What’s trying to be conserved? I prefer to think of a ‘new right’, which integrates evidence from history, evolutionary psychology, and economics to create a local, federalist, realistic policy structure and set of values.
I think that American conservatives should be about the business of conserving the ideas of self-ownership, individual freedom and responsibility, private property, free markets, freedom to contract, freedom of association, limited government, the separation of powers, the rule of law, equal treatment under the law, due process, and constitutional representative democracy.
The problem with protecting "the authority and legitimacy of existing institutions" is that many of today's institutions have abandoned their authority and legitimacy in favor of promoting ideologies that attack our society's legitimacy and the restraints without which society cannot survive, much less flourish.
That list sounds wonderful, but in practice representative democracy increasingly seems to be going against "individual freedom and responsibility, private property, free markets, freedom to contract, freedom of association, limited government, the separation of powers, the rule of law, equal treatment under the law, due process". There seems to be a contradiction at the heart of it.
You can try to square the circle by having your constitution prohibit the government from diminishing the other items on the list. But if people want to, there will be constant pressure to change the constitution, explicitly or implicitly, from the people or from the intelligentsia--or both. Lots of law professors (and judges) believe in a living constitution that changes to fit the needs of the day, with them deciding what the needs are and what must change.
The best comparison of liberalism and conservatism comes from Substacker Conrad Bastable in his Ouroboros Theory: Describing The Nature of Right vs. Left. In his view, conservatism fears endemic warfare (which he calls feudalism) and strives to create order. Liberalism is only possible within an ordered space, and strives to create justice.
Creating order out of chaos requires injustice. One couldn't create America without killing Indians; one couldn't create England without killing Celts, and so on forever. In its attempt to solve injustice, liberalism destroys order, but what remains is endemic warfare that may last a Dark Age before order is re-created. Post-apartheid South Africa is an excellent case study.
And yet "conservative" voices have been threatening endemic warfare for the majority of my lifetime.
I think the major problem with political discourse in general is that we've devolved into populism across the board which requires simplification to appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator. As a result, every conflict is framed through the lens of Good versus Evil, so any extreme action is justified in the opposition of Evil, up to and including violence.
The current political structure does not incentivize nuance, discussion, and admission that the opposition may be earnest in their belief that they want what's best for the country even if it is at odds with your beliefs. Moving forward requires a willingness to be uncomfortable and less sure, both things that make you unelectable in the current climate.
I think it's helpful to separate two points that your post combines. The first is that, in a democracy, it is necessary to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Not many people are both intelligent and interested in politics, as a fraction of the electorate, so democracies evolve in the direction of tribalism and emotive spectacle.
Conservatism tends to be comfortable with violence, but primarily as a means to impose or maintain order (which is the opposite of endemic warfare). Victory of any party, whether originally conservative or not, requires imposing order (which explains a lot about communist parties; in theory they're liberal but practice they're repressive as hell). Order means setting priorities and establishing rules, which is indistinguishable from injustice.
If order breaks down and factions make war without a victor, that's endemic warfare. That's what you see in places like Libya, Syria, Liberia, and other hellholes.
Liberalism is denial of political nature of man whereby man is organized into particular, self-ruling morally authoritative units we may variously call tribes, nations, polities.
This creates political dichotomies such as citizen/foreigner, neighbor/stranger, friend/enemy. Liberalism denies these dichotomies.
The right-liberals deny moral authority of the political community. Thus he regards all men as equally strangers to each other. Logical climax is anarchy.
The left liberals deny particularity. Thus he regards all men as equal neighbors of all others. Logical climax is world government.
"I never characterize myself as a conservative economist. As I understand the English language, conservative means conserving, keeping things as they are. I don't want to keep things as they are. The true conservatives today are the people who are in favor of ever bigger government. The people who call themselves liberals today -- the New Dealers -- they are the true conservatives, because they want to keep going on the same path we're going on. I would like to dismantle that. I call myself a liberal in the true sense of liberal, in the sense in which it means of and pertaining to freedom." Milton Friedman
It’s fine for him to have called himself whatever he liked - and surely he arose out of a tradition broadly called “liberalism” even if he’s being a bit too clever by half about it, in an effort to distance himself from everyone … but government action in the arena of social engineering since the New Deal has not been about freedom/not freedom - it’s been about “equality”.
Equality is the reigning utopian ideal. Power is what it always is to people. I don’t have a personal philosophy? I’m not good at that sort of thing. I think nice things are nicer than nasty ones, and living things and rocks and water are best of all. That’s about it!
I mostly like that quote. At minimum it is interesting.
I've never heard conservatism framed as a path. My initial reaction is to disagree but I'll have to think about that more. I'd like to hear others' explanations.
I don't think of conservatism as a path. I see order emerging three dimensionally and with time. Everything is changing due to a multitude of interrelated, multi-directional connections, forces, and differences. Some things work to some degree for a while and then things change.
In my own house, we all clear the table, then wipe the table, and then vacuum. Top to bottom because of gravity. But this hasn't always been the case. Some of my ancestors had no table. Some probably had slaves to carry out this work. In the future, my top-to-bottom rule will be programmed into a robot, and my grandchildren won't need to emphasize this rule to their own children like I do. Other people don't eat dinner at home or at a table.
Hmm. A path as described in previous comments implies change but I don't see the type of change you describe as a path. At least not the type of path previously described. But maybe I'm still missing something.
I know a smart thinker who identifies “the right” as thinking along a civilization-barbarism axis. Thus they will tend to support institutions they perceive as supporting civilization and oppose those they perceive as undermining civilization. For example, I think most right-leaning Americans who dislike higher education genuinely believe that American higher education institutions are undermining civilization.
