What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?

Philip E. Agre
August 2004



Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.

Q: What is wrong with conservatism?


//1 The Main Arguments of Conservatism






1. Institutions




2. Hierarchy



3. Freedom







//2 How Conservatism Works



* The Destruction of Conscience







* The Destruction of Democracy






* The Destruction of Reason











* The Destruction of Language
















//3 Conservatism in American History


* 1800



* 1900





* the 1970's



* the 1980's


* the 1990's


//4 The Discovery of Democracy












//5 How to Defeat Conservatism


* Rebut conservative arguments



* Benchmark the Wall Street Journal



* Build a better pundit




* Say something new


* Teach logic



Others on the left believe that reason is the property of the elite. This is true historically, but that is simply because the essence of conservatism is to deprive the common people of the capacity to engage in democracy. Many bad theories of democracy actually reinforce conservatism, and this is one of them.

Similarly, others on the left argue that requiring politics to be based on reason tilts the playing field in favor of the elite. This is historically true as well, and politics based on money does the same thing. But that is reality. The fact, again, is that democracy needs the citizenry to be educated, and the skills of reason are the foundation of democratic education. Democracy cannot be established in any other way. Aristocratic rule is not reinforced by the use of reason. The situation is quite the reverse: in order to fight off democratic values, conservatism must simulate reason, and pretend that conservative deception is itself reason when it is not. Many conservative pundits, George Will and Thomas Sowell for example, make their living saying illogical things in a reasonable tone of voice. Democracy will be impossible until the great majority of citizens can identify in reasonable detail just how this trick works.

* Conservatism is the problem

Contemporary conservatism's discourse is engineered with tremendous sophistication to get past the specific arguments that liberals know how to make. Conservative strategists, moreover, are willing to achieve their goals incrementally, depending on the arguments that liberals are capable of making at a given moment. Of course it is important for liberals to make the arguments against each increment. But it is more important to explain what conservatism is in general, and then to explain what is wrong with it.

For example, I once heard Rush Limbaugh discussing with a listener how school vouchers were just a conservative tactic, and how conservatives' real goal was to eliminate public funding for education altogether. This is the sort of thing that loses elections, and yet I have never heard a liberal pundit discuss it.

The extreme nature of conservatism -- not just the extremity of its rhetoric but the oppressiveness of its prescriptions for society -- is clear enough in the conservatives' own literature, but American culture no longer has the categories to identify what it is. Indeed, one can hear fascism, never mind conservatism, on the radio any day of the week. But Americans have mostly forgotten what fascism even is, so that they can listen to fascist rhetoric and it will actually sound kind of fresh.

* Critically analyze leftover conservative theories

Liberal ideology is in disarray. After all, conservative ideology has dominated human thought for thousands of years, and it takes concentrated effort to liberate oneself from it. Such intellectual liberation will never happen without a detailed history of conservative theories -- which is to say, the ways in which these theories have been designed to subordinate people's minds to a hierarchical social order dominated by an aristocracy. Lacking such a history, liberal ideology draws in random and confused ways on conservatism, giving it a sentimental update without particularly changing it. Or else liberalism spins out into something wishfully called radicalism, which at best inverts conservatism into something that does not work as well and does not liberate anyone either. A genuine tradition of liberatory social thought does indeed exist, but it must be disentangled from its opposite.

As an example, let us consider the notion of social capital, which has been fashionable among both conservatives and liberals for some time now. The conservative version of the social capital is a medieval ideology that justifies the hierarchical conservative order in terms of the values of community. This medieval notion of community is particularistic in nature: everyone in a community is knitted to everyone else through a system of roles and relationships into which they are born, and which they supposedly accept and love. This network of relationships is made to sound harmonious, and objections to it are made to sound divisive, by neglecting to mention the oppression of the life-long hierarchical bonds that make it up. This is the kind of society whose passing Tocqueville lamented, and that is at the core of modern conservatism in authors such as Robert Nisbet. For Nisbet, modernity could only be understood in a negative way as an erosion of the particular types of community and order that traditional institutions provided. This is what many conservatives mean when they value social capital, regret its decline, and urge its revival.

This notion of social capital should be contrasted, for example, with Ernest Gellner's notion of the modern democratic citizen as "modular", that is, as capable of moving about within the society, building and rebuilding relationships and associations of diverse sorts, because of a set of social skills and social institutions that facilitate a generalized, dynamic mobility. The modular citizen gets a place in society not through birth or the bonds of an inherited order but through a gregarious kind of entrepreneurial innovation.

The difficulty with too many liberal notions of social capital is that they are oblivious to the tension between conservatism and democracy. As a result, they are vague and ambiguous as to the nature of social capital, how it might be measured, and what kinds of institutions might erode or encourage it. For example, a theory of social capital that locates it in plain numbers of social network connections is insufficient because it undervalues social skills and overvalues particularistic forms of community that are not adaptive in a dynamic modern economy. This is how liberals end up quoting Tocqueville and sounding indistinguishable from conservative theorists of "intermediary institutions".

