National polls today reveal that more people identify themselves as “conservative” than they do any other political outlook. Pollsters do not ask respondents to spell out what they mean, only whether they think of themselves as “conservative” or “liberal” or some other political position. Overwhelmingly, Republicans identify themselves as conservatives, although most cannot come up with a meaningful definition of the term. For almost a decade I have asked countless people to explain their understanding of conservatism, but my admittedly unscientific survey utterly failed to produce a good definition, which is not surprising, because there is none. Even leading conservative intellectuals acknowledge that trying to define conservatism is a futile and not particularly useful exercise.
Conservative scholar Russell Kirk wrote, “Any informed conservative is reluctant to condense profound and intricate intellectual systems to a few pretentious phrases; he prefers to leave that technique to the enthusiasm of radicals.” He added, “[C]onservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogmata; conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time.” Kirk offered as a working premise, however, that “the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity.” He also liked to quote Abraham Lincoln’s rhetorical question about conservatism: “Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?”[2] George Nash, another favorite scholar of conservatives, once asked, “What is conservatism?” He answered that “this is a perennial question; many are the writers who have searched for the elusive answer.” Nash concluded, “I doubt that there is any single, satisfactory, all-encompassing definition of the complex phenomenon called conservatism, the content of which varies enormously with time and place. It may even be true that conservatism is inherently resistant to precise definition.”[3]
William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of the National Review and a major force in modern American conservatism, is almost always articulate to a fault. Yet he, too, has difficulty defining conservatism. When asked to do so by Chris Matthews on NBC’s Hardball, Buckley became tongue-tied. “The, the, it’s very hard to define, define conservatism,” Buckley stammered, before proceeding to offer his favorite but meaningless definition: “A famous professor, University of Chicago, was up against it when somebody said, ‘How do you define it?’ He didn’t want to say, well, he said, he said, ‘Conservatism is a paragon of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is continuing approximation.”[*] National Review editor Jonah Goldberg hinted that Buckley has made a career of looking for a definition of conservatism but has not really succeeded.[4]
In their recent book, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, John Micklethwait (U.S. editor of the Economist) and Adrian Wooldridge (Washington correspondent) sought to explain current Republican conservatism to Europeans, if not Americans altogether. They concluded that “conservatism has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged”—especially since conservatives insist “their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed.”
In Safire’s New Political Dictionary (1993), however, the former New York Times columnist and well-respected conservative William Safire defined a conservative as “a defender of the status quo who, when change becomes necessary in tested institutions or practices, prefers that it come slowly and in moderation.” The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995) explained that the “conservative approach is empirical as opposed to rationalistic, cautiously skeptical rather than dogmatic, and, in certain circumstances, seeks to preserve the status quo rather than engage in wholesale revolution or overthrow existing institutions.” This source added, “It is a matter of judgment how far so-called conservative political parties are conservative in the wider, philosophical sense.”
Michael Deaver, former aide to President Ronald Reagan, asked a number of high-profile and active conservatives with varying degrees of allegiance to the former president about the source of their conservatism. Deaver published brief essays from fifty-four people in Why I Am a Reagan Conservative (2005).[5] Paradoxically, only a few actually claimed to be “Reagan conservatives,” whom Deaver rather narrowly described as those favoring “limited government, individual liberty, and the prospect of a strong America.” More strikingly, none of the contributors made an effort to meaningfully define or even describe conservatism, and only a few of them could say “why” they were conservatives, although several explained “how” they became so. Perhaps a conservative—or anyone else, for that matter—is intimately incapable of the introspection necessary to understand the psychological reasons for his own beliefs and why he is a conservative. That may also explain the fact that many conservatives have easily rejected the findings of social scientists who have recently reported many of the reasons why people become, or remain, conservatives. (A subject addressed shortly in this chapter.)
Leading conservative scholars reject the notion that their thinking or beliefs can be described as an ideology. For conservative scholar Frank Meyer, for example, it is heterodoxy to conclude that the “American conservative movement” is anything but just that, “a movement.” Meyer insisted conservatism is “inspired by no ideological construct.”[6] Similarly, conservative intellectual icon Russell Kirk has adopted the mind-set of John Adams, the first “conservative” president, in refusing to classify conservatism as an ideology. Adams claimed that the “proper definition” of ideology “is the science of Idiocy. And a very profound, abstruse, and mysterious science it is…taught in the school of folly.”[7] Michael Oakeshott, another prominent conservative political philosopher, has remarked that “conservatism is not so much an ideology as it is a disposition to enjoy the fruits of the past and to distrust novelty.” Ronald Reagan, throughout his political career, sought “to downplay ideology and translate the tough theory of conservatism—its libertarian harangues and traditionalist asceticism—into accessible anecdotes and sunny sloganeering.”[8] William Safire quoted Reagan as saying, “I think ‘ideology’ is a scare word to most Americans.” Republican senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania claimed: “Conservatism is common sense and liberalism is an ideology.”[9]
In fact, conservatism now fits the definition of ideology quite aptly, according to the HarperCollins Dictionary of American Government and Politics.[*] But regardless of how any of these terms is defined, asserting that conservatism is not an ideology is, of course, sophistry. Meyer’s belief that conservatism is a “movement” by no means precludes it from being an ideology; Kirk’s reference to Adams’s claim that ideology is idiocy has no substance; Oakeshott has inadvertently defined conservatism as an ideology rather than distinguishing the two concepts; Reagan’s claim that the word “ideology” scared people indicates only his aversion to the term, not the notion that conservatism is not an ideology.
2.
Russell Kirk,
3.
George H. Nash,
*
E. J. Dionne, Jr., pointed out in his book on American political history,
*
Jay M. Shafritz (ed.),
(1) A comprehensive system of political beliefs about the nature of people and society; an organized collection of ideas about the best way to live and about the most appropriate institutional arrangements for society…. But the term has evolved to mean the philosophical bent of true believers of whatever belief. The mainstreams of American politics have never been rigidly ideological; only the extremes of both major parties—on the far Right and far Left—are much concerned with correct rules of thought for the party’s most faithful…. But ideology seems to be making a comeback with the new Right. (2) Whatever one believes about the political process, whether it is articulated or not. (3) An interrelated set of ideas or a world view that explains complex social phenomena in a relatively simple way. (4) The selected and often distorted notions about how society operates. A group may adhere to such notions as a means of retaining group solidarity and of interpreting a world from which they have become alienated.