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Church and Main is a podcast at the intersection of faith and modern life. Join Pastor Dennis Sanders as he shares the stories of faith interacting with the ever-changing world of the 21st century.
The road not taken in American conservatism. This is Church in Maine.
Music.
Hello and welcome to Church in Maine, the podcast at the intersection of faith
and modern life. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host.
Church in Maine is a podcast that looks for God in the midst of the issues that
are affecting church and the larger society. And you can learn more about the
podcast, listen to past episodes, and donate by checking us out.
You can find out at our website at churchandmaine.org or churchandmaine.substack.com.
If you go to our sub stack, you can also access some articles that I write.
And either place, consider subscribing and also consider leaving a review.
You. That helps others find the podcast.
So I hope you're enjoying things in this winter time.
Some places like we are here in Minnesota don't have any snow.
It's a very odd winter.
Well, as we are continuing going into the year, this podcast's name is actually Church and Maine.
And I've called it that because I like to talk about religion and also public
affairs and where those two things intersect.
Now over the past year or so I've done a lot about the church side of this podcast
but I haven't done as much about the main side of this podcast.
So that is because I've been pretty busy. I'm a bivocational pastor and also
since July of last year I've had to take care of my mother after she suffered a stroke.
But I also felt kind of odd being a pastor and talking about politics.
So for a while, I've kind of backed off on the political side of this podcast.
But the thing is, is that I've noticed I don't necessarily ignore politics when
I preach. And that doesn't mean that I'm partisan.
I'm not in the pulpit. But I do talk about politics in the.
So especially in this year, this is a presidential year, and in some ways a
very monumental presidential year, I want to talk about where faith and politics intersect.
And so I'm starting with this week's podcast, which is about American conservatism.
And when we talk about the American right, right now, at least,
we talk about two kind of different streams.
That first stream has at least really came into the fore in the 1960s and really
became prominent with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
This is the conservatism of small government, low taxes and regulation,
and a strong foreign policy, especially back then towards the Soviet Union.
This has been the dominant form of conservatism in the United States. until recently.
The rise of Donald Trump brought a new movement to the fore that has in many
ways displaced Reaganite conservatism.
This is kind of a new but also older form of conservatism.
This kind of national conservatism is not as conservative about the size of
government as the kind of fusionist sign.
Conservatism once did, in fact, they favor energetic government,
a government that goes after its enemies.
As its name suggests, it tends to be much more nationalistic.
It's somewhat at times almost isolationist when it comes to foreign affairs
and all in all can be very, at the same time, very jingoistic.
Those are the two main streams of conservatism right now in the United States,
but there is a third stream,
a stream that's not as strong here in the United States, but is found in other
democracies, especially democracies like Canada or Germany.
The best way to describe that is humanist conservatism.
And this version of the right, as our guest today will describe it,
is a tradition that that is, as he says, quote, driven by a desire to preserve
the dignity of everyday human existence,
those mundane practices of life that sit outside the grandiosity of constitutional
systems and national traditions.
My guest is Jeffrey Tyler Sick, and he will talk about this forgotten branch
of conservatism and how it might be able to take on the times that we find ourselves in.
Jeffrey is an assistant professor of political science and history at the University
of Pikeville in his native Kentucky, and he's also the founding editor and president
of Vital Center magazine.
We'll talk about these three streams of American conservatism and where religion plays a role.
So here is my conversation with Jeffrey Tyler Sick.
Music.
Thank you.
Well, Jeffrey, it is good to have you on the podcast and to talk a little bit
about kind of, I think, an unheard story of conservatism.
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. So you wrote something
in Persuasion magazine, and the title of that is Conservatives Road Not Taken.
And I think for people who are familiar with American conservatism,
most of us are familiar with people such as kind of the folks with National Review and fusionism.
And that whole kind of story has been a kind of a well-known story about American conservatism.
The second story that you kind of bring up is national conservatism.
That's the one that has a strain that has come to fore maybe in the last eight
to ten years or so, especially with the rise of Donald Trump.
But your essay talks about a third road that is present, but it's not always as visible. the fall.
Could you go about kind of just giving a quick synopsis of what that road looks like? Yeah.
I think, and I see this in the articles, that conservatism is usually best defined
by what it's trying to conserve.
And with fusionism, they're trying to conserve the American founding as they
understand it, which for them is kind of a limited constitutional government. woman.
National conservatives are
trying to preserve a particular cultural tradition as they understand it.
