Conservatism After Defeat

Is a Burkean political demeanor still possible?

My friend Ben Lewis has written a reflection on Conservatism and the Problem of Power in which he warns against a certain over-correction among those conservatives who are leaving the framework of a libertarian-influenced conservatism. If there were elements of conservatism as a movement that had adopted some of the liberal framing of the libertarian framework, then in leaving this behind (likely due to the successes of the political Left in recent years), Ben warns against not going too far the other way into a full-blown thrust for pure power.

I cannot help but think he somewhat has my own developments in mind, as I read through the approach of his article— if not, then I am a seething narcissist; so I hope he does! Regardless, I do see myself in some of his points and I would like to take this opportunity not so much to “respond” but rather to interact with his observations for the benefit of those seeking clarity as our world enters politically unknown waters.

Ben is not a libertarian, so he sees in the legitimate function of statecraft the possibility of participation in the political elements of the culture wars. That is, there is a role for the exercise of actual power, by the state, in dealing with those aspects of this increasingly political war that affect the common good. However, “suspicion of power is a foundational tenet of conservative political theory” and therefore to lose this demeanor in the will to wage political battles would constitute abandoning the “conservative mind” altogether.

And then he hones in on those who might be taking lessons from Carl Schmitt (me) by claiming: “This is even more true of the suggestion that politics can be reduced to a winner take all battle between inveterate enemies.” We will get to this.

What struck me most about this essay is that it seems to also reflect the differences that Paul Gottfried had with Russell Kirk during the 1990s. I would like to emphasize that it is my understanding that Kirk and Gottfried were on good terms (I am a year into a Gottfried biography project and have correspondence) and mostly in agreement regarding the meaning of Conservatism against the Neo-conservatives. Both of them rejected the universalist-ideological conservatism of the postwar Media Conservatives and ground their conservatism in place, people, and empirical heritage.

However, Kirk would emphasize TS Eliot’s permanent things and the enduring treasures of our past that could not ultimately be taken away by the evils of the Long Revolution. Gottfried, on the other hand, had much more an interpretation that emphasized our political doom.

Gottfried once noted in a symposium in celebration of Kirk, published at the Kirk center:

Moreover, my quarrel with Russell has less to do with his conservative vision than with the application of that vision to the present age. In my view, Russell’s picture of a conservative order, as put forth in the first edition of The Conservative Mind, has no significant connection to political and social life for most of the current residents of the United States and Western Europe. And that might have been the case even when his book was published in 1953. Reading Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community about the disintegration of modern society, a consumerist culture, and the pseudo-scientific administrative state, a work produced at about the same time as The Conservative Mind, one obtains a more up-to-date sense of the course of modern Western societies than one does from Kirk’s magnum opus.

This is relevant because I think it strikes at the heart of Ben’s urge, which is built upon the great founder of Conservatism as a meaningful Western political tradition, Edmund Burke. In my essay contribution to Gottfried’s paleoconservative anthology, I emphasized three students of power that are actively being read by what I called “post-libertarians.” They were James Burnham, Carl Schmitt, and Antonio Gramsci. Of these, only Schmitt can claim to have been influenced by Burke; but Schmitt himself began to see Burke’s world as having been structurally eliminated by the very Devil that Burke warned against in his tirade against the “new conquering empire of light and reason” (which was the French-sourced political rationalism embodied in Jacobinism).

So we have here two streams of thought that might criticize from different angles the liberalism of libertarianism, and the libertarianism of the fusionist project. It is my personal opinion, perhaps disagreeable to Ben, that both of these streams of thought are useful and productive as Rightist counters to the Leftwing insurgency. I don’t hold it at all against Ben that he may not be interested in the post-Hobbesian “Science of Power,” but I hope he would believe me that I love the world and demeanor of Kirk and the Imaginative Conservatism he inspired. Hence my Tolkienesque Substack title.

Ben quotes Burke to say that

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights that we may enjoy others; and we choose rather to be happy citizens than subtle disputants.

And he continues to quote the eminent British Burkean Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton, one of Burke’s best modern interpreters, criticized the kind of man who would “set himself against all forms of mediation, compromise and debate, and against the legal and moral norms that give a voice to the dissenter and sovereignty to the ordinary person.”

These are employed to express the conservative hesitancy toward using government as a weapon of power against enemies, a function of state that would be more the emphasis of Schmitt and the Rightwing reactionaries in the present moment. The difference between Gottfried and Kirk would rest in whether or not Burke’s statement is still applicable. If Kirk would say this advice reflects a permanent aspect of government, then Gottfried would say it is context-and-time-bound.

Another way of looking at it is that Burke’s warnings against the ideological absolutism of Thomas Paine emphasized that undoing an entire political system would not return us to peace and harmony, but to political absolutism and political chaos.

Burke was very clear that in the beginning of kingdoms, politics was built on blood and violence, on the distinction between friends and enemies. Yet it was the accomplishment of the historical process, of history and experience, that nations could earn themselves a type of political scenario highlighted above by Burke and Scruton. He warned, however, that seeking to tear down this achievement due to perceived imperfections would destroy civilization. In one of the most beautiful paragraphs in the Anglo tradition of letters, he wrote:

All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

What Gottfried and Schmitt and others of the “Science of Power” stream would emphasize is that this already happened. We cannot employ Scruton’s Burkean framework to the extent we may want to because Burke’s warnings 230+ years ago were not heeded. We are a conquered people who are not advocating that we return to the pre-Burkian time of the friend-enemy nature of politics, but rather that we have had the return forced upon us. It is not that Gottfried might think Burke was wrong, it is that he was right, and we should have listened; for his wildest warnings became true.

None of this is to say that Ben’s article contains anything disagreeable. I do think that conservatives should pay attention to the warnings of Kirk and Burke and Scruton about the problems of power. They do represent the very best of the conservative tradition; it cannot be denied that when the state absorbs the authority and hegemony of the civil institutions up into itself, the health of the nation is undermined. This is the essence of Anglo political traditionalism. And I absolutely agree; and will admit that the online hard right will ignore this fact, therein making me more traditionalist than they.

But if Ben senses in people like me an urge to throw off these warnings, it is not because I don’t believe in the idea of the prudent exercise of power, but because we may be further down the road than Kirk anticipated in his lifetime. I share with Scruton (and no doubt Ben himself), a deep pessimism (which is distinct from despair) about our trajectory, but it may be unique to people in the Gottfried stream to interpret our situation as being beyond the horizons of the possibility of a Burkean political demeanor.

If we have already lost the world picture advanced by Burke, Kirk, Nisbet, and Scruton, it is not the case that I consider them wrong but, painfully and with a somber heart, see the world as having been already remade. And this rebirth means we must reconsider the role of the state in moving forward. It may no longer be possible to see “power [as] gentle and obedience [as] liberal.”