CONSERVATISM IS FOR LOSERS

(And I don’t mean that the way you probably think I mean it!)
Paul Crist
January 5, 2011

The partisan divide between the left and right has reached a fever pitch in the United States in recent
years. We constantly hear from politicians and commentators of all stripes that ―Americans‖ want
political leaders to ―come together and put partisan politics aside.‖ But to which Americans are these
politicians and commentators referring? Is a ―coming together‖ possible when each side has
interests and ideologies that are diametrically opposed? Particularly when 80% of the population
enjoys only 15% of the national wealth, is a ―coming together‖ somewhere in an undefined middle
in the interest of a liberal democracy supposedly designed to provide for the ―greatest happiness of
the greatest number [as] the foundation of morals and legislation,‖1 as utilitarian philosopher Jeremy
Bentham declared? Why is it so difficult for left and right to find an acceptable, if not perfect,
middle ground?

Both conservatism on the right, and leftist revolution grew out of the Age of Enlightenment and the
1789 French Revolution. The French Revolution involved the overthrow of a corrupt aristocracy
grown weak, indolent, and unresponsive to the food shortages, crushing poverty and inequality of
the masses, and the growing influence of Enlightenment thought.2 Conservative thinkers such as
Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre sought a return to monarchy and a stable hierarchical social
structure, but they abhorred the corruption and weakness of the ―old regime.‖

The history of leftist revolution, reform, and radicalism has been, and continues to be, based on the
idea that inequality and social hierarchy are not natural phenomenon, but are imposed by powerful
elites over the powerless. Further, if hierarchy can be created by power relations among humans, it
can be destroyed by them as well. This is the fundamental aim of all leftist social movements and
revolutions. Success in supplanting a long-established hierarchical regime requires vigor, dynamism,
and faith in the revolutionary cause and in its leaders.

Conservatism, on the right, requires a more nuanced explanation. Conservatism is related to, but
not synonymous with the ―old regime.‖ Conservatives, like the elites of the ―old regime,‖ value the
stability and order they associate with an idealized past. But conservatives are pressed in several very
distinct directions. They seek to uphold hierarchy, elite privilege, and the familiar; yet, they are
forced to critique the old regime and recognize that its reconfiguration is the only hope of sustaining
its social and economic structures. They are compelled to accept that change; risk-taking; militancy
and mass populism - the tools of the revolutionary left - are also the necessary tools of conservative
counter-revolution.

At core, conservatism is an ideology of reaction. It is a thoughtful reaction to the loss of, or threat
to, an unsustainable old regime. Conservatives abhor the decay, weakness, and corruption of the old
regime, and as such should be thought of as its counter-revolutionary successors. Far from

1
Bentham, Jeremy. “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.” First Edition printed in 1780; and
first published in 1789. A “New Edition,” corrected by the Author,' was published in 1823.
2
Principles of Enlightenment included “leftist” concepts such as human autonomy, reason, secularism, human
equality, progress, popular government, and the centrality of economics to politics. These ideals are clearly
distinct, even incompatible with, monarchy, absolutism, and hierarchy as preferred by Conservatives like Burke.
defending a staid, unchanging traditionalism, conservative counter-revolutionaries seek to replace
the ―old regime‖ with a dynamic, ideologically coherent movement of the masses. They seek a ―new
old regime‖ that marries the energy and dynamism of mass populism with the antique inequalities of
the dilapidated old regime.

The old regime, be it the French aristocracy prior to 1889; southern slave owners prior to the Civil
War; male-dominated social orders throughout history; and perhaps even the privilege enjoyed by
modern-day America‘s corporate and financial sector elites, considers inequality as a naturally-
occurring phenomenon, an inheritance passed from generation to generation, based on race, sex,
position, or nationality. When leftist revolution and reforms threaten the old regime, conservatives
learn vital lessons from their opponents on the left.

