What is the nature of Conservatism

[JohnH]

The new right, post liberal populism, or whatever you want to call it actually isn’t that opposed to taxation. They’d be fine with taxing carried interest, capital gains etc (or at least they say so in surveys).

Generally speaking they are very, very similar to working class Democrats from the 1980s - interestingly, the ones that made my stage a very blue state back then, and now make it a red state.

No clearly defined elite leadership has emerged yet. Trump is an “ersatz” leader but doesn’t have a clearly defined ideology.

[HondurasKeiser]

It seems like yesterday I was hearing presentations of Conservatism that included ideas like expanding individual liberty by reducing government, a defence of law and order, family values, the right to free flow of capital etc... I guess that is the past.

That sounds a lot like neoconservativism. From Reagan to Trump they essentially were Conservatism Inc. Since Trump though the Right has fractured and that fusion that held the various strands of the Right together has largely but not completely dissolved. That’s why it feels as though the ideological positions conservatives staked out 20 years ago have melted away. But not so. The Neocons still preach Free Market, strong defense, strong institutions, etc. it’s just that they’re no longer holding the megaphone or any real positions of power.

What has replaced neoconservatism.

I'm loathe to say that MAGA has "replaced" the Neocon consensus but without doubt the Neocons and their ideas are out of the halls of power these days. The one area where they still have some purchase is in Israel policy and even there, there are competing voices in the administration that are more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and/or despise Bibi.

What's ascendant within MAGA world, though not necessarily the Republican Party entire, is what we used to call "The Old Right" and "Paleoconservatism". They tend towards isolationism, tariff- regimes, manufacturing, the Gold Standard (an esoteric goal to be sure), a strong national identity, and a distrust of the Free Market. The post-liberal writers of a few years ago, people like Deneen, R.R. Reno, Ahmari and Joshua Mitchell, were noticing and critiquing the old Neocon/Fusion consensus and found it wanting e.g. "Modern conservatism hasn't conserved very much.". They along with the Straussians over at the Claremont Institute, attempted to and I think largely failed to give Trumpism some intellectual heft during his first administration. The problem is that MAGA itself is simply Populism-tinged with Paleocon ideas and anger at anything resembling elitism. That ire is directed at elites across the spectrum and on the conservative side, the Neocon Bushites are the elites. This isn't always coherent though. For example, the Post-Liberals/Paleocons would not, I think, be particularly keen on acquiring Greenland, Panama and Palestine. The Straussians would not be opposed to it and the Neocons thrill to the notion.

All that to say, the Post-Liberal critique of neoconservatism is largely correct I think and the fusionism that held "Conservatism" together is largely gone. However, there's yet to be a true intellectual successor to the old consensus and what we have instead is a survival of the fittest within the Republican Party; waiting to see who can outlast/succeed Trump and thus inherit his base.

[barnhart]

A question for HK, which branch of Conservatism was most favorable to Lockian/Jeffersonian liberalism, ie. Individual rights, property rights, limited/diffuse government etc... ?

[JohnH]

A question for HK, which branch of Conservatism was most favorable to Lockian/Jeffersonian liberalism, ie. Individual rights, property rights, limited/diffuse government etc... ?

I’m not HK, but has such a movement with any actual political power ever actually existed? This seems like mostly a fable certain “conservatives” like to tell, even as they trample on individual and property rights and bloat government to enormous sizes.

[Bootstrap]

I think you have a lot of valuable things to say - would you mind participating in these threads in your own words, instead of using AI?

If I wanted to read AI opinions of things I would simply go use AI myself. It is particularly frustrating when your own viewpoints are intermixed with an AI’s, and you don’t share the prompt you used.

Perhaps you could highlight AI generated text in a different color?

I actually did - and do - indicate the text that was directly generated by GPT, which is basically the table at the bottom. Here are the prompts I used, there was a sequence of questions. The tabs on the left show the sequence from top to bottom, clicking on a tab shows the prompt and the output:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ceY ... sp=sharing

As you click through the tabs, I think the insight increases as I ask it to focus on different things, in sequence. The thought process and the sequence is an important part of the result. Early on, I added this guidance, which shaped the rest:

Neither changing nor not changing is an end in itself, but there is a wisdom to stability and to intentional change, guided by a moral compass and the Bible and what Jesus said and did. Or in the secular realm, guided by our constitutional tradition, balance of powers, and laws.

Here's the thought behind the final table: Each of these labels claims to be associated with a set of values, but they are very inconsistent about those values over time. What if we simply made a table based on the values themselves? That's how I generated the final table. And I think it is useful.

I don't think this is the same thing as "AI's opinion of things". That table would have taken me days to compile by hand, and I don't think GPT would have thought of it by itself. If you used AI to explore this in a similar way, you might have come up with a very different table.

[ohio jones]

Generally speaking they are very, very similar to working class Democrats from the 1980s - interestingly, the ones that made my stage a very blue state back then, and now make it a red state.

I agree with this with respect to Ohio -- and beyond, for as Shakespeare said, all the world's a stage.

[HondurasKeiser]

A question for HK, which branch of Conservatism was most favorable to Lockian/Jeffersonian liberalism, ie. Individual rights, property rights, limited/diffuse government etc... ?

What's interesting there of course is that Lockeans and Jeffersonians were the liberals of their day. Indeed, when we talk about "Classical Liberalism", it's the philosophy of Locke that were referring to. The conservatives of Locke's day were the church and the aristocracy and to a lesser degree the monarchy.

Historically, the Right-Left divide in the U.S. has simply been the spectrum of Classical Liberalism; some more conservative others more progressive but we're all liberals in the truest sense of the word. This is in contrast to Europe or Canada where the Right was the landed aristocracy and the left was the revolutionaries. George Grant in Lament for a Nation, compares the political formation of Canada with that of the U.S. Why does Canada have a truly viable socialist party and the U.S. doesn't? Because at the time of our political coalescing, the true conservatives, the "aristocrats" that sympathized with British eloped to Canada and the revolutionaries, those enamored of the French rationalists were fairly few in number.

Today, those that ascribe to "Classical Liberalism". people like Jonah Goldberg, George Will, John Roberts and Robert George would roughly but not perfectly map with the Neocons and even some Paleocons (after all, there is a lot of overlap in these different conservative camps). They would certainly be considered part of the hated elite though and the critique of "...not particularly good at conserving anything" could easily be applied to then.

[barnhart]

I agree with that HK. I grew up reading George Will columns in the back of US news and World report every week and I enjoy Jonah Goldberg, so I have some sympathy for that brand of Conservatism, whatever it is called.

[joshuabgood]

Robert Taft, some say was the last of the old right. When he lost the Republican nomination to Eisenhower, the old right, of small noninterventionist government died. Ron Paul spoke to most of the same points.

[JohnH]

I agree with that HK. I grew up reading George Will columns in the back of US news and World report every week and I enjoy Jonah Goldberg, so I have some sympathy for that brand of Conservatism, whatever it is called.

I have a great deal of trouble "enjoying" anything written by that notorious warmonger who shamelessly lied to us about WMDs in Iraq, and refused to ever say he was wrong, but rather that invading Iraq was a "worthy mistake".

That brand of conservatism is, well, what turned a lot of people like myself completely off of "conservatism". Whatever ideology invading random countries for fake reasons is, it's not something worth conserving.