And in all these cases, it's kind of as they understand it. People are what
they understand in a way.
Humanist conservatives are really very much concerned with trying to sort of
preserve the dignity of everyday life.
I was trying to explain it to a friend. I said it's kind of like Hobbit conservatism,
if you know Lord of the Rings.
I'm obsessed with kind of the niceties of just being a a regular person.
Trying to preserve that way of being.
Which may require policy, but in some ways it's also just a disposition that
you kind of like, that peaceful, tranquil life.
And how would you define, because I think one of the things that has been interesting
over the years as someone who's kind of followed American conservatism is that
the national conservatism,
at least in my view, has always been,
there are just so many dark sides to it.
I think that there are some things that they bring up that make some sense,
and especially dealing with people of the working class, but it seems to be
too bound up in a lot of ways of,
at least from what I see, grievance, but also very limited in their understanding
of the kind of American cultural background in some ways.
And then when it comes to fusionist conservatism, I probably would find more
agreement there, but it seems like they don't always answer the questions of,
again, of the working class, of people who are working and are not entrepreneurs.
And so it always kind of falls short there on that side.
Yeah, I have a friend who wrote a really good article about the failure of the
two different approaches to conservatism to kind of reconcile themselves to
a modern pluralist society in some ways.
He says the fusionists, and I think this is right, they just see what modern
capitalism does, and they say, yeah, this is our political ideology. Isn't it great?
And it does do some great things. It's not always wrong. wrong.
The national conservatives say, well, we just reject a modern pluralist society also.
And there's a kind of conservatism of rejection of the modern world in that sense.
Both of them are not really workable solutions.
The world changes. It evolves over time. There's not a lot you can do about
it. You don't have to like it, but it does.
And so both of them kind of fail to reconcile themselves, I think,
to how you actually help people adapt to a changing society.
One doesn't want to change at all. The other fails to see any need for adaptation to begin with.
And in the end, both become political failures.
Fusionism, I think, is in some ways failing, alienating a lot of working class people.
It was never, to be clear, a very working class ideology,
but what working class it had, and it is significantly alienated and now the
National Conservatives are appealing to them, but they're ultimately doomed to fail,
for separate and in some ways more concerning reasons.
Who would you define as some of the, the people who would be the,
the examples of what you're calling humanist conservatism in modern politics?
Um, no, I think more for philosophically. Right.
Yeah. I think the, the big models, um, Alexis de Tocqueville, I think is a big model.
I mean, as a self-professed liberal, but I don't think philosophic liberalism
and political sort of humanist. I think there's overlap there.
Um, And more contemporarily, I think Michael Oakeshott,
who's a British conservative thinker, and he described conservatism very much
in terms of a disposition and kind of limit the things that can ruin everyday life for people.
And then I think Christian democracy, as it's understood in Europe,
can play a very helpful role in understanding kind of what's the political heart
of people, because Christian Democrats, better than most ideologies,
get the dignity of humans.
The dignity of human life. And when you understand that dignity,
I think humanist conservatism starts to make a lot more sense in a way.
And so the Christian Democrats and their writers like Jacques-Hubertin,
my French is terrible, so goodness knows if that's how it's pronounced.
Are, I think, really great philosophic examples.
I should say it does tend to be more of a European thing. They've had something
like humanist conservatism for a long time.
We've had it, what I would call humanist, in the United States,
but it's not been in vogue the last 60, 70 years.
Why do you think that is? Because, you know, one of the things that fascinates
me, and again, because I kind of somewhat am tangentially around in the more
fusionist circles, there's a lot of talk about the Anglo-American tradition.
And I think there is something to that. I don't want to diss that.
There's always somewhat of a rejection of the more continental conservatism.
But it also seems that there's a lot about continental conservatism that could
be mined and you could learn from. We don't always...
Christian democracy, as you're talking about, has been one.
I think it was Pope Leo VIII, because
his letter encyclical about workers
was something that was important um that
kind of sprouted the christian democratic movement or
people who like abraham um crippier um
the the dutch politician but i guess
i'm just always curious what is it that there's always seemed to be that rejection
of of european conservatism as opposed to the anglo-american tradition yeah
that's a good question um one thing i think even the anglo-american tradition
we're very different from the english in ways i think people don't there's ways
in which the the English are a lot more continental than we are. Yeah.
And I think you're right. There's not a lot we could learn from European conservatives.
