Lack of content in conservative vision

National Review Online has been carrying selections from John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation. I was struck by these revealing remarks by the authors in "A Different Conservatism":

[T]he fact that the Right is such a broad church — that it includes a hefty dose of liberal heresy along with the traditionalism — yields both weaknesses and strengths. On the positive side, it helps to explain why it is such a big and vibrant movement. American conservatism cannot help but contain contradictions because it contains so many vital elements. There are thousands of conservative activists, hundreds of conservative think tanks, a small army of conservative intellectuals. One useful book of conservative experts, published by the Heritage Foundation, the movement's biggest think tank, is as thick as a telephone directory. Yet the broad church also means that people are often worshipping different gods.

Look at Colorado Springs and you'll find at least three competing forms of conservatism — the laissez-faire individualism of the tax cutters and the gun owners, the Christian moralism of Focus on the Family and the militaristic nationalism, represented by the neighboring Air Force Academy and the bumper stickers laughing at Saddam Hussein. But how can you trumpet a strong military and a vigorous foreign policy and then insist on small government? How can you celebrate individualism but then try to subject those individuals to the rule of God? Wherever you go in the Right Nation, you discover similar contradictions.

Note the references to "broad church" and "worshipping different gods." These overtly confessional metaphors seem particularly appropriate and would appear to vindicate my own thesis that ideologies are fundamentally religious. As for these "different gods" themselves, could this very diversity within conservatism be indicative of its lack of coherence as a political vision? Liberalism at least is based on a commitment to individual autonomy and the voluntary character of all communities. Liberal principles are much more easily identifiable than those of, say, conservatism or nationalism. Hobbes' and Locke's political philosophies have a certain intellectual rigour lacking in much of conservatism.

This is not to say, of course, that conservatives are "the stupid party," as John Stuart Mill famously put it. There are many intelligent and eloquent conservatives who stand on definite political principles. Some of these, such as Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Canada's own George Grant, I appreciate a great deal. At the same time, their vaunted principles do not necessarily have a causal connection to their conservatism. One looks in vain, for example, for a distinctively conservative view of the state or any other human institution. Some conservatives, such as Friedrich A. von Hayek and Ayn Rand, have to look to liberal principles to flesh out their conservatism. Conservatism is simply a collection of attitudes towards change and existing institutions. Providing they do not become ideologized and thus distorted, such attitudes are undoubtedly a necessary corrective to those whose zeal for reform might upset the ship of state. Yet attempting to derive a full-fledged political theory from them is an unpromising effort unlikely over the long term to yield fruit.

This means that conservatism will always be handicapped in the larger political debate. Lacking a substantive vision of their own concerning the place of politics within life as a whole, conservatives will be able effectively to challenge their opponents only insofar as they embrace principles drawn from elsewhere, e.g., Catholic social teachings, neo-Calvinism or another of the traditional religious faiths.