Wilhoit, Anti-Conservatism, and Anarchism

Frank Wilhoit’s definition of conservatism (about which much more below) was not, as you would expect from something so incisive and widely quoted, formulated years ago in a scholarly book or article. It appeared only six years ago, in a lengthy comment by Wilhoit (a composer and music theorist), under a blog post by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber, criticizing the viewpoint that would later come to be associated with the sort of centrist bedbug commentators who write at Very Serious Publications like The Atlantic and the NYT op-ed page. Wilhoit commented:

There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.

There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.

There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect….

As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.

The violence has always been a key accompaniment to the ideology; it has always depended on Freikorps,  Blackshirts, Legionnaires, Klansmen  and death squads to remind outgroups of their place in the social order, when they try to get above their station. But in recent years, as Wilhoit says, the ideology has increasingly set aside all the trappings of “cake of custom” and “wisdom of the unlettered,” and all of Russell Kirk’s other vacuous second-hand blatherings from Burke, in favor of pure violence. “Violence” refers not only to the physical violence of street thugs like Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Boogaloo Boys et al, but to all the rhetorical violence and symbolism aimed at mocking the marginalized, reminding them of their outsider status, and isolating them in the face of the collective of right-thinking citizens and its potential for backing up its normative status with the sanction of physical violence if necessary. The message, loud and clear, is “You best get your mind right and keep in your place. Else we’re coming for you. And no one will lift a finger to save you.” We saw it recently displayed in the lying gutter propaganda of Vance and Trump, aimed at stirring up a pogrom against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

I’ve previously written that the word “freedom,” as it appears in right-wing discourse, would make a lot more sense if it were routinely translated into “white folkways” (violently enforced, of course). As Madeline Ashby pointed out in a post on Bluesky onAugust 23:

Someone asked me why they thought they’d “score points” [by mocking Tim Walz’s son for crying out of joy and pride for his dad]. I did a dept honours thesis on Holocaust history; it’s not about points. It’s about social enforcement: viciously putting “undesirables” in place while proving to everyone else that no help is coming for them when it’s their turn.

The fascist impulse to crush empathy and sincerity comes from a real tactical understanding that a population with both will defend its most vulnerable.

Wilhoit concludes by calling for the development of the hitherto-lacking anti-conservative ideology:

So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.

No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:

The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.”

I disagree with Wilhoit on one particular — that the core proposition of anti-conservatism cannot be “mapped onto,” or does not coincide with, the tenets of any other ideology, and that it cannot benefit from elaboration or exegesis.

The core principles of the various ideologies conventionally assigned to the left, since the term “left” was first assigned to representatives of the Third Estate in the French National Assembly — the ideologies of liberalism, socialism, and anarchism, all closely related and intertwined and growing from common Enlightenment roots — have always been Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

The closest approximation to the goal of a society whose governance structures bind and protect all equally can be found in the principles of libertarian socialism. Libertarian socialism not only shares with the broader left the Enlightenment principles that all are of equal dignity and worth, all are ends in themselves, and the equal agency, self-development and flourishing of each should be promoted to the maximum extent possible; it develops these principles most fully in its own principle that all should have an equal say in the decisions that bind them or affect their daily lives. This means a society in which all the institutions whose decisions affect us — workplaces, public utilities and other public services, states — should be cooperatively owned and democratically self-governed.

This latter principle, in turn, is most fully expressed in anarchism, which properly understood is not the antithesis of democracy but its perfect fulfillment. Majoritarianism is not the ultimate value of democracy. Consent is; universal, unanimous consent of the governed to the decisions that affect their lives, with no governance of anyone in any regard without their consent, is the highest form of democracy. Majoritarianism is simply a modification or compromise of this principle — a concession in which a decision must be made binding upon all within some indivisible functional unit. When a neighborhood or town power or sewer system must pursue a single policy, or a workplace must decide on a particular product line or production method — or when those sharing a common domicile must agree on a living room thermostat setting, for that matter — an agreement among those involved to respect the decision of the majority is the closest approximation possible to unanimous consent. 

An anarchist society is one in which the institutions affecting people’s lives are governed by direct democracy where necessary, and the common infrastructures supporting such workplaces, services, communes, etc., are maintained by purely administrative federal bodies subject to control by the local bodies participating in them. No institution exerts sovereign control, or a general police power, over a given territory; to the extent necessary, a body of common law will arise from the ongoing interactions between and within the communities comprising such local and federal bodies, and governing only the relations between the bodies affected. The general principle goes back to Saint-Simon’s substitution of administration of things for legislation over persons, as developed by socialists ranging from Proudhon (dissolution of the state in the social body) to Marx and Engels (withering away of the state).

Libertarian socialism is the highest development of anti-conservatism, and anarchism is the highest development of libertarian socialism.