Transcending Woke Capitalism

by Mark Wegierski

There is currently a debate underway about the shape and future of conservatism in both America and Canada. But what should a genuine conservatism actually consist of? Conservatism today is a bewildered philosophy, an unwieldy morass of amorphous and mutually incompatible ideas. Despite decades of internecine debate, the contemporary conservative movement in Western societies has failed, generally speaking, to provide a coherent and consistent account of itself. No viewpoint that, holus‑bolus, seeks to unite Barry Goldwater under the same banner as T. S. Eliot could be otherwise. No “vital equilibrium” could ever be that vital.

What can be described as the current malformation of  conservatism has been caused, in part, by its weak and problematic position vis‑à‑vis the modern world. The advance of left‑wing thought and praxis in modern society has compressed all competing “right‑wing” ideologies together, forcing the “fusion” of nineteenth‑century liberalism with traditional  conservatism, so that distinctions between the two have become  increasingly blurred.

This union of what were once two strongly distinct political philosophies is not only regarded as a necessary tactical alliance (as it may well might be) but as a new theoretical and philosophical “synthesis”. Post‑war American conservatism in particular has been preoccupied with sometimes ingenious rationalizations of this new philosophical outlook. George Nash, for example, in his book The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945, divided post‑war American conservatism into three main groupings:  “traditionalists”, “fusionists”, and “libertarians”. Purely on the level of theory, “fusionism”, as a “shot‑gun marriage” between two once‑opposed positions, can be seen as difficult to justify. One could also question to what extent the establishment of “fusionism” as a touchstone idea has helped or hindered the disparate groups of the American Right. Continue reading →