August 28, 2006 Issue
Copyright © 2006 The American Conservative

Since its inception, The American Conservative has been dealing with questions of what Right and Left mean in the modern context and to what extent the terms even apply anymore. Commentary memorably took up similar issues in a 1976 symposium, and, 30 years later, in a time of renewed ideological flux, we think a reconsideration is in order.

In the interest of hosting a lively discussion, we chose contributors from across the political spectrum and asked for their thoughts on the following questions:

1. Are the designations “liberal” and “conservative” still useful? Why or why not?

2. Does a binary Left/Right political spectrum describe the full range of ideological options? Is it still applicable?

Not all of these authors share TAC’s editorial orientation, but we believe there is wisdom in the council of many, and each was chosen as representative of a particular perspective. We leave our readers to decide which insights most accord with their own.


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Andrew J. Bacevich

In a domestic political context, the terms “liberal” and “conservative” still retain considerable value. To imagine, however, that the actually existing Democratic Party is genuinely committed to liberal principles or to fancy that the Republican Party qualifies as authentically conservative is to err profoundly. However much Democratic and Republican partisans may pretend to differ, they actually subscribe to a common agenda. Ranking at the very top of that agenda is the imperative of currying favor with the moneyed interests that enable the two parties to sustain their monopoly on power. Party leaders may pontificate about social justice or liberty, but the name of the game is boodle—federal largesse distributed to secure the allegiance of supporters, “contributions” harvested from those same supporters to buy the next election, all continuing in a cycle without end.

In the political mainstream, expediency rules and principles are expendable—as baby-boomer Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have each amply demonstrated. In a system as corrupt as ours has become, principles survive chiefly among those who occupy the political fringe—populists, pinks, aging New Leftists, agrarians, radical environmentalists, Catholic Workers, libertarians, and paleocons. When it comes to illuminating the hypocrisies and contradictions that afflict the American way of life, each of these groups has something to offer—which is why the thinking conservative will find more of value these days in The New York Review of Books than in National Review and why true-blue progressives are better off subscribing to The American Conservative than to The New Republic.

In a foreign-policy context, “liberal” and “conservative” don’t have any real meaning and never have. When it comes to statecraft, the operative dichotomy does not pit Left against Right, realists against idealists, or (as President Bush has fraudulently argued) isolationists against those committed to engagement and leadership. The real divide today occurs between those who buy into the myths of the American Century and those who see those myths for what they are: once useful contrivances that have become a source of self-delusion endangering the national interest.

The American Century is a morality tale. It instructs and inspires but also warns. It tells of how Americans, having lost their innocence on Dec. 7, 1941, rose up in righteous anger to smite a succession of evildoers. The American Century began when the nation finally embraced its providentially assigned mission to spread liberty around the world. Present-day adherents to this school—self-described liberals like Peter Beinart no less than self-described conservatives like William Kristol—do not doubt that the events of Sept. 11, 2001 simply inaugurated the next phase of this grand undertaking. Absent a failure of nerve on the part of the American people—the bogeyman of isolationism always lurks nearby—final victory in the global war on terror is certain to be ours, thereby securing the utopia of permanent U.S. global dominion. The story of the American Century, endlessly reiterated by members of the political elite, has become our substitute for history.

In the opposing camp are those who credit America’s rise to power to something other than righteousness and a dedication to liberty for all. It was not righteousness that bought Louisiana, took California, annexed Hawaii, seized the Philippines, and converted the Caribbean into an American lake. Nor did past administrations collaborate with Stalin, court the Saudi royals, depose Mossadegh, befriend Somoza, arrange the overthrow of Diem, court Mao, and tilt in favor of Saddam against the ayatollahs because of our devotion to democracy and human rights.

Judge actions such as these as you will: nefarious, reckless, shortsighted, necessary, or merely amoral. What cannot be denied is that they describe a pattern of behavior that does not differ in substance from that of most other great powers in history. Like others, the United States acts in pursuit of its perceived self-interest. Professions of concern for freedom, democracy, and human rights serve as little more than window-dressing.

The insiders who dominate U.S. foreign policy have a vested interest in sustaining the twaddle about an American Century. After all, it cements their hold on power. The American Century emphasizes secrecy and deference to those who are presumably “in the know.” It shields members of this self-perpetuating elite from accountability. It provides a handy cloak for megalomania and a ready excuse for error. It keeps debate over foreign policy and its implications narrow and insipid—as the Democratic critique of the Iraq War has demonstrated. It excludes the great unwashed.

American exceptionalism is a delusion. The beginning of wisdom in foreign policy lies in seeing ourselves as we really are and in acknowledging our responsibility for the mess in which we find ourselves, in Iraq and elsewhere. When it comes to extricating ourselves from that mess, the first order of business is to clean up our own act. Principled liberals and authentic conservatives will disagree on how best to do so, but that surely is a debate worth having.  

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

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Jeremy Beer

One of the most striking features of cultural discourse today is the inversion of terminology among self-identified “liberals” and “conservatives.” It is not just that the vocabulary of our leading “conservatives” is peppered with the grand abstractions (“freedom,” “democracy,” “progress,” “evil”) always preferred by power-obsessed revolutionaries and ideological zealots. That has been widely noted for some time now. Rather, it is that the terminology historically associated with the conservative impulse has not simply been forgotten or ignored but has been taken up by others—including those who consider themselves progressives or liberals. “Preserve,” “save,” “conserve,” “sustain,” “protect,” “heritage,” “tradition,” “community,” “place,” “decentralized,” “permanence,” “beauty,” “humane”—these former keywords of conservatism have largely migrated to other political quarters.

One comes across this every day, particularly at the local level. In my own neck of the woods here in southeastern Pennsylvania, there are numerous organizations—civil associations, Burke’s little platoons—that appeal to these concepts in explaining their work. And they are not self-consciously conservative. The best example comes from the Brandywine Conservancy, which buys up land and development rights and owns a hugely popular art museum. The conservancy is largely funded and run by political liberals. Yet it seeks to “preserve the natural and cultural resources of the area and has been instrumental in permanently protecting” thousands of acres. The conservancy specializes in “conservation easements,” “historic preservation,” and “water protection efforts.” The organization is also, as one might expect, a leader in the fight against sprawl in this densely populated area. In that struggle it has allied itself with the New Urbanist idea of “traditional neighborhood development.” “Save Your Heritage!” urges the flyer that arrived in the mail the other day, which promotes a lecture that will provide “tools for local historic preservation.”

One might also mention S.A.V.E., which has waged a years-long war to stop the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation from mindlessly expanding a two-lane highway that rolls through Amish farm country and appeals to the concepts of “livable communities,” “permanently preserved open space,” and a “sustainable future” in doing so. Clearly, these are not the nouns and adjectives of philosophical liberalism. Yet the point is not that these organizations or others with similar missions throughout the nation are flawless models, or even that they are pursuing ends as authentically conservative as they sound (though in fact they usually are); rather, it is that, increasingly, they couch their work in an appeal to traditionally conservative concepts.

The tragedy is that the conservative movement cannot take credit for this groundswell of conservative feeling—not here nor, I suspect, anywhere else. These small, local, civic groups, all of them trying to protect goods necessary to human flourishing, do not appeal to the conservative tradition in making their cases, nor do they attract (for the most part) right-wingers to their causes. The more self-conscious today’s conservative man is of his conservatism, the more likely he is to be suspicious of such organizations. He has been taught to think in terms of ideological abstractions. Say the word “conservation” or, heaven help you, “sustainability,” and he merely flips to the flash card in his head marked “Environmentalism: Bad.” Appeal to tradition or inherited rights, and he reminds you that, In This Time of War, Sacrifices Must Be Made. And, besides being the price of capitalist progress, he has been assured that studies actually show Wal-Mart is good for communities; meanwhile, his own town has lost, oh, half a dozen or more locally owned businesses since the Smiley Face moved in ten miles down the road, finishing the community-killing work started by the federal purse and the federal bulldozer. But what does personal observation count in the face of the great think tanks’ official authority?

The conservers, preservers, savers, and protectors—conservatism once stood for such folks, and such folks were at one time conservatives. But they make bad apparatchiks. They aren’t ideologically motivated and aren’t “thinking big.” They are simply concerned, if often locally prominent, citizens. They may also be sentimental saps, but that’s understandable. As normally functioning human beings, they have formed dear attachments to their social and physical worlds. They like their communities, want to see them thrive and prosper, want to see them made or kept beautiful, want to preserve (or reinvigorate) their sense of their places as unique, and prefer to interact daily with people they know and love—or even hate.

Here is where Russell Kirk was truly exemplary. He ought to be remembered not as “the principal architect of the postwar conservative movement,” as the quasi-official adulation has it, but because he went home. There he restored an old house, planted trees, and became a justice of the peace; took a wife (and kept her) and had four children; wrote ghost stories about census-takers and other bureaucrats getting it in the neck; took in boatpeople and bums; and denounced every war in which the U.S. became involved—especially the first Gulf War, which he detested. And he also denounced abstractions because he knew they were drugs deployed to distract us from the infinitely more important work of the Brandywine Conservancies of the world.

