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Conservatism FAQ
Archive-name: conservatism/faq
Posting-Frequency: monthly
Conservatism FAQ
October 1, 1995 Revision
This FAQ, posted monthly, attempts to deal with common questions and
objections regarding conservatism. Additional questions and comments
are welcome. The conservatism discussed is traditionalist American
conservatism; other varieties are touched on in section 6 and their
adherents are urged to draft additional FAQs.
A current version of this FAQ is available by ftp in compressed form
from rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/conservatism/faq.Z. A copy
can also be obtained in uncompressed form by sending the message "send
usenet/news.answers/conservatism/faq" by email to mail-
[email protected]. A hypertext version is available at
http://www.panix.com/~jk/consfaq.html.
QUESTIONS
1 General principles
1.1 How does conservatism differ from other political views?
1.2 Why is tradition a source of "greater wisdom"?
1.3 Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning?
1.4 How can anyone know his own tradition is the right one?
1.5 What about objective truth?
1.6 Why are most people seriously involved in studying and dealing with
social issues liberals?
2 Tradition and change
2.1 Why not just accept change?
2.2 Isn't conservatism simply another way of saying that people who
currently have wealth and power should keep it?
2.3 Wouldn't we still have slavery if conservatives had always been
running the show?
3 Social and cultural issues
3.1 What are family values and what is so great about them?
3.2 Why do conservatives always want to force their values on everybody
else?
3.3 Aren't conservatives racist sexist homophobes?
3.4 Why can't conservatives just accept that people's personal values
differ?
3.5 What role do conservatives think government should play in
enforcing moral values?
3.6 What happens to feminists, homosexuals, racial minorities and
others marginalized in a conservative society?
3.7 What about freedom?
4 Economic issues
4.1 Why do conservatives say they favor virtue and community but favor
laissez-faire capitalism?
4.2 Why don't conservatives care about what happens to the poor, weak,
discouraged, and outcast?
4.3 Shouldn't the government do something for people for whom the usual
support networks don't work?
4.4 What about welfare for the middle classes?
4.5 If conserving is a good thing, why isn't ecology a conservative
issue?
5 Conservatism in an age of established liberalism
5.1 Why do conservatives talk as if the sky is about to fall and all
good things are in the past?
5.2 Isn't conservatism essentially nostalgia for a past that never was
and can't be restored?
5.3 What's all this stuff about community and tradition when the groups
that matter these days are based on interests and perspectives rather
than traditions?
5.4 Shouldn't conservatives favor well-established things like the
welfare state and steady expansion of the scope of the civil rights
laws?
5.5 I was raised to believe certain substantive liberal positions are
the positions good Americans should hold. Wouldn't it be conservative
for me to stay true to them?
5.6 I was raised a liberal. Doesn't that mean that to be conservative
I should stay true to liberalism?
6 The conservative rainbow
6.1 How do libertarians differ from conservatives?
6.2 What are mainstream conservatives?
6.3 What are neoconservatives?
6.4 What are paleoconservatives?
6.5 What are paleolibertarians?
6.6 What are Frankfurt School Neopaleoconservatives?
6.7 Where do the pro-life movement and Religious Right fit into all
this?
6.8 What are the differences between American conservatism and that of
other countries?
6.9 What do all these things called "conservatism" have in common?
ANSWERS
1 General Principles
1.1 How does conservatism differ from other political views common
today?
By its emphasis on tradition as a source of wisdom greater than
that of any individual or faction.
1.2 Why is tradition a source of "greater wisdom"?
It gives us a comprehensive and generally coherent point of view
that because how it has evolved reflects the experience and thought
of other times, and a collection of habits that have proved useful
in practical affairs.
The usual alternative to reliance on tradition is reliance on
theory. Taking theory literally can be costly because theory
achieves clarity by ignoring things that are difficult to
articulate. Such things can be important; the reason practical
things like politics and morals are learned mostly by imitation and
experience is that most of what we learn consists in habits,
attitudes and implicit presumptions that we couldn't begin to put
into words. There is no means other than tradition to accumulate,
conserve and hand on such things.
