The Origins of Conservativism
The never Trumpers love to pine away for the “true conservativism of Reagan.” The problem is that Reagan was not a conservative. He was, rather, a right-wing revolutionary and an economic anarchist. But the likes of Joe Scarborough, Charlie Sykes, and Bill Krystol, along with others, natter on about the need for the so-called Republican Party to set aside the politics of obstruction, culture wars, and antidemocratic Trumpism. They want to return what they call the “principled, small-government conservatism of Reagan”.
“If we could just go back to what Reagan stood for,” the thinking seems to go, “then things could return to ‘normal’ and sweetness and light would once again reign throughout the land.”
What a load of nonsense, absolutely steaming nonsense. Reagan, by the standard of traditional conservative thinking, the intellectual political frame that held from Edmund Burke to William F. Buckley, was not a conservative. Moreover, there is a direct line of thinking that stretches from Reagan to Trump. (I’ll get back to that later.)
But even traditional conservative thinking, if you drill down to its core, always had obstructionist, culture warrior, and antidemocratic foundations.
When traditional conservatives point to the foundations of their ideas, they tend to point to Burke so we’ll start there. Burke wrote his seminal work, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in 1790 in reaction[1] to a speech by Richard Price. Price had hailed the French Revolution as the spreading of the Empire of Reason that included Britain after the Glorious Revolution, the Unites States after its revolution, and then France. Price’s thesis was that these revolutions created governments based on Enlightenment ideas rather than tradition. Burke started his rebuttal with what we would call cancel culture. He tried to paint Price as a fringe figure. He then launches on an attack on other English writers on religious tolerance claiming no one bothered with such ideas anymore. He posits the Glorious Revolution was about merely (his word) fixing a problem in the secession of the British Monarchy. According to Burke, it would violate traditional norms to have a Catholic monarch rule over a Protestant nation. He conveniently ignores the English Bill of Rights and the Act of Toleration, which were part and parcel of it and made Parliament the primary organ of government. He also ignored the fact that Catholic Ireland was also part of Britain. Such omissions tend to be common throughout conservative thinking. For Burke, any government based on anything other than inherited tradition was bound to be flawed and unstable. This was especially true of governments based on things like the idea that a person was “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” to use another writer’s phrase for it. Any rights that you may have had to be inherited. No rights were inherent. Burke used rights and privileges more or less interchangeably.
He then launches on a long riff about his absolute horror at the arrest of the queen of France. How horrible to have a filthy rabble come into her chamber to arrest her. He constantly uses adjectives like sweet, tender, innocent to describe her while those who arrest her are dirty, riotous, disorderly, barbaric. It is a long riff; so long that I wanted to throw the book against the wall and shout “we get it already.”
The Queen of France was Marie Antionette.
Only after wading through all this culture war stuff about the Enlightenment and horror at the idea of any kind of revolution, does Burke actually get down to what he thinks governing should be. It should be about maintaining the existing institutions, social order, and traditions. This entire section could be boiled down to four words: protect the status quo. Defend our way of life is a more popular way conservatives have said it in US history. But the result is that conservatives always resisted change.
Now to be absolutely fair to Burke and his intellectual followers, theirs was not an absolutist, obstruct everything stance. He does acknowledge that, as things change in society, occasional reform is necessary. But it should always be done prudently, slowly, incrementally, and not alter the existing order too much. And if those reforms include extending rights and privileges to new groups, they should wait until those new groups were deemed “ready” and “deserving.” Burke, in the context of 18th century Britain, was thinking about class. In the American context, such concerns inevitably were connected with race. William F. Buckley’s essential argument when he debated James Baldwin at the Oxford Union about civil rights was about waiting until African-Americans were ready for fuller participation in American political life. Indeed, Burke, like Buckley, believed that any change should be resisted until agitation for change became so great as to threaten order.
For Burke, governments were instituted among men to ensure order. That is the foundational social contract[2] for conservatives. For Burke, and almost all conservative thinkers until Buckley, the best way to maintain order was to protect the status quo. But Burke did not originate that particular version of the social contract. Thomas Hobbes did.
Hobbes was a straight up monarchist. The more absolute the better. A supporter of Charles I, he fled England during the English Civil War and remained abroad until the monarchy was restored. The great irony of Hobbes is that he is the progenitor social contract theory that did so much to undermine absolute monarchy by overthrowing the idea of divine-right kingship.
