The Vanishing Tradition

Perspectives on American Conservatism

Paul Gottfried

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501749858
• eBook ISBN: 9781501749865
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This anthology provides a timely critical overview of the American conservative movement. The contributors take on subjects that other commentators have either not noticed or have been fearful to discuss. In particular, this collection of searing essays hits hard at blatant cult of celebrity and intolerance of dissent that has come to characterize the conservative movement in this country.

As The Vanishing Tradition shows, the conservative movement has not often retrieved its wounded, instead dispatching them in order to please its friendly opposition and to prove its "moderateness." The movement has also been open to the influence of demanding sponsors who have pushed it in sometimes bizarre directions. Finally, the essayists here, highlight the movement's appeal to "permanent values" as a truly risible gesture, given how arduously its celebrities have worked to catch up with the Left on social issues. This no-holds-barred critical examination of American conservatism opens debates and seeks controversy.

1

BIG CONSERVATISM AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Jack Kerwick

According to the conventional wisdom, America is home to a great partisan divide, a seemingly unbridgeable chasm between conservatives on the right and liberals or progressives on the left. The Republican Party is the party of conservatism, or the Right, while the Democratic Party is the party of progressivism. We may safely assume that most Americans, irrespective of their political sympathies, subscribe to this understanding of their country’s political universe. Its popularity notwithstanding, however, the conventional wisdom on this matter is mistaken—and profoundly so.

In what follows, I show that “Big Conservatism,” or “the Big Con”—that is, the contemporary conservative movement with which nationally recognized media personalities in talk radio, cable news, and especially well-established and generously funded print publications are associated—is not really of the Right. This movement is neoconservative. Neoconservatism, far from being a variant of conservatism, is in fact a species of the ideological politics against which conservatism has traditionally defined itself. Its cardinal doctrine of “American Exceptionalism,” the creed that America is unique among the nations of the earth as the bodying forth of an “Idea” and may be the only country in all of history to have been founded on a proposition, is a patently Rationalist construct. It is precisely because “conservatism” is not merely a misnomer for this movement but a form of patently dishonest advertising that I refer to it here as “Big Conservatism,” or simply, “the Big Con.”

Some preliminary remarks regarding the structure and strategy of my argument are in order. I first identify the epistemological presuppositions that have distinguished conservatism as a political-philosophical tradition for the past two centuries. To this end, I allude to the thought of four thinkers—Edmund Burke and David Hume in the eighteenth century, and Russell Kirk and Michael Oakeshott in the twentieth—who are widely recognized representatives of classical or traditional conservatism. These references serve two purposes: they establish that conservative thought does indeed have an enduring identity and, at least as relevant, that the conservative conception of the nature of knowledge consistently leads its proponents to resist the abstract, ideological, and utopian political designs of their opponents. Next, I turn attention to Big Conservatism to show that it too depends on its own set of assumptions concerning the character of knowledge. These assumptions are identical to the philosophy of those radicals and revolutionaries against whom conservatives have railed in the past. And just as the epistemology of the conservative is inseparable from his politics, the politics of the Big Con also features an understanding of political knowledge that illustrates what Oakeshott characterized as “Rationalism.”

Conservatism

It is impossible to come to terms with conservatism unless one understands it primarily as a response to Rationalism, a theory of knowledge distinguished on account of its neglect of—and not infrequently, disdain for—the constellation of culturally and historically specific contingencies that we call “tradition.” Rationalists usually dismiss or relegate to insignificance experienced tradition as a source of knowledge. Genuine knowledge, from the perspective of the Rationalist, is essentially propositional in that it is believed to consist of principles and rules that can be learned or discovered by anyone, irrespective of one’s circumstances. The twentieth- century philosopher Michael Oakeshott characterizes the Rationalist’s view of knowledge as “a knowledge of technique” or “technical knowledge.”¹ The latter can be learned from a book or picked up at a correspondence school. It can be memorized and mechanically applied. Because of its features, technical knowledge conveys the appearance of certainty. It is a self-contained technique, depending on nothing beyond itself.

Nearly two hundred years earlier, Edmund Burke called attention to this conception of knowledge among the apologists for the French Revolution. Burke remarked that Rationalists deny the individuating details of each situation by divesting them “of every relation” in favor of “all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.” Although circumstances endow “every political principle [with] its distinguishing color and discriminating effect” and “render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind,” for Rationalists they “pass for nothing.”² Burke characterized Rationalists as “political-theologians” and “theological-politicians,”³ “new doctors of the rights of men,”⁴ “moral politicians,”⁵ “men of theory,”⁶ “levelers,”⁷ peddlers of a “mechanic philosophy,”⁸ of an “empire of light and reason.”⁹

Oakeshott observes that the Rationalist’s faith in a universal, transhistorical rationality renders him vulnerable to regarding the past as an “encumbrance,”¹⁰ which in turn disposes him more toward “destruction and creation.”¹¹ Burke compares Rationalists to “fools” who “rush in where angels fear to tread”¹² and says that “it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a Constitution whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of long experience,” for “they despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men” and “have wrought a ground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of Parliament.”¹³ Hume too noted the destructive penchant of Rationalists for imposing “violent innovations” that produce more “ill than good.”¹⁴

Rationalists also identify their political models as universal and conceive of politics in terms of ideals and principles—Freedom, Equality, the Rights of Man, Democracy, the Original Contract, the Will of the People, and so on. Their political principles are both abstract and seemingly universal in application. These political-philosophical fictions, which Burke colorfully described as “delusive plausibilities”¹⁵ and “mazes of metaphysic sophistry,”¹⁶ have been anathema to genuine conservatives.

