That human beings start out crooked and prone to sin means we require strong social institutions meant to form us, and that we cannot thrive in their absence. It means the good of the individual cannot be achieved in a society that is not meaningfully attuned to the true common good. But that human beings are made in a divine image and possessed of inherent dignity means that each of us has rights that in practice amount to constraints on what society can do to us. In this sense, the conservative anthropology points toward both communitarianism and individualism, and the tension between the two emerges in every conservative effort to wrestle with real-world governing challenges.
“Democratic capitalism is the best approach we have found for advancing the material prosperity of our society,
but there are times when other goods—family formation, the dignity of the individual, community life, moral principle, national interest, or national pride—need to be prioritized over economic prosperity. to determine in individual cases, but we would do well to avoid casting our arguments about that as simply or most fundamentally debates about economics.”
“Democratic capitalism” is an interesting choice of words to describe the USA. The Economist Group labels the USA “a flawed democracy” and that is generous is given the general neglect of the integrity of voter rolls. “Capitalism,” understood in the general sense of “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.Central characteristics of capitalism include private property and the recognition of property rights, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system and competitive markets,” is a stretch as well given the tax system’s penalties for “profit” that produce distorted and unproductive uses of capital, the tax systems heavy penalties for the use of domestic labor, and the Federal Reserve’s naked manipulation of stock prices, not to mention the intrusive regulation of entire industries, banking, insurance, and healthcare, for example, under Obamacare health care profits are controlled and limited. “State capitalism” might be a better choice. And the other goods of private life are similarly controlled and regulated with the USA’s 2020 rank of 28th in the world on the World Index of Moral Freedom measuring “ how free from state-imposed moral constraints are human beings.”
Note too the phrase “our society.” Who is included in this “our”? And “society” singular? By “society” Levin presumably means “a community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests.” What common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests do the citizens of the US have? Other than the federal government? And aren’t our “institutions” at war with each other? The “What We Believe” statement of Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, which surveys say has the support of upwards of 70 percent of the population, is generally hostile to capitalism and property rights and explicitly calls for the destruction of institutions like the family:
““We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
Levin says “Exactly when and how that should happen is a matter for robust debate and coalition bargaining” at least until it arrives to the USA Supreme Court and the Chief Justice decides which faction he wants to favor at that particular moment.
In short, conservatism in the USA context is something of a fantasyland, and “every conservative effort to wrestle with real-world governing challenges” appears short of “real world.”
Once upon a time, conservative priorities were fairly well established: God, family, country. In that order. Levin doesn’t offer an alternative, just a notion that competing conservative factions should tolerate each other for the sake of having power. God, family, and country are fine priorities as are alternatives such as peace, prosperity, and personal autonomy. The path to either will not be found through intellectual debating but through democratic action and democratic action at this point in USA history will not be possible without radically pragmatic reform of the constitutional foundations of institutions, starting with rule of law, political representation, individual rights and freedoms, and eliminating distortionary taxes and entrenched and unaccountable bureaucracies.
Levin and other national conservatives have returned to the roots of conservatism and want to expel the laissez-faire element. Paleo conservatives hated industrialization and demanded an agrarian society, as Kirk showed in his history of conservatism. Classical liberals joined forces with conservatives around 1900 to fight socialism. But it was a shotgun wedding. Now paleo conservatives want a divorce. The type of economic system they want would be classified today as fascism.
“we require strong social institutions meant to form us”
That is Levin echoing the classical Greek and Roman philosophy heritage. They actually believed that institutions could make people act morally. But that is a betrayal of his Christian heritage. At least he claims to be a Christian. Christianity carried forward the Jewish theology that mankind is born with a tendency toward evil that only God can change. Institutions can’t do it. Government institutions exist solely to punish evil people who violate the rights of others to life, liberty and property.
The West had the institutions that Levin and the national conservatives demand in the middle ages. Yet, atheism sprang up first and most virulently in Catholic France, the state that most exemplified Levin’s ideals. The bloody Revolution and Socialism were born in Catholic France with in the shade of Levin’s institutions.
Boy, it seems pretty clear this was drafted when Levin was still in pseudo-transcendent “A Time to Build – dullest book of the year” mode, and before the current unpleasantness, doesn’t it? What a different a few months make.
Does anyone think the squabbles and arguments between free market, open trade libertarians like Tyler Cowen; Oren Cass’ neo-Reform Conservatism project, Peter Navarro economic nationalists, and social conservatives is one of the “most significant”, or has all that jousting the the perpetual “reinvent / reformulate” conservatism game been overshadowed by something orders of magnitude more significant, urgent, and distressing?
You know what “American Conservatism” really is? It’s “Postmodern American Conservatism”. Consider these recent line from Peggy Noonan:
You know what’s remarkable about these lines? They are in fact the *only* constant of American Conservatism over the last 60 years, the constant repetition of this refrain, not to keep things the same (i.e., ‘conserve’) or stand firmly behind the best ideas from our heritage (i.e., ‘principled’), but only and always to re-think, re-formulate, re-build, re-imagine, re-invent, “because Current Year” and “because donors and voters”. Even Sisyphus understood that there was no point aside from punishment to his interminable rounds of laborious and futile rock pushing.