I always say that the thing about European conservatives, they come in one of
two types. They're either Christian Democrats or they're like the worst sort
of white nationalist in the world.
Yes, exactly. Because there's not a lot of in-between for Christian Democrats.
I mean, for European conservatives.
But I think one of the reasons is America began in part far as a rejection of European society.
In some ways, it brings a lot of European society with it, but the people who
come here actively left for whatever reason.
And so they bring with them a culture that is different from the rest of the
people who decided to leave.
And I think that in a kind of complicated psychological way begins to affect
the American tradition. that these are the people who chose to peace out of European society.
As part of that, one of the biggest effects of that is America is a very individualistic
culture as compared to Europe in a lot of ways.
Europe tends to be a lot more statist politically, which has significant problems, I think.
But they also tend to be sometimes a lot more socially communitarian than Americans.
Community has been struggling all over the world, but has always been a lot
more vibrant in Europe than it has been in the United States in some ways.
Alexis de Tocqueville talks about how when he comes to the United States and
he journeys out into the cities, he says, it's so strange.
He said, everybody just lives in their houses, and there's a house a little
ways down, and this is just their own little island of a world,
which is unthinkable to him in the European world, where maybe you do have some
farmers, but even the farmers' houses are kind of close together in the land.
So it's a way in which we're just a much more individualistic society.
That said, I think the 20th century made America even more individualist than it sort of normally is.
The rise of modern capitalism, which I think is a little bit different from
regular capitalism, was hugely impactful on American culture,
much more than it was in Europe in some ways.
Because Europe has a much more socialist
bent because of their lack of individualism compared to Americans.
But our sort of already lack of individualism made us particularly susceptible,
I think, to the worst problems of a capitalist culture, which is different than
a capitalist economy, I think.
But the idea of a very competitive business-like society. Eddie.
We were easy prey for that, and we got caught in the 20th century, I believe.
Kind of looking at this from a religious perspective and talking a little bit,
as you said, about Christian democracy, there are several strains of Christian democracy there,
especially its religious strains, in that it both comes from some,
especially arising from from Catholic social teaching, but also from Reformed theology.
And that movement, I think, kind of arises from the churches.
And at least for me, you know, as someone who has grown up hearing kind of about
the caring for the poor and helping and dignity, especially for working people,
it seems Kind of makes you wonder, how do you have that...
Where does religion kind of, in this case, fit in with that type of a conservatism?
Because I think here in America, the conservatism and the religion that comes up is more moral.
Yeah. And, you know, I'm not here to say it's good or bad, but that's kind of where it comes from.
But it doesn't always deal with the social, where it seems like in Europe,
the religious conservatism that came up there was far more socially concerned than it was here.
Well, part of it is, for whatever reason in America,
the similar movements that you see in Catholic social thought and in the Reformed
tradition happen to a point in early America in the late 1800s,
early 1900s, but they're all on the left.
And they're somewhat on the left in Europe, too, with Christian socialists and
things like that, but they're almost all on the left here.
Here um and that makes that kind of
um religious thinking a lot more left-wing in the minds of most americans i
think and as the left in america has become less religious um we've seen the
decline of that sort of expression of religious morality i guess you could say um.
Whereas the more right-wing version of that morality, which is very much worried
about how people behave and act and that kind of thing, has remained pretty
strong in America, in the Christian community.
Community um why it didn't emerge on the
right in america i really could i i have i
don't know my my suspicion and this
is only a suspicion is for a long time the
right in america was kind of a combination of the farming more individualistic
farming class that was not wealthy but but independent of a company they weren't
subject to unions and things like that so this was never going to be one of
their huge concerns, and business.
And neither of those is going to be reliant. So the American right has always,
since the late 1800s, when these movements were kind of emerging in the United
States, has had this problem.
Now, if you go back to the early 1800s, you see a lot of this kind of thing
on what I would consider conservatives and and more left-leaning progressive
people in the early 19th century.
You have both John Quincy Adams, who in many ways is a philosophic conservative,
deeply, deeply concerned about social justice.
And you also have people who are clearly on the left, like a lot of the abolitionists
who are equally concerned with problems of social justice.
That begins to fade in the wake of the Civil War for whatever reason.
I confess I don't have a great explanation for it. That is an interesting question.
I'd be interested to know the answer to it.
So do you think one of the things, I remember a few years ago,
someone that's on Twitter that I talk to, and these days it seems like I'm the
old man on Twitter these days.
