From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Subject: Conservatism Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Date: 1 Sep 1995 05:53:04 -0400
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                            Conservatism FAQ
                       September 1, 1995 Revision

This FAQ, posted monthly, attempts to deal with common questions and 
objections regarding conservatism.  Additional questions and comments 
are welcome.  The conservatism discussed is traditionalist American 
conservatism; other varieties are touched on in section 6 and their 
adherents are urged to draft additional FAQs.

A current version of this FAQ is available by ftp in compressed form 
from rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/conservatism/faq.Z.  A copy 
can also be obtained in uncompressed form by sending the message "send 
usenet/news.answers/conservatism/faq" by email to mail- 
server@rtfm.mit.edu.  A hypertext version is available at 
http://www.panix.com/~jk/consfaq.html.





                               QUESTIONS


1    General principles

1.1  How does conservatism differ from other political views?

1.2  Why is tradition a source of "greater wisdom"?

1.3  Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning?

1.4  How can we know our own tradition is the right one?

1.5  What about objective truth?

1.6  Why are most people seriously involved in studying and dealing with 
social issues liberals?

2    Tradition and change

2.1  Why not just accept change?

2.2  Isn't conservatism simply another way of saying that people who 
currently have wealth and power should keep it?

2.3  Wouldn't we still have slavery if conservatives had always been 
running the show?

3    Social and cultural issues

3.1  What are family values and what is so great about them?

3.2  Why do conservatives always want to force their values on everybody 
else?

3.3  Aren't conservatives racist sexist homophobes?

3.4  Why can't conservatives just accept that people's personal values 
differ?

3.5  What role do conservatives think government should play in 
enforcing moral values?

3.6  What happens to feminists, homosexuals, racial minorities and 
others marginalized in a conservative society?

3.7  What about freedom?

4    Economic issues

4.1  Why do conservatives say they favor virtue and community but favor 
laissez-faire capitalism?

4.2  Why don't conservatives care about what happens to the poor, weak, 
discouraged, and outcast?

4.3  Shouldn't the government do something for people for whom the usual 
support networks don't work?

4.4  What about welfare for the middle classes?

4.5  If conserving is a good thing, why isn't ecology a conservative 
issue?

5    Conservatism in an age of established liberalism

5.1  Why do conservatives talk as if the sky is about to fall and all 
good things are in the past?

5.2  Isn't conservatism essentially nostalgia for a past that never was 
and can't be restored?

5.3  What's all this stuff about community and tradition when the groups 
that matter these days are based on interests and perspectives rather 
than traditions?

5.4  Shouldn't conservatives favor well-established things like the 
welfare state and steady expansion of the scope of the civil rights 
laws?

5.5  I was raised to believe certain substantive liberal positions are 
the positions good Americans should hold.  Wouldn't it be conservative 
for me to stay true to them?

5.6  I was raised a liberal.  Doesn't that mean that to be conservative 
I should stay true to liberalism?

6    The conservative rainbow

6.1  How do libertarians differ from conservatives?

6.2  What are mainstream conservatives?

6.3  What are neoconservatives?

6.4  What are paleoconservatives?

6.5  What are paleolibertarians?

6.6  What are Frankfurt School Neopaleoconservatives?

6.7  Where do the pro-life movement and Religious Right fit into all 
this?

6.8  What are the differences between American conservatism and that of 
other countries?

6.9  What do all these things called "conservatism" have in common?


                                ANSWERS


1    General Principles

1.1  How does conservatism differ from other political views common 
today?

     By its emphasis on tradition as a source of wisdom greater than 
     that of any individual or faction.

1.2  Why is tradition a source of "greater wisdom"?

     It gives us a comprehensive and generally coherent point of view 
     that reflects the experience and thought of other times and a 
     collection of habits that have proved useful in practical affairs.

     The usual alternative to reliance on tradition is reliance on 
     theory.  Taking theory literally can be costly because theory 
     achieves clarity by ignoring things that are difficult to 
     articulate.  Such things can be important; the reason practical 
     things like politics and morals are learned mostly by imitation and 
     experience is that most of what we learn consists in habits, 
     attitudes and implicit presumptions that we couldn't begin to put 
     into words.  There is no means other than tradition to accumulate, 
     conserve and hand on such things.

