“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” begins the most famous line of political text in American history, “that all men are created equal.” Quite so, says the conservative. But what sort of equality did the Founders who signed the Declaration of Independence have in mind? For as we explored in

No one can seriously argue that equality means all humans are the same in the sense we are all the same height or have identical athletic abilities, levels of attractiveness, or intelligence. But does equality imply we should be the same in some sense we’re currently not? Does equality mean we are all equally capable of achieving the same if given the same opportunities? Does it mean that the idea of granting us all the same opportunities is meaningless because there’s no way to alter all the historical grievances and societal and economic conditions that cause inequalities and, therefore, the next best thing is to enforce equal outcomes? Or does it go even further and suggest that the mere presence of those historical grievances is justification for retribution against a class or group of people who have wrongly profited off the rest of us?

The conservative advocates none of these definitions of equality. Rather, the conservative professes the equality of all humans before God and before the law. Let’s take a closer look at each:

Equality Before God

Equality before God is not a theological assertion about the existence or presence of God; rather, it is the recognition that humans are—morally, spiritually, and substantively speaking—on an equal footing. The religious tone of the idea can be derived from the Christian understanding of humanity, which teaches that “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34) and, as such, neither should we be (James 2:9).

In other words, while humans are prone to recognize inequalities in things like wealth, ability, intelligence, skin-color, even personalities, and assign some value accordingly, none of that ultimately changes our worth. “[Equality] is an absolute of morals by which all men have a value invariable and indestructible and a dignity as intangible as death,”

The doctrine of equality before God would hold racism or sexism—that is, viewing someone as inferior or superior on the basis of their race or sex alone—to be both wrong and intolerable. There is space for recognizing differences between the races and the sexes, and for debating what responses or roles or functions those differences may warrant or suggest. But the basic substance of the individual is all the same, regardless of the color of their skin or the number of x chromosomes in their genes.

And, while it is true some humans have a greater ability to lead, equality before God also dispels any notions of certain individuals having some inherent right to lead. American conservatives—following the example of the Founders—have long been hostile to privileges and positions granted on the basis of one’s bloodline. Although previously subject to the British monarch, the Founders found claims of nobility and honor afforded merely due to the accident of one’s family background most repugnant.

And even pro-monarch conservatives, such as Edmund Burke, vehemently rejected arbitrary rulers. It is true Burke was a fierce defender of the British monarchy, particularly as the radical revolutionaries in France threatened to spill over into England and topple the government. But Burke was defending the ancient and historic institution of the state, and not the idea that some humans are simply born to rule other humans. “Do not imagine that I wish to confine power, authority, and distinction to blood, and names, and titles,”

It is to our benefit that we have leaders who are virtuous and wise. But virtue and wisdom are only qualifying attributes for leadership, not an actual claim on leadership. That is, the presence of virtue and wisdom does not give anyone the right to lead, and certainly the mere accident of which family or race or group you were born into is even less of a reason. Nor do our elected officials deserve to hold their office on the basis that it’s “their turn” or because they’ve had a particularly harrowing or heroic story, though they may—and we may expect—this to be the case.

Equality before God would also mean—or at least, heavily suggest—that it may not even be possible to successfully appoint leaders of ideal virtue and wisdom in the long run, nor would that guarantee a nation will be led in a right and wise path.

“The weak point in the whole of Carlyle's case for aristocracy lies, indeed, in his most celebrated phrase. Carlyle said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of the equality of men. But the essential point of it is merely this, that whatever primary and far-reaching moral dangers affect any man, affect all men. All men can be criminals, if tempted; all men can be heroes, if inspired. And this doctrine does away altogether with Carlyle's pathetic belief (or anyone else's pathetic belief) in ‘the wise few.’ There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.”

If it’s true that we are all equal—that is, equally prone to vice and folly—then that leaves us with a bit of a mess on our hands. There is no sure bet; there is no system of government or arrangement between groups and individuals or “political” solutions that will ensure virtuous and wise leaders, or the peace and prosperity we would hope would come of being led by such individuals. When we speak of equality, our hearts may well up with pride in the hope for some common goodness and decency. But that equality cuts both ways, for we are just as prone to evil as we are to good. And a political system that does not take that into account is prone to destruction far greater and faster than a political system that works to mitigate against our human imperfections.

Conservatives have lauded the Constitution of the United States for this exact reason. Indeed, James Madison wrote, in defending the Constitution in

Equality Before the Law

If it’s true all humans are of equal worth and dignity and that we are all capable of virtue and wisdom but also vice and folly, and, as that would further suggest, no human can claim a right to rule, then we might reasonably ask what implications this has on our political outlook and legal framework. The great observer of American society, Alexis de Tocqueville,

The same Christian teaching that we are all equal in the eyes of God and ought to treat one another with a similar outlook provides the justification for a legal system that treats everyone with impartiality. This is commonly referred to as the Rule of Law—the idea that no one is above the law and, as such, ought to be treated equally under the law. The legal framework applied to each citizen, therefore, should not differ for reasons such as a person’s wealth or class or station. The President of the United States should be no less free to break the law or evade punishment than someone who is homeless or poor or a minority.

And, while there may be special cases for unique treatment of certain groups, such exceptions are not arbitrary and are applied uniformly to anyone who falls under the provisions of these unique cases. For example, the law may be applied unequally in certain circumstances such as reaching a certain age to be eligible to vote, or being grandfathered in to an older provision of a law, or a priest, attorney, or spouse not being made to testify against a defendant in a trial. These special circumstances do not violate the Rule of Law. But it would be a violation if we allowed an underaged citizen to vote on the basis they were related to a certain political leader, or only some were grandfathered into an older provision of a law because they were white, or a judge felt it was particularly important the spouse of a certain defendant testify in this one particular case.

