Defining Conservatism

The Chronicle of Higher Education for Jan. 13th had an essay by Corey Robin in which he defines conservatism. I thought the definition was wrong, and I waited for conservatives to attack it, but no one seems to have bothered. So, let me do it, because even though I don’t think of myself as a conservative, I’ve spent the last two decades reading works by conservatives. But please correct me if I’m wrong.

Here is Robin’s definition: “Conservatism is a meditation on, and a theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”

Let me begin by observing that this is a definition of conservatism through the lens of leftism. Leftists want to change power relations, but in doing so they run up against conservatives who want to keep things as they are. They naturally conclude that conservatism’s main focus is retaining current power relations.

It isn’t.

They are two types of conservative, as far as I can see, and neither type has retaining current power relations as its main focus. The first type of conservative is what I would call a natural conservative. These are people who had happy childhoods and who like things the way they are. By implication, such people want power relations to stay the way they are, but this is only by implication. They aren’t thinking first and foremost of power relations when they say they like things the way they are.

The other type of conservative is an adult convert, who for a variety of reasons is no longer a liberal or leftist. These reasons could be that the changes that liberals and leftists made went too far, that they realize that there are unintended consequences to making changes, that the changes they wanted weren’t implemented, that changes were made that they didn’t want, that they no longer trust liberals and leftists to do the right thing, and so on. For this type of conservative, too, it is wrong to say that preserving power relations is their main focus; preventing the left from making things worse is a more accurate description.

Incidentally, one thing I’ve learned about conservatives, especially from being part of the battle against the Islamification of the West, is that while conservatives don’t much like change to the left, they don’t much like change to the right, either.

And one thing I learned about the left beginning in the late 1960s is that the left has its own conservative strain. The main thing for the left is its current agenda, and it resists any change to that agenda. So when feminism came along, the left resisted it. I started college in 1969, and feminism was just beginning to get going, but the other leftists all hated it. They simply dismissed the feminist movement, insisting that the problems that women had were unimportant compared with the much greater problems that workers, blacks, Indians, and Vietnamese peasants had. One day, a popular liberal professor at my university was going to talk about feminism in one of his classes. I knew a woman in the class, so I could count on getting an immediate report about what he said. When she got back from class, she said to an ardent feminist I knew, “Well, you sure were put in your place.”

That’s the way the left was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, very anti-feminist. But gradually things changed, and today when I tell this to people younger than me, they find it hard to believe.

By the late 1970s, I was fighting a battle against America’s Sports Establishment. I was trying to make a change in sports in America by supporting soccer, which was both more international than our sports and which I thought of as more progressive. And who was helping me do this? Not my fellow leftists, but frat boys, sorority girls, people in the military, and people from the suburbs with small children. I was still living in Minneapolis at that time, and of the local politicians, which of them supported soccer and which didn’t? None of the liberal politicians supported it, but it was supported by the mayor of Minneapolis, Charles Stenvig, who was firmly on the right.

While the right doesn’t generally like change, the left doesn’t like changes in its agenda.

Comments

[John Townsend]

Perhaps I am naive but it seems a fallacy to believe the term conservative falls into a homogenous and simple definition as offered by Corey Robin, based on the retention or regaining of power, or even yours that reflects those with happy youth who want the world to stay the same or those who have changed their early adult views. I think to do so fails to account for the spectrum of views across the population.

There are those who view themselves conservative who favor a rational approach to government stability. One that says change should be gradual and evolutionary, too much, too fast causes social unrest.

There are others who would accept faster change, but worry the cost in culture and finance will lead to unacceptable consequence. They resist change for the comfort of the status quo.

There are still others who would welcome social reform but are most concerned with the fiscal cost of too large a government, required to implement the social engineering.

I think todays American Conservative reflects a spectrum of views, but I do fundamentally agree that retention of power is not necessarily central to their belief.

[Mark Spahn]

You thought of soccer as "more progressive" than "our sports" (= presumably, football, baseball, basketball, hockey). What does it even mean for a sport to be "progressive"? This puts me in mind of the lament of Jay Nordlinger (at National Review Online): "Can't we have some areas of our life that are politics-free?" (e.g., music, sports)