If there is ever to be truth in our political labeling, we need conservatives who will go home, or at least make homes somewhere, conservatives who will abjure Washington and New York and pick up the struggle in their own burgs to help (re-)build real communities, work to conserve the land and its resources, and ally with their naturally like-minded brethren in order to revive—locally—the religious and historic traditions that might sustain us. In fact, those are the only conservatives we need.  

Jeremy Beer is editor in chief of ISI Books and editor, with Bruce Frohnen and Jeffrey O. Nelson, of American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia.

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Austin Bramwell

In America, it is necessary to distinguish between two senses of the word “conservative.” The first refers to that set of ideas that find their canonical expression in the revolutionary writings of Edmund Burke; the second, to that set of institutions which, after some hesitation in the 1950s (some preferred “individualist” or more recherché labels like “Old Whig”), claimed the term “conservative” for themselves. In distinguishing the two, I do not mean to be tendentious. If the conservative movement is not exactly “conservative,” that is the fault not of the movement but of conservatism. Burke’s writings, however prophetic, do not set forth a timeless approach to political problems. On the contrary, on most questions they offer no guidance whatsoever. One can construct a superficially “Burkean” argument for two sides of any controversy. Was Lincoln “conservative”? The New Deal? Anti-communism? Is gay marriage “conservative”? The Bush tax cuts? The Kyoto Protocol? Is the conservative movement “conservative”? The answer in each case is “yes and no,” or more accurately, “neither yes nor no.”

Of course, Burke does still have the power to scandalize. His interlocutors, believing in the justice of the Revolution, could not imagine that their schemes would come to grief. Burke, by contrast, asking what the actual consequences of their actions would be, exposed truths about the nature of the state that many would still prefer not to hear: that peace depends on unconscious obedience and acceptance of authority; that men can never have equal political power; that hierarchy is inevitable. (To this day, whenever the legitimacy of the state comes into doubt—as in Iraq or in the debate in America over the role of the courts—we ignore Burke at our peril.) Burke mastered, in short, what Max Weber called the “ethic of responsibility,” namely, the demand that no matter how noble our aims, we always give an account of the foreseeable results of our actions.

This ethic does not flinch from the possibility that evil may come from good and good from evil. Its adherents accept, indeed often embrace, the cruelties of the world. It is precisely this embrace of cruelty—yes, cruelty!—that unites all those that we call “right-wing.” The free-marketeer with his warnings against perverse incentives, the Romantic reactionary with his fulminations against “modernity,” the moral traditionalist with his fear of unfettered appetite, the charismatic nationalist with his call for iron-fisted rule, the cold-blooded diplomat with his distrust of humanitarian motives: all reject the Left’s intuition that, with just a little more effort, the world can be cured of its ills. In facing the melancholy truths of our condition, the Right enjoys a freedom of thought that the Left cannot imagine and, perhaps, utterly dreads.

The conservative movement does remain at least recognizably right-wing. Its alliance with the Bush administration, however, has made it less so. “Compassionate conservatism”; “no child left behind”; “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one”; “Freedom is on the march”; “When somebody hurts, government has got to move”: each slogan reveals a man determined to do what is right and to leave the rest to the Lord. Sadly, rather than reject this attitude, some in the conservative movement have adopted it as their own. In their minds, for example, the ideals that motivate Bush’s Iraq policy justify them absolutely.

More often, however, the conservative movement’s support for the Bush administration has had subtler effects. Embarrassed by the apparent failure of the Iraq venture, moderate Bush supporters acknowledge the difficulties but argue that the situation in Iraq is neither rosy nor grim and that, with this or that change in policy, it may even turn out for the better. Maybe so. Surely, however, not all outcomes are equally likely. Rather than set forth assumptions about what actually drives events in Iraq, pro-Bush conservatives prefer to surround their recommendations in a thicket of “mights,” “perhaps,” “coulds” and “ifs.” When describing the ultimate aim of the Iraq occupation, by contrast, their words become suddenly clarion: “the stakes are high, “the terrorists must be defeated,” “victory is in sight.” The rhetorical shift is telling. Rather than feeling responsible for the consequences of its actions, it may be that the conservative movement today, in Weber’s words, “feels responsible only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not quelched.” One may think of this attitude what one will. It is not, however, right-wing.  

Austin Bramwell is a lawyer in New York City.

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Patrick J. Buchanan

Home from the beach Saturday last, I picked up The Weekly Standard. Within the magazine some still regard as the parish bulletin of the Beltway Right was an essay by one Noemie Emery furiously contesting Peter Beinart’s claim to Harry Truman.

Harry belongs to us, insisted Ms. Emery. He was “heir to a great wartime president,” she wrote. Would that be the same FDR who “lied us into war,” whose regime was honeycombed with treason, who at Tehran and Yalta betrayed Poland and all of Eastern Europe to the barbarous tyrant he called “Uncle Joe”?

Freedom was “expanded by Roosevelt and Truman, who extended the welfare state,” Ms. Emery continued. Good to know.

As for Ronald Reagan, he was “an original Truman Democrat and New Dealer [who] ... brought the Truman DNA into the Republican Party with a cadre of Scoop Jackson Democrats …” To Emery, Reagan will go down in history as the Moses who led the neocons out of Egypt to the Promised Land: power. Reagan himself used to tell us Barry Goldwater was the John the Baptist of our movement.

And why is Emery “wild about Harry”? Operation Keelhaul? The defense of Alger Hiss? The loss of China to Maoism? The firing of General MacArthur? The offer to send the battleship Missouri to Russia to pick up Stalin and bring him over to respond to Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech? The “no-win war” in Korea?

No. Ms. Emery reveres FDR and Harry because they “planned, executed, and blessed a campaign so completely hair-raising that the horror remains to this day.” FDR and Truman, you see, had the true grit to do Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. And so a “conservative” magazine claims Harry for our side.

What Ms. Emery’s piece reveals is that conservatism today is as shot through with corruption as the Church of Pope Alexander VI, two of whose brood of bastards were Lucretia and Cesare Borgia.

We are in need of a Council of Trent to redefine who we are.

Still “conservative” remains a respected term and the right term for those who devote their lives to family, faith, community, and country. We ought not give up our good name to cross-dressers. As for Left and Right, they retain much of the meaning they have had since the French Revolution. And we are of the Vendée.

A few years ago, when called a “neo-isolationist,” I wrote,

Most of us ... are not really ‘neo-’ anything. We are old church and old right, anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist, disbelievers in Pax Americana. We love the old republic, and when we hear phrases like ‘New World Order,’ we release the safety catches on our revolvers.

As in New Deal days, our Cultural Revolution, and the high times of the Great Society, a conservative today must be a counterrevolutionary. While Bush’s judges and Supreme Court justices have been top of the line and his tax cuts conservative, his democracy crusade and his open-borders immigration policy, his Big Government conservatism and free-trade-über-alles globalism owe more to FDR and LBJ than Goldwater or Reagan.

But the returns are now coming in from the Bush experiment with a Rockefeller Republicanism that he calls “compassionate conservatism.”

The rising casualties and soaring costs of an unnecessary war in Iraq, an overstretched military, immense trade deficits that must bring down the dollar, the loss of sovereignty and economic independence, a bloated federal bureaucracy to which Bushites have added as much as LBJ, an unresisted invasion over our southern border, the selling of the party of Reagan to the money power—all are the marks of an empire at the end of its tether.

What can save this Republic is the restoration of authentic values and policies of conservatism, imposed at some cost and hardship upon a people who may have lost the capacity and belief in the need to sacrifice to save what their fathers gave them.

In 1968, in The Southern Tradition at Bay, some of the writings of the conservative philosopher Richard Weaver were published. In the foreword, Donald Davidson wrote that his friend had, upon reading John Crowe Ransom’s God Without Thunder, been taken with the idea that an “unorthodox defense of orthodoxy” might be feasible.

Weaver “was suddenly troubled by his realization,” wrote Davidson, that “many traditional positions in our world had suffered not so much because of inherent defect as because of the stupidity, ineptness and intellectual sloth of those who ... are presumed to have their defense in charge.”

Conservatives have seen their movement hijacked by ideological vagabonds and hustlers who are redefining it to mean what it never meant. We need to find who sold the pass. Before we can take back our country, we must take back our movement.

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John Derbyshire

The terms “liberal” and “conservative” are only useful as a first approximation. If you tell me you are a liberal or a conservative, I have information about you I did not have before. Much of it is probabilistic: a conservative is more likely to be a churchgoer than a liberal, though there are liberal churchgoers and conservative atheists.

I think we all have a vague sense that these words describe the “shape” of our thinking about the outside world. A liberal is a person more inclined to get angry about inequalities in society; a conservative, about restraints on freely-willed actions that are not indisputably harmful.

Going a bit deeper, conservatives are those who are pessimistic about the prospects for human nature and society. This is most obviously the case with romantic conservatives like Winston Churchill, who “preferred the past to the present and the present to the future,” and George Orwell, who “loved the past, hated the present, and dreaded the future.” Even a distinctly unromantic conservative like Dr. Johnson “laughed at schemes of political improvement,” though. In the U.S., where an optimistic attitude is more or less compulsory, all this is masked with a lot of uplifting squid ink like our current—not, in my opinion, very conservative—president’s professed belief that “the desire for freedom is inscribed on every human heart,” a thing that is obviously false. True conservatives everywhere, however, even in America, know that we are doomed, doomed.