Successfully administering the Rule of Law is a tall order. And, while the United States has come closer than most nations in achieving such legal impartiality, it cannot be denied that rampant impartialities exist. There is no simple nor easy solution for addressing these impartialities, and much of that discussion stretches far beyond our topic at hand. What the conservative insists, is that equality before the law and the Rule of Law means we treat alterations, additions, and deletions to the law as a near-sacred procedural process and not by executive or judicial fiat. A law may be good or bad, but of equal—and sometimes greater—importance is how we arrived at that law, how it is enforced, and how it is interpreted.

To the conservative, the law is not some plaything or a means of pursuing the latest theory on “justice”, but the very foundation on which our political structure is built. Either we live under the Rule of Law, in which case we respect and follow the proper procedures for altering the law, or we live under the rule of men, in which case the law is altered on the prejudices and preferences of our leaders or the mob.

Throughout the twentieth century and on into the present, conservatives have long fought against the growing tendencies of both the executive and judicial branches of the Federal government to step outside of the established procedures to enact law. And, while it may be true that plenty of Federal and Supreme Court justices and past presidents have had the greatest of intentions and the most altruistic of attitudes, the conservative is understandably wary of handing over the keys of law itself to the goodness and wisdom of a handful of unelected magistrates or single individual.

Just as Chesterton chided Carlyle's call for an “aristocracy of talent” the conservative’s rebukes leaders who step outside of established procedures on the basis that something is the “right thing to do” or that it’s time to “get things done”. Equality before the law is needed precisely because we have equality before God. Democratic institutions are needful not because of the common “goodness” of humanity, but because of our common wickedness and potential to do harm.

Recognizing and defending these dual equalities is what makes the variety of life that conservatives celebrate possible. But enforcing a broader understanding of equality above and beyond this limited view squelches the variety of life, as we will explore in Part 3.

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis was interviewed by J. Cal Davenport and

• Josh’s decision to step down from the Republican party in 2016.
• How Saving Elephants came to be
• How Millennials are similar to other generations in how they respond to persuasion on political questions and how are they unique and different
• Understanding conservative “first principles” and what younger Americans should know about them
• Whether conservatism is about adhering to the “old consensus” or charting a new way forward
• Underrated conservative thinkers

You can check out Cal and Seth's In The Trenches Podcast here:

Comedian

Visions of the future are often replete with a certain utopic uniformity not (currently) realized on earth. Perhaps the most on the nose vision of such a future can be seen on Star Trek, which depicts a galaxy where barriers of culture, religion, class, nationalities, and politic ideologies have withered away. The human race no longer suffers from racism, envy, material want, or class struggle. Progress.

But why the matching uniforms?

There would seem to be baked into this vision of utopia some massive leveling-effort in which distinctions of class, culture, and creeds are obliterated to make way for…Progress. But is that the path to progress? Are the distinctions and varieties found in our world what’s standing in the way of utopia? If so, can they actually be leveled and what would that require? If not, is it possible they serve some purpose?

The Spice of Life

Conservatives view these distinctions and varieties as the spice of life: the unique qualities and aspects of cultures, classes, and individuals that allow us to flourish, grow, and develop into something that is truly ours. To the conservative, a world where these distinctions have been obliterated and all of humanity would be set on a level plain would be cold, narrowing, and soul-crushing. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take a step back and look more closely at the existence and nature of inequalities themselves.

No one disputes inequalities exist. But there is much disagreement on why they exist, or what qualifies as an “inequality”, let alone what should be done about it. Perhaps the sharpest question we can ask is who is to blame for inequalities? Does the mere fact that one person is unequal than another person create an injustice? And what of the various kinds of inequalities? We might be able to reach a wide consensus that no injustice is done if John is taller than Bill, or even if John is wealthier than Bill. But what if John belongs to an ethnic or social group that’s predominantly wealthier than Bill’s ethnic or social group? Is that an injustice?

The Stupidest Idea in Politics

“If there were a contest for the most stupid idea in politics,” economist

But if injustice isn’t the predominant explanation for inequalities, what is? John Adams, Founding Father and second President of the United States, gives just about

“Nature, which has established in the universe a chain of being and universal order, descending from archangels to microscopic animalcules, has ordained that no two objects shall be perfectly alike, and no two creatures perfectly equal. Although, among men, all are subject by nature to equal laws of morality, and in society have a right to equal laws for their government, yet no two men are perfectly equal in person, property, understanding, activity, and virtue, or ever can be made so by any power less than that which created them.”

We’ll spend some time thinking through Adams’ assertion that nature provides for equality of moral and political laws in Part 2. What I want to focus on is Adams’ claim that human nature is the root of inequality. For while this idea may seem quite obvious and agreeable, it is often overlooked in the quest to rid the world of the injustices posed by inequality.

Leftist ideologies often advance some idea of justice or equality that prescribe how the world ought to be. But the most important political fact about our place in the world is that it was here long before we arrived on the scene. Untold years—sometimes millennia—passed before we were around to set the record straight on nearly every social, political, and economic inequality there is. We didn’t invent our relationship to our family, we were born into it. The political ties and obligations were ours by birth, having done nothing to earn them ourselves. I didn’t choose to be an American born and raised into the family I was any more than I chose to be righthanded.

It is true that we have some limited chose in these matters. We choose who to marry, and we may renounce our citizenship and gain citizenship in some other country. But these infrequent instances of choice pail in comparison to the overwhelming fact we did not choose most of our associations. Which means we did not voluntarily consent to the duties they impose on us or the rights and privileges they grant us. As

If, as some Leftists insist, equality is something that is ours by right, who is to provide us with this equality? I have no more claim to the inheritance of my neighbor than my neighbor has to mine as we were not born into the same family. I can’t claim the rights and privileges afforded to the citizens of other nations. If these things make us unequal would we have a right to take what is ours?

The appeal to universal natural rights under

But the conservative is unwilling to go beyond the limited rights afforded to us by God (or by Natural Law, if you like), to the assertion that we have a right to something that is not ours by nature. The right to exist is ours for as long as we are alive, and though it will eventually be taken from us all it is quite different than the supposed right to equality. The right to exist is pre-political; that is, no political arrangement or even government is necessary to provide us with this right. Enforcing equality, however, would require political action. Equality was never ours by birth, and it is not within our power to bestow absolute equality on a species born in inequality.

