Friedrich von Hayek explains in his article “Why I am Not a Conservative” that, given a choice between the progressive parties that destroy liberty, and the conservative parties that defend the status quo, the classical liberal will “generally have little choice but to support the conservative parties.” This is because there are many parallels between the classical liberal prioritization of individual liberty and the conservative principle of limited government in countries with a tradition of liberty. For example, Hayek argues that “in the United States it is still possible to defend individual liberty by defending long-established institutions.”
Hayek further observes that, in this context, conservatism aligns with the defense of liberty: “In a country like the United States, which on the whole still has free institutions… the defense of the existing is often a defense of freedom.” This reflects that strand of conservative tradition seen in Magna Carta, which limits state power in order to enhance individual liberty. Hayek observes that,
…there is much that the liberal might with advantage have learned from the work of some conservative thinkers. To their loving and reverential study of the value of grown institutions we owe (at least outside the field of economics) some profound insights which are real contributions to our understanding of a free society.
However, the conservative principle of limited government was all but extinguished by Lincoln’s revolution, and today’s Lincolnites offer no meaningful opposition to progressivist encroachments on liberty couched in egalitarian language. They seem to fear that society will descend into a cesspit if people are not forced by the federal government to embrace equality, on pain of being prosecuted by the repurposed Department of Justice for violating civil rights. In this they are almost as authoritarian as the progressives.
Nowhere is this trend clearer than in the Republican commitment to the equality and civil rights regimes introduced by progressives, which many Republicans see as one of Lincoln’s greatest legacies. They see the GOP as the “true party” of civil rights, and regard Lincoln as a civil rights hero who created what the Marxist historian Eric Foner termed the “second founding” of America based on the plagiarized civil rights dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.
A recent example of uniparty bipartisanism was seen in the recent unveiling of the new statue of Barbara Johns. Many observers were rather surprised to see Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, and Glenn Younkin, Virginia’s Republican governor, celebrating the replacement of the statue of Robert E. Lee that once stood in the Capitol. The statue of Lee had previously been removed at the instigation of the Democrats. At the time, in December 2020, the New York Times reported that,
Virginia’s statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee was removed from its post in the U.S. Capitol on Monday morning, closing a year that saw Confederate statues toppled as the nation reckoned with racism in its history and institutions.
In April, the month before the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis would set off worldwide protests against racism and police brutality, Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia signed legislation directing the creation of a commission to study the removal and replacement of the statue.
…
The statue will be replaced with one of Barbara Johns, who as a 16-year-old defied school segregation in Virginia in 1951, Mr. Northam said. The governor, a Democrat, called her “a trailblazing young woman of color” who would inspire visitors to the Capitol to “create positive change in their communities, just like she did.”
The fact that many Republicans welcomed the replacement of Lee’s statue with a teenage civil rights activist illustrates their general tendency to support progressive political measures. They may protest at first, but ultimately, they bring up the progressive rear to defend, and indeed celebrate, the new status quo. This is one reason why Hayek criticized conservatism for lacking any philosophical principles. He observed:
I doubt whether there can be such a thing as a conservative political philosophy. Conservatism may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments.
In his article “Remembering the Right,” Paul Gottfried takes a somewhat different view on the nature of this problem, arguing that it is not so much that conservatives lack guiding principles, but more that the dominant form of organized conservatism, which he terms “Conservatism, Inc.,” functions “as a form of media entertainment and as a partisan PR machine.” Their leaders are “conservative stars” whose celebrity status is endorsed and rewarded “for defending the GOP and for reiterating old leftist positions.” They have deliberately jettisoned the principles for which true conservatives once stood. Gottfried observes:
Equally obvious has been the tendency to hurl into a bottomless memory hole provocative past thinkers, such as Southern traditionalists, localists, and military noninterventionists. Other thinkers have suffered an even more ignominious fate at the hands of Conservatism, Inc., by being transmogrified in such a way that they offer no challenge to current “conservative” agendas or media celebrities.
The Lincolnites have certainly rejected the principles and values that played a significant role in the conservative thought of America’s foundation. Among the memory-holed Southern traditionalists mentioned by Gottfried, two stand out—Robert Lewis Dabney and M.E. Bradford. The words of Dabney quoted by Gottfried echo some of the points made by Hayek when he criticized the conservative tendency to defend whatever may happen to be the status quo. Dabney saw the conservative party of his time as
…[A] party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable growling, but always acquiesces in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism.
Bradford also saw the danger in the Lincolnites’ “devotion to perpetually exciting goals, always just beyond our reach,” a quest which imbues the state with unlimited power, “statism covered by a patina of law.” Bradford argued that Lincoln transformed himself into “an Eastern priest/king” and recast the meaning of the Declaration of Independence to give ex post constitutionality to his war. This “opened the door to portentous changes that finally touch even liberty” as state power becomes, in practice, whatever the federal government wants it to be in its never ending quest to fulfill their promises of equality.
The Declaration itself, Bradford argued, did not seek to introduce racial equality as now claimed by the Lincolnites. It was, in his view, a conservative Declaration in the sense that it sought to conserve the rights of freeborn Englishmen against what they saw as the tyranny of the British Crown, reflecting “a political tradition that is conservative and contrary to Lincoln.” The American Revolutionaries were neither egalitarians nor social justice warriors, despite the best attempts of the GOP to portray the Founders as civil rights activists. Bradford explains that egalitarianism is not a conservative principle, and, on the contrary,
Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself—Equality, with the capital “E”—is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle.
Hayek echoes the warning of both Dabney and Bradford in pointing out that if conservative parties have no principled goal in sight, and simply seek to conserve the status quo, conservatism eventually falls into the same trap in which the Lincolnites languish, and becomes incapable of defending liberty. A Republican Party rooted in progressivism and devoted to promoting egalitarian ideals will inevitably fail in the defense of conservative principles. Hence, Hayek observes that,
…as the socialists have for a long time been able to pull harder, the conservatives have tended to follow the socialist…and have adopted at appropriate intervals of time those ideas made respectable by radical propaganda. It has been regularly the conservatives who have compromised with socialism.
