What is American Conservatism?

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published in November 1981

For someone who speaks around the country, as I have been doing, before student and other audiences, I am often asked to define American conservatism. This is a question highly pertinent to the debates now going on within the Republican party and within the Reagan administration between old and new right, between economic free marketers of the monetarist and supply-side persuasion, between libertarian individualists and the new religious right.  

When I am asked to define conservatism, I begin by insisting that my definition concerns American conservatism — meaning that British, French, Spanish, and other conservatisms would have important differences. All of the Western conservatisms are related, members of the family, but they have different histories and emphases.  

My definition of American conservatism comes in three parts. First, it includes representative government and the constitutional process. The process of deliberation by representatives was present from the beginning, from the signing of the Mayflower Compact before the settlers had even landed. It evolved through the colonial legislatures, and, after the War of Independence, issued in the Philadelphia Constitution. 

I say “the constitutional process” because the Constitution is not only a document but a set of rules. They involve a debate and deliberation and usually compromise. They demand restraint and civility. The Federalist Papers really represent a book of constitutional etiquette. All of this is one part of American conservatism.  

The second part is cultural and religious. America is part of Western culture, “from Homer through the present,” as T. S. Eliot put it — though he himself also knew that its roots go much further back than Homer. The great books, works of art, and music represent an extended dialogue on Western man, a dialogue that moves forward in time and changes, but always retains its distinctive Western character. The West as we know it emerged from the fusion of Athens and Jerusalem, reason and faith, and that fusion is part of Western distinctiveness. 

As part of this second cultural/religious point, I am willing to assert that the West is Christian. This always causes a stir, but even a cursory glance at its history indicates the fact. The West without Christianity is unimaginable. Our holidays are “holy days” in their origin, many of them, and the texture of our language is suffused with Christian assumptions. 

Finally, third point, I say that an American conservatism is predisposed toward the free market economy. Not only does its spirit accord best with the republican political assumptions, but it seems to be the most effective system for the production of goods and services. 

You can tracte the emergence of the free market over the course of several centuries — an emergence that has a certain historical naturalness. Socialism, in contrast, would be a throwback to earlier modes of the directed and controlled economy. 

There’s the definition. Question period. Hands fly up into the air.  

“Can an atheist be a conservative?” 

“Yes. I can cite illustrious examples. George Santayana, for example, and David Hume. But it seems to me that because they lacked the Christian component, there is something incomplete about them. They are a bit like the Venus di Milo — what you see is very good, but where is the rest?” 

Hands up. 

“Can a Jew be a conservative?” 

“Again the answer is yes. We have had many important conservative thinkers who were Jews. I think of Will Herberg, of Frank Meyer. I could name dozens. And much of Judaism is intimately related to Christianity. They share the Old Testament, for example. But, historically, Judaism affected Western culture through Christianity, through the fusion I mention with Athenian thought and Greco-Roman universalism. Of course Christians can learn a great deal from other religions, which always have a place in the republican party.” 

This definition of American conservatism seems to me useful and, in fact, correct. It permits one to identify distortions and exaggerated emphases within the conservative camp at the present time. And, I have found my audiences almost always leave discussing it and arguing about it.