Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Are conservatives out of ideas?

Megan McArdle poses the titular question, opining:

… in my opinion, the conservatarian coalition is basically out of ammo. A basic commitment to free markets was enough to hold the coalition together through communism and into the current decade. But “tax cuts are awesome” is not the universal solution to every problem, and moreover, they’re totally unaffordable thanks to entitlements. (Obama’s plans are totally unaffordable too, for the same reason, but that’s a rant for another day).

There is, however, a nascent optimism in the conservative and libertarian policy worlds. The last five years have been pretty demoralizing. Now I’m seeing more and more people who are actually looking forward to going into the wilderness for a little while, where they can get their heads together without having to worry about the intellectual compromises of actual politics. There’s disgust at certain policies that they can’t stop, like the revolting farm bill. But people are kind of excited about figuring out what the next big thing is.

To me, this is basically wrong headed. I can’t think of anything more contrary to the spirit of Burkean conservatism than a seach for the “next big thing.” Indeed, I would argue that a large part of the problem with modern conservatism is that Bush and the K Street Gang were more concerned with finding something big to do than with standing athwart history shouting stop.

Instead, it is the Libertarians and the progressives who are Big Idea people. Despite their obvious differences in philosophy, they share the absurd belief that if only their big idea(s) came to pass, society would inexorably progress towards some ideal.

In contrast, I stand with Buckley ("Don’t let ideologues try to create heaven on earth, because they’ll deprive us of freedom and make things a lot worse") and Bill Bonner ("Traditional American conservatism was not a doctrine of world improvement, but a mood of skepticism toward all “isms” and empire builders").

Why? Think about the Big Ideas of the 20th Century: Compassionate conservatism, Objectivism, Deconstructionism, Freudianism, Nazism, Conceptualism, Socialism, Syndicalism, Minimalism, Communism, Functionalism, Postmodernism, Dadism, Fundamentalism, Fascism. All of them turned out to be basically bad ideas. Some were worse than others, of course, and a few were plain horrific, but my point is that they’re all the sort of thing that gets thrown up when we undertake a search for big new ideas. “A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers,” as Russell Kirk aptly put it.

Update: Ilya Somin critiques this post. I reply. In summary, my basic gripe with Big Ideas is that people with Big Ideas generally want to convert other people to their ideas. And that’s usually a bad thing. As the Iraq war’s taught us, trying to convert people to even good Big Ideas like democracy can sometimes work out quite badly. This was not as clear in the original post as it should have been. But I think the idea was there, especially when I wrote that:

I would argue that a large part of the problem with modern conservatism is that Bush and the K Street Gang were more concerned with finding something big to do than with standing athwart history shouting stop.

And when I wrote about:

the absurd belief that if only their big idea(s) came to pass, society would inexorably progress towards some ideal.

Consider the case of Democracy. Ilya is obviously correct that Democracy is an idea that’s both Big and good. But when Bush tried to export Democracy at the point of a gun, things didn’t turn out so well.

Anyway, thanks to Ilya for giving me the opportunity (and reason) to clarify.