The Bad Conscience of a Conservative Intellectual

If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

—Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly, turn inward…hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction…this instinct for freedom forcibly made latent…pushed back and repressed, incarcerated within, and finally able to discharge and vent itself only on itself: that, and that alone, is what the bad conscience is in its beginnings.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

Them!

In this article, I turn my attention to them. No, I’m not talking about angry mutated ants, made enormous by nuclear fallout, as was the subject of the 1954 sci fi classic, Them! starring James Whitmore and James Arness. By them, I mean the so-called conservatives.

Here at IDT, we really haven’t devoted a whole lot of our word count to them, per se. After all, it’s not like they’re listening, right? We made the decision early on that we weren’t going to be like the handwringers or pearl-clutchers. In the main, our topics have mostly been about overcoming that sort of ‘liberal post-politics.’ We have tried to provide resources for those who want to question comfortable liberal centrist assumptions, to radicalize themselves, and move further to the Left. All this being said, at one point, I did conduct a four-part interview about Eugène Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, which tackles the ineffable process by which previously normal people get caught up in authoritarian populism, and become fascists.

In the present case, however, I am breaking with our long-held practice, because, well, David Brooks has really been annoying me. Yes, that David Brooks. The ‘conservative intellectual’ that the liberals seem to find palatable for some reason; the David Brooks that the MAGA GOP called a RINO, at least until he joined the Democrats. By the way, the RINO epithet has really confused things — for Ionesco, a Rhinoceros was a fascist; now we are being told that a RINO is a non-MAGA, Reagan Republican (i.e., garden variety supply sider and foreign policy hawk). As a source of exasperation, it’s a lot like the Trumpian Right’s adoption of the color red, which previously had been universally recognized as the color of the Left. But I digress.

In December of 2021, The Atlantic featured an article by David Brooks entitled, “What Happened to American Conservatism?” Brooks’ central claim was that conservatism, which he referred to as a rich and forward-looking philosophical tradition, has in recent years devolved, and has now been reduced to “Fox News and voter suppression.” Despite his consistent use of this language of devolution throughout the article, however, Brooks still wonders out loud whether his preferred brand of post-war, American conservatism has turned out to be “just a parenthesis.” Nevertheless, he goes on to maintain that Trump’s authoritarian populism doesn’t represent the telos, or natural consequence, of core conservative ideas.

Brooks doesn’t want to see that the continual rightward drift of GOP politics, beginning in the 80s, heralds the arrival of Trumpism. As Julian Zelizer has recently reminded us, in an editorial for CNN, deep roots of ultra nationalism, nativism, and implacable culture war had to grow over decades in order to blossom. The ‘Reagan revolution’ had already brought to the fore the kind of conservatism that had been considered too radical for the White House back in 1964 (when the Rockefeller wing was still relevant, and the country chose Johnson over Goldwater). Trump was no aberration. The success of the Tea Party in the 2010 midterms, Zelizer says, was already based in pushing conspiracy theories, voting restrictions, and debt ceiling threats, long before Trump.

What, then, does Brooks think are the causes of the purported devolution? He acknowledges that conservatism has what he calls “a dark side.” Epistemological modesty, he says, can turn into brutish anti-intellectualism, and a contempt for learning and expertise; localism can become a narrow parochialism, productive of xenophobia, racism, and tribalism; an emphasis on moral formation can turn into a rigid and self-righteous moralism; and reverence for the past can turn into an abject defense of whomever holds power. But Brooks’ use of the modal verb in the passive voice “can be done,” used throughout, still doesn’t tell us much about what actually causes these transformations.

Brooks also admits that conservatism is marked by internal tensions among its major factions, e.g., traditional conservatives, the libertarians, religious conservatives, southern agrarians (paleocons), and neocons (including foreign policy hawks and supply-side/monetarist economic conservatives), etc. He even goes so far as to say that what unites these different groups is their common oppositions. But having said this, he only uses the word ‘reactionary’ just one time, rather late in the article, as part of his personal mea culpa, where he writes that he had thought that “reactionary conservatism was receding.” At no time does he tell us what he thinks is the essential difference between what he calls forward-looking conservatism and reactionary conservatism.

Instead, Brooks directs us to a set of more proximate causes for what he calls conservative devolution: blindness to overt racism within the movement; an over-emphasis on market freedom over what holds communities together; a national mood of spiritual malaise and lack of confidence (leading to communities and families falling apart); and an increasing recourse to “might makes right,” to authoritarianism and violence and the settling of disputes through raw power and intimidation. One can see how the items in this list are framed in such a way as to appear primarily as sins of omission, excesses of enthusiasm, and various social factors that are meant to be taken only as a background constant.

