Daniel Mahoney has written a beautiful and insightful reflection on “Scrutonian Conservatism” to set up this forum on the five-year anniversary of Sir Roger Scruton’s passing. Mahoney’s essay also serves as a wonderful introduction for anyone unfamiliar with Scruton’s ideas.
I have very little by way of disagreement with Mahoney’s assessment, so I will limit myself to a brief expansion and application of one of his themes—one that I think highlights why it is so important for American conservatives today to continue (or begin) to read Scruton carefully.
Reading Scruton for the first time years ago helped me to clarify and articulate my growing sense that the movement conservatism of the ’90s and early 2000s that I had grown up in was overlooking important things. Tax cuts, GDP growth, abortion—these things mattered and still do, but too often it seemed that the most influential conservative talking heads tended to make these kinds of policy preferences (and of course, the imperative of fighting righteous wars) into fundamental principles that served as the core of the conservative outlook. Was there something more foundational to our civil life that was in jeopardy, and was movement conservatism oblivious?
Fast-forward to today, and there’s a new movement conservatism in town, one that criticizes the old guard for some of the same things I found lacking. Perhaps I should be on board with the new nationalist, “post-liberal” right that has emerged in the last several years, but I’m not. And to clarify and articulate my objections to this new brand, I have also found few better guides than Roger Scruton.
It should be no surprise that Scruton does not fit easily in the popular categories on which much of this contemporary debate often hinges. His mind was too subtle, and he cared too much about the truth to be satisfied with sweeping simplifications. At the intellectual level, the fight over American conservatism has taken place on the battleground of “liberalism.” Mahoney offers an excellent presentation of Scruton’s view that conservativism aims to “save liberalism from itself.” The key, of course, is that Scruton had in mind a liberal tradition or inheritance more than any particular comprehensive liberal theory. He recognized that, all too often, those who recognize good things are not content to value them and preserve them as treasures, but instead seek to rationalize them into absolute values that override all others and provide a simplistic guide for all political action.
Liberal theorists have been prone to do this with personal and property rights; democratic theorists do it with the institutions and habits of self-government; and nationalists do it with the polity itself. Approaching economic liberty, religious freedom, and other practices that we often lump into the “liberal” category as valuable, long-negotiated legal and political inheritances rather than as theoretical absolutes allows for the more subtle approach to liberalism that Scruton exemplifies.
Moreover, I think Scruton defies today’s intra-conservative categories because he recognized the vital political importance of things that politics and policy cannot control. This is a hard saying for any zealous activist, who tends to see political activity as a matter of identifying problems, laying out common goals, and coordinating activities to address them. To the partisan advocate, getting the right people elected must always offer the prospect of solving the nation’s problems. It is therefore easy, on the one hand, to diminish (consciously or unconsciously) the importance of cultural conditions that policy cannot control or, on the other hand, to deny any limits on what collective political action can accomplish. To make a sweeping assessment, I think the movement conservatism of the ’90s and early 2000s often did the former, while national conservatives and post-liberals today often do the latter.
Scruton, however, often left readers with the unsatisfying reality that many of our modern problems are educational, cultural, and spiritual ones, and that public policy cannot rectify them. If a previous generation of conservative activists needed to appreciate the first part of that truth, the emerging new right needs to appreciate the last part.
Attempts to address cultural problems with direct policy solutions can often have hidden effects that only further exacerbate the underlying malaise.
Populism has every incentive to promise political answers for every problem, so long as the people’s champion is empowered to address it. A right-wing populism, then, which recognizes the importance of cultural conditions, will be inclined to promise political solutions. These solutions, though, often overlook the very real limits to what consciously planned political action can accomplish, and may wind up having far-reaching, unintended ripple effects.
