What Are Conservatives Conserving?
I keep wondering about what conservatives mean when they identify as “conservative.” Both conservatism and liberalism are awfully confused in American politics and not at all self-evident. So what are conservatives conserving?
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines “to conserve” as to keep and protect something from damage, change, or waste. The online Collins English Dictionary defines it similarly: to conserve something is to protect it from harm, loss, or change. It goes on to state that, “If you conserve a supply of something, you use it carefully so that it lasts a long time.” Common synonyms for conserve include protect, keep, save, preserve, take care of, and even hoard. Indeed, the English word “conserve” derives directly from Latin cōnservāre — to keep safe, to save, to protect. Thus we must ask what conservatives are conserving, if anything? Indeed, when it comes to ecology and the environment, so-called conservatives certainly aren’t for conservation.
American Conservatives are also more likely to identify as Christian, but the ascendant brand of economically rapacious “conservatism” that aligns with a muscular American form of Christianity which touts family values and all the rest doesn’t seem very interested in conserving God’s creation these days. You know, the results of all that conjuring ex nihilo described in the first chapter of Genesis, which God called good. No, they seem to take their cue from the part about humans being granted dominion: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Ch 1, V 28). Which didn’t really come to pass until well into the Industrial Revolution and the onset of carbon-based capitalist civilization. But multiply and subdue have by any measure certainly now come to pass. Note that God commands humanity to “replenish the earth” here too. Yet that’s fine print. The Bible can be used to justify both pro- and anti-environmental positions even though conservative Christians have gone more for the latter these days. But they don’t have to, nor should they. Indeed, there are some encouraging signs of an emergent Green Christianity that is not only welcome, but also painfully overdue. Yet Christian conservatism is nonetheless mostly giving the middle finger to God’s creation these days. And I am only quarreling with Christianity to the extent that the religion I was raised within is used to buttress the hypocritically “conservative” position.
Once upon a time, conservatism actually lived up to its namesake — or at least espoused the ideal of doing so. As a political philosophy, the original conservatives looked to the past for guidance, promoting traditional social institutions in the face of change and circumstance. For the original originals of the 17th-century English-speaking world, this meant upholding the feudal aristocratic hierarchy governed under the divine right of kings. No individual liberty or personal freedoms here, and certainly nothing about equality or democracy. Of course, change being constant and history being messy meant that conservatism morphed over time — making concessions to constitutional government introduced by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, for example — yet it continued to espouse a philosophy of resisting change by adhering to the social institutions bequeathed by the past, traditions unfriendly to the coming headwinds of capitalism. Conservatism was a worldview that clung to tradition and tried to slow down change, if entirely resisting it proved impossible.
Many see 18th-century English statesman Edmund Burke as a philosophical founder of modern conservatism, and he is indeed exemplary of change and adaptation within the conservative tradition. He accepted the liberal ideals of private property and economic philosophy of Adam Smith, but believed that the business and commercial classes should remain subordinate to the aristocracy and economics kept under the heel of “conservative” social traditions and ethics. He favored an established church while also supporting a degree of toleration for religious difference. These were seen as the best ways to ensure moral stability and good governance. Thus while he was critical of metropolitan British exploitation of the American colonies, he nonetheless opposed their independence. He was also staunchly critical of the French Revolution, which he saw as destroying the traditional fabric of society and state. All of which made Burke-the-Conservative a leading skeptic of democracy.
Change and history being what they are, conservatism continued to mutate in the 19th century, responding to further transformations in society, political economy, and empire within the expanding global sphere of colonial European capitalism. After the end of slavery and repeal of the infamous Corn Laws in the UK, conservatism began to embrace free trade and limited democracy, which strengthened it as a grassroots political force, no longer defending aristocracy and landed wealth, even — ironically, in hindsight — supporting a more generous vision of the welfare state for a time by contrast with the punitive position of the liberals. Yet while conservatives opposed attempts at expanding middle-class representation in Parliament, they acknowledged that electoral reform could not be reversed so long as traditional church and state institutions were not eroded any further. Tensions between the traditional aristocratic and ascending business class wings of conservatism led to their split in the mid-19th century over the matter of free trade, with traditionalists favoring protectionism and the commercial wing going for the new free trade economic philosophy in ascendance. The majority of conservatives sided with the protectionists as compared with a minority of free marketeers who joined forces with the Whigs and Radicals to form the Liberal Party. Yet soon thereafter, the mainstream Conservative Party adopted the doctrine of free trade, laying the groundwork for the 20th-century plotline with which we are more familiar. Conservatives had become Liberals!
Though the plotlines in the UK and USA are in many ways parallel, their nomenclature subsequently diverged at the surface level. After a period of Liberal party dominance before WWI in the UK, Conservatives regained power and control of government, making conservatism the reigning ideology of inter-war Britain. And up to the 1980s under Thatcher, Conservatives accepted policies of social welfare, redistribution of resources, and national stewardship of industry. Yep, you read that correctly. Republicans also generally supported similar welfare state policies and programs in the USA until the era of Reagan. Yet during the last quarter of the 20th century, the socioeconomic ideology of “neoliberalism” has become ascendant — promoting less government, lower taxes, deregulation, and privatization of everything under the sun — infecting American Democrats and British Labourites alike. However neoliberalism is touted in its most enthusiastic and extreme form by Conservatives and Republicans on each side of the pond. Only they don’t call themselves liberals, which is even more confusing in the US, where Democrats are now referred to as “liberals” despite the fact that their more pro-redistributive, technically Social-Democratic policies make them less liberal than conservatives in the original meanings of the terms. But Republicans only became associated with Conservatism since the 1950s. The party now represents a complex and incoherent mix of supposedly “conservative” positions ranging from traditional family, law and order, the right to bear arms, ostensibly Christian values, and anti-Communism to favoring less taxes, small government, limited regulation, and free enterprise. So-called neoconservatives push militarism, American empire, and foreign interventionism abroad; never mind that this requires a big strong central government.