True Equality and Unnatural Equality

To the conservative, true equality—equality before the law and before God—is precisely what gives rise to inequalities. And enforcing unnatural equality necessarily violates our natural equality. If people who are born with different abilities and access to opportunities are all set on a level playing field, we would naturally expect radically different outcomes. If we were to force equal access to opportunities by granting them to those without and depriving them to those who would otherwise have access, we would still see different outcomes because people would still be operating within the abilities they inherited at birth. If we strove still to eliminate even these inequalities, by demanding or enforcing that all outcomes be the same—such that if one person’s abilities allowed them to produce more or excel in some way beyond that of their peers we would deprive them of their excess production—we might finally achieve absolute equality. But the price we’d pay would be the death of distinction, variety, and—in a multitude of historical examples where such heavy-handed leveling has been attempted—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Is that justice? Is that progress?

Leftists demand equality because they demand progress. But what is the relationship between equality and progress? To Russell Kirk,

“Throughout history, progress of every sort, cultural and economic, has been produced by the desire of men for inequality. Without the possibility of inequality, a people continue on the dreary level of bare subsistence, like Irish peasants; granted inequality, the small minority of men of ability turn barbarism into civilization. Equality benefits no one. It frustrates men of talent; and it reduces the poor to a poverty still more abject. In a densely-population civilized state, it means near-starvation for the poor.”

The French political scientist

Undeterred, Leftists have consistently insisted equality would not only bring progress, it could even address the very roots of what ails humanity. We are not suffering from a fallen, imperfectible nature but from a lack of ideal social conditions. “Liberalism believes that if you diminish income inequalities and provide cradle-to-birth income security, criminality will wither away,”

While it stands to reason that significant inequalities in social conditions, to say nothing of abject poverty, can be a factor in how willing some are to engage in illegal or even violent behavior, it is simply not true that eliminating social inequalities provides for any meaningful reduction in crime. And the burden of proof in such a grand experiment would be on those insisting we would be better off if only we gave their latest equalization scheme a go.

Journalist Noah Rothman notes

“The liberal myth holds that privation and dispossession will drive people to acts of political violence,” Rothman continues, “because the liberal myth is a reductionist philosophy that boils down every sociopolitical development to privation and dispossession. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like an opportunity to redistribute incomes.” If equal incomes, social conditions, and outcomes could address societal ills, we would not expect to see violence and lawbreaking among the most privileged and pampered among us.

Instead, efforts at enforced equality through leveling only distort our nature. Perfect equality of social conditions and outcomes isn’t possible because we do not come into this world equally—nor does that mean some oppressive group or class is to blame for inequalities as much of our inequalities are built into the very nature of who we are as a species.

However, as Adams suggested above, we do have a right to a certain kind of equality.In a just state, all of us are equal before the law and before God.This kind of equality affirms the variety that we see in human nature.In fact, it celebrates it.And that is where we’ll turn in Part 2.

Let us review where we’ve come so far: In

In

The Religious and Natural Paths

Clearly, we have taken a rather religious path in exploring this idea of order. There is another pathway, however, that some conservative thinkers and, more broadly, thinkers on the political Right have taken to arrive at pretty much the same place: the path of Nature. What Dr. Martin Luther King called “God’s law” and Russell Kirk referred to as “an enduring moral order”, others have simply called Natural Law.

While no unified definition or consensus exists on what, precisely, Natural law is, I’m using the term to mean the philosophy that we can argue for the existence of certain duties, morals, and rights on the basis they are inherent to human nature. And when I say “argue for” I mean that proponents of Natural Law have often insist that all one has to do is employ their reason to see for themselves that these duties, morals, and rights exist because of our nature.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”--

There are times and circumstances where both the religious and the “natural” pathways lead us to the same idea of order. For, while I have argued a belief in God—let alone the Christian God—is not required to hold a conservative worldview, a conservative is not a strict materialist. As such, a conservative’s worldview must incorporate some notion of supernatural order. And while the supernatural is not incompatible with Natural Law theory, there are certainly worldviews that have no place for the supernatural. Political science professor

“The conservative appeal to reason within the natural-law tradition fails to cope with the problem in its existential form. Its basic error is to appeal to nature as the source of order, precisely when ill minds perceive nature as the source of disorder, as the dilemma from which they must save themselves. A simple counter-assertion cannot work the therapy needed. The real problem is to move to a perception of nature as ordered by a transcendent purpose, whose intention can be learned only by a revelation from on high. The real solution is to move from the threat of disordered nature to the perception of the right order that has been determined by divine intention.”

Disordered Nature and State Imposed Order

The twin paths of religion and nature only get you to the same place if we presume Nature itself to be ordained, created, and ordered. Simply put, the path of nature only gets you to order if nature is ordered in the first place. In a world of chaos there is but one path that leads to order: the collectivist State. The disciples of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau trudged down the pathway of nature and twisted Natural Law theory to insist that this business about self-evident truths and the rights of man justified pulling down society and erecting in its place a State that had the power to enforce order. Historian

“Those things which have been criticized as inconsistencies in Rousseau—his union of extreme individualism with collective tyranny—are actually the result of his penetrating logic. He saw that Locke’s doctrine of natural rights surrendered by agreement leads to a state that is either absolutely just, or—when the state fails in some particular, and tries to prevent dissolution of the agreement by force—absolutely unjust. Society and the state are coextensive terms. Prior to the social contract, each man is a world apart; and the absolute autonomy of this condition can only be surrendered to a custodian that discerns and demands absolute right. That is why the eighteenth-century reformers had to believe that Nature’s intent was clear, everywhere ‘self-evident,’ in order to embark on their experiments.”

