Part II (See September 6th post for Part I)
The Conservatives
On the conservative side, we have Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet. The title of Kirk’s contribution, “Chirping Sectaries,” is taken from T. S. Eliot’s term for a “chirping sect,” which Kirk defines as “an ideological clique forever splitting into sects still smaller and odder, but rarely conjugating” (Freedom and Virtue, p. 120). Kirk adamantly rejects libertarians, accusing them of a “fanatic attachment to a simple solitary principle . . . the notion of personal freedom as the whole end of the civil order, and indeed of human existence.” As previously noted, none of the libertarians cited above would agree with Kirk’s contention. He states further that the only thing they share with conservatives is “detestation of collectivism” (Ibid., p 113). Towards the end of his short essay, Kirk lists several areas of disagreement with libertarians, which indicate that in some cases, he is sparring with a straw man, or an extreme version of libertarianism: 1) conservatives believe in a “transcendent moral order” whereas libertarians are materialists; 2) order is the primary need of a society and must precede the establishment of liberty; 3) libertarians view self-interest as being the “cement of society,” whereas conservatives find it in friendship (Aristotle) and Christian love; 4) libertarians believe in the goodness of human nature whereas conservatives view humans as sinful, fallen, and imperfect; 5) libertarians view the state as “the great oppressor,” whereas in the conservative view “the state is ordained by God”; 6) “The conservative regards the libertarian as impious” (pp. 121 – 122). While all or some of Kirk’s claims could be true of extreme libertarians, he makes some rather sweeping assumptions. For example, a libertarian could believe in a transcendent moral order; a limited government libertarian could believe in the importance of law and order for establishing a civil society where the freedoms of others are respected; and the Founding Fathers based the Constitution on self-interest rather than virtue because they believed, considering man’s imperfect nature (#4 above), it was more practical (see George Carey, “How Conservatives and Liberals View The Federalist, The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1989, p. 8). Kirk’s rationale for his position is that if a libertarian “believes in an enduring moral order, the Constitution of the United States, free enterprise, and old American ways – why, actually he is a conservative with imperfect understanding of the general terms of politics” (p. 119). Kirk has a point, if one defines libertarian as someone who belongs to the rather left leaning Libertarian Party, or an advocate of anarcho-libertarianism, but his rather rigid definition of libertarian seems also to give evidence of an “imperfect understanding of the general terms of politics.”
Some of Kirk’s more interesting observations have to do with tolerance, or what Burke has called “licentious toleration.” Those who have read Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) may be reminded of his point that “tolerance” and “openness” are considered to be the primary virtues in modern liberal democracies. Kirk writes:
It is consummate folly to tolerate every variety of opinion, on every topic, out of devotion to an abstract “liberty”; for opinion soon finds expression in action, and the fanatics whom we tolerated will not tolerate us when they have power.” (p. 116)
In a post-9/11 world with Islamic jihadists subverting Western culture from within in Europe and America while demanding the protection of our laws, when in fact, once they are in power, they will deny us the protection of their law, Kirk’s comment seems prescient. The nineteenth-century French writer, Louis Veuillot, wrote the following: “When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle” (Quoted in James Burnham, The Suicide of the West, p. 237). This is rather obviously true in radical Islam’s war against the West: They see Western law and multiculturalism as a weakness and vulnerability that they can exploit until the day that Sharia law can be imposed upon Western democracies. While freedom of speech is foundational for a free republic, does that right extend to our enemies who are trying to destroy us, and replace our free institutions with despotism? Or even closer to home, will the left tolerate the free speech of the right, now that they are in power? They surely haven’t allowed freedom of speech at university campuses where leftists prevail. The free speech of the opposition to Obama’s healthcare plan has come under increasing attack from the left, although the left’s dissent against the Iraq War was surely tolerated during the Bush administration.
Finally, I wouldn’t be doing Kirk justice if I didn’t mention the emphasis he places on tradition. For example, he wrote: In our time, the real danger is that custom and prescription and tradition may be overthrown utterly among us . . . by neoterism, the lust for novelty, and that men will be no better than the flies of summer, oblivious to the wisdom of their ancestors . . .” (Ibid., p. 116). As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has argued in Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? (1988), a tradition of thought is not a dead dogma, but rather a living body of thought that is constantly being replenished by new interpretations. The danger arises, as Kirk points out, when our fascination for novelty and current fads leads to a quality of thought that lacks depth and historical continuity, becoming obsolete in a generation or less instead of withstanding the tribulations of the ages.
