Part one of a two-part series by Transylvania University political scientist Don Dugi focuses on the term “American conservative” in this presidential election year. Part two, scheduled for the April 13 edition, will look at modern American liberalism.
This election season brings us yet another hot-button term. Like the health care reform battle and its focus on “socialism,” current campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination focus on the term “conservative.” It seems time for another clarification, especially because, in the Republican primaries, all candidates have been claiming themselves to be authentic conservatives and claiming that their opponents are inauthentic or false conservatives.
And the brands of conservative are diverse. You have Romney, who is historically primarily a fiscal conservative (and somewhat moderate on social issues); Santorum, who is a strong social conservative; Gingrich, who claims to be both fiscally and socially conservative; and Paul, who is libertarian (fiscally “conservative” and socially libertarian). And in addition, there are various groups attaching to each candidate (although results like South Carolina cause wonder — the Evangelicals voted for Gingrich, a thrice-married serial philanderer and a Catholic convert).
The agendas for each type of conservative are quite different. For the fiscal conservatives, it is primarily no taxes on the “haves,” although some do talk about reduced spending or balanced budgets, but those goals often fall away when there is money to be made from government policy. The social conservatives focus on abortion or gay marriage, as do many religious conservatives. Libertarians want less government (evidently taking infrastructure, material and political, for granted), ironically advocating a radical version of classical liberalism.
Which raises the question: What exactly is an “authentic conservative” (if there is such a thing)?
The short answer is there is not. As indicated above, there are multiple versions of conservative. Indeed, the divisions and tensions in conservatism are obvious even in Conservapedia’s attempt to define “conservative,” wherein the authors quote Ronald Reagan claiming more individual freedom as the basis of conservatism but then go on to state that “the sine qua non of a conservative is someone who rises above his personal self-interest and promotes moral and economic values beneficial to all.” Clearly pursuing one’s individual freedom can subvert promoting “values beneficial to all” (witness the economic problems of the late 2000s). So someone can be authentically one kind of conservative or another, but not “an authentic conservative” in any absolute sense.
Obviously, there is need for adjectives. However, unlike terms like socialism and welfare, where modifiers denote categories, terms attached to “conservatism” are all over the board. Here are some of them: classical, traditional, neo-, paleo-, social, fiscal, religious, personal, libertarian, grassroots and new. And then there are “conservative” groups, historic and current: Know Nothings, Dixiecrats, McCarthyites, the Eagle Forum, John Birchers, Evangelicals, Neocons, Tea Partiers and more. And there are gradations of each on top of that.
So why are there so many varieties of conservatives? Conservatism is a positional ideology. For most of history, conservative politics were about protecting the interests of “haves,” political and/or economic (Remember, it is the “haves” who make the laws, not the “have-nots” — the latter only get blamed for society’s ills.). Sometimes this protection has been based on force, sometimes on rationalizations developed into political ideologies (of the merit of “haves,” of the value of tradition, of God’s will, etc.). It is these rationalizations that constitute the warp and woof of conservatism. Over time, specific changes in society stimulated a group or movement to advocate specific “conservations,” including everything from preserving the gold standard to McCarthyism to preserving segregation. The proliferation of special conservative agendas escalated after the 1960s, coinciding with an “interest group spiral” in the post-WWII period but accelerated by the changing social landscape, particularly those changes promoted by the civil rights and women’s movements. Some were single-issue groups, like the anti-abortion advocates who used this single issue as a litmus test for or against candidates. And the trend continues, resulting in numerous conservative positions.
And in addition to elite and/or agenda motivations for conservatism, there is conservatism by convenience — for some, being conservative is a default position (What does it take to be a conservative? Nothing — not to decide is to decide, as the policy “wonks” say). That there should be significant default conservatism is not surprising for several reasons; Humans tend to be creatures of habit (”dancing with who brung ‘em”) and so favor the familiar rather than the novel, and many U.S. citizens are seriously deficient in basic political knowledge, which also facilitates a default approach to political matters.
Despite all these variations, the form of conservatism that continues to dominate electoral politics is that of the economic elite. Thus, the primary focus of the conservatives elected to office at the national level is not a social conservative agenda, which has a stronger impact in some states, but rather policies that support the economic elite. Those persons are able to count on the votes of the diverse conservative groups, because all fear the alternative: whatever their specific agenda, they are, after all, called conservative, so there is hope that their preferences will be advanced — at least more hope than there would be if the “other” were elected.
Clearly, there are legitimate grounds for conserving things; the hard question is what things should be conserved. While liberals may be guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, conservatives need to remember that the bath water needs be changed. And since the business of government is welfare, one always need ask: Whose?
Don Thomas Dugi, Ph.D., is a professor of political science and program director, Haupt Humanities 2, at Lexington’s Transylvania University.