With respect to the supposed Rights of Man declared during the French Revolution, Burke maintained that this dogma was no real alternative to historically based rights and that what it declared “admit[s] [of] no temperament and no compromise.” Unfortunately no human government can hope to pass muster if it is to be assessed according to the abstract standard of the Rights of Man. “Against these rights of men let no government look for security in the length of its continuance, or in the justice and lenity of its administration.”¹⁷

Against the idea that all just governments come into existence historically through the consent of citizens with equal rights, Hume famously responds that if Rationalists would “look abroad into the world, they would meet with nothing that, in the least, corresponds to their ideas, or can warrant so refined and philosophical a system.” The truth is the contrary. Irrespective of time or place, “obedience or subjection becomes so familiar, that most men never make any enquiry about its origin or cause, more than about the principle of gravity, resistance, or the most universal laws of nature.”¹⁸

From the conservative standpoint, society is not grounded in a contract. It is rooted in tradition, or habit. According to the Scottish Tory Hume, it is habit that “consolidates what other principles of human nature had imperfectly founded.” He explains that human beings “never think of departing from that path, in which they and their ancestors have constantly trod, and to which they are confined by so many urgent and visible motives.”¹⁹

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Burke makes this same point. It is not a priori principles of which knowledge, particularly political knowledge, consists but rather tradition: “general prejudices” constituting “the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”²⁰ The English, according to Burke, view their rights and liberties not as timeless, self-evident endowments. They are instead understood as “an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity—as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right.”²¹

In Russell Kirk’s treatment of Burke as the quintessential representative of “the conservative mind”²² that Kirk sets out to defend, conservatism stands as the polar opposite of Rationalist, egalitarian politics. The conservative abjures abstract, universalist theorizing in favor of prejudice, “the half-intuitive knowledge that enables men to meet the problems of life without logic-chopping”; prescription, “the customary right which grows out of the conventions and compacts of many successive generations”; and presumption, the “inference” that is “in accordance with the common experience of mankind.” The conservative, comments Kirk, regards as utopian folly “a priori designs for perfecting human nature and society,”²³ the “fanatical ideological dogmata”²⁴ of “metaphysical enthusiasts”²⁵ who are either unwilling to grasp or incapable of grasping that principles are “arrived at by convention and compromise” and “tested by long experience.”²⁶ Kirk contrasts the conservative’s “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence” with the “uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarianism of most radical systems,”²⁷ and his “faith in prescription” with the certitude of those rationalists “who would reconstruct society along abstract designs.”²⁸ Prejudice, precedent, presumption—these are the ingredients of a tradition-centered conception of knowledge. Without them, man “is thrown back upon his own private stock of reason, with the consequences that attend shipwreck.”²⁹

Traditional knowledge is what Oakeshott refers to as “practical knowledge.” Practical knowledge is not propositional. In fact, it “cannot be formulated in rules” and “exists only in use.”³⁰ Propositional knowledge is actually the distillation of a tradition. As such, it necessarily omits the complex of nuances from which it is abstracted. Rationalists, however, do not appear to be aware of this and choose, instead, to believe that the knowledge of morality is “the same to every rational intelligent being,” attained “by a chain of argument and induction,” “metaphysical reasonings, and by deductions from the most abstract principles of the understanding.”³¹

Conservatism, it should now be obvious, is ultimately as much an epistemological perspective as a political-philosophical one. As such, its tradition-centered conception of knowledge has made it the enemy of Rationalist or ideological politics. The latter inevitably presuppose an impoverished epistemology, one based exclusively on an abstract conception of rationality according to which universal propositions are the sole contents of the understanding. Although conservatives in different times and places have disagreed with one another over specific policy prescriptions, their shared epistemology has disposed them toward favoring institutional arrangements that accommodate and encourage social cohesion and continuity with their nation’s past. They have also focused on preserving their own traditions rather than on saving the human race with what Burke contemptuously described as an “armed doctrine” in the form of human rights.

American Exceptionalism

The doctrine of American Exceptionalism (AE)—that America is an Idea with universal applicability—figures prominently within ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Big Conservatism and American Exceptionalism
• 2. The Significance of the M. E. Bradford Affair
• 3. The Tory Right and the American Conservative Movement
• 4. Who Funds Conservatism, Inc.?
• 5. Imagination and Its Failures
• 6. The Contradictions of Catholic Neoconservatism
• 7. Trump, Neoconservatives, and the Misrepresentation of the American Founding
• 8. Why the Alt Right Is Not Going Anywhere (Regardless of What We Call It)
• 9. The Unwanted Southern Conservatives
• 10. Republican Voters and Conservative Ideology
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index