Ta-Nehisi on conservatism

Reader Helen asked me to take a look at Ta-Nehisi Coates' post explaining why he's not a conservative. Here's the gist of it:

I think about the terror that fell upon black communities in the South, after the Civil War, and I wonder whether it could have all been averted by a more a gradualist approach. Sadly, I don't think so. And yet you see Lincoln (a conservative at heart, no?), a reluctant reformer, doing whatever he can to avoid war, to avoid making the war about slavery (initially), trying to save the Union at all cost.

He isn't wrong. But if you are the slave, that essentially conservative approach will always privilege your master over you. Conservatism, with its belief in institutions, traditions, and the past, will seemingly always privilege (perhaps inadvertently) the powerful over the powerless. Institutions, traditions and the past belong to those with power. Privileging them, privileges their agents.

I think TNC is drawing overbroad general conclusions from a particular historical situation. Conservatism, properly understood, is not an ideology, but a temperament. TNC is correct that the default conservative position is in favor of institutions and traditions. But it is not for the sake of flattering power, but rather out of a skepticism about human nature and human endeavor, and the fear that as bad as things are now, we could make it even worse. The idea is that tradition is the accumulated wisdom of the species, and while it is not infallible -- Burke, the great articulator of modern Anglo conservatism, was quite clear that conservatives had to have some means of change, and accomodating natural change -- a wise polity will defer to it as a general matter.

This seems perfectly sound to me. It's clear that conservatism, or rather conservative people, were in the wrong on the matter of civil rights. All conservatives have to ask themselves why that was, and how our principles allowed us to defend something monstrous (by "us," I mean "our side"). The answer will have something to do with elevating conservatism to an absolute principle, and forgetting that our conservatism has to be applied with reference to what we are proposing to conserve. If one is proposing to conserve an immoral institution or practice, then obviously the conservative disposition will lead one to embrace and to defend immorality.

This is always a danger for conservatives. That said, as a general matter, I find the conservative disposition to be a more reliable way of interpreting the world and deciding how to act in it.

I would challenge liberals, though, to be similarly skeptical about liberalism's own claims. It seems to me that TNC's fundamental stance against institutions is not only wrong, but can be very misleading. It is a way of justifying permanent revolution. Wouldn't a thoughtful liberal seek to conserve traditions and institutions that embodied and defended liberal ideals?

Think of abortion. Liberals are fiercely determined to defend Roe v. Wade, because they believe a woman's freedom of choice re: pregnancy is a fundamental good. Liberals are functioning as conservatives on this topic, and indeed the Supreme Court, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, relied on a conservative appeal to tradition to defend a liberal policy goal, and to institutionalize it. To be precise, the Court argued that whatever might be said against Roe, the constitutional abortion license that it granted has become such an important part of American life that to reverse it would be too destructive to our common life. That was actually a temperamentally conservative ruling. But to people who believe that abortion is murder, as to those who believed that black Americans possessed full civil rights -- the Court was relying on conservatism to defend something gravely immoral. So you see, this goes both ways. The problem with liberals like TNC is they believe the fantasy that liberalism is always on the side of the powerless. This is why they defend affirmative action policies that deliver the children of the black middle class into positions at universities and in workplaces, while the children of the white working class are necessarily disadvantaged.

At bottom, I am not a liberal because I do not share the same view of human nature that most liberals do, and because I think that in my culture and country, our traditions and institutions, broadly speaking, are a wise guide to our life in common. And I believe liberals have such an unrealistic view of human nature that they typically run off to tear down fences without any regard for why the fences were erected, so to speak. Nevertheless, insofar as left-liberalism, even left-liberalism embedded in our present-day institutions and customs, work to suppress and roll back traditionalist Christian moral understandings and religious liberties, I will oppose them. Privileging liberal institutions because they are institutions privileges their agents, and can institutionalize immorality. On the other hand, a right-thinking conservative would necessarily be mindful about how upsetting the settled social order too radically could bring about more evils than we live with now. That's what it means to be a conservative, as opposed to an ideologue.