What is Conservatism?

For the last couple of weeks, a debate has been raging on the political right about the proper nature of American conservatism and the proper tactics conservatives should use to achieve their goals. The whole thing started with a Wall Street Journal profile of Chris Rufo, a conservative activist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Rufo, the Journal wrote, has taken inspiration from the post-World War I Marxist revisionist Antonio Gramsci:

For the past year, Rufo has been working on a book called “How the Regime Rules,” which he describes as a “manifesto for the New Right.” At its core is a surprising inspiration: the Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci, a longtime boogeyman of American conservatives. “Gramsci, in a sense, provides the diagram of how politics works and the relationship between all of the various component parts: intellectuals, institutions, laws, culture, folklore,” said Rufo….

On the surface, there is nothing either particularly surprising or controversial about this—except, apparently, to those who don’t understand who Gramsci was and why he mattered. Although he didn’t use the term (which was instead coined by the 1960s West German socialist agitator Rudi Dutschke), Gramsci is one of the godfathers of the “long march through the institutions,” the strategy adopted by the Revisionists to change the culture and, thus, prepare society for the Marxist revolution.

In brief, the Revisionists were surprised and frustrated by the failure of the workers of the world to unite and lose their chains. According to traditional Marxist theory, World War I should have been the perfect opportunity for the working class to resist the bourgeoisie and to fight back against their oppressors. But that didn’t happen. French workers went to war against German workers, who went to war against British workers, and so on. The Revisionists wanted to know why the revolution failed to materialize, and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion—that Marx was an ignorant and arrogant hack—they determined that the workers suffered from “false consciousness” that was caused by the traditionalist “cultural hegemony.” And they decided that the only way to change that was to upend the traditionalist culture by taking over all the institutions of cultural transmission.

All of this is pretty basic history and is widely understood—on the left and the right. More to the point, it is also largely understood on the right that the only way to undo the damage that the long march has done to the institutions of the West is to make a long march back through those institutions and to restore the traditionalist cultural weltanschauung. Today, the cultural left controls and dominates education, including higher education, the media, mainstream religion, and even much of business and commerce (my own personal hobbyhorse). If conservatives wish to break the left’s hold on and destruction of these institutions, they must win back control of them and/or create widely accepted alternatives.

Again, this isn’t exactly contentious. Indeed, it’s largely been the consensus on the right for more than half a century.

Nevertheless, Chris Rufo’s public embrace of Gramsci’s theory and tactics, which have been inarguably successful, set off a firestorm among more conventional conservatives. Specifically, Rufo’s condemnation of “classical liberals” irked a number of these conventional conservatives—most notably Jonah Goldberg, Phil Magness, and Clemson Political Science Professor C. Bradley Thompson (a.k.a. “the redneck intellectual”). Goldberg responded to Rufo, arguing that “A lot of the ideas of the right are classically liberal. Or at least they were considered to be for a century or so,” and “an American conservatism that doesn’t seek to conserve ‘classical liberalism’ isn’t meaningfully conservative anymore.” Thompson is much more subtle, detailed, compelling, and (unsurprisingly) intellectual in his response to Rufo. Thompson nonetheless argues that classical liberals “want to restore the founders’ vision of government.”

There’s no doubt that Thompson is right that “classical liberals” want to restore something, but is it really the founders’ vision? And is Goldberg correct that classical liberalism is integral to American conservatism? At least two people, Ofir Haivry and Yoram Hazony, would argue that they’re both wrong and that liberalism (classical or otherwise) is radically different from conservatism and that much of the founders’ project rejected the former and embraced the latter. In their seminal 2017 article “What is Conservatism?” Haivry and Hazony put it this way:

Anglo-American conservatism is a distinct political tradition—one that predates Locke by centuries. Its advocates fought for and successfully established most of the freedoms that are now exclusively associated with Lockean liberalism, although they did so on the basis of tenets very different from Locke’s. Indeed, when Locke published his Two Treatises of Government in 1689, offering the public a sweeping new rationale for the traditional freedoms already known to Englishmen, most defenders of these freedoms were justly appalled. They saw in this new doctrine not a friend to liberty but a product of intellectual folly that would ultimately bring down the entire edifice of freedom. Thus, liberalism and conservatism have been opposed political positions in political theory since the day liberal theorizing first set foot in England….

The authors also note that while Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was, by and large, a Lockean liberal document, the Constitution, which was drafted in Jefferson’s absence, was inarguably a conservative document that “proposed a restoration of the fundamental forms of the English constitution.” Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Randolph, and the vast majority of the founders were conservatives, in other words, and they largely rejected Locke, Jefferson, and the Enlightenment’s liberalism.

In his response to Chris Rufo, C. Bradley Thompson compares Rufo to Thomas Paine, writing that he, like Paine, “is fearless and is willing to speak truth to power” and “a rhetorically powerful writer who knows how to go for the jugular.” This is all true, yet the comparison to Paine is somewhat inapt. After all, Paine was a radical, a supporter of the French Revolution, and an elected member of the National Convention of the revolutionary French Republic. Paine was a burn-it-all-down-and-start-over liberal and, as such, a forerunner to the leftist revolutionaries of the 20th century. Rufo may be a rebel and a radical, but in contrast to Paine, he seeks the radical restoration of the institutions, not their destruction and replacement.

The fact that Rufo also acknowledges the insights of the Marxist Revisionists and the success of the strategy they devised doesn’t make him a threat to the American tradition or the founders’ vision. It means only that he has taken account of the moral and social chaos the Cultural Marxists have inflicted on the West over the last century. Certainly, one can (and probably should) question some of the ends he wishes the “reformed” American institutions to pursue, but that doesn’t mean that he is somehow an interloper in the conservative project. If anything, his vision may be closer to the Burkean ideal of conservatism than is the classically liberal vision. Again, that’s not to say that he or his plans are perfect. They aren’t. But then, who among us is? As the inarguably conservative Russell Kirk noted, “conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability.”