JVL Dissects A Frog
So I finally caved to the onslaught of incessant email teasers from The Bulwark and gave them $8 a month. Mainly so I could read Jonathan V. Last, whose The Triad submission “What Does ‘Conservatism’ Even Mean Anymore?’ just buried my curiosity needle too hard.
Damon Linker describes The Bulwark crew thusly:
The rise of Donald Trump a little more than a decade later changed things in interesting ways. Suddenly I had a lot of company, as people on the right I’d criticized for years suddenly found themselves dissenting from the Republican nominee for president and vowing to work for his defeat. They defined themselves as being Never Trump conservatives for the purpose of the 2016 election. But once the Orange Man beat Hillary Clinton and reached the White House, the label persisted, as many Never Trumpers refused to put their dissent behind them and assimilate to the new, more right-populist GOP.
Which meant that one-time allies who had become my opponents when I bolted from the right were now once again my allies. Though not all in the same way.
One group, led by William Kristol and other Never Trump refugees from The Weekly Standard (which had been shut down by its increasingly Trump-friendly owners), joined up with likeminded Reaganite conservatives Sarah Longwell and Charlie Sykes to form an online media platform called The Bulwark. At first, its mission was to defend conservatism against its Trumpian corruption. But fairly quickly, and then more fully after the shocking events of January 6, 2021, The Bulwark’s Never Trump stance began to evolve in the direction of defending liberal democracy against Trumpian authoritarianism. This was a goal that required working for the electoral victory and governing success of Democrats.
Please understand: I’m not drifting right. I just have to read some of these folks to stay up on people further right than they are because I’m not going to venture that far into the swamps than I must, and certainly not fork over coin to do so. And yes, even Linker still burns my bacon on the regular.
But anyway, back to JVL and what “conservatism” may or may not mean. Here’s what he says, and it’s good:
…a lot of times there’s some confusion about what “conservatism” even is.
In general, when people talk about “conservatism” they mean one of four things:
A conservative temperament.
Conservative political theory.
Conservative policy preferences.
The conservative movement.
Obviously there is some overlap. But it’s most useful to understand them as separate phenomena which, though they share some genetic material, are distinct from one another in 2024 America.
If you ever talk to someone who claims to be conservative, a good starting point would be to ask them to sort themselves out via those four things.
There are two problems with that approach: (1) no matter what they say, most folks won’t be able to go a millimeter deeper than picking a number, and (2) all but about half of the first option are utterly bankrupt.
JVL explains.
A conservative temperament. This is where I live. It usually starts from a place of humility, gratitude, and pessimism: A person with a conservative temperament or disposition will tend to believe that however imperfect a situation might be, we ought to be grateful for it because it can (and probably will) get worse.
The conservative worldview sees tail risk everywhere and views most progress as (at best) beset by unpleasant and unforeseen consequences.
A real-world example: I have written many times about the distortions and ill effects created by the Electoral College. At the same time, I am wary that any attempt at reform it would create different distortions and ill effects. And these might well be worse.
The liberal worldview believes that progress is possible—maybe even inevitable. The conservative worldview believes that we’re always a step away from a cartoon anvil falling on our heads.
There’s nothing wrong with this “conservative temperament.” Wisdom often confers humility, gratitude, and a certain amount of pessimism (or at least skepticism), and would be a decent apolitical substitute term to use instead of “conservative.”
I’m super happy to admit I’m pessimistic, but much of that comes from a lifetime of watching “conservatives” handing me my ass in politics again and again to the point where the president is legally a king, women have no legal control of their own bodies, and one of our two major parties is openly advocating permanent minority rule. Otherwise, I’m very ready to just try some shit out because I believe that there are smart and dedicated people out there ready to really tackle thorny problems: the skeptical part of me just wants to ask them a bunch of questions to make sure they’ve looked at it from all sorts of different angles and have read some history.
Conservative political theory. You could trace this back to the Greeks, but for our purposes it makes more sense to start around the Enlightenment. Often, the great minds of conservative political theory were recoiling from contemporaneous upheavals: Edmund Burke was reacting to the French Revolution. Michael Oakeshott was repelled by Nazism and Marxism.
Is conservative political theory operable today? That’s a complicated question.
For instance, conservative political theory has a lot to say about subsidiarity and the size of government: It believes that small government is best.
But in practice, there is no movement or constituency in modern America for “small government.” Absolutely none.