Some confusion arises from the history and geography of these words. A conservative in Franco’s Spain, in Brezhnev’s Russia, and in today’s U.S. are very different creatures, though you could tease out common threads of outlook and personality. Hayek is a darling of modern conservatives, yet in the preface of The Road to Serfdom he is very dismissive of conservatism (“paternalistic, nationalistic, power-adoring, … traditionalistic, anti-intellectual, and often mystical …”). Margaret Thatcher and Herbert Hoover both insisted on calling themselves liberals, though both were much too conservative to be elected nowadays.

I am much taken with modern theories of brain function that describe our mental processes in terms of functional modules. One theory postulates (1) a “socialization” module that handles membership of groups: being accepted, defending the group, being aware of other groups, and (2) a “status” module that evaluates and promotes our status in the group (and other people’s statuses too), handling emotions like envy, ambition, humiliation.

If that is right, I would guess that liberals have more strength in their socialization module. They are more focused on co-operative action, group values, leveling, assigning importance to subgroups. Conservatives are stronger in the status module, not minding that some individuals stand above others and emphasizing individual action to enhance status.

That’s all guesswork. I am only trying to demonstrate that a physiological foundation for our liberal-conservative inclinations is possible. If this is the case, and if genomic-evolutionary pathways for the development of these modules can be established, the consequences might be very unsettling. It might turn out that a population with some below-threshold frequency of gene variant XYZ would have trouble socializing its people into a consensual nation-sized entity. I don’t say that’s so, but it might be. As Steve Sailer has said, it would be a good idea to hold off on mass immigration until we know more about this.

As I recall, the terms “left” and “right” started off in the French National Assembly during the run-up to that nation’s revolution. Those who favored equality for all under the law sat on the speaker’s left; those who thought that some people (nobles, churchmen) should continue to have privileged status in law sat on the right.

Those dispositions were morphed by time and circumstances. There came socialism, which insisted that not only should we have equal rights in law, but we should have equal slices of the gross national product. Then there is affirmative action, which argues that groups once deprived of rights should have extra rights till they have recovered from the consequences of the prior deprivation. I think these positions are correctly located on the Left.

Similarly with fascism, to the degree that it is a coherent political philosophy and not just an excuse for a gangster free-for-all. State power is an important feature of fascist nations, and that ought to count against fascism being a Right phenomenon, since strong centralized states were traditional enemies of both church and nobility and all secondary power centers. You can in fact make a case that fascism, which gives equality of rights to all in the group, with much-magnified awareness of and hostility towards other groups, is the “socialization module” run amok and therefore hyper-leftist. If you track things back to source, though, giving more rights to this group and fewer to that group is Right according to the original Assembly seating arrangement, so that the popular conception of fascism as a Right pathology has a lot to be said for it.

With socialism and fascism both pretty decisively vanquished, how do the Left and Right impulses work themselves out today? With most features of political thought and emotion—patriotism, liberty vs. equality, fondness for established institutions, skepticism about social progress—you can track back a line of development to those original Left-Right arrangements.

But what, for example, do we do with elitism? It is traditionally associated with the Right yet is too ingrained a feature of human groups to be decisively assigned to either faction. Present-day Left and Right are distinguished by which elites they prefer, not by a fondness for, or hostility to, elites in general.

This comes up in the context of globalization. In one aspect, it is certainly Left, an evolution from that original notion of equality under the law to the proposition that it is wrong for Americans to favor their fellow Americans over foreigners in any way. Probably several million Americans believe that citizenship is a racist concept. I think we would all place such people definitely on the Left.

On the other hand, there are many reasons for ordinary people to resist globalization, and so many publicly-funded plum jobs for the right people in the globalist bureaucracy, that there inevitably arises the kind of supercilious, privileged, and increasingly endogamous elite characteristic of the folk sitting on the right in that original Assembly.

I would say that since the globalized elites offend the Right’s sense of patriotism—our favoring of this nation, this people—and since, being largely unelected, they can violate our personal liberty or dismantle our institutions with few consequences to themselves, we should place globalization firmly on the Left, notwithstanding the fact that it offers some freedoms (of migration, of commerce) not previously available and sets up a managerial elite. The case is certainly arguable, though.

The world is way more complicated than it was in 1789, and the concepts Left and Right don’t capture all that complexity. I have some math books showing five-dimensional solid figures projected down into two dimensions so that they can be printed on an ordinary page. That’s the kind of thing we do when we talk about Left and Right. Like those geometric projections, it’s not very satisfactory; but it’s not useless, either.

John Derbyshire is a contributing editor of National Review.

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Ross Douthat

The most welcome rhetorical ploy of the last decade was the decision by liberals tired of being tagged with the dreaded l-word to re-label themselves as “progressives.” Liberalism and conservatism have always been ill-matched antonyms, since the former refers to a set of political philosophies—Lockean liberalism, Rawlsian liberalism, and so forth—whereas the latter is something more nebulous, an orientation toward the world rather than a programmatic approach to it. The term “progressive,” with its implied utopianism, is a more precise antonym for “conservative,” and fans of linguistic precision should join subscribers to The American Prospect in applauding its revival.

Still, if one accepts that when people say liberal they usually mean progressive, then the liberal/conservative binary is still a useful way of looking at politics in the West and increasingly worldwide. It’s true that neither term is exact enough to enable an observer to discern the definitive “conservative” or “liberal” line on every policy issue and cultural controversy. But even so, if you call someone a conservative or a liberal, anyone willing to accept a touch of ambiguity in their definitions ought to understand what you mean.

Liberals are Baconists: they believe in Francis Bacon’s dictum that the ends of politics are “the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.” A conservative, meanwhile, is anyone who either says no to Baconism, or who says yes, but only up to a point—and so conservatism embraces anyone who has jumped off liberalism’s fast-moving train at any point over the last five centuries. If you’re a monarchist who thinks that liberalism went wrong with John Locke and the Glorious Revolution, step on up. If you’re a West Coast Straussian who thinks it went wrong with Woodrow Wilson, then welcome aboard. And if you’re a neocon who loved the New Deal but found the Great Society and George McGovern to be a bridge too far, there’s a place for you as well.

But here’s the rub, and the reason for a great deal of recent conservative confusion: the Right actually won a victory in the latter half of the 20th century, after centuries of defeat, and turned modernity away from a particularly pernicious path. This unexpected triumph has meant that many people who became accustomed to calling themselves “conservatives” when the conquest of nature seemed to require socialism or Communism are back on board the Baconian train, racing happily down a different track into the brave new future. These are the people who insist that conservatism ought to mean “freedom from government interference” and nothing more—the Grover Norquists of the world, for instance, or the Arnold Schwarzeneggers. In fact, they are ex-conservatives, because they are no longer sufficiently uncomfortable with the trajectory of modernity to be counted among its critics. They were unwilling to give up freedom for the sake of progress, but they’re happy to give up virtue.

The picture is further complicated by the fact that because conservatism only really exists to say “no” to whatever liberalism asks for next, it fights nearly all its battles on its enemy’s terrain and rarely comes close to articulating a coherent set of values of its own. Liberalism has science and progress to pursue—and ultimately immortality, the real goal but also the one that rarely dares to speak its name—whereas conservatives have … well, a host of goals, most of them in tension with one another. Neoconservatives want to return us to the New Deal era; Claremont Instituters want to revive the spirit of the Founding; Jacksonians want to rescue American nationalism from the one-worlders and post-patriots; agrarians and Crunchy Cons pine for a lost Jeffersonian or Chestertonian arcadia. Some conservatives think that liberalism-the-political-philosophy can be saved from liberalism-the-Baconian-project and that modernity can be rescued from its utopian temptation; others join Alasdair MacIntyre in thinking that the hour is far too late for that, and we should withdraw into our homes and monasteries and prepare to guard the permanent things through a long Dark Age.

Liberals, on the other hand, dream the same dream and envision the same destination, even if they disagree on exactly how to get there. It’s the dream of Thomas Friedman as well as Karl Marx, as old as Babel and as young as the South Korean cloners. It whispered to us in Eden, and it whispers to us now: ye shall be as gods. And no conservative dream, in the 400 years from Francis Bacon until now, has proven strong enough to stand in its way. 

Ross Douthat is an associate editor of The Atlantic Monthly.

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Rod Dreher

Nearly 20 years ago, the leftist critic Christopher Lasch said something that must have struck most people as odd: that the terms “conservative” and “liberal” have outlived their usefulness and serve more to obscure our understanding of the conditions under which Americans live than to illumine them. Given the partisan passions of the day—the Reagan era was coming to an end—and the vast stores of energy that both liberals and conservatives had remaining for the battles ahead, it’s easy to understand why it was hard to see Lasch’s point. From where we stand today, with liberalism intellectually exhausted (still!), and a once vigorous conservatism having no idea how to rescue itself from its own shipwreck of the last five years, Lasch—who died in 1994—looks prophetic. It’s time that the rest of us catch up with him.