1.3  Why isn't it better to reason things out from the beginning?

     Our knowledge is partial and attained with difficulty.  The effects 
     of political proposals are difficult to predict and as the 
     proposals become more ambitious their effects become incalculable.  
     We can't evaluate political ideas without accepting far more 
     beliefs, presumptions and attitudes than we could possibly judge 
     critically.  Accordingly, the most reasonable approach to politics 
     is to take the existing system of society as a given that can't be 
     changed wholesale and try to ensure that any changes cohere with 
     the principles and practices that make the existing system work as 
     well as it does.

1.4  There are lots of conflicting traditions.  How can we know our own 
is the right one?

     We can't be certain.  Our own tradition may lead us astray where 
     another would not.  However, that possibility can not be a reason 
     for rejecting our own tradition unless we have a method 
     transcending tradition for determining when that has happened, and 
     in general there is no such method.

     Putting issues of truth aside, the various parts of a particular 
     tradition are adjusted to each other in a way that makes it 
     difficult to abandon one part and substitute something from another 
     tradition.  A French cook will have trouble if he has to rely on 
     Chinese ingredients or utensils.  Issues of coherence and 
     practicality accordingly make it likely that we will do better 
     developing the tradition to which we are accustomed than attempting 
     to adopt a different one.

1.5  But what about objective truth?

     Comprehensive objective truth exists, but we cannot have it in the 
     form of a set of propositions with the same meaning for all.  We 
     apprehend truth largely through tradition and in a way that cannot 
     be fully articulated, and cannot do otherwise.

1.6  If conservatism is so great, why are most people seriously involved 
in studying and dealing with social issues liberals?

     Conservatives do not believe it is possible to define the 
     considerations relevant to social life clearly enough to make a 
     technological approach to society possible.  Accordingly, they 
     reject efforts to divide human affairs into separate compartments 
     to be mastered and dealt with by a comprehensive plan for the sake 
     of such things as economic well-being or equality of condition.  
     Academic and other policy experts are defined as such by their 
     participation in such efforts.  It would be surprising if they did 
     not prefer perspectives that give free rein to efforts to design 
     and implement social policy, such as welfare-state liberalism, over 
     perspectives that are suspicious of such undertakings.

2    Tradition and Change

2.1  Society has always changed, for the better in some ways and for the 
worse in others.  Why not accept change, especially if everything is so 
complicated and hard to figure out?

     Change has always involved resistance as well as acceptance.  
     Changes that have to make their way over opposition will presumably 
     be better than changes that are accepted without serious 
     questioning.

     In addition, modern conservatism is not resistance to change as 
     such, but to intentional change of a peculiarly sweeping sort 
     characteristic of the period beginning with the French Revolution 
     and guided by Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophies 
     such as liberalism and Marxism.  For example, the family as an 
     institution has changed over time in conjunction with other social 
     changes.  However, the current left/liberal demand that all 
     definite institutional structure for the family be abolished as an 
     infringement of individual autonomy is different in kind from past 
     developments, and conservatives believe it must be fought.

2.2  Isn't conservatism simply another way of saying that people who 
currently have wealth and power should keep it?

     The adoption of any political view will promote the particular 
     advantage of some people.  If political views are to be treated as 
     rationalizations of the interests of existing or would-be elites, 
     then that treatment should apply equally to conservatism and all 
     other views.  On the other hand, if arguments that political views 
     advance the public good are to be taken seriously, then the 
     arguments for conservatism should be considered on their own terms.

     It's worth noting that movements aiming at social justice typically 
     turn out intensely elitist because the more comprehensive and 
     abstract the political principle, the smaller the group that can be 
     relied on to understand and apply it correctly.

2.3  Wouldn't we still have slavery if conservatives had always been 
running the show?

     Why?  Conservatism is not rejection of all change; moral habits 
     evolve with experience and changing circumstances, and social 
     arrangements that grow to be too much at odds with the moral life 
     of a people change or disappear.

