The New Criterion

The American Conservative has put together a fascinating symposium called What is Left, What is Right, Does it Matter?, which consists of essays by esteemed writers. The authors who are contributing to this symposium answered the following questions:

1. Are the designations “liberal” and “conservative” still useful? Why or why not?

2. Does a binary Left/Right political spectrum describe the full range of ideological options? Is it still applicable?

Jeffrey Hart cites Burke as the foundation of conservative thought:

Let us try to cut to the core of Burke’s thought. I first tried this in a Columbia graduate seminar taught by Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling. I offered this: “Most of the things we do are done by habit. If you tried to tie your shoes every morning by reason, you would never get out of the house. Try playing a violin by reason.” Barzun accepted this and raised me. “Burke,” he said, “wants his morning newspaper delivered on time.” In other words, social institutions are the habits of society. They make society work.

But suppose serious change becomes necessary. For Burke, you don’t judge change necessary by appealing to abstractions, to pamphleteers and journalists. You appeal to the man of experience, the statesman. In the Reflections, the statesman is Lord Somers, who knew the institutions of England and knew in 1688 that James II had to go. That kind of knowledge cannot be taught but only absorbed from experience.

The terms “liberal” and “conservative” are only useful as a first approximation. If you tell me you are a liberal or a conservative, I have information about you I did not have before. Much of it is probabilistic: a conservative is more likely to be a churchgoer than a liberal, though there are liberal churchgoers and conservative atheists.

I think we all have a vague sense that these words describe the “shape” of our thinking about the outside world. A liberal is a person more inclined to get angry about inequalities in society; a conservative, about restraints on freely-willed actions that are not indisputably harmful.

Going a bit deeper, conservatives are those who are pessimistic about the prospects for human nature and society. This is most obviously the case with romantic conservatives like Winston Churchill, who “preferred the past to the present and the present to the future,” and George Orwell, who “loved the past, hated the present, and dreaded the future.” Even a distinctly unromantic conservative like Dr. Johnson “laughed at schemes of political improvement,” though. In the U.S., where an optimistic attitude is more or less compulsory, all this is masked with a lot of uplifting squid ink like our current—not, in my opinion, very conservative—president’s professed belief that “the desire for freedom is inscribed on every human heart,” a thing that is obviously false. True conservatives everywhere, however, even in American, know that we are doomed, doomed.