And I kind of brought up the question of Why do we not hear much about certain
thinkers on the right, or leaders on the right, like Benjamin Disraeli here in the United States?
The answer, I can remember the answer just kind of wasn't...
Basically, it was kind of like it didn't feel like it fit or something to that extent. Yeah.
Do you feel that sometimes that thinking on the right here in America,
conservatives, is too limited?
That we're not really thinking more broadly, that it's too constricted in many ways?
Either by economics or by social issues, but it's too constricted in how its thinking goes.
I think that's right, yeah. Yeah, it's too constricted.
It kind of begins, which is not particularly conservative in a philosophic sense.
It begins with its own kind of central premise.
It begins with the thesis and then kind of compiles its evidence and heroes from that.
Conservatism, if you read people like Burke or Oakeshaw or Disraeli,
is really kind of supposed to begin the other way around.
It's supposed to be, in a lot of ways, a lot less philosophic of an ideology.
Kind of begin from evidence and work your way to what is the right thing.
And as a result, though, starting in the mid to late 20th century,
we begin with kind of the fusionist idea, idea
which so free market economics kind of
christian traditionalist social
issues but in a weird maybe limited
government way maybe not kind of depends um you
give us that and so then people like benjamin disraeli just
really don't fit um these people who deeply
concerned about economic poverty and economic
inequality or economic inequality might be
but you know helping the the poor um that's probably
the best way to put it um it was deeply communitarian there was in none of them
hit not an ounce of him as an individualist it's just so counter to what people
like william f buckley who was founding um the fusionist movement in america
really thought of as conservatism um.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which was founded to be kind of a place
to train young conservatives in
America for a long time, was called the Individualist Studies Institute.
There's this way in which that kind of communitarian conservative just was not
accepted because they began with the premise that what makes me different from
a liberal is my concern for the individual over the collectivity.
So how would you you know if you're looking at someone that is a community,
communitarian conservative be different from someone say
on the left no because i think there is always a
lot of fear that you know well if you start
talking about the state well then that makes you a leftist and
it's like i don't think so but how would you define that so i think it depends
there's just i mean one way you could do it's been national conservative and
then the differences from the left are going to be obvious that you're going
to ban porn and regulate what people do in their private homes to the full extent of what you can do.
And that'll be what my wife will pretend when I'm with her husband.
That's one way you can be different from the left.
What made Israeli, who I think in some ways is he's older now,
I mean it's the 1860s, but in some ways a very good example of a communitarian conservative.
What made him really different from the left in his day was his concern that
every little change be worked in to the tradition of the English people somehow.
That every change was building on something that was already there.
And this made the change a lot slower when you were trying to do social progress,
but it also, in his eyes anyways, ways would have
made the change a lot more organic so if
you want you want to help poor people you don't do it by overturning the aristocratic
system let's say benjamin disrael you do it by building something within the
system that has already evolved so that was radical in that respect um and then
there is probably going to be a difference on social issues um,
You don't have to take the national conservative stance, but there's going to be a difference.
I'm from eastern Kentucky. I live in eastern Kentucky. We used to be,
and there still are a few, a lot of old blue-dog Democrats.
And not, I should say, not the ones of the late 20th century who were just kind
of racist people who liked welfare, but people who really believed in helping
the poor, but who also might be pro-life instead of pro-choice.
And who, in a way, were a lot more like a communitarian conservative,
though being Democrats and also being local politics was a huge reason to pitch themselves as such.
And that kind of, those people have been, in recent years, kind of replaced
by the national conservatives politically in their various electoral districts.
And in a lot of ways, they were much closer to a humanist conservative.
Conservative um these kind of working class blue-collar
democrats in america in the
last 30 40 years they were closest to a humanist conservative probably so what
do you think has caused a decline of of humanist conservatism because you said
it earlier that you think it was kind of somewhat there in american culture
till about 70 years ago so what do you think brought brought its demise?
I think a couple of things. One of them is...
The Cold War, we were fighting communism, which is a communitarian,
collectivist ideology.
Something that is hyper-individualistic, that is hyper-capitalist,
is just an easier foiled communism politically.
And I think a lot of people felt, oh, we've seen the way anything remotely communitarian
can go with fascism, with communism. We don't want that.
So part of it, I think, is a reaction against World War II in the United States.
Europe, interestingly, has kind of a renaissance of humanist conservatism after
World War II, but we don't have that.
Part of it, I think, we already had that kind of individualist mindset.
