On Being a Conservative Liberal

Reflections on the enduringly human impulse to resist radical change

Stock photo (Jose Francisco Arias Fernandez / EyeEm / Getty Images)

In my inaugural post for this newsletter, I advocated undertaking acts of “empathetic imagination” to make “understanding possible, even across deep differences.” I was talking about doing this as a liberal about the right, and I made a point of saying I was well suited to this task because “I once considered myself a conservative, and … my liberalism and general outlook on the world have been shaped in various ways by insights and ideas typically associated with the right.”

It’s been a busy 2-1/2 months on here, so I don’t regret that I haven’t done much of this work so far. But I’d like to begin a bit of it in this post—specifically, on the subject that gives many right-leaning ideologies their overarching name and definition: the impulse to conserve the present or resist change.

Avoiding the Ravages of Change

The great British conservative Michael Oakeshott has a lovely essay titled “On Being Conservative” that does a fabulous job of summarizing the impulse to resist change. Here is that essay’s most famous passage: “To be conservative ... is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, … the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

Those sentiments speak to me on a very personal level. My mother suffered a psychotic break when I was eight years old, sending my childhood into a tailspin of confusion and instability. Acts of emotional and physical abuse erupted out of nowhere and for no good reason. Within four months our family was shattered on the rocks, changed in innumerable, irrevocable ways. The world suddenly seemed like a terrifyingly erratic place.

Things settled down somewhat after that, but I had acquired a fear of sudden, rapid change. Deep into adulthood, the announcement of an unanticipated change in plans would provoke intense anxiety that manifested itself in anger, as my brain short-circuited and I did everything I could to repress an instinct to panic.

No wonder I ended up a conservative—though of a peculiar kind. I was raised as a secular Jew in and around New York City, with no religious education, no patriotic sentiments at home, few if any communal ties, minimal extended family, and a complete absence of strictures on sex. That makes my upbringing sound like the caricature of godless liberalism that furnishes the minds of heartland conservatives. Yet there was also the persistent hostility and resistance to unpredictable, rapid change.

That made me an unusual conservative once I became one (in graduate school). I had no real attraction to the surging, striving form of American conservatism that leads some to lament decadence and stagnation or to propose schemes that might inspire greater economic and cultural dynamism. It placed me miles away from Ronald Reagan’s endorsement of Thomas Paine’s line about how it’s possible and desirable to “begin the world over again.” (That quintessentially American sentiment has always struck me as delusional and potentially dangerous.)

My resistance to change also left me suspicious of narratives of decline, whether they came from the religious right or the heated imagination of would-be gurus of renewal like Peter Thiel. “National Greatness Conservatism” inspired an eye roll when it was popular among neoconservatives in the late 1990s, as did Donald Trump’s promise, nearly two decades later, to “Make America Great Again.”

Greatness? Meh.

In place of restless political, economic, and cultural striving, I longed for what a character in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” describes as “peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams.” Oakeshott’s words sounded to me like such a goal. A place of rest. Constancy. Contentment. Stability. Reaching it, and then holding onto it. Preserving it against the ravages of change.

Which doesn’t mean I wasn’t a striver in my career or other aspects of my personal life. I’ve always been ambitious, and what Plato would have called the erotic side of my soul aches for the second half of each pair in Oakeshott’s passage: the unknown, the untried, mystery, the possible, the unbounded, the distant, the superabundant, the perfect, utopian bliss. But I distrust these romantic longings. They scare me. I need to control them. Hem them in. Check them, lest they blow up my life, as the eruption of mental illness into my family blew up my childhood.

These clashing, contradictory impulses eventually led me to religion, and Catholicism in particular. But they also made me the kind of conservative who inclines toward stasis, while at the same time worrying about its tendency toward complacency about injustice and other worldly imperfections.

But then, I also distrusted the untamed demand for perfect justice—because it threatened to make a mess of things by tearing down the good along with the bad. The old conservative worry about unintended consequences spoke powerfully to me. I usually suspected the urge to change things for the better would end up inadvertently making things worse.   

Consequences of Radical Sociocultural Change

I’ve recounted all of this for a couple of reasons. First, because the older I get, the more convinced I become that people’s political commitments and inclinations are rooted in psychology, very much including their personal experiences, successes, and sufferings. Mine certainly are. Second, because my story may help readers to understand why, even though I’ve voted exclusively for Democrats for two decades now, I “get” something about what my friend and kindred spirit Andrew Sullivan once called the conservative soul.

