Even before the demise of Soviet communism, conservatism seemed to be giving way to a variety of conservatisms. There are points on which conservatives continue to agree, of course, such as a general respect for private property and an opposition to communism. But there are so many differences of opinion and emphasis that we can now identify four distinct strands of thought in contemporary conservatism.
Two of these, traditional and individualist conservatism, would by now be famil-iar to you from our discussion of the split in conservatism in the United States in the 1800s. The remaining two, neoconservatism and the religious right, have become prominent in the last three decades or so. Each of these four deserves a closer look, with special attention to the two most recent forms of conservatism.
Traditional Conservatism
The heirs of Edmund Burke—those who adhere to the positions of the classical and cultural conservatives—are now often called “traditional” (or Burkean) conserva-tives. Like Burke, they think of society as a delicate fabric in which individual lives are woven together. On this view, a society of self-seeking individuals, each of whom is essentially independent of the others and therefore free to pursue his or her own
self-interest, is deranged and disordered—a threadbare fabric that hardly deserves to be called a society. Society should promote freedom, to be sure, but traditional con-servatives share Burke’s conviction that this must be ordered liberty. Society does not consist of isolated or atomistic individuals but of people involved in a complex web or network of interdependent and mutual relationships. Each person has a par-ticular station or status and a stake in the larger society into which he or she is born, lives, and dies. The purpose of political activity, then, is to preserve the social fabric within which these vital human activities are carried on from generation to gen-eration. Because this fabric is easily torn, it requires our constant care and respect.
Hence politics, as the British conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901–
1990) put it, is nothing more than attending to the arrangements of one’s society.22 Like Burke again, the traditional conservatives see private property as essential to social stability. They do not equate private property with unbridled capitalism, how-ever, which they continue to regard with some suspicion. According to conservative columnist and author George Will, capitalism at its worst is a “solvent” that can dis-solve the web of traditional relationships.23 Government must therefore take care to see that the economic competition of capitalism is kept within bounds—a point on which traditional conservatives sharply disagree with individualist conservatives.
Individualist Conservatism
In the nineteenth century, as we have seen, businessmen, industrialists, and oth-ers who held to the views of the early liberals came to be called conservatives in the United States. This trend has continued into the present century, and in recent years especially it has spread beyond the United States. For these “individualist” or
“free-market” conservatives, society is not Burke’s delicate fabric but a rough-and-tumble, competitive marketplace. Rather than talk about how individuals are inevi-tably situated in a web of interdependency and connected across generations with their ancestors and their unborn successors, as traditional conservatives do, individu-alist conservatives prefer to talk about “rugged individuindividu-alists” pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. For the individualist, furthermore, freedom is not ordered lib-erty but the freedom of individuals to compete with one another, particularly in the economic arena of the free market. What these modern individualist conservatives propose to conserve, then, is this now well-established freedom. In this respect, as we saw in Chapter 3, they have more in common with neoliberals—and more espe-cially libertarians—than with traditional conservatives. The conservative columnist and author David Brooks underscored the difference between Burkean or classical conservatism and modern libertarianism when he wrote, in defense of the former:
“People are not better off when they are given maximum personal freedom to do what they want. They’re better off when they are enshrouded in commitments that transcend personal choice—commitments to family, God, craft and country.”24
Modern market-oriented individualist conservatives place property rights—
that is, the right to own property and to do with it as one pleases without govern-ment interference—at the top of their list of rights. This explains why Senator Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They believed that the owner of a hotel or restaurant or other business has the right to refuse service to anyone, including African-Americans, Hispanics, or others of whom the property
owner may disapprove. Since it forbids such exclusion, the Civil Rights Act, accord-ing to Goldwater and Reagan, constitutes an improper and illegitimate infraccord-inge- infringe-ment on property rights. Many if not most modern individualist conservatives have not gone this far, if only for fear of alienating African-American and other minority voters. But some, like the libertarian-leaning Republican congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul, have done, and proudly so. In 2004 he said that he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act if he had been in office in 1964 be-cause it was “a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society.”25
Individualist conservatism is the conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan in the United States and of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain. Contrary to traditional or classical conservatives, who stress the intricacy of society and the complexity of its problems, modern individualist conservatives are inclined to claim that social prob-lems and their solutions are simple. Most probprob-lems stem mainly from “too much government,” as they see it, by which they usually mean too much taxation and government interference in the operations of the free market. The solution then is correspondingly simple: “Get government off our backs!” Cut taxes and reduce gov-ernment spending, particularly for social welfare, and give the free market a free rein, in economic if not in moral matters. Some traditional conservatives have criticized these individualist schemes to cut spending for health services, education, and social welfare, complaining that these amount to cuts or tears in the social fabric of civility and stability. When she was prime minister of Great Britain, Thatcher and her fol-lowers responded by dubbing these critics “wet hanky” conservatives, or “wets” for short. Let the free market do its work, individualist conservatives say, and everyone will eventually benefit. So the tension between traditionalists and individualists con-tinues within conservatism.
