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     responsibility for individual material well-being. Conservatives
     believe that it should not; giving it that responsibility means
     despotism, since material well-being is a result of a complex of
     things that in the end extends to the whole of life, and
     responsibility for each individual case requires detailed control
     of the whole.

     Government responsibility for specific cases also means that what
     happens to people, and therefore what they do, is the business of
     no one in particular; if there's a serious problem, the government
     will take care of it. Such an outlook destroys social ties and
     promotes antisocial behavior. If government does things that weaken
     self-reliance and the moral bonds that give rise to community, and
     that can not be made to work without an elaborate system of
     compulsion, in the long run it will increase suffering and
     degradation.

     Conservatives are therefore suspicious of social welfare programs,
     especially attempts at categorical solutions. Suspicion has
     rational limits. Some government social welfare measures (free
     clinics for mothers and children or local systems of support for
     deserving people) may well increase social welfare even in the long
     term. However, because of the obscurity of the issue, the
     difficulty in a mass democracy of limiting the expansion of
     government benefit programs, and the value of widespread
     participation in public life, the best resolution is likely to be
     keeping central government involvement strictly limited, and
     letting individuals, associations and localities support
     voluntarily the institutions and programs they think socially
     beneficial.

4.4 What about welfare for the middle classes, like social security,
medicare, the home mortgage interest deduction, and so on?

     The most consistent conservatives want to get rid of all of them.
     Social security and medicare, they say, are financially unsound,
     and are socially harmful because they lead people capable of saving
     for their own retirement and supporting their own parents to rely
     on the government instead. They could better be replaced by private
     savings, prefunded medical insurance, greater emphasis on
     intergenerational obligations within families, and other
     arrangements that would evolve if the government presence were
     reduced or eliminated.

     Other conservatives distinguish these middle-class benefits from
     welfare by the element of reciprocity; people get social security
     and medicare only if they have already given a great deal to
     society, and in the case of the mortgage interest deduction the
     "benefit" consists only in the right to keep more of one's
     earnings. Still others try to split the difference somehow. As a
     practical matter, the reluctance of many conservatives to disturb
     these arrangements is likely motivated in part by the electoral
     power of their supporters.

4.5 If conserving is a good thing, why isn't ecology a conservative
cause?

     Conservatism is concerned more with relations among men than those
     between man and nature, so ecology is not one of its defining
     issues. There is, however, nothing in conservatism intrinsically at
     odds with ecological concerns. Some conservatives and conservative
     schools of thought take such issues very seriously; others less so.
     There are, of course, conservative grounds for criticizing or
     rejecting particular aspects of the existing environmental
     movement, such as overemphasis on central controls.

5 Conservatism in an Age of Established Liberalism

5.1 Why do conservatives talk as if the sky is about to fall and all
good things are in the past? People have been bemoaning the present for
a long time but things don't seem so bad today.

     Conservatives don't predict more disasters than liberals, just
     different disasters. Like other people they see both hopeful and
     hazardous trends in the current situation. Post-communist societies
     display the disastrous social consequences of energetic attempts to
     implement post-Enlightenment radicalism. Less energetic attempts,
     such as modern American liberalism, do not lead to similar effects
     as quickly. Nonetheless, social trends toward breakdown of
     affiliations among individuals, centralization of political power
     in irresponsible elites, irreconcilable social conflicts, and
     increasing stupidity, brutality and triviality in daily life
     suggest that those consequences are coming just the same. Why not
     worry about them?

5.2 Isn't conservatism essentially nostalgia for a past that never was
and can't be restored?

     In substance, the objection is that the goals of conservatism are
     neither serious nor achievable. That objection fails if in the end
     conservatives are likely to get what they want.

     Conservatism involves recognition that moral community is required
     for the coherence of individual and social life, and that a
     reasonably coherent way of life is a practical necessity. Current
     trends toward radical individualism, egalitarianism and hedonism
     destroy the possibility of moral community. Conservatives are
     therefore confident that in some fashion existing trends will be
     reversed and in important respects the moral and social future will
     resemble the past more than the present. In particular, the future
     will see less emphasis on individual autonomy and more on moral
     tradition and essentialist ties.

     The timing and form of the necessary reversal is of course
     uncertain. It plainly can't be achieved through administrative
     techniques, the method most readily accepted as serious and
     realistic today, so conservatives' main political proposal is that
     aspects of the modern state that oppose the reversal be trimmed or
     abandoned. Those who consider modern trends beneficial and
     irreversible therefore accuse conservatives of simple
     obstructionism. In contrast, those who see that current trends lead
     to catastrophe and that a reversal must take place expect that if
     conservatives aren't successful now their goals will be achieved
     eventually, but very likely with more conflict and destruction
     along the way.

