Another Conservative Taxonomy
November 09, 2006
The latest American Conservative will be of interest to many conservatives, especially following the woodshed experience of the GOP last Tuesday. Of particular note will be the long broadside against conservatism by former National Review trustee Austin Bramwell. Bramwell, you may recall, is the young dandy who briefly shared some real estate with The New Pantagruel over in the high-rent district of the American press.
Bramwell’s article “Good-bye to All That”—already remarked on here and there—scores a number of rhetorical hits. Unfortunately, the whole is far less than the sum of its parts. My overall impression is that Bramwell is deeply confused.
Bramwell begins his essay by picking apart several National Review editorials in support of “the war.” But,
the editors use the term “war” in a purely figurative sense. At the time of the editorial, the U.S. was not at war with Syria, Sudan, or Iran nor, realistically speaking, with any other nation on the list. No matter how vulnerable or despised, no Muslim nation can be turned into a sacrificial substitute for bin Laden. Nor, no matter how often incanted, can the phrase “at war” be made to describe an actual state of affairs. A rhetorical bludgeon designed to compel assent to certain policies, it begs the question of whether war is advisable in the first place.Several more metaphorical “rhetorical bludgeons” utilized by NR come in for similar treatment and Bramwell concludes: “In sum, NR declared that we were ‘at war’ when we were not, for reasons that it did not specify, against enemies that it could not define, and to achieve goals that war does not advance. … Since 9/11, the conservative movement has not made unsound or fallacious arguments for supporting Bush’s policies. Rather it has made no arguments at all.” Nicely done.
But someone has been making arguments. Enter the neoconservatives and their flagship journal the Weekly Standard. “Whatever may be said of neoconservatives,” writes Bramwell, “at least they know what they think.” Neocons are militaristic Hamiltonians, zealous for their country’s honor and glory; despising weakness, they embrace power as the truest path to virtue. Thus, according to Bramwell, while “the movement” only knew that it wanted revenge after 9/11, the neocons were there to provide an ideological framework for revenge. “Neoconservatives just happened to provide a convenient ideological infrastructure with which to justify metonymic revenge against some Muslim Arab or other. Before 9/11, the movement was praising modesty in foreign affairs; after 9/11, it did not so much embrace neoconservatism as blunder into it by accident.” In other words, “movement conservatives” (defined as NR and its circle of influence) have no clear “idea of what they actually think. What they need is analysis: the skeptical tradition extending from Machiavelli to Hobbes, Hamilton, and Burnham.”
Where have all the movement-cons capable of gimlet-eyed analysis gone? Into exile, because analysis “requires intellect, but the movement’s mainstream, perhaps to avoid embarrassment … has increasingly ostracized its brightest minds.” Yet, according to Bramwell, these bright conservative minds toiling in the relative obscurity of the conservative wilderness are no more capable of real analysis than the dumb brutes at NR. One branch of these ostracized-cons ends up obsessing over a “Crisis-of-the-West conservatism” which results in an anti-modern chauvinism. Bramwell concedes that at one time this view was useful, but nowadays it “has become more a posture than a genuine school of thought.”
Another group of ostracized-cons “pleads for the conservative movement to return to its alleged first principles.” This is impossible because the ur-texts of conservatism were authored by “notorious eccentrics given to extravagant claims whose policy implications remain largely obscure.” In fact, men like Russell Kirk “had almost no political opinions whatsoever.” Thus, “the movement never had any first principles to begin with.”
A final group of ostracized-cons has decided to “eulogize local attachments and ancestral loyalties” by invoking institutions and social arrangements implicit in words like “family, church, kin, community, school” and Burke’s “little platoons.” This group is perhaps the most dangerous of the ostracized-cons as “ancestral attachments are dangerously subversive” and are “the curse of uncivilized peoples.” America and the West itself succeeded precisely because it “cut short the reach of the extended family or clan.”
