{"id":13932,"date":"2014-06-10T09:23:32","date_gmt":"2014-06-10T13:23:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13932"},"modified":"2014-06-10T09:30:01","modified_gmt":"2014-06-10T13:30:01","slug":"americas-authentic-conservative-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=13932","title":{"rendered":"America’s authentic conservative movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the influential reform conservative manifesto, Room to Grow<\/a>, Yuval Levin argues<\/p>\n

that what\u00a0matters most about society happens in\u00a0the space between the individual and\u00a0the state\u2014the space occupied by families,\u00a0communities, civic and religious\u00a0institutions, and the private economy. … Local knowledge\u00a0channeled by evolved social\u00a0institutions\u2014from families and civic and\u00a0fraternal groups to traditional religious\u00a0establishments, charitable enterprises,\u00a0private companies, and complex markets\u2014will make for better material\u00a0outcomes and a better common life. …\u00a0What happens in that space generally\u00a0happens face to face\u2014between parents\u00a0and children, neighbors and friends,\u00a0buyers and sellers. It therefore answers\u00a0to immediately felt needs, and is tailored\u00a0to the characters, sentiments,\u00a0priorities, and preferences of the people\u00a0involved. That kind of bottom-up common\u00a0life, rather than massive, distant\u00a0systems of material provision, is what\u00a0makes society tick and what holds it\u00a0together. While it can certainly be reinforced\u00a0by public policy, it could never\u00a0be replaced with centralized administration,\u00a0however capable or rational it\u00a0might be.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Levin decries “public\u00a0programs that consolidate the application\u00a0of technical expertise: that try to\u00a0take on social problems by managing\u00a0large portions of society as if they were\u00a0systems in need of better organization\u00a0and direction.” Instead he\u00a0advocates a “kind of bottom-up, incremental, continuous\u00a0learning process, rather than imposing\u00a0wholesale solutions from above.”<\/p>\n

Imagine that there were a large but decentralized grassroots movement dedicated to precisely these values. It would operate at a remove from the state and would be based instead in nonprofit organizations and colleges. It would be skeptical of top-down directives, expertise, and centralizing policies–especially the drive to measure and assess outcomes\u00a0quantitatively. It would often stand in the way of ambitious plans that originate in bureaucracies.<\/p>\n

This movement\u00a0would evolve elaborate tools for appreciating and developing local norms and assets. These tools might be branded, for example, Asset Based Community Development<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Participatory Action Research<\/a>. The movement\u00a0might also rely heavily on\u00a0local deliberative processes to decide what to do, and the real hallmark of\u00a0those deliberations would be “a belief that constructive processes must focus on strengths and future-oriented possibilities” (as Caroline Lee writes<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Because the movement would believe, as Levin does, in the importance of face-to-face human connections,\u00a0its characteristic response to a local problem would be a hands-on service project.\u00a0Prospective volunteers would be taught to respect local norms. They might even insist (in the words of\u00a0Talmage A. Stanley<\/a>) on a\u00a0\u201cmilitant or radical particularity, knowing a place in its fullness, with its contradictions, its conflicts, its questions, what it means to be a citizen in that place.\u201d The movement would strongly endorse “relational organizing<\/a>,” with its emphasis on human-to-human bonds.<\/p>\n

The movement would also\u00a0be anchored in the values\u00a0of diversity (i.e., support for inherited and “evolved” cultures and norms); social capital (seeing value in the networks and values that connect people to each other); and sustainability (strategies for continuing to do what we have done in the past).<\/p>\n

In all these respects, this movement would be authentically conservative. But–as my readers will have realized several paragraphs ago–I am referring to community service programs, campus\/community partnerships, community-based research projects, and other “civic” practices, most of whose leaders would\u00a0place themselves well to the left of\u00a0President Obama on the political spectrum.<\/p>\n

I make this argument\u00a0not to score debating points against Yuval Levin, although he is deeply invested in the idea that the “Left\u2019s social vision\u00a0tends to consist of individuals and the\u00a0state, so that all common action is state\u00a0action, and its purpose is to liberate individuals
\nfrom material want and moral\u00a0sway.” (I have trouble thinking of any prominent American liberal to whom that sentence would apply.) On the whole, I would like to make common cause with Levin, not debate him.<\/p>\n

Nor do I mean to provoke my friends and collaborators in the “civic” world by calling them authentic conservatives. I have deep regard for genuine conservative values and believe that they need intellectual development and political support. Authentic conservatism has been swamped by laissez-faire neoliberalism on the right and by\u00a0soft technocratic managerialism <\/a>on the left.<\/p>\n

But I do think it’s clarifying to recognize everyday\u00a0civic work as\u00a0conservative. Like any valid ideology, conservatism highlights certain goods with which other\u00a0goods\u00a0conflict. As Bill Galston insists<\/a>, the hard part of politics is not the choice between good and bad\u00a0but between good and good. In promoting decentralized, relational, appreciative, bottom-up, voluntary politics, the civic movement to which I belong (and which\u00a0Levin ought to endorse) risks overlooking other\u00a0values, especially social critique, cosmopolitanism, efficiency, and\u00a0dissent.<\/p>\n

See also: “what defines conservatism?<\/a>” “how conservatives can reclaim the civic ideal<\/a>;” “Edmund Burke would vote Democratic<\/a>“; and “is society an artifact or an ecosystem?<\/a>“<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the influential reform conservative manifesto, Room to Grow, Yuval Levin argues that what\u00a0matters most about society happens in\u00a0the space between the individual and\u00a0the state\u2014the space occupied by families,\u00a0communities, civic and religious\u00a0institutions, and the private economy. … Local knowledge\u00a0channeled by evolved social\u00a0institutions\u2014from families and civic and\u00a0fraternal groups to traditional religious\u00a0establishments, charitable enterprises,\u00a0private companies, and complex […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civic-theory"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13932"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13938,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13932\/revisions\/13938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}