Social capital is just one example of a general crisis of liberal ideology. The first step in resolving this crisis to get clear about what conservatism is and what is wrong with it.

* Ditch Marx

Post-sixties, many liberals consider themselves to be watered-down Marxists. They subscribe to a left-to-right spectrum model of politics in which they, as democrats, are located in some hard-to-identify place sort-of-somewhat-to-the-left-of-center, whereas the Marxists have the high ground of a clear and definite location at the end of the spectrum. These liberals would be further out on the left if they could find a politically viable way to do it. Conservative rhetors concur with this model, and indiscriminately calling liberals communists is back in style. This is all nonsense. Marxism is not located anywhere on a spectrum. It is just mistaken. It fails to describe the real world. Attempts to implement it simply created an ugly and shallow imitation of conservatism at its worst. Democracy is the right way to live, and conservatism is the wrong way.

Marx was a brilliant analyst for his time. His analysis of technology's role in the economy was wholly original. He was the first to analyze the structural dynamism of a capitalist economy. But his theory of modern society was superficial. It overgeneralized from the situation of its time: the recent discovery of economies of scale, crude market institutions, no modern separation of ownership and control, and a small middle class. Marx followed the political economy of his day in analyzing markets as essentially independent of the state. But this is not remotely the case.

One difficulty with Marx, which is the topic of a vast literature, is that his theory requires a periodization of history that does not correspond to historical reality. Capitalism, for example, is supposed to be a discrete totality, but claimed starting dates for this totality range across a good four hundred years. His economistic analysis of society, though indisputably productive in the way that many powerfully wrong ideas are, makes history seem more discontinuous than it is. In fact, the relationship between conservatism and democracy is more or less constant throughout thousands of years of history. One evidence of this, for example, is Orlando Patterson's stunning discovery that Western notions of freedom were invented by former slaves in the ancient world and have remained more or less constant ever since.

In economic terms, Marx's theory is mistaken because he did not analyze the role the capitalist plays as entrepreneur. The entrepreneur does an important and distinctive type of work in inventing new ways to bring together diverse factors of production. Now in fact the nature of this work has remained largely hidden throughout history for a wide variety of reasons. Because Marx had no notion of it, the capitalist's profit seemed to him simple theft. It does not follow, though, that entrepreneurs earn all of their money. The theories of mainstream economics notwithstanding, serious how-to manuals for entrepreneurs are quite clear that the entrepreneur is trying to identify a market failure, because market failures are how you make money. The relationship between entrepreneurship and the state is much more complicated than economics has even tried to theorize. Capitalists, moreover, are not a class. Particular networks of capitalists and other well-off or otherwise connected personages may well try to constitute themselves as an aristocracy, but this is a phenomenon with several more dimensions than just economics.

Nor is Marxism of any use as politics. All that Marx offered to people who worked in deadening factory jobs was that they could take over the factory. While unions and collective bargaining exist in many contexts for good economic reasons, they are an essentially medieval system of negotiations among orders and classes. They presuppose a generally static economy and society. They are irrelevant to knowledge-intensive forms of work. Nor do they provide any kind of foundation for democratic politics. People want their kids to be professionals, not factory workers, and democracy helps people to knit themselves into the complicated set of institutions that enable people to build unique and productive lives.

* Talk American

Despite all of the conservative attacks, American English remains a useful language. So use it, and learn to say democratic things in it. There is a style of academic "theory"-talk that claims to be advanced and sophisticated but actually lacks any precision. "Privilege", for example, is not a verb. If new words are needed and are actually good for analyzing the deception of conservatism or the invention of democracy, go ahead and teach them. Integrate them into the vernacular language.

While you are at it, forget the whole strategy of the counterculture. Be the culture instead.

* Stop surrendering powerful words

Many liberals abandon any word that conservatives start using. That means, since conservatives systematically lay claim to every word of the English language, that liberals have been systematically surrendering powerful words such as family, nation, truth, science, tradition, and religion. This has made it increasingly difficult for liberals to explain what they believe. There is no alternative: if conseratives have been twisting a powerful word, then you have to explain in concise American English what the word really means and how the conservatives have distorted it. Contest the signifiers. Use the words.

* Tipper Gore is right

Snoop Dogg's music really is garbage. Some liberals, however, argue that racists hate rap and so therefore any disapproval of rap abets racism. This is bad logic and stupid politics. If racists hate rap then the logical, rational, politically efficacious thing to do is to say that some rap is good and some rap is bad, and that good rap is an art form like any other, and that the bad rap exists because the people who rap it are bad people.

