Why I Am Not a Conservative

Originally posted on the Facebook page Conservatives, Traditionalists, Monarchists United. I approve this message.
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From Sapientia

By Chang Liu

In an era of utter insanity, reaction is the only way to preserve one’s moral conscience.

Why am I not a liberal? Because I admire the luxuriant giant tree of civilization, including its roots. So it seems being a conservative is the “natural” answer. But what does it mean to be a “conservative”? What do conservatives “conserve”?

A conservative today is usually an economic liberal. He promotes free market the major principle of which is free trade and free competition. The goal of all this, is actually nothing else than the goal of a socialist: the increase of efficiency, the increase of employment, the increase of living standard, the increase of literacy, the decrease of fetal mortality and the advancement of technology. We are told that the increase of total social wealth is what actually made these goals possible. Surely I do not oppose the increase of total social wealth, but what does that mean? In the eyes of the bourgeoisie, the word “wealth” usually means one thing, the material profit. As the classical liberals boasted, “it was the capitalist who created the condition where any socialist activism is possible”, and “without capitalism, 80% of world’s people would not be there!” But is humanity better just because we have more people? Does the happiness of humanity hike with the rapid improvement of the material life? No matter how much the material condition improves, one could not help wondering why, despite all this material progress, the spiritual, or mental wealth is shrinking: the rise of suicide rate in the more materially wealthy parts of the world, the prevalence of drug abuse and the political consensus of both left and right wings on pot legalization, the trend in legalizing non-hetereosexual “marriage”, and the vulgarization of popular culture. Even worse, the mind and the behavior of the deracinated masses are now being engineered by social media giant corporations. One may argue “but this is not the intention of free market capitalism!” But the road to hell is paved good intentions, and moreover, I am not sure urging young kids to engage in computer games with gambling functions (“microtransaction”) is “good” intention. The obsession with the material, is perhaps inherent in the bourgeois mind. Historically, they have no real sense of loyalty to any land, any king, any belief, any community or even any family. Nor do they have any fixed social function. As the great conservative thinker Edmunk Burke put it, “the laws of commerce…are the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God.” (Maybe Burke and his students believe in Mammon? “Orthodox Christians” without charity, what a paradox!) In other words, they are materialists. What does it take to go from this kind of materialist to the Marxist dialectic materialist? Hegelian dialectics, the black magic of sophistry, that is. Besides, after the rise of industrial capitalism, there has been more and more corporate giants which are actually not owned by any private person. Yes, everyone can buy their stock shares, but what is the separation of management from private ownership, aside from being the sheer violation of the private property right? Of course, usurers need this, so they can concentrate their attention in the financial industry, which makes everyone else “proletarian” – whose only possession is the labor-power. The ideological and economic continuity means industrial capitalism is the prelude of socialism. Surely there are free-marketeers, and there are mainly two sorts of them, “minarchists” and anarchists. The so-called “minarchists” ask for such a minimal modern sovereign state: it has a standing army, a nationalized police and a centralized legal system. One has to remember the first economic liberals, i.e. Physiocrats called for an Enlightened tyrant – it means compared to the ancient free states supported by pious and loyal people, the so-called “minarchy” is nothing but a tyrannical modern state supported by deracinated masses: the instrument of a Leninist state is already there. As for anarcho-capitalism, there is no anarcho-capitalism or anarcho-communism; there is only lawless anarchy, where physical violence and “smart” backstabbing are the eternal law of survival. In reality, the so-called minarchy is being practiced, and here we are, bound with quantity over quality, efficiency without purpose, property without ownership, and snobbery without organicity: the greatness of a modern industrial capitalism!

The eternal state with its permanent laws, seems to be ingrained in the mind of the eternal Anglo conservative, and conservatives in other spheres of culture are believing in it as well, thanks to the neoconservative Wilsonian order. It is said, that only by trial-and-error, we will know what works the best. It is also said that we must preserve the traditional political institutions unconditionally. These two are in fact contradicting each other. The change in the internal and external, material and spiritual environments, requires the relevant changes in the social and political institutions, so a civilization can survive. If we see certain political institutions as god-given eternal entities, the fate of the Late Qing Empire will be repeated: the state was getting paralyzed by European colonists, peasant rebels, cult terrorists and radical revolutionaries – from 1851 to 1863, China’s population declined by more than 200 million! Why? Because their social elites were overly obsessed with their ancient political traditions without making any effort to revitalize them. As T. S. Eliot put it, “Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” This political sloth has proven to be causal to the repeated defeat of conservatisms in history. Surely, many conservatives care about words more than reality, so much so that they would sacrifice anything for their “political values”. They are too persistent on political values but sometimes too flexible on moral values. I wonder how much this overintellectualization is related to “sola fide” of Martin Luther.

