Corey Robin, directly aiming a challenge in my direction, says yes – that conservatism is about ideology and power rather than restraint and freedom:
It’s not just Burke who makes … arguments in favor of ideological zeal and against prudential restraints. Nor is it in the face of an arguably lethal threat like Jacobinism that conservatives make them. In the 20th century, one finds a similar move in Hayek, arguing against not the totalitarianism of Stalin but the democratic socialism of Britain and France and the liberal welfare state of the New Deal. Again, this is not a widely noted theme in discussions of Hayek, but if you want a full-throated defense of ideology and utopianism against the prudential improvisations of the proverbial conservative, you could do worse than to start with Volume 1 of his Law, Legislation, and Liberty. There, Hayek says, among other things, that the "successful defense of freedom must therefore be dogmatic and make no concession to expediency."
You can see an earlier version of this argument, in a Raritan essay I read a while back. The trouble with running a blog of this pace and volume is that the time to read Robin's new book is short. So I apologize for not having read it yet, but hope to do so soon.
The obvious response to the essays' highlighting the radical or revolutionary aspects of the conservative mind – including Burke – is to agree that, faced with what looked like the end of all settled order in the late eighteenth century, many over-reacted, including Burke at times. The impulse to witness change and regard it as apocalyptic in its implications – and therefore to become more radical in attempting to arrest or mitigate it – is certainly a deep part of the conservative conversation. Burke, one should recall, was a Whig, not a Tory. And he was an Irishman. He contained multitudes. Equally, there's no question that Hayek's critique of the modern welfare state was radical in its prescriptions – just as Paul Ryan's plans for the future of elderly healthcare are.
I would simply argue that alongside this strain there is an equally countervailing one of respect for existing institutions, pragmatic prudence in governing, and an understanding of the value of moderation in political life. This is most fully achieved in Oakeshott, in my view, who rather downplayed the mercurial Burke, and famously criticized Hayek for excessive abstraction and too much faith in a too-perfect "system." Reihan conceded:
Robin’s ur-thesis is that the right has shrewdly employed a narrative of victimhood, victimhood for the predatory classes, as a means to win power and sympathy. I definitely think there is something to this, and I think it is an unattractive pose that the right ought to have outgrown. But again, I don’t see this as structural or ancient. Rather, I think it is contingent and particular, and that it parallels forms of victim politics that are deployed across the political spectrum.
I see that sense of angry alienation from modernity as more like a flickering flame through conservative history, one that burns sometimes with ferocity but also has long periods of quiet and calm. And context matters: Thatcher's pragmatic radicalism was in direct response to the unmissable collapse of the social-democratic model in Britain by the 1970s. The over-reach of post-war managerial liberalism demanded a conservative radicalism in response.
But having ratcheted back those hubristic moves (think lower tax rates, welfare reform), the proper conservative position decades later is to let be, to reform where one must, but to be a steady steward of a ship in high seas with currents and waves tossing us to and fro. That's why the increased ideology of the American right after their ideological and political triumphs since the 1980s is so, well, unconservative. Its radicalism is not contextual: tax revenues are at 50 year lows, and balancing the budget on spending cuts alone does not have a chance of winning broad consent in the time we have and would profoundly reset US society back a few decades, if not almost a century.
That's reactionaryism, not conservatism. It's religion, not politics. And the fact that these radical strains and extreme reactions have always been part of the right doesn't mean it is defined by them, or that the tradition that Tanenhaus and I champion is non-existent or incoherent.
The Dish 