What I
Learned From Conservatives –And What They Seem to Have Forgotten
Anthony Mansueto
I am not a conservative, at least not in the sense that the term
is currently used in US political and cultural discourse. But I came of age
politically and intellectually during the period when Conservativism
was on the rise, and honed my skills in debate with the emerging conservative
majority of the 1970s and 1980s. In the
process I learned some important lessons, lessons which now define the way I
approach the political and cultural debates of our time. With the recent
victory of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in the 2008 General Elections,
there has been a great deal of soul-searching among conservatives regarding the
direction of their movement and of the Republican Party. As an outsider the
reasons for the current crisis among conservatives is clear: they have
forgotten the lessons they set out to teach the Left. Perhaps this reminder
will help conservatives forge the kind of loyal and constructive opposition
which any government needs and help President Obama and the Democratic Party
avoid some of this historic errors of the Left.
Perhaps the best way to describe the lessons
I learned from conservatives is as a cluster of insights regarding the
conditions for human flourishing and human excellence. Many of these lessons
are economic. Conservatives reminded us that redistribution, while it may sometimes be justified, cannot replace
creativity and entrepreneurship. And
with regard to the latter, while the
State is good at managing big projects (e.g. public works or space exploration),
it has difficulty mobilizing the creativity of those who are not involved in
these projects and in tapping into the ordinary problem solving capacities of individuals
and small organizations, capacities which are fundamental to identifying and
taking advantage of economic opportunities. Our response to poverty, in other
words, may include state spending on welfare
or public works, but it must be centered
on efforts to help impoverished communities discover and take advantage of
untapped economic potentials. Similarly, just as social liberals have stressed
that while it is a good thing to have high standards for the way we conduct our
personal and especially our intimate relationships, imposing those standards on others rarely works and at the extreme
can become repressive and life denying, conservatives have reminded us that
while we can restrict brutal
exploitation and rapacious profit-seeking, there is such a thing as over-regulation that in the name of
justice squeezes the life out of an economy.
At the political level, conservatives
have issued two warnings. On the one hand, they have rightly challenged the presumption,
so prevalent on the Left, that because of our dedication to social justice, we
know what is best for other people and that when we do we have not only the
right but also the obligation to impose it, at home and abroad. They have reminded
us that while there are universal
principles, local conditions vary, and problems are best solved and new
potentials tapped close to home, by those who understand them best. In the
Catholic tradition we call this the principle
of subsidiarity. This means relying on the institutions of civil society,
such as civic organizations and local religious institutions to solve problems
when they can. It also means recognizing the authority of humanity’s most
important political communities –villages and towns, neighborhoods and cities,
vis-à-vis the nation state. And conservatives, drawing on the stark lessons of
the past century, taught us that while it is important to stand up for and act
effectively on behalf of moral principle, we cannot simply remake the world,
and often do more harm than good when we try.
At the same time, conservatives historically
have resisted, and urged the rest of us, to resist making a fetish of
democracy. It was the genius of the Founders to craft a system which integrated
authentic popular political participation with the restraining influence and
dedication to principle which is embodied in institutions such as the Senate
and the Supreme Court.
At the social and cultural level, conservatives
have reminded us reminded us that while liberty and democracy are fundamental
to the good life, the capacity to exercise them must be cultivated. Thus the importance of an intact social fabric of families and
communities which nurture our basic capacities to reason and build
relationships with other human beings. Thus the importance of the
classical liberal arts tradition, one of the great achievements of the West
(and authentically alive if not exactly well only in the
If the conservative movement and the
Republican Party are in crisis, perhaps it is because none of these concerns are reflected in their current agenda. Instead,
we see a continued commitment to tax-cuts for the rich but no money to seed
inner-city entrepreneurs or to compensate them for the risk of going into
business for themselves (e.g. by making health care more affordable). Local
control for Republicans never meant respect for neighborhoods and cities, and most
conservatives invoked “states’ rights” only to resist the
struggle for civil rights. And now even the rights of states in such critical
areas as education are being stripped away as well and transferred to a
Department of Education which the Republican Party once vowed to abolish –and
which recently lost its Assistant Secretary for Higher Education, who resigned
in protest over “accountability” measures which she rightly believed would hurt
the cause of liberal arts education. Conservatives have become the leading
proponents and beneficiaries of plebiscitary democracy (referenda) and of the
rights of legislatures over courts and the Constitution they defend, suggesting
an underlying ideology closer to that of Rousseau than of Burke. And the Bush
administration has undertaken a foreign policy that can only be called utopian –with
predictable results. I see no plans to temper the rapacious demands of the
market for our labor time (which is what is really destroying our families) or
to conserve working class neighborhoods and support the New Urbanism, which
proposes to restore civic life to the suburbs.
It is little wonder that Americans,
left, right, and center, wonder what, if anything, Republicans really value.
I am not a conservative. But I do
believe that helping poor communities tap latent economic potentials is better
than mere redistribution. I believe in subsidiarity, in balancing democracy
with wise deliberation, and in a realistic foreign policy which recognizes the
limits of intervention. I believe strong families, strong neighborhoods, strong
churches, synagogues, masjids, and
temples, and in the classical liberal arts tradition. I believe in these things
because they promote human flourishing and human excellence. I know what I
value.
For me these insights into what supports
human flourishing serve primarily to temper the way I pursue a vision of the
good society which reaches back to Plato and Aristotle, and which runs through
the medieval Aristotelians up to the modern left. This tradition is more
optimistic than most are most conservatives about the possibilities of joining
wisdom and power and about the capacity of humanity generally for building a
just society. But I also believe in the necessity of a vigorous and principled
opposition and in the alternation of parties in power. And the insights which I
have identified above could easily for the basis for one or more alternative
Republican visions for the country, united in their stress on entrepreneurship,
subsidiarity, a principled realism in foreign policy, and support for the
institutions which foster excellence, divided, perhaps, in whether their
principal loyalty lies with the liberating potential of markets or the
importance of conserving the social fabric. A revitalized Republican Party
would, in other words, have both Ripon wing, and a social-conservative wing
tempered by a re-engagement with conservative principles.
But there is more. While I first
learned about many of the conservative insights regarding what supports human
flourishing from my teachers at the
The principles are there. It is a
question of actually owning them and acting on them.