I assume readers of this magazine don’t need to be instructed on what a dead end liberalism is. But if the Bush administration and the Republican misrule of the Congress don’t make conservatives rethink our approach to politics, we are in miserable shape. The conventional conservative response, of course, is to say that Republicans failed to be sufficiently conservative—a neat trick that absolves us from having to consider how the problem could well be with our ideas themselves. Lasch forces us to consider that what we’ve been identifying as conservatism really isn’t conservative at all, but merely an older form of liberalism. Or as philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has similarly observed, “the contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals.”

What does this mean? At the risk of oversimplifying, American politics today are built around the sovereignty of the individual, with progress measured across the board by the degree to which the individual is emancipated to exercise his own will. Liberals tend to favor emancipation from constraints on sexual activity, while conservatives tend to favor emancipation from constraints on economic activity. Neither questions the basic assumption that “freedom” means an expansion of individual choice. While both liberal and conservative politicians will differ on the implications of this conviction, it has become sacrosanct in American politics today. No politician dares to appeal to the American people with a message of material sacrifice for some higher goal. We are consumers before we are citizens.

It seems to me that few of us are willing to look radically—meaning, at the roots—of the American way of life and whether it can be sustained. Over a decade ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky agrarian and essayist, wrote a devastating essay called “Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community” in which he dissected how Left and Right, with their complementary doctrines of expanding sexual and economic freedom, undermined the kinds of traditions necessary to hold community life together. Lasch took this critique—which is generally shared by conservatives of an older tradition—much further. He condemned the Left for its vanity and contempt for ordinary people and the Right for uncritically celebrating a market-oriented individualism that conserves nothing, least of all the traditional values the Right purports to defend. “What is traditional about the rejection of tradition, continuity, and rootedness? A conservatism that sides with the forces of restless mobility is a false conservatism. … Instead of confronting the forces in modern life that make for disorder, it proposes merely to make Americans feel good about themselves.”

While not remotely being tempted to apostasize to the Left, thoughtful conservatives will wonder whether the Republican Party and the conservative movement, as it is now constituted, are worth hoping and believing in. This is not to say that conservatives won’t continue to vote Republican, if only as the lesser of two evils. But it is to say that the time has come to think and talk politically but beyond the conventional categories that have degenerated into empty ritualism and assertions of tribal identity.

I have been impressed—haunted is the more honest term—by Professor MacIntyre’s famous conclusion to his influential 1981 book After Virtue, in which he argued that the radical individualism of the Enlightenment had reached its end in a morally incoherent and therefore unstable society. MacIntyre ended his book by suggesting that we might well be living in a time akin to the breakup of the Roman Empire, when people stopped believing in what you might call the main organizing principle of their society and instead pioneered new forms of community in which to live out the moral life. He raised St. Benedict of Nursia, the father of European monasticism (and indeed, in many ways of Europe) as an example of the kind of figure we need now.

I’m not as pessimistic as MacIntyre, not yet at least, but I find my political imagination engaged by the prospect of a revived Benedictinism in our time. I’m not talking about a neo-Amish quietism but instead about forming loose associations of tradition-minded folks committed to living out the virtues in community, as much as we are able, and building local communities with our time, our labor, and our consumer dollars. Buying your meat directly from a local farmer might just be a more noble and useful political act than writing a check to the GOP. The work my politically liberal friend David Spence does in Dallas—buying abandoned historic properties in the inner city and restoring them lovingly for office and residential space—strikes me as one of the most authentically conservative things anybody in the country is doing. There is nothing ideological about it, either, but to grasp the real meaning of what David is doing, and what the Hale and Hutchins families—Christian fundamentalist farm families who raise meat organically, as they believe God intended—are doing out in rural east Texas, you have to think beyond superficial ideological categories.

Absent some catastrophe, American politics at the macro level will no doubt lumber along on its present dreary course. Real change will happen at the margins, where creative thinkers can emerge. Here’s hoping that in the months and years to come, those of us, Christians and otherwise, who might be thought of as Friends of St. Benedict will find each other and figure out practical ways to preserve the traditional moral life and to strengthen communal bonds against an atomizing, hedonistic, and alienating popular culture—and against two political parties—that seeks, however unwittingly in the case of many conservatives, to sever us from our roots.  

Rod Dreher is an editor at the Dallas Morning News and is author of Crunchy Cons (Crown Forum), which will be published in paperback this fall.

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Mary Eberstadt

The Republican Party today is riven by two particular issues with which American Conservative readers are more familiar than many other citizens: the war in Iraq and the ongoing fact of illegal immigration. Yet neither division of opinion on the Right, I would argue, spells the end of the conservative/liberal divide as we know it.

First, and contrary to what is often asserted, neither immigration nor the war in Iraq can be settled by appeal to conservative first principles of any stripe. Consider Iraq. The ostensible justification for the war—removal of a perceived threat to the United States in the form of an implacably hostile dictator who had already demonstrated willingness and ability to use weapons of mass destruction against enemies—was one to which liberals as well as conservatives could sign on. And so many did.

The war may yet prove to be a tragic mistake. It may yet go down in history as the definitive refutation of the subspecies of conservative foreign-policy ideas known as “democratism.” On the other hand, it may also yet prove, as proponents argue it will, to have a salutary effect on other governments in the region, working in the long run to America’s benefit. However it is ultimately judged by posterity, the war in Iraq is not, and cannot properly be called, a conservative war. It was dictated and justified in the first instance not by political principles but by an extra-ideological perception (correct or incorrect) of imminent threat. Thus the war, controversial though it is, does not re-draw the red-blue state divide that exists independently of it and for other reasons.

Similarly, the conservative division over immigration does not spell the end of that same divide, either. There is nothing intrinsic to the traditions of conservative thought in any form—whether the Founding Fathers, Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Whittaker Chambers, Russell Kirk, writers of Catholic or evangelical or libertarian bent, or indeed in any other right-leaning thinker of note—to settle what will always be a perplexing question: how is a nation of immigrants to draw the line on other immigrants? It is a difficult question, perhaps even an impossible question; but there is no intrinsically conservative (or liberal) answer to it.

Does a conservative welcome the work ethic and overall traditionalism of the Mexican migrant, thus pressing for laws that make legal immigration less restrictive—or does he build a wall in the name of conserving what is already here? Of course it is considered more conservative than liberal to argue for simply applying the law. But at a time when it is exactly the question of which law is best for the country, the enforcement principle is of limited utility as any ultimate political guide. Thus this question of what to do about illegal immigration, like that of the rightness or wrongness of the war in Iraq, is fundamentally extra-ideological. So here too, we see no evidence for the demise of the liberal-conservative distinction.

On the other hand, if we look beyond these two particular issues in dispute, we see enduring reasons for conservatism’s—as opposed perhaps to the current Republican Party’s—ongoing ideological and moral appeal to many millions, indeed to judge by numerous polls a plurality, of Americans. After all, despite real disenchantment among many on the Right, the overall conservative realignment of the United States remains one of the biggest political stories of the past quarter century. Whatever the particular fortunes of the Republican Party one year, two years, or five years hence, the United States as a whole, as a torrent of polls confirms, as progressives foreign and domestic regularly complain, and as the red and blue map makes unforgettably clear, has plainly moved Right.

Thus, in one sense, it is tempting to answer the question of whether conservatism and liberalism as such still exist as Samuel Johnson is said to have refuted Bishop Berkeley’s subjective idealism by kicking a stone: i.e., by pointing to the color chart and leave it at that. More interesting, though, is to ask why this strength continues despite the contemporary disputes that are otherwise dividing the Right.

Having just concluded editing and writing for a forthcoming anthology called Why I Turned Right, in which a dozen thinkers representing conservative institutions and magazines explain what led them away from liberalism and centrism and toward their current positions in what is generally called the conservative world of ideas, I can sketch at least some version of an answer based on the common denominators of these converts’ tales.

First, conservatism and liberalism continue to exist, in one sense, because the New York Times and its allies everywhere say so; i.e., “they” know their adversaries when they see them, and that means “us.”

Second, the binary divide also exists as long as the phrase “pro-life liberal” remains an oxymoron. For though not all conservatives are pro-life, nearly all pro-lifers have come to see themselves, and are seen by others, as “conservative” in some usable sense of the word. And so they are, if only by default. They simply haven’t anywhere else to go.

Third, the binary divide also exists as long as the universities, especially the elite universities, continue to exile sanity and tenure illogic and turn otherwise apolitical people against political correctness; that is how some converts to the Right are first pulled in.

Fourth—and this is a guarded point at a time when what is called the natural family is as perilous as it is today—conservatism as we know it exists in part because people as we know them reproduce. “I became a conservative at 11:59 pm on December 4th, 1997, the way many people become conservatives,” as contributor P.J. O’Rourke puts it in a formulation that will resonate with many. “I became a parent.”

