Tag: conservative

Conservative Readings: Bernard L. Kronick

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

A frequent criticism of conservatism is that all it does is try to preserve the achievements of yesterday’s radicals. As Ambrose Bierce put it, radicalism is the conservatism of tomorrow injected into today.  In 1947, professor of Political Science Bernard Kronick addressed this criticism in an article he published in Southwestern Social Science Quarterly. I love reading Humanities scholarship from before year 1970 because it’s enormously better written than anything you can find today. Kronick, who was born in 1915 and was almost a child in intellectual terms when he published “Conservatism: A Definition”, wrote beautifully. His article is very easy to understand for anybody who is a normal, intelligent and well-read person. There’s zero jargon and a lot of love for the language.

In any case, Kronick says that yes, it’s true that today’s conservatism is yesterday’s radical progressivism. But so what? It still plays the crucial role of slowing the pace of change and making sure that we don’t careen into insane things that will end up destroying us. It is a socially useful task, Kronick says, to modify the manner in which change is introduced while accepting that it will happen eventually.

Conservatives are at a disadvantage, Kronick points out, because their position is by necessity defensive. Their achievement in slowing down change is never recognized because the accolades for introducing the changes always go to the radicals who proposed them, even though these changes could have been terrible without the staying and moderating hand of conservatives. As a result, the conservative movement feels like being nothing but a group of losers. As Kronick says:

The conservative by his very admonitions destroys the likelihood of his fears being realized. He is subsequently ridiculed for what seem to have been foolish fears.

Even when they accomplish little of a positive character, conservatives prevent immeasurable harm. For enormous chaos would result were radicals to have it entirely their own way.

This is why, Kronick reminds us, conservatism is absolutely essential when a society experiences a crisis or undergoes rapid change.

Kronick wrote at a different time and some of his ideas look quaint as one reads them in 2026. This, for example, put a sad smile on my face:

Few desire to live in a state of unceasing change. No people going about its daily business wishes to have its way greatly disturbed for light and transient causes. They desire tranquility above all.

You can hear in Kronick’s words the calm currents of an unhurried time that had not yet witnessed people falling in love with speed, change, and transgression for its own sake.

Definitions of Conservatism: Lincoln Allison

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

Let’s now talk about different definitions of conservatism that have been advanced over the years because they are all interesting and they all give us some food for contemplation. One day I hope to teach a course on conservative thought, and I would start it with these definitions that I found in all sorts of places.

In the definition of conservatism that he wrote for the The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (2009), Lincoln Allison explains that conservatism doesn’t organize itself in opposition to change as such. Instead, it opposes a very specific kind of change. Conservative thought, he says, dislikes the kind of change that is driven by idealistic, aspirational and abstract ideas instead of change that is driven by developing the already existing practice.

Allison also mentions that many people of a clearly conservative disposition do not refer to themselves as such because conservatism has been tainted by people associating it with Nazism. This is quite extraordinary, given that the Nazi worldview was very revolutionary in many ways. It is also curious that leftism has somehow avoided the taint of Stalinism rubbing off on it. Allison is not wrong, though. He observes correctly that since 1945 the number of intellectuals, artists, philosophers and thinkers in Europe and the US who have described themselves as conservative has been minuscule. In intellectual circles, it’s only a bit worse to be a self-avowed pedophile than a conservative. Nobody wants to be a pariah, so people conceal the truth from others and often even from themselves. Conservatism has become a political orientation, quips Allison, that dares not speak its name.

Let’s think about what it means that people who simply oppose the kind of change which aims to create an ideal society are scared of confessing to holding this belief. Let’s think what it means for all of us. Can it be a good thing? Shouldn’t there be some limitation on the human drive to pursue abstract ideas? Apparently, we all as a civilization have decided that no, there shouldn’t be. Because Nazis. Who – and this is the really cute part – wanted no limitations on their drive to pursue the most radical change formulated in the abstract. We hate Nazis so much that we defend the organizing principle of their existence at any cost. Makes total sense.

Allison points out that, since the times of J.S. Mill, the standard, mainstream attitude towards conservatism as a philosophy has been not only negative but downright contemptuous. It became “a truth universally acknowledged” that conservatives are morons. They are stupid, plodding individuals who are too intellectually limited to cast off the shackles of obscurantism and bigotry. Is it any wonder that almost nobody wants to be seen as a stupid, bigoted Nazi? Especially if they are very smart, very unbigoted and very much not a Nazi?

One reason why I like Allison’s definition of conservatism is that he says very correctly (and, God, finally somebody managed to articulate it) that there is no scenario under which “an extreme belief in ‘free’ markets and a minimal state of a kind that never existed or existed only in the distant past” can be called a conservative idea. In other words, neoliberalism is not conservative. It’s in the bloody name, people. Why is it so hard to get anybody to process this simple idea? I don’t mean any of the readers of this blog, of course, but I will be a happy person if I never again hear the question, “But didn’t you say you are against neoliberalism, so how can you be conservative?”

The text of the definition is very short, so I attached it here because I have not been able to find it in open access and had to request the volume through the library. I am hoping that more people will start integrating these ideas into their research and teaching and I want to make the text available to them.

By the way, just for fun I asked the in-built WordPress AI to generate an image to accompany the text of the post, and it gave me an image of some Andrew Tate type wiping his nose, probably after sniffing cocaine. I decided not to inflict the image on my readers.

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