The Roots of “Modern” Conservatism

Edmund Burke

If you were are an apolitical cog in the machine working blindly in your cubicle each day to pay your bills and you asked a liberal and conservative “activist” to describe what each stood for in four words the lib would most probably say “I stand for equality!” while the conservative would say “I stand for freedom!

Now this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left because historically the right has favored liberty for the higher orders only and constraint for the lower orders while on the left advocates favor more equality (particularly in the areas of the law and income) while conceding that total absolute equality can probably never be obtained though Zinoviev once said “No one deserves two rooms while some have none!”

While “modern” conservatism speaks glibly of “freedom” and has built a massive edifice of intellectual justification for its positions it remains reactionary in its true nature and is rooted in “the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere.”

Now conservative intellectuals love to quote Edmund Burke and Thomas Hobbs in their arguments for “freedom.”

Burke was certainly not arguing for “freedom” when  he spoke to Parliament  “The real object of the French Revolution, is o break all those connections natural and civil that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination: to raise soldiers against their officers; servants against their masters; tradesmen against their customers; artificers against their employers; tenants against the landlord; curates against their bishops; and children against their parents.”

Even before Burke, Thomas Hobbes was the first counter-revolutionary.  Rejecting the revolutionary argument he mounted a spirited defense of the most hide-bound form of rule.  He took the calls for liberty which threatened the old order and used them to justify absolute rule, redefining “liberty” in the process.

“The reconfiguration of the old and absorption of the new is designed to make privilege popular, to transform a tottering old regime into a dynamic, ideologically coherent movement of the masses.”

The idea is to conscript the lower orders into a regime of “aristocratic” rule.  Sometimes, “conservatism has multiplied the ranks of privilege, creating ever-finer gradations between the worse off and that were worst off. Here the model is the American firm, with its many tiers of middle and lower management. Sometimes, conservatism has simplified those ranks into two: the white race and the black race of the white supremacist imagination. Sometimes, it has offshored society’s inequalities, seeing in the people of an imperial state a unified rank of superiors, “a kind of nobility among nations” subjugating less civilized people abroad. And sometimes it has turned elites into the victims, encouraging the masses to see their abjection reflected in the higher misery of those above them.”

There are hybrids, for example:” Corporate hierarchies can coexist with sharp binary divides between “productive members of society” and the “undeserving poor.” Or loss of privilege can be recast as victimhood — “Christians” losing their “religious freedom” to discriminate — and thus, via martyrdom, as grounds for reclaiming privilege on a new footing. The same logic can be deployed against the “tyranny” of evolution, global warming or any science at all that offends some conservative faction,”

Today the right is much less credibly challenged than it has been in the past and the rise of Trumpism is perhaps a symptom of the dissolution of the “unity” of conservatism because its victories have been so great and it has achieved so much power.

Recent progressive movements haven’t cohered to the point of scaring conservatives the way that Hobbes, Burke and even Antonim Scalia were scared by earlier movements.  None of the stirrings on the left – Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the LGBTQ movement and the Sanders campaign have achieved enough traction to pose a serious threat to the new right.  Thus conservatives are free to fight amongst themselves.

The left – from the squishy center to the farthest extremes has failed to take conservatism as a powerful movement of ideas – a coherent hierarchical worldview.  The left blows it off because not to do so would question belief in Enlightened Rationalism which is taken as self evident to every man.  Thus the conservative is “ignorant.”

Conservative thought begins and ends with one principle – that some are fit and aught to rule over others – and then it recalibrates that principle in order to meet the current challenge from below.

The question of who is fit and why may shift, sometimes dramatically, but the position of principle remains, along with the recalibration project. Together, these give the conservative intellectual tradition far more heft, continuity and significance than is commonly recognized, either on the left or the right.”

From the moment conservatism came on the scene it has had to contend with the decline of the medieval idea of an orderly universe with its permanent hierarchies of power.    And still to this day we question whether all persons are equal or that some are more “fit to rule:” more equal than others.

Burke was also instrumental in bringing about current conservative economic thought.

“The price is a product of a mutual agreement between buyer and seller,” and thus the market itself “does the work of creating harmony out of dissonance, settlement from conflict.”

But that’s not where Burke ultimately leaves things, as hierarchy once again enters the picture as his argument unfolds. “It is no longer the market settling price but the man of capital determining value, whether he’s buying or selling, whether the commodity is labor or money.” At the same time, Burke argues, “labor is commodity like every other, and rises or falls according to the demand” of the buyer of labor. Thus, the worker’s wage needn’t even be enough to live on, but, as Burke insists, “There is an implied contract … that the labor, so far as that labor is concerned, shall be sufficient to pay to the employer a profit on his capital, and the compensation for his risk.”

Far from being an ancient forgotten text, Burke reads like a primer for understanding GOP economic policy at least since Ronald Reagan and a vivid example of how conservatives favor liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower.

Burke’s economic views shed new light on Hoover’s actions during the onset of the great depression:  that the great depression would end when “confidence” was restored and businessmen said it should  end.

The Republican Party is driven by conservatism as an ideological movement while Democrats are described by the right as a loose coalition of interest groups.  Black and Latino minorities, various LGBTQ groups, immigrants, labor, celebrity elites, ivy league professors etc.   What leftists lack is a unifying ideology which allows the right to tag them generally as “Marxist” elitists and paint them if necessary as Stalinist communists whose ideas are to be ignored.

Unfortunately there is no real “Left” in America.  The Democrats are still controlled by the Clintons and the remainder of the progressive movement, those “interest groups” have little traction or influence on the current governing power.   And the masses of the white working class, the natural constituency of the left, ignore them.  The vast majority are not interested in the doings of Caitlin Jenner.

A unified ideological left capable of bringing the lower classes (read working class) home must be centered on challenging the hierarchical idea that some are more fit to rule than others and the recognition that this begins with a more equitable distribution of the income created by the working classes.

The problem with Democrats is that most of the time no one knows what the hell they are for whereas conservatives know exactly what they are for.

We need a new, vibrant Social Democratic Party to clarify the ideology on the left.  Don’t hold your breath.

Quotes from “The Reactionary Mind” by Corey Robin: https://www.amazon.com/Reactionary-Mind-Conservatism-Edmund-Donald/dp/0190842024

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