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If you had to devise a test to decide who counts as a conservative in the classical sense, what would you check? Politics must count, and religion, and respect for tradition, but almost no one has all three of those in a way that makes the label "conservative" apply.
Politically, most people who apply the term "conservative" to themselves or others actually mean "classical liberal": someone who prefers less economic control/intervention by government and all the market solutions that such a position implies, and also favors no government position on The Good Life, leaving people free to choose whichever life they choose, from pious monasticism to squalid meth addiction. This often means "Red Tribe,' but also covers weirdo libertarians. It rules out nearly all Christians, because they would never say "the true Good Life is not sufficiently knowable for the state to take a position on it," which is why there is so much rhetoric about Christians coming for abortion rights or whatever.
But many religious people don't count either. True Conservatives, in the Burkean sense (not in the literal sense of "this is what Edmund Burke wrote," but in the sense that people mean when they say "I'm a classical conservative") are not supposed to want to change anything in society or culture that was working serviceably. On this definition, though, no American counts, because the Revolution upended a system that was working ok. No protestant counts, because Luther upended a system that was working okay (of course Americans and protestants disagree about that serviceability, but does everyone get a C-pass for their particular complaint? Was Lenin a conservative too?). So this rules out most anglosphere "conservatives." But this leads to the absurdity of going back further and further and finding that no user of bronze tools counts because stone tools were working okay, etc.
In terms of respect for Tradition, there is no definitional problem, but there is the empirical problem of people having no sense of history or culture. Maybe in Europe things are different, but in North America very few people think about tradition at all, and many of those that do overestimate the age of most traditions. So there might be a respect for tradition, but it is uncoupled from ancestral traditions to a point where "I respect tradition" does not mean what anyone wants it to mean.
So my question is, does the term "conservative" mean anything at all anymore other than "red tribe" or "anti-woke"? If so, how would an alien zoologist classify someone as "conservative"? I suggest checking people's children (to check transmission of values) to see how many nursery rhymes they know or how many second-verses of Christmas carols they can sing, but I grant that this prioritizes traditional culture over religion and politics, and a relatively recent tradition at that. Nevertheless, I think that if you sorted people by how many of those things their kids could recite, you would be able to predict more about them than asking "should abortion be legal" or "what is the optimal income tax rate."
Conservatism, insofar as it is a political movement and not merely a feeling or disposition or psychology, was created as part of the fundamental disagreement at the heart of Enlightenment politics: Can man be made perfect through reason?
There is one half of the Enlightenment, godfathered by Hobbes, notably full of Scots like Hume and Smith, who decided to sit amongst itself in the right side of the French Assembly that one time. They say no. Man cannot perfect itself. And therefore not perfect society.
Out of this core tenet, arises essentially all of the political precepts of conservatism: transcendental humility, natural law, hierarchy, property, freedom, prudence, etc.
It seems therefore easy to me to make the test simply one of anti-utopianism:
Do you believe men (and therefore society) can be made perfect?
No conservative shall answer yes, and all Liberals that answer no will be conservatives.
Where does "No, but one can get arbitrarily close." fit in your schema?
(The road to wisdom?/Well, it's plain/and simple to express./Err, and err,/and err again,/but less, and less, and less.) --Piet Hein
It's conservatism.
Once we reach further than those people think is reasonable, they aren't so happy anymore and will say that their progress was fine but this new progress is insane. Mencheviks are not a new phenomenon.
When I say "all Liberals that answer no will be conservatives", it's acceptable to read it as prophecy.
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I don’t think this remotely captures the contours of the actual arguments and beliefs taking place in 21st-century America. Firstly because almost nobody on either side reads 18th- and 19th-century philosophy. More importantly, though, because even among the people who do favor a more technocratic approach, almost nobody would claim that “man can be perfected (that’s not the point), and even the very few who would still believe that such an outcome is only possible far into a theoretical future. It’s just not a live issue, politically or otherwise. “Conservatives” and “liberals” are far more focused on object-level political and aesthetic concerns than they are about the nebulous world of utopian philosophy.
...And yet, we very clearly have a large, cohesive population of people enthralled to vast, superhuman "processes" that were instituted for nakedly utopian goals, continue to operate in the same way they have since their foundation, and at no point changed goals. These processes observably square the circle by continuously adding epicycles between where they are and the goal, rather than admitting the original goal was unachievable and abandoning the effort. See the war on poverty and blank slate education for two notorious examples.
A commenter here once argued to me that affirmative action and other forms of anti-racist government intervention should be implemented for at least three centuries before we could really draw conclusions on whether they worked or not. How does that sort of mindset differ from Utopianism specifically in the actions it produces?
The percentage of the American population living in poverty has in fact decreased considerably from where it was at in the late 1950’s (roughly 22%) to where it is in the 2020’s; in 2019 the number hit a record low of 10.5%. We can argue all day about whether this has any causative relationship with LBJ’s specific policies, but can you at least understand why a good-faith political operator could look at that and not see the War on Poverty as a failure? Do you think that anything less than a full elimination of poverty means that the effort was not worth trying and that we should scrap every program that’s even trying to move the needle? Can you see how somebody who is t a “utopian” could have a reasonable disagreement with you about the answer?
Many of the people you’re identifying as “utopian or as “wanting to perfect humanity” would actually describe what they’re doing as an attempt to incrementally improve the human condition through sustained effort. And I think there are concrete observable examples all around us which can at least plausibly be interpreted as a demonstration of their successes!
Obviously I agree with you that human beings are not blank slates, and I do agree with you that, for example, racial gaps in educational attainment have not closed nor even significantly narrowed as a result of progressive theories of education. I think that progressives are wrong about some pretty important bedrock facts about humanity. However, I think they’re wrong in a different way than what OP described, and I think that there have been some landmark successes in progressive government (for example, the massive reduction in rural poverty and illiteracy in the South under the FDR and LBJ administrations) which make it difficult to credibly accuse progressivism of just being a totally manifestly failed project which only utopians stubbornly denying reality would have any interest in continuing.
I'm not sure how to communicate this without sounding snarky, but you sound exactly like a Stalinist to me. Modernity has killed more people than any other event in the history of mankind, and immiserated Man in ways hitherto unimaginable, yet we ought to be grateful because technical advances whose causes are only tenuously related should see full credit attributed to the policy of the Party and nothing else.
Yet we see regimes that do not actually hold to such ideas benefit from industry without necessarily encountering the same cultural issues. Could it be that improving the human condition and reducing everything to reason and commerce aren't actually joined at the hip?
I think the Enlightenment is a failure, because it did not reach its own goals. I don't think it's an total failure because we did create useful institutions and discover useful truths along the way, but I don't regard the Soviet Union as a total failure either for the same reasons.
Still, Managerial Totalitarianism is a cruel farce and must be destroyed for the welfare of mankind.
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