Telling the Brutal Truth about Conservatism

And dispelling the face-saving illusion of a political spectrum

The political rhetoric and democratic infrastructure sustain the illusion that there are such things as “liberals” and “conservatives” and that they operate on the same playing field.

There’s a “political spectrum” with “left” and “right wings,” and everyone’s political values can be found somewhere in that continuous range of views. There’s a government building in every republic in which all the political party members meet in massive chambers to debate and to vote on legislation.

And there are the typical questions that arise in politics that have “Yes” or “No” answers: Raise taxes? Privatize government functions? Regulate banks and big businesses? Abort unwanted fetuses? Regulate firearms? Keep church and state separate?

That conception of equality, though, is a remnant of modern humanism and thus of liberalism, so conservatives have their opponents to thank for that even-handed treatment. What’s supposed to be the assumption is that all politicians, as well as both the voting and nonvoting citizens are, of course, just people with the same human rights. We have, for example, the inherent freedoms of speech and to pursue happiness as we see fit, so we can express those freedoms in liberal or in conservative ways.

Yet due to those basic secular humanistic assumptions, the modern political context is fundamentally liberal. What, then, becomes of conservatism?

Conservatism in action

To see the conservative worldview in action, have a look at how political opponents are treated in monarchies or dictatorships. Notice that the king or dictator sits alone on a throne, or that he rules with aristocrats whose powers are hereditary, and that all who threaten that absolute control over society are imprisoned or summarily executed. So, there’s no equal treatment of people there.

Or observe how a large corporation in a laissez-faire economy divides itself into a social hierarchy that concentrates power in a tiny minority, namely in the executives and the capitalists (the owners of the means of production), who sit at the top of the power pyramid, as it were. Observe how the army of labourers doesn’t typically mingle with the corporate elites.

This is a caste society that survived the transition from the medieval period to the modern one. Classical liberals predicted that this “freedom” in the economic sector would redound to everyone’s equal benefit, but they underestimated how capitalism could thrive on natural tendencies, such as on the law of oligarchy, groupthink, egoism, greed, and prejudice, which would divert the public from conducting business according to humanistic ideals.

That minority control over large corporations often translates into disproportionate influence over the affairs of democratic government, as the corporate elites become plutocrats who can use their wealth to distort the political process, capturing candidates with bribes and lobbying, and tainting the discourse with thinktanks and corporate ownership of the news.

Consequently, with the conservative, oppressive pattern in capitalistic business having become plain several centuries after the end of feudalism in Europe, late-modern liberals — otherwise known as “socialists” or “progressives” — call for redistributing wealth, unionizing the workforce, ending discrimination in the workplace, and getting big money out of politics.

Yet conservatives insist on keeping the neofeudal inequalities intact in the private sector. They do so by using the modern humanistic rhetoric of “personal freedom” as an Orwellian pretext for protecting nature’s tendency to sort animals into dominance hierarchies, pecking orders, and food chains, as that tendency can evidently unfold even in the anomalous complexity of human societies.

Testing the deflationary hypothesis

I’ve written a long series on conservatism to test a simple deflationary hypothesis. The hypothesis is that liberalism and conservatism are not on an equal footing after all, because conservatives effectively reject humanism. The modern trappings of humanism in democratic governments belie the fact that so-called conservatives function as obfuscators and saboteurs.

Liberals are humanists whereas real conservatives are anti-humanists, which is to say the latter are animalists. That is, liberals adopt the modern metanarrative that humans are people with inherent secular rights. Conservatives reject that assumption on theocratic or social Darwinian grounds. Otherwise, the “conservatives” are only variants of liberals.

Conservative values and policies entail that personhood doesn’t exist as any secular guarantor of equal rights for all humans. Instead, conservatives think we’re the playthings of a supreme deity or of natural forces. Either God divides us into the elect and the condemned sinners and infidels, or nature divides us into castes of masters and slaves, or of predators and dupes.

From God’s or Nature’s perspective, humans aren’t “people” at all, not in the secularist humanist’s normative sense; instead, we’re automata subject to a celestial tyranny, or we’re animals that evolve into parasites and herds. Indeed, for the conservative, the modern humanist’s ideal is based on a sacrilegious or preposterous myth; there’s no such thing as a person as such, no non-animalistic lifeform that deserves special treatment in the universe just for belonging to its species, without any divine blessing.

As I say, I’ve now tested this cynical hypothesis against numerous aspects of conservatism, to see whether what conservatives say can be taken at face value or whether that hypothesis provides the best explanations of the incoherence of conservative writings and of the regressive pattern in their social policies.

The conservative figures I’ve considered are Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Michael Oakeshott, Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., George Will, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Donald Trump, Aleksandr Dugin, and Vladimir Putin. I’ve examined pragmatic conservatism, Chinese realism, neoconservatism, right-wing populism, libertarianism, the hollowness of the political spectrum, and a series of conservative policies.

Readers will judge for themselves, of course, but I assess that the deflationary hypothesis is robust for passing through that gauntlet. If you assume the worst about the conservative’s deepest beliefs, you can cut through the obfuscations and predict the policies the conservative will advocate. That is, you understand conservatives best by assuming the worst about their mindset, namely by recognizing their anti-humanism (their theocratic, racist, or social Darwinian prejudices).

The cynicism of my hypothesis only captures the conservative’s crypto cynicism about the bulk of humanity (about, say, the non-Christians, non-Whites, or lower classes).

The practical upshot

You’re likely wondering what liberals or progressives of good will should do about this, assuming my analysis is correct. Should conservatives be ostracized or demonized for at least implicitly advocating for the return of premodern (relatively savage) social conditions?

Notice how such shunning would be a conservative remedy, though, since it would violate the humanistic principle of freedom of speech, so this is off the table for liberals who act with integrity. Mind you, liberals aren’t generally saints. Humanism, the respect for everyone’s inherent rights as persons, is an ideal we often fail to achieve; moreover, ideals are human inventions so they can have unintended consequences.

But if we’re speaking of the ideal way of handling the gross imbalance between liberals and “conservatives” in the modern context, we should be uncomfortable with the deceptions that prop up the sham of the modern “political spectrum.” Again, most liberals aren’t saints, and there are plenty of modern secular self-deceptions and hypocrisies.

Yet if we progress by digesting even unsettling truths, we should acknowledge that the entire “conservative” ecosystem is an anachronism in the twenty-first century. We pretend it’s not so that the savage animalists can save face in developed countries. Perhaps not everyone can be modernized or those “advanced” countries aren’t so developed, at least not socially. Humanism is an ideology, not a set of absolute truths, and the humanist’s virtues can seem like hubristic vices from a traditional standpoint.

Indeed, there are various strategies for coping with our existential reckoning, and the philosophy of humanism supports the “modern” institutions of science, capitalism, democracy, and modern art. But this is also a counterintuitive worldview that attracts mainly intellectual elites. Higher education secures their fealty, and the unwashed masses still prefer premodern religious dogmas or nihilistic excuses for the reign of sociopaths.

Nevertheless, by tolerating conservatism as an outlook that’s supposed to make sense as a viable option within modernity, as opposed to regarding conservatism as a radical, reactionary repudiation of modernity itself, liberals are inviting foxes into the henhouse.

How should liberals handle this massive confusion or fraud which is “conservatism”? They might begin by dropping the face-saving formulations, cutting through the conservative’s sanctimonious and obscurantist salesmanship, and speaking more bluntly about the political and economic options and stakes.

To wit, it’s only humanists versus animalists. Period.