“Risk aversion rigorously thought-out and systematically applied”

KDW writes on Conservatism and Risk Aversion. “If and Perhaps and But.”

Conservatism is, to a considerable extent, a matter of one’s attitude toward risk. That is one of the reasons the Trump movement, like the Tea Party movement before it, ought not be understood as conservative but as radical—populist, right-wing, and radical.

In one aspect, conservatism is risk aversion rigorously thought-out and systematically applied to government and public life. It is a definite style. Progressives and radicals will set their sights on something good and then, having made the decision to pursue it, run headlong toward that goal, often setting aside procedures, norms, and constitutional restraints in pursuit of the good thing. Often, institutional guardrails will be treated with positive contempt, from Woodrow Wilson’s dismissal of the Constitution to Trumpists’ sneering at norms.

Conservatives, on the other hand, might agree about the goodness of the good thing but still prefer to pursue it slowly and gradually, or partly, or not yet. One reason for that is that we do not wish to damage our procedures and institutions by running roughshod over them; another is that experience teaches us that sometimes the good thing turns out not to be so good. In the 1950s, enlightened progressives were all-in on civil rights and desegregation—and they were right to be. But 40 years before that, progressives had been all-in on eugenics, including forced sterilizations. They were no less sure about the goodness of that project, which, they assured all, was blessed by science. In the 1930s, the most enlightened progressives had been all-in on Soviet-style central planning and authoritarian regimentation, another application of “science”—it is difficult to overstate the influence “scientific management” theories had on the progressivism (and general political culture) of that era. Progressives led the way on both women’s suffrage and on alcohol prohibition—a very mixed bag of policies.

Conservatives are faulted, not without reason, for slow-walking their way through the civil rights era when they weren’t being positively recalcitrant. Fair enough. There was no less fault in American progressives who ran as fast as they could into the embrace of Stalin et al. (and the history there is not as ancient as you might think), but we are asked to provide them with a moral get-out-of-jail-free card, to understand them as only “liberals in a hurry.” The same holds true for eugenics and “race science” and other pseudoscientific enthusiasms with which our progressive friends today would rather not be associated. To be generally skeptical of radical social changes or grand plans, as conservatives are, will sometimes put you on the wrong side of a good development, and it will sometimes put you on the right side of a bad development. One would think that the great twin political enthusiasms of the 20th century—the competing versions of national socialism practiced in the Third Reich and the Soviet Union—would be enough to put us off political enthusiasm entirely for a century or two. But that isn’t how the human heart operates. …

That we so often go wrong in our calculations doesn’t mean that we should stop calculating. That our plans so often go awry doesn’t mean that we should stop planning. What we need is to understand our limitations and begin from a position of moral and epistemic humility.

If you are looking to derive a program from these observations, you won’t have much luck. The best we can do is to embrace caution and prudence in the knowledge that these, too, can cause us problems when the dose is too large or is ill-timed. And so if we are wise we will in our political discourse stick to “conversation so nicely restricted to What Precisely and If and Perhaps and But.”