Thus all the “Outer Party” dark humor. The Inner Party only cares about power, that is, remaining the Inner Party. Likewise, the Outer Party only cares about remaining the Outer Party and not getting purged and replaced with some recent refugees which the Inner Party is always kicking out, which is why the only thing the Outer Party actually always believes in is re-inventing and re-building itself to whatever degree necessary to maintain the privilege of remaining the Outer Party.
Thus, if every other year you are once again going back to the drawing board, and not just reworking the latest squiggles but wiping out all the giant slates in the whole lecture hall because you have to go all the way back to first principles, then there *is* no “American Conservatism” left, besides this incessant, meta-level phoenix cycle.
The lesson is that if you want to conserve, you better conserve conservatism itself first. Otherwise, in the optimistic case, you’ll be reinventing fake conservatism every election for the rest of time. In the less optimistic case, you just go extinct and disappear forever.
Now, the left may indeed be “dull and shallow” like Levin says, and lacking in quality, like an individual orc. But even a single orc is still menacing, and the thing about orcs is that the one thing they aren’t too dull to understand is that quantity has a quality all its own.
This would be like the Abbasids and Seljuqs carrying on some debate in correspondence on the finer points of Sunni Islam in 1257 when a year later the Mongols came, carved the Seljuk’s empire into tiny beyliks, and the tallest structure remaining in Baghdad was a pyramid of skulls.
Levin is a peacetime public intellectual, but war is coming, and the scouts are already here. The reason the various currents opposed to the social jihadist progressives should come together is not because of some purportedly common anthropological perspective (which doesn’t actually exist even as a tenuous fiction), but because otherwise everything they care about is *obviously doomed*, and if they don’t hang together they will surely hang apart.
If your ideological allies don’t all share in theire various conceptions of “the good” the principle that, “Political survival is pretty good, so let’s do that,” then there is really no point to finding other tiny slivers of potential overlap on a Venn diagram.
Levin is inadvertently and coincidentally right about the most significant debates being on the right, but they are the very-heterodox right, and they are about what the undoubtedly necessary regime change should look like. Just like with free trade, the regime change will create its own “winners and losers”.
Consider this passage:
The way you know there is no meat on these overly abstract bones is because a progressive could use the exact same words. They would just modify what comes after with:
If the words you are using in purporting to explain the core of conservatism cannot be distinguished from the core of radicalism except that it hinges on a judgment call on whether the inherited forms of society are fundamentally good or unsalvageably bad (the social flip-side of the “anthropological” coin), but without even hinting as to why one judgment is correct and the other is wrong, then the whole exercise is empty of content and meaning.
“The lesson is that if you want to conserve, you better conserve conservatism itself first.”
This is profoundly wrong.
Conservatism claims to deliver deeply needed guidance to messy human life. It has to deliver. When things go wrong, the conserved core kernel of society needs to justify the central idea of conservatism and do its job. It must provide the guidance it promises. The values being applied need to be clear and consistent. The country needs to be persuaded, over and over, reinforcing the social contract, and most importantly fulfilling it. Giving up on persuasion is giving up on conservatism.
When this fails, people naturally want to progress to something new.
The central danger to conservatism is the very natural tendency to defend itself instead of its core purpose. The institutions and norms are only important because they can guide us to do the right things. If conservatism cannot navigate the complexities of when to defend its institutions and when to guide them back on track, it really isn’t worth fighting for.
“Reinventing conservatism” is never about coming up with clever new marketing for clear and consistent values, but about ditching meritorious and beneficial values whenever they become inconvenient. It is moving with the latest fashions for the sake of staying in fashion and not because they have anything to do with improving lives, solving problems, or speaking important truths even when they become unpopular.
That is the cynical and empty politics of Elia Kazan’s “A Face In The Crowd”, not “conservatism”.
“Reinventing conservatism” was a conversation you were having with yourself. If you want to continue, fine.
Both you and to some extent Levin seem to not really believe in conservatism all that much. The core idea is that we’ve had certain norms and structures evolve over time and we believe they work. They serve to guide and correct.
The quote above from Levin seems to go off the rails by worrying that conservatism struggles with its ability to balance of control vs freedom.
Well, that balance is the part we tried, we liked and are now conserving. If we didn’t believe that our particular society didn’t have that part right, we wouldn’t want to conserve it. If you only believe that what you have conserved works when things are going well, but must be cranked up or loosed due to wider circumstances, you don’t believe in conservatism, you just believe in authority.
You likewise seem to feel conservatism needs to be saved, just not by practicing conservatism right now. That part is in trouble and cannot be expected to correct some bad trends under duress, which I thought was the point.
Instead, you believe we are in a war, and just want to save the flag and resurrect the ideals later.
From studying (back before the birth of Y.L) the works (pl.) of Hayek (and others) the unlikelihood of meaningfully analyzing a social order – from within – should be recognized, We can not examine ourselves from within.
The idea that “institutions” shape people and their social orders is a false construct.
