The Peculiar Claim That Conservatism Simply Is

I still have a dream. It is deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. - Martin Luther King

An earlier post on this blog noted that rulership is illegitimate in our society:

In a world of kings and emperors, sultans and rajahs and warlords, the Founders created a nation with no rulers. To this day no one in our politics—mayor, county executive, governor, president—is legitimately called a ruler. This is because a ruler is someone who can subject others to their will, and in a free country no one can do that.

In a free country no one is subject to the will of another. Yet Mark Lilla detects

The aristocratic prejudice that “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.”

This trickles down to popular culture. In the second season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" the socialite Cordelia says, "Certain people are entitled to special privileges. They're called winners. That's the way the world works."

This is the inegalitarianism of conservative Social Darwinism:

[Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation.

 - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” (Emphasis added.)

No reason is given for this. It just is. In Why I Am Not A Conservative [PDF] Hayek wrote:

But, from its point of view rightly, conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them; and, by its distrust of theory and its lack of imagination concerning anything except that which experience has already proved, it deprives itself of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas. Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality. (Emphasis added.)

In Conservatism Simply Is, self-labeled conservative Andrew Sullivan tacitly accedes to this view of conservative conceptual impoverishment:

Scott Galupo scoffs at the idea and makes a broader philosophical point:

In a 1974 appendix to his study Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Ideology, [Peter] Viereck wrote that classical conservatism, of the mostly British but also French variety, is “an inarticulate state of mind and not at all an ideology. Liberalism argues; conservatism simply is.” Once conservatism becomes conscious of itself—becomes aware that it is a thing set apart—it changes irrevocably; it becomes another species of rationalism. ...

The inarticulate tendency in conservatism is what led John Stuart Mill to say the following:

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. - www.goodreads.com/quotes/76179-i-never-meant-to-say-that-the-conservatives-are-generally

Sullivan adds,

Of course, I think that’s a misunderstanding. The inability to articulate the value of something you have come to love or do is, to my mind, part of its value. Some things in life are ineffable and to explain them almost a violation of their essence.

Frederick C. Crews parodied this position in 1970 (when aficionados of the Youth Movement began showing up in university classrooms):

Though it is only a short step from this state of mind to the virgin anti-intellectualism of our freshmen who regard all discourse as a profanation of selfhood, we believe our lack of curiosity to be more sophisticated and high-principled. - from "Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?"

The only reasonable response would be, "OK, so you can't explain what you're talking about." Why does this matter? Because what what the Founders, echoing Cicero, called "right reason" is a necessary bulwark against the crude machinations of power. The democratic vote, for example, represents an attempt to substitute informed public choice for force in determining the succession of leaders. Justice is the attempt to substitute principle for violence in adjudicating disputes between citizens. A reasoned, principled equality powered a liberal society's rejection of public racial discrimination in the last half century.

Otherwise, we have “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others,” but why the ostensibly fittest are superior is never explained. Logic texts, after presenting an invalid syllogism, note, "the argument cannot guarantee its conclusion, and no one should be persuaded by it."

Even more so, in the case of those who valorize "the inability to articulate."  It-just-is-ism is an avoidance of responsibility for implied claims. The non-argument argument stands alongside the non-apology apology.