The classical Lockean liberal may argue Natural Law teaches humans have certain rights and that a just government is a government that does not trample on those rights. That may be so, says the conservative, but Natural Law untethered from transcendent notions of order leads not to liberty but to statism. The State, far from being limited so as not to trample on our rights, may be viewed as the only entity powerful enough to give us our rights in a world of chaos.

Natural Law theorists insisted their idea was self-evident. And they used this self-evident idea as justification for a variety of what Wills referred to as “experiments”. The two most famous were the American and French experiments of self-government and liberty. But the two experiments employed a radically different understanding of order. The American experiment borrowed a Burkean understanding of order grounded in tradition, history, and religious norms all under a backdrop of God’s Providence. The French experiment used Rousseau’s understanding of order grounded in the

Burke scoffed at this Rousseauian approach—what he decried as abstract, metaphysical arguments for rights that were not ground in any sense of actual, transcendent order. Rights developed not in the sterilized universe of materialism, nor are they discerned by reason alone. To suggest rights could be poked and prodded in such a calculated, scientific manner was like saying we’d found a way to measure the weight and height and width of the human soul.

Rather, rights were supernaturally ordained and discovered through the shared historical experience of a people and divine revelation. That shared historical experience is going to differ between time and cultures, but this does not dull the force of our rights. That is, rights are not something that become more or less true in one time or place, but the ways in which our rights are understood, enforced, expressed, experienced, and applied will necessarily differ from one time and place to another.

Burke vs. Rousseau’s Disciples

Rousseau’s disciple Thomas Paine vehemently disagreed. To Paine, both the French and American “experiments” were not based on irreconcilable foundations, but they were really brothers in arms fighting the common cause of liberty over tyranny. In his excellent book

“For Burke…nature, history, justice, and order are inextricably connected. In his view, we can know the standard of nature only generally and only through the experience of history, whereas in Paine’s view we can know it precisely but only by liberating ourselves from the burdens of history and seeking for direct rational understanding of natural principles. For Burke the resort to history is the model of nature. For Paine, nature waits for us behind the distractions of history, which is merely a sorry tale of errors, crimes, and misunderstandings. Paine’s model of nature is a model of permanent justice that offers us principles for the proper arrangement of political life; Burke’s model of nature is a model of gradual change that stands a chance of pointing society in the right direction.”

These warring views between the disciples of Burke and Rousseau ultimately formed the basis for what has today become the debate between the Right and the Left. Burke’s views were foundational to modern conservative thought. Burke rejected the radical notions of Natural Law theory that justified pulling down any government, tradition, institution, or structure that stood in the way of some abstract notion of rights. He refused to walk down the materialistic, secular path to order. But, as we saw last week, he also refused to take the religious path to order if it meant defining the political process as realization of “Christian” government. Both paths lead to tyranny: one to the atheistic tyranny of Rousseau and the other to the arbitrary power of religious authority over the free will of the people. Levin explains how Burke manages to chart a course between these paths to secure Natural Law and our rights in much safer bedrock:

“[Burke is] neither a utilitarian proceduralist nor a natural-law philosopher. He does not believe that man-made law is the final authority and that only consequences matter. Nor does he believe that political life is an expression of unchanging Christian truths. The regime, he suggests, does not owe its legitimacy directly to God, and neither is every whim of the sovereign legitimate. He proposes, rather a novel notion of political change that emerges from precisely his model of nature and his (again, rather novel) idea of prescription. And yet over time, this idea points us toward a standard of justice and judgment beyond pure utility.”

Ordered Liberty

The conservative is fond of using the phrase “ordered liberty” to indicate a society in which both order and liberty are mutually reinforcing. If Burke is right—if the conservative view of order comports to reality—then this order becomes more than the basis for moral judgments: it becomes the very bedrock upon which liberty can be built. Burkean order leads us to a free society. It doesn’t stray down the paths of utilitarian leveling in its search for perfect equality, or Rousseau’s general will of the tyrannical state, or the religious path leading to a theocratic state, none are which conducive to freedom.

The folly of some Natural Law theorists is their assumption that liberty and order can forever be set in some permanent fixture, that the role of the state, the responsibility of the citizens, and the rights of humanity can forever be discerned, written down, and perfectly experienced. As political philosopher

“The issue is not whether men have natural rights or whether those rights should be respected by government; the issue is whether our generation, by contrast with scores of preceding generations that were also deeply committed to the idea of natural rights, has any particular reason for claiming that it can now make a ‘list’ of them and, having done so, seek to impose them, forever and a day, on future generations. The issue is not whether men have natural rights, but whether those rights can at any moment be specified once and for all.”

Order and liberty are never fully reconciled. They are contradictory—or, at least, paradoxical—principles that are held in tension whose natural state is to pull apart. We are in constant threat of order depriving us of liberty just as we are in continuous danger of liberties being used to undermine order. That’s why Burke taught that our greatest hope of balancing the order/liberty equation was through the patient, deliberative process of grounding our politics and personal lives to the shared historical experiences, norms, and institutions. Balancing order and liberty is extremely hard, and it would be wise to use every tool at our disposal—including enlisting the aid of our ancestors through those experiences, norms, and institutions.

“Affirmation of a transcendent order is not only compatible with individual autonomy, but the condition of it,”

In the conservative view, liberty is the blessing of order and not the ultimate purpose for human existence. For liberty without order is a curse. Order comes first—much like the search for bedrock begins before the house is built. This is where the conservative worldview begins; this is Burke’s “foundation of all good things” upon which the building may commence.

Today the term “neocon” is often used to depict someone as war hawkish or part of “The Establishment”. And it’s often used as a pejorative. To call someone a neocon is to imply they are part of the problem, unsympathetic to the plight of the average Joe, and, quite possibly, evil.

Neocon is, of course, short for “neoconservative”. But what is neoconservatism? Is it simply a group of elitist gloooobalists on the Right who profit from the status quo and ever-increasing military ventures at the expense of the rest of us? And who is a neocon? Politicians ranging from George W. Bush to John McCain to Hillary Clinton have all been labeled neocon. Is it a label without any meaningful distinction?

