Guest post: There could be conservative political virtues
Originally a comment by Jeff Engel on Still never.
President Clinton would have made for a glorious 4-8 years of moaning and crying from the right, able to pick on every peccadillo and declaim about the moral superiority of the Republican Party who – they’d be happy to say – ultimately rejected Trump while the Democrats embraced Her Satanic Majesty. So yeah, it’s not that expensive being a Never Trumper from the op-ed pages.
Still – I don’t believe I can take fully seriously the complaints about Trump’s character combined with the delight in his policies. Bullying, pettiness, aggressive ignorance – these are the same things that will underlie the preferred conservative society of “ordered classes”, people “knowing their place”, and the eager trampling of every protection against well-understood environmental threats. Crassness, bigotry – again, where else do you suppose the dismantling of minority protections comes from? Toadyism as the form of public service – this is what comes of the tireless elevation of business culture as the model of efficiency to which government should aspire, and setting the lobbyists to work drafting the regulations for their industries.
There could be conservative political virtues. There’s a lot to be said for preserving working institutions and reforming them carefully, rather than replacing them wholesale; for insisting on genuine character in leaders and for acknowledging it respectfully regardless of policy differences; for regarding society as an organism more than a mechanism and treating governance as more the work of a doctor than an engineer.
Bret Stephens really could have had all of that with a President Hillary Clinton. He wouldn’t have the policies he’s crowing about, precisely because those come from the vices he supposedly condemns.
Yes. The policies Trump espouses are not conservative, they are reactionary. They don’t want to conserve, they want to tear down. And he shares those values with the bulk of the Republican party, including those, like McCain, who find him totally distasteful, which is why they sooner or later fall in line and vote for the party line, after having received some promises on compromise that they know will never be kept. (See Susan Collins for example of last).
Conservative can be used in multiple ways. In one sense its “the things that people who call themselves and each other conservative think and believe and do when they believe they are thinking and believing and doing conservative things.” In another sense its a set of written down beliefs historically and contemporaneously called “conservative.”
That’s true of most socially constructed things. That’s how religions work. “Islam” could be described with either of those types of description.
I think there’s at least something to be said for some of the “organic society” stuff. I don’t know if I believe it but I don’t think people who believe it are crazy. Its the idea that society is deeply interconnected in terms of how people think, believe, and behave, such that small details in one area can have deep implications in others. Conservatives use this to argue that we should be very careful about changing things, because, for example, making divorce more socially acceptable might lead to unexpected changes in how we think about everything we do in terms of family life, leading to massive cultural changes over time that aren’t being considered when we make our choices about just the issue of divorce. The reason I think this can’t be easily dismissed is because the big empirical part, the part about whether that’s actually true, is relied upon by liberals in a lot of THEIR social critiques. “Patriarchy” is pretty much an organic society argument, except with a negative judgment at the end instead of a positive one.
I might reject organic society stuff, for the record. I don’t know. I think it makes sense in some cases but it allows a lot of woo type reasoning. “Everything is connected, so untold bad things will happen unless my policy preferences are maintained, OR, untold wonders will unfold if only my policy preferences are enacted!” Sure, if you say so. But at the same time how we think about things really does affect how we, well, think about other things…
Anyways… a principled conservative position might be something like, “Lawmakers should carefully preserve the norms of how Congress operates instead of freely doing anything legal that generates policy outcomes they prefer, because the written rules aren’t all that matter. The unwritten rules are part of what makes the system keep working as power trades back and forth, as opposed to allowing us to slide into a zero sum war that destroys us.”
But if we switch back to the “conservatism is what conservatives do” frame… conservatives have been ripping apart social norms by adopting a “business ethics” view of society. You know, “if I can do something legal that will help me win, and I don’t, its only a matter of time until someone else does and I am destroyed, so I must do it first.” Its the party that tried to force a default on the national debt to coerce Democrats to repeal the ACA. That’s only one step away from threatening to invoke the War Powers Act against Canada unless Democrats agree to pass a tax bill. Its the antithesis of respect for norms, and concern that norms allow us to function as a society.
And that’s enough typing unnecessary things on New Years Eve. I don’t know if there’s a thesis in there. But for a lot of elections I’ve been voting straight ticket for the only viable party that can defeat the Republicans, and the above is why.
Certainly even the principled conservative political approach can offer cover for the reactionary BS iknklast points out, or the arbitrary/purely-partisan stuff Patrick does. It is at best subtle and nuanced, and the trouble with that is that you can show that face, more or less, while ditching the substance. For that matter, someone could have sincere intentions and deceive themselves for a long time about how much their politics are coming out of some genuine principled conservatism as opposed to sheer prejudice or greed. If we’re feeling sympathetic, maybe we could suppose some of that is at work in the glimmers of conscience out of McCain, Flake, Collins, Graham, or Corker.
“Could be”? There are, if you cared to look
Jib, I think you’re being unfair. Your own quoted part of the post demonstrates that he did, in fact, care to look, and referenced several things he believes are valuable.