If there is a mini-moral here, it appears to be that conservatism continues and is only as strong as its positive rather than negative visions. Of course there remains much to depress any observer, conservative or otherwise, about the current scene. But as to whether a fundamental realignment of our binary political code has been worked, I believe the evidence for now at least shows otherwise. Admittedly, conservatism for now trumps contemporary liberalism partly by default—but that is still a win, if not the most satisfactory one. 

Mary Eberstadt is Taube Family Foundation Fellow at the Hoover Institution, author of Home-Alone America, and editor of the forthcoming Why I Turned Right (Threshold, Feb. 2007).

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Nick Gillespie

As a small-“l” libertarian—a believer in “free minds and free markets” (to quote my magazine’s tagline), open immigration, civil liberties, educational and reproductive choice, gun rights, pluralism, noninterventionist foreign policy, drug legalization, gay marriage, and perhaps most scandalously of all, a world of meaning far beyond politics in which people are generally free to pursue individual and communal happiness on something approaching their own terms—it’s hard to get too worked up over whether the terms “liberal” and “conservative” mean much anymore. This is sort of like trying to decide whether Razzles are really a candy or a gum: it’s drawing a distinction that doesn’t amount to much of a difference. From the first bite to the last, you still end up with a bad taste in your mouth.

At least since the reign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, American politics have been marked by a broad consensus that the role and scope of government should be big and bigger. This consensus, reflected most clearly in the upward trajectory of public spending at all levels and the willingness of politicians to insinuate themselves via legislation, regulation, and moral grandstanding into every aspect of our lives, is so pervasive that the supposed great gutter of government, Ronald Reagan, described himself—accurately—as a New Deal Democrat. To be sure, liberals and conservatives—and their political proxies, the Democrats and Republicans—have sometimes differed in the ends toward which they swing the government club, but neither crew has been slow to pick up the cudgel in the first place. Certainly over the past dozen years that the Republicans have controlled both houses of Congress, it’s become increasingly difficult for someone not born and bred for partisan loyalty to figure out the operative differences between Dems and Reps, liberals and conservatives. Whatever other crimes he may have committed, Rep. Tom DeLay should go to jail for suggesting last fall that “after 11 years of Republican majority we pared [the federal budget] down pretty good.” Or if not jail, then a hospital for the politically delusional (though I understand that there are few beds available at present).

Hence, we’re well into the second-term of a conservative president who has boosted real discretionary spending more than Lyndon Baines Johnson managed. In his first four budgets, Bush boosted discretionary spending by over 35 percent, compared to LBJ’s 33 percent hike over the homologous period. And, alas, when it comes to foreign policy, Bush has similarly out-LBJed LBJ. Unless you’re slavishly devoted to the party of Walter Mondale or the party of Bob Dole, does it really matter, say, whether it’s liberal Rep. Nancy Pelosi or conservative Sen. Rick Santorum pushing for a minimum-wage increase? Whether it’s Sen. Ted Stevens pushing for content regulation of cable and satellite TV or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton spearheading an attack on the dread menace of video games? Sen. Trent Lott or Sen. Robert Byrd shipping the federal treasury to constituents back home a dollar at a time? Attorney General Janet Reno or Attorney General John Ashcroft pushing for a surveillance state?

It’s an old joke—among libertarians, anyway, a famously funny group (just read the novels of Ayn Rand sometime)—that conservatives want to be your father and liberals want to be your mother. Despite superficial differences, both groups want to be your parent and treat you as a child who must be shielded from your own worst impulses. This isn’t to say that specific policies and individual politicians don’t matter, but it is to suggest that in the aggregate, liberals and conservatives are less like Cain and Abel and more like Chang and Eng.

Yet we thankfully live in an age of glorious ideological confusion. The old, worn-out designations Right and Left—a pentimento of early revolutionary France—are finally breaking down under the weight of current events and in the face of continuing technological and cultural changes that are giving more and more of us the ability to live however we want. The war in Iraq and the current immigration debate, to name two pressing issues, are pitting conservatives against one another and causing liberals no small intra-ideological squabbles.

More important, Americans are evacuating partisan politics. This is reflected in generally weaker attachments to the Democrats and Republicans. In 1969, according to a Harris poll, 81 percent of Americans identified themselves as one or the other. By 2004, only 65 percent did. If anecdote can be trusted, I’m heartened by the number of liberals and conservatives who sidle up to me at policy debates, book parties, and other grim affairs and confess with a mixture of shame and pride that they have unmistakable libertarian tendencies. However inaccurate such hyphenated designations may be, it’s no small curiosity that Noam Chomsky from time to time calls himself a “libertarian socialist” and William F. Buckley occasionally self-identifies as a “libertarian journalist.”

That’s progress, and it suggests that the best way to understand contemporary politics is not through a right-wing/left-wing, conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat frame but in terms of choice and control: does a particular policy or politician increase or decrease our freedom? In his underappreciated 1955 masterpiece, The Decline of American Liberalism, Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. wrote that American history from the colonial period on has been a struggle between forces of centralization and decentralization in politics, economics, and culture. He fretted that the “liberal values associated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment—and especially that of individual freedom—have slowly lost their primary importance in America life and thought.” I think he was mistaken in his conclusion, but his larger analysis provides a key to the 21st century. Because of widely observed increases in wealth, advances in liberatory technology, and breakdowns of stultifying social and cultural orthodoxies, individuals in America are freer than ever to chart their own destinies (we’d be freer still in a world of truly limited government). If we finally jettison played-out designations and think in terms of choice and control, our current moment would come into far-clearer focus. And so would our future. 

Nick Gillespie is editor in chief of Reason, recently named one of “The 50 Best Magazines” by the Chicago Tribune.

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Paul Gottfried

Defining the Right may be easier than defining the Left. The Right resists the Left with determination, however the Left may define itself at a given point in time. It is not hard to locate a place on the Right for the octagenarian warrior against feminism, immigration, and alternative lifestyles Phyllis Schlafly. But the same cannot be done so easily for David Brooks, the New York Times’ “conservative columnist,” who favors gay marriage and liberal immigration and who is now talking up Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate.

The Right is not just a watered-down version of its antithesis. It is passionately against the Left and in favor of what is intact of a bourgeois Christian society. But the Left—marshalling mostly united armies of the media, educational establishment, and entertainment industry—has been able to create its own opposition. Thus the media establishment has given lots of coverage and newspaper columns to neoconservative critics, who accept most of the same picture of social and historical progress as the one embraced by the acknowledged left-center. By this duplication of itself as an oppositional force, the Left has removed from discussion the kinds of questions that only the real Right would engage. It can therefore limit debate to secondary issues, such as whether our borders are to be protected less negligently once illegals are granted de facto amnesty, without having to bring up such fundamental questions as the value of defending an inherited cultural identity in the U.S.

The true Right has covered a wide historical terrain depending on the type of Left that it has had to confront. In the interwar period, at least some elements of the European bourgeoisie rallied to fascist movements, which were thought to be able to oppose the Communists and other revolutionary leftists better than the weakened parliamentary governments of the time. In Spain and Austria, the bourgeoisie were generally correct in the 1930s to support the authoritarian Right as the lesser of two evils; in Mussolini’s Italy, bourgeois supporters of the fascist government may have been justified in their initial endorsement of the “fascist revolution,” given the history of anarchist violence that had given rise to the revolutionary Right. In Germany, however, a different situation existed. There the Nazis did not furnish a bulwark against organized violence and, like the Communists, were a variation on the anti-bourgeois forces of political and moral upheaval.

The Right that has survived no longer talks, in the manner of Latin fascists, about a corporate economy and a national revolution. It is in fact critical of government overreach and generally favors local control over political life. But what makes this Right what it is today is its reaction to the democratic welfare state as a vehicle of leftist change.

Another defining characteristic of the Right is its distinctiveness in relation to conservatism. The term “conservative” has lost any specific or long-term meaning and has been extended to leftist projects such as conquering the world for human rights. But at one time that term did have a grounded meaning, for example, when Edmund Burke and his continental counterparts resisted the French Revolution, as defenders of a traditional society, an established church, and a monarchy. The organically developed, historical rights that these textbook conservatives defended belonged to a bygone world, even if these thinkers, as social theorist Robert Nisbet spent much of his life arguing, still deserve our respect.

In the 19th century, the bourgeoisie assumed the work of defending nation states, a market economy, and strong nuclear families. The bourgeoisie would eventually give life to the modern Right as well. This would happen when those traditions came under attack, first from revolutionary socialists, then from democratic administration, and most recently from the multicultural Left.

“Right” and “conservative” are sometimes applied interchangeably, but these terms of reference do not share the same genealogy. Conservative is the now anachronistic description of a contemporary political side, one that, like its official opposition, is social democratic in its beliefs. The Right, by contrast, denotes an existing but weakened political force.

A key dividing line between the Right and other political positions is its appeal to the people in opposition to political elites. In The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch exemplifies this right-wing populism. Lasch exudes praise for “the people,” who seem drawn from a 1950s vignette of a Catholic working-class family. His ideal wife is depicted as packing her husband’s lunch pail and then preparing her offspring for their departure to parochial school. Against this charming but archaic conception of “the people,” Lasch portrays the elites who are besotted with vice and have no attachments to either nations or communities. The question that is never posed, and one that right-wing populists studiously avoid, is how did this Catholic working-class family permit social degenerates to take power? And why do they waste their hard-earned money on consumerist products produced by those whom they are supposed to despise?

