Rethinking conservatism

Andrew Sullivan has a long essay in The New Republic that tries to explain modern-day conservatism’s policy schizophrenia over the past four years. Some highlights:

Conservatism isn’t over. But it has rarely been as confused. Today’s conservatives support limited government. But they believe the federal government can intervene in a state court’s decisions in a single family’s struggle over life and death. They believe in restraining government spending. But they have increased such spending by a mind-boggling 33 percent in a mere four years. They believe in self-reliance. But they have just passed the most expensive new entitlement since the heyday of Great Society liberalism: the Medicare prescription-drug benefit. They believe that foreign policy is about the pursuit of national interest and that the military should be used only to fight and win wars. Yet they have embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious program of military-led nation-building in the Middle East. They believe in states’ rights, but they want to amend the Constitution to forbid any state from allowing civil marriage or equivalent civil unions for gay couples. They believe in free trade. But they have imposed tariffs on a number of industries, most famously steel. They believe in balanced budgets. But they have abandoned fiscal discipline and added a cool trillion dollars to the national debt in one presidential term…. But conservatism’s very incoherence may be one reason for its endurance. In its long road to victory, the Republican Party has regularly preferred the promise of power to the satisfaction of schism. It has long been pro-government and anti-government. It has contained Rockefeller and Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. As a governing philosophy, it has been able to tack for decades from statism to laissez-faire, from big government to individual freedom, with only occasional discomfort. Conservatism’s resilience has been a function of its internal ideological diversity and balance. The more closely you look, however, the deeper the division has become in the last few years, intensifying dramatically since last fall’s election. Which is why, this time, the balancing act may finally be coming undone. Let me be rash and describe the fundamental divide within conservatism as a battle between two rival forms. The two forms I’m referring to are ideal types. I know very few conservatives who fit completely into one camp or the other; and these camps do not easily comport with the categories we have become used to deploying–categories like “libertarian,” “social conservative,” “paleoconservative,” “fiscal conservative and social liberal,” and so on. There is, I think, a deeper rift, and a more fundamental one. Call one the conservatism of faith and the other the conservatism of doubt. They have co-existed in the past but are becoming less and less compatible as the conservative ascendancy matures. Start with the type now dominant in Republican discourse: the conservatism of faith. This conservatism states conservative principles–and, indeed, eternal insights into the human condition–as a matter of truth. Because these conservatives believe that the individual is inseparable from her political community and civilization, there can be no government neutrality in promoting such truths. Either a government’s laws affirm virtue or they affirm vice. And the meaning of virtue and vice can be understood either by reflecting on the Judeo-Christian moral tradition or by inferring from philosophical understandings what human nature in its finest form should be. These truths are not culturally relative; they are universally valid…. The alternative philosophical tradition begins in precise opposition to the new conservatives’ confidence in faith and reason as direct, accessible routes to universal truth. The conservatism of doubt asks how anyone can be sure that his view of what is moral or good is actually true. Conservatives of doubt note that even the most dogmatic of institutions, such as the Catholic or Mormon churches, have changed their views over many centuries, and that, even within such institutions, there is considerable debate about difficult moral issues. They understand that significant critiques of human reason–Nietzsche, anyone?–have rendered the philosophical quest for self-evident truth even more precarious in the modern world. Such conservatives are not nihilists or devotees of what Pope Benedict XVI has called “the dictatorship of relativism.” They merely believe that the purported choice between moral absolutism and complete relativism, between God and moral anarchy, is a phony one. Their alternative is a skeptical, careful, prudential approach to all moral questions–and suspicion of anyone claiming to hold the absolute truth. Since such an approach rarely provides a simple answer persuasive to everyone within a democratic society, we live with moral and cultural pluralism.

As always, Andrew’s stuff makes for compelling reading — but I’m unpersuaded by his proposed typology, for several reasons:

1) There is no single conservatism of doubt. Libertarians have grave doubts about government intervention in the marketplace. Realpolitik conservatives have grave doubts about the utility of military intervention to change regimes abroad. Traditional Burkean conservatives have grave doubts about any kind of policy or societal change, unless it happens very, very slowly. But those are all doubts about different aspects of policy. In this sense, the conservatism of doubt bears more than a passing resemblance to Ross Perot’s Reform Party — a lot of people who are pissed of at the guys in power, but disagree on everything else. [What about the faith side?–ed. That typology is also not unidimensional. Religious conservatives obviously believe in the importance of religion in American life; neoconservatives carry a similar fervor about regime change in the Middle East, but as Andrew himself acknowledges that, “neocons feel about religion… good for the masses but not quite my cup of tea.”] 2) The political theorists don’t match up. To provide some historical orientation to his typology, Sullivan says at one point:

