26 minute read
The History of Conservatism
FROM CONSERVATISM’S ROOTS IN THE
European upper-class to its adoption of pro-capitalist ideas to today’s mass populist movements of the hard Right, Edmund Fawcett provides a history of a powerful movement. From the October 27, 2020, Humanities Member-Led Forum online program “Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition.” EDMUND FAWCETT, Former European and Literary Editor, The Economist; Author of Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition In conversation with GEORGE HAMMOND, author of Conversations With Socrates
CONSERVATISM CON The Fight for a Tradition
EDMUND FAWCETT: My book is, I trust, a timely history of the political Rights in France, Britain, Germany and the United States. Its message in a sentence is this: Conservatism has always been as much a source of disruption and turbulence as it has been a wise avoidance of heedless change. I think once that idea is grasped, it’s much easier to understand both the appeal and the up-and-down history of conservatism since its origin in the early 19th century. On reaching the present, my history spotlights a question that hangs over liberal democracy in Europe and the United States: Which conservatism is it to be? Is it to be the— broadly speaking—liberal kind that helped sustain liberal democracy after 1945? Or is it to be an illiberal, one-nation kind claiming to speak in the name of what it calls “the people”? In some very general, ground floor sense, conservatism speaks to a kind of universal human desire for order and stability, for tomorrow to be like today. Politically, conservatives have indeed stood for order and
CONSERVATISM CON The Fight for a Tradition
stability, for the rule of law, for prevailing distributions of property, for familiar customs, for effective economy that pays the bills and puts food in the shops. But at the same time, with quickening pace later in the 19th century, those very aims required conservatives to embrace what they initially feared and shunned, namely modern liberal capitalism, this fantastic machine of innovation and prosperity that is forever turning society upside down and creating new tomorrows.
So conservatives, to sum up, offer stability and disruption, continuity and change. The tensions, the difficulties—I think everything that makes the conservative story interesting comes back to that basic conflict. Conservatism has promised and still promises national community and global markets; social peace and meritocratic competition; competence in office, and yet suspicion of government; cultural stability and continual cultural change.
As a left-wing liberal, I’m not promising that my account or my story is neutral. I trust it’s objective. If that’s worked, I hope that conservatives will recognize themselves in their tradition. I hope that the Left will see its opponent’s position, which like careless chess players they’re very often prone to ignore. I wrote the book with a comradely question for the Left: If we’re so smart, how come we’re not in charge? I wrote it so the question for the Right could be as sharp as possible: Will conservatives reconstruct a center conservatism, or join the rush to an illiberal hard Right? GEORGE HAMMOND: It’s a very interesting way of presenting the idea. I think a lot of people will understand this tradition a lot better by the end of this hour, because it’s so different than what people think, especially what you said about capitalism. Everyone assumes that conservatives are totally on the side of laissez-faire capitalism and so on. And they did not start that way at all. In a way it’s just because that’s the current institution, that’s the status quo that they now support. So conservatives really started as monarchists and in favor of the established church basically, and any other institutions that were in power at the time they didn’t plan to change.
You start in the 17th and 18th centuries and sort of the foundational ideas of modern times for conservative thought. So tell us a little bit about [Joseph] de Maistre, [Edmund] Burke and the ideas that you illuminate. FAWCETT: With a small course correction, I think that’s right. Thinkers like de Maistre and Burke, [and James] Madison—these are in a way conservative forerunners. It may seem like a very kind of picky semantic point, but I think conservatism—like liberalism, its opponent—these are 19th century phenomena. You don’t really get them before. Why do I say that? I think for two reasons, which come back to your question. One is that both of them are responses to a completely new condition of society. Great population growth, great productivity growth, much of it driven by
modern industrializing capital. And the folk who wrote in the 18th century, like Burke and Maistre, even Madison, they couldn’t imagine this. However, they had very wise or at least for them very pertinent points to make about something else, the French Revolution. This was very important. HAMMOND: The difference between how the French Revolution and how the American Revolution was perceived—that’s one of the things I really want to talk about. So let’s get into that. FAWCETT: It’s crucial. I mean, very, very quickly, both Burke and Maistre, writing in the 1790s—where were critics of the French Revolution? They weren’t there. They weren’t saying chopping off people’s heads is a bad way to do politics. They weren’t saying anything as crude as that. Their point was that essentially the French Revolution marked an entirely new kind of politics in which brainy people—intellectuals, lawyers, journalists—began to say how politics ought to be conducted. And to Maistre and Burke, how politics ought to be conducted was given. Burke, an English, Irish, conservative, a Tory, how politics was be conducted—it was given by custom. It was given by tradition. For Maistre, a Savoyard Catholic, politics was to be conducted by, in essence, divine authority.