Saving Elephants host Josh Lewis is joined by Matthew Continetti to untangle this often misused, misunderstood, and definitely underappreciated term. Josh and Matthew talk through the three iterations or waves of neoconservatism from the godfather of the movement—Irving Kristol—in the 1960s to the conservative responses to the Vietnam War to the post-Cold War iteration with Irving’s son Bill Kristol on to today, and what this historical tradition can tell us about our own political dilemmas.

,,About Matthew Continetti

From Continetti’s bio with AEI:

Matthew Continetti holds a BA in history from Columbia University and is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where his work is focused on American political thought and history, with a particular focus on the development of the Republican Party and the American conservative movement in the 20th century. A prominent journalist, analyst, author, and intellectual historian of the right, Mr. Continetti was the founding editor and the editor-in-chief of The Washington Free Beacon. Previously, he was opinion editor at The Weekly Standard.

Mr. Continetti is also a contributing editor at National Review and a columnist for Commentary Magazine. He has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among other outlets. He also appears frequently on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report” with Bret Baier and MSNBC’s “Meet the Press Daily” with Chuck Todd.

Mr. Continetti is the author of two books: “

You can find Matthew Continetti on Twitter @continetti.

“How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust?” Martin Luther King Jr. asked in his famous

While King may not have held a conservative worldview, his views on what makes a law just or unjust is fully aligned with conservative thinking. For if terms like “just” and “unjust” have any significance beyond what we or the majority of people just happen to prefer, there must be some standard by which we can understand what is just or unjust. King identified this as the “moral law” or the “law of God”. This is what Russell Kirk referred to as an enduring moral order—which I have been referring to as simply “order”.

Order can be grounded in both philosophy and religion, though religion has historically shown itself to be the more fertile soil for sustaining a sense of order. And, while much good comes from our ability to ground order in some objective, moral standard outside of our momentary whims, much mischief can also arise from the process of attempting to pattern our laws after a religious order. “It is precisely when religion intrudes into politics that the political process is most at risk,”

Burke’s Views on Church and State

To be sure, conservative thinkers have long argued for the necessity of religious orthodoxy as a stabilizing force for good. And this has often been expressed as far more than fine feelings or the prejudice for some utilitarian good effect observed to come from religion. Take

“They do not consider their church establishment as convenient, but as essential to their state; not as a thing heterogeneous and separable; something added for accommodation; what they may either keep up or lay aside, according to their temporary ideas of convenience. They consider it as the foundation of their whole constitution, with which, and with every part of which, it holds an indissoluble union. Church and state are ideas inseparable in their minds, and scarcely is the one ever mentioned without mentioning the other…We have not relegated religion (like something we were ashamed to shew) to obscure municipalities or rustic villages. No! We will have her to exalt her mitred front in courts and parliaments. We will have her mixed throughout the whole mass of life, and blended with all the classes of society. The people of England will shew to the haughty potentates of the world, and to their talking sophisters, that a free, a generous, an informed nation, honors the high magistrates of its church.”

In our increasingly secularized culture, Burke’s words seem shockingly antiquated, perhaps even dangerously superstitious. Was Burke ignorant—or worse, supportive—of the meddling role religious institutions had played in European politics of the Middle Ages? Was he denigrating the liberalization of the West in favor of some form of theocracy? Far from it. Elsewhere in The Reflections Burke disavows a Christian theocracy:

“Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character, to assume what does not belong to them, are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave, and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite.”

In other words, the church is of vital importance to the development of culture and the character of the individual that form the fundamental building blocks of a stable state, but ought not be used as an instrument of the state or involved in directing public policy. “It is one of the triumphs of Christian civilization to have held on to the Christian vision of human destiny,”

For even if we could all agree upon a single faith and were somehow capable of appointing religious magistrates who would perfectly divine laws based on that faith, we would still be committing a category error. As Scruton put it, “secular law adapts, religious law endures.” Religious traditions may guide us in understanding the delicate balance between human flourishing, purpose, tradition, liberty, security, and the roles and responsibilities of a complex web of networks, families, occupations, communities, and governments. But it’s unlikely to solve contemporary debates about tax rates, speed limits, or tort claims.

“Faith, purpose, and value, while expressing themselves in social forms, are never social in origin,”

Secular laws don’t find their origin in the heavens at all, but in a deliberative, consensual political processes. And whether the political process is democratic or authoritarian, some form of deliberation and consent is needed (for even absolute dictators cannot operate forever without the alliance of at least some of their subjects).

Now, consent works something like this: I’m OK with paying a little extra in taxes if it means we’ll get the roads fixed around here. Our secular law is malleable, bending to the unique and changing circumstances—and sometimes preferences—of the governed. Religious law is imposed from outside of our world looking in. Secular law—no matter how authoritarian the society—is imposed on humans by other humans and can be altered for that exact reason.

The Mosaic Covenant and the Theocratic State

It is true that holy texts—say, the Hebrew Torah or the Old Testament—contain specific instructions on how we are to behave from dietary restrictions on down to laws on murder. The Mosaic Covenant is filled with various laws on human behavior that many Evangelical Americans frequently quote as applicable today—“Thou shalt not steal”—and various and sundry edicts they’re less likely to quote—"Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.”

For those who take the Word of God to provide some ideal blueprint for law, it should be noted that the Mosaic Covenant was literally made between Yahweh and His chosen people—that is, the Jews (Exodus 19:1-6). Importing the Mosaic Covenant on our pluralistic, multi-ethnic society located thousands of miles from the Promised Land would be like imposing freedom of the seas international law on a landlocked country. It’s not the authority of the law that’s in dispute but its intended parties and direct application. Such thinking also tends to ignore the remaining texts in Scripture as it would behoove us to read through the books of the Bible that follow the Mosaic Covenant to learn how well things worked out for the people who gave it a go before we try it ourselves.

Russell Kirk argued

“All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory,”

Do Laws Point to Order Directly or Indirectly?