I’m not going to spend time on Brooks’ numerous facepalm-worthy platitudes about conservatism: that conservatism’s greatest virtue is that it teaches us to be humble; that conservatism’s most profound insight is that it is impossible to build a healthy society strictly on the principle of self-interest; that each community must improvise its own set of solutions to intricate human concerns, and conservatives just seek to defend this wonderful heterogeneity.

Instead, the focus here will be on some highly questionable assumptions and claims that Brooks makes about conservative identity and core beliefs, in both its traditional European and American variants. Before proceeding further, it needs to be pointed out that by interrogating conservatism as in itself a reactionary ideology, and attending only to one half of the liberal/conservative doublet, I do not mean to imply an apology for either classical liberalism, or what Wendy Brown has called “progressive neoliberalism.” For timely and incisive critiques of liberal centrism and progressive neoliberalism, see the following articles, previously published here by IDT co-editor Steve Heikkila: The Neoliberal Left is an Anti-Left; American Liberalism has a Fascist Problem; and Goldilocks Won’t Grow Up: A Liberal Centrist Fairytale.

Some Initial Considerations

–On the Origins of Conservatism

When Brooks describes the origins of conservatism, as he does early in the article, things start to go awry, right from the beginning. The roots of conservatism, he writes, “are in the religious wars of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries.” While there is a sense in which this is true (the shape of modern Europe was significantly determined by the Reformation and related religious wars) this answer is nonetheless disingenuous, bordering on ridiculous. Everyone is in agreement: the birth of conservatism is to be found in the reaction to the French Revolution. Since Brooks himself points to Edmund Burke as the father of conservatism, one need only read Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France to come to this same conclusion without much further ado.

Instead, Brooks writes that there are two, competing schools of thought concerning how to bring about a just society which were born out of the overall sense of exhaustion in the wake of the religious wars: The French Enlightenment, which put its faith in reason, leading first to the revolutionary terror, and then the gulag, the cultural revolution, and (gasp) Keynesian economics; and the Scottish Enlightenment, by contrast, which emphasized the preeminence of the passions over the rational faculty, thereby displayed its great virtues of epistemological modesty and restraint.

According to Karl Mannheim, however, it was the Royalist François-René de Chateaubriand who first coined the term ‘conservative’ with the founding of his journal Le Conservateur, where the term stood for the restoration of the pre-revolutionary order of the ancien regime. At around the same time as Chateaubriand, Henri de Saint Simon, for his part, said that conservatism, as an ideology and institutional practice, is the product of a reaction to industrial society, particularly the French Revolution. The 19th century founder of sociology, Emile Durkheim, echoes Saint-Simon almost verbatim.

More recent critics of conservatism say very similar things. Jurgen Habermas writes that conservatism seeks to conserve the old modes of production in an unaltered form. Milan Zafirovsky writes that modern class stratified society is the social constellation for the emergence of conservatism. Albert Hirschman identifies the origin of conservatism in Burke’s and Maistre’s 18th century counter-revolutionary discourse attacking the revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Corey Robin writes that “many of the characteristics that we have come to associate with contemporary conservatism, racism, populism, violence, among others, are not recent or eccentric developments of the American right. They are instead constitutive elements dating back to its origins in the European reaction to the French Revolution.”

Why does all this matter? It matters because, from the start, Brooks avoids grappling with the notion of conservatism as something rooted in a counter-revolutionary, and thus reactionary ideological practice. By making vague references to abstruse philosophical discussions about reason and the passions, he can avoid having to say that he and his fellow-travelers reject the modern ideals of a just society, those that involve mass, participatory democracy. He can avoid the unpleasantness of having to commit, straight out of the gate, to the medieval “great chain of being,” with its naturalized social hierarchies ordained by God, or alternatively, some form of social Darwinist philosophy of the will, where elites rule because their might makes right, and genuflect to a bottle-blond beast.

In The Reactionary Mind, Robin says flatly that modern politics, properly understood, is the story of the march of men and women in subordinate positions against their superiors in hierarchical institutions, and then also, the démarche (counter-move) of those who react against it. Contra what conservative intellectuals may claim, conservatism can be understood as the theoretical voice of this powerful animus against the agency of subordinate classes.

–On Conservatism as a ‘Rich Philosophical Tradition’

Is it right then, to say that conservatism is a “rich philosophical tradition,” one full of “wisdom and sympathy,” an “inspiring description of ethical life,” that has lately devolved and/or been hijacked? I think there are good reasons to doubt it. Before moving to the primary question of whether conservatism has recently devolved, I want to start by arguing here that there are grounds for believing that conservatism is not, in fact, a rich philosophical tradition.

First, with regard to the identification of conservatism as philosophy, the record is really rather scant. It can certainly be argued, as Brooks does, that the Scottish Enlightenment, including Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, provide conservatism with a kind of a blueprint. But Smith and Hume, for example, like most philosophers, contain multitudes, and their polysemic writings are not reducible to a simple ideological project. Burke gets called out as exemplary by conservatives, because he actually made contributions to philosophy (e.g., to Kant’s understanding of the beautiful and the sublime) and he made a number of vaguely uplifting statements along with his politics rants.