Meaning that people who cling to conservative political theory on small government have basically opted out of the real world. They’re the equivalent of a Frenchman arguing that the Merovingian dynasty was better than the Fifth Republic. Maybe this is true! But it’s also immaterial, because the Merovingians are a dead letter.
The other thing that’s odd about conservative political theory is that, historically, it has grown during societal convulsions, when challenges arose to the established order.
Are there any “convulsions” at the moment? I suppose some would say that “wokeness” or immigration or DEI have represented a societal convulsion.
But I would argue that both of these progressive challenges fit firmly within established dynamics of reform and counter-reform.
Instead, I’d argue that the only true challenge to the established order comes from the movement that seeks to move us away from liberal democracy into what it calls illiberal democracy.
One of the great confusions of our time stems from the fact that conservative political theory has traditionally rejected radical change, but the people pursuing radical change today mostly emerged from conservative political theory.
I believe I have mentioned this before. Repeatedly. These people are nuts, and they are advocating the autocratic, often violent, certainly antidemocratic overthrow of the Constitutional order of America. It’s the Flight 93 contingent. The folks who say most “Americans” aren’t really Americans at all. The humans who insist most of us are Unhumans.
To unpack the “conservative political theory” these folks draw upon, you have to enter very deep weeds, and I usually just go back into the 20th century, not to the French Revolution. Yes, the various “theorists” propose wildly varying notions, often totally at odds with the theories of their fellow “conservatives.” But to grasp how it all got glued together, you have to understand. JVL’s option #4…
The conservative movement. There exists in the world a number of people who professionalized “conservatism” and turned it into a small industry.
Matt Schlapp. Hugh Hewitt. Brent Bozell.
Another common conflation is to equate professional operators with “conservatism.” For instance: If Rush Limbaugh was touting some person or thing, then that person or thing was conservative by definition.
The ne plus ultra here is Donald Trump, who has come to personify “conservatism” to the point that whatever he espouses at any given moment becomes the party line in the conservative movement—and hence the official stance of mainstream conservatives.
JVL skips SO many operators, of course. The elephant in the room is the great saint of conservative fusionism, William F. Buckley, who, thanks to recent scholarship, is now revealed as a tap dancer who papered over incoherencies in conservatism to sell the ideology to respectable elites, despite its the frothing racists and antisemites and monarchists and absolute nazis.
He (and others) did it by getting folks to focus on…
Conservative policy preferences. This is the most plebeian form of conservatism because it’s almost entirely based on recent associations.
For 75 years (give or take), the Republican party has been the conservative party in America. So people conflate Republican policy preferences with conservative policy preferences.
Many Trump-skeptical conservatives claim that the policy preferences of the Reagan era are the “true conservative” policies. But I’m not sure why that should be.
Here’s a list of Reagan-era policy preferences:
Activist foreign policy built on robust alliances.
In favor of large-scale immigration.
Constitutional originalism and judicial restraint.
Committed to free trade as an engine of economic growth.
Today, those preferences are rejected (to varying degrees) by the “conservative” party and embraced (again, to varying degrees) by the “liberal” party.
The rump of Trump-skeptical conservatives mostly grew up in the Reagan era and they continue to insist that the policies from that time are the True Conservative policies, while the policies of the current Republican party are not.
But this is like arguing that the “real” AC/DC lineup was with Bon Scott and that the band fronted by Brian Johnson isn’t actually AC/DC.
I am sorry, but the “real” AC/DC is the band that is selling albums and tickets, right now, today.
JVL’s Ship of Theseus argument here is completely valid: all the “policy preferences” of the “conservatism” I grew up with have been systematically swapped out (except in zombie rhetoric that sometimes accompanies proposals that do the opposite because consistency is for those lacking brain worms) and replaced with the echolalia of the Dear Leader who heads the present cult. But none of this was possible without the “conservative movement” of Limbaugh, Buckley, Bozell (all 3 or 4 of them—I lose count), Richard Viguerie, and so many others.
JVL returns to his conservative temperament to side-eye each of these “conservatisms”:
I’m skeptical of all four of these types of conservatism.
Let’s start with the conservative movement, which has exposed itself as a partisan, rather than an ideological, enterprise. Movement conservatives have abandoned most of their previously stated positions over the last eight years as Republican voters shifted their own views.
Worse: In cases where movement conservatives have held on to a position and that position has been adopted by Democrats, the movement conservatives have refused to give Democrats credit or join with them.
