While difficult to define, contemporary American conservatism seems to be shaped by a certain set of core commitments. While not exhaustive, among those characteristics one could confidently list: 1. Commitment to limited government as laid out by the Founders in the Constitution; 2. Support for Free Markets; 3. Strong National defense; 4. Individual responsibility and a suspicion toward collectivism; and 5. Defense of traditional values, particularly support for family. I’m sure there are many other characteristics we could agree upon, but these are several that seem to be core devotions of modern conservatism, and nearly anyone with passing knowledge of American politics could look at this list and agree that this would seem to reflect Conservative values. . . .
in his 1955 book The Liberal Tradition in America, in which he argued that America is a unique nation in the West precisely because it was founded exclusively on a liberal basis, and most explicitly on the basis of principles laid out in the philosophy of John Locke. Hartz argued that it was this liberal tradition that explained the absence both of a feudal tradition (which he regarded as the true source of a “conservative” or “reactionary” politics) and a socialist tradition in America. While he didn’t frame his argument in these terms, his argument suggests that the main current of American politics is split along a narrow range of political views, namely conservative liberalism and progressive liberalism. Yet the dominant American worldview is liberalism, and as such there is no real “conservative” tradition in America that exists independent of a more fundamental commitment to liberalism.
It’s true that “conservative liberalism” is more “conservative” than “progressive liberalism,” if we mean by that it takes at least some of its cues from an older, pre-liberal understanding of human beings and human nature. Still, its dominant liberal ethic – summed up in the five points I suggested at the outset – means that in nearly every respect, its official allegiances end up eviscerating residual pre-liberal conservative allegiances. In particular, it could be argued that conservative commitments 1-4 – that end by favoring consolidation (in spite of the claim to favor “limited” government), advancing imperial power and capitalism (i.e., why consolidation is finally necessary), and stressing individual liberty, are all actively hostile to commitment number 5 – the support for family and community. It is a rump commitment without a politics to support it, and one that daily undergoes attack by the two faces of contemporary liberalism, through the promotion of the Market by the so-called Right and the promotion of lifestyle autonomy by the Left. A true conservatism has few friends in today’s America. Deneen, "Is there a Conservative Tradition in America?"
I've always admired Deneen for being that rare kind of cultural conservative who understands that conservatism in America is really captured by a classical liberal mindset--that it's not conservative at all. He understands that market capitalism has been the greatest destructive force of traditional values, and he understands that conservative support of both traditional values and market capitalism is incoherent and contradictory.
Elsewhere in the article excerpted above, Deneen says
The false anthropology of liberalism – anathema to the deeper insights of a pre-liberal “conservative” tradition – spawns the perverse but inescapable progeny that it purports to despise, but which at every turn it fosters. Any conservative impulse is throttled by its more fundamental fealty to the liberal tradition.
I tend to agree with him that liberal anthropology (i.e., its understanding about what it means to be human) is inadequate for its unbalanced emphasis on the individual deracinated from community. But that deracination has been the price modern societies have paid for economic development. Individualism and cosmopolitan tolerance are adaptive values healthy people have made in a world in which traditional community life has been destroyed by the market capitalism and the tradition-killing new technologies political conservatives celebrate. Some thoughtful cultural conservatives--J.R.R. Tolkein was one of them--would like to destroy this dehumanizing machine. His story in Lord of the Rings was essentially a anti-modern, anti-technology parable. Wendell Berry is another, and Deneen comes pretty close to theirs in his attitude toward modernity.
Readers here might wonder why I spend so much time looking at a paleo-conservative like Deneen's work, and the reason is that, like Tolkien's and Berry's, I find much of his critique of modernity and American society valid. He's a clear, principled thinker who advances a defense of premodern values with which I feel a deep sympathy. We part company, though, when it comes to finding a way forward, because his rejection of modernity and its liberal, progressive mentality is so thoroughgoing I don't think the phrase "moving forward" has any positive content for him.
For Deneen modernity--everything in the West that followed upon the Renaissance and Reformation was a mistake--a kind of second Fall, and he wants to return to a pre-lapsarian, premodern status quo ante. I look at history as a more dynamic and dialectical process, which in a dumb, blind, painful, groping way is a movement out of darkness and toward light. And I would argue that the decadence we're experiencing now is not the fault of modernity so much as it is its being spent. We're at the end of a cycle. We're in that awkward phase which in the west we experienced as the classical Roman/Greek macronarrative broke down and the Christian narrative replaced it. Or similarly when the medieval Christian macronarrative broke down, and the modern, Renaissance/Enlightenment narrative asserted itself. We're in a historical cultural phase similar to the 200s A.D. or the 1300s. We're at slack tide, an in between time when there there's no movement, no energy to work with. It's just how history rolls.
My argument here over time has been that the postmodern, postsecular era into which we are now entering will synthesize essential elements of the Age of Faith with essential elements the Age of Reason. This synthesis will comprise a dynamic interaction of premodern, irrational/communal elements with modern critical thinking and individualism. Seems, contradictory? As I argued in my essay "Metaxis", the trick is not to be either this or that, but to live in the tension between what appears to be opposites. Such a synthesis of the premodern and its modern antithesis is the postmodern historical cultural task that lies before us. That's the basic conceptual frame that organizes this blog
Such syntheses are not interesting for conservatives like Deneen because they believe that modernity was a mistake, root and branch. In this view, the West lost its way with the coming of the Reformation and the shattering of Christendom and its culturally unifying cultural macronarrative. And reading between the lines in Deneen's article excerpted above, it's pretty clear, to me at least, that Deneen, had he lived in 1776, would have sided with the Tories because of their fealty to the vestiges of the premodern crown-and-altar narrative. Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison would have been way too hubristically liberal for him.
There's no going back, but our going forward does not require that we leave the most important treasures that the ancestors have bequeathed to us behind. The fundamental mistake conservatives make, in my opinion, is to think that you have to take the whole package. The trick is to know what is worth taking and what is an unnecessary burden, because if we are to move forward, we have to step nimbly and travel lightly.
[See also "Elitism and the American Equality Ideal" for another post provoked into being by a Deneen essay.]