If we survey the European terrain in the 19th century, what do we see? There is the German nationalist historian, militarist, and anti-Semite Heinrich von Treitschke, who hardly qualifies. In Italy, one finds the economists/political theorists Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, and a bit later, the Italian-German sociologist, Robert Michels. Polymath intellectuals, surely. But not on the radar of American conservatism. Then as now, 19th century American conservatism mostly belongs to John C. Calhoun.

In the 20th century, more economists. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom (1944) inspired the post-war conservative movement in America, even if he himself was never really such an implacable foe of the Welfare State. There is the work of the economist George Stigler, and of course Milton Friedman. Ludwig von Mises influenced libertarianism; and at the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss’ critique of liberalism, and his defense of ancient virtues seems to have influenced a generation of neocons (Wolfowitz, Feith, Pearle, Bill Bennet, Newt Gingrich, and Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas). Then there is Ayn Rand (I think I threw up in my mouth). There is also the group of neocon sociologists, Daniel Bell, Peter Berger, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Lipset, Robert Nisbet, and Edward Shills — all intellectuals, cited by other such people, but not much paid attention to by movement conservatives since the 80s.

If we look at the landmark titles that make up the postwar conservative canon, along with Friedrich Hayek, and roughly in order, we find the following: Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948), William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951), Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953), Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community (1953), Michael Oakeshott’s essay, “On Being Conservative” (1956), Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962), and Frank Meyers’ In Defense of Freedom (1962). We should also include the various writings of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz of Commentary Magazine fame, 1950s-1990s.

Standing out from among the others in this list, it must be admitted that Michael Oakeshott actually qualifies as a philosopher. As for the rest of them, the best that can be said is that they represent at least a kind of an intellectual tradition, if not a properly philosophical one. Of course, this also assumes that anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism can be said to amount to an intellectual tradition. As the literary critic Lionel Trilling once wrote, “the conservative and reactionary impulse do not express themselves in ideas, but only in action, or irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

Surveying the descendants of the major canonical works of conservatism listed above, I have to agree with Mike Lofgren, where he writes in Salon that “the books of right-wing authors are almost invariably distinguished by their numbing sameness, their shrill cry of victimhood, a hunt for scapegoats, a tone that alternates between hysteria and sarcasm, and a recipe for salvation cribbed from RNC talking points and Heritage Foundation briefs.” Lofgren goes on to add that the vast majority of these efforts are “…the products of political operatives, talk-show entertainers and political ghostwriters, as opposed to anyone with genuine intellectual credentials.”

For his part, Oakeshott himself clearly identifies conservatism as more of a disposition or an attitude, writing that, “to be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” Similarly, we see Edmund Burke being quoted, by Brooks and others, as saying equally vague and uplifting things like, “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

But as Corey Robin points out, there is a much darker side to Burke, who, toward the end of his life, “harped on the subordination of the masses…as the imperative for any sort of political order.” This sort of double-sidedness is characteristic of so-called conservative intellectuals, and this sort of cherry-picking, as Brooks does with Burke, is similarly quite characteristic.

On the other side of the channel, Burke’s contemporary Joseph de Maistre, who could just as easily lay claim to the title of founder of conservatism, was much more transparent. Per Lofgren, the 19th century French critic Émile Faguet described Maistre as “a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, an apostle of a monstrous trinity, composed of pope, king, and hangman…a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, part executioner.” Conservatism, as essentially a reactionary politics, was always, back to its origins, something schizoid; part vaguely philosophical and uplifting Burke, part scary Maistre.

Another way to look at this ‘double aspect’ of conservatism is to look at it from the standpoint of a kind of a bad faith division of labor. Consider once again Brooks recourse to Hume’s positions on ‘reason vs the passions,’ and Burke’s aesthetic ideas. Brooks tells us that the conservative is unimpressed by puny reason, but is passionately and aesthetically moved to a feeling of respect for the sublimity of ancient wisdom and traditions. Here we see the conservative intellectual performing his primary task, that of carrying water for the conservative politician/activist and the elite classes generally.

As McManus says, in his article in Jacobin, “Reading Edmund Burke,” “conservatives dress up arguments for deferring to tradition and authority with the gloss of unknowable profundity.” The conservative intellectual only springs into action when egalitarian movements are on the march, and there is a need to counter the restless critique of forms of traditional power, which are in danger of being exposed as crusty elites defending their privileges. They are then forced to spring into action, “providing intellectual defenses for what they simultaneously claim cannot be adequately grasped by the intellect.”