Yes, an institution that weakens civilization isn't really something one should expect conservatives to want to conserve.
But where does higher education lie on that spectrum? Tradeoffs. I don't think there is any doubt that American higher education does some things that support civilization and some things that weaken it. The question becomes where one sees the balance. I'm not surprised by how a large number of conservatives feel about the weaknesses but I'm very surprised by how little weight they give to its benefits.
Yes, whether today’s higher ed is ACTUALLY undermining civilization is a separate question. But I would observe that as an institution, American higher ed has not exactly gone out of its way to reassure conservatives in this regard. Many academics are are heavily invested in seeing themselves, and scholarship generally, as subversive.
I think most conservatives would agree that curricula in useful fields like medicine or engineering support civilization, but that the humanities curricula are (mostly) weakening it. There used to be humanities programs that supported civilization, and there could be again, but there aren't many now.
An increasing reason for my skepticism is the fact that, for those wanting to learn, the internet plus search are plenty. The alternative of getting a job & studying on one’s own is more practically feasible today, than ever before.
The signaling value of ed is something I don’t want to conserve much.
As usual, Stu, you don’t list any specific benefit as an example.
Generally it’s considered that Learning, and practicing, critical thinking is a skill set college grads have more of than those with similar IQs but without college. For decades now, this ability to see both sides, and tradeoffs, has been less in college than in workplaces, so it’s a slight negative.
I’d quantify the benefits-costs ratio as about the same as registered Republican professors to all others. At Princeton I think it’s 1 / 800 (Robbie George, tho I’m not certain he’s registered), with some 23 or so “conservatives” who hide it.
"As usual, Stu, you don’t list any specific benefit as an example."
Sure. Because from my point of view, it's obvious there are both benefits and drawbacks. I'm going to try to list some benefits, in many cases knowing why you think they aren't benefits. So be it.
1 Economic engine. I don't think there's any doubt government funded research has been important economically. Similarly, that money has fueled university research key to US dominance in many fields. One of the biggest is medicine. I am immensely grateful for medical advances in my lifetime and I have no doubt a significant share of that comes from universities.
1a Could universities be replaced by organizations such as Batelle (non-profit research group as well as co-manager of Oak Ridge along with UT), Institute for Defense Analysis (which started under university oversight), Sandia (under university oversight), Applied Physics Lab (entirely university), etc.? Sure. Is that likely to work better than what we have? I doubt it. Note: could this have happened via funding to private sector? sure, but my experience with government funding of research by for-profit companies leaves me certain this would have far less success.
1b Are you aware of the DARPA autonomous vehicle challenge? I worked on a project with DARPA starting about the first first year of that challenge. It was an amazing progression from the teams failing miserably the first year to rapid improvement and success a few years later.
2 Maturity. No doubt you could argue that without college, those high school grads would mature quicker. I'd agree. but I'd also argue a lot of kids move into the working world easier at 22 than 18. Everyone is different but I don't see any way I could have where I was shortly after college if I had tried getting there in a society without the college option.
3 skill set. I studied civil engineering and then had an engineering career where I used very little of what I learned. Did I need any of it? IDK. That said, I think we would be woefully short of structural engineers if they had to learn it by a combination of on the job, on their own, and with the assistance of the internet. Same goes for doctors and at least some nurses. I can guess other areas of engineering which are similar but I'm honestly less certain which ones.
4 Sorting. Surely you are aware that the college credential is used by employers as an indicator of who to hire. Often it is exactly that crude. Other times it's more than that though. Imagine if the NFL and NBA had to draft straight out of high school. As it is, there are a few players who jump into the pros then or before four years of college but most need more time to reach that level. And the teams need the college results to better evaluate the talent.
"Generally it’s considered that Learning, and practicing, critical thinking is a skill set college grads have more of than those with similar IQs but without college."
What is your basis for saying this?
No doubt most people, college or not, have less than ideal critical thinking skills. Is one group better in that regard? IDK. If we look at highly skilled blue collar workers, maybe they develop more critical thinking skills while college grads are in school. I think we have to weigh that against the group who 4+ years out of high school are either working rather menial jobs that don't do much for critical thinking or are still living in their parent's basement, so to speak. I think these groups have more never-college and college dropouts than college grads.
And of course critical thinking isn't the only relevant skill. Which group makes more dependable employees? which group is more mature? More competent? the list goes on.
I don't know if your "generally" statement is correct or not but it's worth noting that employers tend to pick college grads. Maybe that's entirely for other reasons but I suspect not.
Even if you are an institutionalist, surely you grok that the reason that conservatives give so little weight to the benefits of academia today is that:
a) they believe that the downsides vastly exceed the benefits, and
b) they have evidence of a system - U.S. academia through somewhere between 2003 and 2013, take your pick - where the benefits *did* exceed the downsides.
No, I don't. While I think I see the downsides and can understand why they give them as much weight as they do (somewhat more weight than I do), that helps me not at all in understanding why they give so little weight to the benefits.
I feel like I understand thinkers on the Left pretty well, but I do not understand conservatism. Self-reported conservatives always seem to adopt whatever the Left believed in 20 or 40 or 60 years ago. This pretty much guarantees the Left always wins.
I am also skeptical that the reason why people vote Right is because they have read and absorbed conservative writing.
I just think that voters on the Right think the Left is batshit crazy and want to be left allow to live their lives.
They don’t vote Right, nor Left. They vote R-Republican or D-Democrat. Or Green or Libertarian or some such.
Conflating Reps with being on the Right suits the media, and many academics, but it’s often not true. More importantly, it hides the tribal reason most Dems vote Dem & Reps vote Rep.