1.3 Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning?
Our knowledge is partial and attained with difficulty. The effects
of political proposals are difficult to predict and as the
proposals become more ambitious their effects become incalculable.
We can't evaluate political ideas without accepting far more
beliefs, presumptions and attitudes than we could possibly judge
critically. Accordingly, the most reasonable approach to politics
is to take the existing system of society as a given that can't be
changed wholesale and try to ensure that any changes cohere with
the principles and practices that make the existing system work as
well as it does.
1.4 There are lots of conflicting traditions. How can anyone know his
own is the right one?
No one can be certain. Our own tradition may lead us astray where
another would not. However, that possibility can not be a reason
for rejecting our own tradition unless we have a method
transcending tradition for determining when that has happened, and
in general there is no such method.
Putting issues of truth aside, the various parts of a particular
tradition are adjusted to each other in a way that makes it
difficult to abandon one part and substitute something from another
tradition. A French cook will have trouble if he has to rely on
Chinese ingredients or utensils. Issues of coherence and
practicality accordingly make it likely that we will do better
developing the tradition to which we are accustomed than attempting
to adopt a different one.
1.5 But what about objective truth?
Comprehensive objective truth exists, but we cannot have it in the
form of a set of propositions with the same meaning for all. We
apprehend truth largely through tradition and in a way that cannot
be fully articulated, and cannot do otherwise.
1.6 If conservatism is so great, why are most people seriously involved
in studying and dealing with social issues liberals?
Conservatives do not believe it is possible to define the
considerations relevant to social life clearly enough to make a
technological approach to society possible. Accordingly, they
reject efforts to divide human affairs into separate compartments
to be mastered and dealt with under an overall plan for promoting
comprehensive social goals such as economic well-being and equality
of condition. Academic and other policy experts are defined as
such by their participation in such efforts. It would be
surprising if they did not prefer perspectives that give free rein
to efforts to design and implement social policy, such as welfare-
state liberalism, over perspectives that are suspicious of such
undertakings.
2 Tradition and Change
2.1 Society has always changed, for the better in some ways and for the
worse in others. Why not accept change, especially if everything is so
complicated and hard to figure out?
Change has always involved resistance as well as acceptance.
Changes that have to make their way over opposition will presumably
be better than changes that are accepted without serious
questioning.
In addition, modern conservatism is not resistance to change as
such, but to intentional change of a peculiarly sweeping sort
characteristic of the period beginning with the French Revolution
and guided by Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophies
such as liberalism and Marxism. For example, the family as an
institution has changed over time in conjunction with other social
changes. However, the current left/liberal demand that all
definite institutional structure for the family be abolished as an
infringement of individual autonomy (typically phrased as a demand
for the elimination of patriarchy and sexism and for the protection
of children's rights) is different in kind from past developments,
and conservatives believe it must be fought.
2.2 Isn't conservatism simply another way of saying that people who
currently have wealth and power should keep it?
The adoption of any political view will promote the particular
advantage of some people. If political views are to be treated as
rationalizations of the interests of existing or would-be elites,
then that treatment should apply equally to conservatism and all
other views. On the other hand, if arguments that political views
advance the public good are to be taken seriously, then the
arguments for conservatism should be considered on their own terms.
It's worth noting that movements aiming at social justice typically
turn out intensely elitist because the more comprehensive and
abstract the political principle, the smaller the group that can be
relied on to understand and apply it correctly.
2.3 Wouldn't we still have slavery if conservatives had always been
running the show?
Why? Conservatism is not rejection of all change. Otherwise it
would be useless as a guide to action; for example, it could not
oppose liberalism because to oppose liberalism is to propose a
change in the political culture. Conservatism recognizes that
moral habits evolve with experience and changing circumstances, and
social arrangements that grow to be too much at odds with the moral
life of a people change or disappear.
