While Wenzel is correct that there are many different strains of conservatism, that does not mean that there are no underlying principles that undergird conservative thought. Before getting to Wenzel's critique, some exposition of what conservatism is is necessary In the introduction to his seminal book, The Conservative Mind, Russel Kirk laid out six tenets that are common to most threads of conservative thought. They are as follows:
1. Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls.Of these six tenets, two, three, and four are compatible with a libertarian philosophy, and tenets five and six can coexist with libertarian thought in societies where there is a tradition of ordered liberty. Tenet one is orthogonal to libertarian thinking. None are necessarily hostile to a libertarian philosophy. However, conservatism presents are deeper understanding of human nature and human relationships than does Wenzel's libertarianism.
2. Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of the human experience, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves called "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"- a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated conservatism."
3. Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have often been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and before the courts of law, are acknowledged by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.
4. Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate private property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress.
5. Faith in prescription and and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power.
6. Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is Prudence.
After failing to define conservatism in any useful sense, Wenzel gets off to a bad start in his critique of conservatism by saying that "Conservatism is preoccupied with aggregates such as "community," "moral ecology," "society," or "the nation"; what is more, conservatism is willing to sacrifice individual rights on a communitarian altar." This is a moderately outrageous statement, particularly given that Wenzel has not yet and never does define either liberty or declare what constitutes an individual right. But why, according to Wenzel, is this supposed preoccupation of conservatism a problem? According to Wenzel, "The groups to which individuals adhere- families, clubs, churches, 'society,' or 'country'- do not really exist or enjoy agency." This is because "individuals (and only individuals) act." On one level, this is so true as to be a truism (you'll get no endorsement of Rousseau's general will from me), but on another level it is preposterous. His definition of agency is completely arbitrary. I could just as easily say that I am not writing this post because it is really a series of different organ systems, organs, tissues, cells, and, ultimately, genes interacting with one another and the surrounding environment to produce this effect, and that I therefore do not exist or enjoy agency except as an abstraction. Groups do not fail to enjoy agency just because the action of a group is dependent upon the actions of individuals within the group. Rather, the agency of the individuals within the group gives the group the ability to exercise that agency.
But it gets more interesting still because the agency able to be exercised by an individual depends upon the agency of groups. The ability of an individual to exercise agency at all is dependent upon, first of all, the agency of his parents. The agency of the parents is affected by the community in which the parents live, whose agency is affected by surrounding societal groups, the nation, and surrounding nations. Wenzel does acknowledge the importance of associations, but he throws up his hands when considering the problem of solving disputes within the group: "But what constitutes a 'community'? Fifty-one percent of its members? Fifty-one percent of its voters? Perhaps a two-thirds-super-majority or a unanimity of voters? Or all members? Or, perhaps, the small percentage that manages to capture the political process or the right commission?" The conservative response is that there is no single answer. Each group exists in different circumstances, and each group should find a way to resolve conflicts that most effectively secures what it understands to be the good, learning from its mistakes over time and adapting to new conditions. This can be a messy process: We call it politics.
Wenzel goes on to assert that "neglect of methodological individualism leads to a violation of rights, as the acting individual loses status as an end." This is nonsense on stilts. Whether a philosophy of methodological individualism, as defined by Wenzel, is nurtured or neglected has nothing to do with whether individual rights are violated. Indeed, under a Nietzschean view of the world, methodological individualism encourages the violation of individual rights as it is only individuals who stand in the way of obtaining or keeping power. Belief in the natural rights of man listed in the Declaration of Independence and a system of negative liberties are surer safeguards of individual rights than belief in methodological individualism.
Still, Wenzel is right to be concerned that "aggregates offer a convenient excuse to impose private ends through public means." Strangely, he turns his fire on conservatives here, as though conservatives haven't been opposed to things like welfare, Medicare, Obamacare, cap and trade, affirmative action, the ethanol mandate, and excessive government regulation, to name a few. But be that as it may, where Wenzel starts to fall here is that he assumes too clear a line between what is private and what is public and also fails to recognize that there are differing degrees of public, never mind that what may appear to be a purely private matter may have consequences to others severe enough to justify public action. Given recent research that has come to light, pornography may be such an issue, but Wenzel would have us proscribe such discussions in the public arena because "conservatism wants more government to fix social ills." This is really where Wenzel's argument goes off the rails.
From here on out, the conservatism Wenzel describes is nothing like conservatism as it actually is, and the libertarianism he advocates bears a striking resemblance to the conservatism he claims to be rejecting. He argues, "conservatism rests on a claim of privileged access to truth, whether through revelation or some sort of 'practical reason' to derive rules of personal and interpersonal conduct- which really seems to boil down to a reverse engineering to justify personal preferences." On the other hand, libertarianism trusts institutions that help generate and transmit knowledge, as we recognize our limitations and eschew our limited reason in favor of reason nestled in tradition." That sounds an awful lot like the fifth tenet to me.
Where the difference between Wenzel, who admits "there are plainly benefits to conservative values," and the social conservatives lies is in their understanding of what they're doing. To the social conservative, social conservatism is about defending those traditions and institutions that have allowed American society to flourish. In order to accomplish this, they act on the governmental level to undo the damage done by the state. Wenzel would rather have the civil society deal with social ills. The problem is that the state has undermined the institutions that have allowed civil society to flourish. It has assumed the role of father as things like welfare and abortion on demand have given men the excuse to leave the women they impregnate on their own to deal with the consequences. It has taken over much of the role performed by churches and charities. Allowing no-fault divorce has undermined the institution of the family by turning the marital relationship from a relationship of love and self-sacrifice into one of self-satisfaction and so undermined the very civil society Wenzel would like to see promote virtuous living. The goal of social conservatives is first to prevent the state doing further damage to the institutions that make civil society possible and, if possible, repair some of the damage already done. Their fear is that if the state continues to undermine the family, churches and the like, Leviathan will be master of all as liberty dies because people look to the state first for their security. Liberty is an essential right, but it does not exist in a vacuum. Our tradition of liberty rests on a whole host of institutions and associations that must be preserved if liberty is to survive.