And so the combination of our kind of revulsion at that, communitarianism,
and our already kind of inclination towards being very individualistic made
humanist conservatism seem outdated.
We're also in the mid-20th century.
This is America at kind of the height of its imperial power.
We become the superpower. And I'm just frankly, humanist conservatism is not
a great fit for like an imperial world.
If you're very concerned with like preserving the dignity of everyday life, it becomes difficult.
If that's your primary concern, then tremendous economic growth and these other
things that are really important if you want to dominate the world are not as
likely to happen quickly.
I'm not going to say that won't happen, but they're never going to be the same priorities.
I think these two things really undermined it. I also think there was a.
Humanist conservatives at the time were rather bad politically for a number of reasons.
A lot of them were kind of in the middle, and they struggled to differentiate
what made them a real conservative.
Instead, they just kind of seemed on the Republican side like watered-down Democrats
and on the Democratic side like watered-down Republicans. Republicans.
And in the end, both sides kind of got squeezed out.
There's a hilarious video of FDR, and I won't try to do an impersonation or
anything, but he's running for re-election.
He says, this is what the Republicans say. He says, we love social security. We love welfare.
We want to give you more social security, give you more welfare,
but we're going to do it better. We're going to do it cheaper.
We're going to do it smarter.
Leave it up to us. And he's painting fun of them because he says,
well, why would you vote for a Republican if they're identical to a Democrat?
And they were identical. People like Wendy Wilkie, who were running against
FDR, had significant differences from him, even though they may be liked somewhat as well for policies.
But they did a very bad job making that clear.
And in the end, that also underlines humanist conservatism, I think.
Hmm. So, do you see any type of a room today for a revival of humanist conservatism?
And if so, do you see it happening now?
I think there is room for a revival. I don't know if it's—well,
I'll say both if I think it's happening in a minute, but I think there is great room for a revival.
I think the Trump faction of the Republican Party, the national conservatives,
have kind of horned in on humanist conservatism's natural place.
But I think if candidates can get into those districts and into other districts
that are maybe just a lot more moderate and feel lost in the current political
climate, I think there's kind of two openings.
Openings, one is the politically lost, left behind, which a lot of people feel
that way, and the other are the economically distressed, politically left behind
in a different sense, and that they feel that the country has left them behind.
Because it's a more moderate, it's a more appealing approach than Trump.
And so I think you could, I'm not going to say you can pick up a lot of Trump
people, but you can pick up some people who I think would be inclined to support
national conservatism, and you can pick up a whole bunch of moderates,
especially especially in the suburbs, where polls show that voters particularly.
They feel a little like nobody really represents their viewpoints.
I think even with conservatism, there's great appeal in those places.
It will take political leaders willing to go out and sell it,
which is an important skill.
Rhetoric is in a lot of ways more important than ideas, because if you can't
sell the ideas, it doesn't matter how good they are.
So it will take that. And if it's happening, there's a small chance,
I think, that it's happening.
The Blue Dog Caucus and the House of Representatives has recently kind of reconstituted itself.
And follows a lot of these policies or the principles I kind of outlined in this.
And they certainly see themselves as being appealing to rural,
red-leaning congressional districts.
I think it's an open question how successful they'll be.
If they're very successful, I mean, this could be humanist conservatism world.
World um otherwise it will take people real innovators on the the republican
party probably to build it up um in areas that have been dominated by trump
as kind of an alternative.
And probably should have asked this earlier but i'm kind of curious where do
you feel that both fusionist and national conservative fall short?
And why are they falling short? Because I think that's even the bigger question right now is,
especially with fusionist conservatism, one could say that back in the 70s and
80s, that was a payday, that one was doing very well.
Bill Clinton is more fusionist than Donald Trump. I think we think he's well into the 90s.
But somehow that branch is not as, or it doesn't seem to be working now.
So I'm kind of curious, what is it that has brought them short, and why? Yeah.
The fusionists are hyper-concerned about a tyrannical government,
which is completely fair. Government can become tyrannical.
They're especially concerned about tyrannical government and economics.
They think it's bad. There are many of them devotees of Milton Friedman.
They believe in deregulation, they believe in low taxes, they believe that private
companies should be allowed to do what they want, that it is not the government's business.
A lot of this has led to tremendous economic growth in the United States and in Europe.
We are a wealthier country than we have ever been.
What it has also done is it has led to huge innovations in technology that have
created the mechanization of a lot of industrial jobs.
