Revolutionary Politics

1

We are now living in a moment of revolutionary politics. That the revolution is being led by those who call themselves conservatives is not itself surprising as revolutions go, although perhaps it helps to explain why so little attention has been paid to the revolutionary character of recent political developments. The lasting effects of these developments are difficult to determine. Some of the institutions that have been degraded by this politics will, no doubt, recover. For others, the damage may be much more longstanding.

In speaking of the revolutionary politics of our time, I am referring neither to the substantive ends of government policy nor to the pace at which those ends are pursued. Those aspects of the “conservative revolution,” and the tension with some classic conservative tenets, have been enough remarked upon.² Such observations about the agenda of that party which calls itself conservative raise important questions: in particular, about the accuracy of the neo-conservative self-characterization as a movement purely of restoration, concerned to strengthen practices and institutions that have been constant in American politics and society punctuated only by the “disruptions” and “excesses” of the sixties and their legacy. But while these are significant questions, they are largely limited to the concern with neo-conservatism’s conservative credentials. While it is undoubtedly true that some modern American social conservatives once thought it a sufficient defense of their program to point to the virtues of stability or to sound a Burkean-like chord of inheritance, prescription and organic development, surely few people really believed it: most of us knew that the defense of (certain) existing social institutions and practices — even when the defense genuinely was of existing institutions and practices — entirely on conservationist or immanent grounds has almost always been at least partly a rhetorical gesture, that almost all conservatives (Burke included) have been conservative at least in part because of the substantive virtues they believed to be possessed by the institutions and practices they defended, and that the “conservative” hostility to change has always been partly a consequence of the particular substance of the change and not merely its pace or its connection to a political program of deliberate reform. Some conservatives (that is, some of those calling themselves conservatives) who favor particular social values and practices on substantive grounds (or partly on such grounds) may continue to claim falsely that their support rests purely on the virtues of conservation and incrementalism. Such claims ought, surely enough, to be unmasked, and no doubt public discourse would be better off if there were less dissembling in such things. But the defense of those values, practices, and institutions which are at the core of the neo-conservative agenda do not depend on the strong conservationist claims; they can be defended on substantive grounds, and there are plenty of “conservatives” who have done so.

The character of the political developments that I shall discuss here are of broader interest. They are not merely problems of classification. Moreover, while they ought to be of concern to genuine political conservatives, for they run against some traditional conservative principles, the concern should hardly be limited to those who call themselves conservative. The conservative principles with which I shall be concerned here are principles on which healthy democracies depend, and which both “liberals” or “progressives” and “conservatives” have shared: they are, that is to say, principles with respect to which we (or most of us) have all been conservatives. Indeed, because many of the central protagonists in these recent developments are from the Party of Conservatives and because that party appears to be the immediate beneficiary of these developments, it is more likely that the protection of these traditional conservative principles will have to fall most heavily to those outside of that party.

2

Revolutionary politics is centrally characterized by a disregard for, or rejection of, the norms of established institutions. This disregard need not, of course, be for all established institutions or for established institutions equally. A revolutionary politics may be concerned with radically transforming particular “social” institutions, and yet may, at least in principle, proceed wholly in accordance with the norms of existing political...