Against Ad-Hocracy

P olitics is supposed to be a means of solving problems that do not have their origins in politics but instead arise from what Hobbes called the “state of nature.” How do we go about protecting ourselves from marauding bandits? How do we prevent our crops from being stolen by the people across the river? How can we solve disputes about property or injuries without resorting to vendettas and blood feuds? If we build a wall around our village to protect us, how should the expense be borne? These are the original problems of politics.

Eventually, politics reaches a point of sufficient entrenchment where it begins to create severe problems of its own, which is where we find ourselves at the moment.

Politics sometimes is thought of as a kind of lid that sits atop the boiling pot of society. That is one assessment of modern liberalism, cynically (or pragmatically) understood as a system in which the well-to-do and the powerful share just enough of their wealth and power to keep the peasantry from rising up in arms against them. You heard a lot about that over the summer, in those ancient days when our friends on the left still were lionizing mobs and armed militias that destroyed life and property for political ends and worked toward the overthrow of government. Riots, they lectured us, are the weapons of the powerless, and justly wielded. That is what is meant by the slogan, “No justice, no peace.”

But if justice is to mean anything other than the state in which those most willing to engage in political violence are given what they demand, then justice must be defined — which is another way of saying we must put limits on it. (Defined comes from the Latin definire, meaning to impose limits.) The need for such definition is the reason we write down our laws rather than putting every dispute and controversy to a plebiscite, and it is why we have constitutions — which is to say, it is why we have limited government.

Limited government is not some libertarian concoction — if you prefer to keep the Bill of Rights, then you believe in limited government. If you prefer unlimited government, then history and a few unhappy corners of the modern world offer many examples.

The long project of making the king subordinate to the law was the great achievement of British political thinking, and it laid the philosophical foundation for the American founding, in which British subjects in North America did away with kings altogether and substituted a different model of political life. It is that model of politics that American conservatives seek to conserve — not necessarily in its every jot and tittle (we did away with the Articles of Confederation, slavery, and much else, and it has been a good while since the U.S. government has issued letters of marque and reprisal) but in its principles, its philosophy, its intellectual structure, and, especially, its constitutional architecture. And here it is regrettably necessary to distinguish between conservatives per se and the Right more broadly, many of whose current leading lights and ascendant radical factions take a distinctly kingly view of presidential power and understand the law as just another instrument of domination.

Some of our political disagreements are about ends, but most of them are about means. Most of us desire widespread prosperity, physical security, social mobility, peace, a clean environment, well-administered courts of law, the happiness of minority groups, etc. But how do we achieve those ends? Conservatives believe that peace and prosperity come from organic social development enabled by a foundation comprising individual rights, including, especially, property rights; the rule of law, with legislatures acting within the bounds of well-defined constitutional limits and independent courts committed to the law itself rather than a freelance socio-political agenda; prudent and thrifty public administration; a thriving civil society and religious life that provide the things government cannot, such as community and moral orientation; entrepreneurship, free enterprise, and trade; and the distillation of ancient human experience that we call tradition.

When Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes to effect a soft takeover of American corporations, dictating to them everything from the composition of their boards to the range of their political activism, conservatives object — not because we are worried that Microsoft’s shareholders will get a raw deal, but because Senator Warren’s proposal represents a fundamental change to the property-rights regime upon which American economic prosperity is founded, a fundamental change in the relationship between citizen and state. Conservatives who object to “cancel culture” are mindful of the legal distinction between private corporate action and state censorship, but are also mindful of the fact that civil society can be made into a cat’s-paw of politics, and recognize that what is proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez et al. would constitute a kind of soft Jim Crow for political minorities. Our solicitousness of the undemocratic character of many of our institutions — the Senate, the Bill of Rights, the Electoral College — is rooted in an understanding that there is more to peace and justice than majority rule.

Against this, the progressives offer ad-hocracy, willy-nilly social engineering in response to whatever the demand of the second is. That is why we went from “Nobody is talking about gay marriage!” to “Gay marriage is a constitutional mandate!” to “We’re going to put you in jail if you won’t bake a cake for a gay wedding!” in about ten years. The times, they are a-changin’: Planned Parenthood was founded by a dedicated eugenicist who claimed to abhor abortion and has become an organization of dedicated abortionists who claim, somewhat dubiously, to abhor eugenics — and both positions were considered, in their respective times, the incontrovertibly rational position of scientific progressivism. Self-evident truths freshly minted yesterday and bolstered by a Vox article headlined “Study says . . .” are not good enough on their own, because we have seen them come and go.

So of course we conservatives are always repeating ourselves. History repeats itself. We must always begin, and begin again, at the beginning.