American Conservatism and the Beaconsfield Position
In reviewing Sam Tanenhaus’s The Death of Conservatism, Jackson Lears repeats Tanenhaus’s odd contention that “One puzzling feature of American politics is that the people who call themselves conservatives seldom want to conserve anything.” In the original essay that became the book, Tanenhaus insisted that “movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy — ‘statist’ social programs; ‘socialized medicine’; ‘big labor’; ‘activist’ Supreme Court justices, the ‘media elite’; ‘tenured radicals’ on university faculties; ‘experts’ in and out of government.” While it’s clear what the right has opposed, wrote Tanenhaus, conservatives remain “haunted” by the question of “what exactly has it been for?”
This is all very silly. Each item on Tanenhaus’s list of things conservatives oppose could be restated as something conservatives support: So the conservative movement stands for liberty against statism, free markets and choice against socialized medicine, freedom of contract and the right to work against big labor, originalism and constitutionalism against activist Supreme Court justices, fairness and patriotism against the media elite, and the Great Books and traditional core curricula against tenured radicals. It’s not a particularly puzzling feature of American politics that the conservative movement wants to destroy the things Tanenhaus lists — it’s precisely because conservatives want to protect something else.
But Tanenhaus thinks this isn’t proper conservatism. He believes conservatism reached “its peak period as an intellectual force” in 1965-1975, after which conservatives lost their minds. Tanenhaus lauds Irving Kristol’s Public Interest, for example, for publishing “rigorously nonpartisan policy analysis” during that time, but then accuses Kristol of going delusional in 1975 when he identified a “new class” of liberal social engineers who wanted to ideologize American life. By 1995, Tanenhaus writes, Kristol “spelled out the terms of revanchist strategy” by writing “American conservatism is a movement, a popular movement, not a faction within any political party. Though, inevitably, most conservatives vote Republican, they are not party loyalists and the party has to woo them to win votes. This movement is issue oriented. It will happily meld with the Republican party if the party is ‘right’ on the issues; if not, it will walk away.”
Tanenhaus thinks this is crazy, but it’s no different from how any other political faction operates. The party might decide not to court the movement’s votes, if it wants to, but the movement — precisely because it believes its agenda is best for the country — will try to urge the party in its direction. Tanenhaus makes a straightforward description of democratic politics seem like a nefarious conspiracy.
Indeed, any argument that traces the fall of modern conservatism to the election of Ronald Reagan is self-evidently ridiculous. Tanenhaus’s view of conservatives as serving “the vital function of clarifying our shared connection to the past and of giving articulate voice to the normative beliefs Americans have striven to maintain even in the worst of times” seems to relegate them to writing literary essays in National Review but not actually affecting public policy. That’s because Tanenhaus doesn’t think their policy prescriptions are worth implementing. He seems to think it’s self-evidently a bad idea — and anti-Burkean! — to want to reduce the size of government or regulatory burdens or taxes or to actually see those traditional normative beliefs reflected in law, but that only means he disagrees with conservatives, not that he’s diagnosed some kind of pervasive intellectual rot.
As an alternative to modern American conservatism, Tanenhaus offers “the Beaconsfield position” of Benjamin Disraeli. At the end of his essay, Tanenhaus quotes Disraeli’s Vindication of the English Constitution :
“Political institutions, founded on abstract rights and principles, are mere nullities,” Disraeli wrote. Europe, too, had its pre-democratic places where “a comparative civilisation had been obtained under the influence of a despotic priesthood. And these are the regions to which it is thought fit suddenly to apply the institutions which regulate the civil life of Yorkshire and of Kent!”
It’s not clear whether Tanenhaus means to endorse Disraeli’s view that other Europeans, “untinctured, even in the slightest degree, by letters, and steeped in the grossest superstition,” are incapable of democratic self-government. “We may celebrate the constitutional coronation of a Bavarian in the Acropolis and surround his free throne with the bayonets of his countrymen,” Disraeli writes immediately after the passage Tanenhaus quotes. “We may hire Poles and Irishmen as a body-guard for the sovereign, who mimics the venerable ceremonies of Westminster as she opens the parliaments of Madrid or Lisbon; but invincible nature will reject the unnatural novelties, and history, instead of celebrating the victory of freedom, will only record the triumph of folly.”
Yet putting aside Tanenhaus’s position on the prospect of achieving democracy in Spain, the simple fact is that the American Constitution, unlike the British, founded America’s political institutions precisely upon those “abstract rights and principles” Disraeli dismissed. In his Vindication, Disraeli denounced a new “political sect” that aimed “to submit the institutions of the country to the test of Utility and to form a new constitution on the abstract principles of theoretic science.” By contrast, in Federalist 9 Alexander Hamilton wrote that the American Constitution owes its form to “great improvement” in “the science of politics,” which led to an understanding of “the efficacy of various principles” such as the separation of powers and a system of checks and balances. “These are wholly new discoveries,” wrote Hamilton of these abstract principles, “or have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times.”
