What is Conservatism?
What, I ask, is Conservatism? Or, more concretely--since I write with an eye to present-day politics in the United States--what, to begin with, is contemporary, American Conservatism?
The question, make no mistake about it, is "up"; people, American undergraduates especially, are wondering about it, as wonder they well may. Contemporary political journalism finds the terms "conservative" and "liberal" somehow indispensable, so that people encounter them now twenty times a day: The coalition of Republicans and Democrats that struck down most of Mr. Kennedy's legislative program in the last session of Congress is a "conservative" coalition. Senator Byrd and Senator Goldwater are "conservatives," just as Senator Humphrey and Senator Douglas are "liberals." National Review is a "conservative" magazine, the New Republic a "liberal" magazine. Moreover, the journalists who employ the terms in question now do so unapologetically, and with what seems an easy confidence that their readers will understand by them what they mean by them. That meaning, however, is certainly not to be found in any dictionary or encyclopedia; nor, we may safely guess, could the writers who spend the terms as common coinage (or the readers who accept them) come up with definitions that they themselves would consider even marginally satisfactory. Nor can anyone with an ear for these things long remain unaware that there are difficulties, about the terms, and that people, who generally tend to be very wide about the language they speak, sense these difficulties, especially what I believe to be the major difficulty. That is to say, Yes, Senator Goldwater is a "conservative" and Senator Humphrey, who does seem to disagree with Senator Goldwater pretty much all the time, is a "liberal"; that is easy, presumptively without difficulties, if only because these are the terms that these distinguished statesmen apply to themselves. And Yes, National Review is "conservative" and New Republic "liberal": that also is easy, again because each of them applies the relevant term to itself but also because--for that seems to help--they so identify each other. But what, most people still have to ask, am I? What is The New York Times, which National Review excoriates as the fons et origo of the "Liberal propaganda line," and which Professor Rossiter, apparently without a bat of an eyelash, describes as a "great conservative newspaper"? What is Senator Thomas Dodd, who is said to owe his seat in the Senate to the labor (i.e., Liberal) vote in Connecticut and yet, when he speaks on foreign policy, receives "hero-treatment" in the editorial columns of National Review? What of the average newspaper reader, who can only say to himself that he seems to agree with the "conservatives" about some things and with the "liberals" about others?
All this adds up to a "major difficulty," as I see it, for the following reason: Current usage of the terms "conservative" and "liberal" clearly implies (a) that there is a line, on one side of which we may fairly expect to find conservatives who are consistently "conservative," standing over against, on the other side, liberals who are consistently "liberal," and therefore (b) that the line exists, and falls where it does fall, for good reason. It is, in consequence, an intelligible line and makes sense as a line (the words as currently used don't make sense unless that line makes sense). Yet one runs across no one who seems able to say where the line is and why and how it does make sense. So, I repeat, people are wondering, and, paradoxically, the more not the less because they feel
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