The Conservative, the Progressive, and the Masonomist

Your description of conservatism made me smile. But it considerably overstates the case. In fact, by appealing to the important lessons of history, many conservatives are merely trying to ensure that those lessons are not forgotten, or overlooked simply because they’ve become embedded in social norms. You could say that conservatives are progressive in the following sense: they’re trying to ensure that political, economic, and cultural debates have a progressive (rather than cyclical) trend.

…and I know Masonomists well-enough to know that they should be considered conservatives in that sense at least.

Certainly, under tradional Conservative definitions his matrix is acceptable. But I would argue that it is misleading due to the generally accepted meaning to modern conservatism, which is fairly antithetical to the old definition of conservative.

There of course is great literature on how Conservatism now is essentially classical liberalism, but I don’t really see a need to reverse the label. If it is confusing to have switched once, I don’t think it would be less confusing to switch a second time — so instead of trying to use an old definition, since we’re not discussing text that referrenced the term as it used to be defined, we should just leave conservatism as it’s modern meaning. Of course this puts those such as Pat Buchannon on defense attempting to claim they’re the “real” conservatives, but those quibbles exist all the time, and since Buchannon is (although a popular commentator) not representative of the current bulk of “conservative” thought, he should be on defense.

Arnold,

Your losing much of your sharpness. I’ve noticed a decline in many of your posts for a while now. This one is a nice example. Your diagram is completely wrong, if for no other reason than it simplifies people’s beliefs and reduces the number of categories for those beliefs to the point of losing all information.

-Ken

Perhaps for clarity rather than calling it a ‘free market liberal’ it should be called a ‘minimally invasive liberal’. It’s a liberal with some respect for unintended consequences and the imperfectability of human kind.

That is, a respect for those things, but not submission to them.

Troy…we don’t take you more seriously if you put PhD after your name. Read Cowen’s book.

And I’d have to agree with the mislabeling of conservatives. I’d much rather encourage “decentralized, unplanned human activity” than not.

The title shouldn’t make anyone take me more or less seriously. You should judge my ideas, regardless of what title I may or may not have. I do find it annoying when people act like I should hide the fact that I do have a Ph.D. I worked hard to earn, like I should be ashamed of it. The avoidance of Dr. or Ph.D. just seems like a bunch of politically correct egalitarianist nonsense (I really want to use a much stronger term than “nonsense” here — one of a more bovine origin).

There are, alas, several problems with your classification, Arnold.

1, Conservatism Confused

There are several problems with the way you classify this term: a more accurate one, which was used extensively in 19th century European political discourse, would be reactionary: diehard opposition to both the two epochal upheavals of the late 18th century and on into the next two.

1) The industrial revolution, with the rise of a new urban industrial middle class that challenged, often violently on the Continent of Europe, the traditional status, power, and wealth of the landed aristocracy and the traditional upper-class bourgeoisie: lawyers, accountants, financiers.

Britain was unusual here, largely because the British landed aristocracy — showing more flexibility and far more interest in agrarian improvements from the 17th century on — encouraged their sons (and daughters) to marry the emerging middle classes for reasons of money and to mingle with them on equal terms. Tocqueville was so struck by this tendency to “stoop to conquer”, his term for this aristocratic flexbility — as compared with the rigidities of the French aristocracy-of-the-sword who showed contempt not just for the emerging industrial middle classes in France, but the new aristocracy-of-the-robe that ran the military and civilian bureaucracies — that he saw it, rightly, as a major reason why Britain avoided the kind of radical revolutionary waves that France and other Continental countries suffered, not just in the 1790s, but way on into the 19th century.

2) The democratic revolutionary wave that began in the US, which never spilled over into radical social upheavals, only to radicalize rapidly in the French revolution after 1789 — which, among other things, upset the European balance of power and plunged Europe into 16 years of total ideological warfare, ending only with Napoleon’s second defeat at Waterloo in 1815. That revolutionary wave persisted, off and on, erupting again in France in 1830, in France and most of Central Europe in 1849, and again and again at times in the more rigid, backward regions of Spain, Italy, Eastern (and Central Europe), and the Czarist Empire in 1904 and again in 1917-1918.

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2. You Confuse Reaction with Conservatism

Meaning? Rooted in pre-industrial, pre-democratic, highly orthodox religious traditions, reactionary conservatism turned extremist and violent against these two major changes — and in the process, over time, captured the new (3rd) revolutionary upheaval of the 19th and early 20th century: nationalism, which became a marked reactionary tool and, together with Social Darwinianism, racism, and ever growing anti-Semitism, eventually moved toward fascisms of various kinds after 1918. (Communism and the fear of it was an added attraction that brought large numbers of intellectuals, priests, threatened aristocrats and old and new middle classes — and (though voting studies now find it exaggerated) the threatende lower middle classes — into fascist circles.

