A Very Brief Intellectual Autobiography
Reading Samuel Freeman’s review of Roger Scruton in the latest NYRB, I had a mini-realization about my own work on conservatism, which features Scruton quite a bit.
In the mid-1970s, conservatism, which had previously been declared dead as an intellectual and political force, began to have a major impact on liberalism. Politically, you could see that influence in the slow, then sudden, retreat from traditional New Deal objectives, culminating in the election of Bill Clinton. What that meant was a massive turnaround on economic issues (deregulation, indifference to unions, galloping inequality) and a softer turnaround on social issues. While mainstream Democrats today are identified as staunch liberals on so-called social or moral issues like abortion and gay rights, the truth of the matter is that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they really beat a retreat on that front (not only on abortion but also, after an initial embrace by Clinton of gays and lesbians, on gay rights as well).
Among academics, particularly liberal political theorists, the impact of conservatism was equally strong. Where a generation of Rawlsian political theorists had cut their teeth on the economic questions of redistribution and the welfare state, suddenly the questions on the table had to do with how a liberal democracy can deal with intractable differences of religion and morality, whether and how men and women could argue over fundamental questions of “the good” rather than hide or subsume their disagreements under more seemingly neutral rules of “the right.”
You could see this shift most visibly in the Rawlsian turn toward political liberalism. In the earlier work, “difference” meant the Difference Principle, which was a Rawlsian rule about whether to accept economic inequalities in the polity and how they might be arranged. Now “difference” came to be associated with religious differences, deep disagreements over questions like sexual morality that liberals had previously thought belonged to the realm of private belief and practice.
It wasn’t just Rawlsians and liberals who felt the impact of this turn; so did more radical and left theorists, for whom questions of difference and deeper modes of pluralization began to loom large.
One of the reasons I wrote my book on conservatism, I now realize in retrospect, was not to contest these Rawlsian or more radical arguments about difference and pluralization. It was instead to try and take a step back, to show how the landscape in which these liberal arguments were occurring had been shaped, deeply shaped, by conservatism, often in ways liberals did not understand. Where academic liberals and leftists had accepted the simple distinction between economic and social conservatives—as did I, for a very long time—and had believed that the social conservatives were driven by moral questions, I wanted to show that conservatism was, yes, a deeply moral and ideological praxis, only that it rotated around a different set of principles from the ones liberals seemed to think the right held dear. The real axis of rotation, I claimed, was domination and hierarchy, particularly in the private realms of power, and it was that axis that united social conservatives, economic conservatives, and national security conservatives. (I had already begun to broach some of these questions of domination in my first book on fear, which tried to use the liberal interest in fear and emotion more generally as a way of inching the left toward a more robust engagement with questions of social domination in the family and the workplace, but since that was written in shadow of 9/11, it got little traction or play.)
To be clear: domination and hierarchy are not, to my mind, non-moral issues, neither for the left nor the right. They’re deeply moral. Only they are also part of a social and material practice. We cannot and should not separate the moral from the economic in conservatism any more than we would in socialism.
While I believe my account can help us understand conservatism across the ages, it would be nice to think that it is also suited to explain the right today, not only in the Age of Trump but also in the Age of Bernie. Increasingly, we’ve seen, these questions of social domination are coming to the fore. As the left begins to move into a position where it can not only get a clear view of its enemies but also to take aim at them—both the hard right revanchism of the GOP and the soft neoliberalism of the Democrats—my hope is that a generation of academic political theorists, who learned their trade against the backdrop of a mistaken view of conservatism, might now begin to see the conflicts of the day in a different light.
Indeed, judging from what I see among younger political theorists, I believe that turn has already begun.