Prof. George Is Right: Principle Sustains American Conservatism

The controversy sparked by the Oct. 27 release of Tucker Carlson’s softball podcast interview with white nationalist, antisemitic, misogynist conspiracy theorist Nick Fuentes generated a wide range of reactions on the right. Some, notwithstanding Carlson’s increasingly outlandish and toxic opinions, expressed loyalty to him; others went further, insinuating that criticism of Carlson reflects the malign Jewish influence on American politics of which he warns. Meanwhile, many denounced Carlson and asserted that those who spout antisemitism place themselves beyond the pale. The controversy has prompted others still to examine the indignities, grievances, and resentments that have opened many young right-wingers to a “burn it down” frame of mind that revels in transgressive rhetoric and propagates bigotry.

The Carlson controversy has also raised anew for American conservatives an old question about the relation in their movement between principles and tradition.

American conservatives must combine principles with tradition

A healthy American conservatism must blend universal principles and distinctive traditions – beliefs, practices, and institutions – because the United States arose out of a blend of universal principles and distinctive traditions. To downplay or ignore either the principles or the traditions distorts America’s heritage, impairs judgment about the policies best suited to deal with present discontents, and jeopardizes the nation’s future.

American conservatives would do well to keep in mind these basic observations, which ought to be truisms for them but have been obscured by right-wing polemic and invective and left-wing mockery and scorn.

The left pours contempt on tradition; conservatives cannot afford to do that

Blending principle and tradition is rarely an issue for progressives in America, particularly for the woke progressivism that has taken root in America’s elite universities and on the left wing of the Democratic party. That’s because contemporary progressives routinely disdain the wisdom embedded in traditional beliefs, practices, and institutions. They tend to find in the past little more than ignorance and superstition, irrational customs and suffocating associations, capricious laws and exploitative institutions. For contemporary progressives, it frequently seems, the past’s primary lesson concerns the wickedness of previous generations. And from the contemporary progressive point of view, it often appears, the principal imperative to which the past gives rise is for elites, in the people’s name, to remake morality and politics by cleansing them of inherited norms and imposing on citizens homogeneous beliefs about social justice.

For American conservatives, by contrast, tradition typically represents a repository of accumulated experience and judgment. It tells the long and winding story of peoples’ and nations’ language, culture, attainments and setbacks, hopes and aspirations. It gives expression to shared values while nurturing among citizens a political cohesiveness bound up with a sense of common political destiny.

Among the principles are a set of inalienable rights

The distinctively American political tradition, moreover, is indissolubly bound up with an overriding and universal principle: All human beings are equally endowed with unalienable rights. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed the principle, adding that securing citizens’ inherent rights is a just government’s primary purpose. The Constitution established political institutions to translate the principle of equality in basic rights into law and public policy. And America’s greatest reformers invoked the principle to persuade ordinary citizens and politicians to protect the rights of all Americans without regard to race, ethnicity, or sex.

This is not to deny that the American experiment in ordered liberty also owes much to Biblical faith, classical Roman ideas about virtue and citizenship, and the British common-law tradition. It is to affirm that in America, combining and reconciling universal principles with tradition does not force together opposites but rather honors the diverse elements out of which the nation was formed. The blending does not always come easily because tradition has multiple and competing strands, and principle can be exacting. At the same time, the blending does not go against the grain of America’s political heritage but rather exhibits fidelity to it.

What Professor George said about principles and tradition

On Nov. 5, author John Zmirak, writing at Chronicles, took umbrage at a Nov. 1 statement posted on “X” by Princeton Professor of Politics Robert P. George concerning universal principles and conservatism.

Zmirak faulted George for neglecting American national traditions. But Zmirak neglected the context of George’s statement, the better to land cheap shots against the Princeton professor and against neoconservatives among whom he weirdly placed George.

A member of the Heritage Foundation Board of Trustees, George posted his “X” statement two days after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ ill-advised intervention in the controversy over Tucker Carlson’s Nick Fuentes interview. On Oct. 30, three days after Carlson released his podcast, Roberts posted a short video affirming his enduring friendship with Carlson.

In the process, the Heritage president trafficked in antisemitic tropes, lashing out at a supposed “venomous coalition” attacking Carlson and accusing a sinister “globalist class” of putting foreign governments’ interests ahead of U.S. interests. On Nov. 5, Roberts apologized, perhaps influenced by George’s Nov. 1 statement.

