Deneen: Does America Have a Conservative Tradition?

Patrick Deneen is one of the most thoughtful conservatives writing today.  Over at Front Porch Republic he asks: "Is There a Conservative Tradition in America?"  Once again, Deneen is on the mark.  He writes:

Yet, by another measure the answer is anything but obvious. Americans have largely come to accept a certain definition of conservatism that largely goes without examination in the media and everyday discussion. While difficult to define, contemporary American conservatism seems to be shaped by a certain set of core commitments. While not exhaustive, among those characteristics one could confidently list: 1. Commitment to limited government as laid out by the Founders in the Constitution; 2. Support for Free Markets; 3. Strong National defense; 4. Individual responsibility and a suspicion toward collectivism; and 5. Defense of traditional values, particularly support for family. I’m sure there are many other characteristics we could agree upon, but these are several that seem to be core devotions of modern conservatism, and nearly anyone with passing knowledge of American politics could look at this list and agree that this would seem to reflect Conservative values.

Herein lies the problem and the question: with the likely exception of #5 on my list – “defense of traditional values, particularly support of the family” – every characteristic that I’ve listed is actually a species of liberalism. I don’t mean that they are liberal in the way that we typically use the word to describe people like Nancy Pelosi or Michael Dukakis; rather, I mean liberal in its classical conception, that political philosophy that arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with its deepest origins in the Social Contract theory of Thomas Hobbes, further refined by John Locke, amended by Adam Smith and Montesquieu, and put into effect by our Founders, especially in those two founding documents The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. To be clear – there is a species of conservatism within this tradition, to be sure – about which I’ll say more – but at the outset it needs to be acknowledged that we are speaking here of the difference between conservative liberals and progressive liberals, and not typically non- or anti-liberal conservatives and liberals per se. 

Deneen shows how most of the so-called "founding principles of America, particularly those embodied in our basic documents" such as the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, are liberal.  He continues:

The Declaration is our nation's work of high philosophy, a distillation of Lockean principles deriving from his Second Treatises on Government.  Yet, thinkers from Edmund Burke to Russell Kirk has shown the deeply anti-conservative bases of the social contract theory of Lockean (and Hobbesian) origin one that is premised upon a conception of human beings as naturally “free and independent,” as autonomous individuals who are thought to exist by nature detached from a web of relationships that include family, community, Church, region, and so on. The Lockean logic subjects all human relationships to radical scrutiny, valorizing choice and voluntarism as the sole basis of legitimacy in any human bond. This logic radically destabilizes all existing ties, making individual calculation the primary basis on which to assess the legitimacy and claims of any association. This logic not only places the polity under its legitimizing logic, but all traditional relations, even finally the family itself. The logic used to justify America’s break with England worked like a steady solvent throughout its history, first detaching people’s allegiances from communities, from Churches, then from the individual States, and finally today – among the vanguard, the enlightened elite – from the nation and from the family alike. Today’s conservatives in most cases see this as a step too far, yet they have generally signed on in support of the philosophy that led to this culmination of the Lockean project.

And on the Constitution:

Conservatives today see the Constitution as the more conservative, even stabilizing document, giving form and shape to a limited government of enumerated powers, divided powers and the federated sharing of powers. Today conservatives assign blame to the intervention of 19th-century Progressives – thinkers like John Dewey and Herbert Croly – for the evisceration of the Founder’s 18th-century sober wisdom. They see particularly the influx of foreign contaminants – in the form of progressive German philosophy inspired by the likes of Kant and Hegel – as the source of the corruption of the Constitution. They seek its restoration to its original form, the original understanding of the Framers.

This explanation overlooks a substantial body of writing that argued that the Constitution was a document that sought a centralizing “consolidation” from the very outset. I speak of the extensive writings of the varied authors called “Anti-federalists,” – that group of men who Herbert Storing categorized as the “conservatives” in the ratification debate. It was for varied reasons that the Anti-federalists opposed ratification of the Constitution, but in many cases saw and predicted tendencies in the document that have reached full flourishing in our own day. Their witness renders problematic the view that the Constitution has been substantially misinterpreted by today’s liberals, and rather suggests that the Constitution, too, had a logic like the Declaration that has taken time to work out, but which in the end has come to realize exactly those fears expressed by the Anti-federalists in the 1780s.

Deneen concludes: "A true conservatism has few friends in today’s America."