     The conservative outlook emphasizes community and mutual 
     obligation, both of which slavery denies.  Slavery disappeared in 
     Western and Central Europe long before the modern revolutionary 
     age.  In modern times brutal forced labor has been far more 
     characteristic of radical than conservative regimes; the reason is 
     that radicalism, by overemphasizing the role of theory in politics, 
     destroys reciprocity between the ruling theoreticians and those 
     they govern, and so is far more likely than conservatism to lead to 
     gross oppression.

3    Social and Cultural Issues

3.1  What are family values and what is so great about them?

     In general, they are values that promote and maintain a society in 
     which people's most basic loyalties, and the relationships upon 
     which they rely most fundamentally, have to do with particular 
     people rather than the state.  Family values are fundamental to 
     moral life because it is primarily in relationships with particular 
     people that are taken with the utmost seriousness that we find the 
     degree of mutual knowledge and responsiveness that is necessary for 
     our obligations to others to become concrete realities for us.

3.2  Why do conservatives always want to force their values on everybody 
else?

     Conservatives aren't different from other people in that regard.  
     Anyone with a notion of how society should work will believe that 
     other people should follow the program he favors.  If Liberal Jack 
     thinks the government should be responsible for the well-being of 
     children and wants to support the arrangement through a tax system 
     that sends people to jail who don't comply, and Conservative Jill 
     thinks the family should be responsible and wants to implement that 
     responsibility through a system of sex roles enforced by informal 
     social sanctions for violators, each will want what the public 
     schools teach to be consistent with his program.  Both will object 
     to a school textbook entitled _Heather Has Two Mommies Who Get Away 
     with Paying No Taxes Because They Accept Payment Only in Cash_.  
     Liberal Jack will object to the book _Heather's Mommy Stays Home 
     and Her Daddy Goes to the Office_, while Conservative Jill will 
     object to other well-known texts.  Why should one be considered 
     more tolerant than the other?

     The issue of social tolerance most often comes up in connection 
     with sexual morality.  For a discussion from a conservative 
     perspective, see the Sexual Morality FAQ, available at 
     http://www.panix.com/~jk/sex.html (hypertext version) or 
     http://www.panix.com/~jk/sex.faq (plain ASCII version).

3.3  Aren't conservatives racist sexist homophobes?

     That depends on what those words mean.

     "Racist"--Conservatives consider community loyalty important.  The 
     communities people grow up in are generally connected to ethnicity.  
     That's no accident, because ethnicity is what develops when people 
     live together with a common way of life for a long time.  
     Accordingly, conservatives think some degree of ethnic loyalty and 
     separateness is OK.

     "Sexist"--All known societies have engaged in sex-role 
     stereotyping, with men undertaking more responsibility for public 
     affairs and women for home, family, and childcare.  There are 
     obvious benefits to stereotyping, since it makes it far more likely 
     that individual men and women will complement each other and form 
     stable and functional unions for the rearing of children.  
     Conservatives see no reason to struggle against those benefits, 
     especially in view of the apparent consequences of the weakening of 
     stereotypical obligations between the sexes in recent decades.

     "Homophobes"--Finally, sex-role stereotyping implies a tendency to 
     reject conduct and patterns of impulse and attitude that don't fit 
     the stereotypes, such as homosexuality.

3.4  Why can't conservatives just accept that people's personal values 
differ?

     Both liberals and conservatives recognize limits on the degree to 
     which differing personal values can be accommodated.  Such limits 
     often arise because personal values can be realized only by 
     establishing particular sorts of relations with other people, and 
     no society can favor all relationships equally.  No society, for 
     example, can favor equally a woman who primarily wants to have a 
     career and one who primarily wants to be a mother and homemaker.  
     Institutions that accept the general validity of traditional sex 
     roles will favor the latter at the expense of the former, while 
     institutions that reject sex role stereotypes in favor of 
     individual independence will do the reverse.

3.5  What role do conservatives think government should play in 
enforcing moral values?

     Since conservatives believe moral values should be determined more 
     by the feelings and traditions of the people than by formal 
     decisions and theory, they typically prefer to rely on informal 
     social sanctions rather than enforcement by government.  
     Nonetheless, they believe that government should be run on the 
     assumption that the moral values on which society relies are good 
     things that should not be undercut.  Thus, conservatives oppose 
     public school curricula that depict such values as optional and 
     programs that fund their rejection, for example by subsidizing 
     unwed parents or artists who intend their works to outrage accepted 
     morality.  How much more the government can or should do to promote 
     morality is a matter of circumstance to be determined in accordance 
     with experience.  In this connection, as in others, conservatives 
     typically do not have high ambitions for what government can 
     achieve.

