On Conservatism

A guest essay from David Polansky on why everyone defends what they know best.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I’m thrilled to be publishing this essay by David Polansky on the hidden conservative in us all. If liberals prefer the status quo, are they the real conservatives? Polansky is a political theorist who writes at Strange Frequencies, which you should check out and subscribe to. This is one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read so far this year. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

— Shadi Hamid

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The great historian and poet Robert Conquest famously formulated several laws of politics, of which the first ran:

Everyone is conservative [or, in some versions, reactionary] about what he knows best.

What he really meant by this was his observation that people tend to take more substantively conservative positions on matters with which they have practical experience, regardless of their political leanings. But it is also the case, I think, that people tend to be reflexively conservative when it comes to views and institutions to which they are already committed. That is to say, even when their positions are directionally liberal or radical, they are still likely to be interested in conserving those organizations that support them. Thus, for example, old organized labor types are deeply concerned with preserving the traditions of their unions, regardless of whether they have any use for the idea of tradition as such.

This is one of those things that is almost tautologically true but also strangely disorienting. If everyone (or almost everyone) is a conservative in some sense, then what can the word even mean? Is it not an instantly relativizing concept?

Now this has always been a philosophical problem within “conservative” thought going back to at least Edmund Burke—that is necessarily contextual. A British peer living in the late 18th century is going to be concerned with conserving different customs than a 15th-century Aztec priest in Tenochtitlan.

Nonetheless, a striking degree of political commentary these days is effectually (as Machiavelli would say) conservative. Part of this is dialectical: President Trump’s executive assault on established shibboleths in both foreign and domestic policy has triggered an almost instinctive reaction (though it remains to be seen how much that assault will ultimately prove a matter of tone more than substance). What is interesting is that this circling of the wagons is almost entirely being conducted by nominally liberal individuals and institutions. There is nothing substantively conservative at work here; what we are seeing is just across-the-board defenses of the status quo.

Now, there is in fact a famous conservative line on this, known as Chesterton’s Fence:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This is generally very sound advice, and we have already seen some proof of this with the DOGE-induced firings of U.S. federal employees—for example, in rescinding the termination of park ranger positions. But in a broader sense, there is no necessary reason why the number of federal employees should stand where it presently does, which is to say approximately as high as it was after the end of the Cold War and before the Clinton-era cuts. This is not to really to argue for the larger DOGE business, which has more than a whiff of P. T. Barnum about it, but to point out the essentially conservative nature of much opposition to it, which is not easily recognizable as such.

Or, here is another example of what I mean:

Lots of people will see this and decry spread of conspiracies theories or what have you on the right. But while this particular guest is admittedly either lying or stupid, there’s nothing meaningfully “right wing” about this. After all, the right has historically opposed greater equality, but Joe Rogan has made his name largely thanks to his egalitarian sensibilities: he has been happy to talk to a wider variety of people than conventional media typically allows, and this is evidently part of his popular appeal.

Of course, the wider the pool of candidates for discussion you open up, the more likely you are to encounter more fools, fantasists, crackpots, etc. This is just a basic democratic problem.

But the interesting part is how the nominally left-leaning media establishment is far more concerned with bottle-necking this stuff—i.e., it is functionally inegalitarian. Leading media figures are definitionally in elite positions (ideally on the basis of some merit). We can of course argue about just how intellectually elite some of these gate-keepers really are, but I think it is inarguable how their authority rests upon a tacit claim to superiority here. They will determine what information is disseminated, which experts are consulted, what the acceptable boundaries of public discourse, and so on. Nor is this by any means a new phenomenon.

The point is that all of this is a fundamentally conservative position involving the maintenance of basic hierarchies, and they have reacted quite dramatically over the past decade or so to the various challenges to their position—above all from Trump and his supporters. This reality is, again, obscured by the ways that so many of their preferred policies and rhetoric cash out as “liberal” or “left wing.” Thus, concerns about “misinformation” are almost universally coded as liberal, but if one follows this logic through it necessarily points to an elite hierarchy—possibly a technocratic one—that is in a position to determine the legitimate flow of mass information.

I am not really leveling a critique here, because I myself do happen to believe in hierarchies (though not necessarily established ones). I am rather trying to call attention to the basic tension at work, in which nearly every major establishment institution in American life—from the federal government to the media to academia to the NGO complex and so on—is observably liberal or left-leaning in political orientation but functionally conservative and even reactionary now that their prerogatives are under threat.

If you don't believe me, take another example of which I have some personal knowledge and insight:

The article's complaint conceals the reality that the existing situation here is, from a genuinely liberal standpoint, indefensible. Universities accept public funds to juice their annual cohorts of doctoral candidates (which in turn becomes a justification to appeal for further public funding). These candidates perform the lion’s share of gruntwork at larger universities, including teaching, grading, student interactions, and various administrative tasks—all of which are conventionally considered essential duties of an academic institution. Finally—and here is the kicker—there is no market for their skills upon graduation, such that it is now routine to see over 400 applications for a single junior professorship position at a middling school. This is, in sum, a highly exploitative system, which clearly benefits the institutions and their senior faculty and administrators at the expense of both the students and the public at large that helps foot the bill here.

There is no liberal case to made for this status quo, but there is a straightforwardly conservative defense that basically comes down to defending it because it is the status quo: any change must be change for the worse. Articles like the above only work insofar as their readership is broadly ignorant of the realities of the academic sector and makes the progressive assumption that more PhDs must be a good thing in itself.

