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Professor calls for liberals to help him show that conservatism is not just for 'fools or bigots' [1]
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Date: 2023-03-23
Over the course of human history, there have been many movements and political and economic systems that simply ceased to work. No one would, hopefully, suggest that professors in American universities need to spend a lot of time teaching students the joys of feudalism. They wouldn’t call on those professors to “set up reading groups” to ponder the divine rights of kings, the authority of the one true church, or how you will be happier once you understand the dignity of being a proper serf.
But this is exactly what Shields is demanding here, with exactly the same arguments that were made in every feudal society then, and in every authoritarian society now.
Every year I ask my students, most of whom are quite liberal, to read books in this conservative tradition, all of which are paired with books by progressive authors. Books like “The Case for Marriage,” “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution” and “Why Liberalism Failed” open students to the possibility that our ancestors were not merely fools or bigots. Instead, they built social institutions that, however flawed, also repressed some of our more self-destructive impulses and encouraged some of our better angels.
How about the concept that our ancestors were our f***ing ancestors? And that, just as few would recommend we go back to applying leeches to overcome an imbalance of the four humors, there’s also little to be gained by casting off decades or centuries of experience in what works for human societies to reembrace a system that was designed by a privileged few for the benefit of a privileged few.
It’s not that there’s no wisdom to be found in past works of politics, economics, or philosophy. Of course there is. But those works have to be studied in context, in light of everything we’ve learned since then.
What we’ve learned is this: Conservatism does not work. The ragged edges of the system were always visible in how it continued to support rigid class and race hierarchies, how it bolstered misogyny, and how it drew on a particular slanted form of religion as a backstop to reasoned argument. You can still hear every bit of this as Shields presents his case that we should save conservatism from its own children.
Take marriage. Members of the upper middle class still largely get and stay married, even without the old social pressures that once made marriage all but mandatory. Most of my liberal students know as much. But what they are rarely forced to confront is the idea that this kind of traditionalism builds wealth, softens men and creates an ideal environment for privileged children to flourish, while for most everyone else, the expansion of sexual and romantic freedom has undermined family life, deepening inequality in its wake.
This is, to put it in the clearest Charlie Cale terms, bullshit. I’m not saying that to cut off discussion, but because what Shields is presenting here is simply fantasy, disconnected from either the current world or history. He’s taking the arguments from his conservative tomes and projecting them onto a Perfect Past that never existed on this Earth.
Not that this is unusual. Because invoking some kind of Eden-esque time when men were men, women were women, children knew their place, everyone valued hard work, and everyone tied an onion to their belt is the essence of conservatism. It’s not history. It’s not economics. It’s a fairytale story about a fairytale time, told by people who really, really wish they had a reason to chide all those loose women and uppity Black people who simply will not cede the sidewalk at their approach.
What kind of “traditionalism” builds wealth and gives children that chance to “flourish?” The kind that cuts off parts of town by race and allows white people to build value while denying it to everyone else. What kind of “social pressure” makes marriage “all but mandatory?” The kind that shuns anyone who fails to fit a narrowly confined idea of gender roles and promotes both bigotry and violence.
Here’s why there aren’t many conservative professors keeping alight the true blue flame of just-those-parts-of-Adam-Smith-we-like: Conservatism lost. It has proven to be economically, socially, and morally nonviable over the long term. Most of it, exposed to the light of close examination, is simply reprehensible—an attempt to preserve much of the implicit inequality that existed under feudalism, just without the titles and fancy wigs.
The ways in which conservatism was used to repress the rights of women, the value of people of color, and the sheer existence of LGBTQ+ human beings are right there in Shields' call to save the system. It does not matter if he believes “the sexual revolution has left young women less happy in their romantic lives” because it’s the young women who get to make that decision, and they, as much as if not more than any other group, have rejected the ideas of conservatism.
What Shields is asking for here is repression wrapped in a paternalistic claim to know what makes people “really happy.” What’s that, Ms. Cale? Oh, yeah. Bullshit.
Conservatism failed. Its hour is done. That didn’t happen because no one was studying it closely enough. It’s because they finally did.
That, in its failure, it has shed a movement of violent contrarians who want to impose their will on everyone else, appeal to some non-existent past, and reject any signal of social progress made over the last two centuries isn’t a coincidence. That’s what conservatism was all along. Now it just has fewer people writing books that try to put a more dignified face on it.
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