In both their cases, they thought that ordinary folk were simply not capable of organizing their own affairs. They needed to be guided. Of course, the French Revolution in a broad sense was against that. “No, no, no. We’re all part of politics. We can all argue about it. We can all pitch in.”
Madison was very interesting, because unlike Maistre and Berg—who really sort of held up their hands [to] change and said, “We want to stop this,” and of course it was in vain—Madison thought of constitutions. In other words, a big change, an American revolution, in order to preserve a certain stability, a certain authority in government. So he was in a way thinking of constitution to avoid revolution.
But the three of them were all in advance of conservatism. They handed on to conservatives in the 19th century a set of ideas, which were very useful to conservatives. The suspicion of intellectuals, the importance of custom, the importance of stability. But I think they weren’t, strictly speaking, themselves conservatives. HAMMOND: We’ll move to the past again, but I want to talk about Madison and the Constitution. One of the things that’s helpful for Americans to understand clearly is that the Founders did not try to create a wide open democracy. They were aiming at
something else altogether, and Madison and his constitutionalism was a form of how to control this situation. FAWCETT: That’s a very pertinent point. It kind of broadens as we go later into the history. If you could say conservatism and liberalism are on this side, democracy is a very different idea. You could think of conservatives and liberals, and preconservatives in Madison’s time, if you will, this is an argument about how to do politics among a very small group of people. They’re almost all men in the United States. They’re almost all white, but indeed across Europe, they’re almost all white, they’re almost all men. It’s a tiny, educated, propertied part of society. Of course, there are exceptions and it’s becoming more widespread, but by and large, this is a minority preoccupation.
What does democracy do? Democracy, in the broad sense, completely blows that argument apart. It says every last one of us in society has a voice. We have something to say in politics; we have something to say to our bosses; we have something to say in cultural and ethical life. We’re not dominated. We’re not told what to do and that’s an end of it. And above all the point about democracy is a matter of range. It includes everybody. Whereas both the conservatives and the early liberals didn’t see it that way. You could see it this way: Liberalism and conservatism lay out a feast; democracy draws up the guest list. HAMMOND: Certainly at the beginning, when people were even considering democracy, they weren’t considering it as a universal right. As we very well know, it took a long time for the vote to get to everybody, and we’re still arguing about it. FAWCETT: Indeed. Historians and others among your listeners may correct me, but I think there were property qualifications for the vote until the 1820s and ’30s; in other words, 30, 40 years after the Constitution. Blacks were disenfranchised, of course; women didn’t get the vote until 1918. So in terms of electoral democracy, the United States was a very slow developer, as well as Britain. In 1918 in Britain, I think still something like 20 percent of men didn’t have the vote, women didn’t get the vote until then. HAMMOND: It’s interesting. It seems to me that as a culture gets more and more confident, it allows more and more people to take part, because they don’t feel that [it’s a threat to the] stable status quo. Wherever they are on a scale, a lot of people have this desire for the status quo to keep continuing. When people are confident, they don’t think it’s going to be disrupted by sharing. FAWCETT: You see that arc in the conservative story. Again, go back to the sort of pre-conservative Madison. He and the Founders were immensely wise in the way that they provided these counterbalances. You may feel that [it is] too resistant to change, but it is a remarkable mechanism. And one of the overriding concerns, particularly for Madison, was the fear that minorities with a valid point of view would get kind of squashed out by majorities.
