Tradition vs. Transcendence

Right now, I'm working on E.J. Dionne's excellent book "Why Americans Hate Politics," a thrilling discussion of thermal currents in the Indian Ocean. I mean, a thrilling discussion of why Americans hate politics so much.

And I don't use the word thrilling facetiously--at least, with no more than my usual level of facetiousness. There's actually quite a bit of good stuff. What really caught my eye was Dionne's brief history of the conservative movement.

Set outside Dionne's liberal bias for a moment. Just because he leans left doesn't mean everything he says about conservatives is a lie. In Dionne's telling, the early conservative movement was torn between two competing movements.

First, there were free-marketeers like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. They attacked government intervention in the free market and extolled "rugged individualism."

On the other side, there were the traditionalists. These were men like Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk, who espoused a higher order and transcendent moral law.

Both sides distrusted one another. The free-marketeers looked on the traditionalists as would-be aristocrats, nostalgic for the good ol' days of monarchy and nobility. The traditionalists, for their part, saw the free-marketeers as grasping, selfish; they thought unchecked capitalism would lead to the destruction of the all-important community.

I'm exaggerating the differences for effect. But that was the state of the conservative movement back in the 40s and 50s. It got me thinking: how does the current division within conservatism compare to those old arguments?

To put it in brief, I think modern conservatism is divided not into traditionalists and free-marketeers, but into traditionalists and transcendentalists. The traditionalists belong to the populist wing of the Republican Party. They're the people who loved Sarah Palin, sympathized with Joe the Plumber, and were never comfortable with that "squish" McCain.

The transcendentalists are the people we usually think of as the moderate conservative intelligentsia--David Brooks, George Will, etc. They were never comfortable with Palin; nor are they comfortable with the traditionalists in general. Witness Kathleen Parker's denunciation of the "oogedy boogedy" wing of the GOP.

Why do I use the terms traditionalist and transcendentalist? This post is getting awfully long, so I'll make it brief.

TRADITIONALISTS value law, order, and continuity. They want to be left alone by the government. They value tradition for its own sake. They don't fear change, but they're a little suspicious of it.

TRANSCENDENTALISTS believe pretty much the same thing. The only difference is that they try to find a deeper meaning to these traditionalist impulses. They don't like tradition for its own sake, so they try to articulate the principle behind it.

This has been 1) awfully complicated and 2) awfully pretentious, so I apologize. I'll try to clarify this division in future posts. For now, just something to think about.