I teach conservative authors in a course called “The American Culture Wars.” The course explores a number of controversies around issues like marriage, gender, inequality, children, crime, and the like – as they have been fought out by public intellectuals on the right and left.
Thus, I don’t teach conservatives straight up. I teach them in conversation with liberal thinkers. One reason for doing so is that conservatism tends to emerge out of a sense that some valued inheritance needs to be protected from liberationists who, in the name of equality and freedom, seek a significant break from the past. Conservatives respond by seeking to prevent that break. In our present day, they are working to preserve everything from marriage to religion to traditional gender norms to tough-on-crime policies. So, although we sometimes think of conservatism as something older than liberalism, it tends to be born out of it. Conservatives are the concerned children of liberals. That’s one reason why conservative thinkers and parties emerge in liberal democracies practically everywhere.
One challenge to introducing students to conservatism is that it is a tradition profoundly shaped by its context. Since conservatives are often reacting to a threat in their own time and place, the causes they have championed vary widely. This is why Samuel Huntington called conservatism a “positional ideology.”
Conservatism, then, can’t offer a theory of justice in the way, say, that liberalism can. Instead, it’s a collection of intuitions that, collectively, shape the way that conservatives think about human nature and the good society. Conservatives begin with an important insight about people: Unlike other creatures, we humans are born without really knowing how to live. And so, we turn to our customs, our traditions, our social institutions, which have developed over oceans of time to guide and restrain us. Those same traditions are hard to build and easy to break. So, conservatives tend to worry about those who see them as simply irrational or unnecessary or repressive.
But liberals, I stress to my students, also see something that is true about human beings: We are born with the capacity to make choices – and those choices often reflect reasonable differences over how best to live. And so liberals tend to defend political institutions and cultural practices that they believe maximize our freedom and equality. And they are often skeptical of inherited norms and traditions, because they notice, often correctly, that they can be coercive. So, liberals often are critical of institutions like religion, marriage, gender roles and the like. To them, they are the enemies of a society that is fully free and equal. And because they place greater trust in our reason and imagination than conservatives tend to, they are more confident that we can reconstruct the world in ways that better align with equality and freedom.
Although it’s useful to counterpose these traditions, I always emphasize that lots of heterodoxy is possible. For one, liberalism is our tradition – and so, American conservatives often want to preserve what’s best in liberalism. That’s why American conservatives have defended everything from free markets to liberal education to race-blind policies. And even when conservatives explicitly defend illiberal institutions, they often believe that their survival is essential to a thriving, free society. In addition, I stress to my students that we can arrive at conventionally liberal ends for conservative reasons, and vice versa. Some conservative intellectuals defended same-sex marriage because they thought that doing otherwise might undermine the legitimacy of marriage, while some liberals today worry about the decline of marriage because it has increased inequality. Conservatives can even embrace radicalism, as they increasingly do these days, if they conclude that our institutions are so broken that there is nothing left to conserve. So, I stress to my students that there is nothing doctrinaire about these broad traditions.
That said, these traditions continue to structure so many of our disagreements. They represent different starting points – and so they place intellectuals on different paths – even though they don’t determine where they land on any given issue.
My students have almost no exposure to conservative intellectuals. Few have ever read one, save perhaps an occasional editorial by David Brooks or Ross Douthat. When they do think of conservatives and their ideas, mostly populists from the MAGA-verse come to their minds. One reason it’s important to teach these thinkers is to show students that conservatism isn’t simply what Donald Trump says it is. That lesson may be especially important to my right-leaning students who are still trying to figure out what it might mean to think and act like a thoughtful conservative.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, if liberal and leftist professors want to subvert Donald Trump, they should teach conservatism at its best. I can’t imagine how the next generation of Republican leaders will lead us in some new direction, if all they have ever been tutored in is the conservatism of the MAGA-verse.
The biggest reason I enjoy teaching this course, though, is because it offers far more than just a window into conservatism or our politics. It’s also about the good life. My students will soon be faced with important life questions, such as: Should I get married? Cohabitate? Have children? How should I raise my future children? What sort of sex education should they have? Should I practice the religion of my ancestors? Should I ever consider an abortion or divorce? Under what conditions?
My sense is that my students especially appreciate the opportunity to reflect on the kind of life they want to make for themselves, once they are released into the wilds beyond our manicured campus.
Personally, I think that our best America is a nation wedged between Locke and Burke, between freedom and virtue, between autonomy and custom. The challenge, then, for all of us is to find the right balance in our time and place, so that we remain a nation of socially integrated individualists. If that’s true, we don’t want the culture wars to end, even if we’d prefer a more serious and elevated version of the one we’re living through. This course represents a modest effort to introduce students to our culture wars at their best by exposing students to the intellectuals who wage them.
