BWare

I’m glad to see this blog post comment has caught on a little bit. It stunned me when I first read it, and now I’ve seen it in such disparate places as LGM, Jalopnik, and Charlies’s Diary [1] [2].

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.

— Frank Wilhoit [3] , 20180321 crookedtimber.org

Read the whole thing, as the kids say:

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 [4], 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.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.

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.

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.

[1] With and without attribution, or attributed incorrectly to the wrong FW.
 

[2] Maybe not so disparate, but I was surprised when I saw it in the Jalopnik comments with absolutely no push back that it was wrong. It’s apparently self-evident. It’s just whether you think it’s a desirable condition or not.
 

[3] This Frank Wilhoit, a musical composer, and seemingly pretty sharp fellow. However, he’s not that Francis Wilhoit, from subsequent comments which I can no longer dig up. Also he died in 2010, so unless it’s a nom-de-plume, or he’s posting from the grave, it’s a different Frank Wilhoit. Though from the very short Wikipedia entry, he seems like a good dude who might have said this. However, there should absolutely be credit where credit is due for this conception.
 

[4] “Bad money drives out good.”