Texas Republicans recently became embroiled in a dispute between two factions that we could call, for purposes of exposition, the “Heritage Texans” and the “Creedal Texans.”
Heritage Republicans believe that a nation is constituted by a specific and identifiable people who are historically rooted in a place over time, while Creedal Republicans believe in a concept they call “the idea of Texas.” Their idea of Texas involves hard work, love of football, and the savoir-faire to say, “Hook ‘em Horns.” To the Creedals, anyone from anywhere in the world who embraces this idea is as much a Texan as anyone whose ancestors rode with the Texas cavalry in 1861.
Which of these factions represents true conservatism? What is real conservatism, anyway, in a situation where different sides of an allegedly conservative party are unable to agree on such a fundamental issue?
Creedal Republicans believe that conservative values entail upholding the civil rights laws that were introduced by the Radical Republicans in the post-bellum reconstruction era. The political consensus today, as they see it, is based on what they call “our shared values.” These values are said to be enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, with which, it is further assumed, we all agree. Anyone who dissents from that is typically denounced as “racist.”
The fact that their political opponents agree with them on this issue does not strike the Creedals as troubling, because many of them are, in any case, devotees of political compromise. They seek the middle ground between opposing parties and favor issues on which the Uniparty can stand united. But when the strongest supporters of a conservative faction are socialists, questions must be raised about the coherence of their political ideology.
Writing in 2019, Kai Weiss observed that some conservatives “have even gone so far as to embrace Bernie Sanders, the openly (“democratic”) socialist democratic presidential candidate.” Their abandonment of free market policies was driven, at least in part, by what they saw as “disintegration of society into individualism of the wrong sort.” The concept of “individualism” is fraught with ambiguity, but by “the wrong sort” they usually mean the type of atomistic individualism that rejects the importance of family, community, and nation.
In the natural rights tradition, individuals are not atomistic and human beings are more than just “an idea.” They also form societies where they live together, their bonds of loyalty being rooted in time and place. The question is whether this tradition has any relevance in understanding the political ideology of conservatism in a time when many liberal conservatives are ideologically indistinguishable from progressives.
A good starting point in answering this question is the philosophy of Edmund Burke, who is widely regarded as “the father of conservatism.” While many scholars traditionally regarded Burke as a utilitarian who scorned the natural law tradition, it is now thought that this was a distortion of Burke’s philosophy. Peter Stanlis argued, in his book Edmund Burke and the Natural Law, that “Burke’s political philosophy [cannot] truly be understood without reference to classical and Scholastic Natural law.”
Stanslis argued that one reason why influential philosophers rejected the “natural law” was that it seemed vague and unscientific. He observed that, “Burke frequently attacked what he called ‘metaphysical’ or ‘abstract’ rights, and that he generally placed against such ‘rights’ arguments of moral prudence, legal expediency, and practical utility.” Stanlis argued that Burke emphasized practical utility not because he worshiped efficiency but because he wanted to avoid “a useless quarrel in metaphysics” that would be of little value in resolving practical problems.
Acknowledging these concerns about the perceived metaphysical nature of natural rights, Murray Rothbard observed that, “Among intellectuals who consider themselves ‘scientific,’ the phrase ‘the nature of man’ is apt to have the effect of a red flag on a bull.” Natural law is seen as mythical, making it an unsuitable foundation for political principles. Any attempt to derive political principles from some “higher” law called the law of nature is feared to be hopelessly arbitrary and subjective. Stanlis also saw that as a reason why many philosophers rejected the natural law. He argued that,
David Hume’s rejection of Natural Law undoubtedly resulted in part from his impatience with the ambiguities in the eighteenth century uses of “nature.” “The word natural,” he wrote, “is commonly taken in so many senses, and is of so loose a signification, that it seems vain to dispute whether justice be natural or not.”
Many positivist or utilitarian perspectives consider it much more sensible to insist that “right” or “wrong,” for political purposes, can only be reliably ascertained by reference to the prevailing law or the democratic consensus. As they see it, social consensus is to be derived through the voting process, and majority opinion is then taken to reflect the will of society. A course of action is deemed “wrong” if it violates the prevailing legal principles, and not by reference to any natural law principles.
In that context, “natural rights” may be thought to have little or nothing to do with conservatism. On the contrary, it is widely associated with radicals of a socialist bent who believe that unlimited free stuff is their “natural right” and are, therefore, unconcerned about the costs their demands will impose on others.
Stanlis explained that while “nature” and “natural” are superficially ambiguous terms, it would be wrong to suppose that by choosing utilitarian standards ambiguity in political discourse can be avoided. On the contrary, ideological ambiguity besets all political labels and philosophical terminology. It explains why we can end up with some Republicans who share all the same political beliefs as the Democrats. They may use the same words, but they mean entirely different things.
It is impossible to avoid ambiguity when we can only rely entirely on words to communicate. As Stanlis put it, abandoning the natural law altogether for that reason is “a precaution carried to excess.” By that reasoning, we could never rely on any political or philosophical terminology because someone with an entirely different worldview could always co-opt it for their own ends. The use of the word “liberal” to signify “socialist” is a good example of how that happens.
That rush to avoid the language of natural law has led many to overlook important aspects of Burke’s conservatism. Like Aristotle, Burke drew upon “eternal laws of right and wrong,” and an “immutable, pre-existent law” derived from human nature and reason. For example, he argued that property rights are inherent and inalienable rather than being the gift of the government. His concept of liberty also recognized the concept of free will emphasized by natural lawyers. As Stanlis observed, Burke was interested not just in paying lip service to liberty in the abstract sense, but in advancing true liberty in the real world. Understanding the nature of man is central to this enterprise:
True liberty, Burke cautioned, is “not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty, as if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will.” Such “liberty” was but another name for arbitrary power, such as George III had claimed over the colonies or Hastings over India, and Burke knew it could not be reconciled to civil liberty under Natural Law. Like Aristotle, Burke believed man was by nature a political animal, so that true liberty must be “social freedom,” a condition which required restriction on raw will and prevented anyone from exercising arbitrary power.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke also argued against any notion of “liberty” that is destructive of a nation, that would “destroy all vestiges of the national character.” This partly explains his criticism of the French revolutionaries, who claimed to be fighting for liberty while they sought to conquer, subdue, and destroy.
. . .these pretended citizens treat France exactly like a country of conquest. Acting as conquerors. . . The policy of such barbarous victors, who contemn a subdued people and insult their feelings, has ever been, as much as in them lay, to destroy all vestiges of the ancient country, in religion, in polity, in laws, and in manners. . .to lay low everything which had lifted its head above the level, or which could serve to combine or rally, in their distresses, the disbanded people under the standard of old opinion.
Understood in the Burkean sense, natural law principles help to explain why destroying national culture and tradition, tearing down a people’s heritage, and destroying their historic memorials, cannot accurately be described as “conservatism.”