The conservative outlook emphasizes things for which ideologies of
the Left have trouble finding a place. Some of those things, such
as mutual personal obligation, are denied by slavery as well.
Slavery disappeared in Western and Central Europe long before the
modern revolutionary age, while in modern times brutal forced labor
has made a comeback under radical rather than conservative regimes.
A reason for its resurgence is that radicalism, by overemphasizing
the role of theory in politics, destroys reciprocity between the
ruling theoreticians and those they govern, and so is far more
likely than conservatism to lead to the gross oppression slavery
exemplifies.
3 Social and Cultural Issues
3.1 What are family values and what is so great about them?
In general, they are values that promote and maintain a society in
which people's most basic loyalties, and the relationships upon
which they rely most fundamentally, have to do with particular
people rather than the state. Family values are fundamental to
moral life because it is primarily in relationships with particular
people that are taken with the utmost seriousness that we find the
degree of mutual knowledge and responsiveness that is necessary for
our obligations to others to become concrete realities for us.
Family values are rejected to the extent the necessity of practical
reliance on particular people is viewed as something oppressive and
unequal that the state should remedy.
3.2 Why do conservatives always want to force their values on everybody
else?
Conservatives aren't different from other people in that regard.
Anyone with a notion of how society should work will believe that
other people should follow the program he favors. If Liberal Jack
thinks the government should be responsible for the well-being of
children and wants to support the arrangement through a tax system
that sends people to jail who don't comply, and Conservative Jill
thinks the family should be responsible and wants to implement that
responsibility through a system of sex roles enforced by informal
social sanctions for violators, each will want what the public
schools teach to be consistent with his program. Both will object
to a school textbook entitled _Heather Has Two Mommies Who Get Away
with Paying No Taxes Because They Accept Payment Only in Cash_.
Liberal Jack will object to the book _Heather's Mommy Stays Home
and Her Daddy Goes to the Office_, while Conservative Jill will
object to other well-known texts. Why should one be considered
more tolerant than the other?
The issue of social tolerance most often comes up in connection
with sexual morality. For a discussion from a conservative
perspective, see the Sexual Morality FAQ, available at
http://www.panix.com/~jk/sex.html (hypertext version) or
http://www.panix.com/~jk/sex.faq (plain ASCII version).
3.3 Aren't conservatives racist sexist homophobes?
That depends on what those words mean; they are often used very
broadly.
"Racist"--Conservatives consider community loyalty important. The
communities people grow up in are generally connected to ethnicity.
That's no accident, because ethnicity is what develops when people
live together with a common way of life for a long time.
Accordingly, conservatives think some degree of ethnic loyalty and
separateness is OK. Ethnicity is not the same thing as "race" as a
biological category; on the other hand the two are difficult to
disentangle because both arise out of shared history and common
descent.
"Sexist"--All known societies have engaged in sex-role
stereotyping, with men undertaking more responsibility for public
affairs and women for home, family, and childcare. There are
obvious benefits to stereotyping, since it makes it far more likely
that individual men and women will complement each other and form
stable and functional unions for the rearing of children.
Conservatives see no reason to struggle against those benefits,
especially in view of the apparent consequences of the weakening of
stereotypical obligations between the sexes in recent decades.
"Homophobes"--Finally, sex-role stereotyping implies a tendency to
reject conduct and patterns of impulse and attitude that don't fit
the stereotypes, such as homosexuality.
3.4 Why can't conservatives just accept that people's personal values
differ?
Both liberals and conservatives recognize limits on the degree to
which differing personal values can be accommodated. Such limits
often arise because personal values can be realized only by
establishing particular sorts of relations with other people, and
no society can favor all relationships equally. No society, for
example, can favor equally a woman who primarily wants to have a
career and one who primarily wants to be a mother and homemaker.
For example, if public attitudes presume that it is the man who is
primarily responsible for family support they favor the latter at
the expense of the former, while if they do not make that
presumption they do the reverse.
3.5 What role do conservatives think government should play in
enforcing moral values?