For instance: There are many Reagan-conservatives who claim to care deeply about foreign policy. But their views on America’s place in the world, the efficacy of intervention, and the importance of alliances now exist entirely within the Biden-Harris Democratic coalition.
Meanwhile, the Trump-Vance Republican coalition is actively hostile to the foreign-policy views of Reagan-conservatives.
Show me the list of Reagan conservatives who credit Biden and Harris for their positions and recognize that the Democratic party is now the home for such views. I’ll wait.2
Many “conservative policy preferences” were redistributed between the two parties by realignment. And when it came time to choose between the policy and the party, nearly all of the movement conservatives chose the latter.
I’m skeptical of conservative political theory, too.
Don’t get me wrong: There’s wisdom to be mined in conservative theory. But also danger. You get Edmund Burke, but you also get Joseph de Maistre.
Every time I hear someone talk about how True Conservative Thought is anathema to the current state of conservatism, which embraces illiberal democracy, I’m reminded of the scene in No Country for Old Men where Anton Chigurh asks Carson, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
To put it starkly: If we’ve reached a point where fascism has been brought to the fore not by runaway liberalism but by the conservative party and the conservative movement, then maybe we ought re-examine some parts of conservative political theory. I’m Ron Burgundy?
And any conservative who doesn’t feel the need for such a reexamination, and thinks that the answer is something like “True conservatism has never been tried . . .”
Well, I’m skeptical of that as well.
As for me, well, I’m done with skepticism when it comes to “conservatism.” I’ll accept that the temperamental variety is still valuable, but I’m not calling that conservatism any more. I’ll call it caution or hesitancy or skepticism or wisdom or vetting an advocate/proposal. But “conservatism” is a bankrupt brand aside from the lingering loyalty that its identitarians still hold for it, which is just plain sad.
What JVL elides with his tidy taxonomy of conservatisms here is the fact that it’s really all been a giant swirl of all four types of conservative down through the ages. You cannot—apart from the political science syllabus construction laboratory—cleanly separate them.
Temperamental hesitancy to rush into change wants to hear counterpoints to proposals for said change. Maybe conservative political theory suggests some directions for those counterpoints. Follow those directions, and you land on a different policy proposal, then the conservative movement propagates and advocates for those proposals and the candidates who support them.
That’s the neutral, absolutely good-faith version. And frankly, I believed that version about conservatives for most of my coming-of-age. Into young adulthood, I started to see bad-faith actors, mostly among the conservative movement, and they seemed to be breaking the rules of the sane and sensible dialectical approach to left-right progress: you know—the eagle has a left wing and a right wing but it needs both to be able to fly.
Today it’s all just…soup. Or sewage. Not even salad because in a salad you can tell the individual ingredients apart. Oh, there are still emphases: this or that will still have more of the flavor of conservative political theory or the conservative movement or whatever, like a chunky morsel that didn’t get completely pulverized, but it’s all in the blender. Movement conservatism—basically, the quest to attain political power at all costs—picked and chose whatever elements of conservative political theory were handy at whatever moment until all of conservative political theory became a slurry to scoop from.
This was true from the start of Buckley and fusionism when the ostensible project was to fight the commies. Such a grand battle required a truce and alliance among the factions of the right. Or was it fairer to say that, if they muted their differences in public, they could present a unified face to better gain power as a movement, ostensibly to oppose the commies, but really to oppose the “commies” within their own society—the dreaded libs they’d always been at war with, long before the USSR rose up as the Big Bad with the Bomb to frighten us all under our school desks?
If you read the ideas of Buckley’s intellectual influences, then see what happened after the Wall fell, it’s hard to believe there was any good faith involved at any point in this saga. I mean, we’re 35 years out from the fall of the Wall: Trump, Vance and the 100 think tanks who contributed to Project 2025 are all about defeating and rolling back Marxism and socialism, by which of course, they seem to mean the New Deal (91 years ago), women’s suffrage (104 years ago), any semblance of reproductive freedom (151 years, if we go from the Comstock Act), church-state separation (156 years, if we go from the 14th Amendment’s incorporation doctrine)…and so on.
To try to be fair here, isn’t something of the same true of the libs? I mean, isn’t, say, the present Democratic Presidential ticket just a soup of joy and exuberance, like, I dunno, kids’ breakfast cereal or something? Maybe. Kinda. Sorta.
