Conservative Tree Huggers

After taking that presidential selector quiz yesterday, I was a bit puzzled. It seemed strange that I, who have long considered myself a conservative of some stripe or another (with a brief sojourn among the libertarians), would find the Green Party candidate at the top of my list (with admittedly a large area of disagreement)!

But after reflecting on it a bit, maybe it’s not so strange. My intellectual heroes are people like Russell Kirk, C. S. Lewis, Christopher Lasch and J. R. R. Tolkien, all of which combined a degree of social conservatism with a recognition that conserving the physical and social ecology of civilization required placing limits on the untrammeled market. All of them had a “green” streak and exhibited a love for the natural world. According to Eric Scheske:

Kirk himself had “liberal” traits, as that term is understood by many today (though Kirk would have fiercely denied that the traits are liberal). He detested Ayn Rand and her objectivist philosophy that teaches that selfishness is a virtue, and distrusted the efficiency-obsessed economics of many capitalist economists. He denied that people have an absolute right to private property. He admired the trust-busting and early conservationist Teddy Roosevelt (listing him as one of the top ten conservatives of all time14). He endorsed environmental protection legislation and was an ardent lover of nature who planted thousands of trees during his lifetime.

Furthermore, all of these thinkers recognized the dangers to a virtuous communal life posed by a state that engages in regular war-making. Tolkien in particular regarded modern war as uniquely horrific, differing in kind and not just in degree from earlier conflicts. Kirk was an ardent non-interventionist who cast his first presidential vote for socialist Norman Thomas to reward the latter for his opposition to war.

So, it occurs to me that an ecologically concerned, mixed-economy favoring, non-interventionist conservative might just have more in common with a David Cobb or a Ralph Nader than with George Bush or John Kerry. This despite serious disagreements over some social issues.

And lo and behold, I’m not the only one who thinks this way. After doing a quick Google search I came across this wonderful blog named, appropriately enough, A Green Conservatism. The proprietor, a “Marcus Tullius Cicero” even has a green conservative manifesto of sorts:

The central political commitment of this tradition of conservatism, stated with a view to the conditions of our time, is that the life of civilization should be so ordered, and states should so act, as to enable all members of the human community to live as well, and hence as virtuously, individually and collectively, as circumstances allow.

But, as the reader will know, the central commitment of modern conservatism in America, and similar movements worldwide, is to taking one’s capitalism straight, so to speak, in the name of liberty. At the extreme, this position is indistinguishable in many of its practical commitments from a kind of ecologically blind – and to that extent not really typical – libertarianism.

In particular, state ownership of enterprises or provision of services, egalitarian redistribution of income or wealth, and interferences with the market or other facets of human behavior intended to protect the interests, rights, and dignity of consumers, workers, or even just bystanders – I am thinking here of the issue of externalities, and taking it in a large enough sense to encompass all our environmental concerns – are all rejected and resisted by these conservatives, and attempts are periodically mounted to roll them back.

On all of these issues, I am firmly opposed to the aims and views of modern conservatism. For instance, like nearly everyone today, I favor a mixed economy. And generally I favor more, rather than less, of all those kinds of economic and environmentalist measures these conservatives oppose, to the point that I am, in these things, actually notably to the left of the Democratic Party.

That this type of “conservatism” bears little resemblance to the variety currently prevalent in the GOP seems obvious enough. In any event, it’s nice to know I’m not completely alone in my weirdness.