Thus we get conservative firebrands like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rand Paul, whose encounter
with revolution teaches them that the leftists were right after all: inequality is a human creation. And
if it can be uncreated by humans, it can be recreated by them as well. The genius of conservative
counter-revolutionaries is that they learn to adopt the language of leftist revolution in the employ of
a return to the social and economic orders of the old regime, albeit a more muscular version of it.

After years of opposing the women‘s movement, Phyllis Schlafly celebrated the ―power of the
positive woman.‖3 As if borrowing from The Feminine Mystique,4 she railed against the
meaninglessness and lack of fulfillment among American women, but blamed these ills on feminism
rather than sexism and gender-based power relationships. She claimed that women‘s ―liberation‖
could only be found in a life of ―Christian devotion and motherhood.‖ When she spoke out against
the Equal Rights Amendment, she didn‘t claim that it introduced a radical new language of rights,
but argued that it would ―take away the right of the wife in an ongoing marriage, the wife in the
home.‖ Schlafly adopted the language of rights, a leftist proposition, in a way that was diametrically
opposed to the aims of the feminist movement; she was using rights talk to put women back into
the home, to keep them as wives and mothers in a male-dominated social arrangement. But that is
the point: conservatism adapts and adopts the language of rights, fairness, and democratic reform to
the cause of inequality and hierarchy. Schlafly, by adopting rights language in defense of the ―old
regime,‖ was tacitly admitting the role of human agency in upholding male-dominated social
structures.

In confronting leftist revolution, the conservative voices the kind of affirmation of agency described
in this 1957 editorial from William F. Buckley‘s National Review: ―The central question that emerges‖
from the civil rights movement ―is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take
such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not
predominate numerically? The sobering answer is yes – the White community is so entitled because,
for the time being, it is the advanced race.‖5 Again, the "taking of measures" to uphold "entitled"
power relations, tacitly admits that the relations are not inherent, and elites cannot take them for
granted as the natural order of things.

Nixon‘s Southern Strategy to win the White House was summed up by the recognition, in his view,
that ―the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while

3
Schlafly, Phyllis. “The Power of the Positive Woman.” Crown Publishing; 1st Edition July 1977.
4
Friedan, Betty. “The Feminist Mystique.” W.W. Norton & Co. First published February 1963.
5
Buckley, Jr., William F. (August 1957). "Editorial". National Review
not appearing to.‖6 Looking back on this strategy in 1981, Republican strategist Lee Atwater was
even clearer: ―You start out in 1954 by saying, ―Nigger, nigger, nigger.‖ By 1968 you can‘t say nigger—
that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like ―forced busing,” “states’ rights‖ and all that stuff. You‘re
getting so abstract now you‘re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you‘re talking about
are totally economic things and a by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.‖7

Atwater, Haldeman, and Buckley all adopted the language of ―rights,‖ claiming that government was
usurping rights by promoting the equal treatment of racial minorities in the American South. The
hierarchical status quo was under sharp attack by progress in the Civil Rights movement, and the
only effective way for conservatives to fight back was to admit that human agency created the
unequal power relationships of the Jim Crow era, and human agency must be used to defend and/or
return to their desired status quo. The notion of inequality as a naturally occurring phenomenon
based on race could, for a time, be given lip-service, but was ultimately discredited by progress
toward Enlightenment-based principles, leaving Southern racial conservatives on the defensive and
speaking to their political allies in code. The code words, of course, were firmly grounded in the
language of rights.

More recently, conservative leaders have adopted leftist language of diversity to promote the
conservative agenda in education. Conservative school boards in the South have insisted on the
teaching of creationism as ―truth,‖8 and demanded changes to school texts to reflect their particular
views of history. They claim, for example, that radical professors have created a ‗hostile learning
environment‘ for conservative students.9 They decry a lack of ‗intellectual diversity‘ in academics,
and that the conservative viewpoint is ‗underrepresented‘ in curricula and reading lists. The
university should be an ‗inclusive‘ and intellectually ‗diverse‘ community, they claim. All this is
language borrowed from the left, and employed with the aim of perpetuating through education the
hierarchies inherent in racial, economic and religious dogma.