Robert Nisbet’s piece, “Uneasy Cousins,” is certainly more conciliatory than Kirk’s; after all, he at least refers to libertarians as cousins. He lists four things that conservatives and libertarians share in common: 1) a common dislike of government intervention in the lives of citizens; 2) “equality before the law”; 3) “the necessity of freedom, most notably economic freedom”; and 4) “a common dislike of war,” in particular the “war-society” under Wilson and FDR. Finally, he notes that “there is a shared dislike by libertarians and conservatives of what today passes for liberalism: the kind that is so widely evident in the schools, the established churches, the universities, and, above all, the media” (Freedom and Virtue, pp. 16 – 18).
In Nisbet’s listing of the differences between conservatives and libertarians, perhaps the most significant difference has to do with the libertarian view of “individualism,” which stands in opposition to all or most social structures, and not just the state, whereas to conservatives like Nisbet, intermediate associations, like the family, church, and local associations are believed to foster both freedom and order as a buffer to state tyranny. The conservative view on this issue can be traced back to Burke’s idea of “little platoons” as being the essential building blocks of society: “To love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections” (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, p. 53). But Nisbet, who was mainly influenced by Tocqueville earlier in his career, when he presented the idea of intermediate associations in his The Quest for Community (1953), considered himself to be a classical liberal like Tocqueville. In Democracy in America (1835), Tocqueville wrote admiringly about the American propensity for forming what he called “voluntary associations”: "Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations” (Vol. 2, p 114). (According to Gary North, it was after reading Kirk’s The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, also published in 1953, that Nisbet began to identify with the conservative philosophy that can be traced back to Burke (see “Robert Nisbet: Conservative Sociologist,” LewRockwell.com, August 15, 2002). However, according to Brad Lowell Stone, who is more authoritative on Nisbet [see “Robert Nisbet: A True Sociologist,” The Intercollegiate Review, Spring 1998, p. 39], Nisbet was simultaneously influence by Tocqueville and Burke, after returning to UC Berkeley after World War II, and prior to publishing The Quest for Community in 1953.) While Tocqueville was enthusiastic about the tendency of Americans to belong to “voluntary associations,” he was critical of the individualistic and egalitarian tendencies in American democracy. In his critique of American “individualism,” Tocqueville wrote: “individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life,” until eventually “it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness” (Democracy in America, Vol. 2, p. 104). He believed that individualism would lead “each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows, and to draw apart with his family and his friends,” and thus, leaving “society at large to itself” (Ibid.).
Tocqueville, unlike most modern libertarians, did not conceive of the individual and the state as being opposed to one another, rather, as Brad Lowell Stone has written, “he describes ‘individualism’ and the centralization of state power as rising in tandem, both rooted in the passion for equality” (“Mediating Structures,” First Principles, 10/09/08). Undoubtedly due to his knowledge of the excesses of the French Revolution, Tocqueville did not consider equality and liberty to be compatible goals in a free society, and in a democracy, he believed that equality would eventually win out: “The taste which men have for liberty, and that which they feel for equality, are, in fact, two different things; and I am not afraid to add that, in democratic nations, they are two unequal things” (Ibid., p. 100). He believed that equality was the passion of his democratic age, and he noted that liberty was more fragile than equality. As we can witness in our own times, to destroy equality, once it’s institutionalized, is quite a laborious process, as Tocqueville recognized – “Its social conditions must be modified, its laws abolished, its opinions superseded, its habits changed” – “political liberty is more easily lost” (p. 101). The purpose of this rather lengthy digression is to point to the history of this notion that, as Nisbet has argued, intermediate associations have served an essential function in both preserving social order and providing a buffer against the intrusions and tyrannies of the state. Without these social structures, the individual is left at the mercy of the state and its laws, which, as a study of history reveals, can quickly become tyrannical without a more diffuse system of power. In more recent times, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus have taken up the cause of intermediate institutions under the banner of what they call “mediating structures” (Brad Lowell Stone, “Mediating Structures”).
Nisbet mentions a couple of other differences between libertarianism and conservatism: For example, different attitudes about authority and about the nation. About the former, Nisbet has observed, “The existence of authority in the social order staves off encroachment of power from the political sphere. Conservatism, from Burke on, has perceived society as a plurality of authorities” (“Uneasy Cousins,” p. 19). As I argued above, Nisbet believed that libertarians were generally opposed to authority residing in the mediating structures of the social order, and with the collapse of all intermediate authority, all authority would have to reside in either the individual or the state. The libertarian assumption would seem to be that liberty is at odds with authority and law, except to the extent that they guarantee individual rights. But can the state be trusted? If it cannot be trusted, are we left with anarchy? As an example of the breakdown of social order (admittedly not the best of orders): J. L. Talmon has written that during the French Revolution, “Liberty was at war with morality and order. There was a danger of anarchy” (J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 1952, p. 108). After the destruction of the Old Regime, there was no order or authority in France, leading to violence and anarchy in the streets. There can be no freedom for the peaceful and law-abiding when there’s anarchy and violence because the law of the jungle prevails. Robespierre’s solution was to redefine liberty as conforming to the General Will (of the people) and the Revolution, which in practice meant the will of Robespierre and the Jacobins, and to take over violence as a state monopoly of the Committee of Public Safety, to be used against those condemned as enemies of the Revolution. The point being not that the Jacobins were an example of libertarianism gone awry, but rather that with the breakdown of social order, anarchy will generally prevail until it is replaced by tyranny.