It is really only the so-called social or moral conservatives who tout the “traditional” family, oppose abortion and gay rights, and the like whose position strives to maintain the original meaning of conservatism as that which resists change by clinging to the past (never mind that that past never existed). These folks rose to cultural and political prominence during the culture wars of the late 20th century and remain a potent force. Yet it is economic “conservatism” that beats at the heart of contemporary conservatism — whether or not one is Christian, or neocon. The movement’s center of gravity is most defined by its espousal of limited government, regressive taxation, deregulation, privatization and what they take to be self-reliance. This is essentially neoliberalism masquerading as “conservatism,” as we have already seen: a doctrine of predatory capitalism, promoting economic growth and profit-seeking at every turn. Which is why so many analysts of capitalism — no matter their political position: pro- or anti- or somewhere in-between — have so often characterized the underlying logic of capitalism as creative destruction, as the laissez-faire Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter once put it. This is because capitalism as a cultural system is always changing, expanding, innovating, exploiting, turning things upside down, wringing them out and moving on, liquidating, financializing — in other words, radically and relentlessly reorganizing as much as possible. And now the global scale and frenzied intensity of capitalism’s creative destruction have reached truly epic proportions, threatening the very viability of the climate, human civilization, and life on the planet altogether. How else are we to understand a self-righteously “conservative” anti-masking ideology in an era of Coronachaos?
I recently asked some Midwestern conservatives I know what it means to them and how the language of “conservatism” is relevant to their worldview. For them, it boils down to less government and lower taxes, which they take to mean conserving resources and not wasting them, given that governments are considered inherently inefficient and corrupt, therefore wasteful. This may sound good as a glittering generality but it is more myth than reality. America’s most prosperous period was built upon strong central government control and activity within the economy facilitated by a progressive tax system after WWII. Plus the now incantatory neoliberal-conservative invocations of “free markets” are also historically skewed, given that the successful 19th-century American and earlier 18th-century British processes of industrialization producing economic prosperity and national power were predicated upon forms of state investment and economic intervention that represent the exact opposite of what contemporary conservatives understand as “free” markets. Which is not to say that there aren’t any inefficiencies or forms of corruption in government. Only that fixing government’s problems should be predicated on transforming our venal and money-driven political culture across the entire partisan spectrum, and that big corporations suffer from the same problems of inefficiency, corruption, and bureaucracy leveled at the public sector. Indeed, the history of privatization is one of endless corrupt insider dealing and predatory schemes to obtain rights for value extraction that make economies less competitive — not more so.
Which leads me to the heart of my argument: contemporary American “conservatives” have become full-on capitalists, which means that conservatism has entirely abdicated its original position, an irony of epic historical proportions. If capitalism means creative destruction (and by everyone’s rendering, it does), conservatism has become an oxymoron in that it promotes the most radical philosophy of change ever known in human history. “Conservative” has become a hypocritical placeholder for corporatist politics, the empty eye of the storm. Therefore conservatives don’t deserve their namesake any more. Indeed, in yet another ironic turn, it is environmentalists and those of us concerned about anthropogenic climate change who have become “conservatives” despite this somehow being considered a leftist or progressive position.
Consider this: let’s say just for the sake of debate that climate change may not be happening (an extreme minority position) or may not be anthropogenically driven (the new compromise position among “conservatives” who have to at least concede some ground to the overwhelming science on the matter, else they look like the Taliban). The overwhelming scientific consensus is that it’s not, but let’s say that it is for the moment. A truly conservative posture in relation to change is one that resists and tries to slow it down even when unable to stop it. Indeed, conservatism in the literal sense of the term is skeptical about anything producing change and cautious about a changing future, so why aren’t conservatives the first in line when it comes to doing anything and everything possible to resist the terrifying forms of anthropogenic planetary change affecting God’s creation that just might be hurtling down the pike toward us, as the overwhelming international scientific consensus avers? Because they’re not conservative, that’s why. A conservative approach should act on the possibility of epic planetary climate change and the unfathomable consequences it brings. Conservatism should be cautious about change, especially radical change that threatens the viability of civil society and democratic governance, not to mention civilization altogether. Anyone who isn’t mobilizing to respond to anthropogenic climate change — by which I mean much, much more than just the impact of carbon-based industrial civilization on the climate — can no longer call themselves conservative.
On the contrary, “conservatives” are fundamentalist believers in radical change and their beliefs have become a self-fulfilling prophecy on a scale none of us can entirely fathom at this point. No, conservatives aren’t conservative — they’re creative destructionists. And the supreme irony is that their political-economic philosophy is accelerating our collective path toward a disastrous future that will necessitate highly centralized forms of governance in response. Imagine that: Big Government and State Intervention brought to you by Conservatives. And it’s coming sooner than you think.