But to go forward, that arc of growing confidence is very important for conservatives, because they start out rather timid and afraid in completely new circumstances. After all, you’re looking at people who are the sons and grandsons of people who simply by nature expected to rule. It never occurred to them that they would have to justify themselves. I mean, they might have to justify themselves to some nasty contender who said, “No, you’re not the right king. This one is.” Of course there was conflict, but in terms anything like we think of today, as rulers needing to justify themselves, it didn’t really happen. This was a class used to ruling. However, they were now the outs, and the liberals were the ins.
So conservatives started out very underconfident in that. They were also very frightened of the people. They knew a great deal about people one by one. The boss knew his workers, the squire knew his tenants. The
priest knew his parishioners. But in terms of this growing new thing called modern society, they hadn’t a clue and they had no sociologists. They didn’t have a lot of data. So they had to have to rely on quite a lot of imagination and fear.
Over the 18th century, when they got into trouble, they tended to get into trouble by exaggerating the danger of the people. But by the end of the 19th century, they’d overcome that. In Britain, you had Lord Salisbury, who in the middle of the 19th century as a young man [was a] ferocious anti-democrat. [The unpublishable things] he said about people! By the time he was taking office at the end of the 19th century, he and his agents had started a modern democratic machine with almost all the familiar things that we expect of it, that slowly took over and began to dominate British elections. Something similar happened in your country at the time of [William] McKinley, when they developed the Republican Party into an effective modern machine. [Along with Republican Senator] Mark Hanna, a Cleveland man at the time when the industrial Midwest was one of the hearts of the country. HAMMOND: Very hard to be a successful political party and call the people the deplorables. You lose way too many of the voters. FAWCETT: Absolutely. Something that is quite difficult for us on the Left to understand is how successful the Right has been at listening to and winning the votes of—that slippery phrase—the people.
But anyway, by the end of the 19th century, certainly in the United States and in Britain, they had very effective parties—and indeed in France. Germany was a more difficult case. HAMMOND: You set out the book as a study of all four of those countries. And for good reason. You’ve got a couple of hundred years of history of an attempt in all of those countries [of the development of] democracy. I thought what was interesting was that the rise and fall of conservatism, although not exactly at the same year or the month or anything like that, but the waves in all four countries seem to be fairly right on. I want to talk a little bit about that pattern, because we’re experiencing another version of it right now. And maybe [explain] why that happens, at least to the extent that’s possible to say. FAWCETT: I think that’s right. You have in the conservative tradition a kind of a long wave that works itself out over the 19th century, as conservatives become in effect a capitalist party. They agree with free market liberals that capitalism—finance capital, industrial capital—these are the good way to go. There’s no resisting it. HAMMOND: And that was a pillar of their resistance before that period of time. FAWCETT: They tended to support institutions and interests that didn’t really do a lot for modern capitalism, like the large landed interests, the church, the monarchy in Britain. And in France, the ultras as they were called, who were now constantly trying to bring back a monarchy that was really kind of walking dead, even at the beginning of the 19th century. This was not important for capitalism. It wasn’t helpful. So they did have to learn that lesson that you couldn’t fight in vain to defend dying institutions. But they did come to see that they were defenders of capitalism. In some sense, to use this puzzling phrase, they became sort of liberal conservatives in the sense that liberals are for the free market.
They didn’t become liberal in every way. They often were very illiberal. They continued to be very illiberal in social matters, in matters of punishment, in matters of sexual morality. Almost all the conservative parties took a very long time, indeed into the late 20th century, to get that message or to accept that. But in the core element of economics— free market—and the functioning of pluralistic institutions, by the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, the Republicans in the United States, the Tories in Britain and the conservative parties of the Right in France had by and large become blended with “rightwing liberals.” However, there were two
difficulties for them. One is that modern liberal society does upset a great many things which conservatives hold dear: cultural tradition, ethical authorities, order, instability in society.