A similar dynamic holds for foreign policy, which has historically been the domain where one would see the greatest flux and tactical flexibility. This may seem a bit counterintuitive, but the novel and somewhat artificial quality of the recent passion for Ukraine (a country that has played no significant role in American history) reveals a larger continuity: the belief that we have always been a particular kind of country that somehow aligns with the prevailing foreign policy tendencies of the post-Cold War era.

It is not at all necessary, by the way, for this continuity to accurately reflect historical reality. For example, it has now become de rigueur to compare Trump unfavorably to, e.g., the WWII generation of leaders, criticizing him for “coddling dictators” or what have you:

Now, it takes but a moment’s consideration to recall (to take just one example) that we were prepared to ally ourselves with Josef Stalin—a far nastier leader of a far nastier regime than anything one might find in Putin’s Russia—when we found it necessary to do so (and truth be told, our goodwill persisted well after the formal end of the Second World War and required us to overlook a great deal of ugliness in how the Red Army took and held eastern territory all the way up to Berlin). This is, again, not an argument either way about our current policies but rather an observation about how argument over them now proceeds.

This deliberate ignorance, if we can put it that way, is not even remarkable really. Ernest Renan famously claimed that the act of forgetting was a crucial part of nationalism. By this he meant that act of establishing nationhood required a certain willingness to disregard the complex realities of history in favor of those particular facts that were instrumentally useful for it.

I don’t mean to say that what is at work in this case is nationalism (though it may overlap with it in certain cases); but the mechanism is much the same. The establishment status quo is conserved by understanding it as more stable and more durable and more necessary than it really is, and this understanding is all the more powerful for not being entirely conscious or deliberate. Finally, the cognitive dissonance in all these cases likely contributes to both the intensity and the confusion of much contemporary political discourse. And these examples are only drawn from within the United States.

In the case of European defense and security, the consistent refusal of European leaders to devote a sufficient measure of their GPDs to defense spending is something we’ve been complaining about since roughly Eisenhower. And yet the mere possibility of a U.S. pivot on the Ukraine-Russia war, coupled with more forceful demands the the European powers take their military obligations seriously has produced a remarkably fierce reaction.

That this is not a reasoned response is evident from the role that Ukraine—a country that figured not at all into the calculations or self-understanding of either Americans or Europeans for most of their history—has been made to play here. And believe me, this stuff goes deep—here is erstwhile rightwing firebrand Marine Le Pen decrying the suspension of U.S. aid to Ukraine, despite the fact that her entire political platform and that of her party has hitherto been based upon opposition to mainstream Eurocratic policies. It must really be emphasized that thus far relatively little has actually changed in material terms. Aid hasn’t yet been canceled, NATO still exists, etc. Much of this remains at the level of rhetoric, but the idea that things might actually change is sufficient to trigger alarm among figures across the political spectrum who otherwise mostly disagree with one another.

The rage (really, rage) displayed by establishmentarian types across Europe can only really be understood as a kind of reflexive show of disbelief that any of these shibboleths might actually be challenged beyond the level of mild rhetoric in private conference. And yet there has, as far as I can tell, been no substantive attempt to defend the geopolitical status quo since the end of the Cold War on strategic terms. They're just accustomed to it is all.

In a different register, I see this aggrieved reaction all the time now in Canada (lately intensified by the Trumpian tariff threats), where generally declining material conditions have come under heavy scrutiny. This scrutiny has in turn invited substantial pushback from mostly liberal Canadians who insist that Canada is doing as well as always, but the conflict here is not so much political as it is generational. It is simply very difficult for, say, Baby Boomers to recognize that the institutions they instinctively defend no longer function as they once did, and yet they find criticism of those same institutions intolerably offensive.

And perhaps this should not surprise us—for, of all the demographics, conservatism is historically most associated with the elderly. And one is far more likely to find reflexive expressions of support for the economic status quo among the over-60 crowd. And why not? After all, they retain their disproportionate hold on major assets, housing above all. The experiences that shaped them and their outcomes were largely favorable. There seems to be no force on earth that can make them understand that the material and social conditions under which they flourished have vanished or are vanishing, and the healthy institutions they imagine themselves to be defending lie decades in the past.

I suspect that much of the political situation today across all these countries is at least partly a result of their demographic situation, in which a gerontocracy continues to wield power and wealth to a degree not seen in a very long time. And it is due to the way that this demographic reality cuts across left and right, that we have such confusion of categories, in which nominal liberals act like traditionalists, and nominal conservatives like radicals. All of this is really part of a much longer conversation (which won’t be taken up here) about the way that our political glossary no longer meaningfully corresponds to reality at all, such that a more comprehensive rectification of names is badly needed. “Liberal,” “left-wing, “right-wing,” “radical,” “reactionary”: these and other words all once had meanings that, while not independent of context were also not wholly reducible to it.

And in case it needs saying, Trump and his novel flurry of executive activity is a major catalyst for all of these reactions. But it must also be said that there is not a single case here in which either the structural flaws of these institutions or the critiques of them actually originated with him. Sclerosis, corruption, and decay—in a word, entropy—are fundamental constants of complex societies, and the impulse to defend social institutions in the face of these realities transcends any particular political or ideological orientation. It is a human impulse.

Again, above all and across a remarkable variety of domains, the establishmentarian response these days might be described as formally liberal but substantively reactionary. Hence, the truly abysmal quality of political commentary lately, not to mention the hysterical tone it gets issued in. But maybe this shouldn’t surprise us. Did not Lionel Trilling describe conservatism as a series of "irritable mental gestures?” Perhaps he was onto something.