Arnold listed nine conservative thought traditions—which ones do you understand and which not?
I never mentioned Republicans or Democrats in my comment.
To be clear, I understand the argument, but I don’t understand the mentality that leads to constant complaining about society going in the wrong direction, but then doing little to nothing but institutionalizing the very thing that they were complaining about once they are in power.
I also do not understand how conservatives identify good change from bad change. Conservatism seems to be an argument against change, but then they always leave open the caveat that some change is good. But there is nothing within the world view that tells us in a concrete way how to distinguish what is good change and what is bad change.
The result of conservative thought seems to be constant political victories by the Left.
When one side wants radical change and implements it while in power, and the other side wants no change while in power, there is only one outcome.
This is a consequence of infusion of libertarian ideas into American conservatism, something that Russell Kirk warned in his essay "Chirping sectaries".
I disagree. In my experience, libertarians are far more supportive of rolling back the programs implemented by the Left. Conservatives just keep things the way they are, so this effectively institutionalizes the policies of the Left (just at a slower pace than the Left wants).
And then the Left implements more changes, and conservatives institutionalizes it.
Except for various physical constants, such as the speed of light in a vacuum, everything in nature and the universe is constantly changing. All organisms on earth are changing and evolving. These organisms compete and cooperate for energy and do work with it. We create order from energy.
There is no way to prevent change. Change is occurring regardless of your efforts to conserve whatever you’re trying to conserve.
Nature is the only force that can truly conserve, and it has already spoken on what is fixed and universal.
If your life isn’t one of adapting to change, you might want to reconsider your philosophy.
When you prevent other people from adapting to change you take away their dignity, self-respect, and agency.
People often tend to be resistant to change. You probably don’t need to encourage their resistance. More likely, you need to encourage agency so that people can adapt to change.
There is a harsh truth here, and it goes something like this: there is no panacea, no ultimate win; there are only trade-offs born of constant change and limited time and energy. Based on this interpretation of reality, life should be exhausting, difficult, and ultimately wear us out. And it does. Life is difficult—so difficult that we cannot survive for more than about a century.
How does this inform what I should do today? I don’t know, but I should probably go to Costco. I was also hoping to get some reading done. And I should prepare for whatever lies ahead.
Regardless of where what you said fits into conservatism, I think it misses a key component or two. First, there are technology changes, economic changes, instutional changes, policy changes, and cultural changes. Conservatism is very much about slow and small changes to institutions and policy while mostly not restricting tech and economic change. Maybe cultural change lies somewhere between but that one seems fuzzier to me.
To give but one example, what Trump has done with tariffs is the antithesis of conservative. That's not because tariffs are good or bad but because of the scale of changes.
I think you may be right about American conservatism in recent times, but I think it has often (and in many places) been the case that conservatives opposed tech and economic changes. After all, they can be very disruptive to society.
You are probably right. But if we looked at specifics, I'm sure we'd find that they weren't behaving as conservatives, much like with many things Trump has done.
Can you give an example of something like that which Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell opposed?
I'm thinking, for example, of the old landed gentry in England and other countries. They were surely conservative, but my impression is that they would have opposed economic changes because changes would likely have undermined their power.
My statement doesn't mention how change should occur or what causes change. It basically says "change will occur in all things except those things in nature that are fixed and universal."
Here's how I would start to tackle these higher order questions.
So, what causes change? And how should I adapt to change?
With more thought and research I can develop a pretty good answer for the former question, but the latter question is always open to change. In other words, my opinion about how change should occur is always changing. I don't even know exactly how I should change today, let alone how other people should change.
We will never all agree on how change should occur. We don't know what changes will occur and we certainly can't prepare for things that we don't know about.
What we can say is that the universe is changing and life seems to always adapt to that change.
None of us has much influence over how organisms change. Each of us plays a tiny role based on our very limited understanding of the world.
So, we should probably start by acknowledging the high likelihood that we will not agree on how to change or how a particular vaguely-defined group of so-called conservatives has changed and should change.
I doubt we can even agree on who conservatives are. It seems to me that progressives are very conservative in their attempts to censor speech for example.
Actually, humans are continuously changing, adapting to and influencing nature. This is called evolution. See Darwin et al.
Evolution can be so slow that it seems as if humans have a nature that is constant, but anyone who has studied biology and cosmology and has pondered our evolution from single-celled organisms and subatomic particles, knows it would be wrong to say that our DNA is constant.
Our DNA changes, hence human nature changes.
Agreed?
Of course, for practical purposes we often use a rule of thumb approximating “human nature” as constant. Doing so helps in the creation of rules. But because all things change, except certain fixed physical constants, the rules change as well.
I think you completely blew by Mr Kling's definition of liberal change and how that relates to conservatism. It has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of naturally occuring evolution of technology, nature, or society.
The liberal change conservatives resist is exemplified by the famous Chesterton Fence. It is the tendency of liberals to claim that structures and institutions would 'work better' if redesigned not because of organic changes but because the liberal has determined their function does not fit within some grand scheme of predetermined social outcomes. It is the very antithesis of adaption to organic change.
So in your view, conservatives should resist certain rapid changes according to certain principles like Chesterton’s fence. And conservatives know better than progressives what the pace and direction of change should be?
So are conservatives perfect and all knowing with regard to how to change things? Can there be any way better than conservative ways?
Do conservatives ever resist change to a detriment?
He wrote an excellent book - perhaps about other people’s politics - called The Three Languages of Politics (or something similar). It’s short, sweets and also on Audio Book.
What he did was illustrate how modern conservativism doesn't align with older views and needs to be clearly redefined. It isn't an illustration of personal belief.
