In liberal society, true conservatism means being a dissident

In May 2002, a nationally known neoconservative asked me this question in an e-mail: since conservatism means adherence to a society’s actually existing traditions, and since homosexuality is now an accepted part of our society, shouldn’t a conservative support homosexual rights? My answer to my correspondent—who in fact was David Horowitz—appeared in the third blog entry I ever posted at VFR.

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Paul Henri, a VFR reader at least since 2003, writes:

Your post is just one of many examples of why your site has been so valuable to me. You know how to judge what the man on the street is interested in and to explain it for him. You enable the man on the street to deal with liberal intellectuals.

Terry M. writes:

By Horowitz’s definition a conservative is anyone who shows a willingness to accept and defend inordinate social behaviorisms as part of our cultural tradition whenever it becomes evident to him that this is now an established social norm. By his definition there can be little distinction made between a liberal and a conservative.

To Horowitz a conservative is just a liberal of a different order, and vice versa. The terms are interchangeable because they both describe people who work to preserve the existing order, whatever it may be, and however it came to be. Liberals are conservatives in reality because they work to preserve, protect, and defend the existing order as part and parcel of their liberalism. Conservatives are really just liberals because they’re not, in reality, defending any fixed and immutable principles against their attackers, they’re just waiting for the next social norm to manifest itself so they can get behind it.

What kind of goofy method of defining terms is that?

LA replies:

Well said.

You wrote: “By his definition there can be little distinction made between a liberal and a conservative.”

I would add that by his definition there can be little distinction made between right and wrong. In fact the reasoning process is not essentially different from that of the arch relativist Stanley Fish, who says there’s no truth outside what the prevailing majority happens to believe at any given moment.

Terry M. writes:

Do the relativist Fish and others like him not understand the palpable error they engage by such reasoning? For relativists like Fish there is no objective, universal truth, except their objective, universal truth that, well, there is no objective and universal truth.

LA replies:

However, I should add that we don’t know that this is his position, since he asked me the question but didn’t return to it. Maybe he was persuaded by me! In fact, during this period, I several times challenged him on his constantly re-iterated support for homosexual rights as a central plank of his political credo (“I’m not a right-wing bigot because I believe in tolerance for homosexuals”), and later it seemed to me that he had stopped bringing this issue up: Now I don’t know for a fact that he stopped bringing it up, but it sure seemed that way to me. And if he did stop saying it, I credit myself for the change, because I was relentless on this point. For example, I showed him how making tolerance for anything, let alone homosexuality, the center of one’s political creed is the essence of liberalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 29, 2007 08:08 PM | Send