Despite what conservative intellectuals may claim, Corey Robin says, conservatism is a revanchist, counter-revolutionary ideology. As the theoretical voice of animus against the agency of subordinate classes, conservatism is thus a counter-intellectual activity that arises when there is a threat either to the power of ‘the old regime,’ or else to the project of its restoration. Mike Lofgren makes this point in Salon in the most straightforward way: “There is no such thing as a conservative intellectual; only apologists for right-wing power.”

Conservative Identity & Core Beliefs

In “What Happened to Conservatism?” Brooks has a number of things to say about ‘conservative virtues.’ Conservatives, he says, demonstrate what he calls “epistemological modesty.” By this, he means that they do not put too much stock in rationally-guided programs for changing/improving society. We are just too fallible, the conservative thinks, and there is too much that we don’t know, and we are bad at calculating the effects of our actions. Conservatives have faith in the latent wisdom that is passed down by generations.

He also says that conservatives have an inclination toward ‘the sentiments,’ to the manner in which things like the sublime and the beautiful arouse passions in us. For the conservative, moral sentiments, which are rooted in the passions, are aroused by what is sublime in each nation’s culture and ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Conservatism understands that we are a collection of unconscious processes, deep emotions, and clashing desires. Conservatism’s greatest virtue is that it teaches us to be humble.

In his section on American conservatism per se, he doesn’t have much more to say, beyond these pan-conservative attributes. American conservatism, he says, descends from Burkean conservatism, and it begins with Hamilton, and ends with Mitt Romney’s 2012 candidacy. He also mentions the tensions that exist to some degree, tensions between libertarians, religious conservatives, neocons, etc.

But what does it really mean to be an American conservative? Excluding specific policy prescriptions, what are the American conservative’s core beliefs? In The Conservative Tradition in America (1991, 1996, 2003) conservative scholars Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodward develop a list of what they call “the ten canons of conservatism” as taken from Clinton Rossiter’s Conservatism in America and Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. The ten canons are as follows:

1. Social Order & Stability: Conservatives believe in the importance of order in society, and this translates into the idea that respect for tradition is the first requirement of good government. The structure of society as given is said to contain the stability and wisdom of generations, and even the involvement of God in its development. Conservative are thus opposed to sweeping change, preferring slower change within existing institutions. Following Burke, conservatives reject the desire to remake the fabric of society based on rational principles, citing this as the cause of moral degeneracy, social decency, and the disregard of property rights. The American, Rossiter says, feels more deeply than he thinks about political principles, and what he feels most deeply about them is that they are the gift of the great men of old. Conservatives are not averse to change when it comes to preserving the order that they love.
2. State Power & the Limits of Government: The primary functions of the state are national defense, and the protection of private property. The policing of the international order (budget unlimited) is characterized as the injection of moral authority, as is the policing of the social at home. The purpose of government does not include major socio-economic planning, because the central direction of economic planning is the road to serfdom. As per point one above, change in the sphere of the social should be extremely curtailed, and where it is allowed to occur, should always be incremental and organic within a sparsely regulated free market environment.
3. Localism, & the Decentralization of Social Institutions: Following Burke and Tocqueville, families and its extension in churches, voluntary associations, business groups have a special role between citizen and government. Local and regional institutions provide a check on the power of government. Efforts should be directed toward strengthening families, churches, and local communities. Per conservative thinkers like Nisbet, social institutions of the local community can better meet all the needs that government has taken upon itself under the post-war welfare state. Families do a better job of handing welfare needs than state programs, and private schools perform better and with less expense than public schools.
4. Belief in God: Conservatives believe in a transcendent order and natural law which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems and social problems are at bottom traditionally religious and moral problems. Conservatives are thus religiously dogmatic in the democratic public sphere over and against liberal democratic value pluralism.
5. Duty over Rights: The pre-modern version of natural right that conservatives espouse means that duty to God and fellow men should be pre-eminent over individual rights. As Burke wrote, man’s rights exist only in obedience to God. As Rossiter says, rights are something to be earned rather than given. Duties of obedience, virtue, and service are the price of rights. Opposition to the priority of rights dovetails with opposition to policies associated with the New Deal, the Great Society, etc., in favor of individual and community responsibilization.
6. Constitutional Originalism: Conservatives argue that the constitution should be interpreted according to the original intent of the founders, unless or until it has been amended. This follows from conservative notions about social order and stability, and the providential origin of tradition, including the constitution itself. Conservatives refer to the American system as a constitutional democracy or constitutional republic, to emphasize the limitations placed upon democracy by the founders, whereas those on the left sometimes prefer democratic republic, to emphasize that the system is a mix of democratic and republican elements.
7. Private Property & Capitalism: The distrust of government economic planning is closely related to the desire to protect the right of private property against distribution/redistribution. Government should allow the unfettered law of supply and demand to guide the economy. This includes low taxes and deregulation. Where there is intervention, it is with the aim of increasing equality of opportunity. Genuine welfare needs should be met by private and community solutions, since increased government activity does more harm than good.
8. Liberty over Equality: Since existing elites (supposedly) represent a natural order of things (traditional prerogatives are backed by providence) it follows from the priority of duty over rights (to redistributed wealth) that conservatism prioritizes individual liberty over equality. Conservatism makes much of the loss of incentives that supposedly follows where equality is favored, and they argue that an emphasis on equality undermines social stability (the stability of the established order).
9. Elite Class & Meritocracy: The traditional conservative belief in the importance of aristocracy to provide order is transformed in America to that of a “natural aristocracy” that anyone could supposedly join by virtue of merit and ability. The conservative believes that civilized society requires orders and classes.
10. Anti-Communism: Implacable anti-communism and anti-socialism (even after all major players on the world stage are explicitly state capitalist) remains a top identity point because it involves all of the prior nine canons. This being said, D&W also say that most conservatives are opposed to anti-communist demagoguery and conspiracy theories of the McCarthy type. Or least it used to be the case.