Carl R Trueman highlights a divide between a worldview based on mimesis vs poesis. I would suggest this is a useful differentiator for conservatives and liberals. Mimesis means a focus on improving the self by conforming to norms grounded in external reality. Poesis means improving or creating the self via self-expression based on authenticity to inner identity.
I was typing a longer comment and I lost it due to user incompetence, so I will just say this: I think this list is good, but I would include something about emergent order. Current culture, customs, institutions, and so on are a product of a kind of evolutionary process, and top-down, wholesale attempts to change them are therefore not likely to result in a net improvement, at least in Western Societies (a stagnant, backward country like Saudi Arabia or China during the Qing Dynasty should maybe have people thinking less skeptically about attempts at changing the social contract. I like to think that if I'd been born in either of those places, I'd be more of a liberal or progressive).
Everyone likes to think they'd be the iconoclast in a culture they view as backward. Statistically, you'd be in the majority in accepting the world as it is.
“Thirty years after Muller composed his introduction, many conservatives are fed up with important institutions, including higher education and mainstream media. This has turned many conservatives into ‘brokenists.’ They are not disposed to protect the authority and legitimacy of existing institutions.”
Interestingly (to me), Arnold did not list government here among the broken institutions.
And more precisely, the federal government (even if it is no doubt also true of many state and some local governments).
But it seems to me this one is the key.
Were the federal government not broken - while also being so powerful - any of the other institutions being broken would be much less problematic.
My claim is that all of the other institutions are more broken due to the power of the federal government. My associated claim is that, with the possible exception of media, most would be less leftist if not for the power and money associated with the federal government.
My claim, of course, I cannot prove.
But it *is* why all of we non-leftists - brokenists or not - should applaud Trump, Musk and DOGE’s however limited success at uncovering, and at least beginning to reverse, the unholy NGO federal money laundering scheme..
What you say sounds interesting, reasonable, and rational up until the last paragraph. Prior to Musk/DOGE, there were people who already saw things this way and people who didn't. That has not changed and very few if any have switched camps.
Musk/DOGE were the ones to uncover very large amounts of essentially purely political NGO funding embedded in the federal budget. Trump is the first one to do anything about this.
I did not and do not mean to suggest they were the first ones to ever discover any "bad" political NGO funding anywhere ever.
But it remains the first concerted effort.
My point with the last paragraph is that anyone who opposes leftists should applaud that effort, whether they are brokenists or institutionalists (or somewhere in between).
It's like we speak different languages or something.
The people who liked what these NGOs did back before DOGE do not believe anything that you think DOGE uncovered. The see statements from DOGE as you would see statements from liberal media - highly suspect and not to be believed.
I didn’t say anyone on the left would - or even *should* - approve.
I said no more and no less that everyone who is anti-leftists (“anyone who opposes leftists”) should approve.
Exactly what part of this are you disagreeing with? Even those with TDS on the non-left don’t have a problem with cutting off funding to leftist organizations.
Apologies. I did indeed read past the word non-leftist. If I had caught it I would have responded differently or not at all.
Differently, Bill Maher is an anti-leftist. I doubt he approves of anything DOGE did. I'm quite a bit right of Maher and I find DOGE claims to be both less than compelling and overstated. There are lots of people in the middle and even conservatives who aren't fans of Trump who also aren't fans of DOGE.
I respectfully disagree with you that on the narrow issue of DOGE uncovering funding for leftist political NGOs that he would disagree.
I’m agnostic on whether and if so how much Maher (the rare person of the left, along with Dershowitz, who is openly against the hard left) or other centrists or other supposedly center-right folks with TDS were/are opposed to the other stuff DOGE got involved in. If you want to say most of those folks are anti-DOGE in general, I will not argue with you. Certainly for those who are institutionalists (as you clearly lean, at minimum), I’d agree.
But on the narrow issue of taxpayers funding leftist NGOs, it seems we still disagree.
What’s trying to be conserved? I prefer to think of a ‘new right’, which integrates evidence from history, evolutionary psychology, and economics to create a local, federalist, realistic policy structure and set of values.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-new-right
I wrote this about why conservatism is unlike other politics. It draws more on poetry than philosophy which I hope helps... https://theviewfromcullingworth.blogspot.com/2022/11/beloved-over-all-how-conservatism-isnt.html?m=1
Recently, I went on a tirade about the problems of “poetry” becoming truth for the modern era.
I think that American conservatives should be about the business of conserving the ideas of self-ownership, individual freedom and responsibility, private property, free markets, freedom to contract, freedom of association, limited government, the separation of powers, the rule of law, equal treatment under the law, due process, and constitutional representative democracy.
The problem with protecting "the authority and legitimacy of existing institutions" is that many of today's institutions have abandoned their authority and legitimacy in favor of promoting ideologies that attack our society's legitimacy and the restraints without which society cannot survive, much less flourish.
That list sounds wonderful, but in practice representative democracy increasingly seems to be going against "individual freedom and responsibility, private property, free markets, freedom to contract, freedom of association, limited government, the separation of powers, the rule of law, equal treatment under the law, due process". There seems to be a contradiction at the heart of it.
You can try to square the circle by having your constitution prohibit the government from diminishing the other items on the list. But if people want to, there will be constant pressure to change the constitution, explicitly or implicitly, from the people or from the intelligentsia--or both. Lots of law professors (and judges) believe in a living constitution that changes to fit the needs of the day, with them deciding what the needs are and what must change.
A “living constitution” isn’t a constitution; it’s a license to do whatever five judges decide. That’s why support for the rule of law is essential.
Agreed, yet...imagining The Five can intuit the deepest and most obscure beliefs of the Founders tenets borders on delusional.
