I have been thinking about the ostensible nature of conservatism, and how it relates to the self-proclaimed conservatives of today.
The 10 conservative principles, according to Russell Kirk, define what is means to be a conservative -- but those principles can be broadly categorized into foundational methodology and concrete policies, the difference being roughly comparable to the difference between scientific method and scientific findings. It seems to me that inasmuch as today's conservatives actually fit that definition of 'conservative' at all, it is because they accept the findings, but not the foundaitonal principles -- kinda analogously to someone accepting microchips and computers but not quantum mechanics, or modern medicine but not evolution theory.
Those 10 principles are:
- The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.
- The conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity.
- Conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription.
- Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence.
- Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.
- Conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability.
- Conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.
- Conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.
- The conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.
- The thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.
Of these, principles ##1-6, and #10, can I think be classified as comprising the fundamental methodological framework, while the rest of them are artifacts of the aforementioned methodological framework being situated in this place and time.
My perception of modern conservatives is that they embrace the situational outcomes of the foundational conservative philosophy, but not the foundational philosophy itself, as evidenced by the many ridiculously imprudent and adventuristic republican policies, such as the neocon geopolitical programme or the supply-side economics. Such a political attitude can be classified as 'conservative' only in a superficial sense, a cargo-cult sense. As Richard Feynman had writen in 'Cargo Cult Science':
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land.
This is, I think, what today's conservatism has become -- a mere shell, form without substance, lacking roots and philosophical foundation; a superficial imitation of what which most conservative thinkers claim they believe in, but go no further than making the claims.
We are not dealing with real conservatism, but with a cargo cult version thereof. Today's conservatives traded philosophical coherence for power, and sold their soul in the process.
I understand the strategic importance of hanging the current administration's failures around the neck of the conservative ideology -- but I think it's just as important to point out that what is perceived as conservatism in today's america, is not in fact conservative at all. I may be castigated for it, but I think we need a balance of power, we need more than one healthy political party, and I think that even if Democrats regain control of the government, we will all be better off if they have a healthy, sane, cogent and philosophically coherent opposition, which would keep the public discourse vigorous and rational.
I think GOP needs to do some serious philosophical soul-searching, and abandon the cargo-cult conservatism that has come to dominate it in the last few decades.
P.S. If human experience and precedent are to be cruicial guides, then universal healthcare is an eminently conservative proposition -- after all, the rest of the developed world has tried it with far greater success that we see here in USA from our privatized healthcare system. Perhaps someone out there would be willing to make a conservative case for universal healthcare, just as Andrew Sullivan has been making a conservative case for gay marriage.