Core principles not negotiable

In that statement, with which Zmirak takes strident issue, George reaffirmed his commitment to “the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of each and every member of the human family.” Since American conservatism embraces that “foundational principle of all sound morality,” it

simply cannot include or accommodate white supremacists or racists of any type, antisemites, eugenicists, or others whose ideologies are incompatible with belief in the inherent and equal dignity of all.

The rejection of bigots is not “cancellation,” George emphasized, which seeks to ruin the lives of those with contrary opinions, but rather upholds a standard of conservative-movement membership stemming from “core principles that are not negotiable.” That standard is consistent with championing free speech and debating those with opposing views – essential elements of a vibrant American conservatism. Recognition of human beings’ equal dignity, George concluded, reflects the “ancient faith” – inscribed in the Declaration of Independence – to which Abraham Lincoln appealed in his great October 1854 speech in Peoria, Illinois, to argue that slavery contradicts the equality in human rights on which America was founded.

Zmirak’s objection

In “Answering Robert George on Conservative Principles,” Zmirak treats George’s appeal to America’s “ancient faith” as exemplifying “what’s wrong with neoconservative ideologues.” While ruthlessly seeking hegemony within the conservative movement, Zmirak charges,

[T]he neocons wear the mask of high-minded idealists in public, pretending that they’re shocked, shocked, by the most basic facts of political existence – such as interethnic conflict, religious divisions, and the clashing material interests of different social groups.

Instead of facing up to political life as it really is, neocons maintain that American conservatism

must be grounded entirely on abstract philosophical principles that could apply anywhere to anyone, and benefit no one in particular – such as, heaven forbid, our fellow citizens whose votes we claim to seek.

Zmirak’s vulgar caricature of George’s views and his use of “neocon” as a term of opprobrium resemble the vulgar caricatures of the modern tradition of freedom under the rubric “liberalism” advanced by new-right theoreticians Patrick Deneen and Yoram Hazony. In these cases, “neocon” and “liberalism” function as all-purpose slurs against those who recognize the centrality of rights to the American political tradition.

Zmirak grants that George is “entirely sincere.” Unlike other neocons, Zmirak observes, George

really does believe that the conservative movement exists only to conserve a narrow, partial, and highly abstract set of principles – instead of a people, their country, their churches, institutions, and best interests.

The problem, Zmirak maintains, is not principles. He himself stresses the authority of natural law, which makes it mandatory to “reject genuine bigots and fanatical tribalists who urge us toward genuine evils.”

Rather, according to Zmirak,

George’s problem – and it’s a fundamental, fatal one – is that he mistakes and conflates the Natural Law with certain post-World War II bromides, the practical implications of which have already proven nearly fatal to Western nations.

Those bromides, Zmirak contends, prevent George from appreciating that the principle of equal human dignity

must stand in perpetual, creative tension with the particulars of Western civilization and the concrete needs of peoples.

What is wrong with the Zmirak critique

To illustrate George’s supposed blindness, Zmirak blurs the context in which George wrote and the controversy to which he responded. Bypassing George’s concrete concerns about antisemitism and other forms of bigotry within right-wing ranks in America, Zmirak abruptly turns to immigration throughout the West. He contends that George’s way of thinking encourages “Western nations” to welcome “millions of foreigners more religiously zealous than virtually any Westerner, whose creed obliges them to attempt religious conquest.” That’s nonsense. George opposes open borders, which undermine national sovereignty and the rule of law, but supports legal immigration that assimilates new citizens to the best in America.

Nothing in George’s appeal to universal principles, moreover, requires the abandonment of prudence in applying them. Lincoln decried slavery as an evil but undertook war to preserve the Union. Similarly, affirming inherent human dignity poses no obstacle to recognizing the special obligations owed by the U.S. government to the nation’s citizens, including the protection of Amerca’s borders and the establishment of legal criteria for earning American citizenship.

Meanwhile, white nationalism, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories are not hypothetical ailments. These moral and intellectual afflictions plague a non-trivial portion of today’s American right. Invoking the universal principles on which the nation is founded to condemn these maladies and renew American conservatism reflects – indeed, is compelled by – the best in America’s traditions.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.