Standing Aside for History
James Hanley on Sep 5th 2008
The somewhat overlooked, but most remarkable, aspect of Palin’s nomination is that conservatives seem to have embraced a potential woman president without the slightest reservation. That is, while some may have reservations about Palin as an individual, none seem to have reservations about her gender. Even though the number of Republican women political leaders has been growing steadily, it was not so long ago that this would have been unthinkable. Remember Elizabeth Dole’s brief run for the Republican nomination in 2000? She was unable to raise sufficient funds to even make it to the first primary.
William F. Buckley famously said that the role of a conservative was to
stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
A few years later, Freidrich Hayek–whether consciously responding to Buckley or not I can’t say–took issue with just that aspect of conservatism.
Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change…
Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.
Palin’s nomination is evidence in support of Hayek’s argument, but not the only one. I vividly remember the 2004 presidential debate in which the candidates were asked about their views on homosexuality. In what would have been a stunning development just a few years earlier, both candidates, including the conservative and religious Bush, defended the rights of homosexuals to be treated with “dignity and respect.”
SCHIEFFER: …Both of you are opposed to gay marriage. But to understand how you have come to that conclusion, I want to ask you a more basic question. Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?
BUSH: You know, Bob, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I do know that we have a choice to make in America and that is to treat people with tolerance and respect and dignity. It’s important that we do that.
And I also know in a free society people, consenting adults can live the way they want to live.
And that’s to be honored.
Of course Bush did follow that by reiterating his support for the federal marriage amendment, but that does not eclipse the fact that for the first time in history a conservative Republican presidential candidate asserted that we ought to treat homosexuals as individuals with rights, rather than as a threat to the American way of life. For me, that was the signal that the struggle is nearing an end: conservatives have been dragged along the path of history to the point where–as a party–they’re just whimpering “Oh, OK,” on gay rights, rather than robustly yelling “Stop!”
McCain’s nomination of Palin is another such moment, except this time the conservatives have so forgotten what they used to be against that they’re actively yelling “Go!.” Hayek was concerned that conservatives would keep being dragged down the slope of progressivism, but as a libertarian voice, I imagine he would approve of this particular conservative surrender.
To be fair, Bush’s appointment of Condoleezza Rice as a female Secretary of State was supported by conservatives and her name was seriously bandied about as a potential candidate, so it’s not as though this moment came out of the blue. But come it has, and my reservations about Palin aside, it’s a moment to savor, when conservatives step aside and stop thwarting the historical development of political equality.
Filed in The Basement
Hope you’ll forgive my slight factual edit.
Also… are you saying that conservatives are not being conservative enough? I’m not sure I follow.
I have no idea what you edited, so you must have gotten it right.
No, I’m not saying that conservatives aren’t conservative enough. (My idea of “conservative enough” is being not very conservative at all.) Just noting that Hayek was right–conservatives will frequently end up where liberals are telling them to go, just because eventually they’ve become accustomed to the idea and it’s no longer a radical change. And that’s when you can tell the liberals (or progressives, as Hayek calls them, to reserve the word liberal) have won.
Of course the liberals never seem to realize when they’ve won, but that’s another matter altogether.
Remember Elizabeth Dole’s brief run for the Republican nomination in 2000? She was unable to raise sufficient funds to even make it to the first primary.
This might not have been because of her gender, you know. There were, as I recall, a few males who couldn’t get out of the starting block as well. I wouldn’t have voted for Dole if you paid me, but I’ve been saying for over 30 years that Jerry Ford should have picked Anne Armstrong as his running mate in 1976 (instead of picking Dole’s husband), and that if he had, he’d probably have won.
I think conservatism as a political ideology is long dead. Therefore I don’t think one can make accurate observations and predictions using the text-book model.
I see today’s form of conservatism merely as a mechanism to forward the objectives of Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists. The evidence I have are that claims (individual rights, limited government, integrity) in no way match their actual positions. Theirs’ is longer a standard for governance, which is why identity politics works so well with them. I also believe they are especially attracted to people who go against the stereo-type, e.g., Clarence Thomas, Joseph Liebrman as an ally only, & Sarah Palin, because it makes them feel as if their positions are well-considered and open-minded. If this were true, then why the rejection of Mitt Romney? I believe it wasn’t his Mormonism so much as the transparency of his changing position on a core element of this ideology, abortion.