If (for some reason) one desires to evaluate this list of conservative core beliefs at something approaching face value, it can be difficult to know where to start. So many loose threads to tug upon. Of course, God only knows why anyone would want to do so — it’s not like conservatives are ever remotely fair to their adversaries and critics — but hey, what the hell. One of the most straightforward ways of doing this is simply to consider the major flipside implications of each item listed. Just such an approach for evaluating the Dunn and Woodward’s ‘ten canons’ has been offered by Milan Zafirovsky (Modern Free Society & Its Nemesis, 2008). Zafirovsky says that his approach, following Robert Merton’s Social Theory and Structure (1968) is to establish the “positive net balance of an aggregate of consequences of conservatism on modern free society.”

Due to space considerations, there is only time here for a few (albeit highly schematic) highlights:

• Social Order & Stability: However sincerely some conservatives revere tradition and put faith in the wisdom of past generations, Zafirovsky says, this first canon results, de facto, in the conservation of the social status quo. The current condition of society, seen through the prism of a golden past, is the best of all possible worlds. Since this leads the conservatives to disregard alternatives to this supposedly natural and eternal order, conservatism has no utopia. Rather it is a counter-utopia to the liberal design and hope for a future free, equal, and just society. Conservatism only embraces change as a tactic, in order to reverse prior changes instituted by liberalism, i.e., things like secularism in education and public life, the New Deal, the political-cultural revolutions of the 60s, etc. as traditionalist and anti-Modern, conservatism seeks to lock people within old sites of hierarchical domination, leading to a programmatic dismissal of cultural modernity.
• Belief in God: Where belief in God extends beyond private conscience into the political public sphere, it ultimately implies a moral absolutism of traditional values. The concomitant anti-rationalism and anti-individualism in morality in turn leads to an understanding of moral values as a kind of an entelechy unfolding itself in the collective creations of communities, resulting in völkisch nationalism, nativism, racism, and xenophobia. There is also a tendency, as Mannheim pointed out, to ‘spiritualize’ the ruling powers. Finally, conservatives reduce the socially undesirable byproducts of economic processes to the level of a spiritual crisis, whose remedy is religion. Substituting degenerate culture for the true sources of social crisis, conservatism conducts ‘culture wars.’
• Duty over Rights: The priority of the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) of traditional communities over rationalistic (deontological) forms of moral reasoning implies also the priority of duty over rights in the realm of politics, and as a result, a nationalist, nativist, ethnocentrism permeates conservatism to the point of being a secular religion. The use of nationalism for partisan political purposes in turn transmutes a healthy patriotism into something inclusive of chauvinism, jingoism, xenophobia, imperialism and aggressive militarism. With the added ingredient of so-called American exceptionalism, the need to maintain majority citizenship for categories like Anglo-Saxon Protestant leads to extreme anti-immigrant agitation.

Zafirovsky continues in this vein, making similar points about the other canons of conservatism, although the mapping isn’t always completely clear, and the overlaps in his analysis can be repetitive at times. Nevertheless, the overall effect is to counter the widespread conservative perception in America that conservatism is some sort of a safeguard and model for a free society, rather than its adversary.

The Conservative Deployment of Reactionary Rhetoric

The ‘bad conscience’ of the conservative intellectual expresses itself, in the first instance, in and through the elaboration of pseudo-philosophical or intellectual grounds in support of conservative anti-egalitarianism, which gets pursued simultaneously on the terrain of the political and the social by any and all means possible, and with unflagging vigor.

Another aspect of this conservative bad conscience becomes visible when the set of standard rhetorical strategies they employ come into view and are shown to be rooted in something approaching informal logical fallacy. In his book The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), Albert Hirschman shows us how conservatives consistently reach for the same set of rhetorical devices, the same bag of tricks, over and over again, since the birth of the modern age.