Such reactionaries wanted a powerful, militarized central state to protect them against the industrial middle classes and later, in arm with many of the middle clases, the industrial working classes and their increasing drift into support for Socialist parties. They feared change, feared decentralized government, feared democracy, and were, to repeat, increasingly ultra-nationalsit, Social-Darwinian, anti-Marxist, anti-Liberal, and anti-Semitic.

You find remnants of these traditions today in the ultra-nationalist National Front parties, under different names, in France, Belgium, Austria, Italy, and — on the fringes fortunately — Germany.

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3, Moderate and Flexible Conservatism, of the Anglo-American sort.

4. Contemporary US Conservatism

With the exception of the slave-holding Southern aristocracy, the US political right has never had even a Tory wing of pre-industrial, pre-democratic thought, and whatever thought Calhoun and others produced tended to disappear after 1865, the year the civil war ended.

Nor is there anything like Christian Democracy that has powerfully influenced the politics of Germany, Italy, Austria, Belgium, and for a time France — paternalistic, favoring stability and the family, suspicious of free markets, and faovring eventually a welfare state to that end.

Today, American conservatism is an umbrella term that brings together, in uneasy alliance, four different intellectual and political groupings:

*Libertarian free-market enthusiasts

*Evangelical Christian Majority types, who favor free-markets, but dislike and react against the kind of radical or liberal cultural and moral changes that have occurred in US life since the early 1960s. They want to use the legal system, for good or bad, to stop or reverse these changes. Obviously they are in conflict here with Libertarians.

*Neo-Conservatives: The term was originally applied by former liberals — aghast at the radical social changes of the late 1960s and early 1970s — associated with the intellectuals who started and managed the most influential journal of social policy in the US and English-speaking world, The Public Interest: especially Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, James Wilson, and — with Norman Podhoritz’s Commentary Magazine — showed with rigorous academic work that the Great Society programs and increasingly ambitious social policies of the US government were based on faulty or incomplete knowledge and were producing increasingly deplorable spillover consequences. Think of the new welfare policies after 1965, and their impact on the black (and increasingly Hispanic and to an extent white) two-parent families. Or of growing coddling of criminals until the 1990s.

These neo-conservatives did dislike and criticized libertarian economic reductionism, stressed cultural traditions and cohesionl, and favored in line with Burkean-Conservatism in Britain, a moderate welfare-state as a stabilizing influence in American life.

The application of the neo-conservatism began in the 1980s, with the new Reagan offensive against the Soviet Communist empire. Most accepted power-realism, but added a strong thrust to counter Communism with a strong human rights approach (where possible) and the promotion of democracy. This too brings them into conflict with Libertarians.

* Reactionary conservatism, neo-nationalist and nativist, of the Pat Buchanan sort. It has some overtures of anti-Semitism, though that is hardly true of, say, a pundit like Lew Dodds; and it lacks the violent and extremist thrusts that marked European reactionary conservatism of the 19th and early 20th century, with its easy embrace of Fascism.

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5. The Republican Party in 2008

The party seems in disarray, and for several reasons: the Bush-bungling in its policies in Iraq, the adminsitration’s group-think closed policymaking, and its inability to communicate effectively with the American people. The latter, as opinion polls show, are concerned with a variety of social and economic issues, plus a war that they no longer support in Iraq, a direct consequence of rigid occupational policies pursued by the Bush team, full of arrogance and contempt for others with a very belated adaptation of military strategy only 12 to 18 months ago.

Nor is that all. There’s the economy. Regarding it, it does no good for libertarians and others to deplore the exaggerated pessimism about the US economy.

For one thing, good social science — ignored by free-market enthusiasts for decades — has shown since the path-breakng work of Samuel Stoffer and others in the late 1940s that people’s sense of “deprivation” isn’t absolute and unchanging, but rather a matter of “relative” comparisons between the existing status-quo or trends from it with previous “gains” eventually taken for granted and shaping expectations of continued gains into the future.

For another thing, the pathbreaking work of Tversky and Kahneman in frame-theory — which collides directly with Libertarian and free-market rational choice theory — matches up pretty closely with the work done on relative deprivation . . . not least in the ways in which people judge their contemporary and likely near-future happiness or deprivation according to how they frame (and hence perceive and understand) the status quo and the expectations surrounding it and changes, good or bad, in the future.

On top of that, as a third and final thing, there is the simple pragmatic problem of who has benefitted from the recent business cycle upswing since the 3rd quarter of 2001. The fact is, however much you may be nonchalant about it, real wages have hardly improved at all on the average . . . the first time this has happened in a cycle-upswing since the short, thwarted one of the mid-1930s Great Depression period.

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Oh, something else too. Most Americans — rightly I think — are far more attuned to the strains on our social-fabric of continued legal and illegal immigration out of Mexico and Central America than free-market enthusiasts . . . who, entranced with the low-wage impact of such immigration, are utterly indifferent to these social strains: growing violent gangs in urban areas, increasingly poor educational performance by the children of immigrants, and an illegitimacy rate of around 50% for Hispanics in our country today.

