In the latest round of bloggery about conservatism, I think Chait has it. My own view is that conservatism is fundamentally rooted in skepticism about the human mind and its capacity to change society. So it’s basically resistant to large-scale change, but, on the rare occasions that such change happens, is necessary and turns out okay, conservatives can live with it. Our skepticism is not absolute or ideological; it’s temperamental. Our belief in markets, for example, is not based on some idea that markets produce the most wealth. It’s based on the idea that markets devolve decision-making to the most personal, immediate level and so tend to minimize the risk of big, bad decisions, made by fallible, distant brains. Markets devolve decision-making to the people closest to the issue at hand and so lead to collective outcomes that best represent the actual choices of most people. It’s just a plus that they also generate more wealth than any other system yet devised. At the root of this is – yes – individual freedom. Why else would you want individuals’ personal choices best reflected in social or economic policy? Because individual liberty is what counts – because we can only fully know ourselves. The link between skepticism and freedom is a vital one.
In this sense, a conservative of the type I favor tends to be indifferent to things like economic growth. If faster growth were caused by a bigger government, a conservative would still back smaller government and individual freedom. Similarly, my hostility to a progressive income tax is because I believe it’s hubristic over-reach. Why should a government have the power to penalize some individuals for their relative success while rewarding others for relative failure? A government’s only concern should be raising revenue for the basic tasks of government; and it should do so by as neutral and fair a scheme as possible. Any more ambitious scheme should be queried and nit-picked until it dies. Any proposal designed to enforce some abstract notion of "social justice" would never pass the skeptical conservative’s sniff test. That’s why a conservative is also deeply suspicious of religious types in government, those keen on moralizing people according to their own views of what God thinks. Like socialism, Christianism is another form of big government hubris. Who are they to tell me what to do with my life? This is usually followed by two words dearest to the conservative heart: Buzz off.
In my upcoming book on conservatism, I put it this way:
There are many who often invoke the rhetorical bromides of "freedom" but, when pressed, acknowledge that no such thing really exists. The fundamentalist believes that humans have freedom – but only to choose the good; and he believes that a government dedicated to upholding that good, whether deduced from God or his own version of "nature", has every right, and, in fact, a duty to ensure that as many citizens as possible achieve that good. And so laws are designed to encourage virtue and discourage vice. Freedom is limited and conditional. A socialist will argue that freedom is an illusion to those people who begin with a material disadvantage, and that the state must act to remedy such a disadvantage before freedom can truly exist. The poor are not free, he argues. Those who are at the bottom of the heap of human inequality deserve substantive aid to equalize the system. And so he wants a system of redistributive justice to ensure "real" freedom.
A conservative, in contrast, will be skeptical of both arguments. He’ll want to know from the fundamentalist who exactly came up with this "good." He’ll ask why he should adhere to a view of virtue which is deduced from a religion he doesn’t share or from a "nature" he doesn’t recognize as his own. He’ll ask the socialist, in turn, why he is being forced to give up his own money and property for the sake an idea of substantive equality that sounds like a surreal fantasy to him. Who guarantees either vision – that of the virtuous or that of the substantively equal? And who says what is virtue? And by whose standard do we judge substantive equality? If inequality remains after redistribution, what then? And, by the way, how do we control a state that has the power to divest me of my income and wealth and property?
The conservative will just keep asking the questions; and will refuse to give up his freedom until he gets an answer that satisfies his skeptical soul. Which is to say, he will never stop asking; and so the political project based on virtue or substantive equality can never get started. The pesky conservative stands doggedly in the way, knowing what he doesn’t know, distrustful of those who claim to know better, querulous and quirky and always himself.
He’s really irritating, in other words. But a conservative’s natural orneriness is the cornerstone of Anglo-American liberty. And he has bossy, moralizing, certain foes to his right and to his left.
The Dish 