5.3 What's all this stuff about community and tradition? The groups that
matter these days are groups like yuppies, gays, and senior citizens
that people join as individuals based on interests and perspectives
rather than tradition.

     Can this be true in the long run? When times are good people
     imagine that they can define themselves as they choose, but a
     society will not long exist if the only thing its members have in
     common is a commitment to self-definition. The necessity for
     something beyond that becomes clearest when the times require
     sacrifice. Membership in a group with an identity developed and
     inculcated through tradition becomes far more relevant then than
     career path, life-style option, or stage of life. One of Bill
     Clinton's problems as president was that people saw him as a yuppie
     who wouldn't die for anything; at some point that kind of problem
     becomes decisive.

5.4 If conservatism is so great, why are most people seriously involved
in studying and dealing with social issues liberals?

     Conservatives believe it is impossible to define and control the
     considerations relevant to social life accurately enough to make a
     technological approach to society possible. Accordingly, they
     reject efforts to divide human affairs into compartments to be
     dealt with by experts as part of an overall plan for promoting
     comprehensive goals like equality and prosperity. Academic and
     other policy experts are defined as such by their participation in
     such efforts. It would be surprising if they did not prefer
     perspectives that give free rein to them, such as welfare-state
     liberalism, over perspectives that are suspicious of them.

5.5 How can tradition do anything but endorse the way things happen to
be--which at present means established liberalism?

     If traditionalism were a formal rule it could of course tell us
     very little; the current state of a tradition is simply the current
     practices, attitudes, beliefs and so on of the community whose
     tradition it is. The point of tradition, however, is that formal
     rules are inadequate. Tradition is not self-contained, and not all
     parts of it are equally authoritative. It is a way of grasping
     things that are neither knowable apart from it nor merely
     traditional. One who accepts a religious tradition, for example,
     owes his ultimate allegiance not to the tradition but to God, who
     is known through the tradition. It is allegiance to something that
     exceeds and motivates the tradition that makes it possible to
     distinguish what is authentic and living in the tradition from
     nonessentials and corruptions.

5.6 Shouldn't modern conservatives at least favor things that are as
well-established as the welfare state and steady expansion of the scope
of the civil rights laws?

     Yes, to the extent they are consistent with the older and more
     fundamental parts of our social arrangements, such as family,
     community, and traditional moral standards, and contribute to the
     over-all functioning of the whole. Unfortunately, the things
     mentioned fail on both points. Existing welfare and civil rights
     measures make sense only as part of a comprehensive centrally
     managed system that is adverse to the connections among men that
     make community possible, and is designed to reorder society as a
     whole through bureaucratic decree. It is very difficult for
     conservatives to accept anything like such a system.

5.7 I was raised a liberal. Doesn't that mean that to be conservative I
should stay true to liberalism?

     How can you feel bound to a viewpoint that does not value loyalty
     and can therefore survive only if it is fundamentally not accepted
     by most people? For someone raised a liberal, the conservative
     approach would be to look for guidance to the things on which the
     people with whom he grew up actually relied for coherence and
     stability, including the traditions of the larger community upon
     which their way of life depended. Those things will always include
     fundamental illiberal elements that enabled the community to
     function as such.

6 The Conservative Rainbow

6.1 How do libertarians differ from conservatives?

     In general, libertarians emphasize limited government more than
     conservatives and believe the sole legitimate purpose of government
     is the protection of property rights against force and fraud. Thus,
     they usually consider legal restrictions on such things as
     immigration, drug use, and prostitution to be illegitimate
     violations of personal liberty. Some but not all libertarians hold
     a position that might be described as economically Right (anti-
     socialist) and culturally Left (opposed to what are called cultural
     repressiveness, racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on), and tend to
     attribute to state intervention the survival of things the cultural
     Left dislikes.

     Speaking more abstractly, the libertarian perspective assigns to
     the market the position conservatives assign to tradition as the
     great accumulator and integrator of the implicit knowledge of
     society. Some writers, such as F.A. Hayek, attempt to bridge the
     two perspectives on that issue. In addition, libertarians tend to
     believe in strict methodological individualism and absolute and
     universally valid human rights, while conservatives are less likely
     to have the former commitment and tend to understand rights by
     reference to the forms they take in particular societies.

