Neoconservatism & Classical Conservatism

Tradition, “Second Nature,” anti-Rationalism, and anti-Utopianism are some of the key ideas that have historically been associated with the conservative intellectual tradition.

These ideas are essentially formal; logically speaking, they precede and form the substance of the positions taken by individual conservative thinkers on specific “practical” issues (“abortion,” “capital punishment,” “Democracy,” etc.).

Neoconservatism and paleoconservatism are names of popular political movements, and popular political movements are identified in terms of the substance of the beliefs they promote regarding the issues of the day. Whether either can legitimately claim to draw sustenance from what I call “classical conservatism” -- an intellectual phenomenon -- depends on the types of reason the adherents of each provide for the positions they hold. That is, only if the substance of their beliefs reflects a worldview constituted in large measure by some combination of any of the forgoing ideas that have been enduring features of conservative thought can the proponents of either camp make the case that they are genuinely “conservative.”

Neoconservatism

American Interventionism & American Exceptionalism
Neoconservatives are distinguished, first and foremost, by their unbridled and unrivaled support for using the American military for the sake of promoting “Democracy” throughout the world. Only if the governments of the world are democratically constituted, the reasoning goes, will there be world peace, for democracies do not wage war against one another. America, neoconservatives think, has a unique role to play in this crusade for “Democracy,” for it alone among the nations of history was founded on those very “rights” that democracies are instituted to protect.

Thus, their advocacy of “American interventionism” reflects their belief in “American Exceptionalism.”

Legal and Illegal Immigration
That there are some neoconservatives opposed to illegal immigration isn’t nearly as revealing of their political vision as the fact that they unanimously, and ecstatically, support legal immigration. Neoconservatives appear not in the least concerned about the potentially corrosive cultural effects of an immigration policy that is unprecedented in regard to both the number and kind of immigrants that it permits. The vast majority of immigration today, as everyone well knows, stems from the “Third World” and, as such, consists of people less skilled, less educated, and more resistant to assimilation than any that America has ever tried to absorb in the past.

Verdict: Neoconservatism is Not a Form of Conservatism
The paleoconservative denies that neoconservatism is a form of conservatism. And it would seem that he is correct.

The doctrine of “inalienable human rights” enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the belief that America is a nation uniquely founded in this doctrine appear to be the formal ideas underlying the neoconservative’s endorsement of Global Democracy and “Third World” immigration. Yet this vision is anything but consonant with classical conservatism.

The belief that morality is comprised primarily of “principles,” in this case principles specifying “inalienable rights” alleged to be universal in status and accessible to all human beings, regardless of circumstances of place and time is excessively rationalistic. And the belief that America is founded on such “rational principles” is no less so.

As these ideas are rationalistic, so they facilitate utopianism. Indeed, the commitment to democratizing nations of the world to which it has always been a stranger, like the commitment to producing a genuinely “post-racial” America where race, ethnicity, and culture become as irrelevant as eye color, are commitments to utopianisms.

And inasmuch as these ideas are rationalistic and utopian, they deny the primacy of place that conservatives have always accorded tradition and “second nature.”

There is obviously much more that can be said about neoconservatism but, unfortunately, spatial constraints demand this all too brief analysis.

Next week, I look at paleoconservatism to determine how it relates to classical conservatism.