Conservatism from the margins

Conservative parties have long dominated the political scene in the top OECD countries, and dominate policy choices even when so called “social democratic” or progressive parties are elected. That degree of domination has not, so far, been matched with an intellectual history of the movement that does not merely move from head to head: from, say, St. Thomas Aquinas to Edmund Burke. I  am too much the left-bot, the Marx reader, to think that this is satisfactory. I take the conservative claim to monopolize or articulate “common sense” as a clue to understanding how the conservative effect emerged in the modern world. I’d maintain that the effect has two sources: one, rooted in the establishment – the alliance of landowners and Capital  – adopted a  strategy well summed up by the Prince in The Leopard with the famous phrase, “everything must change so that everything stays the same”. But Burke, I think, is an emblem of another kind of conservatism:  a conservatism from the margins. This kind of relationship is drawn to the organic notion of the social, identifying the organic with a form of lifestyle that is in the crosshairs of liberalism. The  marginal conservatives derive from various nostalgic pictures of an original society: the Catholic population of Ireland, the Bretons  in the French revolution, the Austrians (among others) in the Austro-Hungarian empire, etc. Their effect is to produce a double vision of conservatism as not only the natural ideology of the ruling class, but also, paradoxically, as the victims of the liberal order. This victimhood is systematically undervalued, if seen at all, by the liberal order – by those who generally have succeeded in Capitalism’s circulation sphere, per Marx – the emblematic winners in the world of non-productive labor.