Beyond the adoption of revolutionary language, conservatives learn to deploy rights-based language
beyond the limited audience of conservative intellectuals and readers of dry political discourse.
From those same leftist revolutionaries, conservatives learn to mobilize the masses with spectacular
street demonstrations and displays of power, while ensuring that power is never truly shared with or
redistributed to the masses. This is the task of right-wing populism: to appeal to the mass without
disrupting the power of elites or, more precisely, to harness the energy of the mass in order to
reinforce or restore the power of elites. The phrase ―astro-turf movements‖ has recently become a
derisive description among the left to describe mass mobilizations organized and funded by
conservative elites, an apt send-up of the term ―grassroots.‖

Conservative reactionary populism is not a recent innovation of the Christian Right or the Tea Party
movement. In fact, it runs throughout conservative discourse from the very beginning. Joseph de
6
H.R. Haldeman, “The Haldeman Diaries: inside the Nixon White House.” Entry for April 28, 1969, quoting
President Richard Nixon. Putnam & Sons. May 1994.
7
Lamis, Alexander P. “The Two-Party South.” Reprinted in “Southern Politics in the 1990’s” with Lee Atwater’s
name revealed as the author of the quote.
8
Creationism being a basic and unquestioned belief of fundamentalist, hierarchically organized religions.
9
Such a statement begs a number of interesting questions: Are “conservative students” born that way? Is there a
genetic predisposition? Or is it socialization in a hierarchical system that accounts for the existence of these “so-
called “conservative students?”
Maistre,10 was a pioneer in the theater of mass power, conjuring scenes and staging street dramas in
which ―the lowest of the low could see themselves reflected in the highest of the high.‖
―Monarchy,‖ he writes, ―is without contradiction, the form of government that gives the most
distinction to the greatest number of persons.‖11 Ordinary people ―share in its brilliance and glow,‖
though not, Maistre adds, in its decisions and deliberations: ―man is honored not as an agent but as a
portion of sovereignty.‖ Arch monarchist that he was, Maistre understood that for the king to return
to power he needed a touch of the plebeian about him. When Maistre wrote of the certain triumph
of the counterrevolution, he emphasized the populist credentials of the returning monarch. ―The
people should identify with this new king,‖ says Maistre, ―Because like them he has attended the
terrible school of misfortune,‖ and suffered in the ―hard school of adversity.‖ His humanness (as
opposed to the old view of divine authority) implying an almost pedestrian, and reassuring, capacity
for error. The new king would be like the masses, and unlike the old king, he would know it. The
human agency required of ascending the throne and reestablishing the old, hierarchical order would
be an important factor in attaining mass support.

Few examples in history of the inventiveness of right-wing populism can match that of the master
class of the Old South. The slaveholder created a uniquely American form of democratic feudalism,
turning the white majority into a lordly class, sharing in the privileges and rights of governing the
slave class. Though the members of this ruling class knew that they were not equal to each other,
they were compensated by the illusion of superiority—and the reality of rule—over the black
population beneath them. It is remarkable that by 1860, four hundred thousand whites owned
slaves in the South – the vast majority not those who lived in the grand antebellum mansions.
Ordinary and even relatively poor whites owned slaves. Through the opportunity of becoming a
master, the lowest white men could, as de Maistre described earlier, ―see themselves reflected in the
highest of the high,‖ making the slaveholder South perhaps the most democratic master class society
in history.

For this hierarchical society to survive, the mass populism promoted by state legal and tax laws was
essential, for had those poor whites been excluded from the promise of master-class inclusion, the
system would surely have broken down. ―The minute you put it out of the power of common
farmers to purchase a Negro man or woman…you make him an abolitionist at once,‖12 noted James
Oakes. And even for non-slave-owning whites, they were, by virtue of the color of their skin, a part
of the Southern aristocracy, and so defended its social order. As the antebellum ruling classes faced
ongoing challenges to their power, they could always offer up racial domination as a way of securing
the energy of the white masses – again proving the point that conservative counterrevolutionaries
are always forced to concede that hierarchy is indeed not ordained by God, nor hereditary, but must
be created and vigorously defended using the tools taught by leftist revolutionaries.