Since conservatives believe moral values should be determined more
by the feelings and traditions of the people than by formal
decisions and theory, they typically prefer to rely on informal
social sanctions rather than enforcement by government.
Nonetheless, they believe that government should be run on the
assumption that the moral values on which society relies are good
things that should not be undercut. Thus, conservatives oppose
public school curricula that depict such values as optional and
programs that fund their rejection, for example by subsidizing
unwed parents or artists who intend their works to outrage accepted
morality. How much more the government can or should do to promote
morality is a matter of circumstance to be determined in accordance
with experience. In this connection, as in others, conservatives
typically do not have high ambitions for what government can
achieve.
3.6 What happens to feminists, homosexuals, racial minorities and
others marginalized in a conservative society?
The same as happens in a society based on the liberal conception of
inclusiveness to religious and social conservatives and to ethnics
who consider their ethnicity important. They find themselves in a
social order they may not like dominated by people who may look
down on them in which it may be difficult to live as they prefer.
In both kinds of society, people on the outs may be able either to
persuade others to their way of thinking, to practice the way of
life they prefer in private, or to break off from the larger
society and establish their own communities. Such possibilities
are in general more realistic in a conservative society that
emphasizes federalism, local control, and minimal bureaucracy than
in a liberal society that idealizes social justice and therefore
tries to establish a unitary and homogenous social order. For
example, ethnic minorities in a conservative society may well be
able to maintain themselves and thrive through some combination of
adaptation and niche-finding, while in a liberal society they will
find themselves on the receiving end of a comprehensive campaign to
eliminate the public importance of their (and every other) ethnic
culture.
An important question is whether alienation from the social order
will be more common in a conservative or a liberal society. It
seems that it will be more common in a social order based on
universal implementation of a bureaucracy's conception of social
justice than in one that accepts the moral feelings and loyalties
that arise over time within particular communities. So it seems
likely that a liberal society will have more citizens than a
conservative society who feel that their deepest values and
loyalties are peripheral to the concerns of the institutions that
dominate their lives and so feel marginalized.
3.7 What about freedom?
Conservatives are strong supporters of social institutions that
realize and protect freedom, but believe such institutions attain
their full value as part of a larger whole. Freedom is fully
realized only when we are held responsible for the choices we make,
and it is most valuable in a setting in which goods can readily be
chosen that add up to a good life. Accordingly, conservatives
reject perspectives that view freedom as an absolute, and recognize
that the institutions through which freedom is realized must
respect other goods without which freedom would not be worth
having.
In addition, conservatives believe there is a close connection
between freedom and participation in government. Since how we live
affects others, an important aspect of freedom is taking part in
making society what it is. Accordingly, the conservative
principles of federalism, local rule, and private property help
realize freedom by devolving power into many hands and making
widespread participation in running society a reality.
4 Economic Issues
4.1 Why do conservatives say they favor virtue and community but in
fact favor laissez-faire capitalism? Doesn't laissez-faire capitalism
promote the opposite?
Conservatives typically view economic liberty as one of the
traditional liberties of the American people that has served that
people well, but are not fans of pure laissez-faire. Many are
skeptical of free trade and most favor restraints on immigration
for the sake of permitting the existence and development of a
national community. Nor do they oppose in principle the regulation
or suppression of businesses that affect the moral order of
society, such as prostitution, pornography, and the sale of certain
drugs.
Conservatives strongly favor free markets when the alternative is
to expand bureaucracy to implement liberal goals, a process that
clearly has the effect of damaging virtue and community. They also
recognize that the market reflects men's infinitely various and
often unconscious and inarticulate perceptions and goals far better
than any bureaucratic process could. Since conservatism is in part
the belief that social life can't in general be administered,
conservatives tend to prefer self-organization to central control.
In any event, it's not clear that laissez-faire capitalism need
undermine moral community. "Laissez faire capitalism" is a
description of what the government does, not of society as a whole.
While social statistics are a crude measure of the state of
morality and community, it is noteworthy that crime and
illegitimacy rates in England fell by about half from the middle to
the end of the 19th century, the heyday of untrammelled capitalism.