3.6  What happens to feminists, homosexuals, racial minorities and 
others marginalized in a conservative society?

     The same as happens in a liberal society to religious and social 
     conservatives and to ethnics who consider their ethnicity 
     important.  They find themselves in a social order they may not 
     like dominated by people who may look down on them in which it may 
     be difficult to live as they prefer.  In both kinds of society, 
     people on the outs may be able either to persuade others to their 
     way of thinking, to practice the way of life they prefer in 
     private, or to break off from the larger society and establish 
     their own communities.  Such possibilities are in general more 
     realistic in a conservative society that emphasizes federalism, 
     local control, and minimal bureaucracy than in a liberal society 
     that idealizes social justice and therefore tries to establish a 
     unitary and homogenous social order.  For example, ethnic 
     minorities in a conservative society may well be able to maintain 
     themselves and thrive through some combination of adaptation and 
     niche-finding, while in a liberal society they will find themselves 
     on the receiving end of a comprehensive campaign to eliminate the 
     public significance of their (and every other) ethnic culture and 
     the other things that constitute them as a separate people.

     An important question is whether alienation from the social order 
     will be more common in a conservative or a liberal society.  It 
     seems that it will be more common in a social order based on 
     universal implementation of a bureaucracy's conception of social 
     justice than in one that accepts the moral feelings and loyalties 
     that arise over time within particular communities.  So it seems 
     likely that a liberal society will have more citizens than a 
     conservative society who feel that their deepest values and 
     loyalties are peripheral to the concerns of the institutions that 
     dominate their lives and so feel marginalized.

3.7  What about freedom?

     Conservatives are strong supporters of social institutions that 
     realize and protect freedom, but believe such institutions attain 
     their full value as part of a larger whole.  Freedom is fully 
     realized only when we are held responsible for the choices we make, 
     and it is most valuable in a setting in which goods can readily be 
     chosen that add up to a good life.  Accordingly, conservatives 
     reject perspectives that view freedom as an absolute, and recognize 
     that the institutions through which freedom is realized must 
     respect other goods without which freedom would not be worth 
     having.

     In addition, conservatives believe there is a close connection 
     between freedom and participation in government.  Since how we live 
     affects others, an important aspect of freedom is taking part in 
     making society what it is.  Accordingly, the conservative 
     principles of federalism, local rule, and private property help 
     realize freedom by devolving power into many hands and making 
     widespread participation in running society a reality.

4    Economic Issues

4.1  Why do conservatives say they favor virtue and community but in 
fact favor laissez-faire capitalism?  Doesn't laissez-faire capitalism 
promote the opposite?

     It's not clear that laissez-faire capitalism need undermine moral 
     community.  "Laissez faire capitalism" is a description of what the 
     government does, not of society as a whole.  While social 
     statistics are a crude measure of the state of morality and 
     community, it is noteworthy that crime and illegitimacy rates in 
     England fell by about half from the middle to the end of the 19th 
     century, the heyday of untrammelled capitalism.

     Conservatives typically view economic liberty as one of the 
     traditional liberties of the American people that has served that 
     people well, but are not fans of pure laissez-faire.  Many are 
     skeptical of free trade and most favor restraints on immigration 
     for the sake of permitting the existence and development of a 
     national community.  Nor do they oppose in principle the regulation 
     or suppression of businesses that affect the moral order of 
     society, such as prostitution, pornography, and the sale of certain 
     drugs.

     Conservatives strongly favor free markets when the alternative is 
     to expand bureaucracy to implement liberal goals, a process that 
     clearly has the effect of damaging virtue and community.  They also 
     recognize that the market reflects men's infinitely various and 
     often unconscious and inarticulate perceptions and goals far better 
     than any bureaucratic process could.  Since conservatism is in part 
     the belief that social life can't in general be administered, 
     conservatives tend to prefer self-organization to central control.  