And not the historical American nation?
Can these things exist in a nation of 100 percent Hindus?
Will such a nation still American ?
The best comparison of liberalism and conservatism comes from Substacker Conrad Bastable in his Ouroboros Theory: Describing The Nature of Right vs. Left. In his view, conservatism fears endemic warfare (which he calls feudalism) and strives to create order. Liberalism is only possible within an ordered space, and strives to create justice.
Creating order out of chaos requires injustice. One couldn't create America without killing Indians; one couldn't create England without killing Celts, and so on forever. In its attempt to solve injustice, liberalism destroys order, but what remains is endemic warfare that may last a Dark Age before order is re-created. Post-apartheid South Africa is an excellent case study.
And yet "conservative" voices have been threatening endemic warfare for the majority of my lifetime.
I think the major problem with political discourse in general is that we've devolved into populism across the board which requires simplification to appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator. As a result, every conflict is framed through the lens of Good versus Evil, so any extreme action is justified in the opposition of Evil, up to and including violence.
The current political structure does not incentivize nuance, discussion, and admission that the opposition may be earnest in their belief that they want what's best for the country even if it is at odds with your beliefs. Moving forward requires a willingness to be uncomfortable and less sure, both things that make you unelectable in the current climate.
I think it's helpful to separate two points that your post combines. The first is that, in a democracy, it is necessary to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Not many people are both intelligent and interested in politics, as a fraction of the electorate, so democracies evolve in the direction of tribalism and emotive spectacle.
Conservatism tends to be comfortable with violence, but primarily as a means to impose or maintain order (which is the opposite of endemic warfare). Victory of any party, whether originally conservative or not, requires imposing order (which explains a lot about communist parties; in theory they're liberal but practice they're repressive as hell). Order means setting priorities and establishing rules, which is indistinguishable from injustice.
If order breaks down and factions make war without a victor, that's endemic warfare. That's what you see in places like Libya, Syria, Liberia, and other hellholes.
Liberalism is denial of political nature of man whereby man is organized into particular, self-ruling morally authoritative units we may variously call tribes, nations, polities.
This creates political dichotomies such as citizen/foreigner, neighbor/stranger, friend/enemy. Liberalism denies these dichotomies.
The right-liberals deny moral authority of the political community. Thus he regards all men as equally strangers to each other. Logical climax is anarchy.
The left liberals deny particularity. Thus he regards all men as equal neighbors of all others. Logical climax is world government.
What do I wish to conserve?
Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Bill of Rights. Property rights.
"I never characterize myself as a conservative economist. As I understand the English language, conservative means conserving, keeping things as they are. I don't want to keep things as they are. The true conservatives today are the people who are in favor of ever bigger government. The people who call themselves liberals today -- the New Dealers -- they are the true conservatives, because they want to keep going on the same path we're going on. I would like to dismantle that. I call myself a liberal in the true sense of liberal, in the sense in which it means of and pertaining to freedom." Milton Friedman
It’s fine for him to have called himself whatever he liked - and surely he arose out of a tradition broadly called “liberalism” even if he’s being a bit too clever by half about it, in an effort to distance himself from everyone … but government action in the arena of social engineering since the New Deal has not been about freedom/not freedom - it’s been about “equality”.
Equality or power? How about power in the name of equality?
Luciaphile, I'm genuinely curious what your personal philosophy is and how you think of yourself. Can you help me understand you?
Equality is the reigning utopian ideal. Power is what it always is to people. I don’t have a personal philosophy? I’m not good at that sort of thing. I think nice things are nicer than nasty ones, and living things and rocks and water are best of all. That’s about it!
But you often have so much to say. Where does that come from?
I mostly like that quote. At minimum it is interesting.
I've never heard conservatism framed as a path. My initial reaction is to disagree but I'll have to think about that more. I'd like to hear others' explanations.
I don't think of conservatism as a path. I see order emerging three dimensionally and with time. Everything is changing due to a multitude of interrelated, multi-directional connections, forces, and differences. Some things work to some degree for a while and then things change.
In my own house, we all clear the table, then wipe the table, and then vacuum. Top to bottom because of gravity. But this hasn't always been the case. Some of my ancestors had no table. Some probably had slaves to carry out this work. In the future, my top-to-bottom rule will be programmed into a robot, and my grandchildren won't need to emphasize this rule to their own children like I do. Other people don't eat dinner at home or at a table.
We change as things around us change.
Hmm. A path as described in previous comments implies change but I don't see the type of change you describe as a path. At least not the type of path previously described. But maybe I'm still missing something.
I think of stasis as a tendency to maintain a path through time. Stasis can come from anyone.
The stasis that Milton Friedman points to contributes to a particular path through time.
Thank you, Milton.
Thanks for your positive energy and kindness Kurt.
I know a smart thinker who identifies “the right” as thinking along a civilization-barbarism axis. Thus they will tend to support institutions they perceive as supporting civilization and oppose those they perceive as undermining civilization. For example, I think most right-leaning Americans who dislike higher education genuinely believe that American higher education institutions are undermining civilization.
Yes, an institution that weakens civilization isn't really something one should expect conservatives to want to conserve.
But where does higher education lie on that spectrum? Tradeoffs. I don't think there is any doubt that American higher education does some things that support civilization and some things that weaken it. The question becomes where one sees the balance. I'm not surprised by how a large number of conservatives feel about the weaknesses but I'm very surprised by how little weight they give to its benefits.
Yes, whether today’s higher ed is ACTUALLY undermining civilization is a separate question. But I would observe that as an institution, American higher ed has not exactly gone out of its way to reassure conservatives in this regard. Many academics are are heavily invested in seeing themselves, and scholarship generally, as subversive.