As the scholar Carroll Quiglley wrote (some 60 years ago), social organizations develop instrumentalities (facilities) to meet the several needs of those organizations for the objectives of their members. Those facilities involve human relationships for their operation – and ultimately the relationships and their objectives become dominant “institutionalizing” the facility. Thus “institutions” are generated by society and are products, not the shapers, of the societies where they are observed.
To “build” institutions (to “shape” or otherwise impact the nature of a society and the relationships within it) is a concept of “constructivism.” It involves determination (fixation) of social objectives, rather than their arising in therelationships of individuals seeking individual objectives.
It is probably true that “western” societies have not “innovated” social facilities since the emergence of “Open Access” (particularly commercially) about 200 years ago. There has come to be extensive intermediations (interventions, intrusions) into direct human relationships (at all levels) from external sources -principally governmental or political in nature.
The results have included continuing societal (and other) fragmentation and the formation of social “cells” for the maintenance of desired relationships; or, to gain from the operations of interventions.
Yuval Levin sounds very much like John Gray.
That’s a lot of verbage just to say, “we require strong social institutions meant to form us.”
Maybe so, but the next question is, “Are those institutions going to be top-down or bottom up?” From what I’ve heard of Yuval on podcasts, it seems he’s more inclined to go with top-down.
And that’s what seems to be the difference between the classical liberal and nationalist conservatives.
The phrase Levin’s essay brings to mind is the one that was applied to Jimmy Carter 40 years ago: “More mush from the wimp.”
Levin’s complacency is truly breathtaking. Yes, what passes for “debate” on the Left is of zero intellectual interest, but the Left nonetheless seems poised to take over the federal government in a few months. Is this the time for traditionalists/conservatives/civic nationalists/classical liberals/free marketeers/etc. to be patting themselves on the back for having interesting debates while sitting together in a canoe about to go over Niagara Falls? I don’t have any bright ideas about how to avert the coming catastrophe, but a person who pretends it’s not happening is too disconnected from reality to be worth listening to.
And speaking of disconnection from reality, it is all well and good to talk about how important nongovernmental social institutions are for human wellbeing and social functionality, but Levin (at least in this essay) gives no indication that he understands the extent to which these institutions are in a state of collapse, disrepair or irrelevancy, have become consumer-driven industries rather than sources of authority, or have been largely or entirely coopted by the Left. A few tradition-friendly Supreme Court decisions (assuming we even get them from the likes of Roberts and Gorsuch) are not going to clean up this mess.
Just a wild guess, but I suspect that Levin’s insistence that “economic” issues should not be the center of political debate is driven by an aversion to placing even partial blame for the decline of the social institutions he professes to care so much about on the policies favored by his free-market-and-free-trade-at-any-price funders (e.g, financialization of the US economy, shipping any jobs possible to low-wage third world countries, admitting China to the WTO, flooding the US with immigrants). No, I’m not saying there haven’t been other factors, and I have no idea how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but the business interests that support “Burkean” establishment conservatives like Levin deserve a share of the blame.
Unlike Levin, I doubt that there’s any deep “anthropology” behind the rigid free market ideology that has driven American conservatism into a ditch. Libertarians and free market ideologues, like the Left, believe that the human society should be reordered and rearranged by reference to an ahistorical, abstract Kantian blueprint dictating how wealth and power are to be distributed. The libertarian/free market blueprint is not the same one promulgated by the Left, but it is still a blueprint that demands countervailing cultural considerations be given no weight.
I get the feeling that Levin, who came to this country as an Israeli immigrant when he was around 10 years old and presumably has lived his life here in a highly-educated metropolitan/academic bubble, has in his head an idealized, midcentury, Norman Rockwell-like picture of what the “real” America is like, and cannot bring himself to admit that this “real” America has died.
Sorry for the dearth of charity.
Well no, libertarianism emphatically don’t have blue print for how and power ought to be distributed. Your argument probably hinges on all of us accepting that whatever ostensible ‘traditions’ ought to be enforced at gunpoint (perhaps including ancient traditions as the nonexistence of section 230 or anti-discrimination laws for conservatives or whatever) are somehow neutral, organic, time-tested practices.
In any case, if you think the libertarian defense of markets is based on Kantian deontology, I don’t know who you’ve been reading. I think that’s about as accurate as positing that socialists these days are mostly motivated by Jesus.
I wish Arnold would examine the more energetic, imaginative, smarter, honest and youthful side of the conservatives, particularly Bronze Age Pervert, Curtis Yarvin, Qanon followers and others.
Energetic, yes. More imaginative, yes. Smarter, no (Childish BAP and conspiratorial know-nothings, but Yarvin is great). More honest, possibly. Younger, yes.
Completely disagree. You should check out his podcast, which is different from his beautiful book.
Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/bronze-age-pervert/caribbean-rhythms-with-bap-episode-46-caste-is-racial-caste
BAP is an impressive autodidact. The work and literature he cites and talks about is very impressive. He’s cited so MANY old and interesting books to read, all more interesting than any given to me by mainstream intellectuals.
The man has made reading exciting again.