Conservative Revival Now?

A conservative revival is what we all want, isn’t it? And yet, what is conservatism? Yoram Hazony offers a stimulating exploration of the prospects for a conservative revival in America, and in doing so sheds some light on the confusion surrounding the very idea of conservatism:

Conservative Revival Now

I’ll be quoting extensively from Hazony’s article, so I’ll express my reservations up front.

In his first paragraph Hazony identifies the traditional political regime of America as “Protestant nationalism.” Obviously, there’s a fair amount of truth in that characterization, but at the same time it calls for qualification. The idea of “Protestant nationalism” fairly describes the founding of the American republic as embodied in the US Constitution. Yet the Constitution is a far cry from the sort of Protestantism that founded the New England colonies, Pennsylvania, or even the Virgina led South. In fact the Constitution reflects the direct influence of the type of mixed constitution or “mixed government” espoused by Aquinas and other (later) Scholastic Catholic thinkers, such as Suarez and Bellarmine:

Mixed government (or a mixed constitution) is a form of government that combines elements of democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, ostensibly making impossible their respective degenerations which are conceived as anarchy, oligarchy and tyranny. The idea was popularized during classical antiquity in order to describe the stability, the innovation and the success of the republic as a form of government developed under the Roman constitution.

Unlike classical democracy, aristocracy or monarchy, under a mixed government rulers are elected by citizens rather than acquiring their positions by inheritance or sortition (at the Greco-Roman time, sortition was conventionally regarded as the principal characteristic of classical democracy).

The concept of a mixed government was studied during the Renaissance and the Age of Reason by Niccolò Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes and others. It was and still is a very important theory among supporters of republicanism. Various schools have described modern polities, such as the European Union and the United States, as possessing mixed constitutions.

…

One school of scholarship based mainly in the United States considers mixed government to be the central characteristic of a republic and holds that the United States has rule by the one (the President; monarchy), the few (the Senate; aristocracy), and the many (House of Representatives; democracy). Another school of thought in the U.S. says the Supreme Court has taken on the role of "The Best" in recent decades, ensuring a continuing separation of authority by offsetting the direct election of senators and preserving the mixing of democracy, aristocracy and monarchy.

While WW2, hard on the heels of the New Deal, certainly put paid to whatever remained of that type of constitutional order in America, the fact is that the disintegration of Protestant nationalism began within a generation of the American Founding, as a result of the disintegration of Protestant intellectualism. The concept of a “mixed constitution” was the product of classical and medieval intellectualism, with its distinctive belief in the ability of Man to understand himself and the world in which he lived. That tradition was displaced in America (Hazony well describes the effects of that displacement), beginning with the Transcendental Movement in New England, the thought leading region of the young republic. Transcendentalism retained, at most, a tenuous connection with the type of general Christian belief that was so characteristic of the American Founding and its Constitution:

Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in New England. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in the everyday, rather than believing in a distant heaven. Transcendentalists saw physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than discrete entities.

Transcendentalism emphasizes subjective intuition over objective empiricism. Adherents believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little attention and deference to past masters. It arose as a reaction, to protest against the general state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time. The doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School was closely related.

Transcendentalism emerged from "English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of David Hume", and the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German idealism. Perry Miller and Arthur Versluis regard Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme as pervasive influences on transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism’s guiding ideas led to the progressive movement in America, which—under the additional influence of Marxist thought—is with us today. What remains of Protestant nationalism is embodied in Evangelicalism, which struggles to form a coherent identity—split between anti-intellectual currents and a minority that seeks to recapture the best intellectual traditions of the West. In much the same way, the still sizable Catholic element in America finds itself split between the secularized progressive factions and those who cling to the traditional Catholic philosophical viewpoint. It is now the Evangelicals and the Catholics who form the Conservative movement in America.

Finally, what Hazony refers to as “Enlightenment liberalism” is perhaps more commonly termed “Classical Liberalism” or what I call “liberaltarianism”. These are distinctly non-conservative forms of thought which, nevertheless, are often regarded as conservative and even claim the title for themselves. They form the core of the anti-Trump establishment, while other elements of this tendency are the loud minority of those who demand a constitutional utopia.

So, on to Hazony!

For three generations, Western nations have lived in the shadow of the World Wars. The depths of the trauma have never been fully examined, nor its consequences entirely mapped. But we know that within a few years after the end of the Second World War, political life in these countries underwent an unprecedented revision. By the 1960s, the old Protestant nationalism that had animated the generation of Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower had been set aside, and Enlightenment liberalism became the new framework within which American political life was conducted. America was given what was, in effect, a new liberal consitution that guaranteed the civil liberties of blacks and other minorities, but also banned prayer and Bible-reading from the schools and lifted earlier legal restrictions on divorce, pornography, immigration and abortion. Academics and intellectuals even gave a new name to the regime—which they now called "liberal democracy."

In the decades that followed, many Americans and Europeans came to believe that in liberalism they had discovered the final political theory: A regime so obviously desirable that competition among political ideologies had in effect come to an end. Soon, liberalism would be adopted by all nations. The reign of liberal ideas would last forever.

No one believes this anymore.

Five years of political upheaval—from 2016 to 2020—was all it took to shatter the hegemony of Enlightenment liberalism. Suddenly, the conflict among competing political visions is fiercely alive once more:

On the one hand, the appeal of a revived nationalist conservatism was given dramatic expression by the 2016 election of Donald Trump's "America First" administration in the United States, by Britain's departure from the European Union and by the rise of nationalist conservative governments in Eastern Europe, Italy, India, Brazil and more.