Hobbes laid down what he thought about “good governance” in his 1651 treatise, Leviathan. The best form of government is when all power is invested in as few hands as possible, preferably only one set of hands: an all-powerful executive. And by all powerful he meant just that: legislative, executive, ecclesiastical, economic, artistic, educational, judicial, or anything else that might influence the hearts and minds of the people. He called it the unitary executive. (Yes, I did a head snap when former Attorney General William Barr talked about the presidency as a unitary executive.) Hobbes believed that people needed this because human beings are so self-interested that they will behave like brutes engaged in a “war of all against all.” He called that the state of nature. The unitary executive’s primary job was to maintain order so people would not revert to being violent brutes. Too much personal autonomy was a bad thing for people, Hobbes thought. And he didn’t necessarily care about methods of maintaining order.
Almost all traditional conservatives believed that acting on narrow, base self-interest needed to be restrained.
Hobbes and Burke laid down the basic themes of traditional conservative thinking. Conservative thinking has, baked into its origins, autocratic tendencies. But, for Burke and most traditional conservatives who followed him, protecting the status quo meant just that. Once a right or privilege, or a norm developed, or, an entitlement became established, it became part of the status quo, no matter how vigorously conservatives opposed it in the past, and thus was to be defended. That is why President Dwight Eisenhower said that no conservative would propose getting rid of Social Security. They may not expand any program or extend rights and privileges any further but they wouldn’t roll them back either. For a Burkean conservative, the idea of stripping 50-year-old constitutional rights from women or suppressing the right to vote would have been anathema.
The other thing, going all the way back to Hobbes, was the idea that government had to be effective — had to perform the tasks set to it well. The single greatest fear among traditional conservatives was an enfeebled government that could not act effectively. While traditional conservatives might argue that certain parts of life and society should fall outside of government action, as do liberals, the size of government was never an issue. Too small of a government, one so small that as to be ineffective, able to drown it in a bath tub, was a bad idea. It would result in disaffection; disaffection leads to disorder. It is the reason Hobbes named his treatise for the largest and most powerful creature on earth, the leviathan — whale.
Born out of an absolute horror of the idea of revolution, protective of the status quo, obsessed with order, conservative thinking remained remarkably consistent until the late 1970s. How did this set of political ideas morph into what we have now. What changes led conservatives down the path to believing all government was ineffective, in economic anarchy, in reactionary social policies, and being supportive of insurrectionists? How did conservatives go from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump?
Enter the Neocons
Well, what happened was that three sets of ideas came together to help create the so-called Reagan Revolution. This in turn was reinforced by the “conservative” media bubble. The problem with all of these ideas is that they were, at least in part, repudiations of traditional conservative thinking but were close enough so that the Bill Buckleys of the world were willing to go along with them. At least until they were hunted out of the Republican Party as RINOS.
The first group were the right-wing culture warriors. The most predominate of these were evangelical Christians. They were largely motivated by a reaction to the removal of prayer from public schools and Roe v. Wade. They predominated because they were the most organized of the culture warriors under the banner of the Moral Majority, a political action group headed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell. They seemed to believe that the US was in moral decline because of the tumult of the sixties and seventies, especially on sexual matters and the “traditional” family. But they were not alone. RWCWs also included white supremacists and racists who were upset over the advancement of civil rights. Gun enthusiasts wanted to return to an imaginary time when people could carry weapons whenever, wherever they wanted. And then there were all those that felt like the America they knew, their way of life, was slipping away for whatever reason.
What they all shared was a sense of grievance over the idea that the liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s had gone too far, that the old verities of the past had been overthrown, and that this threatened their core values. And there was a belief that a gain by someone else represented a loss for them. There was also a belief that America was in a state of decline, losing its position in the world morally, economically and politically.
The other thing they shared was an absolute certainty that they were right.
What they wanted was a return to the past, to a status quo ante. At least they all wanted to return to an idealized, nostalgic, sepia-toned, selective memory version of the status quo ante. Mostly it was the 1950s that they took as a model. Of course, they weren’t really thinking about the real 1950s of Cold War paranoia, McCarthyism, Jim Crow (although some were probably thinking about that), women so depressed that tranquilizers were invented. No, they were thinking of returning to the Leave it to Beaver version of the 1950s.
None of this was in the conservative tradition of Burke and Eisenhower. This politics of grievance, decline, and nostalgia was straight up reactionary politics. They didn’t want to defend the status quo, the fundamental principle of traditional conservatism. They want to destroy the status quo. They wanted what traditional conservatives always feared. They wanted a revolution. That’s what Reagan promised. The Reagan Revolution.
