Where are the Conservatives Nowadays?

I want to enlarge upon what I’ve said in a prior posting, What is a Conservative?: Most modern politicians or thinkers who call themselves ‘conservative’ are better described as ‘right-wing liberals’.

By definition, conservatives conserve, but those — Rush Limbaugh is a good example — who call themselves conservatives are mostly concerned with the marketplaces. The marketplaces don’t conserve and we shouldn’t want them to do so. Marketplaces innovate, sometimes by bringing the products of one continent to the residents of another and sometimes by encouraging the development of new products. This is good, but marketplace forces are also dangerous and most people shouldn’t live in marketplaces — certainly children shouldn’t for that opens them to easy exploitation. We modern human beings often try to put constraints on the marketplaces, especially with the bureaucracies of the central governments but that often makes matters worse. We try to control various large and abstract institutions by pitting them against each other and often that merely makes the surviving institutions stronger.

Conservatives, if the term is to mean anything, must conserve specific flesh-and-blood traditions. There are obvious exceptions in intellectual and artistic traditions where some of the traditions are in the form of abstractions, but those are few. Even the Christian Church, in Her Roman center and other branches alike, is held together more by liturgical and other practices as well as by more concrete manifestations of belief. Good theological and philosophical systems are necessary to keep the Church healthy but simple beliefs and concrete activities as mundane as church picnics are the mortar for the imposing edifice.

In politics and economics, social systems in general, big institutions with moral duties abstracted away from human beings are more often the enemy than the friend of truer forms of human intercourse and human freedoms within those legitimate forms of intercourse. This may be especially true in the case of corporate capitalism because of the very strength of this system: it innovates more rapidly than any other known system. Innovation is not always good. Innovation brought us the polio vaccine but it also brought us electronic entertainment which seems as addictive as heroin and arguably as destructive though the damage, being to the mind and soul, might be itself damage self-awareness. Human beings damaged in this way might also try to suppress their awareness of their own damaged state. They certainly can be more easily exploited by the gods of the marketplaces.

Capitalism itself is not a problem so long as ownership laws are such that the property and other productive assets are not fully fungible, not convertible into a form of ownership where those properties and assets are owned by abstracted entities like our modern corporations. At least not all of them. Moral structures will be dissolved so long as a large percentage of our productive assets are controlled by abstract entities, corporations and central governments, rather than being owned by flesh-and-blood human beings who are morally responsible for their actions.

There may be better possibilities in a layered system in which most productive assets, and the corresponding owners and workers, are enmeshed in local economies and a handful of companies interact with companies from other local marketplaces. There could be multiple layers going up to a continental or cross-oceanic scale. The idea would be similar to the layered risk-sharing in insurance or mortgage banking but goods rather than risk would be distributed.

In any case, I don’t see how anyone can delude themselves or others in thinking someone a conservative for fighting to preserve corporate capitalism, a form of enconomic organization which has proven itself better able to chew up local communities, extended families, and religious communities than Stalinism or Maoism. Corporate capitalism has proved itself to be more effectively corrosive and anti-traditional in practice than communism was.

Moral corruption is not a disease of corporate capitalism, it’s the essence of corporate capitalism. Moral structures have to be destroyed for the markets to continue advancing into ever more extreme products and services. Else, how can the flows of cash, to tax-collectors as well as corporate investors, continue to rise? Human beings must be turned into fanatic consumers if the Gross National Product is to continue rising.

There aren’t very many conservatives in the modern world outside of Hasidic or Amish communities. Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush are most certainly not conservatives if the term is to retain any rational definition.

Am I a conservative? Not really. There are no true conservatives today, outside of members of some small ethnic communities, because only they have social or moral structures worth conserving. There are foundations and there are building materials and those can be best used by radicals who see the value in those foundations and have the courage to experiment with the building materials.