The New Conservatism

A. Gerasimov, Lenin on a Tribune

I believe there’s a common feeling among those who follow politics and economics, based mostly on the labels assigned, that “conservatives” want things to stay the way they are, while “progressives” want things to move forward.

Conservatives are supposed to yearn for the political, economic, and social conditions of their youth. In my case that would be rock-n-roll, ducktail haircuts, the postwar boom, Eisenhower political blandness, and stable nuclear families living in suburban housing with good schools. There were some downsides to be sure: duck-and-cover drills, Jim Crow segregation, Formica in loud colors, and Melmac dinnerware. But all in all, for the white middle-class majority, it was a good time to be alive in America. We didn’t see the social and economic problems or, if we did, we minimized them.

Progressives are supposed to look ahead to better times, which means focusing on the things that need to change right now. For most progressives these days that would be income inequality, industrial and automotive pollution, environmental damage and anthropogenic climate change, racial inequality, binary gender inequality, capitalist winners and losers, housing shortages, healthcare governed by insurance companies, and cultural hostility for “the other” leading to rampant hate speech. Sure, there are some good things: advances in renewable energy, administrative regulations on industry and finance, progressive income taxes, union protections, feminism, and the #metoo movement. But these things are not enough—may never be enough—when what is needed is a true social, cultural, and economic revolution to make people equal in both their expectations and outcomes, happier with their lives, and kinder to each other.

But are these labels correct?

I believe many conservatives have a forward-looking approach in many areas, including politics and technology. They believe the social and economic climate is improving all the time, compared to the situation fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years ago. They believe in continued evolution in this regard, but not abrupt revolution. Much of their expectation is based on humankind’s increasing knowledge and technological capability, derived from the application of scientific and humanitarian principles originating in the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries.

In contrast, many progressives seem to be in the position of tacit conservatives. They don’t trust evolutionary change in social, political, or technological conditions, largely because such change is not predictable or guided by the principles to which they subscribe. In other cases, they actually want to preserve a static world which is safe and predictable until they choose to change it through a directed revolution.

Let me suggest three areas in which this is so.

First, union protections. The history of unionism has been one of fighting changes in technology and working conditions that might affect the number and skill levels of jobs, or require workers with seniority in a craft to learn new skills or enter new positions. The classic example of this tendency was “featherbedding” in the railroads during the 1930s and ’40s, preserving the jobs of firemen who stoked the boilers on steam engines when the railroad companies converted to diesel-electric locomotives. An earlier example was hand weavers who tried to destroy and ban mechanical textile mills because the machines put them out of work. Unions consistently choose older ways of working over new efficiencies if it means that certain jobs and skills will become outmoded. This is a bid for stasis over advancement and is, at least in spirit, non-progressive. What they will make of artificial intelligence and increasing automation in the workplace is totally predictable.

Second, capitalism itself. The basis of market-driven economics and capital investment is “creative destruction.” Every product and service, every company that provides products and services, competes in the marketplace for consumer attention and dollars. Consumer favoritism and brand loyalty only go so far—and not far at all if a product line or service deteriorates in terms of quality, usefulness, price, or some other dimension that customers value. Sometimes, however, frivolous products or variations are introduced and sold; the classic example is Bernie Sanders’s complaint about “twenty-three kinds of deodorant.”¹ But by and large, new and useful products are coming all the time: consider the personal computer and the internet revolution.

Capitalism in a free market means giving people what they want, even if it means giving them what they only think they want—or what you can convince them to want, or deceive them into wanting. Capitalism is not predictable and directed, but decidedly uncontrolled. Sixty years ago, when I was a child, everyone confidently predicted that my car would fly by the time I was middle aged. But no one, looking at the basement full of vacuum tubes or single transistors that was the current state of the art in computing predicted the development of the integrated circuit, the microchip, and telephones that would eventually replace cameras, stereo systems, movies and television, telegrams, libraries, and retail stores. Creative destruction is a wild and woolly territory—just ask a taxi driver whose radio-dispatched cab is being replace by a cellularly summoned Uber or Lyft driver.

We’ve seen enough of the command-and-control economies that were spawned from social and economic revolutions in the 20th century to know how they operate. They were all focused on preserving the status quo in terms of products, processes, and services. None of them developed the advances in computing, personal communications, or consumer goods—let alone medical technology and energy infrastructure, to name a few more areas—that we have steadily enjoyed in the capitalist West.²

Third, the environment. Is the climate changing? Oh yes! It was changing before modern industrialization and transportation fueled by coal, oil, and gas began increasing the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide load. We live on a planet with a precession in its orbit, under a variable star, with an active geology based on plate tectonics. We have gone through periodic ice ages, glaciations, warming and cooling periods, and occasional long winters due to volcanic eruptions ever since humans started recording their history—even before, if you count all the cultures with a flood story in their mythology.

Sea level rises and falls, deserts grow and shrink, forests advance and retreat, rivers change their course, all without the influence of human activity. Life has evolved on this planet to adapt to these changes. Every extant individual and species was shaped to take advantage of a particular environmental niche—except humans, of course, who use their big brains and clever hands to build shelters and machines that let us exploit areas where we otherwise could not live. Since those environmental niches—particularly the ones with marginal populations—are changing all the time, some species must either adapt, move, or die out. It matters not how picturesque or precious a species might be, if it lives too close to extinction in terms of diet or tolerance for environmental stress, it will eventually disappear. In the long run, no one can save the panda.

And yet the current crop of environmentalists would try to prevent this change wherever possible. They want a static world in which every river, swamp, and forest remains unchanged, where every butterfly and exotic plant can be preserved. They want to fix the world’s climate at some preferred set point—usually around the time and temperature of their childhood—and maintain it … forever.

Even the politics of the progressives is frozen in place and time. Their view of “the arc of history” is guided by a 19th-century view of social and economic order as prescribed by Marx and Lenin and then communicated by the anti-war radicals and anti-capitalist activists of the 1960s. It is a world view that values world peace at the expense of national sovereignty and the primacy of human-muscle labor at the expense of technological advancement. If they were alive today, Marx would not be a Marxist, and Lenin would be busily adapting and promoting some other social and economic creed.

I believe we are at a time of great confusion over labels and intentions. I also think we are at a time that demands a new teaching, a new world view, a new politics and economics that is neither “conservative” nor “progressive” but adopts a new social and philosophical stance entirely.

I just wish I knew what it was.

1. I’m sure all the ladies out there wouldn’t mind using my brand of deodorant, which has the image of a sailing ship on the package. Or that Bernie wouldn’t mind using the Secret brand—“Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman.” One of the comments about life in Russia in the 20th century was the prevalence of “Soviet scent,” as if one smell would fit all bodies.

2. To be fair, none of them made flying cars, either.