Right-wing vs. conservative: is there a discernable difference?

Perhaps this sort of thing only happens in college, but the conflation of lots of different ideas coming from all sorts of influences on and off campus have inspired this post.

The heightened profile of the Youth for Western Civilization at Vandy, a self-proclaimed right-wing group that aims to counter its perception of raging leftism on campus, has certainly made me think about the nature of right-wingism (full disclosure: some members of YWC occasionally write for the Torch). Mark Levin’s latest book and his appearance on the Rush Limbaugh program yesterday got me thinking about the nature of American conservatism.

Add in some discussion of European right-wing movements from a class I’m in on Vichy France and some ridiculous ideas like a “Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements” and you’ve got me going.

So when I picked up this month’s Orbis to find an article titled “Xenophobia and right-wing political movements” I was interested. The Web site indicates this is an opinion article, which is more than the print edition says. The article is full of ad hominem, begging the question, and other logical fallacies that ask the reader to make serious intellectual leaps.

The idea is that xenophobia is inherently linked to right-wing movements in Europe, and thus the Republican Party in the United States could be expected to take advantage of these sentiments, or something like that. One of its many flaws is its lack of historical explanation of the right’s link to nationalism in Europe.

… one does not need to go back into the past to point to electorally successful xenophobic parties. In Western Europe, the far-right National Alliance in Italy and the Swiss People’s Party are both current members of their respective national governments. Other far-right parties, such as Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Norway’s Progress Party, and the Freedom Party of Austria, represent some of the largest political parties in their countries as measured by their share of the national vote.

Up until around the middle of the 19th century, nationalism was not a dominant force in right-wing or conservative politics in Europe; royalism or nobilism was. The writer, Evan Didier, conflates nationalism and xenophobia (the fear of strangers or foreigners), without really giving proper definitions, and then conflates that with right-wing movements.

All of this is pretty loose and could start a whole separate discussion, but the point is that Didier seems to be leaving out any historical or intellectual context to his argument. In doing so, he baselessly asserts that all of this xenophobia could rear its ugly head in the GOP based on the fact that they are, um, also right-wing. 

This seems to be the worst assumption made about the modern American conservative movement, perhaps even by members of the movement. Anglo-American conservatism is intellectually informed by a whole host of other influences than continental right-wing thought. If we consider Edmund Burke the founder of modern conservatism, we see the breaking point all the way back to the French Revolution.

Burke was a Whig MP who supported the American Revolution at the time but was vehemently opposed to the French Revolution 13 years later. He supported the Americans in 1776 because they were “revolting” against the British disregard for its own common law system. What became of our Revolution was, of course, the United States of America, which is what we conservatives, with disagreements here or there, are looking to conserve. Common law, free markets, representative democracy and individual liberty; these are the ideas and institutions we cherish.

Contrast this with the French Revolution and how “right-wingism” became the conservatism of France and the continent. Burke was against the French Revolution largely on the terms of how such a revolution would apply in Great Britain itself. Those who opposed it in France, however, were royalists and aristocrats and the large landowners. The political issues of the nobility that plagued French and continental politics for at least a century afterward either slowly disappeared in the case of the UK (which had a small nobility and constitutionally limited monarchy) or were non-existent in the US (which had none).

The issues of nationalism in Europe were unique when they came to be associated with the Right. Originally a left-of-center idea, nationalism became a right-wing tenet as royalism became obsolete. Events like the Dreyfuss affair in France at the turn of the century solidified the change. Some Anglo-American conservative principles were also intertwined in European right-wing thought, but others weren’t. One of the Catholic conservatives’ main beef with the pre-WWII 3rd Republic in France was its supposedly hedonistic capitalist system. Anti-Semitism and a general hatred or “fear” (I can’t stand all of our -phobias) of foreigners were also a part of this tradition, and so these ideas remain part of the political culture of Europe.

To be sure, American politics has had its share of nationalism and distrust for foreigners (though the two are in no way the same). I believe strains of this are still seen in the greater right-of-center culture, but they remain on the fringes (i.e. JBS, 9/11 trutherism, Michael Savage) rather than at the center.

But there is a strict difference between the xenophobia so often attributed to conservatives and the realistic views that illegal immigration should be curbed and radical Muslim terrorism is a serious problem. Conservatism in the sense that I and many other mainstream cons understand it seeks to preserve the ideals of the American Revolution, informed by even older ideas about the place of man in the world, for example.

I can’t really speak much more on this (like I haven’t rambled on enough already), but there are plenty of smart people, like William F. Buckley, Jr., who can articulate it more succinctly.

Tagged as: conservatism, immigration, Rush Limbaugh, vanderbilt university