It is the central conservative dogma that the state can do little, if not nothing, to promote moral thoughts and behavior. Edmund Burke once said, “It is in the power of government to prevent much evil; it can do very little positive good in this, or perhaps in anything else.” But is it true? Centuries before Burke, St. Augustine of Hippo believed that the state simultaneously serves the divine purposes of chastening the wicked and refining the righteous. Many conservatives argue, based on the minarchist doctrine, that the state is an evil, but a necessary one. Meanwhile, they also argue that the state should be impartial, and by “impartial”, they mean amoral. From the theoretical point of view, anyone committed to the mission of promoting evil must start his adventure by convincing others that evil is “necessary”: “Only Catholics soaked in canon law and papal superstition maintained the old prohibitions against usury”, wrote Cotton Mather; “If we did not nuke Japan, we would have suffered unbearable losses”, argued the 21st century neoconservative. Even worse, conservatives like Andrew Sullivan are actually the pioneers of various postmodern progressive social movements. So, political amorality becomes political anti-morality. Again, if one looks back into the history of the progress of such a political ideal, despite of its ostensibly just claims, what it has wrought us is one license to vices after another. Virtues need no license, because anyone with moral conscience know that virtues are hard to maintain so there is no real legal restriction on them. Those who believe that the state is a necessary evil necessarily end up creating an evil state. By contrast, the generation educated under the Portuguese Estado Novo and its Spanish counterpart is said to be extremely polite and respectful. “It can do very little positive good in this”? History seems to disagree. For a traditionalist, as opposed to a conservative, what must be permanent are the moral values, and the political values can be flexible and the political institutions must serve the purpose to preserve the moral values, not the other way around.

Needless to say, the flexibility on moral values has cost conservatives a lot, besides the well-known political defeats. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn once said, “The urban conservative…is nothing but an inhibited ‘progressive’.” From Lawrence v. Texas to the eventual legalization of non-heterosexual marriage, one sees this pattern, especially from the opinions of the conservative judges, such as this opinion from Clarence Thomas on Lawrence v. Texas, “Although he agreed with Scalia’s dissent for the most part, Thomas felt obliged to write separately to point out that the law was ‘silly’ and should be repealed”. Is this law really “silly”? One would wonder why CDC stopped publishing data about AIDS back in the years of Obama administration. The progressives are convinced missionaries of their progressive previsions, while conservatives are half-hearted followers of social traditions. In reality, I really do not think any Old Whig could tell others to obey the traditional political values when they themselves were the revolutionaries who destroyed the legitimate ancient institution via the “Glorious” Revolution. Those “eternal” Angloes who boast about Magna Carta never pay any tribute to Alcuin of York: so much respect for tradition! So it is not really surprising that conservatives are just Fabian progressives – progressives with a 10 year jet lag.

Thus, it is not difficult to understand why conservatism lacks real content and has no actual proposal. Conservatism, as an ideology of Old Whigs, is the wish of the bourgeoisie. Christopher H. Dawson once asserted, “The bourgeoisie upset the throne and the altar, but they put in their place nothing but themselves. Hence their régime cannot appeal to any higher sanction than that of self interest. It is continually in a state of disintegration and flux. It is not a permanent form of social organization, but a transitional phase between two orders.” A transitional phase. The conservatives today are more radical than the Radicals back in the 19th century. Paul Joseph Watson, “the defender of gay rights and women’s rights against bigotry”, once said, “conservatism is the new counter-culture!” By that I guess he means it is the new urban fashion among spoiled middle class kids. Maybe in 10 years, Kanye West will become the new William F. Buckley Jr. yelling “Stop!” in his hip-hop songs.

Why am I not a conservative? Because conservatism is insufficient for the mission of restoration and regeneration: there is little to “conserve” in modernity and postmodernity (or, “neo-modernity”). In an era of utter insanity, reaction is the only way to preserve one’s moral conscience.

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