4.2 Why don't conservatives care about what happens to the poor, weak,
discouraged, and outcast?
Conservatives do care about what happens to such people. That's
why they oppose government programs that they believe multiply the
poor, weak, discouraged, and outcast by undermining and disrupting
the network of social customs and relations that enable people to
carry on their lives without the aid of government bureaucracy.
Those tempted to attribute opposition to the welfare state to
narrow self-seeking should consider the increase in charitable
giving during the Decade of Greed and its subsequent decline.
Moral community declines when people rely on government to solve
their problems rather than on themselves and each other. It is the
weak who suffer most from the resulting moral chaos. Those who
think that interventionist liberalism means that the weak face
fewer problems should consider the effects on women, children, and
blacks of trends of the past 30 years (a period of large increases
in social welfare expenditures) such as family instability,
increased crime, reduced educational achievement, and the reversal
in the older trend toward less poverty.
4.3 What about people for whom the usual support networks don't work?
Shouldn't the government do something for them?
Maybe. The issue is the practical effect of government programs on
people's responsibility for themselves and for each other. It
appears that in the long run a system whereby the government
guarantees that no one lacks the material basis for a decent life
can not be made to work without an elaborate system of compulsion,
and increases degradation and suffering by weakening self-reliance
and the moral bonds among individuals that give rise to community.
On the other hand, some social welfare measures (free clinics for
mothers and children or measures that aid only clearly deserving
people) may well increase social welfare even in the long term.
Because of the obscurity of the issue, the difficulty in a
democracy of limiting the expansion of government benefit programs,
and the value of encouraging widespread participation in public
life, the best resolution may be to keep government out of the
matter and let people support voluntarily the institutions and
programs they think are socially beneficial.
4.4 What about welfare for the middle classes, like social security,
medicare, the home mortgage interest deduction, and so on?
The most consistent conservatives want to get rid of all of them.
Social security and medicare, they say, are financially unsound,
and are socially harmful because they lead people capable of saving
for their own retirement and supporting their own parents to rely
on the government instead. They could better be replaced by
private savings, prefunded medical insurance, greater emphasis on
intergenerational obligations within families, and other
arrangements that would evolve if the government presence were
reduced or eliminated.
Other conservatives distinguish these middle-class benefits from
welfare by the element of reciprocity; people get social security
and medicare only if they have already given a great deal to
society, and in the case of the mortgage interest deduction the
"benefit" consists only in the right to keep more of one's
earnings. Still others try to split the difference somehow. As a
practical matter, the reluctance of many conservatives to disturb
these arrangements is likely motivated in part by the electoral
power of their supporters.
4.5 If conserving is a good thing, why isn't ecology a conservative
cause?
Conservatism is concerned more with relations among men than those
between man and nature, so ecology is not one of its defining
issues. Some conservatives and conservative schools of thought
take environmental issues very seriously; others less so. There
are, of course, conservative grounds for criticizing or rejecting
particular aspects of the environmental movement.
5 Conservatism in an Age of Established Liberalism
5.1 Why do conservatives talk as if the sky is about to fall and all
good things are in the past? People have been bemoaning the present for
a long time but things don't seem so bad today.
Conservatives don't predict more disasters than liberals, just
different disasters. Like other people they see both hopeful and
hazardous trends in the current situation. Post-communist
societies display the social effects of energetic attempts to
implement post-Enlightenment radicalism. Less energetic attempts,
such as modern American liberalism, do not lead to similar
consequences as quickly. Nonetheless, social trends toward
breakdown of affiliations among individuals, centralization of
political power in irresponsible elites, irreconcilable social
conflicts, and increasing stupidity and brutality in daily life
suggest that those consequences are coming just the same. Why not
worry about them?
5.2 Isn't conservatism essentially nostalgia for a past that never was
and can't be restored?
The accusation is that the goals of conservatism are neither
serious nor achievable. That accusation fails if in the end
conservatives are likely in substance to get what they want.