Perhaps this seems a distinction without a difference. What’s the substantive difference between manmade law built upon the foundation of God’s law and manmade law attempting to duplicate God’s law? The difference is whether we believe the relationship between manmade law and God’s law to be direct or indirect.

A direct relationship would imply that the political process is capable of producing justice; that we can ascertain philosophical truth claims to such a degree that we can know which laws will produce justice without examining their effect. A direct relationship would have no need to consider historical context, the character of a people, or any circumstantial background before rendering abstract “justice”. A direct relationship would imply the state could ensure justice by correctly identifying oppressors and victims and correctly doling out reparations accordingly. The conservative rejects this view.

Historian

“The rationalist pits the individual against an abstract order of justice in the state, instead of tracing the spontaneous growth and grouping of social forms that give the individual a field for expression and activity. The state appears apocalyptically, in such theories, bringing justice ‘new-born’ into prior chaos. But in the real order, the state arises from a hierarchy of social organizations, of groups formed to fill particular needs. The state stabilizes this spontaneous social expression. It answers a natural demand for unity. It cannot initiate such unity, or carve countries out of the map by legislative fiat.”

Conversely, an indirect relationship would imply that our laws are aimed at producing good, practical outcomes and, in so doing, point to God’s law. An indirect relationship wouldn’t dare to declare a law just without examining its effect. An indirect relationship would consult Wills’ “hierarchy of social organizations”—such as religious tradition, shared cultural experiences, or prevailing norms and customs—before enacting law. An indirect relationship would imply the state has a duty to identify specific acts of injustice, including the perpetrators of injustice and their victims, and to render judgment accordingly, but wouldn’t dare to attempt to right all injustices by giving some advantage to a broad group of “victims” or by pulling down their perceived “oppressors”.

Just as the priest has no business running the affairs of the state, neither does the philosopher. Religion and philosophy are invaluable tools that may guide us towards a greater understanding of just laws, but they are metaphysical, abstract, rationalist tools that can never perfectly align with the material, circumstantial, prudential, and sometimes even grubby business of practical politics.

Conservative Paradoxes

The conservative position then presents us with two paradoxes. The first is the notion that there exists an enduring moral order—God’s law, if you will—that provides a foundation for all good things. Humans didn’t create this order, and they surely can’t alter it based on their preferences or opinions. The best we can do is seek to understand the order and live by it. But—and it’s a big BUT—our ability to understand this order, let alone translate it into the practical application of everyday life, is limited by our imperfect nature. Therefore, the best we can hope for is to aim at justice, knowing that the circumstances and complexities of life are going to make this a continual process of renewal and not some fully achievable end in this life.

And what’s true at the individual level is just as true for the state. In the political realm, our laws are just when they align with God’s law. But that “alignment” is indirect and imperfect, and we are constantly in need of re-examining where we stand and judging the measurable outcomes of our laws. We will never achieve perfect justice with our laws, though we understand perfect justice does exist.

The second paradox--

The most obvious reason for this is that belief in order originating outside of human hands would imply ultimate justice is not a project of the state, but a promise of the Almighty. Kristol further explains how a loss of religion leads to an overreliance on the state:

“There has been a decline in the belief in an afterlife in whatever form—the belief that, somehow or other, the ‘unfairness’ of this life in this world is somewhere remedied and that accounts are made even. As more and more people cease to believe any such thing, they demand that the injustice and unfairness of life be coped with here and now. Inevitably this must be done by the government, since no one else can claim a comparable power.”

Jesus Christ

I opened this post by using the term order as a substitute for King’s “moral law” or the “law of God”. From that basis it’s nearly impossible to talk about order without “getting religious”. But throughout the Enlightenment on up until today some have used the terms “natural rights” or “natural law” to describe a similar notion of order. What might conservatism have to tell us about natural rights? That is where we’ll pick things up in the fourth and final post in this series.

As we

This idea is, of course, controversial. While other worldviews may have similar notions of order, there are plenty of others who find the idea strange, laughable, dangerous, and unproven. A universe of some divine, transcendent, outside “order” making truth claims may sound like a recipe for authoritarianism. As conservative journalist

For now, I’d like to turn to another aspect of this idea of order that may be equally controversial: If order exists, where did it come from?

Supernatural Origins

“There are many American conservatives,”

The simplest reason for this is that the conservative worldview rejects the doctrine of pure materialism. That is, conservatives may differ on the nature of the supernatural, but they do agree on the existence of the supernatural. To the conservative, humans are not merely highly sophisticated computers wrapped in meat, but beings with a physical and spiritual nature, nor is reality composed of matter only but beauty, truth, and goodness. The conservative would say that beauty, truth, and goodness are just as real as physical objects made of matter. That is, they are not mere preferences but things that derive their value and being from an enduring moral order.

What’s more, conservatives have also insisted that it is absolutely essential humanity observe the spiritual order if it ever hopes to get on in the physical world. “The material order rests upon the spiritual order,”

Edmund Burke was even more to the point

Reducing Religion

Sir Roger Scruton’s views seem less religious than Burke or Kirk. As he wrote in

But this was precisely the concern Irving Kristol wrote about a generation earlier.

Clearly, this is a big subject and I do not mean to turn this series into an evangelistic tract. My larger point is that the conservative notion of order is not something that humans simply developed or adhere to out of some evolutionary advantage, but it is something real and imposed on us in a supernatural sense. Trying to hold this notion in mind without appealing to God as its origin can be challenging—let alone trying to get an entire nation to hold to the idea of a supernatural order in a culture where religion has been relegated to private superstitions. But I digress.

Spooky Religion

Those who oppose conservative thought often object to the conservative’s dogged fixation on these spookish, religious notions. Some liberty-minded classical liberals and libertarians who might otherwise be sympathetic to conservative ideas may object to what they view as the needless spiritualization of political matters. And, here again, one can find legions of examples where ideas of religious imperatives can be twisted to authoritarian or theocratic ends. I am not ignorant of the destructive ways in which religious dogma has been used to suspend judgment or debate in matters of politics—something I’ll delve into in Part 3. But the conservative does profess that—at bottom—all societal issues are the result of our imperfect and—trigger warning!—sinful nature.