The major change that the Left has undergone over the last 30 years is the replacement of an economically-oriented socialist persuasion by a multicultural one. Up until the 1960s, the Left invoked Marxism or some more diluted, gradualist road to socialism. This Left was not necessarily concerned with feminist or gay issues. The present Left, by contrast, accentuates lifestyle radicalism. It even urges the state to punish those who hold reactionary moral views. The updated Left plays down such old-style socialist goals as nationalizing productive forces, and it favors the market when commerce can be used to break down regional and national barriers and to achieve cultural diversity.

The current Left swoons over Third World immigrants, a group whom it celebrates as a source of cultural enrichment. It is also willing to tax its majority European population to pay for the cultural comfort and social services of those whom it happily welcomes from the Third World. But these gestures should not be equated with recrudescent Stalinism or authentic European socialism. The Left assumed a new identity when its working-class base began to dwindle and when it traded that base for yuppies and self-assertive Third World constituencies. The Left then proceeded to move in a culturally radical direction, a development whose consequences we are now seeing. 

Paul Gottfried is professor of the humanities at Elizabethtown College and author, most recently, of The Strange Death of Marxism.

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Jeffrey Hart

The terms “liberal” and “conservative” remain in current usage and probably retain value, but the question is a tricky one. We will begin with definitions, but things get difficult when we try to apply the terms to actual politicians and their policies.

Let’s start with Hobbes and Locke and their assumptions about human nature. For Hobbes, man’s heart was savage. In the mythic pre-social “state of nature,” life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” That required the restraints of strong government. For Locke, in contrast, “the state of nature has a law of nature to govern it … and reason … is that law.” Thus the restraints of government could be mild. Perhaps Hobbes was conservative, Locke liberal.

Burke, rather than starting with assumptions about human nature, began with experience and shared history. In practice, he was a reformist Whig. For example, advocating prudence, he urged conciliation with the American colonies, offering everything except formal independence. Adam Smith said that Burke was the only man in England who understood his economic theory; but Burke also urged the importance of the “unbought grace of life.” He would not approve of everything-has-a-price capitalism.

Burke is thought to be a conservative. He did attack the French Revolution. But if we strip away such operatic passages as the one on Marie Antoinette, Burke should be understood as a critic of ideology, “abstract ideas,” “metaphysic dogma.” To the Rights of Man urged by the philosophes, he opposed the actual historic liberties of Englishmen.

Let us try to cut to the core of Burke’s thought. I first tried this in a Columbia graduate seminar taught by Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. I offered this: “Most of the things we do are done by habit. If you tried to tie your shoes every morning by reason, you would never get out of the house. Try playing a violin by reason.” Barzun accepted this and raised me. “Burke,” he said, “wants his morning newspaper delivered on time.” In other words, social institutions are the habits of society. They make society work.

But suppose serious change becomes necessary. For Burke, you don’t judge change necessary by appealing to abstractions, to pamphleteers and journalists. You appeal to the man of experience, the statesman. In the Reflections, the statesman is Lord Somers, who knew the institutions of England and knew in 1688 that James II had to go. That kind of knowledge cannot be taught but only absorbed from experience.

Everyone knows that Burke opposed the abstract doctrines he saw as energizing the French Revolution. Less often realized is that he soon came to see the Revolution as inevitable, without, of course, withdrawing any of his hatred of ideology. In 1791, he wrote:

If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they, who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.

In the Reflections, more than a year earlier, Burke had not been Burkean enough. The complexities of society can include, as well as complex institutional structure, complex social forces that become irresistible: the French monarchy had been doomed by the accumulation of such forces.

Burke was a conservative in the sense of William Buckley’s definition of conservatism as the “politics of reality.” Unfortunately, many supposed conservatives—I will echo T.S. Eliot’s phrase—“cannot bear very much reality.”

Let us try a few notes on presidents and their success or failure in dealing with reality. Through many needed economic reforms, such as the SEC, it can be argued—Conrad Black and other historians have done so—that Franklin Roosevelt saved capitalism. In that sense, in dealing with realities and not ideology, he was conservative. He was also bipartisan in his war leadership and unanimously considered a great war leader.

Harry Truman, a liberal Democrat—the Henry Wallace Left did not think him liberal enough, the Strom Thurmond segregationists thought him too liberal—was also a realist. Against the segregationists, Truman knew the civil-rights revolution was gestating. Against the Wallace Left, he knew the Soviets had to be blocked.

Eisenhower adopted a fatherly persona. But in fact, he was realistic, lucid, even ruthless. He knew the old empires were finished, refused to help the British and French at Suez, refused to help the French in Vietnam. He knew the New Deal could not be repealed, and of Sen. William Knowland, the right-wing hero, he asked, “How stupid can one get?” A complete realist, Eisenhower won re-election in a landslide and, with Franklin Roosevelt and Reagan, another prudent realist, is among the top ten presidents.

That brings us to George W. Bush, the most ideological president in American history. He thinks in abstractions and acts on them. No president stands at a greater remove from Burke’s critique of ideology. His foreign policy—the march of democracy—is immune to fact and, notably in Iraq, to a Burkean sense of history. In economics (supply-side dogma, calamitous debt), in science (Intelligent Design), in his opposition to stem-cell research and therapy, Bush has been a brass-bound ideologue. On stem-cell research, Bush formulates his opposition this way: “It’s wrong to destroy life in order to save life.” His first use of the word “life” refers to a few insensate cells, his second to an actual sick human being. His formulation is self-refuting. As an exercise in the use of the “moral imagination”—a term coined by Burke—let us cut through verbiage to concrete fact: if you had a child with Type I diabetes, a devastating disease, and I said I had a few cells that would cure her, would you turn this offer down? The question answers itself. It also answers Bush.

The common denominator of successful presidents, liberal or conservative, has been that they were realists. Because Bush is an ideologue remote from fact, he has failed comprehensively and surely is the worst president in American history—indeed, in the damage he has caused to the nation, without a rival in the race for the bottom. Because Bush is generally called a conservative, he will have poisoned the term for decades to come. 

Jeffrey Hart is a senior editor of National Review and author, most recently, of The Making of the American Conservative Mind.

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Nicholas von Hoffman

The words “liberal” and “conservative” may be meaningless to anyone given to precise definition, but they remain useful for fisticuffs, serving as verbal mud pies in political disputes.

True, calling someone a conservative is not the same bone-crusher as calling someone a liberal. The latter epithet is so damaging that people who have been scored off as fuzzy, liberal caterpillars have been known to hump off under a leaf in hopes of re-emerging as brilliantly attractive, progressive butterflies.

But even though the progressive label may afford a degree of cover, there is something wishy-washy about the word. A progressive is a blanched liberal, and those who adopt the name rarely fool anyone. Of late the ruse has been so unconvincing that professional politicians are reconciling themselves to donning the hair shirt of liberalism again.

There is no conservative counterpart to the liberal who blushes and fidgets when the name is applied to him. Conservatives take pride in the appellation as they fight abortion, flag burning, and the love that once dared not say its name but now shouts it from the rooftops. Only lately have they begun to encounter occasions when it’s an embarrassment. The longer George W. Bush and his confederates remain in office the more frequently such instances occur.

Past that, the liberal-conservative polarity has disappeared. The guiding principles that distinguished the two once great schools of thought are not doing much guiding. When a faction inside the American Civil Liberties Union is evidently trying to gag an opposing faction from publicly expressing dissent, we are wading around in a swamp.

Bipolar politics is our tradition, but the old poles have lost their magnetism and, for the moment, reconstituting them seems impossible. What would a new conservatism or new liberalism look like? What principles would it steer by? And if not two parties, how about three or four or ten? A nonstarter. Our laws and political institutions are so stoutly designed for bipolar politics that multi-polarity does not have a chance. Even if it did, in a country that is having trouble scraping together two political parties founded on something other than nonsense, a multi-party system looks less than promising. There are days when it seems we don’t have enough decent political ideas to stock even one.

In lieu of political parties based on stately essays by the great thinkers of the past, we can continue with what we have—which is crisis politics. Whoever comes up with the most frightening crisis wins. Of late it has been the Republicans, whether conservative or not, who have delivered the knockout punches. Dead babies, dirty bombs, men exchanging wedding bands with other men, toppling skyscrapers, evil Arabs, girl bishops—they’ve swept the Democrats, whether liberal or not, out of contention. Not that the D’s don’t have hopes. It has been said that the Democrats are but one Katrina away from seizing power.

None of the above has much to do with any conservative-liberal continuum. It has to do with how one political gang can jump on what’s happening at the moment and cash in on it. But then polarities of principle, the grand abstractions that are so hard to apply, have seldom dominated our government policy. If it were otherwise, the Concord Coalition would not be a flyspeck of a group, unknown outside the small world of policy wonkery.