Hirschman sets the stage by identifying what he calls the three main progressive thrusts of the modern age: the 18th century battle for the Rights of Man (among them, freedom of religion, speech, and thought); the 19th century struggle to establish universal (male) suffrage; and in the 20th century, the extension of citizenship rights into the social and economic sphere (minimal conditions of health, education, and economic security) via Welfare State programs.

Each of these three progressive thrusts, Hirschman says, has been followed by ideological counter-thrusts, leading to setbacks for progressive programs. The first reaction was the counter-revolutionary discourse of the 18th century opposing the assertion of equality before the law (e.g., Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France). The second reaction came in the form of 19th century arguments against universal suffrage, i.e., a discourse disparaging the masses, the majority, parliamentary rule, etc. The third reaction was the 20th century conservative critique of the Welfare State.

In examining these counter-thrusts, Hirschman notices some recurring patterns. Each reactionary wave involves deployments of what he calls the perversity thesis, the futility thesis, and the jeopardy thesis:

The Perversity Thesis: The perversity thesis is recognizable as the general strategy of economic conservatives in our own time, who want to negate progressive policies without being overtly against lots of people “having nice things.” Under this aspect of the rhetoric of reaction, conservatives will attempt to demonstrate that a given progressive action is ill-conceived because it will produce the contrary of the objective being pursued, via a chain of unintended consequences. The attempt to push society in a given direction will result in moving it in the opposite direction. Attempts to reach for liberty will make society sink into slavery; the quest for democracy will produce oligarchy and tyranny; social welfare programs will create more rather than less poverty. Everything backfires.

The Futility Thesis: The futility thesis argues that a given attempt at change is abortive, that change is largely surface, façade, cosmetic, and hence illusory, because the deep structures of society remain untouched. The futility thesis is designed to show that action is incapable of making a dent, leaving the promoters of change demoralized and in doubt about the meaning of their endeavors. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Jeopardy Thesis: The jeopardy thesis asserts that a proposed change, though perhaps desirable in itself, involves unacceptable costs or consequences for some other valued state of affairs. The jeopardy thesis is essentially a slippery slope argument. It generally involves a highly subjective comparison between heterogeneous benefits and costs. As with the other rhetorical strategies, it is deployed in civil, political, and socio-economic dimensions.

Perversity, Futility, and Jeopardy Theses & the Welfare State

Hirschman goes through each of the three rhetorical strategies in relation to each of the three waves of reaction since the beginning of political modernity. His historical account of the use of these strategies to counter basic democratic political rights in the 18th century, and universal suffrage in the 19th century are quite interesting. But given space limitations, it is useful to focus briefly on how these rhetorical strategies are deployed in the 20th century, in relation to the Welfare State.

With respect to the perversity thesis, free marketeers have generally argued in the 20th century that any policy aimed at changing market outcomes (e.g., those effecting supply and demand, wage supports, etc.) can only interfere with the market’s equilibrating processes, producing the opposite effects from the ones intended.

Hirschman responds by saying that such claims are generally overstated. There is nothing certain about these perverse effects, particularly in the case of so basic an economic parameter as the wage. It’s true, human actions are apt to have unintended consequences. But they rarely result in the exact opposite of the intended outcome. This is not to say that purposive social action does not occasionally have perverse effects. But the perverse effect is by no means the only conceivable variety of unintended consequences and side effects.

It should not be forgotten, he writes, that there are actually many unintended consequences of human action that are welcome rather than not. There are also many cases where actions, policies, or inventions are comparatively devoid of unintended consequences, welcome or otherwise.

Additionally, there are cases where purposive social action has both favorable and unfavorable unintended effects, with the balance being in considerable doubt. For example, water chlorination gets rid of dangerous microbes, but also removes naturally occurring B12. Finally, there are situations where secondary or side effects detract from the intended effect, but do not nullify, on balance. Those who utilize the perversity thesis often fail to recognize that policy making is often a situation of trial and error, with incremental improvement, where yesterday’s experiences are incorporated into today’s decisions, so that perverse effects can be detected and corrected.

With respect to the futility thesis, Hirschman calls out instances where it was argued that, in Welfare State programs, transfer payments never reach the intended recipients. When a welfare scheme can be shown to benefit the middle class instead of reaching the poor, the futility thesis is operative. In the days of the Great Society, the charge was often heard that the newer social welfare programs served primarily to provide jobs to a large group of social workers, administrators and other sundry professionals.

In 1970, George Stigler put forward the futility thesis as a general critique of the welfare state, arguing that public expenditures for education, housing, and social security, along with the taxes levied to finance them, were state-mandated income transfers from the poor to the middle class. Stigler said that the middle class maneuvers the voting system to reduce turnout of the poor by means of various voting requirements, and then molds the fiscal system so as to suit its corporate interests. These arguments were picked up by Milton Friedman in Free to Choose (1979).