I'm unclear on your point. I read the tone as disagreement but I don't see anything contrary to what I wrote, or at least to what I intended.
I meant it to come off as agreement. Sorry if it came off the other way.
I think most conservatives would agree that curricula in useful fields like medicine or engineering support civilization, but that the humanities curricula are (mostly) weakening it. There used to be humanities programs that supported civilization, and there could be again, but there aren't many now.
An increasing reason for my skepticism is the fact that, for those wanting to learn, the internet plus search are plenty. The alternative of getting a job & studying on one’s own is more practically feasible today, than ever before.
The signaling value of ed is something I don’t want to conserve much.
As usual, Stu, you don’t list any specific benefit as an example.
Generally it’s considered that Learning, and practicing, critical thinking is a skill set college grads have more of than those with similar IQs but without college. For decades now, this ability to see both sides, and tradeoffs, has been less in college than in workplaces, so it’s a slight negative.
I’d quantify the benefits-costs ratio as about the same as registered Republican professors to all others. At Princeton I think it’s 1 / 800 (Robbie George, tho I’m not certain he’s registered), with some 23 or so “conservatives” who hide it.
"As usual, Stu, you don’t list any specific benefit as an example."
Sure. Because from my point of view, it's obvious there are both benefits and drawbacks. I'm going to try to list some benefits, in many cases knowing why you think they aren't benefits. So be it.
1 Economic engine. I don't think there's any doubt government funded research has been important economically. Similarly, that money has fueled university research key to US dominance in many fields. One of the biggest is medicine. I am immensely grateful for medical advances in my lifetime and I have no doubt a significant share of that comes from universities.
1a Could universities be replaced by organizations such as Batelle (non-profit research group as well as co-manager of Oak Ridge along with UT), Institute for Defense Analysis (which started under university oversight), Sandia (under university oversight), Applied Physics Lab (entirely university), etc.? Sure. Is that likely to work better than what we have? I doubt it. Note: could this have happened via funding to private sector? sure, but my experience with government funding of research by for-profit companies leaves me certain this would have far less success.
1b Are you aware of the DARPA autonomous vehicle challenge? I worked on a project with DARPA starting about the first first year of that challenge. It was an amazing progression from the teams failing miserably the first year to rapid improvement and success a few years later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
2 Maturity. No doubt you could argue that without college, those high school grads would mature quicker. I'd agree. but I'd also argue a lot of kids move into the working world easier at 22 than 18. Everyone is different but I don't see any way I could have where I was shortly after college if I had tried getting there in a society without the college option.
3 skill set. I studied civil engineering and then had an engineering career where I used very little of what I learned. Did I need any of it? IDK. That said, I think we would be woefully short of structural engineers if they had to learn it by a combination of on the job, on their own, and with the assistance of the internet. Same goes for doctors and at least some nurses. I can guess other areas of engineering which are similar but I'm honestly less certain which ones.
4 Sorting. Surely you are aware that the college credential is used by employers as an indicator of who to hire. Often it is exactly that crude. Other times it's more than that though. Imagine if the NFL and NBA had to draft straight out of high school. As it is, there are a few players who jump into the pros then or before four years of college but most need more time to reach that level. And the teams need the college results to better evaluate the talent.
"Generally it’s considered that Learning, and practicing, critical thinking is a skill set college grads have more of than those with similar IQs but without college."
What is your basis for saying this?
No doubt most people, college or not, have less than ideal critical thinking skills. Is one group better in that regard? IDK. If we look at highly skilled blue collar workers, maybe they develop more critical thinking skills while college grads are in school. I think we have to weigh that against the group who 4+ years out of high school are either working rather menial jobs that don't do much for critical thinking or are still living in their parent's basement, so to speak. I think these groups have more never-college and college dropouts than college grads.
And of course critical thinking isn't the only relevant skill. Which group makes more dependable employees? which group is more mature? More competent? the list goes on.
I don't know if your "generally" statement is correct or not but it's worth noting that employers tend to pick college grads. Maybe that's entirely for other reasons but I suspect not.
Even if you are an institutionalist, surely you grok that the reason that conservatives give so little weight to the benefits of academia today is that:
a) they believe that the downsides vastly exceed the benefits, and
b) they have evidence of a system - U.S. academia through somewhere between 2003 and 2013, take your pick - where the benefits *did* exceed the downsides.
No, I don't. While I think I see the downsides and can understand why they give them as much weight as they do (somewhat more weight than I do), that helps me not at all in understanding why they give so little weight to the benefits.
I’ll stick with Kirk’s “Ten Conservative Principles.”
I feel like I understand thinkers on the Left pretty well, but I do not understand conservatism. Self-reported conservatives always seem to adopt whatever the Left believed in 20 or 40 or 60 years ago. This pretty much guarantees the Left always wins.
I am also skeptical that the reason why people vote Right is because they have read and absorbed conservative writing.
I just think that voters on the Right think the Left is batshit crazy and want to be left allow to live their lives.
"I just think that voters on the Right think the Left is batshit crazy and want to be left [alone] to live their lives."
I think that pretty well hits the nail on the head.
I suppose that’s why people describe this synthesis as a ratchet. Hat trick might be another possibility.
They don’t vote Right, nor Left. They vote R-Republican or D-Democrat. Or Green or Libertarian or some such.
Conflating Reps with being on the Right suits the media, and many academics, but it’s often not true. More importantly, it hides the tribal reason most Dems vote Dem & Reps vote Rep.
Arnold listed nine conservative thought traditions—which ones do you understand and which not?
I never mentioned Republicans or Democrats in my comment.
