Symposium: Conservatism Must Conserve

This article is in response to “Rescuing Freedom from Despair” and is part of the symposium on What’s Wrong with Conservatism and How Do We Make It Right?

Mr. Tobin, I respectfully disagree. See, I disagree with a lot of things: utopian liberalism, racism, the use of mustard on hot dogs. But I really disagree with the idea that “conservatism persuades and succeeds when it is identified with the expansion of liberty, not with the building of walls or its denial.”

Conservatism conserves, it doesn’t expand. That’s that. It’s etymological. George Grant said the problem with modern society is the exultation of potentiality over what is.

And he’s correct. The utopianism Tobin attacks is something to be distrusted, it’s the kind of stuff that leads you drink Kool-Aid on a hot Guyanese day or, say, murder Roman Polanski’s wife and unborn child. But at the same time, a conservatism that concentrates on expanding “liberty” (a hairy term to define already) is part of the same instinct. On the other hand, one can expand by contracting; one can protect rights and liberties by acting conservatively.

Maybe many American conservatives are interested in expanding liberty; maybe standing athwart history trying to scream stop as the Great Society slouches toward Bethlehem to be born isn’t necessarily a good thing, but the fact is that the rhetoric of expansion is anti-conservative. The emphasis of our movement needs to be on protecting and conserving, as I’ve said previously, even if that’s meant in a radical way. By saying “we can expand your liberties without the dangers of that big ole bully Progressivism,” we’re creating a dichotomy; we’re playing on the terms of the liberal movement. We’re saying limit doesn’t matter and that we’re the better liberals.

But we shouldn’t want to be the better liberals. The Hegelian recognition of subjective freedom is a thoroughly modern, and thoroughly un-ignorable, phenomenon. At the same time, conservatives can’t let that impulse to profess the freedom of man mean the destruction of the idea of limit. We can’t go emphasizing the thing that defines exactly what we stand against. We need to stand for the wisdom of conservatism, for the wisdom of recognizing limit. Contrary to what Mr. Tobin implies, this is not despair. As Tolkien put it, “It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.” On the contrary, it is the wisdom of acknowledging our human limits.