Finally, I’ll turn to what Nisbet conceived to be the difference in attitude towards the nation between conservatives and libertarians. Consistent with what has already been said about intermediate associations, authority, and social order, Nisbet referred to Burke’s love of country and “’the smaller patriotisms’ of family and neighborhood” (Ibid., p. 23). According to Nisbet, nationalism, though it could be excessive, was in a rather “tenuous condition” in America and the nations of the West: “Patriotism, the cement of the nation, has come to be an almost shameful thing” (Ibid.). In more recent times, there has been a disagreement between traditional conservatives and Neo-cons over the definition of the nation. The latter group, which has included Irving Kristol, Bill Bennett, and Jack Kemp, has posited that America is a “creedal” or “propositional” nation. Bennett and Kemp have declared: "The American national identity is based on a creed, on a set of principles and ideas." Defining the nation in more traditionally conservative terms, Pat Buchanan has quoted the French philosopher, Ernest Renan:
A nation is a living soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the common possession of a rich heritage of memories; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to preserve worthily the undivided inheritance which has been handed down. (Buchanan, “Nation or Notion?” Conservative Resources)
Buchanan also quotes former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as follows:
To be a nation, a people must believe they are a nation and that they share a common ancestry, history, and destiny. Whatever ethnic group to which we may belong, we Americans must see ourselves as of a unique and common nationality in order to remain a nation.
I think it goes without saying that people are more willing to defend with their lives "a common ancestry, history, and destiny" than just a proposition or idea, disconnected from any strong cultural loyalties.
To conclude this section on the conservative position, neither Nisbet nor Kirk was enthusiastic about a conservative-libertarian fusion. But it should be clear from their arguments that both men were arguing against a rather extreme version of libertarianism, either the anarcho-libertarianism of Rothbard, who in his later years became more conservative, or the left-leaning libertarianism of the Libertarian Party. Nisbet said that “conservative-libertarian” was “oxymoronic” (Ibid., p. 18), while Kirk, as we quoted him above, described any libertarian who believed in an “enduring moral order, the Constitution of the United States, free enterprise, and old American ways,” to be actually a confused conservative. So despite the disagreeable (cantankerous?) positions of our conservative exemplars, perhaps there is a little more room for a rapprochement than either thinker would admit.
Conservative-Libertarian Fusionism
Representing fusionist thought in Freedom and Virtue are former North Caroline Senator, John P. East, and M. Stanton Evans, an advocate of Meyer’s fusionism. East summarizes traditionalism, with its classical Greek and biblical roots, as valuing transcendence, and piety as the “preeminent virtue,” while critical of the secularism and religious skepticism of the libertarians. He argues that “man is not self-produced, nor is his fundamental nature malleable” (“Conservatism and Libertarianism: Vital Complements,” Freedom and Virtue, p. 82). He does believe, however, that conservatives and libertarians do have some common cause and that they share: 1) the belief in “the central role of the concept of the individual,” and 2) a “unity in opposition to the egalitarian-collectivist bent of the modern age” and its varieties of statism and totalitarianism (Ibid., p. 85). Although he states his position in objective terms, East clearly sides with Kirk and Nisbet in his emphasis on “a sense of history, tradition, and community,” and when he goes on to say that according to traditionalists, “impiety . . . is the ultimate philosophical error”:
The philosopher is no longer to pursue understanding of the world and to attune himself to it; rather, he is to change it to conform to his heady vision of what ought to be; that is, he is to gain dominion over being. (p. 85 – 86)
Of course, East’s criticisms of modern thought apply doubly to progressives, egalitarians, and statists, who, following the Jacobin lead, aspire to mold man into their image of perfection and virtue, as most libertarians are not big advocates of social engineering. But unlike Rothbard, East does not see Meyer as primarily a libertarian, but rather as a Christian theorist with libertarian leanings: “it is the symbol of the Incarnation which establishes the individual permanently and irrevocably ‘as the ordering principle, the fount and end of social being’” (p. 87). Following Meyer, East claimed that the first principle of American conservatism was “the free man seeking Christian virtue in a community of limited government,” but “coerced virtue was a contradiction in terms” (Ibid., pp. 87 – 88).