In the days of the communist threat, this tension was often checked by the com-mon desire for a strong military to defend against communist aggression. For even individualist conservatives believed that government ought to be strong and active in the area of military defense. More than anything else, in fact, this belief distin-guished individualist conservatives from neoclassical liberals. Now that communism no longer poses so grave a threat to the security of capitalist countries, individualist conservatives may move increasingly in the libertarian direction of the neoclassical liberals. This, however, is a move that other conservatives are unlikely to make.
Neoconservatism
To complicate matters further, other forms of conservatism have emerged from the social turmoil of the 1960s. One of these, “neoconservatism,” occupies a position somewhere between traditional and individualist conservatism. Neoconservatism takes its bearings from a group of prominent academics and public figures, including one former vice president of the United States—Dick Cheney—and others who have held important positions in recent Republican administrations, including Lynne Cheney, who chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986 to 1993, before her husband became vice president.
Other prominent neoconservatives have included Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), the author Irving Kristol (and his son, William, editor of The
Weekly Standard), UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, the political scientist James Q. Wilson, the sociologist Nathan Glazer, and—until their recent disavowal of neoconservatism—authors Francis Fu-kuyama and Michael Lind.
Many neoconservatives can be described as disenchanted welfare liberals. Once enthusiastic supporters of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs in the 1960s, these neoconservatives became disillusioned with these programs and with the general direction of welfare liberalism. Government is trying to do too much, they concluded, and it is making things worse, not better. The time has come for government to do less for people so that they may be encouraged to do more for themselves. Senator Moynihan called this policy “benign neglect.”
Like traditional conservatives, neoconservatives warn that well-intended policies and programs can and often do produce unintended harmful consequences. Since such consequences are not only unforeseen but are unforeseeable in principle, we should be wary of any plan, program, or policy that promises only good results. Such schemes of “social engineering” tend to go awry and to backfire, harming those they were meant to help.26 Also like traditional conservatives, neoconservatives regard capitalism with a mixture of admiration and suspicion. They acknowledge its merits as an economic system capable of generating great wealth, but they also are aware of the social disruption and dislocations brought about by a freewheeling market economy—including labor unrest, unemployment, periods of economic boom and bust, and an apparently permanent “underclass” of the uneducated and unemployed.
As one neoconservative, Irving Kristol, once said, capitalism deserves two cheers, but not three.27 According to Daniel Bell, capitalism harbors a number of “cultural contradictions” through which it undermines its own moral and intellectual founda-tions.28 On the one hand, capitalism rests on people’s willingness to defer pleasures and gratifications—to save and invest in the present in order to receive a greater return in the future. On the other hand, capitalism in the age of the credit card cre-ates an illusion of abundance that leads people to think that there are no limits—that anything is possible—and that one can have it all, here and now. So capitalism is, in a sense, at odds with itself. It praises the virtues of thrift, saving, and hard work, on the one hand, while on the other its advertising agencies and marketing experts encourage people to buy now, pay later, and aspire to a life of luxury and ease.
Nor is this attitude confined to economic matters. It spills over into other areas as well, neoconservatives say. This “buy now, pay later” attitude is especially danger-ous insofar as it shapes attitudes about government. Neoconservatives complain that too many people now expect too much, too quickly from all of their institutions, including government. They want lower taxes and at the same time increased gov-ernment spending for their pet projects. They want to live on their lines of credit in politics as they do in their personal finances. These attitudes, on which contempo-rary capitalism relies, have potentially disastrous social and political consequences.
This is particularly true in modern democracies, where every interest group clamors for an ever-larger share of the public pie. The consequences, neoconservatives say, are too obvious to miss—runaway debt, budget deficits too large to comprehend, and worst of all, a citizenry incapable of checking its appetites and demands. As these problems mount, demands on government increase—and government loses its capacity to govern.