4.2  Why don't conservatives care about what happens to the poor, weak, 
discouraged, and outcast?

     Conservatives do care about what happens to such people.  That's 
     why they oppose government programs that multiply the poor, weak, 
     discouraged, and outcast by undermining and disrupting the network 
     of social customs and relations that enable people to carry on 
     their lives without the aid of government bureaucracy.  Those 
     tempted to attribute opposition to the welfare state to narrow 
     self-seeking should consider the increase in charitable giving 
     during the Decade of Greed and its subsequent decline.

     Moral community declines when people rely on government to solve 
     their problems rather than on themselves and each other.  It is the 
     weak who suffer most from the resulting moral chaos.  Those who 
     think that interventionist liberalism means that the weak face 
     fewer problems should consider the effects on women, children, and 
     blacks of trends of the past 30 years (a period of large increases 
     in social welfare expenditures) such as family instability, 
     increased crime, reduced educational achievement, and the reversal 
     in the older trend toward less poverty.

4.3  What about people for whom the usual support networks don't work?  
Shouldn't the government do something for them?

     Maybe.  The issue is the practical effect of government programs on 
     people's responsibility for themselves and for each other.  It 
     appears that in the long run a system whereby the government 
     guarantees that no one lacks the material basis for a decent life 
     can not be made to work without an elaborate system of compulsion, 
     and increases degradation and suffering by weakening self-reliance 
     and the moral bonds among individuals that give rise to community.  
     On the other hand, some social welfare measures (free clinics for 
     mothers and children or measures that aid only clearly deserving 
     people) may well increase social welfare even in the long term.

     Because of the obscurity of the issue, the difficulty in a 
     democracy of limiting the expansion of government benefit programs, 
     and the value of encouraging widespread participation in public 
     life, the best resolution may be to keep government out of the 
     matter and let people support voluntarily the institutions and 
     programs they think are socially beneficial.

4.4  What about welfare for the middle classes, like social security, 
medicare, the home mortgage interest deduction, and so on?

     The most consistent conservatives want to get rid of all of them.  
     Social security and medicare, they say, are financially unsound, 
     and are socially harmful because they lead people capable of saving 
     for their own retirement and supporting their own parents to rely 
     on the government instead.  They could better be replaced by 
     private savings, prefunded medical insurance, greater emphasis on 
     intergenerational obligations within families, and other 
     arrangements that would evolve if the government presence were 
     reduced or eliminated.

     Other conservatives distinguish these middle-class benefits from 
     welfare by the element of reciprocity; people get social security 
     and medicare only if they have already given a great deal to 
     society, and in the case of the mortgage interest deduction the 
     "benefit" consists only in the right to keep more of one's 
     earnings.  Still others try to split the difference somehow.  As a 
     practical matter, the reluctance of many conservatives to disturb 
     these arrangements is likely motivated in part by the electoral 
     power of their supporters.

4.5  If conserving is a good thing, why isn't ecology a conservative 
cause?

     Conservatism is concerned more with relations among men than those 
     between man and nature, so ecology is not one of its defining 
     issues.  Some conservatives and conservative schools of thought 
     take environmental issues very seriously; others less so.  There 
     are, of course, conservative grounds for criticizing or rejecting 
     particular aspects of the environmental movement.

5    Conservatism in an Age of Established Liberalism

5.1  Why do conservatives talk as if the sky is about to fall and all 
good things are in the past?  People have been bemoaning the present for 
a long time but things don't seem so bad today.

     Conservatives don't predict more disasters than liberals, just 
     different disasters.  Like other people they see both hopeful and 
     hazardous trends in the current situation.  Post-communist 
     societies display the social effects of energetic attempts to 
     implement post-Enlightenment radicalism.  Less energetic attempts, 
     such as modern American liberalism, do not lead to similar 
     consequences as quickly.  Nonetheless, social trends toward 
     breakdown of affiliations among individuals, centralization of 
     political power in irresponsible elites, irreconcilable social 
     conflicts, and increasing stupidity and brutality in daily life 
     suggest that those consequences are coming just the same.  Why not 
     worry about them?

