PAUL JOHNSON; LOOKING FOR A TRUE CONSERVATIVE
www.forbes.com/currentevents.
PAUL JOHNSON
People say that the election of Barack Obama and his pursuit of radical measures–from state-run health care to unilateral nuclear disarmament–marks the end of American conservatism. One Jeremiah, Sam Tanenhaus, has produced a predictable book, The Death of Conservatism. I do not sympathize with such defeatism. To begin with, conservatism is protean. One kind was neatly summed up by that bluff old Victorian the Duke of Cambridge: “It is said I am against change. I am not against change. I am in favor of change in the right circumstances. And those circumstances are when it can no longer be resisted.”
Then there are reactionaries. Margaret Thatcher is a good example. She did not agree with Winston Churchill’s principle that Labour’s nationalization program, introduced in the postwar period of 1945–51, could not be reversed. She simply reversed the program, privatizing British Airways, steel, water, electricity, gas and other industries.
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There are also romantic conservatives. These are the intellectual descendants of Edmund Burke, who see their views as creative and imaginative. They are quite happy to embark on change if it has the positive purpose of underpinning the security and stability of society. The outstanding recent American example of this is William F. Buckley, who left behind a school of his own, as well as his magazine, National Review.
A fourth category is made up of economists, ranging from Milton Friedman to Friedrich Hayek, who identify conservatism with capitalism. They cannot be opposed to change as such, for the chief source of change is capitalism itself–and never more so than today. The birth of industrial capitalism in the late 18th century was the biggest single upheaval in history. Moreover, it was merely the first in a series of technological transformations that continue at an accelerating pace.
One has only to list these first four varieties of conservatism to realize that there is no possibility of its death. The instinct to resist change, to recover the past or to romanticize it are part of human nature and will always find political expression. Capitalism is merely a term for the investment of money in wealth creation.
Conservatism, indeed, is so protean that one of its most powerful expressions is now found with the radical left. The noisiest single lobby in the world today is the Climate Change/Global Warming/Green alliance, of which the supposedly liberal President Obama is an enthusiastic member and which has the support of left-wing ideologues all over the world.
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Reading the list of qualifications for a true conservative, it is clear Obama is the best choice for the true conservative. But American conservatives want destruction, prohibition, extremism and
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This is essentially a reactionary movement, for its aim is to confine and even reverse capitalism, returning to a precapitalist arcadia in which woods and forests expand, the sea is no longer harvested, energy is strictly rationed and controls on human activity, especially wealth and job creation, are universal.
It’s no accident that this movement began as “conservation,” an old form of resistance to change, and got its first impetus from the publication of Rachel Carson’s romantic book The Sea Around Us. This form of conservatism has a new order of priorities, in which “preserving the planet” comes before the interests of mankind.
Indeed, many of its supporters would prefer a pristine world in which Homo sapiens remained primitive or did not exist at all. Their faith, like most forms of political absolutism, is a substitute for genuine religion. In fact it is, in one sense, a crude form of religion–pantheism, the worship of the Earth and all its manifestations.
No Danger of Conservatism’s Dying
In all this topsy-turvy confusion what’s needed is a clearheaded philosopher who can sort out the various forms of conservatism and show sensible-minded people, such as the regular readers of Forbes, which of the many varieties they should support.
A true conservative today should stress construction, encouragement, moderation and understanding instead of destruction, prohibition, extremism and slogans. A conservative thinks in terms of countless minor corrections and improvements based on experience and experiment rather than in terms of a universal, uniform solution based on theory and enforced by inflexible law.
A conservative, in the best sense, sees the world and its inhabitants as an interdependent organism, comprising innumerable local communities and territories, each adapting to particular conditions. A conservative is someone who goes with the grain of humanity and the nature of the physical world, rather than trying to regiment and fashion a utopia through force of law. And, needless to say, an acceptable conservative is not one who thinks all the answers are obvious but is a modest person who admits that problems are not easily solved, that perfection is unattainable in this world and that it is often necessary to admit mistakes, change one’s mind and start again.
Republicans should start looking now for a person who embodies these characteristics. If one can be found there should be no difficulty in putting Mr. Obama into his true historical place as an interesting and instructive one-term President.
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