Conservatism involves a recognition that certain trends are
pernicious because they destroy the possibility of moral community.
Examples include the current trends toward hedonism, radical
individualism, and radical egalitarianism. Since moral community
is required for the coherence of individual and social life, and
since a reasonably coherent way of life is a practical necessity,
conservatives are confident that in some fashion those trends will
be reversed and in important respects the moral and social future
will resemble the past more than the present. In particular, the
future will see less emphasis on individual autonomy and more on
essentialist ties among men and moral tradition.
The timing and form of the necessary reversal is of course
uncertain. It plainly can't be achieved through administrative
techniques, the method most readily accepted as serious and
realistic today, so conservatives' main political proposal is that
aspects of the modern state that oppose the reversal be trimmed or
abandoned. Those who consider modern trends beneficial and
irreversible therefore accuse conservatives of obstructionism and
lack of realism. In contrast, those who believe the trends lead to
catastrophe and that a reversal must take place expect that if the
conservatives aren't successful now their goals will be achieved in
the future, but with more destruction and conflict likely along the
way.
5.3 What's all this stuff about community and tradition? The groups
that matter these days are groups like yuppies, gays, and senior
citizens that people join as individuals and are based on interests and
perspectives rather than tradition.
Can this be true in the long run? When times are good people
imagine that they can define themselves as they choose, but a
society will not long exist if the only thing they have in common
is a commitment to self-definition. The necessity for something
beyond that becomes clearest when the times require sacrifice.
Membership in a group with an identity developed and inculcated
through tradition becomes far more relevant then than career path,
life-style option, or stage of life. One of Bill Clinton's
problems as president is that people think he's a yuppie who
wouldn't die for anything; at some point that kind of problem
becomes decisive.
5.4 Many things liberals favor, such as the welfare state and steady
expansion of the scope of the civil rights laws, are well-established
parts of our political arrangements. Shouldn't conservatives favor
things that are so well-established?
Yes, to the extent they are consistent with the older and more
fundamental parts of our social arrangements (such as family,
community, and traditional moral standards) and contribute to the
over-all functioning of the whole. Unfortunately, the particular
things mentioned fail on both points.
5.5 I was raised to believe in certain substantive liberal positions
(the color- and gender-blind ideal, for example) on the grounds that
those are the positions good Americans should hold. Wouldn't it be
conservative for me to stay true to them?
Yes, if those are the views the people among whom you grew up
really lived by and experience does not drive you to change them.
Such a situation is unlikely to arise often. Liberal positions
(affirmative action is an example) typically are devised centrally
and propagated by the mass media and educational system. On the
whole they are more suited to be applied to society as a whole by a
bureaucracy than incorporated into people's informal day-to-day way
of life, and are adverse to the connections among men that make
community possible.
5.6 I was raised a liberal. Doesn't that mean that to be conservative
I should stay true to liberalism?
How can you feel bound to a viewpoint that does not value loyalty?
If you were raised an ideological liberal, you were raised to
reject tradition and follow abstract reason or current fashion.
Such a view can survive only if it is not universally accepted. For
someone raised in it the conservative approach would be to look for
guidance to the things on which the people with whom he grew up
actually relied for coherence and stability, including the
traditions of the larger community upon which their way of life
depended.
6 The Conservative Rainbow
6.1 How do libertarians differ from conservatives?
In general, libertarians emphasize limited government more than
conservatives and believe the sole legitimate purpose of government
is the protection of property rights against force and fraud.
Thus, they usually consider legal restrictions on such things as
immigration, drug use, and prostitution to be illegitimate
violations of personal liberty. Many but not all libertarians hold
a position that might be described as economically Right (anti-
socialist) and culturally Left (opposed to cultural repressiveness,
racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on), and tend to attribute to
state intervention the survival of things the cultural Left
dislikes.