Consider Scruton’s comment in 2018 on economic protectionism, the conservative advocates of which sometimes promise will lead to a social renewal driven by blue-collar manufacturing jobs, which will then stabilize families, bring down “deaths of despair,” and increase birth rates:
Adam Smith argued that trade barriers and protections offered to dying industries will not, in the long run, serve the interests of the people. On the contrary, they will lead to an ossified economy that will splinter in the face of competition. President Trump seems not to have grasped this point. His protectionist policies resemble those of postwar socialist governments in Europe, which insulated dysfunctional industries from competition and led not merely to economic stagnation but also to a kind of cultural pessimism that surely goes entirely against the American grain.
That last line, easy to overlook, is important. Attempts to wrestle economic activity into submission in hopes that it will achieve some specific, pre-ordained goal are not bad simply because they lead to stagnation. They also contribute to “cultural” decline. He does not spell out exactly what he meant, but I think it probably has something to do with the pervasive attitude he decried in multiple contexts as a driver of social decay: “The idea of the state as a benign father figure, who guides the collective assets of society to the place where they are needed, and who is always there to rescue us from poverty, ill health, or unemployment.”
This view of the state flies in the face of the preconditions of a healthy civil life that Scruton articulated in many works, including How to Be a Conservative and the essay “The Need for Nations.” The conservative holds that civil life is premised on a pre-political attachment to people who, sharing a common place, find ways to address their common problems themselves. These free men look to law and politics not to arrange their lives for them, but to provide a framework, operating within their cultural milieu, for resolving their conflicts and enforcing side-constraints on their activity. As citizens come to embrace the notion that politics is meant to arrange for a comfortable life—to rescue people from forces that they can’t possibly confront themselves—they cease to see themselves as active participants in civil life, or as part of a “we” that shares a public life together. Politics, then, eventually becomes a competition to ensure that the state is properly looking after my needs more than yours.
I bring up the comment on protectionism, therefore, not to make any particular point about economic policy, but to note that attempts to address cultural problems with direct policy solutions can often have hidden effects that only further exacerbate the underlying malaise. The political response to a disordered cultural scene must try to identify and correct the political forces that have attacked the pre-political “we.” That is the font from which culture springs. But we should not attempt to cover over problems with the false promises of political planning.
Moreover, a more expansive view of the aims of politics can encourage other, darker tendencies. The foundation of civil life that Scruton described—neighbors settling on arrangements to live peaceably together—points to a politics of tradition, custom, continuity, and compromise. Insofar as one is committed to a powerful, guiding, paternalistic understanding of political activity, Scruton recognized, this kind of politics will seem weak and lacking in willpower. “Many people—young men especially—are dissatisfied with it,” he writes in The Uses of Pessimism. “They seek the commitment that will absorb them and extinguish their individual goals; they yearn for the unified plan that will take away the burden of accountability, and for the zero-sum encounter with the enemy that will summon them to sacrifice.”
The “young men” described here aren’t hard to find in the new conservative movement, where it is not at all surprising to hear popular commentators offer SparkNotes versions of Carl Schmitt, pundits call for a dictator who will purify American culture with fire, or online “influencers” summon up neo-pagan vitalism. The actual political manifestations of the new right don’t run to these extremes, of course. But the fact that so many young men in the movement are attracted to such totalizing ideas is disconcerting. These are people who do not want the freedom and responsibility to confront life as thinking, learning, and loving beings.
In one sense, as I’ve indicated above, pointing to the vital importance of things outside the scope of politics is unsatisfying. But in another sense, it is cause for optimism. For against these “young men,” it reminds us that no matter what the political or cultural dynamics around us, we have it in our power to live life well: “The choice lies before us, as it has lain before every human being in history, to live well or badly, to be virtuous or vicious, to love or to hate. And this is an individual choice, which depends on cultural conditions only obliquely, and which no other person can make in our stead.”
As movement conservatism works through its identity crisis, Scruton’s works remain an essential source of a conservatism that stands on sure ground, one that cautions against cultural indifference, false hope, and despair.
Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.