Take social issues. I’m pro-choice (within limits). I strongly support women’s rights, gay rights, and legal protections for transgender people. But I also empathize with more culturally conservative Americans who bristle as one after another set of new moral commandments get handed down from on high every few years by their supposed social betters.

The movements for black civil rights and women’s rights were followed by the gay-rights movement, which culminated in the call for same-sex marriage, which ended up with a Supreme Court decision, in 2015, embedding this new sociocultural norm in the U.S. Constitution. The latter change—from traditional marriage exclusively reserved for one man and one woman to marriage potentially applying to two men or two women as well—happened with astonishing speed, within a single generation. Even Republicans have largely come around on the issue, and in an incredibly short span of time—showing, perhaps, how comfortable Americans can sometimes be with change.

Yet I shuddered when, within a matter of months following the Obergefell decision, I began to hear activists from (otherwise obsolete?) gay-rights organizations talking about the need to push transgender issues as the next front on the leftward side of the culture war. These activists weren’t just calling for legal protections from discrimination, which wouldn’t have been especially controversial. They were demanding that the country at large give up on “the gender binary” and reject belief in any kind of biological component of sexual identity.

In its place, people were now expected to embrace an ideology of absolute gender fluidity. Boys could be girls, girls could be boys, requests on the part of children to physically change from one to the other using a range of sometimes quite radical medical interventions needed to be respected and heeded, and any and all resistance to this agenda was henceforth declared to be an expression of rank bigotry. The change even extended to pronoun usage, which went in the matter of a couple of years from something perfectly obvious and unworthy of thought for native speakers of American English to a highly fraught matter of social propriety and potential insult.

Can anyone really be surprised that this push for dramatic sociocultural change, with much of it focused on minors, coincided with a surge of support for right-wing populism, which promised to fight the left with greater ferocity than ever before?

Economic Shifts

The populist turn had also been prepared for by decades of economic and cultural decline throughout the so-called Rust Belt of Midwest, brought about in significant part because of the economic dynamism unleashed by globalized free trade. Such dynamism might have been economically beneficial in the aggregate, but at the local level throughout communities that relied on manufacturing jobs, the embrace of international open markets produced massive changes for the worse.

From the Clinton administration on through the Obama years, the Democratic response was to propose retraining programs for “displaced” workers who required new skills to find new jobs. But that was just a proposal of even more change on top of already destabilizing change. Republicans, meanwhile, usually supported the same trade policies but without the promised helping hand. That meant somewhat less change, but more slowly unfolding stagnation and decline.

Put it all together, and we get the modest but electorally decisive Midwest shift of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin away from the Democrats and toward a Trumpified Republican Party, which promised not just to stop the change, but to reverse it. That made political sense, since stopping the slow-motion economic and cultural decline of the Rust Belt where it was in the mid-2010s wouldn’t have been such an appealing prospect.

In that respect, Trump promised a new kind of change to replace the old kind. It would be a reversal—an effort to run the clock backwards to a time when the region and the country as a whole were the manufacturing hub of a free world rebuilding after the destruction of the Second World War.

This is just one of many ways in which Trump was a reactionary figure, not a conservative one. But then, as I’ve already indicated, the pre-Trump, Reaganite Republican Party wasn’t especially conservative either, with its giddy embrace and encouragement of Promethean capitalism’s creative destruction.

There are, it seems, no American Oakeshottians.

A Political Home for a Conservative Liberal

Except, perhaps, in a certain underpopulated corner of the Democratic Party—the corner in which I’ve found a de facto political home for the past two decades.  

I harbor no illusions about the increasingly progressive character of America’s left-leaning party. Yet the general orientation of American liberalism feels broadly congenial to me, animated as it is by an impulse to improve the country and the prospects of our struggling fellow citizens while also remaining open to pragmatism about how, and how quickly, to bring about those changes.

I’m well aware that I reside on the conservative edge of the Democratic Party. And that’s fine, even if my preferences often lose out in intraparty debates. Where else am I going to go? As someone who blends liberal and conservative impulses in a pretty idiosyncratic way, I’m exceedingly unlikely to find a perfect home in a country with just two viable parties. The liberal tradition that remains a vital part of the Democratic Party, and which at its best I deeply admire, is as good as it’s likely to get for me.    

That’s how I’ve ended up where I find myself today: voting for Democrats; criticizing the left wing of the party that often foolishly ends up providing fuel for right-wing fires; warning about the greater dangers of the Republican Party’s anti-liberal, rightward drift; and pleading the case to my fellow liberals for understanding and empathizing with the enduringly human appeal of standing athwart history, yelling “Stop!”