"Is there a Conservative Tradition in America?"

A little while ago today, this little item was forwarded to your semi-humble correspondent from an old friend, asking if any "true" conservative tradition existed in America. It's by Patrick Deneen (not this Patrick Deneen, unfortunately. That woulda been sah-weet!) but a professor at G-Town. Deneen argues that no real conservative tradition in the US exists, precisely because our founding was so radical and liberal (in the classical sense of the word), but we are sorta stuck with "classical" and "progressive" liberalism. This in turn means that while we in America toss around the label all the time, none of us really can claim it fairly. Thomas Sowell a few days ago also wrote about the dangers of labels, for what it's worth.

At first glance, it his hard not to concede that Deneen is right -- it does seem a bit contradictory to call "conservatives" exactly that. After all, we are a revolutionary nation, and conservatism is a decidedly non-revolutionary feeling. There really aren't too many loyalists anymore, hoping to get that awful George Washington off our money and get the Queen back on there, where she belongs. As I'm sure readers of this blog know, a guy named Hayek (you may have heard of him) wrote a really cool essay entitled "Why I am not a Conservative" and eventually described himself as an "old Whig." (Though I personally think that anyone who gives himself that moniker 150 years after the death of the Whig party obviously has some respect for tradition!) Another guy, James Buchanan (it's slightly less likely you've heard of him, but you should look him up too) ripped off Hayek and wrote "Why I, too, am not a Conservative," and came out at about the same place, describing himself as a classical liberal in the Hamiltonian sense. (And again, you find a guy who's quoting the ideas of a dude who's been dead for 200 years.)

What I personally find "conservative" in our current era is that we are asking for people to go back, and understand that there fundamentally is a Rousseau-type "civic religion" about our founding (though Rousseau himself would be mortified about America's, I believe). We had a code of laws that seemed to make us successful for many, many years, and preserving these laws *should* continue to benefit us in the future. The fact that yes, indeed, the revolutionaries were liberal at the time should not dissuade us from using the word "conservative" to describe them today.

Furthermore, I think that Deneen misreads Burke here. He points out that Burke found a few rather non-conservative things in the American Revolution, which is true enough as far as it goes. But it also must be borne in mind that Burke *supported* the actions of the guys we now call Founding Fathers. Some traditions, such as representation in the British Parliament, unequal taxation, and the abilities of local officials to handle local affairs (all of which were present in England at the time) were indeed being denied to the colonies. In other words, you could make an argument that precisely because those traditions *weren't* being upheld by the most enlightened nation at the time, the American Revolution was almost forced to happen. The American Revolution was as much about the extension of traditions as the severing of a cord.

Deneen's Straussian argument is a little better. When we talk about the "first wave of modernity" and the rise of thinkers like Hobbes, Locke and Machiavelli, we definitely see a shift from the conservatism of "the divine right of kings" to that of natural law. Nevertheless, this idea of natural law is for these three still very much anchored in the idea of original sin, and man's propensity to fail. It's Rousseau who -- in my personal opinion -- really becomes the first "modern" thinker, because he's the one who really starts to detach society from this anchor of human nature. This had, of course, disastrous results in Europe, as various Utopians forced their visions of the perfect society on the continent from Napoleon to Lenin to Hitler. Here it should be pointed out that the "divine right of kings" was a bit less, ahem, accepted on the Isles, particularly after around 1215. So one can almost say that modernity and the idea of limited government started then. It's hardly surprising that the first contractian philosophers were British. Maybe that means that Britain has a poorer history of conservatism than Germany (that's actually a very interesting argument, actually, come to think of it), but it doesn't mean that we Americans are essentially conservative-free.

Fast forward to 2010, and the people we know as conservatives in America today. Deneen writes about five guiding principles of the conservative movement today:

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.

He argues that only one of these (#5) is a particularly conservative attribute. Of course, when he says that we in America basically only have two choices (Jonah Goldberg once described them as Vanilla Liberalism and French Vanilla Liberalism) it makes it very hard to say that anything is conservative. But I submit that a defense of traditional values, particularly that of the family, is precisely why we have the other four. I think that #1 and #4 are essentially the same -- I don't see how you can hope to cultivate individual responsibility with unlimited government. The reason we foster individual responsibility, however, is because we believe that the individual can do a better job taking care of his or her family than the state can. Supporting the family and supporting the individual as mutually reinforcing. The best way to promote this, in turn, is supporting the free market. We set up institutional arrangements so that while a family who goes poor receives compassionate assistance from the state, we realize that communities and individuals are often far more efficient and generous (and virtuous, if that has any conservative relevance at all!) than the welfare office is. And the best way to generate the wealth that enable charity to even happen is through the free market. This is why the Republican Party is at its best when it dons the mantle of fusionism -- demonstrating that we are moral because we see in our children the passing on of traditions, and at the same time enabling them to have the wherewithal to do that, which we need the free market for. Moreover, only the free market can allow us to keep and grow the bounty Providence has allowed us to attain. We would be foolish (and immoral) to take this splendid institution, the free market, and discard it for a collectivism that will consign our children to a future with fewer options for them. As for #3, well, I'm really not sure why national preservation of our values should even be considered a modern hyperindividualist distraction from "true" conservatism.

So I suppose that I disagree with Dr. Deneen. I don't think that he's completely off-base, just that time has allowed us to take up the name. It funny, because here in Czech Republic, and in Europe, frequently the Klausian-Thatcherite-Lockean tradition is sometimes written "liberal-conservative" as an adjective -- "ODS is a liberal-conservative party." For what it's worth, the party grouping that the ODS and the Tories belong to in the European Parliament is known as the "European Conservatives and Reformists." Is that contradictory or complementary? Or is it just complimentary?