5.2  Isn't conservatism essentially nostalgia for a past that never was 
and can't be restored?

     Conservatism involves a recognition that certain trends are 
     pernicious because they destroy the possibility of moral community.  
     Examples include the current trends toward radical individualism, 
     radical egalitarianism, and hedonism.  Since moral community is 
     required for the coherence of individual and social life, and since 
     a coherent way of life is for us a practical necessity, 
     conservatives are confident that in some fashion those trends will 
     be reversed and in important respects the moral and social future 
     will resemble the past more than the present.  In particular, the 
     future will see less emphasis on individual autonomy and more on 
     essentialist ties among men and on the autonomy of moral tradition.

     The timing and form of the reversal is of course uncertain.  
     Because conservatives would prefer it to happen as soon and as 
     simply as possible they are accused of nostalgia and attempts to 
     turn back the clock.  If they don't get what they prefer the 
     reversal will nonetheless take place, but with more conflict, 
     disruption, and unpredictable consequences.

5.3  What's all this stuff about community and tradition?  The groups 
that matter these days are groups like yuppies, gays, and senior 
citizens that people join as individuals and are based on interests and 
perspectives rather than tradition.

     Can this be true in the long run?  When times are good people 
     imagine that they can define themselves as they choose, but a 
     society will not long exist if the only thing they have in common 
     is a commitment to self-definition.  The necessity for something 
     beyond that becomes clearest when the times require sacrifice.  
     Membership in a group with an identity developed and inculcated 
     through tradition becomes far more relevant then than career path, 
     life-style option, or stage of life.  One of Bill Clinton's 
     problems as president is that people think he's a yuppie who 
     wouldn't die for anything; at some point that kind of problem 
     becomes decisive.

5.4  Many things liberals favor, such as the welfare state and steady 
expansion of the scope of the civil rights laws, are well-established 
parts of our political arrangements.  Shouldn't conservatives favor 
things that are so well-established?

     Yes, to the extent they are consistent with the older and more 
     fundamental parts of our social arrangements (such as family, 
     community, and traditional moral standards) and contribute to the 
     over-all functioning of the whole.  Unfortunately, the particular 
     things mentioned fail on both points.

5.5  I was raised to believe in certain substantive liberal positions 
(the color- and gender-blind ideal, for example) on the grounds that 
those are the positions good Americans should hold.  Wouldn't it be 
conservative for me to stay true to them?

     Yes, if those are the views the people among whom you grew up 
     really lived by and experience does not drive you to change them.  
     Such a situation is unlikely to arise often.  Liberal positions 
     (affirmative action is an example) typically are devised centrally 
     and propagated by the mass media and educational system.  On the 
     whole they are more suited to be applied to society as a whole by a 
     bureaucracy than incorporated into people's informal day-to-day way 
     of life, and are adverse to the connections among men that make 
     community possible.

5.6  I was raised a liberal.  Doesn't that mean that to be conservative 
I should stay true to liberalism?

     How can you feel bound to a viewpoint that does not value loyalty?  
     If you were raised an ideological liberal, you were raised to 
     reject tradition and follow abstract reason or current fashion.  
     Such a view can survive only if it is not universally accepted.  For 
     someone raised in it the conservative approach would be to look for 
     guidance to the things on which the people with whom he grew up 
     actually relied for coherence and stability, including the 
     traditions of the larger community upon which their way of life 
     depended.

6    The Conservative Rainbow

6.1  How do libertarians differ from conservatives?

     In general, libertarians emphasize limited government more than 
     conservatives and believe the sole legitimate purpose of government 
     is the protection of property rights against force and fraud.  
     Thus, they usually consider legal restrictions on such things as 
     immigration, drug use, and prostitution to be illegitimate 
     violations of personal liberty.  Many but not all libertarians hold 
     a position that might be described as economically Right (anti- 
     socialist) and culturally Left (opposed to cultural repressiveness, 
     racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on), and tend to attribute to 
     state intervention the survival of things the cultural Left 
     dislikes.

     Speaking more abstractly, the libertarian perspective assigns to 
     the market the position conservatives assign to tradition as the 
     great accumulator and integrator of the implicit knowledge of 
     society.  In addition, libertarians tend to believe in strict 
     methodological individualism and absolute and universally valid 
     human rights while conservatives are less likely to have the former 
     commitment and tend to understand rights by reference to the forms 
     they take in particular societies.

