Progressivism and the Younger Generation, by Mark Henrie.

Posted on Mar 9th, 2012 in Philosophy, Politics | 0 comments
Progressivism and the Younger Generation, by Mark Henrie.

As Sigmund Freud never said, the great unanswered question is: “What do conservatives want?” You must confess that it is a genuine question, because the characteristic conservative stance for the past two centuries has been one of opposition. We are more clear, and unified, about what we oppose than by what we propose. Stephen Holmes, in his self-congratulatory and ultimately fatuous book, The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, argued that there is no real theoretical substance to conservatism, because those called conservatives through the years have been trying to “conserve” too many contradictory things—sometimes absolute monarchy, sometimes constitutional monarchy, sometimes constitutional republics, sometimes free trade, sometimes protected trade, sometimes corporatist authoritarian regimes, etc. But if conservatives have changed their defensive front, it is perhaps because the Left has, through these same centuries, constantly changed its mode of attack: sometimes advocating enlightened absolute monarchs, sometimes constitutional republics, sometimes plebiscitary democracies, sometimes parliaments, sometimes executive agencies, and lately advocating the supremacy of constitutional courts and “global governance”—whatever that is. One might say that a sufficient response to Stephen Holmes is: tu quoque.

Conservatism has been a matter of opposition, of “standing athwart History yelling ‘Stop’!” But if this is true, then the nature of the opposition is a matter of the first importance. Just yesterday, it seems, our politics was structured by the divide between liberals and conservatives. Today, thanks in no small part to conservative success at diabolizing the L-word, we are invited to consider a politics structured by the divide between progressives and conservatives. Is this a distinction that makes any difference?

On first look, the answer seems to be “No.” After all, those who now embrace the label of “modern progressives” are those, like Hillary Clinton, who yesterday were called liberals. What is more, if we examine the new conservatism that has emerged in reaction to the new progressivism—namely, the Tea Party—we discover (the empirical political scientists tell us) much the same people who, just yesterday, were known as the “religious right.” While particular issues may have changed, the underlying fundaments remain the same.
On second look, the emergence of progressivism as a foil by which to understand conservatism is a clear improvement of our intellectual situation. For those among us who identify conservatism with classical liberalism, the new terminology spares us the irksomeness of explaining the difference between classical and modern liberalism, so confusing to generations of undergraduates. Moreover, for those among us who have developed an intellectually powerful account of the spoliation visited upon America’s natural-rights republic by imported German historicist ideas and political schemes, the new language finally “gets it right,” and Americans are now in a position to understand the real issues that face us. Of course, with gains there are always, also, losses. The new intellectual framing of our politics, precisely in removing liberalism from its polarity vis-à-vis conservatism, threatens to throw into eclipse the critique of “rights-talk” that was one of the more promising theoretical conservative advances of the 1990s.

But I would like to take a third look, and consider the question of the progressive/conservative framing in light of the larger question, “What do conservatives want?” It seems to me that it is of the essence of conservatism to feel oneself on the losing side of history.

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