How Capitalism Undermines Conservatism

Conservativism, according to Russell Kirk, is not the same as Capitalism; nor is it compatible with unbridled Capitalism. Capitalism is one of the forces of modernity, arising out of the Englightenment, which undermines the conservative order. He writes:

"The Industrial Revolution seems to have been a response of mankind to the challenge of a swelling population: 'Capitalism gave the world what it needed,' Ludwig von Mises writes sturdily in his Human Action, 'a higher standard of living for a steadily increasing number of people.' But it turned the world inside out. Personal loyalties gave way to financial relationships. The wealthy man ceased to be magistrate and patron; he ceased to be neighbour to the poor man; he became a mass-man, very often, with no purpose in life by aggrandizement. He ceased to be conservative because because he did not understand conservative norms, which cannot be instilled by mere logic - a man must be steeped in them. The poor man ceased to feel that he had a decent place in the community; he became a social atom, starved for most emotions except envy and ennui, severed from true family-life and reduced to mere household-life, his old landmarks buried, his old faiths dissipated. Industrialism was a harder knock to conservativism than the books of the French egalitarians. To complete the rout of traditionalists, in America an impression began to arise that the new industrial and acquisitive interests are the conservative interest, that conservativism is simply a political argument in defense of large accumulations of private property, that expansion, centralization, and accumulation are the tenets of conservatives. From this confusion, from the popular belief that Hamilton was the founder of American conservatvism, the forces of tradition in the United States have never fully escaped." (Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, pp. 228-9)

The conservative order is the one that Capitalism destroyed. Capitalism and its evil twin, Socialism, are both anti-conservative and modernist in spirit and both of them encourage human beings to create themselves and their environment instead of understanding themselves as God's creation and stiving to accommodate themselves to His order. The place of the ordinary man in a society dominated by collectivist socialist statism is little different from his place in one dominated by monopoly capitalist statism. The two forms of statism ever draw closer together in the ever-expanding, infinitely voracious, Western, welfare state.

Conservativism as a political force today is nearly dead in Canada. The Conservative Party is a strange admixture of philosophies ranging from neo-conservative to libertarian to traditional social conservativism. In the Unites States, conservativism is a stronger force, capable of waking up from time to time and shaking the new order to its foundations, constantly exercising a restraining force upon the spirit of the age, the spirit of collectivism and statism. It is embodied in the Evangelical and conservative Catholic and Protestant Churches, the middle class and the Midwest and South. It is the last remnant of conservative culture that has yet to be eradicated by the modern, rational, utilitarian forces of levelling and egalitarianism. It will need to be crushed before soft totalitarianism can reign unchallenged in the United States.