Conservatives Without Conscience

During a 1999 forum at Yale on free speech and homosexuality, as the chairman of the Yale Political Union’s Conservative Party chapter, Austin Bramwell claimed that “principled objections to homosexuality and to the gay movement can rarely be voiced on [the Yale] campus.”[80] In 2004, Austin wrote in the National Review on why those who oppose gay rights should not use the argument “If homosexuality is okay, what’s wrong with incest?” The better question is “If homosexuality is okay, what’s wrong with self-mutilation?” Austin again took the cudgel against gay marriage in the January 2005 issue of the American Conservative, advising gay marriage opponents not to despair, for the people were on their side, and all they needed was the right strategy.[*] He explained that the strategy was simple, for no constitutional amendment was needed. A simple act of Congress, based on the Fourteenth Amendment, would do the job, based on his rather tortured reading of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which struck down antimiscegenation laws.[81] It is unsettling that a young conservative would today rely on the same approach employed by an uglier version of conservatism in a past era: white supremacy.[82]

Austin does not hold out much hope for new thinking. He recently wrote about how today’s young conservatives “rarely come to right-wing ideas through any kind of epiphany. Rather they inherit their conservatism from parents or grandparents. Through generously funded seminars and think tank internships, they study the canon of conservative thought…almost all written in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.”[83] (I would add that the earlier teachings are largely irrelevant in today’s conservative politics.) Austin appears to be speaking for himself, his wife, his friends, and his own associates in explaining how they came to conservatism.

So What Exactly Is Conservatism?

Cut through all the smoke of conservatism and what is really left? David Horowitz—an intellectual who was once active with the radical left but had second thoughts and moved to the right—has described it as well as any amorphous thinking can be analyzed. Horowitz’s shift in outlook appears to have given him unique insight, and he has offered a concise definition of conservatism vis-à-vis liberalism. In 1992, as part of a lecture series at the Heritage Foundation, Horowitz said that “conservatism [is] an attitude about the lessons of the actual past. By contrast, the attention of progressives [is] directed toward an imagined future. Conservatism [is] an attitude of caution based on a sense of human limits and what politics [can] accomplish” (emphasis added). In his response to the question being addressed by this Heritage Foundation conference—whether contemporary conservatism was truly conservative—Horowitz candidly answered, “No,” acknowledging that today’s conservatives are “rebels against the dominant liberal culture.”[84] In later updating his Heritage lecture, Horowitz wrote that conservatism “begins as an attitude, and only later becomes a stance,” and noted “that conservative attitudes derive from pragmatic consideration.”[85] This, clearly, is a highly conceptual view of conservatism, but an accurate one.

To further clarify the elusive nature of conservatism, and the elemental attitudes it encompasses, let us turn to political science professors Kenneth Janda of Northwestern University, Jeffrey M. Berry of Tufts University, and Jerry Goldman of Northwestern University, who discuss this political philosophy in their textbook, The Challenge of Democracy: Government in America. They provide a remarkably simple yet sophisticated chart that graphically shows the distinction between political conservatism and other ideologies (liberalism, libertarianism, and communitarianism) from both historical and contemporary vantage points, and the dynamics of these conflicting points of view.[*]