Reading this in The American Conservative; Defining Conservatism Down - As the Right’s popularity has grown, its intellectual challenge to the Left has diminished, by Austin Bramwell.
Interesting stuff, found via Tyler Cowen, who warns, "prepare to be offended if you are conservative or libertarian." Well, if that doesn't pique my interest....
Bramwell:
Had conservatism a Cassandra, she might, amidst the current mood of triumph, point out that whereas 50 years ago the American Right boasted several political theorists destined to exert a lasting influence, today it has not one to its credit. In the 1950s and ’60s, James Burnham, Richard Weaver, Leo Strauss, Harry Jaffa, Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, and Willmoore Kendall (among others) were all at the apex of their powers. No figure of similar stature remains.
Red flag up yet? later...
Given this philosophical complacency, one would think that Kirk, Hayek, and others (including eccentric outsiders such as R.J. Rushdoony, L. Brent Bozell, and Ayn Rand) had left behind a commanding legacy. One would expect that, like Burke, they had articulated ideas so powerful that they can only be contended with, not refuted.
Yup, big problem here...
Has conservatism achieved this exalted stature? If we are honest, we must answer no.[...]while American conservatives have retained their passion for Big Ideas, their passion for the biggest idea of all—the Holy Grail that will refute liberalism—has waned. Most simply assume that the Grail has already been found.
[...] Yet the Holy Grail has not been found. One can still find lapel-grabbing right-wingers who will argue late into the night that their favorite thinker has figured everything out for all time. (My personal favorite: certain libertarians believe that Alan Gewirth, a now forgotten philosopher of the 1970s, showed how the rightness of limited government derives ultimately from Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction.) This is not the place to take up the argument with them. I only wish to observe, as an empirical matter, that no one person’s ideas actually define American conservatism. If English conservatism is nothing other than Burkeanism, American conservatism is not Rothbardianism, Randianism, Jaffaism, or Hayekianism.
That could be because Rand and Hayek ARE NOT CONSERVATIVES AT ALL.*
Sorry, was I shouting? Bramwell's not done yet:
No economic model can prove that government interference in the economy by nature tends to do harm. While economics can show that some government programs will fail—rent control, say, or confiscatory tax rates—it cannot show that all government programs will fail. As for the various moral arguments for libertarianism, they are even weaker. Liberal theorists such as Ronald Dworkin and Amartya Sen have long since shown that libertarians simply fail to grasp the full dimensions of equal liberty, which does not demand, as libertarians would have it, that everyone should be equally free to starve, but that everyone should have a fair chance to pursue his goals freely. This principle may require a more active government than libertarians would allow.
It isn't fair to judge Bramwell's moral values from this short article, but I don't know what distinction he makes from economic values. Libertarianism doesn't hold equal liberty as a primary moral value. (As I understand, that term implies equal access to resources regardless of means.) Instead, libertarianism holds moral restrictions on government, not moral requirements on governments' performance.
Anyway, I agree with Bramwell in his indictment of conservative philosophy. And by happy coincidence, I came across this today. Hayek rejects conservatism:
At a time when most movements that are thought to be progressive advocate further encroachments on individual liberty, those who cherish freedom are likely to expend their energies in opposition. In this they find themselves much of the time on the same side as those who habitually resist change. In matters of current politics today they generally have little choice but to support the conservative parties. But, though the position I have tried to define is also often described as "conservative," it is very different from that to which this name has been traditionally attached. There is danger in the confused condition which brings the defenders of liberty and the true conservatives together in common opposition to developments which threaten their ideals equally. It is therefore important to distinguish clearly the position taken here from that which has long been known - perhaps more appropriately - as conservatism.Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called "liberalism" was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. This already existing confusion was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character. And some time before this, American radicals and socialists began calling themselves "liberals." I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism.
I too describe myself as a liberal, for the same reasons. Among conservatism's moral failings is the insistance on equating desirable results from government with moral action, more plainly, that the ends justify the means. When this libertarian says the political left and right are equivalent, this is what I mean.
*I'm surprised that any present day conservatives want to claim Rand as an ally, militant atheism and all.
Posted by Walter at August 24, 2005 08:06 PM