This has been an abiding puzzle, but you could say that, given their political dominance in the 20th century, conservatives have created a modern world at which they don’t feel completely at home. So that tension, those hesitations, always allowed two things for the mainstream conservative parties, who have a fantastically successful long run of governing. One is the outsiders in politics who sort of don’t buy into what I call the liberal status quo. They’re always making trouble. You saw this in the 1890s, particularly in France and Germany. You saw it again in France and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s. You see it now in the rise of what I call the hard Right—very disaffected, angry, that sees itself as somehow the people against the elites. That’s something that is common to all the countries and runs through the history.
The second approach, and this is quite interesting, is what I’d call cultural and ethical criticism. This runs through the history. To take some British examples, from [poet Samuel Taylor] Coleridge through T.S. Elliot, who was American but became British, through the late [philosopher] Roger Scruton, there’s a very, very strong, eloquent thread of conservative thinking, which is that plural, modern, diverse life is an ugly or wrong way to live. It’s not essentially a political [movement], at least in a macro-political sense; it’s not that kind of movement. But it’s much more of a cultural criticism. “We’re doing it wrong.” “We’re leading the wrong kinds of life.” And this has been very, very powerful. HAMMOND: That word wrong you use, that’s the crucial thing, because it implies a whole bunch of assumptions— FAWCETT: And not afraid of saying “You’re wrong.” HAMMOND: And there’s a right and a wrong way to do things. FAWCETT: That’s a very good point. HAMMOND: One distraction here is because people don’t talk about this cultural issue as much as other ones, but legitimacy: to be a legitimate birth versus non-legitimate birth. If you go back to our childhoods, legitimacy was a fairly important thing. In a world today, there are countries where the majority of the children are not legitimate. It’s the legitimacy-bastard idea; it used to be a really, really big issue. And it’s now not disappearing because there are countries, like—I just looked up the stats—China and India are still under 1 percent of the children are illegitimate. Whereas in the United States, it’s nearly 40 percent; in parts of Europe, it’s the same. And it’s over 50 percent in some of the Scandinavian [countries]; and in South America, which has been a Catholic [region], very Christian, it’s over 60, 70 percent. It’s such a fundamental shift, obviously that over the history of humanity, we’ve continued to make children in many different ways, and there’s been lots of different cultural institutions, FAWCETT: Marriage takes many forms. HAMMOND: It was totally legitimate 3,000 years ago to have many wives and in only in a few places many husbands—but that kind of thing. I thought it was a good custom to talk about as this is one of the things that has changed dramatically and the conservatives complain about it, but they complain about other things much more than they complain about that. FAWCETT: That’s true. I’m in my midseventies, and if I think of the ethical change in society in my life, it’s quite extraordinary. There’s been an acceleration. It’s quite extraordinary. Personally, I think it’s welcome.