— Michael Gordon, AKA, the buggy professor, http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org

Edmund Burke’s great book Reflections on the Revolution in France , drives home his great powers of insight into ideological extremism . . . which he identified with overly abstract intellectuality that reduced everything in complex social life to a set of basic principles and precepts.

Published in 1790, just a year into the revolution when a brief, ill-fated constitutional monarchy had been set up, Burke’s book predicted what would follow in the next years in France: the monarchy would be destroyed, revolutionary Jacobin fervor would be unleashed, mass terror, executions, and warfare — against domestic and foreign opponents — would ensue. At some point, he observed, such anarchy and fanaticism would provoke a military leader to assume dictatorial control and bring new order to France.

The reality of things?

Both these predicted trends did materialize, with their dangerous and destructive outcomes: mass terror and fanaticism, followed in 1795 by Napoleon and two others assuming dictatorial power . . . followed not long afterwards by Napoleon crowning himself emperor and plunging France anew into almost two decades of total warfare in Europe.

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The key point about Burke’s conservative thought — which was echoed by George Washington and John Adams in this country: beware of totalizing intellectual systems that reduce a complex world to basic abstract first principles and premises whose proponents — full of fervor and righteous conviction — seek to remake the social, political, and economic worlds of human beings in their image.

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Here, more specifically, are three paragraphs summarizing Burke’s justified suspicion of what would become the world’s first totalitarian revolutionary system: (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflections_on_the_Revolution_in_France )

“Burke argued that the French Revolution would end in disaster because it was founded on abstract notions that purported to be rational but in fact ignored the complexities of human nature and society. Burke’s beliefs were built on the foundation of a collection of philosophies originating primarily in the western world that ranged from philosophers such as St. Augustine, Cicero, all the way back to Plato. His brilliantly elegant yet practical and complex philosophy reflected his belief that Government Policy and Mandate should be first and foremost grounded in the human heart….

[Extended quote from wikipedia elided. Please do not requote extensively on EconLog material that can be found elsewhere online.–
Econlib Ed.]

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By now, let us hope, the caricature of “conservatism” that Bryan has mistakenly set out in his 4×3 table should be clear. For my part, I would go further. And argue that Burke’s, Adam’s, Hamilton’s, Washington’s, and Madison’s suspicions of ultra-abstract theories and models were sound and apply to today’s totalizing theories and models used by radical socialists on the left and libertarian enthusiasts on the right.

Both sides appeal to the possession of basic, taken-for-granted assumptions, premises, and first principles of their theories — often modeled and run statistically by “experts” (in Bryan’s case, presumably, Ph.D. economists of the right-thinking sort) — to give us sure-footed, near-totalizing insight and policy-guidance into refashioning a whole society or economy or its polity in line with the theory’s image of the idealized result.

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Others, especially those who subscribe to the kind of concrete comparative and historical work about the complexities of human societies, tend to adopt a more Burkean and Hamilton-Madison view of the world. It was that view that inspired the editors and hundreds of social scientists, historians, and philosophers who made the Public Interest the dominant policy journal in American life for over 30 years.

Again and again, as their articles — based on keen scholarly work — showed, our government was attempting to implement social and economic policies that were based on flimsy or outrightly bogus knowledge about human behavior and social complexities. And yet their were and are numerous radical and liberal scholars who continue to push their advocacy-riddled nostrums onto the public agenda, often filled with data and statistical modeling.

Worse, these misguided policies almost always entailed harmful and even dangerous unintended consequences that we’re still combatting, with (fortunately) some success. Why some success? Because of a different sort of intellectual and scholarly approach to these massive social problems, such as welfare policies that encouraged illegitimacy and family break-up or encouraged more and more vicious street-crime and gangs and rampant unsafe streets almost everywhere in many US cities. An outstanding example of such modest, but concrete, well-founded policy proposals: the sorts of policing methods, based on Jame Wilson’s and George Kelling’s modest but powerfully persuasive Broken Windows theory of crime (1982, in the Public Interest). Implemented, eventually, in several cities around our country, the approach has its most strikingly beneficial results in the Rudy Guiliani years in New York in the 1990s and on into this decade.

Small wonder that the Swedish ambassador to the UN in that city wrote an op-ed a few years back in the New York Times, praising Guiliani’s great success . . . to the point that he himself had nominated the mayor as a candidate for the Nobel peace prize. All over Europe today, there are efforts to try emulating Wilson’s and Kelling’s modest hard-headed policy suggestions.

Funny enough, if you go back and read their 1982 article, it does not rest on modeling, has no statistical apparatus, and sets out a variety of concrete observations and solid but modest policy proposals.

The moral? Maybe it’s self-evident to some of us.

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Michael Gordon, AKA, the buggy professor, http://www.thebuggyprofessor.org