M. Stanton Evans, as a follower of Meyer, was the greatest advocate of fusionism during these debates, although Evans considered “fusion” to be a “misnomer” because he thought the separation of traditionalist and libertarian to be an “unnatural” separation of what should be a “natural and necessary unity” (“Toward a New Intellectual History,” Freedom and Virtue, p. 125). And like East, Evans points to the Biblical tradition, particularly the Christian Middle Ages in Evan’s case, as the source of the Western tradition of “individual liberty, limited government, and representative institutions,” which he believed to be rooted in the “ psychological individualism” resulting from the Christian belief in the “immortal, individuated soul” (Ibid., pp. 126 - 27). So Evans’ New Intellectual History was essentially an effort to trace our free institutions to the Christian feudal system that was a “network of contracts” proceeding from the Biblical idea of a covenant, from the Magna Carta to the Mayflower Compact and colonial government in America. He concluded that it was a mistake to consider our libertarian institutions to be the invention of the Enlightenment:
[T]he institutions of limited, representative government, far from being products of secular intuition, were derivative from our religious heritage generally and the political practices of the medieval era specifically. It is a conceit of modernity to suppose that these ideas were invented by the theoreticians of the Enlightenment. (p. 131).
My presentation of Meyer’s fusionism is hampered somewhat by the fact that I’m not directly familiar with Meyer’s work, however Evans, as a close associate of Meyer’s is a reliable exponent of Meyer’s thought. Lee Edwards in “Conservative Consensus” (Heritage Foundation, January 22, 2007, p. 3), has written that Meyer assembled a group of conservative thinkers in 1964, to answer the question, “What is conservatism?” Included in this diverse group were such diverse thinkers as Russell Kirk and Friedrich Hayek, representing the traditionalist and classical liberal poles of the movement. Despite their numerous differences enumerated above, surprisingly enough, they did come to an agreement on several basic tenets as follows:
• They accept “an objective moral order” of
“immutable standards by which human conduct
should be judged.”
• Whether they emphasize human rights and
freedoms or duties and responsibilities, they
unanimously value “the human person” as the
center of political and social thought.
• They oppose liberal attempts to use the State “to
enforce ideological patterns on human beings.”
• They reject the centralized power and direction
necessary to the “planning” of society.
• They join in defense of the Constitution “as originally
conceived.”
• They are devoted to Western civilization and
acknowledge the need to defend it against the
“messianic” intentions of Communism.
Concluding Remarks
One thing that has become clear to me in re-reading these debates is that the conservatives are, in fact, arguing against the more extreme versions of libertarianism, anarcho-libertarianism and the socially leftist libertarianism of the Libertarian Party. The latter is generally perceived as representing the position of libertarianism in America today because of the tendency on the part of the public to equate the Libertarian Party with the voice of libertarianism. There are, however, many small “L” libertarians who do not subscribe to all the positions of the LP. These include followers of the classical liberalism of Hayek, Tocqueville, and some of America’s Founding Fathers. Whatever we call those who have a strong belief in liberty and limited government – classical liberals, libertarians, or conservatives – there does seem to be enough commonality to form an alliance against the radical left and their fellow travelers in America. In fact, I would venture to say that most of those on the conservative right end of the political spectrum have an assortment of beliefs that combine libertarian and conservative elements. It’s only at the extreme, purist range of the spectrum that these uneasy cousins are even aware of their differences for the most part. It is only when libertarianism becomes a doctrinaire belief that isolates liberty from the other ideals of conservatism, or when conservatism downplays the importance of liberty, that the conflicts ensue. There’s also quite a bit of truth to what East and Evans have said: perhaps it was no coincidence that our free institutions arose in the West, with roots in the fertile ground of classical antiquity and biblical traditions, and synthesized in the Middle Ages into a Christian culture, before bearing fruit in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Why is this important, this fusion or alliance of conservatism and libertarianism? In the words of fellow blogger, Francis W. Porretto:
I hope to see a continuing refinement of libertarian-conservative or “fusionist” thought. I do what I can to advance it. Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Larry Elder, and others of greater stature than myself are also working on it, from their particular perspectives. It is the most important effort under way in political thought. Unless it succeeds, and allows us to build a single front—united on critical matters and tolerant of divergence on lesser ones—with which to oppose the statism and special-interest-propelled panderings of the Left, freedom in America is doomed. (Francis W. Porretto, “The Conservative-Libertarian Schism,” Eternity Road, November 23, 2002)
It is important because as Porretto has said, and as I have said in several previous articles, unless conservatives and libertarians can put their differences aside to oppose the statism of the left, “freedom in America is doomed.” Neither conservatives nor libertarians are strong enough to go it alone: United we stand, divide we fall. The left has all the advantages with their control of all the organs of cultural transmission: the media, the universities, the foundations, the schools. All we have going for us is the American people: their common sense, their natural conservatism, and their love of liberty.
