Not long ago, I described myself as being a conservative Republican who turned against it because I realized conservatives were putting business over the environment and prejudice over people … and I wanted to expand on that a little bit.
Back in the day, conservatism meant to me respect for the Constitution and the traditions of America … and the first time I realized that my conservative ideals were misaligned with the beliefs of most Republicans was at a College Republicans meeting at Georgia Tech in the 1990’s, where the club leadership asked everyone in the room to say what conservatism meant to them.
I was the only person in the room who said that “conservatism” meant “loyalty to the principles of the Constitution.” Every single other person said their definition of conservatism was their support for “traditional social values,” which, as an (at the time) dyed-in-the-wool Catholic, I was shocked and appalled by—because traditional Catholic theology only supports traditional social values only if you don’t carry its logic through to its conclusions.
Let me explain what I mean. Traditional theological values—in which each person is recognized as not just an autonomous decision maker but as a distinct individual worthy of respect as an end of themselves—recommends we seek an end state which resembles traditional social values—in which willing couples form strong marital bonds as the foundation for nuclear families that raise children to have knowledge of traditional theological values—but they cannot be applied to politics, because the power of the state is the power of the gun, and enforcing traditional social values goes directly against what Jesus preached overtly and the implications we have drawn from that theologically.
Most “theologians” want to forget that immediately so they can recruit the power of the state to bending people to their personal wills, because people not agreeing with them angers them and people not behaving as they like frustrates them. But that’s straight-up evil, and has no place in a civil society. “The land shall have one law for the believer and the alien” — and because the alien, by definition, is not following your beliefs, the law of the land must not try to impose the religious ordinances of the so-called chosen people, but must serve all the peoples of the land … equally.
The traditional values of THIS country, America, are great, containing gems of secular humanism and Christian theology alike. I can’t sit through a Passion Play in Eastertide without thinking that the protections we have in America’s Constitution are a secular attempt to prevent the kind of trials that Jesus went through prior to his unjust execution by Roman authorities who had no basis in their law for convicting a Jew of making statements that sounded heretical, but happened to be true.
But conservatism—preserving traditions for the sake of preserving traditions—is wrong, both structurally and practically. Structurally, we can most easily see this in the writings of Christian writer and satirist G. K. Chesterton, who was famous for saying that a reformer should not be allowed to tear a fence down unless they first were forced to articulate what the fence was good for in the first place. Chesterton, no-one is fooled by your bogus requirement that reformers produce arguments against their own positions before proceeding—for if they do, it becomes an argument “conservatives” can use against them. No. We’re not doing that. If a conservative thinks the gate has value, it’s your responsibility to produce an argument that it does have value … otherwise, you’re vulnerable to propagating some mindless cultural tradition like cutting a turkey in half just because your grandmother had a small oven.
That’s why when I think of what conservatism is, I think of Russel Kirk’s Ten Conservative Principles. Many of these are genuinely not bad, and it’s not hard to get behind them. But his fifth principle, the Principle of Variety, gives away the game: “For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality.” When you realize this doctrine was first put forth in the 1950’s, during the beginnings of the Civil Rights struggle, it’s clear that modern conservatism, whether its current proponents understand it or not, is actually founded on an opposition to resolving the racial disparities caused by slavery. That is the real reason Chesterton asks his opponents to say what a fence is good for: his position could not stand if he had to admit what benefit he gained from the evils done by that fence.
And so, I am a proponent of liberalism, which I take to mean not asking what is good about our society that needs to be preserved, as a conservative does, but instead asking how our society falls short of our values and seeking ways to improve it. Liberalism, done properly, should take conservative values into account—preserving those parts of our society consistent with our values—without falling into the trap of progress for progress’s sake. That doesn’t always happen, so we need conservatism as a brake on liberalism—or, as one of my more liberal friends put it, if your steering wheel can’t turn both to the left and to the right, you’ll soon run off the road.
Perhaps true, but my bias is to turn the wheel away from the bad and towards the good. Martin Luther King once said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice; to paraphrase something my wife once said, that only happens if you actually steer it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: My wife, seeing off her mother on our front porch after we all went to a watch party.
