Should I Be Clearly Conservative?
A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it. ― William F. Buckley
Many of my positions and proposals are likely more popular on one side than the other of the political spectrum. But I haven’t tried to notice or emphasize that, or advertise myself as taking positions to help one side fight the other. My reasons usually have little to do with any desire to affiliate myself with a political side. I have long preferred to see and present myself as a neutral analyst, drawing whatever conclusions logic demands in each case.
However, I worry that this strategy may be a mistake. If politics is the main source of energy and interest among my potential readers, maybe my focusing on other dimensions sucks the energy out of my pitch. Maybe I should instead pick a side, and emphasize how I, my positions, and my proposals support that side.
I’m especially wondering about this choice regarding cultural drift, the topic on which I am writing a book. I see politics as having little to do with why I picked this topic, how I analyzed it, or which my conclusions I drew. However, I have to admit that those conclusions do in fact favor one side more than others: the conservative side, at least re some ways that is conceived.
For example, fertility is widely taken as more of a right issue than left, as the religious, traditional, and non-urbans are more fertile and the right is more these things, and as the left is more environmental and see fertility as conflicting with that. Fertility fall seems our clearest evidence of cultural drift, and I came to the topic via my seeing that the main proximate causes of fertility fall are strong cultural trends.
The left more eagerly embraces cultural activism, a main cause of cultural drift, while the right has tended to be more traditional, and critical of left efforts to induce rapid cultural changes. As in the Buckley quote above. My analysis says that right criticism has been roughly correct; we have in fact been too eagerly embracing cultural change.
The left is also more globalist, embracing wider circles of empathy, and joining into a global left community, while the right tends to have more local allegiances, and to fragment into different local rightist groups. And the emergence of a global monoculture, especially among elites, is another of the main causes of cultural drift. We’d have healthier cultural evolution with more deeper multiculturalism, with more active hostility between different cultures.
Today, the left is more popular among cultural elites, who tend to be more globalist, while the right tends to be more populist, and suspicious of such elites. And while prestige has long been one of our main engines of cultural choice, it seems we would have healthier cultural evolution if we could weaken the power of prestige.
For example, many big maladaptive cultural trends, such as excess medical spending, seem to result from our over-reliance on the ancient heuristic of expecting more value from more prestigious sources of services whose quality we find hard to evaluate. If we could instead choose such services using more direct incentive contracts, we’d less need shared norms and prestige markers to manage such services, and then culture could less go wrong via the drift of such cultural features.
Let me emphasize that these considerations have in fact make me more sympathetic to conservative views. This isn’t about my adopting a mere conservative pose or mask. And cultural considerations have made me less libertarian; I have to accept that consistent worldwide cultural habits that limit liberty likely were culturally adaptive, even if I don’t understand why.
So here is a poll where I ask you:
In a book on cultural drift, should I present myself and my thesis as (A) politically neutral, (B) as strongly politically aligned with conservatives, whose positions do in fact tend to be favored by my analysis, or (C) as aligned, but only weakly, with conservative views.
Results: (A) 60% (B) 16% (C) 24% (out of A/B/C).
Robin, as someone who’s known you for 20 years or so — I think what makes you irreplaceable is precisely how you reason things out for yourself, reach “crazy” conclusions that no one else does (sometimes, as with prediction markets or the Great Filter, crazy enough to change the intellectual landscape), and refuse to hitch yourself to any tribe. Please don’t change that! Please just continue to talk to all the more independent-minded people from any tribe or no tribe. Certainly be wary of the (formerly) right-wing tribe, which is quickly degenerating into a pure cult of personality, excommunicating heretics with a ruthlessness that would make even the woke tribe blush at the height of its power.
This is a bad time to ask this question. William Buckley’s “Conservative” movement is all but dead, and the term is being applied to various would-be successor ideologies vying for influence. You could probably make the same claim for “liberalism.” I think you should be clear about the policy implications of your new way of thinking, but you may need to be careful and descriptive about how you describe the ideological alignment.