Truly Comfortable Conservatives
There is a sentence in Andrew Sullivan’s recent review of Edmund Fawcett’s book, Conservatism: The Fight For a Tradition, that I can’t get past. Sullivan makes the assertion that there are two “moods” to conservatism:
The first is an attachment to the world as it is, and a resistance to too drastic a change in anything. The second is an attachment to what once was — and a radical desire to overturn the present in order to restore the past.
Nothing too controversial here. The conservatism that resists change is the one articulated by William F. Buckley, Jr. in the National Review’s mission statement, standing “athwart history, yelling Stop.” The conservatism that wants to return to the past is the one Donald Trump invokes when he bellows, “Make America Great Again.”
The sentence from Sullivan that sticks in my craw comes in the next paragraph:
A defense of the status quo against disruption comes naturally to anyone truly comfortable in the world.
I’ve read this sentence dozens of times now (the NYT Book Review in which it appeared on the front page has been sitting next to my spot at the table all week). All the words, put together in that order, seem to make sense, yet it strikes me every time as wrong, an intellectual error. It took me a while to figure out why.
To be clear, I am very much not conservative, politically or culturally speaking, although I do identify with many of the adjectives Sullivan uses to describe “status quo” conservatives: “skeptical, defensive, pragmatic.” For example, though I largely agreed with Bernie Sanders’s policy platform in 2016, I was resistant to his language of political revolution, having read enough about the grim aftermath of most historical real-life revolutions. (In the 2020 primaries, Warren was my candidate of choice.)
One thing I would definitely not call myself is “truly comfortable in the world.” Neither, as it turns out, did Buckley. “National Review is out of place,” he wrote in that same mission statement. It is that phrase — truly comfortable in the world — that bothers me, for two distinct reasons.
The first problem is this: the world we live in is, fundamentally, a place of change. Sullivan seems to entirely miss this point: to be truly comfortable in the world, you almost by definition have to be comfortable with change, i.e., not conservative. This isn’t just true in 2021. It was true when Buckley was writing in 1955, the year after Brown v. Board of Education, and the year before Elvis broke big. It was true fifty years before that, in 1905, when Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity and automobiles and electricity were transforming the landscape. Keep going back to any era, for hundreds of years, and you will find things in flux. The world keeps changing because people keep changing, learning new things, rejecting or revising old traditions, suffering plagues and wars, walking steadily away from the imperfect past and into an unknown future. Conservatives who, in Sullivan’s words, have an “attachment to the world as it is” can more truly be said to have an attachment to a notion of the world that they prefer, whether or not it resembles the world as it really is.
This gets to the second problem I have with Sullivan’s sentence. Simply put, this is not a comfortable world if you’re prepared to look at it honestly, and it never has been. The truly comfortable conservative whom Sullivan describes is someone who by necessity must be either blind or indifferent to suffering and injustice that require urgent change. He is attached to a sanitized view of the world where people and things are in their proper places. This tracks with what we’ve seen in conservative policies and legislation over several decades. Buckley’s magazine, for example, seeing a threat to the status quo of white people in the South, stood athwart history and yelled Stop to integration.
Perhaps this explains why it has been so easy for so many status quo conservatives to go along with Trumpism. It may be hard to remember now, after the mob attack on the Capitol, but not a single Republican in Congress expressed having any sort of problem with the Trump administration’s retrograde conservatism for the better part of four years. Although Trump personally introduced radical change to our political system, flouting norms and violating traditions left and right, he did so with the explicit promise that he would restore a world where conservatives could feel truly comfortable. If you can’t stop the world from changing, then at least make it change back. Both forms of conservatism ultimately buy into the same fiction.
Of course, as Jay Gatsby showed us all, there is no going back and no standing still— not for Buckley, not for Trump, and not for Sullivan. The engine of history rolls on. You could choose to stand in front of it, yelling with arms spread wide, imagining you could stop it through sheer force of will. But why do that, when you could ride the train instead and see where it takes you?