Do not be afraid of losing contact with young people. If all you know about youth culture is Snoop Dogg, then I suppose it is time for some focus groups. Use the focus groups to identify language that Martin Luther King would approve of. Besides, there is plenty of good politics in mass culture, as cultural studies professors have explained at length.

Nor should you be afraid of losing campaign contributions from the entertainment industry. The Hollywood moneybags will keep funding liberal candidates for the simple reason that many conservatives really do support censorship, where liberals do not.

That said, there is certainly a disconnect between some liberal entertainers and the liberals who win elections. Some entertainers are willing to get up on stage and embarrass John Kerry. Scorn them.

* Assess the sixties

Make a list of the positive and lasting contributions of the sixties. Americans would benefit from such a list.

* Teach nonviolence

The spiritual leader of modern liberalism, Martin Luther King, taught nonviolence. This has been narrowly construed in terms of not killing people. But, as King made clear, it has other meanings as well. You have to love your enemies. This is difficult: the reality of conservatism is so extreme that it is difficult even to discuss without sounding hateful. There is also an intellectual dimension to nonviolence. Nonviolence means, among other things, not cooperating in the destruction of conscience and language. Nonviolence implies reason. Analyze the various would-be aristocracies, therefore, and explain them in plain language, but do not stereotype them. Nonviolence also has an epistemological dimension. Few of us have the skill to hate with a clear mind. Conservatism is very complicated, and you cannot defeat it by shouting slogans. This is the difficulty with Michael Moore. He talks American, which is good. But he is not intellectually nonviolent. He is not remotely as bad as Ann Coulter, and liberals have criticized him much more thoroughly than conservatives have criticized Ann Coulter. But he is not a model for liberal politics. There is no doubt that Martin Luther King would be in George Bush's face. But how? That is why liberals need a language.

* Tell the taxpayers what they are getting for their money

Civilization requires a substantial number and variety of public services, which in turn require moderate and reasonable amounts of taxes. Despite decades of conservative rhetoric, a majority of Americans are perfectly happy to pay their taxes. And yet liberals keep letting conservatives clobber them with rhetoric that makes taxes sound like a bad thing. It is time for liberals to stop losing this argument. To start with, do not talk about amounts of money ("we should spend $15 billion on health care"). Instead, talk about what the money buys ("we should provide medical care to 15 million children"). And stop letting Bush call his tax policies "tax cuts": he is not cutting those taxes; he is just postponing them.

* Make government work better for small business

The market continually undermines both conservatism and democracy. Both systems must continually improvise to accommodate it. The difference is that conservatism pretends to be a timeless order whereas democracy is all about experiment, innovation, and entrepreneurial culture. Conservatives have historically tried to include entrepreneurs in their coalition, even though conservatism is almost the opposite of the cultural conditions of a modern economy. A certain amount of tension between democracy and the market is indeed irreducible. But a great deal has been learned about markets and their relationship to government, and the democratic culture of innovation can reduce the unnecessary tensions between small business and government while providing for social values such as urban design, consumer information, and the environment.

An excellent example of this is duplicative paperwork. Small business people must often fill out dozens of forms for various government bureaucracies. This is a significant expense. These forms should be combined and given a clean and unified interface. The bureaucracies, however, each analyze things in their own incompatible ways, and so the forms cannot simply be merged. Like much of democracy, this is an interesting design matter.

* Clone George Soros

George Soros is an excellent citizen. Conservatism has gotten so out of sync with the conditions of a modern economy that significant numbers of wealthy people, especially young entrepreneurs who live and breathe the liberal culture that makes successes like theirs possible, would be happy to help build the institutions that a democratic society needs. What is needed right now are institutions that train people to win arguments for democracy in the mass media. Antireason has become thoroughly established in the media, and it will take real work to invent languages of reason that are fresh and cool. And this work just costs money.

* Build the Democratic Party

Your model should be Pat Robertson. He is as extreme on the right as anybody in the United States is on the left. Yet his people took over large parts of the Republican Party. They did this in three ways: laboriously designing a mainstream-sounding language, identifying large numbers of talented activists and training them in the day-to-day work of issue and party politics, and building their own communications systems. Liberals should do the same.

Now, many liberals argue that the Democratic Party would magically start winning again if it would only move to the left. This is lazy nonsense. The Democratic Party has moved to the right for the simple reason that liberals do not have a language that wins elections. To take over the Democratic Party, liberals need to replace the left-wing policies that do not work and, for the policies that do work, get a language that moves 51% of likely voters to vote Democratic.

Other liberals argue that the Democratic Party, and the "system" in general, are irretrievably broken, and that they must build a third party, such as the Green Party with its endorsement of Ralph Nader. The difficulties with this notion are hard to count. For one, splitting the left is a certain recipe for centuries of aristocratic domination. For another, building a party with only people who share your opinions to the nth degree is a certain recipe for factionalism and isolation. For another, the Green Party is a chaotic mess that has no serious chance of becoming a mass-based political party.