The United States and Britain have two different constitutional and political traditions. For all Tanenhaus’s discussion of Burke, he doesn’t seem to understand that precisely because Burke rejected universalist ideology, he would not have the same political prescription for America as for Britain, but would have paid attention to the distinctive features of each society. Britain has an evolutionary, unwritten constitutional tradition while America was born of revolution and adopted a Constitution based upon abstract principles in order to protect abstract rights. It’s no surprise American conservatives are not Beaconsfieldians; they are conserving different things. Tanenhaus’s idea that the conservatism of nineteenth-century England is the ideal form of conservatism for twenty-first-century America and everywhere else is about as far removed from “Burkean conservatism” as one can get.
“It’s not a particularly puzzling feature of American politics that the conservative movement wants to destroy the things Tanenhaus lists — it’s precisely because conservatives want to protect something else.”
I disagree partially – Some of the things you list.. “the conservative movement stands for liberty against statism, free markets and choice against socialized medicine” are just untrue. They are against statism, but not necessarily for liberty (patriot act), against socialized medicine but not necessarily for free markets (we must protect medicare funding from the new health care bill’s possible cuts).
— warden · Oct 8, 08:31 PM · #
I don’t see why one can’t trace the decline and fall of conservatism to the election of Ronald Reagan. First and foremost, it has turned the conservative movement and the Republican Party into a bunch of mindless Reagan worshippers, with all the pols claiming to be closest to the hagiographical godlike Reagan. Second, any time a movement wins an election, it becomes hostage to the interest group wheeling and dealing inherent to (small-d) democratic politics. No longer arguing amongst themselves in small circulation magazines, conservatives became as craven as everybody else. Fast forward three decades and conservatism is once again a loosely-connected mess of “irritable gestures” based on resentment of so-called elites and nostalgia for a past that never really existed.
— rj · Oct 8, 09:11 PM · #
Sorry, that should be “irritable mental gestures.” Lionel Trilling, you can stop rolling in your grave now.
— rj · Oct 8, 09:15 PM · #
I think the estimable Mr. Menashi overstates his case here. The American War for Independence was not fought over “abstract principles” unmoored to particulars (See Revolution, French). The Constitution references and retains the recognized rights of Englishmen, and the common law. The checks and balances you reference were meant to preserve against tumults of “abstract rights” and other inflammations of the body politic. The Declaration of Independence is closer but even there its list of defalcations of the King are not abstract but particular. Your point is valid but I think it gives to much to the Paines and Jeffersons and not enough to the Adams, Hamiltons, Washingtons, Franklins and Madisons.
— jjv · Oct 8, 09:39 PM · #
I agree with Warden that conservatives have chosen statism and that they aren’t always proponents of liberty, especially when morality is involved.
A case can be made that conservatives who have recently called for limited government are going against the grain of conservative governance, but it remains to be seen if it’s only rhetoric or a true rejection of statism.
— mike farmer · Oct 8, 10:23 PM · #
Good post, Steven. Burke had many insights, but I’ve never related to British conservatives or tories. When I was studying British history in college, I related more to the early Whigs. As to warden’s point – conservatism is a broad term that encompasses many conflicting ideas or factions (for instance, libertarians vs. social conservatives). I consider myself a part of the moderate libertarian faction. Regardless, Sam T just wants us all to accept the liberal solution for everything and surrender, as the UK conservatives did (excluding brief push backs).
— JC38 · Oct 8, 11:39 PM · #
2nd paragraph: It’s true that it’s trivial to restate a negative proposition as a positive one. But a positive one is conservative only if the valued thing currently exists. If it existed only formerly, it’s reactionary. And something yet again if the valued thing is only hoped for in the future.
— K · Oct 9, 02:27 AM · #
Yes, but K, neither Tanenhaus nor his pseudo-educated readers would derive the same frissons of ecstasy from being told that people on the political right, though often referred to generically as “conservatives,” are in some cases reactionary and in some cases visionary. It’s the idea that conservatives are beset by irremediable ontological contradiction that thrills the average Upper West Sider.
— y81 · Oct 9, 01:02 PM · #
Nice one, y81.
No response, no reasoning, just the insinuation that people who liked the article are from a particular corner of Manhattan. And you wonder why Tannenhaus says the conservative movement lacks intellectual rigor.
— rj · Oct 9, 02:54 PM · #
Tannehaus says the conservative movement lacks intellectual rigor because Tannenhaus lacks intellectual rigor.
— TRB · Oct 11, 12:19 AM · #