Reagan legitimized part of these reactionary forces, especially the religious right on the issue of abortion. For the ones who wanted to turn back civil rights, gay rights, and other rights for women, Reagan dog-whistled them. The biggest dog whistle, of course, was when he gave his first speech after his nomination in Philadelphia, Mississippi, whose only claim to fame had been the murder of three civil rights workers by the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1960s.
All Trump really did was turn Reagan’s dog-whistle into a megaphone of reactionary grievance.
But, while he dog whistled and legitimized these forces of social reaction, Reagan seems to have focused much more on the two other parts of his revolution, both of which would exacerbate the grievances of the RWCWs. But these aggrieved ones would turn out to be the hard core of Trump’s base. These are also the ones Trump played to the most.
The second part of Reagan’s revolution were the right libertarians. Right libertarians have a minimalist view of government that posits government’s role should be, as Robert Nozick puts it in his 1973 Anarchy, State and Utopia, “limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on.” Anything beyond the most basic functions necessarily entails infringement upon individual rights. Indeed, they have redefined liberty to mean that you have the right to do whatever you want, however you want. They also tend to have an absolutist view of individual rights, meaning rights without limits. Especially property rights. Additionally, because of their absolutist views on rights, they have a rather extreme view of the importance of the individual — that the individual is paramount to the point that they reject the idea of a common good. In that regard, libertarianism is a direct assault on the basic premise of democracy — the idea that people come together, through elections and representation, to try to solve society’s problems for the common good. It is a rejection of the principles laid down in the preamble to the Constitution.
Right-libertarianism is a fundamental rejection of the idea of a social contract.
Indeed, as we have seen from the anti-mask, antivaccine crowd in recent months, any appeal to the idea of the common good is seen as an attack not only on liberty but the beginning of tyranny that will lead straight to a soviet-style totalitarian state where any dissent will be crushed mercilessly. It is, of course, an either/or fallacy: absolute liberty, as they define it, or a completely collectivist society that crushes all individual autonomy.
Right-libertarians get that last idea from Ayn Rand. Right libertarians mostly to point Rand as the source of many of their ideas. Rand had been traumatized as a young girl by her family’s experiences during the Bolshevik Revolution. There is much to decry in Rand — her belief selfishness is a virtue, her false version of what objective means, her tedious writing just to name a few. But it is this either/or fallacy that informs everything she wrote, that is the core of everything she believed. It is the source of all the blathering today about personal freedom, even freedom to endanger others. It is best incapsulated by Anthem, the novella she wrote in 1937.
Anthem is a dystopian novella about a collectivist future where the idea of individuality has been completely eliminated. Everything is planned by councils (the Russian word for council is soviet) and no independent thought is allowed. Equality 7–2521 wants to be a scholar but he is assigned to be a street sweeper. He also falls in love with Liberty 5–3000 in contradiction to the mating rules of the ultra-collectivist society. Equality rediscovers electricity and presents it to a council who are horrified he did unapproved research. They threaten to punish him so he runs away from the city to the forest where he finds a house from “the old times” which apparently has a lot of books. Liberty 5–3000 follows him. They settle down and start living lives as individuals. It ends with them rediscovering the word “I”.
The message is clear: if you want to live a fully human life, then you have to get away from any sort of society or collective. If you want to live a fully human life, no one should be able to tell you what to do. Only an absolutist version of personal autonomy allows for a fully human life; any appeal to the good of others is tantamount to life in a gulag where any individuality is erased.
What did Hobbes say about too much personal autonomy again?
But the real core of the Reagan Revolution was not culture wars or libertarianism. It was economics. These ideas initially went by many different names: Reaganomics, Supply-side Economics, the Austrian School, the University of Chicago School. Today they are called Neoliberalism. The godfather of Neoliberalism is Friedrich August Von Hayek. His ideas and premises informed much of Reagan’s economic platform and small-government conservativism.