6.2  What are mainstream conservatives?

     People who mix the traditionalist conservatism outlined in this FAQ 
     with varying proportions of libertarianism and liberalism.  Rush 
     Limbaugh is a mainstream conservatives; so in general is any 
     conservative who gets elected.

     Mainstream conservatives often speak the language of liberalism, 
     especially classical liberalism.  Their appeal is nonetheless to 
     tradition; typically, they reject political practices that have become 
     accepted in the recent past by appealing to those characteristic of 
     the more remote past or to social practices traditionally viewed as 
     outside politics that now have been called into question and are 
     seen as political.

6.3  What are neoconservatives?

     A group of conservatives most of whom were liberals until left-wing 
     radicalism went mass-market in the late sixties.  Many of them have 
     been associated with the magazines _Commentary_ and _The Public 
     Interest_, and a neopapalist contingent is associated with the 
     magazine _First Things_.  Some still have positions consistent with 
     New Deal liberalism, while others have moved on to a more full- 
     blown conservatism.  Their influence has been out of proportion to 
     their numbers, in part because they include a number of well-known 
     Northeastern and West Coast journalists and academics and in part 
     because having once been liberals they still can speak the language 
     and retain a certain credibility in establishment circles.

6.4  What are paleoconservatives?

     Another group of conservatives most of whom were never liberals and 
     live someplace other than the Northeast megalopolis or California.  
     The most prominent paleo publications are _Chronicles_ and _Modern 
     Age_.  They arose as a self-conscious group in opposition to 
     neoconservatives after the success of the neos in establishing 
     themselves within the Reagan administration, and especially after 
     the neos helped defeat the nomination of paleo Mel Bradford as head 
     of the National Endowment for the Humanities in favor of one of 
     their own, Bill Bennett.  The views set forth in this FAQ are 
     consistent with those of most paleoconservatives as well as many 
     neoconservatives.

6.5  What are paleolibertarians?

     A group of libertarians, notably Llewellyn Rockwell and the late 
     Murray Rothbard, who reject mainstream libertarianism as culturally 
     libertine and often squishy-soft on big government and who ally 
     themselves with the paleoconservatives.  Their main publication is 
     the _Rothbard-Rockwell Report_.

6.6  What are Frankfurt School Neopaleoconservatives?

     A group (so named for the first time in this FAQ) that has come by 
     way of Frankfurt School cultural criticism to a position 
     reminiscent of paleoconservatism emphasizing federalism and 
     rejection of the managerial state.  Their main publication is 
     _Telos_, which now includes paleocon Paul Gottfried on its 
     editorial board.

6.7  Where do the pro-life movement and Religious Right fit into all 
this?

     Like conservatism, both movements reject hedonism and radical 
     individual autonomy and emphasize the authority of institutions 
     other than the modern managerial state.  Their general goals can 
     usually be supported on conservative principles, but they tend to 
     base their claims on principles of natural law or revelation that 
     take precedence over tradition.  Thus, these movements are distinct 
     from conservatism although there is also much in common.

6.8  What are the differences between American conservatism and that of 
other countries?

     They correspond to the differences in political tradition.  In 
     general, conservatism in America has a much stronger 
     capitalist/libertarian and populist streak than in other countries.  
     The differences seem to be declining as other countries become more 
     like America and as many American conservatives become more 
     alienated from their own country's actual way of life and system of 
     government.

6.9  What do all these things called "conservatism" have in common?

     Each rejects, through an appeal to something traditionally valued, 
     the liberal tendency to treat individual impulse and desire as the 
     final authorities.  Differences in the preferred point of reference 
     give rise to different forms of conservatism.  Those who appeal to 
     the independent and responsible individual become libertarian 
     conservatives, while those who appeal to a traditional culture or 
     to God become traditionalist or religious conservatives.  Depending 
     on circumstances and the traditions of a people, the alliance among 
     different forms of conservatism may be closer or more tenuous.  In 
     America today libertarian, traditionalist and religious 
     conservatives generally find common ground in favoring federalism 
     and opposing the managerial welfare state.
-- 
Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com and http://www.panix.com/~jk)
Palindrome of the week:     No sir! Away! A papaya war is on.