The conservative rejects the idea that societal ills can be entirely, or even predominantly, blamed on the Marxist concept of class struggle or the progressive’s notions of social injustices or even the libertarian/classical liberal’s views of state coercion. To whatever degree those problems persist, they pale in comparison to humanity’s real problem: original sin. Put simply, the conservative believes in both an enduring moral order and humanity’s consistent failure to live up to that order.

To the conservative, the purpose of civilization is to literally civilize the otherwise barbarous instincts of our species. Take an infant from your typical American family and give them to parents living in the heart of the Congo, and that infant is unlikely to grow up working at Starbucks and spouting Bernie Sanders campaign slogans. Humans are hardwired to behave in certain respects and the civilization and institutions that surround us are meant to shape that hard-wiring into ways that our civilization has discerned to adhere to some understanding of an enduring moral order. Perhaps you may object to the idea of society imposing some value system on us. Very well, show me a society that makes no efforts to shape the next generation by imposing a value system and I’ll show you a group of hairless apes.

As

Order’s Origins

But we can’t restore order to the state or the soul if we don’t first begin to understand that order. It’s one thing to settle upon the existence of order, it’s quite another to reach some consensus on what that order would have us do.

The most common—perhaps we could say “accepted”—means of discerning order is utilizing our capacity to reason. Indeed, some have argued that reason is not only all one needs to discern order, but the only legitimate tool at our disposal. The Enlightenment thinker Thomas Paine was absolutely insistent on this idea. As Yuval Levin noted in his book

Burke, as we’ve noted above, had no problem appealing to authority. If order is indeed supernatural in nature, then it just won’t do to limit our understanding of that order through natural means such as reason alone. I don’t want to get sidetracked with the arguments against an appeal to reason alone—a topic

I like the way

“Revelation and reason both are ways to order, and by either can a transcending leap be achieved. But that leap is not the work of narrow logic; instead, it is accomplished by the higher imagination, by the perceptions of genius, by an intuition which transcends ordinary experience—by a means, in fine, which we cannot adequately describe with those tools called words. Neither the leap of Israel nor the leap of Hellas brought full knowledge of the transcendent order; it required the fusing of Jewish and Greek genius in Christianity for a leap still higher.”

Stanley Parry, professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame,

“The conservative appeal to reason within the natural-law tradition fails to cope with the problem in its existential form. Its basic error is to appeal to nature as the source of order, precisely when ill minds perceive nature as the source of disorder, as the dilemma from which they must save themselves. A simple counter-assertion cannot work the therapy needed. The real problem is to move to a perception of nature as ordered by a transcendent purpose, whose intention can be learned only by a revelation from on high. The real solution is to move from the threat of disordered nature to the perception of the right order that has been determined by divine intention.”

Authorized Authorities

If we hope to make any progress in discerning supernatural order, we must abandon the idea that we can achieve this through our natural means of reasoning. Appeals to authority must also be allowed. And what might those appeals be?

“Conscience is an authority;”

Kirk

But if this is so, does this imply that our best shot at governing society in accordance to this God-willed order is to leave that governance in the hands of the theologians? Would accepting revelation as a means of discerning order—quite literally, what we’re defining as how humans ought to behave—undermine the entire notion of liberty? For how could government be just if it leaves citizens alone to pursue their appetites in accordance with their sin nature, and not the higher virtues order calls us to? Secular society seeks to separate the church from the state; does the conservative’s notion of order seek to replace the state with the church? This is where we’ll pick things up in Part 3.

In the wake of the global pandemic, American attitude on trade with China is beginning to sour. Is president Trump’s hawkish stance on free trade the right way to go? Has free trade made us more prosperous or mere stooges of foreign governments who take our jobs and rob us of billions in trade deficits? Joining Josh to untangle these important issues is Scott Lincicome, international trade attorney and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

This episode was inspired by a listeners email:

Hello I’m a new listener and big fan of the show all the way from Massachusetts. I was hoping you would cover some economics like the supply side vs demand And maybe the debt deficit and why it matters. I know some of it can be wonky but I think your listeners would really enjoy it I know I would.

Regards,

Raphael

While a discussion on trade touches only aspects of a broader discussion on conservative economic ideas, this episode will at least serve as an introduction to the subject with many more to come in the days ahead.

About Scott Lincicome

From the Cato Institution’s biography of Scott Lincicome:

Scott Lincicome is an international trade attorney with extensive experience in trade litigation before the United States Department of Commerce, the US International Trade Commission (ITC), the US Court of International Trade, the European Commission and the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Dispute Settlement Body. He has also advised corporate and sovereign clients on US bilateral and regional trade agreements and US trade policy, as well as WTO matters, including accessions, compliance and multilateral trade negotiations. Scott is also a Visiting Lecturer at Duke University, where he teaches a course on US trade policy and politics.

From 1998–2001 Scott was as a trade policy research assistant at the Cato Institute. Since 2009, Scott has authored or co‐​authored several policy papers published by the Cato Institute and other organizations. He also blogs on international trade politics and policy at his personal blog,

You can find Scott on Twitter @scottlincicome.

Ignorance is bliss—so they say—and I suspect much of that has to do with a certain unassuming, ignorant confidence about the world around us. The more we learn, the more we realize how much we still don’t know. When we know very little, it can be much easier deceiving ourselves into thinking we know about all there is to know about some individual or concept.

Since 2016 I have been slowly and painstakingly working my way through Russell Kirk’s

Now here I am, nearly four years later, producing podcasts and blog posts and immersing myself in conservative ideas and arguments. I feel significantly less ignorant yet, I must confess, all the more ill-equipped to take another stab at this central concept of conservative thought: As

“The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.”