Hayek’s family of minor Hapsburg noblemen and scholars had been severely impacted by the hyperinflation following the collapse of the Empire at the end of World War I. He formulated his ideas at the London School of Economics, largely in opposition to the ideas developed at the same time by John Maynard Keynes at the University of Cambridge. Keynesian economics would dominate economic policy from the 1930s until, really, the elections of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — the other great proponent of supply-side economics. Hayek began by redefining liberty as not being about rights to participate in governance, or a commitment to human rights, or, indeed, any of the principles long associated with the term. For Hayek, liberty meant a “policy that deliberately adopts competition, markets and pricing as its ordering principles.” His basic premise is society has become so complicated that any sort of economic planning would always be a bad decision that would introduce inefficiency and negative outcomes. The only way to have an efficient, productive economy is to allow self-interested people participate in unregulated markets. Hayek uses the terms “freedom” and “liberty” interchangeably. All that is from his 1943 The Road to Serfdom. The title makes it clear, Hayek’s is a slippery slope argument. Any government action to regulate markets will ultimately lead to an unfree, soviet-style socialist society. Indeed, according to Hayek, the only economic policy that doesn’t lead to dystopia is controlling the money supply by keeping interest rates and inflation low. That’s the supply in supply-side economics. It never had anything to do with the production of goods and services. It had everything to do with stock markets and investment banking. Fiscal policy, things like spending on infrastructure, education, social programs, and basic science, took a back seat to deregulating markets, tax cuts, keeping interest rates low, and controlling inflation. Indeed, except for defense spending, Reagan decried all other fiscal policy as big government spending.
Had Hayek stopped there, it would have been bad enough but he wasn’t quite finished yet. In 1960, he published The Constitution of Liberty, the book Margaret Thatcher liked to wave around proclaiming, “This is what we believe.” In it he wrote about how “liberty” had to be balanced with “personal responsibility.” But, if you remember how Hayek defines liberty as the right to be selfishly self-interested in a completely unregulated market, it becomes clear that personal responsibility means you are responsible for your economic situation and should solve your economic problems by yourself. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Don’t expect anyone, especially government, to help you. Further, he argues that the coercive power of government should only be used to restrain those that would restrict other people’s liberty in that free market — like unions, consumer rights groups, environmental groups and the like. State power should only be used against those who would restrict the free market.
There we have it, the three strands of neoconservative thinking: a religion-infused reactionary view of the social order, an extreme version of individual autonomy based on selfishness that includes, at its bottom, a denial of the idea of a social contract, and a belief in essentially economic anarchy, as Keynes viewed Hayek’s main ideas, that posited hypercompetitive self-interest operating in an unregulated marketplace was liberty. The last two, as they broke down local economies and a sense of community, fed the first by creating ever more people who felt aggrieved. But all three strands were able to couch their rhetoric in terms of liberty and freedom although all three were defining those terms in ways alien to any traditional meaning of the terms. And all of them are inherently absolutist in their thinking. And all of it was a far cry from traditionally conservative views rooted in ideas about the status quo, respecting institutions, effective governance, and absolute horror at revolution put forth by Burke and the like.
History Aids the Neocons in Driving Out Traditional Conservatives
So the question really becomes how did these ideas come to displace the traditional, conservative thinking that held sway from the 1790s until the 1980s? How did these absolutist, reactionary, and, arguably, anarchic ideas become the dominate version of “conservative” thinking?
Three historical events played a large hand in the ascendency of the three strands of neoconservative ideas.
The first was the oil glut of the 1980s. Much of the stagnation and inflation of the 1970s had been caused by the oil shocks beginning in the early seventies when oil prices soared. The oil shocks were caused by geopolitics — Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia, withheld oil production as political leverage because of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Gas prices soared; if you’re old enough you should remember the gas lines, the restrictions based license plate numbers, and no gas signs at gas stations. It was the primary cause of inflation and cuts in industrial production leading to unemployment. This was called stagflation. The dirty secret of industrial economies is that they depend on cheap energy. But oil prices collapsed to $10 a barrel in the mid-eighties. Low oil prices meant low inflation and the economy picked up again. Reagan claimed that it was his Hayek-based, free-market policies had caused the return of prosperity. The tactic worked so well that in the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries only one candidate, Richard Gephardt, questioned whether free trade/free markets was a good idea. He lost.
The true results of the economic policies of Reagan and his followers would not be really felt until decades later.
Then came 1989.
There are times when I feel like no one remembers 1989 and the great hope that was in the air. Beginning on April 15th Chinese students began a protest in Tiananmen Square. While the protests were still on-going, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev arrived for a summit with Chinese leaders. That lead to the arrival of the international press corps who, in addition to covering the summit, also covered the protest. After Gorbachev left, the Chinese shut down the international press in Beijing and violently cleared the square on June 4th. But not before the students’ message reached the wider world. They were protesting for “democracy, freedom, and human rights.”
Those Chinese students sparked protests throughout the Soviet bloc, in Berlin and Prague, in Budapest and Sofia, in every capital behind the Iron Curtain. Gorbachev, unlike previous Soviet leaders, did NOT send the Red Army with its tanks to suppress the protests. One by one, communist governments fell until by New Year’s Eve 1989 only the Soviet Union remained. The Soviet Union itself would collapse a little more than a year later in 1991.
