This blog post by federal appellate judge Richard A. Posner got a lot of attention recently, so I thought I'd print it out and read it carefully. With all due respect to Judge Posner, he should have majored in philosophy instead of English. Had he done so, he would not have conflated so many distinct things. Conservatism is not to be identified with a conservative "movement," and neither of them is to be identified with a political party, such as the Republican Party. A political party that hopes to be successful in a two-party system such as ours must be a coalition. Ronald Reagan, for example, brought together a number of disparate groups: libertarians, neoconservatives, evangelicals, and conservatives. Each of these groups preferred Reagan and the Republican Party to either Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale. The current Democrat Party is a coalition of liberals, progressives, atheists, feminists, teachers, blue-collar workers, homosexuals, African Americans, and environmentalists, to name just a few of the disparate groups that compose it.
If all Judge Posner is saying is that the Republican coalition has come apart, then he's probably right; but that's hardly worth writing a blog post about. So why does Judge Posner talk about the "conservative movement"? Why not the libertarian movement? Why not the evangelical movement? Why not the neoconservative movement? Many of the people he mentions as belonging to the conservative movement are not conservatives. He mentions Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and George Stigler, calling them either "conservative thinkers" or "conservative economists." Hayek is famous for writing an essay entitled "Why I Am Not a Conservative." Why does Judge Posner lump him in with the likes of Barry Goldwater, Russell Kirk, and William F. Buckley? If these individuals have anything in common, it is opposition to the welfare state. By that logic, conservatives and progressives should be lumped together, for both oppose the extreme individualism of libertarianism.
Judge Posner says that "the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual grounds." This is risible. As any observer of the current political scene knows, it's progressivism, not conservatism, that is powered by emotion and religion. Yes, religion. Not religion of the supernatural variety, but secular religion. (Don't laugh; there are atheistic religions.) Has Judge Posner been paying attention to the global-warming alarmists? Does he not see that environmentalism (nature worship) is the new secular religion? Has he read any Michael Crichton? It would have been nice if he had explored these things. Alas, his blog post is the intellectual equivalent of a drive-by shooting. One thing I have noticed over the years is that Judge Posner enjoys provoking people. Sometimes this affects his judgment.
A final comment. Judge Posner says that one of the "major blows to conservatism" is "a continued preoccupation with abortion." Well, yes, many self-described conservatives care a great deal about abortion, which is—lest we forget—the intentional killing of innocent human beings for any or no reason. Would Judge Posner say that antebellum abolitionists were "preoccupied" with slavery? What's the difference? That he doesn't care about abortion as a moral or legal issue doesn't mean that most Americans don't, much less that they shouldn't. When you think about it, what could be more important than abortion (other than the horrific way human beings treat animals)?
