Years ago, I wrote a paean to the virtues of radicalism, extolling the virtues of being immovable in your beliefs and refusing to compromise what is true for what people will like. In there, I wrote about how change can only be accomplished by those who refuse to give ground or be moved from their just cause, no matter what the enticements to do so may be. Compromise, I explained, only led to slow and painful social, political, and moral degradation – a losing battle where the only ones who triumphed were the politicians who got to take advantage of said degradation to enhance their odds of reelection. Though I never mentioned it by name, that article was (is) aimed at demolishing the intellectual basis of conservatism. Which isn’t all that hard to do because conservatism has no intellectual basis.
Does that seem harsh? Perhaps so, but it is nonetheless the truth. Conservatism is a failed ideology (if it can even be called that) which will never accomplish anything meaningful or substantial. This is because Conservatism is nothing more than the last generation’s Progressivism. The so-called “Progressives” of yesteryear simply grew old, calcified, and became the “Conservatives” as the contemporary “Progressives” have developed whole new agendas to push. In a world where people want their problems solved today, the best Conservatives offer are the nostalgic promises of the blessedness of yesterday.
As a result, even when they win elections the best they can do is slow down the rate of change and maybe put off until tomorrow the Progressive victory. Thus, many of the Old Right conservatives of the early 20th century were languishing Jeffersonians and Classical Liberals while the Conservative Resurgence of the 1980s was led by Ronald Reagan, a man who even then styled himself as a New Deal Democrat and who promoted New Deal-style government social programs, and contemporary conservatives support Donald Trump and his leftist political and economic policies. Today’s conservatives are just last generation’s “radicals” floundering in the wake of the radical Left.
I’m not the first man to notice this, nor am I really the best. That honor goes to the Nobel Prize winning economist, Dr. Fredrich von Hayek, popularly known as F.A. Hayek. Though von Hayek’s most well-known work is undoubtedly The Road to Serfdom, which masterfully argues that the end product of Socialism is a totalitarian state ruling over a society in which all are serfs in all but name, the source for all quotations that in this article comes from Why I am Not a Conservative, the postscript to his book The Constitution of Liberty. The essay is the preeminent dismantling of conservative “ideology” the definitive work on the failures of conservatism as a social and political philosophy.
Because it is too long to republish here, I have instead selected some of my favorite quotes from the text, the ones which I think to be the most insightful and power, with some little commentary of my own added. It is my hope that the reader will be inspired to abandon the false promises of conservatism and embrace the ideas of liberty and individualism to their fullest extent. Only by doing so can we begin to created a better future for ourselves and all those who come after us.
A Brief History
Early in the essay, Hayek gives a brief history of American politics explaining how conservatism came to be equated with liberalism in the United States:
Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called “liberalism” was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. This already existing confusion was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character. And some time before this, American radicals and socialists began calling themselves “liberals.” I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism.
It is one of the mainstay claims of American conservatives that they represent liberty and freedom. They certainly speak the language at times. And the reason for this is because for a time the conservative instinct to preserve things as they are meant preserving at least some of the vestiges of actual liberalism, classical liberalism, which still existed in the United States. But this has collapsed in the face of the continual changes in the American political landscape and the importation of “European-style conservatism,” with its emphasis on nationalism, religion as a tool for (re)defining culture, and support for powerful central governments, under the cloak of neoconservatism. Dr. Hayek continues:
The picture generally given of the relative position of the three parties does more to obscure than to elucidate their true relations. They are usually represented as different positions on a line, with the socialists on the left, the conservatives on the right, and the liberals somewhere in the middle. Nothing could be more misleading. If we want a diagram, it would be more appropriate to arrange them in a triangle with the conservatives occupying one corner, with the socialists pulling toward the second and the liberals toward the third. But, as the socialists have for a long time been able to pull harder, the conservatives have tended to follow the socialist rather than the liberal direction and have adopted at appropriate intervals of time those ideas made respectable by radical propaganda.
…The position which can be rightly described as conservative at any time depends, therefore, on the direction of existing tendencies. Since the development during the last decades has been generally in a socialist direction, it may seem that both conservatives and liberals have been mainly intent on retarding that movement.
Do you doubt that conservatives have always trended towards socialism? Then please explain to me the last time that any conservative actually got rid of a major department of the government or ended a massive government welfare program? Do you know the last time that was?
Never.
The only guy I think would’ve actually tried was Ron Paul and the Republican Party did everything it could to destroy his candidacy. Because the conservatives are not classical liberals and don’t believe in liberty or limited government. Today’s conservatives are just last week’s socialists. And whatever they say with their words, usually uttered to obfuscate, confuse, and lie to the public anyway, their actions reveal them for who and what they truly are – proponents and protectors of growing socialism in the United States.
The Failures of Conservatism
Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments. But, though there is need for a “brake on the vehicle of progress,” I personally cannot be content with simply helping to apply the brake. What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move. In fact, he differs much more from the collectivist radical of today than does the conservative. While the last generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time, the liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.
