Is Conservative a Bad Word?
On Preserving Our Precious National Inheritance
There is an interesting ideological split among fans of the agrarian writer Wendell Berry. He is popular among those on the Left, but he also has a sizeable following among those on the Right.
There is a strain in Berry’s writing that can only be compared to the bleak worldview that dominates today’s Left, especially among the champions of various critical theories, as well as fanatical environmentalists, as evidenced already in one of his earliest pieces of non-fiction:
It occurs to me that it is no longer possible to imagine how the country looked in the beginning, before the white people drove their plows into it. It is not possible to know what was the shape the land here in this hollow when it was first cleared. Too much of it is gone, loosened by the plows and washed away by the rain am walking the route of the departure of the virgin soil of the hill. I am not looking at the same land the firstcomers saw. The origin surface of the hill is as extinct as the passenger pigeon. The pristine America that the first white man saw is a lost continent, sunk like Atlantis in the sea. The thought of what was here once and gone forever will not leave me as long as I live. It is as though I walk knee-deep in its absence. (“A Native Hill,” in The World-Ending Fire, p. 17)
In this way of thinking, humanity—apart from the enlightened few like Berry—is little more than a virus on the earth (or I should say: western, white humanity).
Berry, however, often makes points that could come from figures on today’s New Right:
Sentimental capitalism holds in effect that everything small, local, private, personal, natural, good, and beautiful must be sacrificed in the interest of the ‘free market’ and the great corporations, which will bring unprecedented security and happiness to ‘the many’ – in, of course, the future. (“The Total Economy,” in The World-Ending Fire, p. 68)
Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, Oren Cass, and many others, have made similar points for years. Local is better. Unfettered capitalism is not the be-all-end-all of human existence. Free global trade may serve to undermine America’s national interest (or at least regional and local interests). Etc.
Central to the strand of Berry’s thinking that resonates with many on the New Right is his conservationism. Soil needs conserving. Local farms need conserving. And so on. Conservationism probably seems to most conservatives to be a concern only for the Left, but Roger Scruton has written convincingly (to my mind) on why conservatives should embrace the term. In the chapter “Conserving Nature,” (p. 34) in his book A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism, Scruton contends that
Conservatism and conservation are in fact two aspects of a single long-term policy, which is that of husbanding resources. These resources include the social capital embodied in laws, customs and institutions; they also include the material capital contained in the environment, and the economic capital contained in a free, but law-governed, economy.
The word conservatism itself has gotten a bad rap among some New Right thinkers and writers. The argument is that conservatives in American haven’t conserved anything of value, and so we should abandon the useless term. There is obviously some truth in this critique: those who call themselves conservatives in America have indeed conserved very little of value in recent times on the national level, not healthy family life and sexual morality, not law and order, not our universities, nor our churches, not impartial treatment before the law, not our military, not our borders, and not much more.
I would, however, push back against the rejection of the term conservative. The problem is not the term itself, but the fact that those who designate themselves as conservatives are not actually conservatives at all. Conservatism is not a set of policy prescriptions (unlimited capitalism, unfettered world trade, worldwide military adventurism, etc.). It is a way of life, and a way of approaching the political task itself. Consider Scruton again:
Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. (How to Be a Conservative, p. viii)
Conservatism, understood as a form of political and cultural action, is worth defending. In fact, it is indispensable. The many good things that have been passed down to us from our Western and Christian heritage are worth conserving. We are watching how true this is in America today as our cities rapidly devolve into drug-infested dens of lawlessness and iniquity, while law-abiding citizens are quickly realizing it is attempts to defend what is good, true, and beautiful that will lead to the hammer of the law coming down on one’s head.
And it is in answer to this cultural degeneration that I think the most enduring insight of the New Right is to be found. The various lesser dogmas of the New Right may very well be soon forgotten, but the core insight of lasting value—if the rest of the Right (and some in the middle) will wake up in time—is that conservatism is utterly worthless if doesn’t act, and act with strength and dispatch, to conserve our precious national political, legal, and cultural inheritance. There will be nothing of value left to conserve if this foundational New Right insight is not acted on, and acted on quickly. This simple change in mentality, a change from impotently standing athwart history yelling stop while history burns everything good to the ground, is profound and necessary. And it is at the heart of conservatism, rightly understood.
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