Speaking more abstractly, the libertarian perspective assigns to
the market the position conservatives assign to tradition as the
great accumulator and integrator of the implicit knowledge of
society. In addition, libertarians tend to believe in strict
methodological individualism and absolute and universally valid
human rights while conservatives are less likely to have the former
commitment and tend to understand rights by reference to the forms
they take in particular societies.
6.2 What are mainstream conservatives?
People who mix the traditionalist conservatism outlined in this FAQ
with varying proportions of libertarianism and liberalism. Rush
Limbaugh is a mainstream conservatives; so in general is any
conservative who gets elected.
Mainstream conservatives often speak the language of liberalism,
especially classical liberalism. Their appeal is nonetheless to
tradition; typically, they reject political practices that have
become accepted in the recent past by appealing to those
characteristic of the more remote past or to social practices
traditionally viewed as outside politics that now have been called
into question and are seen as political.
6.3 What are neoconservatives?
A group of conservatives most of whom were liberals until left-wing
radicalism went mass-market in the late sixties. Many of them have
been associated with the magazines _Commentary_ and _The Public
Interest_, and a neopapalist contingent is associated with the
magazine _First Things_. Some still have positions consistent with
New Deal liberalism, while others have moved on to a more full-
blown conservatism. Their influence has been out of proportion to
their numbers, in part because they include a number of well-known
Northeastern and West Coast journalists and academics and in part
because having once been liberals they still can speak the language
and retain a certain credibility in establishment circles.
6.4 What are paleoconservatives?
Another group of conservatives most of whom were never liberals and
live someplace other than the Northeast megalopolis or California.
The most prominent paleo publications are _Chronicles_ and _Modern
Age_. They arose as a self-conscious group in opposition to
neoconservatives after the success of the neos in establishing
themselves within the Reagan administration, and especially after
the neos helped defeat the nomination of paleo Mel Bradford as head
of the National Endowment for the Humanities in favor of one of
their own, Bill Bennett. The views set forth in this FAQ are
consistent with those of most paleoconservatives as well as many
neoconservatives.
6.5 What are paleolibertarians?
A group of libertarians, notably Llewellyn Rockwell and the late
Murray Rothbard, who reject mainstream libertarianism as culturally
libertine and often squishy-soft on big government and who ally
themselves with the paleoconservatives. Their main publication is
the _Rothbard-Rockwell Report_.
6.6 What are Frankfurt School Neopaleoconservatives?
A group (so named for the first time in this FAQ) that has come by
way of Frankfurt School cultural criticism to a position
reminiscent of paleoconservatism emphasizing federalism and
rejection of the managerial state. Their main publication is
_Telos_, which now includes paleocon Paul Gottfried on its
editorial board.
6.7 Where do the pro-life movement and Religious Right fit into all
this?
Like conservatism, both movements reject hedonism and radical
individual autonomy and emphasize the authority of institutions
other than the modern managerial state. Their general goals can
usually be supported on conservative principles, but they tend to
base their claims on principles of natural law or revelation that
take precedence over tradition. Thus, these movements are distinct
from conservatism although there is also much in common.
6.8 What are the differences between American conservatism and that of
other countries?
They correspond to the differences in political tradition. In
general, conservatism in America has a much stronger
capitalist/libertarian and populist streak than in other countries.
The differences seem to be declining as other countries become more
like America and as many American conservatives become more
alienated from their own country's actual way of life and system of
government.
6.9 What do all these things called "conservatism" have in common?
Each rejects, through an appeal to something traditionally valued,
the liberal tendency to treat individual impulse and desire as the
final authorities. Differences in the preferred point of reference
give rise to different forms of conservatism. Those who appeal to
the independent and responsible individual become libertarian
conservatives, while those who appeal to a traditional culture or
to God become traditionalist or religious conservatives. Depending
on circumstances and the traditions of a people, the alliance among
different forms of conservatism may be closer or more tenuous. In
America today libertarian, traditionalist and religious
conservatives generally find common ground in favoring federalism
and opposing the managerial welfare state.
--
Jim Kalb ([email protected] and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week: (Yawn.) Madonna fan? No damn way!
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