In domestic matters, then, neoconservatives tend to be skeptical liberals. They support government-sponsored welfare programs, but they insist that these programs should help people become independent, not make them ever more dependent upon the government. In foreign affairs, they have taken a hard-line anti-communist stance, generally calling for economic and military assistance for anti-communist regimes and rebel movements around the world. More recently they have been strong proponents of the “war on terrorism” and “regime change” in Iraq and other countries that allegedly harbor terrorists. Neoconservatives believe that power—military power in particular—is no good unless it is used to achieve ends they deem to be in the national interest. Act-ing on this belief, Vice President Cheney and other “neocons” in President George W. Bush’s administration led the United States to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. The subsequent attempt to establish stability and democracy there has produced mixed results, ranging from provoking a bloody and costly civil war among religious sects and ethnic groups within Iraq, and drawing radical Islamists from other countries into Iraq, to an unstable and uncertain peace in the aftermath of Ameri-can withdrawal—all contrary to neoconservative hopes and expectations. The result has been a widespread condemnation of neoconservatism, and some who were once proud to call themselves neoconservatives now disavow the movement.29
Neoconservatives also take a strong interest in the political implications of art, lit-erature, education, and other broadly cultural matters. Like all cultural conservatives, neoconservatives believe that a people defines who it is, or who it aspires to be, through its culture. In too many aspects of our culture—in our music, our literature, our theater, our movies, our art, our schools—we are defining ourselves, neoconservatives argue, as ill-mannered, amoral drifters and degenerates who are undermining or discarding what remains of a once great and vibrant Western culture. Indeed, neoconservatives sometimes suggest that an “adversary culture” of left-leaning intellectuals, feminists, and assorted malcontents poses a greater threat to our values and way of life than do any real or imagined threats to the free market. So the political struggle that “true”
conservatives wage must be, in their view, a cultural and intellectual struggle against this “adversary culture.” For while “highbrow” culture and university education may initially influence the outlooks and attitudes of only a relatively small segment of soci-ety, these attitudes and values eventually trickle down to the masses—just as the long hair and drug dabbling of college radicals in the 1960s gradually spread throughout American society. One of the projects undertaken by neoconservatives, consequently, is the attempt to remind people of the value of work, discipline, and virtue.30
Like other cultural conservatives, neoconservatives see politics and culture as two sides of the same coin. Whether expressed by the intellectuals of the adversary culture or the stars of popular music, movies, and television, the attitudes of too many cultural leaders have set the tone for the rest of society—and with disastrous effects. Rock and rap music lyrics feature four-letter words that have lost their capac-ity to shock and disgust many people. This change amounts to “defining deviancy down,” according to Daniel Patrick Moynihan.31 That is, actions once regarded as aberrant, shocking, and shameful are now accepted as normal. For example, men and women who live together without being married and have children out of wed-lock are no longer viewed as shameful and abnormal but as normal and acceptable.
Illegitimacy has lost its stigma. Thus it comes as no surprise, according to another leading neoconservative, that
the percentage of illegitimate births has increased to a startling percentage since World War II. . . . Girls today are far more “sexually active” . . . than was formerly the case. Why this increase in sexual activity? Well, the popular culture surely en-courages it. You can’t expect modesty (to say nothing of chastity) from girls who worship Madonna.32
The reference to Madonna may be dated, but the neoconservative message is clear:
to preserve or to restore the discipline and self-restraint necessary to any decent soci-ety, we must attend to cultural changes—and strive to stem the cultural tide. On this point neoconservatives agree with the conservatives of the Religious Right.
The Religious Right
In the years after World War II, a number of evangelical Protestant ministers led campaigns against the dangers of what they called “Godless, atheistic communism.”
In the 1970s these campaigns grew into a larger movement known as the “Reli-gious Right.” This movement marked a reaction against the changes many saw, and deplored, in the American society during the 1960s. High divorce and crime rates, urban decay and riots, growing welfare rolls, the decline of patriotism, widespread drug use, and legalized abortion—all were signs that the United States had lost its way. The time was ripe for a movement that would restore the country to its tradi-tional ways. The time had come, according to the Religious Right, for a return to morality in government and society.
As defined by the leaders of the Religious Right, “morality” is the moral code of Christian fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalists believe that the Bible is to be read literally, not symbolically, with every word taken to express and reveal the will of God. That is why they protest against the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools, for instance, and why they generally decry the growth of liberal or secular humanism. In their view the United States was founded and has prospered as a “Christian nation,” and it must now return to its roots. It comes as no surprise that the leaders of the Religious Right have often been ministers of evangelical churches such as the Reverends Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) of the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition.
The Religious Right also claims to be democratic, by which it means that society should follow the lead of a righteous or “moral” majority of Christians. Where will this moral majority lead? To less government intervention in the economy, as the individualist conservatives wish, but also to a larger and more active government in other respects. In the past the Religious Right has campaigned for a strong defense to check and turn back the threat of communism, and now it supports an aggressive
“war on terrorism.” It also wants increased government intervention in activities and areas of life that others, including many other conservatives, deem to be private.
They want the government to ban abortions, to permit prayer in public schools, to restrict or outlaw certain sexual activities, and to purge schools and public libraries of materials that they regard as morally offensive. On these and other points the Religious Right would greatly expand the powers of government. In that respect their views stand in sharp contrast to the professed views of other conservatives.
In their broad vision of what they hope to accomplish, however, the conser-vatives of the Religious Right agree with other conserconser-vatives. According to Ralph
Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition, the members of this coalition pray and work for a spiritual awakening that will lead to a political and cultural
Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition, the members of this coalition pray and work for a spiritual awakening that will lead to a political and cultural