At the same time, an updated Marxism ("anti-racism" or "woke") launched an astonishingly successful bid to seize control of the institutions that had been responsible for the development of liberal ideas in America, Britain and beyond. By the summer of 2020, most important news media, universities and schools, Big Tech and other corporations, and even the government bureaucracy and the military, had adopted a policy of accommodating the new Marxism and advancing its agenda.

In fact, as we all know, this astonishingly successful Cultural Marxist “long march through the institution” began in the 1960s, if not earlier, but its complete dominance of American institutions has become evident only with the last generation.

The hegemony of liberal ideas, which was supposed to last forever, has come to an end after only 60 years.

What will happen next?

Many commentators have compared the crumbling of the liberal order in America to Weimar Germany. And indeed, on the far right, we can now find an assortment of personalities singing the praises of dictatorship and "white identity."

Yet despite the grim historical parallels, America may have the resources to overcome these challenges. Many Americans still possess a strong intuitive commitment to the Anglo-American constitutional tradition. This includes the great majority of nationalist conservatives who supported the Trump presidency. ... They propose government action against the progressive cartels that dominate big business, the media, universities and schools; and seek policies that may assist in reversing the dissolution of the family and religious tradition. But nationalist conservatives support a democratic regime and peaceful transitions of power, as well as customary protections of property rights, free speech and religious liberty.

With the collapse of liberal hegemony in America, this nationalist conservatism offers the best hope for restoration of political stability and health.

Pay special attention to this next section. The destruction of the “Anglo-American cultural inheritance” that Hazony so eloquently describes is not simply the result of the progressive assault—principled conservative resistance to progressivism was seriously weakened by the malign influence of “Enlightenment” or “Classical” Liberalism, masquerading as conservative movements.

But there are considerable difficulties in the way of any kind of revived political conservatism in the English-speaking world. Two stand out especially:

First, many of today's "conservatives" know very little about what it would take to actually conserve anything across generations. True, Cold War conservatives did lead the successful effort to defeat Soviet Communism abroad and socialism at home, a struggle that reached its successful conclusion during the Reagan-Thatcher years in the 1980s.

Yet during these very same years, the political and religious traditions that had granted stability and continuity to America and Britain for centuries were being severely damaged and even overthrown. This shocking destruction of the Anglo-American cultural inheritance has involved the suppression or stigmatization of crucial ideas and institutions such as God and Scripture, nation and congregation, marriage and family, man and woman, honor and loyalty, the sabbath and the sacred. This is not only due to excessive political pragmatism or weakness of character among conservatives. There is also, at this point, an astonishing degree of ignorance. Many conservatives do not really know, anymore, why you would need to preserve these things.

First among those are the liberaltarians. And so Hazony comes to the point:

Which brings us to the second remarkable fact about contemporary conservatism: The extraordinary confusion over what distinguishes Anglo-American conservatism from Enlightenment liberalism (or "classical liberalism" or "libertarianism," or for that matter, from the philosophy of Ayn Rand). For decades now, many "conservatives" have had little interest in political ideas other than those that can be used to justify ever greater doses of personal liberty. And if anyone has tried to point out that this exclusive focus on individual liberty is liberalism, and that it has no power to conserve anything at all, he has been met with the glib rejoinder that, after all, What we conservatives are conserving is liberalism.

Bingo!

This confusion over the content and purposes of political conservatism has paralyzed the conservative impulse in the English-speaking world. For the truth is that Enlightenment liberalism, in and of itself, is bereft of any interest in conserving anything. It is devoted entirely to freedom—and in particular, to freedom from the past. In other words, liberalism promises to liberate us from conservatives! That is, it seeks to liberate us from the kind of public and private life in which men and women know what must be done to propagate beneficial ideas, behaviors and institutions across generations.

As Anglo-American conservatism has become confused with liberalism, it has, for precisely this reason, become incapable of conserving anything at all. Conservatives have become bystanders, gaping in astonishment as the consuming fire of cultural revolution destroys everything in its path.

If we care about making anything stable and permanent under these conditions of permanent revolution and cultural devastation, we must have other tools at our disposal besides the lists of individual freedoms and proscribed forms of discrimination that liberals have been compiling and promoting since the 1940s. These will have to be conservative tools, not liberal ones.

However, to have such tools at our disposal, democratic nations will have to let go of their post-war obsession with liberalism. They will have to rediscover the history and philosophy of authentic Anglo-American conservatism, which is focused not on freedom but on how things propagate in time, and on what must be done if conservation and transmission is to actually take place across generations.

Now comes the really hard part:

And they will have to rediscover the practice of conservatism—which is not only the practice of conservative government, but also, especially, the practice of being a conservative person and leading a conservative life.

Is it possible for individuals who have grown up in a liberal society, obsessed with personal freedoms, to become strong conservative men and women and to do what a conservative calling demands of them?

I believe it is possible because I have seen it happen countless times. I have seen individuals and entire families discover that they've been on the wrong course, repent and set out to restore the tradition with their own hands and in their own lives. And if that can happen, then it is also possible on a larger scale—at the level of congregations, cultural movements and nations.

Why hasn't it happened until now? Perhaps because the times were not yet sufficiently deranged. Perhaps we had to see, with our own eyes, how every aspect of our great cultural inheritance is being set upon and laid low. Perhaps we had to see for ourselves that America really is poised to throw itself into the abyss, taking all the democratic nations with it.

If so, then the rise of the new Marxists presents an opportunity for a conservative revival unlike any we have seen in our lifetimes. To be sure, the potential for tragedy is very great. But the extremity of this catastrophe can also permit a rethinking and a restoration that has been impossible until now. Many will now find that they are ready for the rediscovery that I have described: The rediscovery of a conservative life.