It has led to the sort of free trade that causes jobs to go overseas.
And any number of sort of these kind of innovations that remake the way the
American workforce is constituted.
Infusionism, as a result, has done some really great things,
but it has also left a lot of people behind.
Data shows that while the economy has grown significantly, it has grown almost
entirely in urban areas. while leaving behind most of rural America.
And instead of sort of really understanding this as a problem,
a lot of fusionists tend to blow it off.
There's not a job in your area. Just move.
Things like this. And I always say, you know, there's a housing crisis in urban
America. If I said, there's no houses, why don't you just move?
It would seem so uncaring. And that's exactly how these people who have been,
or in areas that have been economically left behind, feel.
They feel as though nobody cares about them.
And they, in return, have revolted against the people that they blame for this.
The people who both are not caring, the people who have executed the policies
that seem like have drawn it back.
And that's the political establishment and the fusionists having dominated the
Republican Party, since at least Reagan, perhaps before, are a huge part of
the political establishment until relatively recently.
I remember in 2016, during that presidential election,
hearing that phrase a lot, because there was a lot of talk, again,
about the working class and how things weren't going in certain areas and that
people would always say, well, they could move.
My response to that is, have you ever read The Grapes of Wrath?
Moving is not always a great option for people.
People um so you know it's not always
so easy and it's not it can be you know people
don't always want to leave their communities that they were have been long a
part of and so yeah and this is what makes it so unconservative in a way conservatism
is at the end of the day no matter what sort of it's a lot about roots it's
about being tied to the past tied to where you belong long.
A lot of people don't want to, I mean, my family has lived in Appalachia since
the 1790s. I don't want to leave if I don't have to.
Is it rational? No. But conservatism has always been,
philosophically at least, about embracing the level of irrationality in the
human life, about embracing the fact that there's a kind of romantic,
emotional element to human existence that you cannot just sort of push away.
This is a huge part of Edmund Burke. It's a huge part of Benjamin Disraeli.
It's an important part of people like Russell Kirk, who are more modern.
So to kind of lose the sense of this is just completely bonkers.
Now, national conservatives might be taking that to a different.
Overcorrect the problem, I think, in some ways.
Well, and I think that's been the frustration I've noticed with national conservatism
is that they go to the other extreme, and it becomes very particular.
And as I think you've said earlier, they kind of want to shut out the world
and not deal with change.
And that's not helpful either, because the world is changing.
Our American society is changing. And we can't just put blinders on and think
that we can just go to another time and that everything will be okay.
That has not worked. And I think part of national conservatism also seems to
be too willing to kind of play with some more darker forces that have been a
part of American society in the past. Oh, yeah.
Well, the thing is, if you write, I mean, they're all about embracing their
cultural tradition, but kind of only their cultural tradition,
and a particularly narrow interpretation of their culture, but that's another thing.
The thing is about embracing a cultural tradition entirely and kind of making
that all your ideologies.
Is you lose sight of other universal truths that you also shouldn't ignore.
The dignity of all people, equality of all races, these other sort of important
things that we know to be true through human reason.
They've kind of abandoned that rational side of things often.
I mean, not all of them are racist and not all of them are .
They have abandoned that, and they refuse to kind of admit that traditions also
are a kind of evolving thing.
I'm not Catholic, but if you are a Catholic, it is not as though the Catholic
tradition stays the same forever.
The liturgy changes, it evolves, the opinions of the church change and evolve. That's the point.
Tradition is supposed to be a moving thing.
It has some relevant relationship to its past but it moves, it evolves I kind
of fail to acknowledge that,
I like to say that one of the main goals of humanist conservatism is the world
will always change the world will always have ups and downs and so for the humanist conservative,
the question is how can you bring people and help maintain a flourishing society
for them through the ups and downs, regardless regardless of whatever it'll be.
National conservatives begin in a very ideological way with their ideal society.
It happened in the past. They don't want to move on.
Whatever has moved on, they want to take it back.
And that's just not a helpful way to think because things do change.
Things will always change.
There's a great Italian book called The Leopard, and one of the characters says
this, and I think it's a great line. He says the only way for things to stay
the same is for everything to change.
And this is just true to human existence, I think.
We have to adapt or die.
So well and i think that may be something to consider that at least it should
be that conservatism is about adaptation yeah because i think too often it's about,
either trying to keep things the way they are or or what have you um yeah well and there's um,
And this has been the case for a while. I mean, Buckley has the famous quote
from the opening international view that being a conservative is,
it's really about standing with our history and yelling stuff.