To be clear, I understand the argument, but I don’t understand the mentality that leads to constant complaining about society going in the wrong direction, but then doing little to nothing but institutionalizing the very thing that they were complaining about once they are in power.
I also do not understand how conservatives identify good change from bad change. Conservatism seems to be an argument against change, but then they always leave open the caveat that some change is good. But there is nothing within the world view that tells us in a concrete way how to distinguish what is good change and what is bad change.
The result of conservative thought seems to be constant political victories by the Left.
When one side wants radical change and implements it while in power, and the other side wants no change while in power, there is only one outcome.
This is a consequence of infusion of libertarian ideas into American conservatism, something that Russell Kirk warned in his essay "Chirping sectaries".
I disagree. In my experience, libertarians are far more supportive of rolling back the programs implemented by the Left. Conservatives just keep things the way they are, so this effectively institutionalizes the policies of the Left (just at a slower pace than the Left wants).
And then the Left implements more changes, and conservatives institutionalizes it.
The process just keeps repeating.
Really? Haven't libertarians been ever for all the left innovations such as gay marriage and transgenderism?
“second-order naive realism” -- I like that!
Except for various physical constants, such as the speed of light in a vacuum, everything in nature and the universe is constantly changing. All organisms on earth are changing and evolving. These organisms compete and cooperate for energy and do work with it. We create order from energy.
There is no way to prevent change. Change is occurring regardless of your efforts to conserve whatever you’re trying to conserve.
Nature is the only force that can truly conserve, and it has already spoken on what is fixed and universal.
If your life isn’t one of adapting to change, you might want to reconsider your philosophy.
When you prevent other people from adapting to change you take away their dignity, self-respect, and agency.
People often tend to be resistant to change. You probably don’t need to encourage their resistance. More likely, you need to encourage agency so that people can adapt to change.
Conserve the liberty to change.
Nothing doesn't change....and of course Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's..."If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
There is a harsh truth here, and it goes something like this: there is no panacea, no ultimate win; there are only trade-offs born of constant change and limited time and energy. Based on this interpretation of reality, life should be exhausting, difficult, and ultimately wear us out. And it does. Life is difficult—so difficult that we cannot survive for more than about a century.
How does this inform what I should do today? I don’t know, but I should probably go to Costco. I was also hoping to get some reading done. And I should prepare for whatever lies ahead.
Don't forget to floss...and brush twice a day, 2 1/2 minutes each time, once in the morning and once before bed.
😆
In everything that changes, there is one thing that does not change.
(Otherwise it won't be the same thing and the term "change" could not apply.)
Regardless of where what you said fits into conservatism, I think it misses a key component or two. First, there are technology changes, economic changes, instutional changes, policy changes, and cultural changes. Conservatism is very much about slow and small changes to institutions and policy while mostly not restricting tech and economic change. Maybe cultural change lies somewhere between but that one seems fuzzier to me.
To give but one example, what Trump has done with tariffs is the antithesis of conservative. That's not because tariffs are good or bad but because of the scale of changes.
Good example. I don’t think Trump calls himself a conservative, he’s registered as a Republican.
Neither conservative nor liberal are on the ballot in America.
I think you may be right about American conservatism in recent times, but I think it has often (and in many places) been the case that conservatives opposed tech and economic changes. After all, they can be very disruptive to society.
You are probably right. But if we looked at specifics, I'm sure we'd find that they weren't behaving as conservatives, much like with many things Trump has done.
Can you give an example of something like that which Milton Friedman or Thomas Sowell opposed?
I'm thinking, for example, of the old landed gentry in England and other countries. They were surely conservative, but my impression is that they would have opposed economic changes because changes would likely have undermined their power.
That sounds right but it's not really the kind of conservative that i intended.
My statement doesn't mention how change should occur or what causes change. It basically says "change will occur in all things except those things in nature that are fixed and universal."
Here's how I would start to tackle these higher order questions.
So, what causes change? And how should I adapt to change?
With more thought and research I can develop a pretty good answer for the former question, but the latter question is always open to change. In other words, my opinion about how change should occur is always changing. I don't even know exactly how I should change today, let alone how other people should change.
We will never all agree on how change should occur. We don't know what changes will occur and we certainly can't prepare for things that we don't know about.
What we can say is that the universe is changing and life seems to always adapt to that change.
None of us has much influence over how organisms change. Each of us plays a tiny role based on our very limited understanding of the world.
So, we should probably start by acknowledging the high likelihood that we will not agree on how to change or how a particular vaguely-defined group of so-called conservatives has changed and should change.
I doubt we can even agree on who conservatives are. It seems to me that progressives are very conservative in their attempts to censor speech for example.
Human nature is constant (first principle of conservatism as enunciated by Russell Kirk).
How so, if humans evolved from simple particles over billions of years and will evolve further?
Given humans, the human nature is constant.
Human nature is 99+% constant. But how it is expressed changes within certain limits (which we have a limited understanding of).
Actually, humans are continuously changing, adapting to and influencing nature. This is called evolution. See Darwin et al.
Evolution can be so slow that it seems as if humans have a nature that is constant, but anyone who has studied biology and cosmology and has pondered our evolution from single-celled organisms and subatomic particles, knows it would be wrong to say that our DNA is constant.
Our DNA changes, hence human nature changes.
Agreed?
Of course, for practical purposes we often use a rule of thumb approximating “human nature” as constant. Doing so helps in the creation of rules. But because all things change, except certain fixed physical constants, the rules change as well.
I agree. That's why I said 99+%, not 100%,
Now what are some examples of this “constant” human nature?
Is it human nature for some men to believe they are women by affirming their gender through chemical and surgical transition?
Is it human nature to be polygamous under certain conditions?