Doubt, in other words, means restraint. And restraint of government is the indispensable foundation of human freedom. The modern liberal European state was founded on such doubt. In the seventeenth century, men like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke looked at the consequences of various faiths battling for control of the moralizing state–and they balked. They saw civil war, religious extremism, torture, burnings at the stake, police states, and the Inquisition. They saw polities like Great Britain’s ravaged by sectarian squabbles over what the truth is, how it is discovered, and how to impose it on a society as a whole. And they made a fundamental break with ancient and medieval political thought by insisting that government retreat from such areas–that it leave the definition of the good life to private citizens, to churches uncontaminated by government, or to universities that would seek and discuss competing views of the truth.

Well…… I know Sullivan has the Ph.D. in political theory, but I would take issue with his interpretation of Hobbes. While he was not a huge fan of religion, Hobbes was in many ways your classic big government liberal. Consider his arguments in Leviathan about those things that weaken or tend to the dissolution of a commonwealth:

[A] man to obtain a kingdom is sometimes content with less power than to the peace and defence of the Commonwealth is necessarily required. From whence it cometh to pass that when the exercise of the power laid by is for the public safety to be resumed, it hath the resemblance of an unjust act, which disposeth great numbers of men, when occasion is presented, to rebel; in the same manner as the bodies of children gotten by diseased parents are subject either to untimely death, or to purge the ill quality derived from their vicious conception, by breaking out into biles and scabs…. In the second place, I observe the diseases of a Commonwealth that proceed from the poison of seditious doctrines, whereof one is that every private man is judge of good and evil actions. This is true in the condition of mere nature, where there are no civil laws; and also under civil government in such cases as are not determined by the law. But otherwise, it is manifest that the measure of good and evil actions is the civil law; and the judge the legislator, who is always representative of the Commonwealth. From this false doctrine, men are disposed to debate with themselves and dispute the commands of the Commonwealth, and afterwards to obey or disobey them as in their private judgments they shall think fit; whereby the Commonwealth is distracted and weakened. A fourth opinion repugnant to the nature of a Commonwealth is this: that he that hath the sovereign power is subject to the civil laws. It is true that sovereigns are all subject to the laws of nature, because such laws be divine and divine and cannot by any man or Commonwealth be abrogated. But to those laws which the sovereign himself, that is, which the Commonwealth, maketh, he is not subject. For to be subject to laws is to be to be subject to the Commonwealth, that is, to the sovereign representative, that is, to himself which is not subjection, but freedom from the laws. Which error, because it setteth the laws above the sovereign, setteth also a judge above him, and a power to punish him; which is to make a new sovereign; and again for the same reason a third to punish the second; and so continually without end, to the confusion and dissolution of the Commonwealth. A fifth doctrine that tendeth to the dissolution of a Commonwealth is that every private man has an absolute propriety in his goods, such as excludeth the right of the sovereign. Every man has indeed a propriety that excludes the right of every other subject: and he has it only from the sovereign power, without the protection whereof every other man should have right to the same. But the right of the sovereign also be excluded, he cannot perform the office they have put him into, which is to defend them both from foreign enemies and from the injuries of one another; and consequently there is no longer a Commonwealth.

With Hobbes, we’re not exactly talking about a big believer in the whole checks and balances thing. [Why not discuss Hobbes’ big-government social politics, or the importance of faith in Locke’s derivation of property rights?–ed. Because I’m trying to keep this post under 5,000 words.]

In the end, Sullivan is dressing up a very simple argument — “keeping religion in its safest place–away from the trappings of power…. keeping politics in its safest place–as the proper arrangement of our common obligations, and not as a means to save or transform our lives and souls” — in clothes that don’t fit. The divide between those who put their faith first in their politics and those who prefer to keep it out of government is not responsible for all of the hypocrisies that Andrew listed in his first paragraph — they’re just responsible for many of the obvious ones. The question of whether religious fundamentalists have too much power in the Republican Part and in the Bush administration is a good one to have — currently Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds are going a couple of rounds on the question. However, I’m not sure that Sullivan’s TNR essay provides anything new in answering that question.