This summer I’m studying to be a conservative.
At the end of this month I’m going to take a hiatus from YSDA, just as I did last year. Mostly, I want to focus on a new book project, but I’ve got other important goals on my list. Improve my golf swing and my fly cast, for example.
But I’m also going to study conservative thought. By this I most definitely do not mean anything having to do with Donald Trump, who is no conservative in any event. Trump is a blood and soil, white Christian nationalist populist. I want nothing to do with any of that or with the obnoxious “conservative” blatherers, like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson.
Instead what I’m considering is a Milton Friedman-George Will-David Brooks sort of Eisenhower conservatism.
I started thinking about this last year when I read Sam Tanenhaus’ excellent (and massive) biography of William F. Buckley. Buckley made conservatism cool and intellectually defensible in the 1950s and 1960s when politically liberal views were dominant everywhere. I found Buckley’s overall approach appealing, even while I still disagreed with some of his specific ideas. (I mean it’s hard to justify his defense of Joe McCarthy.) But the guy seemed to be having fun and he enjoyed a good debate with the other side. His political opposite, John Kenneth Galbraith, was one of his best friends. The insufferable Gore Vidal was not — to Buckley’s credit.
At about the same time I read the Buckley bio, I was also reading The Age of Eisenhower by William Hitchcock, a mostly sympathetic revisit of a president whose stock has been gaining in recent years.
Those books reenforced ideas I had already been forming. Years ago I read Suicide of the West, a 2018 book by Jonah Goldberg. He argues that the natural human tendency is to reward our friends and punish our enemies, to be, in a word, tribal. What he describes as “the miracle” (liberal Enlightenment values, meritocracy and capitalism) requires constant work and vigilance lest we slip back.
At about the same time I read The War on the West by Douglas Murray. Murray sees the greatest threats to freedom, democracy and Enlightenment values coming from the West itself. He tries to answer the question: why are liberals so self-loathing?
I’ll need to brush up on those texts. I’ve also been sampling a series of free lectures on natural law and enlightenment thinkers: Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Kant, Adam Smith, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, etc.
Also on my summer reading list is The Enlightenment: the Pursuit of Happiness by Ritchie Robertson and the Conservative Sensibility by George Will.
I realize that I’m in political no man’s land, no matter what I choose to call myself. I enthusiastically reject what Donald Trump represents. But I’m also repulsed by a liberalism that rejects Enlightenment values to pursue a rigid identity politics in which everyone is either a helpless victim or an undeserving winner based solely on their race or gender. What attracts me most about traditional conservatism is that it sees people as individuals who are primarily responsible for their own lot in life.
Identity politics is now so engrained in the Democratic Party that I don’t see how it can reform itself. Meanwhile, I don’t know how the Republicans can recover from Trump, now that they’re addicted to his populist voters. If the pre-Trump party could ever reconstitute itself I might give it a try, but I don’t see that happening.
What I question is whether I want to go on thinking of myself as a moderate, non-partisan Democrat or rather as a traditionally conservative (and classically liberal) independent.
I know. Nobody cares. But I do. And it might shift the focus of YSDA when we return next fall. We’ll see.
In any event, we’ve got a couple more weeks of posts coming before we put this thing on ice for the summer and I take Spinoza to the beach.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
Eisenhower was OK.
Douglas Murray is a total clown. A defender of the enlightenment who rejects multiculturalism and champions thugs like Viktor Orban? Give me a break.
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News to me that he supported Orban. That would be bad. All I know about the guy is this book, which I found quite good.
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“That would be bad”.
That’s something for you to work on. A quick ask to AI shows Murray praised Orban’s immigration policies. Seems to be in line with Murray’s perspective. Are you now against Murray’s views on mass immigration?
Point is no one is pure.
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Fair point. And, of course, Jack supports Graham Platner, who had a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest (and claims implausibly that he didn’t know what it was) and has made more than his share of misogynistic and homophobic comments on social media.
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Friedman.
It is a noble effort to try to deprogram yourself. I hope you can get past Trump. Mark Cuban did and he’s a helluva lot smarter than you.
Thomas Sowell should be on your list.
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Cuban is not that smart, don’t care if he is a “good businessman” or successful or had a reality show, he just isn’t. I’ll give you that he sounds good at surface level pitch but he ain’t that deep.
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I appreciate this as someone who went on a similar journey. I would also suggest Rule and Ruin by Geoffrey Kabaservice, I think you’ll find it right up your alley.
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And Michael Lind, he is another fun conservative centrist type, very sharp.
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Or you can read Thomas Sowell, who gives the underpinnings of conservative and liberal thought with the concept of “constrained” and “unconstrained” views. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGvYqaxSPp4
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To me the choice is still easy, at least when it comes to electoral politics. One party denies climate change – and has since well before Trump came onto the scene – while the other party, for all its baggage, does not and actively tries to combat it. I’ll continue to support the party that takes actions to try and ensure the long-term livability of our planet. The last major Republican I can even remember advocating for climate policies was Jon Huntsman when he was running for president way back in 2012, and he barely made a blip on the radar.
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Agreed. But as I mentioned I’m not contemplating becoming a member of Trump’s party.
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Enjoy your summer. I just reread Christopher Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elites. Certainly Not a classical conservative, but probably as good now as it was 30 years ago when published. I think I grew up with him, having read his first book when I was graduating high school.
Ken Streit
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Had to add another comment, if you want to add to your list of reading you should check out the Wisconsin Bluebook Republican platforms from essentially the 1930s through the 1990s before the super social conservatives took over. Anyway, they are nice and short and give a concise vision of a progressive conservatism centered on the concept of “the good life” that is really missing from our modern discourse. You can find them all online, they really helped me figure out what it is I want from politics and government and made me wish for a political party centered on the classical concept of “the good life”.
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