It must also be said that conservatism has always appealed to, relied on, and been the voice of
outsiders. Neither Edmund Burke nor Joseph de Maistre were French. Alexander Hamilton,
conservative Founding Father, economic conservative, and the first Secretary of the Treasury was of
Caribbean descent, and widely rumored to have had some African ancestry. Many of the

10
Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre (1753-1821) was an influential spokesperson for the hierarchical monarchal
state following the French Revolution of 1789. He argued for the restoration of hereditary monarchy as the only
stable form of government. Along with Edmund Burke, he is considered a father of European conservatism.
11
Joseph-Marie, Comte de Maistre. “Considerations on France.” Published 1797.
12
Oakes, James. “The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders.” Norton Publishing. 1998.
neoconservatives that transformed the Republican Party, forging the modern-day alliance between
the military-industrial complex, business elites, and social conservatives, were Jews, including Irving
Kristol, Allan Bloom, Norman Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and others. Sarah Palin
claims to be a ―woman in a world of men.‖ And Glenn Beck certainly fashions himself as an
outsider, railing against a decadent, sinful, and socialist elite in control of America.

Victimhood and disinheritance has always been a central part of the conservative ―outsider‖
narrative. Burke disparaged the mob‘s wretched treatment of Marie Antoinette. Southern White
conservatives today decry their loss of privilege, albeit in carefully constructed language, 150 years
after their defeat in the Civil War and emancipation. Christian conservatives condemn the social
decay and lack of personal responsibility they see overtaking all aspects of American life. While the
complaint of the left has often started from the premise that they never had anything to lose,
conservatism virtually always speaks for those who have lost something of value. As such, it
touches within the psyche something universal, an experience that we can all share. Nothing is ever
so cherished than that which we no longer own. More importantly, the conservative ideology offers
the promise that the loss can be recovered, or at least partially so.

It is this basis in loss that distinguishes conservatism from the ―old regime.‖ Conservatism is not
about protection and preservation – it is about recovery and restoration. It is not, as John Stuart
Mill suggested, the party of order, but instead it is the party of the loser seeking to regain what was
once his. And this is the key to conservatism‘s attraction.

The left‘s demand for redistribution – of power, rights, or wealth – raises the question of whether
the beneficiaries are deserving, or prepared to wield the power they seek. The left struggles to make
of people what they have not been, empowered. The conservative faces no such challenge, since
they seek only to regain the empowerment and status previously enjoyed. Thus, the job of the leftist
revolutionary is infinitely more difficult than that of the conservative counterrevolutionary.

These deep differences between the left and right, growing as they do out of the struggle to
overcome or restore entrenched inequality and hierarchy, make for powerful political enemies. It
makes for enemies in a zero-sum struggle. Any gain by leftist revolutionaries exacerbates the
perceived loss on the part of the counterrevolutionary right. And any setback in the uphill battle for
equality and empowerment being waged by the left is a step toward the restoration of hierarchy
sought by the right. In this context, compromise and finding middle ground is impossible.

Enemies are important to political and social movements. Irving Kristol lamented the end of the
Cold War and defeat of the Soviet Union (and, as he thought, the defeat of leftist revolution
globally), saying it ―deprived conservatives of an enemy, and in politics, being deprived of an enemy
is a very serious matter. You tend to get relaxed and dispirited. Turn inward.‖ Winning your war
leaves you nothing much to do. For conservatives in the battle between left and right, fighting on
with a goodly dose of pessimism is a more effective strategy than declaring victory, or even
progress. It is better to keep moving the goalpost, never quite satisfied with the gains achieved.
And while endlessly lamenting his losses before an energized mass audience, the conservative will be
quietly summing his winnings behind the scenes.