I hear open-mindedly many of the difficulties. I think on the historical point, illegitimacy mattered hugely to royal dynasties and people with a lot of property, but bastardy and legitimacy didn’t matter so much to most folk. Push the centuries back, the solemnization of marriage is not modern, but it was a sort of relatively late development for ordinary folk—I’m not talking about the ruling classes. So all of these moral ideas are kind of continuous in character— marriage, then legitimacy—but that content changes. I think what is disturbing and is indeed disturbing for many conservatives, and probably not just conservatives, is when change accelerates. It has accelerated extraordinarily in the last several decades. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but I think getting used to it is clearly difficult and requires a lot of arguing. [Laughter.] HAMMOND: And as you pointed out, though, it’s not that this is a brand new thing. It’s just a return to [the idea that] a thin veneer of civilization is disappearing,
FAWCETT: That was a sort of slightly pointy-headed point of mine a moment ago. It’s not very comforting to be told they didn’t have marriage in the 10th century. “Okay, Edmond, but you know, living in the 21st.” The historical point has its limits. HAMMOND: So let’s go back to the “current” time then. I wanted you to talk about [German Chancellor Otto von] Bismarck, a little bit in Germany. You make very good points on Bismarck. The German part of [conservative history] is a little bit different, but it is interesting to see a country where it wasn’t a country, basically how the Prussians moved it to “Germany,” and then what the consequences were in the 20th century. FAWCETT: The German case is very difficult, because of what they did from 1930 to 1945. They visited on themselves and the world a kind of worse catastrophe than is imaginable. I worked in Germany many years, and they recovered quite brilliantly in many ways. But that happened, and it’s very difficult because that happened to see the history beforehand in any way but a main road leading to that self-inflicted catastrophe. I think historians know that and avoid it, but writing a general book of the kind I did, even I found that difficult. There were conservative traditions in Germany. These were not fascistic traditions in any way. They were conservative productions. They were landed. They were connected with eastern Germany to some extent—you know, East Prussian lands. But on the other hand, they were also very strong in Hamburg, in Dusseldorf, in centers of industry. They were very like the parties that we talked about earlier—McKinley and Salisbury’s parties.
Bismarck is a very interesting figure, because he is a case where you had a really quite authoritarian figure who is nevertheless governing under the rule of law, governing with quite a number of civic and local freedoms, personal freedoms. So was this somehow a completely authoritarian society? No. Was it an authoritarian government? Yes, up to a point. But remember that Germany was unified of many, many different [principalities], kingdoms, cities and so on. Indeed, up until 1918, when the empire fell apart, it was both governed at the center by Bismark and the Reichstag—the national parliament—and by all the localities.
So actually it was a sort of Rube Goldberg construction. When one thinks of authoritarians and thinks of somebody being able to pick up a telephone and give orders, which are then carried down—it wasn’t like that at all. So Bismarck was both constrained
Photo credits: Sarah Palin by David Shankbone; Phyllis Schlaffly by Warren Leffler; Ann Coulter, Donald Trump and Sean Hannity by Gage Skidmore; Condoleezza Rice by Tech Crunch; Boris Yeltsin by Velislav Nikolov (EU2018BG); Dinesh DSouza by Mark Taylor; Edmund Fawcett photo courtesy the author; James Madison by John Vanderlyn; Joseph de Maistre by Karl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein; Tea Party protest by Surfsupusa; Ronald Reagan with Jeane Kirkpatrick is an official White House photo; Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán courtesy of www. kremlin.ru; additional photos unattributed or otherwise in the public domain.
by the rule of law and by freedoms, but also by simply the circumstances of this construction. I think he’s an interesting example. German conservatives in the 19th century who argued for that kind of conservatism, they said, “Don’t fuss so much with institutions, with democratic accountability; focus on maintenance of personal freedoms and the rule of law.” HAMMOND: Well, it’s interesting how the Hanoverians did better in England than they did in their own country. [Laughter.]
I think the reason that people try to stay away from a more nuanced idea about Germany’s history is that everybody wants to believe it will never happen in their country. Yet German civilization was not all that much different than the French and the British, the Americans until the post-World War I—problems and all, right? FAWCETT: There is a strain of historical thinking, which survives somehow, that the self-inflicted disaster 1933–45 was baked into German history. There’s another strain which, while allowing for long-term trends, sees huge contingency in what happened. When you look carefully at the mistakes that were made and the chances for continuing the fragile liberal democracy, the missed chances, you see contingency played a huge part. You bring up a point that I think is worth stressing. Particularly on the Left, they kick around the label fascist with abandon. You have similar abuse on the Right; I’m not making a partisan point. But on the Left, “So-and-so is a fascist.”
This is very misleading. Indeed, even the hard Right now in Germany and in France, the hard Right represented by the Trump Republican Party or the Brexit Tories in Britain—it’s not fascist in any historical sense. However, there are certain common appeals to this mythical being—the people. That’s quite something to keep your ear open to.