Is it human nature to enslave humans under certain conditions?
Is it human nature for some humans to be vegan under certain conditions?
Under what conditions?
Thanks for clarifying.
Human nature is constant (First principle of conservatism as enunciated by Russell Kirk).
I think you completely blew by Mr Kling's definition of liberal change and how that relates to conservatism. It has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of naturally occuring evolution of technology, nature, or society.
The liberal change conservatives resist is exemplified by the famous Chesterton Fence. It is the tendency of liberals to claim that structures and institutions would 'work better' if redesigned not because of organic changes but because the liberal has determined their function does not fit within some grand scheme of predetermined social outcomes. It is the very antithesis of adaption to organic change.
So in your view, conservatives should resist certain rapid changes according to certain principles like Chesterton’s fence. And conservatives know better than progressives what the pace and direction of change should be?
So are conservatives perfect and all knowing with regard to how to change things? Can there be any way better than conservative ways?
Do conservatives ever resist change to a detriment?
Arnold,
Can you please write a simple, easy-to-read post explaining your political philosophy?
He wrote an excellent book - perhaps about other people’s politics - called The Three Languages of Politics (or something similar). It’s short, sweets and also on Audio Book.
Yep.
Uhh, I think maybe he just did.
What he did was illustrate how modern conservativism doesn't align with older views and needs to be clearly redefined. It isn't an illustration of personal belief.
He can do better than this. It might take a few long walks though.
Conservatives are reactionaries.
And the Clydesdale horses have left the stable.
Carl R Trueman highlights a divide between a worldview based on mimesis vs poesis. I would suggest this is a useful differentiator for conservatives and liberals. Mimesis means a focus on improving the self by conforming to norms grounded in external reality. Poesis means improving or creating the self via self-expression based on authenticity to inner identity.
I was typing a longer comment and I lost it due to user incompetence, so I will just say this: I think this list is good, but I would include something about emergent order. Current culture, customs, institutions, and so on are a product of a kind of evolutionary process, and top-down, wholesale attempts to change them are therefore not likely to result in a net improvement, at least in Western Societies (a stagnant, backward country like Saudi Arabia or China during the Qing Dynasty should maybe have people thinking less skeptically about attempts at changing the social contract. I like to think that if I'd been born in either of those places, I'd be more of a liberal or progressive).
Everyone likes to think they'd be the iconoclast in a culture they view as backward. Statistically, you'd be in the majority in accepting the world as it is.
You can be on the left or right without being an iconoclast. Don't conflate being a dissenter with being a revolutionary.
Yup. Loyal opposition is valuable...necessary... in any democracy. Absent a loyal opposition, it's Little Red Book time.
“Thirty years after Muller composed his introduction, many conservatives are fed up with important institutions, including higher education and mainstream media. This has turned many conservatives into ‘brokenists.’ They are not disposed to protect the authority and legitimacy of existing institutions.”
Interestingly (to me), Arnold did not list government here among the broken institutions.
And more precisely, the federal government (even if it is no doubt also true of many state and some local governments).
But it seems to me this one is the key.
Were the federal government not broken - while also being so powerful - any of the other institutions being broken would be much less problematic.
My claim is that all of the other institutions are more broken due to the power of the federal government. My associated claim is that, with the possible exception of media, most would be less leftist if not for the power and money associated with the federal government.
My claim, of course, I cannot prove.
But it *is* why all of we non-leftists - brokenists or not - should applaud Trump, Musk and DOGE’s however limited success at uncovering, and at least beginning to reverse, the unholy NGO federal money laundering scheme..
What you say sounds interesting, reasonable, and rational up until the last paragraph. Prior to Musk/DOGE, there were people who already saw things this way and people who didn't. That has not changed and very few if any have switched camps.
Musk/DOGE were the ones to uncover very large amounts of essentially purely political NGO funding embedded in the federal budget. Trump is the first one to do anything about this.
I did not and do not mean to suggest they were the first ones to ever discover any "bad" political NGO funding anywhere ever.
But it remains the first concerted effort.
My point with the last paragraph is that anyone who opposes leftists should applaud that effort, whether they are brokenists or institutionalists (or somewhere in between).
It's like we speak different languages or something.
The people who liked what these NGOs did back before DOGE do not believe anything that you think DOGE uncovered. The see statements from DOGE as you would see statements from liberal media - highly suspect and not to be believed.
We clearly *are* speaking different languages.
I didn’t say anyone on the left would - or even *should* - approve.
I said no more and no less that everyone who is anti-leftists (“anyone who opposes leftists”) should approve.
Exactly what part of this are you disagreeing with? Even those with TDS on the non-left don’t have a problem with cutting off funding to leftist organizations.
Apologies. I did indeed read past the word non-leftist. If I had caught it I would have responded differently or not at all.
Differently, Bill Maher is an anti-leftist. I doubt he approves of anything DOGE did. I'm quite a bit right of Maher and I find DOGE claims to be both less than compelling and overstated. There are lots of people in the middle and even conservatives who aren't fans of Trump who also aren't fans of DOGE.
Ok, now we are closer.
I respectfully disagree with you that on the narrow issue of DOGE uncovering funding for leftist political NGOs that he would disagree.
I’m agnostic on whether and if so how much Maher (the rare person of the left, along with Dershowitz, who is openly against the hard left) or other centrists or other supposedly center-right folks with TDS were/are opposed to the other stuff DOGE got involved in. If you want to say most of those folks are anti-DOGE in general, I will not argue with you. Certainly for those who are institutionalists (as you clearly lean, at minimum), I’d agree.
But on the narrow issue of taxpayers funding leftist NGOs, it seems we still disagree.