This is observational evidence only, but given I am literally surrounded by them where I live, a fair indictment.
Of course the liberals never seem to realize when they’ve won, but that’s another matter altogether.
Ain’t never gonna happen. The moment you claim victory, you’re out of business.
Hayek’s right of course, but the “first” conservative, Edmund Burke said, “A state without the means of change is without the means of its conservation.” Conservatism isn’t a what as much as a how, a contradistinction to radicalism. There certainly is a tide toward accommodation with gay folks’ issues across the board, an “organic” change that Burke would probably be fine with.
Of course, when conservatives want to “roll back” the New Deal [they don't really---I'd say libertarians are more sympathetic to that], “progressives” become the “conservatives” and protectors of the status quo. And of course the “anti-war” crowd most closely resembles the “conservative” GOP isolationists of the 1930s. And anti-globalism is considered the province of the far left, but it’s “conservative” too.
And then there’s Pat Buchanan. Your call.
I think Mr. Van Dyke’s post supports my sense that these labels have ceased to be meaningful. My “liberal” friends and I don’t - and, as best I recall from a time prior to the Rs’ success in turning the label into an epithet, never have - self-described as such. When George Will and other pretentious seers say “liberals do-think-support silly position X”, we seldom do. And members of the current “conservative” admin self-labeling as such can only be cause for mirth.
One of the few disappointments I experience reading this blog is what strikes me as an excessive attention to such labels. Why not just state one’s position on individual issues and argue that other positions are flawed. What (non-tribal) benefit accrues to ascribing to some possibly non-existent homogenous mass movement all the positions - especially the foolish ones - with which one disagrees?
BTW, I recognize that “libertarian” may be still a reasonable label in that there arguably is a core belief system that is definitional (although I notice that there seems to be lack of concensus as to what it is). Perhaps that’s because to date, libertarians have not collectively been a political force warranting corruption of the label.
- Charles
Tom,
I actually reference Burke in my first draft, but pulled it out to keep things concise. I often call myself a Burkean libertarian, although my more philosophically inclined friends have their doubts that such a combination is possible.
Thank you, Mr. Hanley. I think there would be a place for a Burkean libertarianism. Capital “L” Libertarianism just scares the bejesus out of many people, not so much that its ideas are radical, but that their implementation would be.
I guess you could call a gradualist approach to liberalising the state Burkean Libertarianism (BL).
Big-L libertarians call for the legalisation of all drugs now. BLs call for making marijuana posession a finable offence only, and then when the world doesn’t cave in after 5 years, call for legalisation.
This could work, and is likely to get over the Status Quo is God approach most people seem to take to politics.
Mr Van Dyke: Speaking form personal experience, it isn’t so much the fear of implementation that bother most people about libertarians as it is a dissatisfaction with the attitude many strike as being somehow politically purer than those who genuinely agree with the democratic or republican party platforms. Bill Maher, and the intense anger his snide and self-satisfied libertarianism engenders, is a good example of this.
I’d also like to point out that, from a historical perspective, both political parties in the United States are “conservative” parties; both opposed to what you call radicalism, that philosophy that political change should be huge, quick, violent and dynamic. As to the New Deal, in that the struggle over it has always been a struggle over pushing our government into a new, more active role than that it played in the inter-war period between the S-A War and the Great World War, I don’t really think you can cast the progressives as becoming a status quo force for trying to retard its dismantling. I doubt I will do a good job of expressing my point here as it is something that just occurred to me, but the fight against the New Deal really never ceased to be the struggle to keep it from happening begun by the men who considered Hoover, Coolidge, and Harding such fine presidents. The same arguments were used against it, by the younger associates of those men who began the debate, who as they grew old taught the arguments to a new generation. As late as Clinton’s years, New Deal programs were still being derided as “socialistic” and “big government interference”. The general trend has continued to be towards a more socially active government, but the “conservative” forces within our government have always been focused on undoing it, not on doing something new which moves beyond it. This explains why issues such as workplace safety and accessibility, which one would expect a philosophy driven by social conscience to support, have caught as much opposition over the years as the EPA.
As late as Clinton’s years, New Deal programs were still being derided as “socialistic” and “big government interference”.
I think the ire was turned against the Great Society, and as it was a fairly recent innovation, some of it was rolled back.
As it’s now quite integrated into the structure of 2008 America, I think The New Deal is here to stay.