So what does the future hold? Many symposia, that much is certain. What else? Many ad hoc alliances between different parts of the busted-up ideological centers of the now defunct Right-Left cores. A recent example of such was the coalition of libertarians, conservatives, and lefties renting the Daughters of the American Revolution Hall on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday to hear Al Gore thunder on the topic of civil rights and civil liberties.

More broadly, the terms conservative and liberal will continue to be used and misused as we, who doubt we are a part of either, stumble in the swamp, looking for a solid place to put our feet. 

Nicholas von Hoffman is a former columnist for the Washington Post and is the author, most recently, of A Devil’s Dictionary of Business.

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James Kurth

It certainly now seems that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” fit the realities of American politics very poorly. The existence of such new, but also confusing, terms as “neoliberal” and especially “neoconservative” is one obvious illustration. However, we will argue that some version of this confusion has long characterized American politics, indeed is the essence of American politics, and that liberal and conservative still remain the most useful terms we are likely to have, now and in the future.

Suppose that one had to invent, to build from the ground up, new labels to fit the actual, contemporary, major divisions within American politics. We would first start with a specification of just what those divisions are. To begin with, there is the great divide over social, cultural, or moral issues (as in “the culture war” and “moral values”). Here there is a clear division between those Americans whose priority is the free choice and expression of the individual and those who prefer to subordinate this individual freedom to religious (specifically, biblical) teachings or traditional norms. The first tendency especially reveres the First Amendment of the Constitution; the second tendency especially reveres the Ten Commandments of the Bible. In addition, the first tendency admires the values now found among the political and cultural elites of other Western democracies (which they call “universal human rights”); the second tendency is attached to distinctly American values (American exceptionalism). Most political analysts, not only in the media but also in academia, are perfectly comfortable with applying the terms liberal and conservative respectively to these two tendencies (as in “social” or “cultural liberals” and “social” or “cultural conservatives”).

Second, there is the great and long-standing divide over security issues. Here there is a clear division between those Americans whose priority is individual liberty, particularly the freedom of movement and association of individuals and also of members of minority communities (civil liberties and civil rights) and those whose priority is national security, who prefer to constrain the movement and associations of some individuals (and of some minorities), if that would enhance the security of the nation (and of the majority) as a whole. Again, most political analysts, not only in the media but also in academia, are perfectly comfortable with applying the terms liberal and conservative respectively to these two tendencies.

Thus far, our terminological construction project has been rather simple. Liberals are those Americans who prioritize individual freedom over anything else; conservatives are those who are willing to subordinate this to traditional values or community interests, e.g., a religion or the nation. However, in America confusion has always arisen when we turn our attention to economic issues.

This adds a third great, and very long-standing, divide in American politics. Here there is a clear division between those Americans whose priority is the freedom of individual entrepreneurs or corporate enterprises (“free enterprise,” “the free market”) and those who prefer to subordinate this individual freedom to government regulation and limitation. Today, and for many years, most political analysts have applied the term conservative to the first tendency and liberal to the second (as in “economic” or “fiscal conservatives” and “economic” or “fiscal liberals”).

We now can see why in America the terms liberal and conservative have often been confusing and awkward. The liberals generally favor individual expression on the social and security issues but government regulation on the economic ones. Conversely, the conservatives generally favor restraining individual expression by government regulation (or preferably by self-restraint informed by religious teachings or by traditional and patriotic values) on the social and security issues but free enterprise on the economic ones.

Social conservatives, security conservatives, and economic conservatives all tend to support the Republican Party. But their different priorities over the freedom of the individual make for a great deal of tensions, indeed divisions, within the party itself. Most obviously, richer, business (“country-club”) Republicans generally promote economic conservatism and downplay (or even privately despise) social conservatism. Conversely, poorer, employee (“Main Street”) Republicans generally prioritize social conservatism and downplay economic conservatism. The first tendency provides the campaign dollars for the Republicans; the second tendency provides the actual votes. It is little wonder that the Republican Party has been a chronic schizophrenic, and is especially so today.

In the past three decades, moreover, the project of globalization has brought about the expansion of the American economy into the global economy, with the free movement of goods, capital, and labor across open borders. Some Americans have benefited from globalization (“the winners”) and some have been hurt (“the losers”). This has brought about a new division over economic issues. Some Americans, especially the winners from globalization, prioritize this new version of free enterprise operating across open borders in the global arena. Other Americans, not only the losers from globalization but also those whose self-identification centers upon the American nation, prefer to restrict the free movement of goods, capital, and labor in order to protect the American economy (or more precisely, the interests—not only economic but also social, cultural, and security—of Americans within the territory of the United States itself).

Some political analysts have applied the term liberal (or among some social scientists, neo-liberal) to the first tendency and conservative to the second. But this usage is haunted by the legacy, discussed above, of applying the term conservative to free enterprise, although now that enterprise has become global, and applying the term liberal to government regulation, but now that regulation includes protection imposed by government barriers. Consequently, other political analysts have been more comfortable applying the term “globalist” to the first tendency and “populist” to the second. Globalization and the new divisions that it has brought have therefore added even more confusion to, and erosion of, the terms liberal and conservative.

Nevertheless, what is true of all kinds of conservatives is that they are trying to preserve, to conserve, an existing and established state of affairs, be it involving the social, the security, or the economic realm. And what is true of all kinds of liberals is that they are trying to change this state of affairs, normally but not always in favor of more freedom for the individual (the exception being some kinds of regulation of the economy). The confusion arises from the fact that, as Tocqueville observed as long ago as the 1830s, in America what has always been the existing and established economic state of affairs has been free enterprise or the freedom of the individual. And, as Marx observed as along ago as the 1840s, it is the nature of this economic freedom, of capitalism, to undermine and eventually destroy the existing and established state of affairs in every other realm, including the social and security ones. Thus, in America, conservatism means conserving a liberal dynamic that is constantly in conflict with conservatism. American conservatism thus is simultaneously both conservative and liberal. It always has been, it is now, and it always will be. Perhaps the best thing for American conservatives is to get used to it and to seek the best balance of the two for their particular time and place. 

James Kurth is the Claude Smith Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore College, where he teaches American foreign policy, defense policy, and international politics.

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Michael Lind

The meanings of the terms “conservative” and “liberal” (and its synonym “progressive”) have been altered by two long-term trends in American politics. The first is the replacement of ideology by partisanship; the second is the alignment of partisanship and identity.

In living memory conservatism and liberalism referred to ideological movements, not political parties. The conservative movement was not identical with the Republican Party, nor was the liberal movement identical with the Democratic Party. This is no longer the case. Today conservative means partisan Republican and liberal means partisan Democrat. Ideological liberals who deviate from the Democratic party line of a given moment are ignored or vilified, as are ideological conservatives who deviate from the Republican party line.

Without ideological movements, there is no place for ideologues. Most of those who pass for prominent conservative and liberal intellectuals today are actually engaged in public relations. It is the job of these apparatchiks to sell a party line to the public, after the party line has already been determined in private by negotiations among donors, special-interest spokesmen, pollsters, and politicians.

The replacement of ideology by partisanship has been accompanied by the alignment of partisanship and ethnicity. The major divide between American politics is not geographic. Maps of how counties vote show that there are no red states and blue states, only red states and blue cities. But the city-suburb divide itself is merely a surrogate for an ethnic and religious divide.

Today the Republican Party is the party of the ethnic and religious majority, white Christians, and the Democratic Party is the party of ethnic and religious minorities—non-whites (blacks and Latinos) and non-Christians (Jews and post-Christian secularists). The fact that the Republicans get some non-white and Jewish and secularist votes, while the Democrats get a minority of white Christian votes, does not alter this pattern. The big cities are Democratic because that is where blacks, Latinos, Jews, and post-Christian secularists are concentrated, and the suburbs and small towns are Republican because that is where most white Christians live.

The emergence of a pan-white, pan-Christian majority party, the Republicans, shows that the melting pot worked for whites. The ethnic divisions among Anglo-Americans and European-Americans have been effaced by assimilation and intermarriage. The once deep theological divide between Protestants and Catholics in the U.S. has been replaced by an alliance of conservative Christians against moral liberalism in both its secular and religious varieties.

By contrast, the core of the Democratic Party is a coalition of ethnic and religious minorities that have little in common other than suspicion of the white Christian majority. Blacks fear white racism; Latinos fear Anglo nativism; and Jews and post-Christian secularists fear Christian triumphalism. A traditional big-city patronage machine, the Democratic Party offers each minority what it wants: affirmative action (blacks and Latinos), mass immigration from Latin America (Latinos), and strict separation of church and state and moral liberalism (Jews and secularists).

The party of the majority and the party of minorities naturally look at government in different ways. Because it represents the white Christian majority, the Republican Party of today is nationalist, identifying the majority with the state; communitarian, thinking that the values of the majority should be enforced by the state; and majoritarian, trusting in elected representatives. As a coalition of minorities, the Democratic Party, with equal consistency, is anti-nationalist, insisting on the difference between the majority and the state; multicultural, rejecting the idea that majority values should be enforced by the state; and anti-majoritarian, trusting in unelected judges to protect ethnic minorities and maverick individuals against the national majority.