The full implications of this idea—not to mention the arguments in favor or disapproving of this view or the thorny business of trying to agree upon a working definition of “moral order”, “human nature”, or “permanent truths”—is precisely what makes this so challenging to untangle. But untangle we must for, if we ever hope to understand conservatism, we must first understand the foundation conservatism rests upon.

Adding to the confusion is the multitude of ways in which this concept has been explained and the various labels that have been attributed to this central idea. What Kirk calls an enduring moral order has gone by many other names from law to norm to authority to divine truth to natural law to sacred law to God’s law to many others. Throughout this series, I’ll simply refer to the idea as “order” and attempt to parse through instances where I’m quoting someone who seems to have a slightly different idea or word in mind.

Material and Immaterial Laws

I believe Kirk still had this notion of an enduring moral order in mind when he wrote of “law” and “norm” in

And because it’s outside of the material world, it cannot be studied or measured or defended through material means. We can observe the law of gravity each time we miss a step or lose our grip on a plate of food and we can discern certain truths about gravity through the scientific method. But we can’t do the same for concepts like justice or love or courage. If we are going to get on knowing anything about virtues, we must come by this knowledge by some other means than tools used to understand the material world.

But while there may be obvious differences between the order of the material and the immaterial realms, they are alike in three important ways: First, our ability to understand them is finite. We have certain tools at our disposal to learn more about the material world around us, but no scientist worth their salt would claim we are ever capable of fully understanding all there is to know about the material world in some exhaustive sense. Science is self-correcting and ever-learning, it is not capable of perfect knowledge. Our ability to comprehend, or agree upon, aspects of the immaterial moral order is even more limited. While tools like reason, tradition, intuition, and claims of revelation may help, much of the moral order is truly inscrutable.

Second—as Kirk tells us—we don’t create or destroy order. True, we might “defy” in some sense the law of gravity by building contraptions that fly, but this doesn’t alter the existence of gravity. It simply means we’ve found some way to work around it. In much the same way, the immaterial order may be employed in all kinds of interesting ways, but we can no more create virtue or morality than we can will gravity out of existence.

The third way material and immaterial order is similar is that they both have a cause and effect relationship, though this relationship is much more direct for material order and opaque for immaterial order. The cause and effect relationship for breaking the law of gravity is obvious. If gravity foretells that my plate full of food will fall when I loosen my grip on my way back to the table from the buffet, we can easily see the cause and effect relationship at work. What’s not so easily observed—indeed, what’s quite literally unknowable in most instances—are the consequences of breaking humanity’s enduring moral order.

The term Kirk used instead of cause-and-effect was “influence”. The serious conservative does not mean to imply that violating or trifling with the moral order has an immediate, predictable, measurable, and equitable effect. Perhaps in some cosmic, transcendent sense we could say that violators will be prosecuted in a balanced way. But in our temporal existence it is easily observable that two people can behave in immoral ways and reap radically different effects. It is better here to speak of the consequences of grating against the moral order. If Kirk is right—if there exists “law for man”—then the fact that consequences are sure to follow a breach in the moral order is more important than our capacity for measuring those consequences.

If we hope to build a society that’s functional, we must observe the order made for humanity. Our world may be imperfect and even imperfectible. But the building can never be any stronger than its foundation; we can only hope to make progress if we first build upon the perfect bedrock of order.

While much nuance and disagreement exist at the peripheries of the moral order, as we move closer to the center reasonable humans have an innate sense of something beginning to take shape. Kirk

The Foundation of All Good Things

It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of order. It’s not some idea relegated to trivial conversations amongst people with a lot of time on their hands, it is quite literally the glue that holds reality together. “Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos,”

Edmund Burke

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we can explore further down those paths we need to step back and take inventory of where this leaves us. If Kirk’s assertion of the existence of an enduring moral order is true, we’re faced with an abundance of questions, such as:

• Can we define this moral order, or at least discern it? If so, how?
• What is the relationship between societal order and the order within each individual in society?
• Where does this order come from? Is it spiritual in nature?
• What political and legal implications does a moral order impose?
• Doesn’t the flirtation with ideas of a moral order quickly descend into authoritarian theocracy? How does the conservative guard against that?
• What implications does this have for politics or the state? Or is this a matter of faith that should be left out of political considerations altogether?
• What is the relationship between order and liberty? Are these ideas in conflict or can they be reconciled?

All that and more I hope to address in the weeks ahead. But first, let’s talk about how we might discern order and what order would have us to do. That is where we’ll pick things up in Part 2.

In the wake of the global pandemic, American attitude on trade with China is beginning to sour. Is president Trump’s hawkish stance on free trade the right way to go? Has free trade made us more prosperous or mere stooges of foreign governments who take our jobs and rob us of billions in trade deficits? Joining Josh to untangle these important issues is Scott Lincicome, international trade attorney and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

This episode was inspired by a listeners email:

Hello I’m a new listener and big fan of the show all the way from Massachusetts. I was hoping you would cover some economics like the supply side vs demand And maybe the debt deficit and why it matters. I know some of it can be wonky but I think your listeners would really enjoy it I know I would.

Regards,

Raphael

While a discussion on trade touches only aspects of a broader discussion on conservative economic ideas, this episode will at least serve as an introduction to the subject with many more to come in the days ahead.

About Scott Lincicome

From the Cato Institution’s biography of Scott Lincicome:

Scott Lincicome is an international trade attorney with extensive experience in trade litigation before the United States Department of Commerce, the US International Trade Commission (ITC), the US Court of International Trade, the European Commission and the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Dispute Settlement Body. He has also advised corporate and sovereign clients on US bilateral and regional trade agreements and US trade policy, as well as WTO matters, including accessions, compliance and multilateral trade negotiations. Scott is also a Visiting Lecturer at Duke University, where he teaches a course on US trade policy and politics.

From 1998–2001 Scott was as a trade policy research assistant at the Cato Institute. Since 2009, Scott has authored or co‐​authored several policy papers published by the Cato Institute and other organizations. He also blogs on international trade politics and policy at his personal blog,

You can find Scott on Twitter @scottlincicome.