Reagan and the Roots of Conservatism:William A. Galston
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If Ronald Reagan was not a conservative, there is no modern American conservatism. But if Yuval Levin’s provocative new book, “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right,” is correct, Reagan was anything but a conservative on what Mr. Levin regards as the most fundamental division between left and right—Burke’s and Paine’s rival conceptions of political change.
In his 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense,” Paine famously proclaimed that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Burke, whom Mr. Levin regards as the progenitor of conservatism, saw the future as inextricably linked to the past and present. Abrupt or revolutionary change begins with social destruction and ends in self-destruction. Change that improves the world is rooted in respect for the tacit wisdom of the present. A true patriot and wise politician, Burke wrote, “always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country,” a thought that Mr. Levin summarizes as “we do not have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
This brings us to Ronald Reagan, whose attitude toward change was more like Paine’s than Burke’s. Reagan often quoted Paine’s “we have it in our power” affirmation and did so in one of the most systematic statements of his creed—his acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican convention.
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This detail is symptomatic of a larger truth: In its politically relevant form, modern American conservatism does not embody a theory of incremental change. On the contrary, conservatives from Reagan to the present day have been moved by the belief that America is headed in the wrong direction and needs to reverse course. Ever-growing government must shrink; the encouragement of risk-taking must replace the expansion of publicly provided security; the relentless growth of laws and regulations must yield to the rebirth of individual liberty.
The point is not whether contemporary conservatism is right or wrong, but rather that it is radical, not Burkean.
In fact, it is hard to be both an American and a follower of Burke. As Mr. Levin acknowledges, Burke rejects the theory of natural rights at the heart of the Declaration of Independence, and he denies that society is a contract that the people may alter when it ceases to secure those rights. In Burke’s view, Mr. Levin suggests, the early Americans “merely sought to continue and preserve the traditions of the English constitution and the privileges they had always enjoyed.” If that had been the case, the first two paragraphs of the Declaration would have been superfluous.
As Mr. Levin shows, Burke saw a limited role for reason in political life. Indeed, he argued that “political problems do not primarily concern truth or falsehood.” America’s Founders, who based their argument for independence on self-evident truths, disagreed with Burke. The authors of the Federalist essays in the 1780s argued that “the science of politics, . . . like most other sciences, has received great improvement,” such that they understood principles that theorists and statesmen of previous epochs grasped imperfectly or not at all.
Burke was skeptical, Mr. Levin says, about the ability of human beings to reason directly about abstract principles. That would mean that the deepest anti-Burkean of all was our greatest president, the founder of the Republican Party. In 1859, Abraham Lincoln wrote: “All honor to Jefferson —to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.” In this respect, among many others, today’s conservatives follow Lincoln, not Burke. The two Americans whose understanding of our founding most closely resembled Burke’s were Stephen Douglas and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.
Rejecting a politics of individual choice, Burke emphasizes instead the unchosen obligations that structure social life. Although he was familiar with the fact of social mobility, it was hardly central to his vision. Society as he saw it consists of ranks and orders, hierarchies and obligations, connected by sentiments of fear, awe and reverence. Since the withering of the Virginia aristocracy in the early 19th century, the dominant sentiment of American society has been social equality. Today’s conservatives embrace the ideal of equal opportunity as firmly as today’s liberals; the rival ideologies differ about the means to that end, not the end itself.
None of this is to say that Burke is irrelevant to contemporary politics. His insistence on the political centrality of passion and imagination is an essential corrective to theories that find room only for reason and self-interest. There are, as Burke said, abuses of liberty and pathologies of choice. There are limits to our ability to foresee the consequences of our policies, and therefore reasons for caution. As Mr. Levin suggests, there is room for Burkean practice if not Burkean theory.
Burke might just do as the source for a revived British conservatism. But for their theoretical inspiration, American conservatives will have to look elsewhere.
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left by Yuval Levin (Dec 3, 2013)
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