Defining Conservatism

Battles between self-understood “conservatives” can get ugly -- real ugly -- and at no time more so than when the participants are “paleoconservatives” and “neoconservatives.”

Paleoconservatives denounce their neoconservative counterparts as impostors, left-leaning frauds who have illegitimately appropriated the label of “conservatism.” Paul Gottfried, for example, typically refers to “the two lefts,” by which he means those who openly acknowledge their commitment to “liberalism” and those -- the neoconservatives -- who don’t.

Neoconservatives don’t deny paleoconservatives a place on the political right, but they seek to de-legitimize them by either referring to them as “the far” or “extreme Right,” or by refusing to mention them at all. In any case, neoconservatives never regard paleoconservatives as conservative.

There is no genuine intercourse of ideas between these two self-identified “conservative” camps; all that transpires between them, regrettably, is animosity. Still, this conflict underscores the urgency with which we need to come to terms with the obvious question: What is “conservatism?”

The Object of Definition
Before the enterprise of defining “conservatism’ can proceed, we must be clear as to the kind of thing on which we would like to set our sights: an intellectual/theoretical tradition or a popular political movement? That most of the definitions submitted on behalf of “conservatism” fail to take note of this distinction does not alter in the slightest the fact that it is crucial.

An intellectual tradition need not be defined in terms of the content of the positions that happen to be taken by its adherents with respect to any given moral, political, or other issue. Take the ethical theory “utilitarianism.” Individual utilitarian thinkers can and do disagree with one another over any number of issues, from abortion to capital punishment to war. Yet while the substance or content of their views on these issues varies from one person to the next, they are still proponents of one and the same theory by virtue of their subscription to some specific formal principles, especially “the principle of utility.”

A popular political movement, on the other hand, so as to distinguish itself from other popular political movements, must, it appears, be known primarily by the content of the positions on the issues of the day that its members generally take. “Liberals” support “abortion rights,” a more “activist” Supreme Court, and “Welfare rights”; neoconservatives are distinguished by their support for an aggressive foreign policy and unabashed support for Israel; and paleoconservatives are known for, among other things, their opposition to the extent to which America and Israel are intertwined, as well as their grave misgivings regarding immigration, both legal and illegal.

But even this distinction between the theoretical and the practical only takes us so far in the case of “conservatism,” for neither its self-professed theorists nor its practitioners see themselves as solely one or the other. “Conservatism” as a theoretical tradition is parasitic on “conservatism” the practice, and the latter conceives itself as the embodiment or heir of the former.

A definition of “conservatism” must provide essentially formal suppositions in terms of which the phenomenon that it designates has historically identified itself. In short, what this means is that a person is a “conservative,” not so much by virtue of the substance of the positions to which he subscribes, but his manner of reasoning. A “conservative,” then, is one who accepts certain distinctive, but formal, presuppositions and endorses those views on more specific issues to which those assumptions appear to point.