Damon Linker’s latest Substack is a response to a debate I sparked with a tweet and a subsequent essay about the often-murky definition of the term “fascism,” particularly as left-wing critics of the contemporary Right employ it. It’s a smart, serious piece, but Damon won’t be surprised to hear that I have significant disagreements. I’ll attach a couple of quick quotations that stood out to me as erroneous and add my thoughts below.
The premise of the piece — “as much as I think it’s perfectly valid to continue having nuanced arguments about the F-word and its selective applicability in the current context,” Damon argues — is that “it might be more illuminating to avoid invoking it in favor of a less inflammatory concept or series of distinctions. Clearly, something has changed about the character of the American right over the past decade or so. It’s worth looking for comparative and descriptive terms that allow us to place people and ideas on a spectrum ranging from normal to troubling to truly alarming.” To identify the “troubling” and “truly alarming” trends on the right, one obviously has to begin by laying out an idea of what “normal” conservatism looks like.
Here’s Damon’s definition:
The [conservative] impulse is toward protecting something that exists so that it might persist and even thrive into the future. In that respect, conservatism isn’t a destructive impulse or even a reformist one. It wants to keep things in our world (or some specific things within that world) as they are.
This isn’t wrong, per se; it’s more of a “yes, but” or even a “yes, and” situation. We should preface this by saying that conservatives themselves have been debating the definition of conservatism from time immemorial. “There is nothing more quintessentially conservative than debating the meaning of conservatism,” I noted in the American Mind back in July. “In his 1964 essay, ‘Notes Towards an Empirical Definition of Conservatism; Reluctantly and Apologetically Given,’ William F. Buckley admitted that he had ‘never failed to dissatisfy an audience that asks the meaning of conservatism.’ Richard Weaver’s consciously obtuse definition of conservatism — ‘a paradigm of essences toward which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation’ — was itself a tongue-in-cheek reference to the ultimate futility of defining the term.”
The reason that the meaning of “conservative” is subject to controversy is at least partially because there are many kinds of conservatives with many different ideas of what that specifically entails. Damon’s brief outline of the term may capture a certain genre — Michael Oakeshott’s preference for “the familiar to the unknown” and “the tried to the untried,” for example — but it’s incomplete. Conservatism isn’t merely the impulse to “keep things in our world (or some specific things within that world) as they are”; in practice, it is, in fact, often a “reformist” impulse and, even occasionally, a “destructive” one. (Remember that Ronald Reagan ran on closing down the Department of Education!) Conservation actually requires adaptation and change. As Edmund Burke put it, “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its own conservation.”
The limits of Damon’s operating definition, I think, get him into trouble when he begins to contrast “conservatives” with another, more “troubling” right-wing political impulse that conservatives stand “in sharp contrast to” — namely, that of “reactionaries.”
Here’s Damon again:
A reactionary is someone who believes a specific and crucially important aspect of the world that traces its roots back into the past has already been corrupted or extinguished in our time through prior revolutionary change. The reactionary believes this precipitous decline requires a counter-revolutionary response.
Just as a revolutionary aims to overthrow the world of the present in order to build a new one oriented toward the future, so a counter-revolutionary aims to overthrow the world of the present in order to build a new one oriented toward the past. The reactionary seeks not to stand athwart history yelling, “Stop!,” as a conservative might, but to throw the conveyor belt of historical motion into reverse—or to leap out of the flow of historical change in order to return us to a moment in the past before the revolution took place and forestall the onset of decline this time around.
I think it’s indisputably the case that there are far fewer conservatives on the American right today than there were 20 or 40 years ago, and far more reactionaries.
But the truth is much blurrier than the clean categories that Damon attempts to sort it into. Particularly in his earlier years, Buckley, the author of the famous line about standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” that Damon cites in contrast to the forces of reaction, sounded notes far closer to the genre that Damon dubs as “reactionary.”
As I wrote in June:
It’s worth remembering that, in their time, William F. Buckley and the other young conservatives who were involved in the Sharon Statement were radicals, too. Tom Hayden, the author of the Port Huron Statement, noticed as much: In an essay published a year after the Sharon Statement — and a year prior to Port Huron — Hayden noted that “during the past year, conservative students have come to life.”
These were not the staid patricians of the Old Right: “What is new about the new conservatives is their militant mood, their appearance on picket lines,” Hayden wrote. “The new conservatives are not disinterested kids who maintain the status quo by political immobility, nor are they politically concerned but completely inactive sideliners. They form a bloc. They are unashamed, bold, and articulately enamored of certain doctrines: the sovereignty of individual self-interest; extremely limited government; a free-market economy; victory over, rather than coexistence with, the Communists.”
Indeed, Buckley explicitly identified with the “radical conservatives — “who are ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity” — in National Review’s 1955 mission statement. He described his political project as a “counter-revolution”; not a moderate, incrementalist accommodation to the existing state of things, but an “overturning” of “the revised view of society” brought about by the progressive revolution.
It’s true, as Damon argues, that there are worrying trends on today’s Right. But the terms that Damon uses to describe those trends denote opposition to a much larger, pre-existing swath of conservative thought than is represented by his framing.