Monetarist attacks on Keynesian macroeconomics were formulated along similar lines. It was not argued that these policies would deepen recession or increase unemployment. It was argued that they would unrealistically raise expectations in a way that would ultimately render them futile.

In response, Hirschman once again argues these criticisms should not be allowed to become totalizing, since program designers, once again, learn from mistakes, and make incremental improvements to ensure that benefits reach the intended recipients. The trouble with futility is that it is proclaimed too soon. There is a rush to judgment, and no allowance is made for social learning or for incremental, corrective policy-making. Also, the dynamic here can actually be self-fulfilling. For example, the economists Gaetano Mosca and Villfredo Pareto, Hirschman says, actually contributed to the rise of fascism in Italy, by pouring ridicule on the country’s fledgling democratic institutions. Alternatively, the dynamic can be self-refuting, as the futility charge leads to new, more determined, and better-informed efforts to achieve real change.

Lastly, there is also the assertion of the jeopardy thesis, in relation to the Welfare State. In these cases, it is claimed that Welfare State programs are a mortal threat to liberty and democracy. This argument first appears in Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). Governmental interference in the market is a threat to liberty, because the action of government is only warranted most narrowly, in areas where people can agree (i.e., where rich people agree with the majority). Serfdom is a function of increasing the scope of government beyond this point. Hirschman points out that these dire warnings of serfdom were certainly not terribly credible, 1940-1960. The expanded scope of social protection postwar was seen in most countries as having contributed to growth, smoothing out the business cycle, and strengthening democracies.

In the early 70s, James O’Connor wrote that the modern capitalist state was involved in two, contradictory functions, an accumulation function (investment, capital formation, maintenance of GDP) and a legitimation function (education, health, and welfare). In saying this, O’Connor was enacting a right-wing appropriation of a Marxist critique, that of the contradictions of capitalism and its legitimation crisis (Habermas, 1973). Rather than agreeing that this contradiction undermined capitalism, the Right said that it undermined democracy, because attending to the legitimation function promoted equality over individual liberty, and the welfare state created social space for discontents, students, radicals, etc.

Hirschman’s overall response is to say that the jeopardy thesis is rooted in a stubborn, zero-sum mentality, a belief that any fortuitous gain in one direction, for an individual or group, is bound to be balanced and therefore erased by an equivalent loss in another. We gain and we lose, but what we lose is more precious than what we gain. There are several problems with the indiscriminate application of the jeopardy thesis. For one thing, there is rarely a pinpoint causal nexus. As long as rise and fall sequences are fortuitously timed, this is sufficient for the application of this rhetoric, clear causality or not.

Also, it is easy to imagine the opposite, which progressives regularly do. A projected reform can be seen to strengthen an already existing reform or institution. Complementarity, synergy, harmony, or mutual support are equally imagined. Progressives have argued that expansion of the Welfare state is actually necessary to save capitalism from its contradictions, and to make sure that a liberal society with universal suffrage is not undermined by large numbers of uneducated, unhealthy, and impoverished voters.

Finally, there is also a rich field of intermediate possibilities between mutual support and jeopardy. For example, both sides could be right, but in turn. A new reform could be seen to strengthen an old one for a whole, but enter into conflict with it at a certain point, with harmony and jeopardy each holding sway in alternation. Or there could be different aspects or facets to a reform, some of which are in harmony and others which are working at cross purposes, with no clear case to be made for absolute gain or loss.

The Reactionary Mind of the Conservative

Is it unreasonable to suggest that beneath the conservative’s core beliefs, and beneath the conservative intellectual’s reactionary pseudo-philosophy and rhetoric, there lies the reactionary mind of the conservative? In the preface to The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman announces his decision to “attempt a cool examination of surface phenomena, discourse, arguments, rhetoric, historically and analytically considered.” He says that this is based on his conviction that “it is propitious to look at the imperative of arguments rather than fundamental personality traits,” because to engage in depth psychology, and to inquire into the conservative mind or personality is to seek to demonize the Other.

Hirschman does not adopt this stance out of a postmodernist rejection of depth; he does so because he still has hopes of a space for dialogue. But Hirschman was writing this in a different world, back in the world of more than thirty years ago. Also, where Brooks himself makes the case that the conservative “understands that we are a collection of unconscious processes, deep emotions, and clashing desires,” he clearly opens the door for a depth psychological analysis.

In The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, Corey Robin offers us some interesting glimpses into ‘what lies beneath,’ i.e., into the personality traits and dynamics that drive conservatives in their reactionary impulses. He starts by making various observations about conservative attitudes concerning power.