In the end, all of the ostracized-cons suffer the same fate as the movement-cons because they have been duped into thinking that conservatism is a coherent body of thought when it isn’t—they fail to embody the “skeptical tradition” which is a prerequisite for “actual analysis” which will lead to “a genuine school of thought” which has real “policy implications” and produces “political opinions.”
The overall picture that emerges from Bramwell’s taxonomy of conservatives is so bizzarely Rousseauian as to nearly bugger description. Conservatives fall into three broad categories. There are the neocons, who know what they think and presumably have done actual analysis because they have clearly defined political opinions. The movement-cons are the thoughtless drones who provide most of the raw power driving the conservative engine. They don’t have an original thought in their head but their desire for revenge after 9/11 drove them straight into the arms of the neocons. Finally, there are the ostracized-cons who pine for something that never existed in dangerously subversive ways that result in a “mere posture” rather than the more substantial “political opinions.”
Bramwell clearly rejects the latter two groups. It is the neocons who actually come away with some approval, though Bramwell is coy enough to limit himself to praise in the form of faint damnation. What becomes apparent is that Bramwell condemns conservatism in its non-ideological forms. He can accept the neocons as at least being a legitimate political movement precisely because they are the only group of ideological conservatives. Which is to say that they “know what they think” and that what they think results in specific policy prescriptions as opposed to the mere postures of eccentric men or, even worse, the pre-political attachments of merely social relationships. In this sense, Bramwell is expressing an almost undiluted form of Rousseauian political philosophy; the very philosophy which the conservatism of Burke to Kirk has existed to stand against. Kirk famously defined conservatism as the absence of ideology. Is it any surprise that he and his intellectual heirs would exhibit their political thought principally as a “posture” rather than as a set of policy prescriptions?
For Bramwell, the symbol of “analysis” functions as a form of Rousseau’s “general will” which was the aggregate of rational individual wills cut off from (or set free from) any pre-political attachment. Ancestral loyalties undermine the general will and therefore must be “cut short.” To a large degree, Bramwell is correct that the success of the modern west is attributable to cutting short these pre-political loyalties by following the path set forth by the great Enlightenment theorists of liberalism such as Rousseau and his chief English bedfellow, John Locke. It is thus surprising that he apparently shows absolutely no recognition of the fact that conservative thinkers since the Enlightenment have stood precisely against this sort of stripping the alters in the name of pure reason. Rousseau maintained that “everything is radically connected to politics.” If there is one idea that Bramwell advocates in his essay, this is it. And if there is one idea most purely antithetical to authentic conservatism, this is it.
Finally, the train wreck that this article has become jerks so wildly as to give any desk-bound policy wonk permanent spinal damage. For Bramwell’s final act is to turn around and accuse movement conservatives of “ideology.” By ideology Bramwell means a kind of closed minded adherence to party over all else as described especially by George Orwell in 1984, complete with memory holes and two-minute hates. This take-down of “ideological conservatism” is fine as far as it goes. Voegelin and Kirk (two of Bramwell’s useless obscurantists) did it all before and, dare I say it, with a deeper level of both psycho-spiritual and political “analysis.” Voegelin in particular isolated the “closed” nature of these systems which denies the ability of anyone to question it. I guess those eccentric theorists with no practical ideas might have come in useful after all if Bramwell had bothered to read them.
On the other hand, it should come as no surprise that movement-cons engage in Orwellian power politics. This is basic party-ism. It is necessary, though reprehensible in certain respects and always dangerous to real thought. This is one reason conservative luminaries have always stood outside mere politics. However, Bramwell strangely resists the very Machiavellianism of power politics which results from his vaunted devotion to political analysis and shrewd skepticism about the way the world really is.
In the end, what Bramwell despises is any pre-political loyalty of any kind. Even party loyalty, which is only barely pre-political, must be dispensed with in favor of purely individual political calculus. How, I wonder, is this anything but a rather smart version of Andrew Sullivan’s prescription for conservatives? That it should appear in the pages of The American Conservative is perhaps the most remarkable thing about it.
This is Another Conservative Taxonomy in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: A Jape In Wolfe’s Clothing? | Next: Austin Bramwell Responds | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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