The other thing is, remember fascism was historically specific. It arose across Europe and in Germany in the 1920s and ’30s after a disastrous war and fueled by a catastrophic economic slump. So it had a whole series of particulars that don’t have present-day counterparts. HAMMOND: Yeah. It’s crucial to see those nuances, because if you just revert always to calling someone either a communist or a fascist, it’s not helpful. There’s a whole spectrum that we’re always dealing with. You have this whole spread of personalities that are comfortable in different ranges. And if we see how big that center is, I think that’s where the stability of democratic civilizations come about.
I also think that the way that Germans
treated the post-World War II situation, once we got to the mid-’50s and taught all the children that this was a terrible thing and made it very clear and lived up to what the problem was and recreated a very democratic society—I think that shows the strength of the civilization that existed prior to the disaster. FAWCETT: I completely agree. And then, you know, there were legitimate quarrels—it was partly generational—but the legitimate quarrels in the ’60s about the speed and thoroughness of Germany’s historical reckoning with itself. But that quarrel, which seemed very important at the time, now it seems less important. I think people would agree fully with what you’ve just said. There has been a historical reckoning, and not just a kind of intellectual admission or presidential statements, which are important, but the creation of a society that in many ways tried to make sure that this could never happen again.
Just throw in there a related point to “this never happening again.” There are lots of ways that liberal democracies can weaken and become corroded and even die. They don’t have to become fascist. There’s a counterpart foolishness on the Right to the mudslinging of the Left [calling opponents fascists]. The counterpart foolishness is to say, “Okay, the hard Right—it’s very troubling for conservatives, but look, it’s not fascist. Phew. We can relax.” They’re not fascists, but we can’t relax. Or at least if you’re a certain kind of liberal-minded conservative, you shouldn’t relax. HAMMOND: In all four countries, the hard-Right is in power—in a way in the United States, it’s in power in the United Kingdom, it has a growing thing with [Marine] Le Pen’s group in France, and it’s a small minority but still growing all the time in Germany. It’s kind of interesting that their hatred for fascism is keeping that down. Give us some nuances about these things. None of them are fascist. They’re tending a little bit toward the illiberal, rather than a liberal approach. So why don’t you give us a little nuance about how we should think about the different shifts and why they’re taking place at the current time, because it’s a prosperous time. It’s not a time of fear and depression, even war. FAWCETT: No, I think that’s quite right. COVID is a huge disruption, but let’s sort of go back a year. You’re quite right. The “hard Right”—the phrase now has gone into common currency, but I think a lot of people, particularly conservatives, are dubious of it, they think that there’s something invented here. A chimera, some mythical beast that isn’t really there.
When you look at the Republican Party of [Mitch] McConnell and later Trump, if you look at the Tory Party that in effect became the anti-European party in the last two or three years—if you look at the differences and similarities and then contrast them with the old French National Front, which has renamed itself National Rally, or with this smaller party in Germany—but still very strong—called the Alternative for Germany, there are so many differences of situation, history, language, even some policies that you say, “Indeed, this is a chimera. This contrast between liberal conservatism, center-minded conservatism, and the hard Right is false.” And there are many conservatives who say that.
Against that, I will cite some conservative authorities who certainly think there is a dangerous, illiberal, populistic hard-Right. In my country, two examples are a wonderful journalist and writer, historian Ferdinand Mount, who used to run Margaret Thatcher’s think tank in Whitehall in the government. He shakes his head; he’s written furiously against the present Tory government. Indeed I think he even used the phrase a kind of fascism light at one point, which I thought was rather ill-advised, but still. Another person, another very good historian, Max Hastings, has said that Boris Johnson, the prime minister is ruling from the Trump playbook.
In your country, George Will, David Brooks, Ross Douthat—three generations of excellent conservative commentators, have all raised serious doubts about the character of Trump Republicanism or McConnell Republicanism. They have said, “This is something different. This is not us.”
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