{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has chosen briefly to suspend his investigations of William of Occam, Blaise Pascal, and Lucien Goldmann so that he might turn his gaze to a question that keeps him, and no doubt many others, awake at night: Who stole conservatism?}
“America is in peril. The welfare of American men and women and the future of our youth are at stake. We dedicate ourselves to the protection of their political liberty, their individual opportunity, and their character as free citizens, which today are threatened by Government itself.” (Republican Party platform, 1936)
In his 2016 book, Who Stole Conservatism, Mario Di Nunzio did a superb job of demonstrating how, and why, the American Right became unmoored from anything resembling conservatism. Because I agree with Mr. Di Nunzio’s thesis—that conservatism was undone by its blind allegiance to capitalism—I will be quoting him at some length.
“Classical conservatism,” as Di Nunzio explains, was represented by the likes of Edmund Burke, Henry Adams, Richard Weaver, and Russell Kirk. While there were of course variations on the larger theme, “This kind of conservatism [featured] a great respect for tradition, enduring moral values, religion, and skeptical attitudes towards popular (especially political) enthusiasms.” Moreover, “It insisted not that novelty in society was bad but that core social, cultural, and political values should not be lightly sacrificed to passing fashion or self-interest. Community interest and community responsibility should reflect a society’s traditions, religious and ethical values, cultural heritage, artistic legacy, concern for others, political programs, and economic life.” This, claims Di Nunzio, was a conservatism “intended to serve stability, order, organic development, and the common good,” while avoiding “uncontrolled and unpredictable social upheaval.”
Set aside, if you will, your opinion of classical conservatism as described above; focus instead on how little it resembles anything offered by American “conservatives” in the last fifty years—or, if one accepts Di Nunzio’s framing, in the last hundred and fifty years. “An American conservative movement emerged,” he asserts, “during the post-Civil War Gilded Age; it directed its energies toward a defense of capitalism even at the cost of muting, altering, or even abandoning” what were thought to be essential tenets of a conservative worldview.
Before proceeding, we should distinguish between “conservatism” as temperament and “conservatism” as ideology. The former represents an ingrained resistance to change and an attachment to, or even a fondness for, existing cultural mores, social structures, and institutions—some more than others, of course. The latter comprises a political agenda based on so-called “first principles” (strong military, low taxes, devotion to the Second Amendment, and seething hatred of liberalism) and characterized increasingly by brashness, truculence, and sheer adolescent delight in giving offense.
The older conservative temperament was articulated in the 20th century by such writers as Joseph Wood Krutch, the Southern Agrarians, Richard Weaver, and Russell Kirk (who insisted that conservatism was not an ideology). The new conservative ideology has been spelled out since then by Newt Gingrich, Patrick Buchanan, Milton Friedman, and their many followers; it has also been spewed into the public square by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson.
As noted, Di Nunzio traces the bifurcation of conservatism back to the 19th century. “Since the Gilded Age, conservatism in America has included an amalgam of sometimes incompatible ideas about politics, culture, and morality, but it has been dominated by its blind support for unregulated business enterprise.” Few things evoke cognitive dissonance more than the conservative support for capitalism, which, as Di Nunzio writes, “has been a dominant influence for change in society with little regard for preservation or continuity and much distortion of culture and values.” To hear capitalism--the socio-economic equivalent of Shiva, a destroyer of traditions and communities--being praised for its “creative destruction” and heralded (by conservatives!) for its endless innovations, is to experience an intellectual vertigo from which it is difficult to recover. “Capitalism,” as Di Nunzio says in the book’s introduction, “stole conservatism and holds it captive without apology.”
He offers select examples:
The right of an undiscriminating capitalism to invest in virtually any enterprise, however sordid or socially damaging, without interference or oversight by public authority, has been defended [by conservatives] as essential to the survival of human freedom. Conservatives have mounted no campaigns to protest the sleaziness of so much advertising or the constant drumbeat to stimulate consumerism. The modern American conservative offers impassioned support for the unchallenged right to buy arms without limits and does not [support] even the most limited restraints on the killing power of high-caliber assault weaponry. Witness, too, decades of virtually blind support for military expenditure and the blending of genuine patriotic support for the troops at risk with a blank check for the military/industrial complex (President Eisenhower’s warning about this may have inspired the more avid on the Right to accuse him of Communist sympathies). The sum of these parts composes a portrait of American conservatism fully out of touch with its roots.
Irrevocably committed to its defense of capitalism, the American Right has had to look elsewhere to account for the ills of Modernity--individualism, rootlessness, secularism, alienation, lowering of cultural standards, relativism, etc. The usual suspects include various European philosophers (e.g., Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, Derrida, Foucault, Gramsci, Marcuse) and the tenured professors who indoctrinate naive, servile students with their doctrines. Conservatives insist that our difficulties all stem from liberal arts students being taught to question authority—except, of course, the authority of their instructors and the iconic, subversive figures they invoke.
One suspects that if Adam Smith were to return from the grave and observe the world that the market’s Invisible Hand has created, he might call for Invisible Handcuffs with which to restrain it. Modernity’s “pervasive materialism” stems from the dominance of the market; its consequences “cannot be reconciled with and are, in fact, inimical to” classical conservatism. What passes for conservative thought in the 21st century “is so intimately wedded to the pecuniary objectives of corporate capital [and] so tainted by capitalist distortions” that it is a travesty to call it “conservative”; it is “thoroughly materialist, perversely individualist, and narrowly focused on adjusting all political and economic policy to serve the manipulators of capital.” The new conservative discourse “shows little concern for the differences between [private] wealth accumulation and the pernicious social consequences of undisciplined enterprise. Public squalor, urban and rural, draws little conservative outrage, but taxes and government expenditures are assaulted as intolerable evils. Legislative efforts toward insuring access to healthcare or establishing an economic safety net for the neediest in society are dismissed as profligate public expenditure on behalf of the undeserving.”
Di Nunzio’s assessment preceded the American Right’s recent turn towards a faux populism led by a vulgar, cretinous billionaire, but that turn does not represent a break with conservatism’s pro-capitalism stance. America’s white working class has been mobilized to vent its “economic anxiety” against various imagined oppressors—Marxist professors and Critical Race Theorists on college campuses, transgender persons attempting to live their complicated, confusing lives, globalists and elitists, bureaucrats working for the Deep State, Hunter Biden—rather than against Wall Street and the Fortune 500. MAGA Republicans block attempts to raise the minimum wage, make it harder for workers to unionize, promote unpaid overtime and unsafe working conditions; but their populist rhetoric and their willingness to demonize all sorts of social and political “others” stokes their base. So long as the mobs, with their torches and pitchforks, don’t come for the plutocrats, the venture capitalists, the inheritors of wealth, and the despoilers of the planet: modern conservatives can stand a little anarchy.
America no longer has a conservative movement; it has instead “a perverse, adulterated, grossly distorted” ideological contraption that would horrify the likes of Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver. What this country needs is a good five-cent conservatism; where is Robert Taft when we need him?
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Mario Di Nunzio, Who Stole Conservatism? (Praeger Publishing, 2016)
What hath Capitalism wrought?
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