6.2 What are mainstream conservatives?

     People who mix the traditionalist conservatism outlined in this FAQ
     with varying proportions of libertarianism and liberalism. Any
     conservative who gets elected or otherwise hits the mass market
     (e.g., Rush Limbaugh) is likely to be a mainstream conservative.

     Mainstream conservatives often speak the language of liberalism,
     especially classical liberalism. Their appeal is nonetheless
     conservative; typically, they reject more highly developed forms of
     liberalism in favor of earlier forms that retain more traces of
     non-liberal traditions.

6.3 What are neoconservatives?

     A group of conservatives most of whom were liberals until left-wing
     radicalism went mass-market in the sixties. Their positions
     continue to evolve; some still have positions consistent with New
     Deal liberalism, while others have moved on to a more full-blown
     conservatism. Many of them have been associated with the magazines
     _Commentary_ and _The Public Interest_, and a neopapalist
     contingent (now at odds with many other neoconservatives over the
     relation between religion and politics) is associated with the
     magazine _First Things_. Their influence has been out of proportion
     to their numbers, in part because they include a number of well-
     known Northeastern and West Coast journalists and academics and in
     part because having once been liberals they still can speak the
     language and retain a certain credibility in Establishment circles.

6.4 What are paleoconservatives?

     Another group of conservatives most of whom were never liberals and
     live someplace other than the Northeastern megalopolis or
     California. The most prominent paleo publications are _Chronicles_
     and _Modern Age_. They arose as a self-conscious group in
     opposition to neoconservatives after the success of the neos in
     establishing themselves within the Reagan administration, and
     especially after the neos helped defeat the nomination of paleo Mel
     Bradford as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities in
     favor of one of their own, Bill Bennett. The views set forth in
     this FAQ are consistent with those of most paleoconservatives as
     well as many neoconservatives.

6.5 What are paleolibertarians?

     A group of libertarians, notably Llewellyn Rockwell and the late
     Murray Rothbard, who reject mainstream libertarianism as culturally
     libertine and often squishy-soft on big government and on most
     issues share common ground with paleoconservatives.

6.6 What are Frankfurt School Neopaleoconservatives?

     A group (so named for the first time in this FAQ) that has come by
     way of Frankfurt School cultural criticism to a position
     reminiscent of paleoconservatism emphasizing federalism, rejection
     of the therapeutic managerial state, and (most recently) liturgy.
     Their publication is _Telos_, which now includes paleocon Paul
     Gottfried on its editorial board and publishes Chronicles editor
     Thomas Fleming as well as writers such as Alain de Benoist
     associated with the European New Right. (It has also published the
     author of this FAQ.)

6.7 Where do the pro-life movement and religious right fit into all
this?

     Like conservatism, both movements reject hedonism and radical
     individual autonomy and emphasize the authority of traditionally-
     based institutions in opposition to that of the modern managerial
     state. Their general goals can usually be supported on conservative
     principles, but they tend to base their claims ultimately on
     principles of natural law or revelation that are sometimes handled
     in an antitraditional way. As popular movements in an
     antitraditional public order they often adopt non-conservative
     styles of reasoning and rhetoric. Thus, these movements have strong
     conservative elements but are not purely conservative. It should be
     noted, however, that pure conservatism is rare or nonexistent and
     may not even be coherent; the point of conservatism is always some
     good other than maintenance of tradition as such.

6.8 What are the differences between American conservatism and that of
other countries?

     They correspond to the differences in political tradition. In
     general, conservatism in America has a much stronger
     capitalist/libertarian and populist streak than in other countries.
     European conservatism once emphasized support for throne, altar and
     sword as hierarchical bearers of authoritative traditions. In
     America those hierarchies never existed, and especially in recent
     years conservatism has emphasized opposition to new antitraditional
     hierarchies of formal expertise and bureaucratic position. These
     differences seem to be declining as other countries become more
     like America and as many American conservatives become more
     alienated from their country's actual way of life and system of
     government.

6.9 What do all these things called "conservatism" have in common?

     Each rejects, through an appeal to something traditionally valued,
     the liberal tendency to treat individual impulse and desire as the
     final authorities. Differences in the preferred point of reference
     give rise to different forms of conservatism. Those who appeal to
     the independent and responsible individual become libertarian
     conservatives, while those who appeal to a traditional culture or
     to God become traditionalist or religious conservatives. Depending
     on circumstances, the alliance among different forms of
     conservatism may be closer or more tenuous. In America today
     libertarian, traditionalist and religious conservatives find common
     ground in favoring federalism and constitutional limited government
     and opposing the managerial welfare state.
-- 
Jim Kalb (http://jkalb.org)

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