Taking his cue from some of Burke’s statements on the French Revolution, Robin says that the heart of the conservative opposition had to do with the dismay at the breakdown of the society-wide “chain of subordination” implied by the Rights of Man. When the conservative looks upon democratic movements from below, Robin says, “he sees a terrible disturbance in the private life of power.”

Conservatism, he says, is thus not a commitment to limited government and liberty, a wariness of change, or a politics of virtue. Neither is conservatism “a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians, and warriors.” Its animating purpose is opposition to the liberation of men and women from domination. Our first major clue to understanding the reactionary mind, therefore, comes from identifying the core value of conservatism: that hierarchies are right and natural, and that some people are fit to rule others.

In light of this, the next clue comes from an understanding of conservative strategy in the modern age, in the liberal-democratic world of post-revolutionary societies. The strategy of conservatives, at least until recently, has been to allow men and women to become democratic citizens of the state, but to make sure they remain feudal subjects, in the family, the field, and the factory.

To do this, conservatism offers a compensatory ideology of victimhood for those who think they have lost something because of the demise of traditional hierarchy and prerogatives, something of value. It concerns ‘the forgotten man,’ rather than ‘the wretched of the earth,’ the poor and oppressed. Believing fervently in traditional, hierarchical prerogatives, conservatives are always and everywhere butt-hurt. Since, as Andrew Sullivan has written, “all conservatism begins with loss,” the chief aim and animating purpose of the conservative mind is restoration. To win supporters, they create an ideology, wrapped in an envelope of loss. Conservatism pays its adherents with the wages of hate/resentment, and offers them, first and foremost, the opportunity to punch down on those they consider beneath them.

Robin uses these insights to explain the yawning gap between the conservative intellectual on the one hand, and the conservative politician/activist on the other. The job of the conservative intellectual is to somehow make privilege popular, by finding ways to appeal to the masses without disrupting the power of elites. When Oakeshott says that to be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, the near to the distant, present laughter to utopian bliss, etc., along with unnecessarily black and white choices, Robin sees only a kind of conceit.

Conservative intellectuals, Robin says, often deny any affinity between conservatism and violence. Conservatism, they insist, is pragmatic and adaptive, a sensibility and not an ideology, and therefore, not interested in violence. He says that the history of conservative suggests otherwise. Contrary to what conservative intellectuals say, when they claim the mantle of prudence and moderation, what has continually roused the conservative to his most profound reflections, Robin writes, is his reaction – to things like the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, the end of slavery and Jim Crow, social democracy and the New Deal, the Great Society, civil rights, feminism, and gay rights.”

Following all of this, Robin hazards a deeper analysis of the conservative mind’s underlying understanding of power dynamics. The conservative’s nihilistic will to power is on display, he says, back to Burke’s aestheticization of politics. It is found in Burke’s deeply Romantic account of the aesthetic experience of the sublime (crashing storms over the alps, tossing seas, contemplation of the infinite, of the divine, etc.), and the passions that these things arouse. Robin says that Burke describes ‘the self’ as actually needing the kind of negative stimulus that is provided by pain and danger, in order to enliven and strengthen the will. Without struggle, Burke explains, the world turns gray. Novelty diminishes. Curiosity exhausts itself. Enthusiasm gives way to weariness. Momentary pleasures result in a dull and indifferent malaise.

Robin says that it is actually this lethal ennui, lurking just below the surface of conservative discourse, that really explains the gap that exists between the conservative theorist, like Oakeshott, and the conservative politician/activist. In politics, Robin writes, the sublime is encountered in two forms: hierarchy, and violence. Indeed, most sublime of all is when the two are fused, when violence is performed for the sake of creating, defending, or recovering a regime of domination and control.

Failing to distinguish the distinct spheres of value in the modern age (i.e., how modern people have different criteria for truth, moral judgments, and aesthetic judgments) Burke and his progeny fatefully inject aesthetic criteria into the realm of political action. What kind of political form, Robin asks, entails the simultaneity of, or oscillation between self-aggrandizement and self-annihilation that is the mark of the sublime? Once again, the answer, he says, is found in the combination of hierarchy and violence. Social hierarchies ensure that everyone, save those at the very top and the very bottom, enjoy the opportunity to rule and to be ruled. As Rousseau wrote, people consent to wear chains so that they may in turn give them to others. Here we see lineaments of the sublime – annihilated from above, aggrandized from below.

As for the mind of the conservative intellectual, in the last analysis, it isn’t all that different from the reactionary mind of the conservative generally, except for the fact that the reactionary intellectual has a bad conscience. They argue for conserving a golden past while agitating for radical social change. They build an entire political agenda out of Lampedusa’s famous dictum: “If we want things to stay as they are, then things will have to change.” They want to believe that they are somehow different from the bottle-blond beast to whom they now must declare their allegiance, and for whom they must now carry water, in what remains of the liberal democratic society’s public sphere.