Identity politics lives and dies by demography. Democrats hope that mass immigration from Latin America will permit a growing Latino population, allied with the urban minority coalition, to dominate the government. The Republican Party, as the nation-state party, cannot incorporate Latinos as a distinct voting bloc with distinct group privileges the way that the group-based Democratic ethnic machine hopes to do. The white Christian majority, however, might absorb most second- and third-generation Latinos into a mixed-race Christian majority, a task that would be easier if fewer Latinos were foreign-born.

And what of ideologues in this ethnically-based political system? There will still be libertarians, social democrats, greens, populists, and others. If they have any strategic sense, they will not try to take over one of the two parties. Instead, they will organize themselves as non-partisan movements that seek to influence both of our identity-based national parties.

These ideological movements should call themselves by their proper names. Libertarians and populists who argue that they are the true conservatives are wasting their breath. So are social democrats and greens who argue that they are the true liberals or progressives. For the foreseeable future, the term conservative will be a synonym for Republican and liberal or progressive will be a synonym for Democrat. As labels for genuine public philosophies, those terms are gone for good. Good riddance. 

Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. and the author of What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President.

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John Lukacs

Have the adjectives—and nouns —“liberal” and “conservative” become meaningless? Not quite. But almost. Inflation first weakened, then liquefied much of their meaning.

Liberal became a political adjective only in the early 19th century. Before that (see, for example, Jane Austen) it was commendatory, meaning “generous,” “broad-minded,” etc. Soon after that, broad-minded people began to appear whose minds were so broad as to be flat. But that was only one kind of devolution. More important: the originally liberal advocacy of freedom, of limited government, lost much of its meaning as liberals began to champion governmental support of this or that, eventually accepting the provider state. Worse was to come. That was (and still is) the liberals’ unquestioning and thoughtless belief in Progress, often at the expense of religion. Thus, among other things, they have advocated the extension of all kinds of liberties well beyond reason.

Hence the paradoxical situation. Liberalism has won. Abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, female and other emancipations, free speech, and the end of censorship were accomplished; they have become worldwide. But that is, too, why liberalism has become boring. It has little or nothing more worth advocating; indeed, it has almost nothing more to say.

Conservative, too, became a political adjective only in the early 19th century. Its meaning was unpopular, with few exceptions. In the United States, virtually no politician would designate himself a conservative until after about 1950. Thirty years later, more Americans said and thought that they were conservatives than those who said and thought that they were liberals. Presidents were elected as they thought it advantageous and popular to call themselves conservative. The trouble with that inflation was manifold. Most conservatives disliked liberals more than they liked liberty. Serial marriages, divorces, consumers of pornography, barbaric households with mannerless children were as frequent among conservatives as they were among liberals. Worse: conservatives came to believe in Progress even more than liberals; their inclinations to conserve shrank to near nothing.

But let us face it: the isms are becoming wasms. Conservatives should be better off than liberals because while liberalism is an ism, conservatism is something of an oxymoron, since a conservative ought to be opposed to any kind of ideology. Meanwhile, Original Sin—a conservative, not a liberal, recognition—continues to exist.

The real enemy is now the (outdated) idea of Progress, together with the (thoughtless) belief in Technology. Conservatives should be the first to recognize that. If they don’t, their demise will be worse than that of the liberals who, after all, had won—though only on one level and too late. A conservative who fails to protect and to conserve is nothing but a radical loudmouth of a bad sort. 

John Lukacs is the author, most recently, of June 1941: Hitler and Stalin.

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Heather Mac Donald

Upon leaving office in November 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft thanked his staff for keeping the country safe since 9/11. But the real credit, he added, belonged to God. Ultimately, it was God’s solicitude for America that had prevented another attack on the homeland.

Many conservatives hear such statements with a soothing sense of approbation. But others—count me among them—feel bewilderment, among much else. If God deserves thanks for fending off assaults on the United States after 9/11, why is he not also responsible for allowing the 2001 hijackings to happen in the first place?

Skeptical conservatives—one of the Right’s less celebrated subcultures—are conservatives because of their skepticism, not in spite of it. They ground their ideas in rational thinking and (nonreligious) moral argument. And the conservative movement is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies.

Conservative atheists and agnostics support traditional American values. They believe in personal responsibility, self-reliance, and deferred gratification as the bedrock virtues of a prosperous society. They view marriage between a man and a woman as the surest way to raise stable, law-abiding children. They deplore the encroachments of the welfare state on matters best left to private effort.

They also find themselves mystified by the religiosity of the rhetoric that seems to define so much of conservatism today. Our Republican president says that he bases “a lot of [his] foreign policy decisions” on his belief in “the Almighty” and in the Almighty’s “great gifts” to mankind. What is one to make of such a statement? According to believers, the Almighty’s actions are only intermittently scrutable; using them as a guide for policy, then, would seem reckless. True, when a potential tragedy is averted, believers decipher God’s beneficent intervention with ease. The father of Elizabeth Smart, the Salt Lake City girl abducted from her home in 2002, thanked God for answering the public’s prayers for her safe return. When nine miners were pulled unharmed from a collapsed Pennsylvania mineshaft in 2002, a representative placard read: “Thank you God, 9 for 9.” God’s mercy was supposedly manifest when children were saved from the 2005 Indonesian tsunami.

But why did the prayers for five-year-old Samantha Runnion go unheeded when she was taken from her Southern California home in 2002 and later sexually assaulted and asphyxiated? If you ask a believer, you will be told that the human mind cannot fathom God’s ways. It would seem as if God benefits from double standards of a kind that would make even affirmative action look just. When 12 miners were killed in a West Virginia mine explosion in January 2006, no one posted a sign saying: “For God’s sake, please explain: Why 1 for 13?” Innocent children were swept away in the 2005 tsunami, too, but believers blamed natural forces, not God.

The presumption of religious belief—not to mention the contradictory thinking that so often accompanies it—does damage to conservatism by resting its claims on revealed truth. But on such truth there can be no agreement without faith. And a lot of us do not have such faith—nor do we need it to be conservative.

Nonbelievers look elsewhere for a sense of order, valuing the rule of law for its transparency to all rational minds and debating Supreme Court decisions without reverting to mystical precepts or “natural law.” It is perfectly possible to revere the Founding Fathers and their monumental accomplishment without celebrating, say, “Washington’s God.” Skeptical conservatives even believe themselves to be good citizens, a possibility denied by Richard John Neuhaus in a 1991 article.

I have heard it said in the last six years that what makes conservatives superior to liberals is their religious faith—as if morality is impossible without religion and everything is indeed permitted, as the cliché has it. I wonder whether religious conservatives can spot the atheists among them by their deeds or, for that matter, by their political positions. I very much doubt it. Skeptical conservatives do not look into the abyss when they make ethical choices. Their moral sense is as secure as a believer’s. They do not need God or the Christian Bible to discover the golden rule and see themselves in others.

It is often said, in defense of religion, that we all live parasitically off of its moral legacy, that we can only dismiss religion because we are protected by the work it has already done on our behalf. This claim has been debated ad nauseam since at least the middle of the 19th century. Suffice it to say that, to many of us, Western society has become more compassionate, humane, and respectful of rights as it has become more secular. Just compare the treatment of prisoners in the 14th century to today, an advance due to Enlightenment reformers. A secularist could as easily chide today’s religious conservatives for wrongly ignoring the heritage of the Enlightenment.

A secular value system is of course no guarantee against injustice and brutality, but then neither is Christianity. America’s antebellum plantation owners found solid support for slaveholding in their cherished Bible, to name just one group of devout Christians who have brought suffering to the world.

So maybe religious conservatives should stop assuming that they alone occupy the field. Maybe they should cut back a bit on their religious triumphalism. Nonbelievers are good conservatives, too. As Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center has advised, it should be possible for conservatives to unite on policy without agreeing on theology. 

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

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Scott McConnell

Liberal and conservative, Left and Right are usually meaningful divisions, except in periods of flux, when they become mixed and jumbled until they are reformulated into a new constellation. When we began this magazine four years ago, we felt strongly that “conservative” was a label worth fighting for, and that the neoconservatives, for all their think tanks and journals, should not speak exclusively for the movement. That particular battle doesn’t seem so pressing anymore. To this day, if one were to list eight or ten issues that typically distinguish an American conservative from a liberal, TAC would align with National Review and The Weekly Standard on three-fourths of them. But it hardly matters. Few TAC readers or contributors feel much solidarity with those publications, or, to put it mildly, they with us. Political taxonomies break down in the face of one transcendent issue—and that is what has occurred over the past four years.

It is hardly unusual for one issue to define, or redefine, matters. American politics were largely organized for 40 years on where one stood on the Cold War. For a decade before that, much of American intellectual conflict turned on one’s view of Stalinism. And there were always figures who straddled the typical Left/Right divide: Sen. J. William Fulbright, for instance, opposed federal intervention in support of racial integration but is known to history as a leading “liberal” opponent of the Vietnam War and interventionist foreign policy. In retrospect, there probably was a common thread tying together the two stands—a skepticism about how much Washington know-how could remake a circumstance with deep and complicated roots. But that isn’t the point.

The defining issue of our day is the Iraq War and American foreign policy. It has been so since the