And the protesters all said they were doing it for democracy, freedom, and human rights.
But leaders in the West, especially Republican President George H.W. Bush and Conservative Prime Minister Thatcher, called it a great victory for….wait for it, capitalism. And by capitalism, they meant free market, Hayek-inspired capitalism. So rather than sending people knowledgeable about things like how to run elections, or jurists to help set up independent judiciaries, or people knowledgeable about how legislatures work, Bush sent a lot of advisors reengineer economies and privatize industries and create free markets.
Especially in America, free-market, neoliberal capitalism was triumphant. And Reagan was credited with bringing down the Soviet Union. But the real result of Reaganomics, the inequality, stagnation, shrinking of the middle class, the obscene concentrations of wealth, would not really be felt for another couple of decades. Not really felt until 2008 and the financial crisis.
The last event was barely noticed at the time but would have a major role in helping creating the conditions that Trump so easily exploited. Reagan often spoke of “liberal bias” in the media whenever coverage went against him. Not really that far from Trump’s calling the nonconservative press “fake news” which is not that far from calling the press the “enemy of the people”. In 1987, Reagan succeeded in eliminating the fairness doctrine that required broadcasters to present both sides of a political issue. He often said it was his proudest achievement.
One of the first results of this was a rather bizarre radio syndication deal for a radio personality from an obscure station in California named Rush Limbaugh. It was bizarre in that radio stations didn’t have to pay for his show except for allowing the syndicator to sell four minutes of advertising for each hour. Limbaugh then took the idea of “liberal bias” and applied to not only the press, but also universities, government, and, well, experts of any kind including scientists. By the middle of the 1990s, this was taken up by Fox News and other outlets. And it worked, people on the right began to believe that only Rush, Fox and similar outlets were credible sources of news.
It was, and still is, insidious. Rush and Fox convinced people to trust them not because they had better information or better arguments but because they taught their listeners to not trust anyone else. Not to trust people who actually know or study things.
When they weren’t doing that, they were feeding the aggrieved a never-ending supply of scapegoats, conspiracy theories, and fallacious arguments. It’s the Clintons, feminists, gays, government, African-Americans, immigrants (especially those not from Europe), Democrats, and liberals — always those evil liberals — who are coming to destroy your way of life and were responsible for every bad thing in America. When they weren’t doing that, they were busy hunting RINOs — what they called traditional, Burkean conservatives — out of the Republican party.
Meanwhile, the results of that Hayek-based neoliberal economic system was blasting the economies of small towns throughout the country and Rand-based libertarianism was shredding their sense of community. Both of them, also, made it harder to deal with the increasing number of social problems they created.
This just created more aggrieved RWCWs because they were already in a neoconservative media bubble.
By the mid-1990s that bubble was already in place. I lived in Missouri then. If you traveled around the Midwest and parts of the South in those years you saw lots small towns with dying business districts. But if you went into a restaurant or a bar that had a TV, it was always on Fox. Most people had their car radios preset to Rush. The right-wing echo chamber was merely reinforced by the internet and social media. It existed long before most people even knew what the internet was.
In the end, Trump did NOT create the current mindset of the erstwhile Republican Party of radical social reaction, extreme individualism, antidemocratic tendencies, and selfishness. He was just was better at exploiting it. What Trump and Trumpism really are is both the symptom and culmination of the Reagan Revolution.
And so I would like to tell Messrs. Scarborough, Sykes, and Kristol, along with all the others who want to return to the good old days of Reagan, to stop it. Because all you are really doing is advocating for the very things that made Trump possible. Reagan wasn’t conservative; Trump isn’t either. They are two sides of the same coin.
[1] Just an interesting side note, Thomas Paine wrote The Rights of Man in reaction to Burke’s reaction to Price. If you ever get a chance to read about the Enlightenment, a good way to view it is as a grand dialogue about what it means to be human and an individual in society. Everyone seemed to be writing in response to someone else.
[2] Here I want to define my terms. At its most basic, social contract theory is the idea that governments are created by human beings to serve particular purposes. It was in many ways a rejection of divine-right monarchy. Supernatural, or indeed any nonhuman force like Marx’s material dialectic, explanations need not apply. One of the reasons why there is such confusion about the idea of the social contract is that the writers and thinkers about it don’t agree on what those purposes are or what obligations and rights individuals have to the larger society.
