Daniel Mahoney wrote a beautiful and insightful reflection on “Scrutonian conservatism» to create this forum to mark the fifth anniversary of the death of Sir Roger Scruton. Mahoney’s essay also makes a wonderful introduction for anyone unfamiliar with Scruton’s ideas.
I have very little disagreement with Mahoney’s assessment, so I will limit myself to a brief development and application of one of his themes – a theme which, in my opinion, highlights why he is so important for today’s American conservatives to continue (or begin) to read Scruton carefully.
Reading Scruton for the first time years ago helped clarify and express my growing feeling that the conservatism of the 90s and early 2000s movement that I grew up in was overlooking important things. Tax cuts, GDP growth, abortion — these things mattered and still matter, but too often it seemed like the most influential conservative talking heads tended to make these kinds of policy preferences ( and of course the imperative to wage just wars) fundamental principles. which served as the core of the conservative perspective. Was there something more fundamental in our civilian life that was in danger, and was the conservatism of the movement unconscious?
Fast forward to today, and there’s a new conservatism movement in town, one that criticizes the old guard for some of the same things I was missing. Perhaps I should side with the new “post-liberal” nationalist right that has emerged in recent years, but I don’t. And to clarify and articulate my objections to this new brand, I have also found few better guides than Roger Scruton.
Not surprisingly, Scruton does not fit easily into the popular categories on which much of this contemporary debate often rests. His mind was too subtle and he cared too much for the truth to be satisfied with radical simplifications. At the intellectual level, the fight against American conservatism took place on the battlefield of “liberalism.” Mahoney provides an excellent presentation of Scruton’s view that conservatism aims to “save liberalism from itself.” The bottom line, of course, is that Scruton had a Liberal party in mind. tradition Or legacy more than any particular overarching liberal theory. He recognized that, too often, those who recognize good things do not simply value and preserve them as treasures, but instead seek to rationalize them into absolute values that take precedence over all others and provide a simplistic guide for any political action.
Liberal theorists have tended to do this with personal and property rights; democratic theorists do it with the institutions and habits of self-government; and nationalists do it with the political system itself. Approaching economic freedom, religious freedom, and other practices that we often lump into the “liberal” category as valuable, long-negotiated legal and political legacies rather than theoretical absolutes allows for the more subtle approach to liberalism that Scruton exemplifies. .
Additionally, I think Scruton challenges today’s intra-conservative categories because he recognizes the vital political importance of things that politics and policy cannot control. This is a difficult statement for any zealous activist, who tends to view political activity as a matter of identifying problems, defining common goals, and coordinating activities to solve them. For the partisan lawyer, electing the right people must always offer the prospect of solving the nation’s problems. It is therefore easy, on the one hand, to diminish (consciously or unconsciously) the importance of cultural conditions that politics cannot control or, on the other hand, to deny any limits to what collective political action can accomplish. . To make an overall assessment, I think the conservatism movement of the 90s and early 2000s often did the former, while today’s national conservatives and post-liberals often did the latter.
Scruton, however, often left his readers with the unsatisfying reality that many of our modern problems are educational, cultural, and spiritual and that public policy cannot solve them. If the previous generation of conservative activists needed to appreciate the first part of this truth, the emerging new right needs to appreciate the last part.
Attempts to resolve cultural problems through direct political solutions can often have hidden effects that only further exacerbate the underlying malaise.
Populism has every interest in promising political answers to every problem, provided the people’s champion is empowered to solve it. A right-wing populism, which recognizes the importance of cultural conditions, will therefore be inclined to promise political solutions. However, these solutions often overlook very real realities. limits to what consciously planned political action can accomplishand could end up having unintended and far-reaching ripple effects.
Consider Scruton 2018 commentary on economic protectionismwhose conservative supporters sometimes promise a social renewal driven by blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, which would then stabilize families, reduce “deaths of despair” and increase birth rates:
Adam Smith argued that trade barriers and protections for dying industries will not, in the long run, serve the interests of the population. On the contrary, they will lead to a sclerotic economy which will break down in the face of competition. President Trump does not seem to have understood this point. Its protectionist policies resemble those of postwar socialist governments in Europe, which insulated dysfunctional industries from competition and led not only to economic stagnation but also to a kind of cultural pessimism that certainly goes to the against the American grain.
This last line, easy to ignore, is important. Attempts to subjugate economic activity in the hope that it will achieve a specific, predetermined goal are not bad simply because they lead to stagnation. They also contribute to “cultural” decline. He doesn’t explain exactly what he meant, but I think it probably has something to do with the omnipresent attitude he denounced in multiple contexts as a driver of social decadence: “The idea of the state as a benevolent father figure, who guides the collective goods of society to where they are needed, and who is always there for us save people from poverty, poor health or unemployment.
This view of the state runs counter to the prerequisites for healthy civic life that Scruton has articulated in numerous works, including How to be conservative and the essay “The need of the nations.” The conservative maintains that civil life is based on a pre-politics attachment to people who, sharing a common place, themselves find ways to solve their common problems. These free men turn to law and politics not to organize their lives for them, but to provide them with a framework, operating within their cultural milieu, to resolve their conflicts and impose secondary constraints on their activity. As citizens come to embrace the idea that politics is meant to ensure a comfortable life – to save people from forces they cannot cope with themselves – they stop seeing themselves as active participants in civil life or as part of a “we” who share a public life together. Politics then ends up becoming a competition to ensure that the state does business properly. My needs more than yours.
I therefore bring up the comment on protectionism, not to make a particular point about economic policy, but to highlight that attempts to solve cultural problems through direct political solutions can often have hidden effects that only serve to further exacerbate the underlying discomfort. The political response to a disordered cultural scene must attempt to identify and correct the political forces that attacked the pre-political “we.” This is where culture springs from. But we should not try to hide problems under false promises of political planning.
Additionally, a broader view of policy goals may encourage other, darker tendencies. The basis of civil life described by Scruton – neighbors arranging to live together in peace – indicates a politics of tradition, custom, continuity and compromise. To the extent that one engages in a powerful, directive, and paternalistic understanding of political activity, Scruton recognized, this type of politics will appear weak and lacking in will. “Many people, especially young men, are dissatisfied with it,” he wrote in The uses of pessimism. “They seek commitment that will absorb them and stifle their individual goals; they long for a unified plan that would remove the burden of responsibility, and a zero-sum encounter with the enemy that would call them to sacrifice. »
The “young men” described here are not hard to find in the new conservative movement, where it is not at all surprising to hear popular commentators offering SparkNotes versions of Carl Schmitt, pundits calling for a dictator who would cleanse American culture by fire, or online “influencers” evoke neo-pagan vitalism. The current political manifestations of the new right obviously do not go to these extremes. But the fact that so many young men in the movement are attracted to such totalizing ideas is disconcerting. These are people who do not want the freedom and responsibility to face life as thinking, learning and loving beings.
In a certain sense, as I indicated above, emphasizing the vital importance of things that do not fall within the political sphere is not satisfactory. But in another sense, it inspires optimism. Because in the face of these “young men”, it reminds us that whatever the political or cultural dynamic that surrounds us, we we have the power to live life well: “The choice is offered to us, as it has been to every human being in history, to live well or badly, to be virtuous or vicious, to love or to hate. And this is an individual choice, which only indirectly depends on cultural conditions and which no one else can make for us.”
As the movement’s conservatism undergoes its identity crisis, Scruton’s works remain a vital source of a conservatism that rests on safe ground, one that warns against cultural indifference, false hope, and despair.
All opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.