, it’s for truly conservative reasons. We see it in these debt-ceiling standoffs. On the one hand we’d love to regulate the hell out of these banks, but on the other, we are not interested in blowing up the whole world economy.
As a long-term result of all this, American political terminology has become almost unintelligible. Radical extremists are called “conservative”, those who want to conserve the middle class and provide opportunity to the poor are considered “far left”, and Wall Street is called “the center”.
If you want to see a real conservative today, look at Elizabeth Warren. And that’s where I’d like to see this country go. I want to conserve our American values.
Privilege is the common denominator, connecting the plutocrats (of all colors and sexual orientations) with the white working class.
Correction “
one partytwo parties that pretend to cater primarily to the workers and wage earners,and one party that caterswhile catering to the employers and financiers.The more disparate a coalition of divergent interests, the more it seeks to develop a “coherent” unifying ideology to paper over the cracks. Edmund Burke is useful in that he puts a respectable face on naked self-interest and makes it seem public spirited. His Statue is outside my alma mater, Trinity College Dublin, where he was the founder of the College Histrorical Society (Hist) the oldest undergrad society in the world. As a supporter of British rule in Ireland, he is, in Ireland all but forgotten; to be resurrected only in academic political philosophy lectures. Although his mother was a Catholic, he was a leading light in a political system which penalised and excluded Catholics. Perhaps that explains his attractiveness to those who would exclude all but the ruling class of legitimate political discourse.