The Trials of Thinking Conservatives

Two bloggers who have long identified themselves as "Conservatives", Charles Johnson and Andrew Sullivan, have recently announced that they can no longer call themselves by the name.

David Frum, another disaffected conservative, has urged them to stay in the movement and try to reform it, quoting Rudyard Kipling on the perils of belonging to any mass movement:

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools;

Frum defends conservativism as the philosophy that supports robust national security, modest government, a balanced budget, welfare reform, competition in education, and opposition to "abuse of the legal system for attorneys' gain."

Andrew Sullivan counters that contemporary conservatism is corrupted by denial of scientific facts (evolution and global warming), religious fundamentalism, lunacy about drugs, savage homophobia, and the embrace of torture, its claim to belief in fiscal restraint and limited government is a fraud, and its main recent contribution to the world has been a policy of unlimited war.

I find this discussion interesting because in many ways I am a conservative person. When I hear about a new, off-the-wall scientific theory, my first response is always to think of reasons why it can't be true. I have an instinctive aversion to new fads or fashions, and I have a great respect for the wisdom of long dead thinkers. I like old things. In terms of contemporary politics, there are at least two issues on which I fall strongly on the conservative side: I support rigorous, competitive, fact-based education and I detest the politics of racial and ethnic grievance. I also have trouble with a lot of the tone of American liberalism, the listen-to-the-wisdom-of-children, peace will break out when we read minority women instead of dead white men sort of crap. I am suspicious of all utopian projects. I detest modern architecture and modern music.

But I have never been able to take American conservatives seriously as an intellectual or moral force. Looking at the movement overall, I see mainly prejudice, greed, intellectual emptiness, and cynicism. The main pillars, so far as I can tell, are the hatred of taxes, the hatred of blacks and Mexicans, a bizarrely worshipful attitude toward "the market", and a love of saying "God Bless America." To me, conservatism should start with an actual knowledge about the past and a respect for old things that still work. But take, for example, torture. The United States has been opposed to torture since our creation; we wrote a ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" into our consitution. During World War II, a real war for the survival of democracy, we were proud that we never tortured as a matter of policy. But when Cheney and Bush chose to throw over this splendid legacy, the conservative movement rushed to endorse them, because, apparently, their panic about brown-skinned evil-doers was more important than our historical legacy. Or military spending; why has support for national security become the rigid belief that we must always spend more on everything, no matter how much it costs? (Consider missile defense, government boondoggle if there ever was one.) Or the crazed love of "markets." Anyone who knows any history knows that governments have been deeply involved in the economy since chiefs started exchanging extravagant piles of gifts. Regulation of wages and prices is at least as old as writing. Conservatism should mean preserving the order of society, and that should mean doing what we can to get everyone a fair deal. Letting investment bankers dream up ever more complicated ways to get obscenely rich is not conservative. It is a bizarre new social and economic experiment, and it isn't working out very well.

So I find the whole notion of a thinking, principled American conservatism just sort of weird. I see nothing but contradictions -- cut taxes, raise defense spending, balance the budget! -- crankiness, and fear. And it is interesting to me that as the lunacy of conservatism surges to the fore, under the banners of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh, people with brains are seeing the contradictions in the movement that have always kept me out of it.