Conservatism in Crisis?: Anglo-American Conservative Ideology after the Cold War

237 Pages·2003·1.19 MB·English

by  Bruce Pilbeam (auth.)

Conservatism in Crisis?
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Conservatism in Crisis?
Anglo-American Conservative Ideology
after the Cold War
Bruce Pilbeam
© Bruce Pilbeam 2003
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-0-333-99765-9
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First published 2003 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-43288-2 ISBN 978-0-230-59686-3 (eBook)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pilbeam,Bruce,1974–
Conservatism in crisis? : Anglo-American conservative ideology after
the Cold War / Bruce Pilbeam.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-349-43288-2
1.Conservatism – United States.2.United States – Politics and
government – 1989– 3.United States – Politics and government –
Philosophy.4.Conservatism – Great Britain.5.Great Britain – Politics and
government – 1979–1997.6.Great Britain – Politics and government –
1997– 7.Great Britain – Politics and government – Philosophy.I.Title.
JC573.2.U6P55 2003
320.52(cid:2)0973–dc21 2002193094
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction: Understanding Conservatism
after the Cold War 1
The nature of this book 3
What is conservatism? 6
Varieties of conservatism 10
A historical excursus 18
The post-Cold War context 23
2 Rolling Back or Rolling Forward? The Role of the State
in an Uncertain Age 32
Background and perspectives 33
The onward march of freedom 36
The new Leviathan 40
‘Big government Conservatism’ 49
The restoration of authority 53
Conclusion 57
3 Rediscovering the Little Platoons: Civil Society
and Community 58
Reclaiming a tradition 59
Meaning and agendas 62
Individualism, pluralism and the market 67
Why civil society? Why now? 70
Tensions and dilemmas 73
Conclusion 82
4 Fighting the Culture War 83
The real Cold War 84
Major issues 89
The refuge of scoundrels 100
The remoralization of society 102
Puritanism and anti-Puritanism 109
Conclusion 114
v
vi Contents
5 Embracing the Future: the New Economy, Globalization
and the End of the Nation-State 115
The nation-state and identity 116
A world without borders, progress without limits 119
The tenacity of the past 126
Resisting the globalist tide 130
Not so ranting evangelists 133
In defence of what? 138
Conclusion 140
6 The Postmodern Alternative 142
The postmodern condition 143
Whose Enlightenment is it? 148
Towards a postmodern conservatism? 150
The conservative condition 158
Conclusion 168
7 The Green Alternative 169
Towards a green conservatism? 170
Obstacles to a green conservatism 185
Conclusion 194
Conclusion 196
Final assessment 201
References 205
Index 221
Acknowledgements
Most of all, I wish to thank Gaynor for all her support, patience
and understanding, without whom this book would not have been
completed.
I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Economic and
Social Research Council for funding the research for this book. For com-
ments on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Andrew Gamble, Mike Kenny,
Noël O’Sullivan and Matthew Festenstein. All opinions expressed within
are, of course, my own.
Material included in Chapter 3 has previously appeared in C. Pierson
and S. Tormey (eds) Politics at the Edge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).
Material from Chapter 6 has appeared in Journal of Political Ideologies,
Vol. 6, No. 1 (2001). Material from Chapter 7 has appeared in Political
Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2003).
vii
1
Introduction: Understanding
Conservatism after the Cold War
At the beginning of the 1990s, a propitious set of circumstances appeared
to exist for the flourishing of a confident and assertive conservative ide-
ology. Indeed, history appeared to be on conservatives’ side, with their
major enemies – both within and without – decisively defeated. The col-
lapse of the Soviet Union brought to a close nearly half a century of Cold
War conflict, while the long-term retreat of labour movements and
left-wing ideologies throughout the West was all but concluded. With the
discrediting of many of the Left’s most cherished ideals, including
the state management of industry and centralized planning, it seemed
that the 1990s would be a decade in which conservatism would be at its
most triumphant. As argued most notably by Francis Fukuyama, the dis-
appearance of the only seeming alternative to Western capitalism could
be read as signifying ‘the end of history’ itself, at least in terms of funda-
mental ideological conflict (Fukuyama, 1989, 1992).
It was hardly unexpected, therefore, that in marking their Cold War
victory many conservatives would loudly trumpet triumphalist notes.
American conservative Norman Podhoretz asserted that ‘unrecon-
structed hard-line anti-communist cold warriors’ like himself were
proven by communism’s demise to have been ‘right about everything,
wrong about nothing’ (Podhoretz, 1990, p. 9). Magnifying conser-
vatives’ sense of self-satisfaction has been the belief that they have
also been responsible for setting the domestic political and intellectual
agendas of recent decades. Upon this basis, Edwin Feulner, president of
leading conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation, claims that
‘Nowadays Conservatism is not only the dominant but even the sole
intellectual tradition in America’ (Feulner, 1998, p. ix).
The argument of this book is somewhat different. While the difficul-
ties of the Left in coming to terms with the post-Cold War world have
1
B. Pilbeam, Conservatism in Crisis?
© Bruce Pilbeam 2003
2 Conservatism in Crisis?
been amply explored, much less attention has been paid to the problems
the Cold War’s ending has produced for the Right. In fact, despite con-
servatism’s victory over socialism, what will be shown is that it too has
been disoriented by the Cold War’s conclusion, is often not as confident
or assertive as initially it may appear, and is possibly even exhausted as
an ideology of contemporary relevance.
On the surface, these suggestions may seem curious. Yet while the self-
assuredness noted above is undeniably evident among post-Cold War
conservatives, a sense of disillusionment and uncertainty has proved at
least as common. For example, British conservative Kenneth Minogue
detected a distinct mood of pessimism at a conference of British and
American anti-communist intellectuals meeting in Berlin in 1992 (the
latter including Podhoretz, Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the
former including Peregrine Worsthorne and Ferdinand Mount). Although
the meeting’s purpose was celebratory – the aim being to ‘enjoy some of
the pleasures of triumph’ – Minogue testifies that ‘a sense of gloom [was]
more real among the participants than any sense of triumph’ (Minogue,
1992/3, pp. 81, 83). The reality was that speaker after speaker simply iden-
tified new threats to Western society to replace the one just vanquished,
ranging from anti-Western hatred to political correctness.
In other words, conservatives may not be wholly comfortable with the
world they have won. Within conservatism, Minogue is far from alone in
perceiving disquiet and dissatisfaction among conservatives (see Kesler,
1998; Scully, 1997; Steyn, 1997). What is interesting is how little enthusi-
asm has been mustered for the belief that history has reached a harmo-
nious end-state, with Fukuyama’s thesis in particular seeming to have
found few friends (though even it was not the unqualified celebration of
liberal capitalism’s triumph it is often taken to be). That is, few appear to
have embraced the optimistic conviction that humanity’s greatest strug-
gles have been consigned to the past. While this might have been
expected among Fukuyama’s radical opponents, it is more surprising to
find widespread scepticism equally apparent among supposedly victorious
conservatives. In common with his left-wing critics, conservative review-
ers of Fukuyama also stressed that there are many problems still besetting
Western societies, such as crime and social disorder (Crowther, 1990;
Johnson, 1992; Minogue, 1991/2). Irving Kristol – one of the most promi-
nent American conservative intellectuals – went as far as to argue against
Fukuyama’s thesis that ‘I don’t believe a word of it’ (Kristol, 1989, p. 27).
Moreover, it is by no means certain that conservatives have achieved
any form of intellectual supremacy. Even conservatives may not
believe that their triumphs over the Left have granted them ideological