True liberals, true promoters of free markets, free will, and free men, must of necessity have a vision for society. They want to liberate people from the control of the government, from the domination of others, and to think, believe, and act as they choose. Conservatives do not. They have no vision for tomorrow and therefore offer no counter to the political utopia that Leftists promise is just around the corner if only we listen to and obey them more and more. have no vision for society and therefore can offer no hope for a better world. The best they can do is try to slow the capitulation of society to the political left until the currently radical position becomes the conservative one of tomorrow as newer and even more radical ideas and created.
This failure to have a vision for society is fundamentally rooted in the failures of conservatives to understand liberty itself. This results in conservatives having a fearful outlook on existence and leads the conservative to love and treasure power and control as evidence of “order.”
There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people’s frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change “orderly.”
…Since it distrusts both abstract theories and general principles, it neither understands those spontaneous forces on which a policy of freedom relies nor possesses a basis for formulating principles of policy. Order appears to the conservatives as the result of the continuous attention of authority, which, for this purpose, must be allowed to do what is required by the particular circumstances and not be tied to rigid rule.
…Let me return, however, to the main point, which is the characteristic complacency of the conservative toward the action of established authority and his prime concern that this authority be not weakened rather than that its power be kept within bounds. This is difficult to reconcile with the preservation of liberty. In general, it can probably be said that the conservative does not object to coercion or arbitrary power so long as it is used for what he regards as the right purposes. He believes that if government is in the hands of decent men, it ought not to be too much restricted by rigid rules. Since he is essentially opportunist and lacks principles, his main hope must be that the wise and the good will rule—not merely by example, as we all must wish, but by authority given to them and enforced by them. Like the socialist, he is less concerned with the problem of how the powers of government should be limited than with that of who wields them; and, like the socialist, he regards himself as entitled to force the value he holds on other people.
Because the conservative, due to the limits of his philosophy (or lack thereof entirely), he is incapable of understanding liberty. But the overt powers of the State – the police, the military, the prestigious offices, etc. – are all so obvious they cannot be ignored. And because they – with their rituals, and ranks, uniforms, and orders- seem to create order the conservative is drawn to lionize and idolize them. Ultimately, the conservative doesn’t hate powerful central governments. He, like the socialist, merely hates when others hold that power because his goal is the same as theirs, to force his values and ideals on society through law using the same systems of social control – the military, police, etc. In the end, the conservative is just as dangerous a tyrant as the socialist or any other political Leftist. The only difference is that the socialist bases his power on the hostility to historical fact while the conservative bases his power on hostility to newly discovered facts:
Connected with the conservative distrust of the new and the strange is its hostility to internationalism and its proneness to a strident nationalism. Here is another source of its weakness in the struggle of ideas. It cannot alter the fact that the ideas which are changing our civilization respect no boundaries. But refusal to acquaint one’s self with new ideas merely deprives one of the power of effectively countering them when necessary. The growth of ideas is an international process, and only those who fully take part in the discussion will be able to exercise a significant influence. It is no real argument to say that an idea is un-American, un-British, or un-German, nor is a mistaken or vicious ideal better for having been conceived by one of our compatriots.
If the greatest dangers of political Leftism is arrogance, the very real danger of conservatism is that of ignorance. His unwillingness to engage and incorporate newly discovered facts (and here I mean facts in the actual sense and not in the propagandistic sense that Leftists use that word) leaves him ignorant. His nationalism leaves him open to promoting some of the most horrific ideas and defending the most horrific actions simply because his nation, that is to say the ruling government which always claims to “represent the people” in some amorphous and nonsensical manner, did it. For example, this is why so many conservatives (73%!) believe that using atomic bombs to slaughter hundreds of thousands of men, women, children, and babies was (and is) acceptable. (This is another area where conservatives have adopted what was once the politically Leftist position.) The slaughter of babies is only bad when the other person does it. To conservatives, Hitler’s extermination camps were horrific and killing humans with poison gas is evil, but firebombing their cities, smothering millions with smoke and ash, and then completely obliterating them from existence – in short turning Japanese cities into massive extermination camps – is good because America did it. And if you think killing civilians is bad but allow those in power to do it anyway then you don’t think killing babies is bad. You are just trying to soothe your conscience because you know what you have done is evil.
Final Thoughts
In the end, the conservative willingness to adore power and glorify warmongers, in other words to go beyond simply aping political Leftism and embracing its means, methods, and ends, comes from the failures of conservatism to mean anything at all:
The task of the political philosopher can only be to influence public opinion, not to organize people for action. He will do so effectively only if he is not concerned with what is now politically possible but consistently defends the “general principles which are always the same.” In this sense I doubt whether there can be such a thing as a conservative political philosophy. Conservatism may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments.
Conservatives are all too willing to not merely countenance but to actively do horrific evils when called upon. This is because there is no conservative political philosophy. There are no sets of uniquely conservative values or morality. This isn’t to say conservatives don’t have passionate opinions about things, but to say that there is no limit to what they will do to obtain power and exercise it at home and abroad. This makes them no better than the Leftists the conservatives claim to oppose. And to the true friends of liberty, conservatives and conservatism can be nothing more than just another force of social, economic, political, and religious corruption and oppression that needs to be thrown off along with political Leftism if we hope to discover and create free and prosperous societies.