I think if you look at actual conservatives like Edmund Burke or Benjamin Desai,
people would call themselves conservatives up to that point.
There's very little that is less conservative than standing in front of history
and yelling stuff, maybe standing for history. Like, well, slow down.
Let's, let's do this at a reasonable pace. Sure. Sure.
That doesn't make a catchy tagline, I admit.
But that's sort of the point of conservative philosophic tradition.
People like Disraeli, people like Burke, people like Michael Oakeshaw,
is that the world has complexities, the world evolves.
Embracing those complexities and that evolution and making the best of them
is kind of the key to politics.
We've lost that in America. There's always been conservatives who sort of abandoned that.
In the wake of the French Revolution, there were a lot of reactionaries,
for instance, but still.
We've completely lost that in America recently, I think, in some ways.
Do you think that there is any hope for, kind of, to use the word,
a flourishing of humanist conservatism in the next five to ten years?
No. Well, things are complete chaos right now, I think, politically,
and it's terrible. I don't think anybody can pretend that it isn't.
But the one virtue chaos has is that it can become a great time to build new things.
I was thinking recently, for instance, the Republican Party is,
I think, at serious risk of making itself a regional party, completely losing
touch with the national electorate.
Which seems deeply concerning, and it is, but it's happened several times before.
In American history. And every time that it has happened, the party that emerges
out of the wake of that tends to be better than the one that existed before it.
Because it's a party that has had to face its biggest demons and figure out
how it can continue to win.
Or the faction. The Federalist Party is the most big example because the party
itself completely collapsed.
But the Whig Party that in some ways embraced at least the Federalist tradition,
I think was a lot better than the Federalist Party, a lot more in touch with
a changed post-1800 America that the Federalists were attempting to reject.
And so there's important ways in which, yeah, things are terrible,
but I think there's all the hope in the world that things could get better,
that the right things could happen and suddenly start to flourish. Yeah.
Hmm. And do you see of any type of politicians that are out there that aren't
kind of embracing this philosophy?
It seems earlier, a lot of them would probably be currently in the Democratic Party.
Yeah, that's what I said. party um i think that's a live question um obviously
they think there is um i'm not sure every democrat thinks that there is um and
also they're right now their electoral base is rural,
america where trump won um by just a little bit he did win but he didn't kill
um in that region um that's not a whole lot of places so can they start to win
in these places that republicans of one by a lot,
or expand into other areas that are more entrenched blue or entrenched red.
There's only so many swing districts in America from which you can base a faction
of your party. And gerrymandering means there's a lot less than there used to be.
So, to me, I think it's a really live question if they become a flourishing
part of the Democratic Party or not.
I think there is a potential. Nobody really seems to be pushing this right now.
But But if Trump loses in 2024, if things go a particular sort of way,
that maybe a wing like this in the Republican Party will start to emerge.
I've already seen this. I live in Kentucky, like I said.
There's already increasingly a one-party state. There's already a faction emerging
in one sort of the Republican Party that is a lot more moderate on social issues,
not particularly pro-Trump. Thank you.
It's still like the blue dot democrats like a live question what kind of faction
this will end up being how large a faction how important a faction but in both
cases there's real hope that they could become bastions of humanist conservatism
i think yeah you know one of the things that i found,
um was a hope and that ended up dashed was um jd or a person was jd vance um yeah and when he,
kind of came on the scene in 2016.
He seemed to, in some ways, represent that in a way.
And for whatever reason, my guess is more politically chose more of a nationalist track.
But I think had he maybe stayed on that or he was kind of an example of what
could have been of a more humanist conservatism out there.
I think that's right he could be the poster child for this now if he had wanted to be and he didn't,
he went the Donald Trump route either out of genuine change of opinion or being
a grifter I hate to judge for sure but,
either way he did it he did do it and he
was a great place for that but I
think something similar could emerge emerge um especially in
states like north carolina and georgia especially
as the south becomes a
little bit more urban and thus the states become
a little bit politically more moderate or winnable
to democrats a different kind of republican different kind of democrat may emerge
um as competitive in those states um jd vance is an ohio republican i don't
think it's And he particularly surprised that for a while he seemed to be in
this tradition being a kind of rural Ohio from Appalachia, Republican.
That's the natural place for a humanist conservatism to emerge, I think.