But there’s a big difference. The Ds have historically chosen to approach politics as a majority interest coalition party as opposed to the GOP’s ideological focus. If you have an ideological focus, you need an ideology. And if your ideology is internally incoherent, completely flips over the course of a generation or two, has always consisted of factions whose fundamentals were philosophically at odds with one another and whose common ground always entailed resistance to the dignity and rights of Black citizens, women, LGBTQ+, the poor and have-nots or have-lesses…well, you’re going to—over time—have problems forging a popular majority based on that “ideology,” whatever the hell you say it is.
Sooner or later, you either have to morph or mellow the ideology into something palatable and attractive enough to appeal to broad swaths of the citizenry (instead of demonizing them left and right), or drill down to its only real essence, its kernel of consistency: that some people matter more than others, and the people who matter deserve to wield power over the rest, forever and ever, Amen.
In such a worldview, reasons can be proffered for the supremacy, but they’re post hoc and there just as smoke screens and distractions for those who don’t grasp what game is being played. Eh, give ‘em a policy proposal or a good sound bite to send ‘em down a rabbit hole. Throw out a trolly meme or suggest Kamala gives blow jobs to amp up the incels and the racists. Let Jordan Peterson or Tim Pool rationalize and intellectualize the supremacy to their cadre of pitiful ignoramuses.
By contrast, the Ds, who don’t claim to have and don’t base their mass appeal on a single overarching ideology (though I wish they’d start articulating something closer to one to counter the Right…”These guys are weird” is a start, but needs more) also come off like a grab-bag, a loose miasma of ideas and overtures this way and that. Thing is, it’s not a mortal sin in a non-ideological party to have a variety of ideologies at play or to pick bits and pieces of various ideologies and political theories to weld together for mass appeal. For “conservatism,” it is.
It’s fatal to the “conservative political theory” component of the identity, which means whole chunks of “conservative” history and the arguments and achievements racked up by movement conservatives based on those thinkers and their borrowed seriousness. It kills their noble narratives about themselves. It’s also deadly to “conservative” political policies, now abandoned and polarity-reversed, because they show the fair-weather nature of “conservative principles” and the historical roots of “conservatism’s” dark side, its affection for dictators and hierarchies and its hostility to difference and rights and what hundreds of millions of regular Americans find perfectly normal in 2024.
(And the fact remains, leftists aren’t running the Democratic Party the way right-wingers have entirely captured the GOP—and did so much earlier than most of y’all are ready to have a conversation about.)
As for the “conservative temperament,” the valid hesitancy in the face of wild-eyed reformers that probably started this whole ideology, well, everybody with a brain and a little experience under their belt has some of this. What’s funny-sad is that modern-day “conservatives” seem to lack functional versions of it. They exhibit extreme skepticism of the most well-established, proven, track-recorded facts and patterns, while at the same time spinning delusional fantasy conspiracies utterly detached from all doubt or critical thinking when it comes to whatever assertion their leaders or spokesmen are grifting in their direction. It’s sad at a human level, but schadenfreudey if you think in terms of karma, and then sad and terrifying again from the perspective of the fate of the nation.
So JVL’s typology of conservatisms is useful, but in a dissection kind of way. To do some injustice to E. B. and Katharine S. White, conservatism “can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.” JVL may have a purely scientific mind. Many pundits have such minds, which is why so many of them trend toward the pedantic, hair-splitting, detached-from-lived-reality side.
But to be fair to scientists, some are ecologists and such who study living systems and feedback loops and complexity. If you’re one of those nerds, you can grok what I’m saying here, and it’s worth restating JVL’s now-ludicrous-appearing remark:
Obviously there is some overlap. But it’s most useful to understand them as separate phenomena which, though they share some genetic material, are distinct from one another in 2024 America.
“Share some genetic material?” Outside the lab’s meticulously segregated test tubes, the varieties of “conservativism” long ago interbred like Viagra’d bunnies in the wild and gave us such a melange of malformed offspring that it’s utterly pointless to try to parse the noble lineage any one of them may have sprung from.
The Frankensteinian experiment has failed. “Conservatism” of any variety is either a basic, common-sense starting point when vetting ideas or utterly bankrupt, and certainly not a chest of Eternal Truths. Instead, it stands revealed (as it has, increasingly, for a long time, but now SO obviously) as naked power worship now in the desperate home stretch mounting a last ditch effort for permanent minority rule by people who just think they’re better than the rest of us.
Why do they think this? Doesn’t matter. Even they don’t know. They never did.
Just drop it already. Live your life and let others live theirs.