And do you think that you could see that type of conservatism arise from churches
in a way that, as we talked earlier, the roots of things like Christian democracy in Europe?
Yeah. Yeah, I think so.
There's a way in which humanist conservatism is less political,
I think, than fusionism and nationalism, this sort of celebration of humanism.
Of a life just well-lived with family and friends and community.
That's a great thing to have in the church in general.
I think that's in line with a lot of what the church is about and this kind
of filling of social justice and personal responsibility.
I think churches that emphasize that and then emphasize without being partisan,
without saying, you know, you have to be conservative, But emphasize that that
kind of life is a good life, and that kind of life should be the foundation
for everything, including our politics,
can become a great source.
And then the church doesn't have to do the work necessarily of sending people
out there to do it explicitly.
They'll have already sort of prepared and laid the ground for it.
So I think there is an important way in which the church can play a role here.
I think one of the things, um, it's kind of wrapped things up is I'm reminded
of is a book I read years ago by, um, Arthur Larson, who was a,
um, I'm trying to remember what role he had, but it wasn't the Eisenhower administration
and the book that he wrote.
It was in the late 50s was called a republican looks at his
party um and i think he would more fulfill
that type of humanist conservative and he
has a tale of um and
in his ways was dealing with the more conservative
people who are just kind of like or against kind of the status
or state in some ways or on the
taking on the or accepting some parts
of the new deal and he talks about um um
two women two grandmothers um one grandmother is in uh wearing kind of these
old clothes that are kind of tattered um and in a covered wagon with a horse
and um they're going off to the casino.
And there's another older woman that's kind of dressed very modern, um, in a sports car.
And you may think she is going off to the casino. Nope. She's going to church.
And I thought that that represented what was talking about,
what he was trying to talk about as a conservatism, that one of them is,
is living a life of dignity through the, through the workings,
you know, accepting parts of the new deal and all of that.
Another one isn't. and so it just seems like that was what he was trying to
get at in some ways yeah and I think that's actually a very good parallel.
Yeah I think so because I think in a lot of ways,
we do have the option of a conservatism that accepts, now it's not an economic
new deal now in some ways it's,
social it's the social world, it's a world that's changed,
a multiracial, multicultural multicultural society multicultural west and do
we accept that and move on with our lives and try to create a conservatism society
that's reconciled with that or do we try to reject it wholesale,
and in the process do them try to do the impossible and drag a whole lot of
people down with us and i think that's kind of the choice um i don't think you
can always pitch it that way to voters i don't I don't think that's what they always need to hear.
But I think that's the choice we have for conservatives today.
Okay. Well, it's going to make it for an interesting, something to think about
as we go through what's going to be an interesting election year.
At least not one that I'm looking forward to.
If polls are to be believed, most people are not. Yes, yeah.
But it does leave some hope for, I think for things where things can go in the future.
Um, even though this year might not be the year for that. Um,
I think that there's still some hope out there.
I think so too. There's always hope.
Yeah. And that's foolish of me, but so if people want to, um,
follow your writings online, where can they find you?
Um, so you can find me on Twitter, uh, Jeffrey Tyler sick. I also have a personal
website, jtylersick.com, where I post my commentary regularly.
It doesn't sound like a blog, so it doesn't email you when I post, but you can check that.
Either one of those pretty often. Okay. Well, Jeffrey Tylersick,
thank you for taking the time to talk.
And we may have you back here in the near future just to talk a little bit more
about, especially where politics and religion intersect.
Yeah, I would love that. Thank you so much. All right. Take care.
Music.
Well, thank you so much for being a part of this conversation with Jeffrey.
There are several links that are related to this episode in the show notes.
I do hope that you will take advantage of them.
Also, just wanted to remind you of the other podcast that I do called Lectionary Q.
This podcast focuses on looking at a text from the Revised Common Lectionary
and adding in a reflection and asking some questions.
It's something that I've been trying to do, was started in the fall of 2022
and took a break and started up again late last year.
You can find it and subscribe to the podcast by going to lectionaryqalloneword.substack.com.
Also, as we finish up this episode, please consider sharing this once you've
listened to it. Pass it on to a friend or family member that might want to hear
stories about where church and public policy intersect.
And that's it for this episode of Church in Maine. Again, please remember to
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Finally, also consider donating so that we can continue to produce more episodes.
I'm Dennis Sanders your host. Thanks again for listening.
Take care, Godspeed, and I'll see you very soon.
Music.