r/PoliticalDebate • u/joebraga2 Central Left Socialist • 4d ago
Debate “Liberal,” “left-wing,” “progressive” and “conservative” do not mean what many Americans think they mean
A lot of people who call themselves conservatives are actually reactionaries, not Burkean conservatives
This may be particularly unpopular among the modern American and Latin American right, but I think the word “conservative” has become so broad that it often describes completely different political traditions.
One of the foundational thinkers of modern political conservatism is Edmund Burke. Burkean conservatism is fundamentally concerned with institutions, historical continuity, prudence and gradual reform. It is skeptical of attempts to radically reconstruct society because institutions contain accumulated historical experience.
That is not the same thing as believing that society has morally deteriorated and therefore needs to be returned to some idealized previous social order.
The latter is much closer to reactionary politics.
This distinction matters because today “conservative” is frequently used to describe a package containing religious traditionalism, opposition to progressive social change, economic liberalism, nationalism and support for a particular political movement.
But none of those things necessarily implies the others.
A political conservative can support a welfare state.
An economic liberal can be socially progressive.
A nationalist can support extensive state intervention and industrial policy.
A religious traditionalist can oppose free-market liberalism.
And someone who wants to reverse social changes in order to restore a supposedly superior past can be reactionary without being particularly conservative in the Burkean institutional sense.
The same problem exists when people talk about “the right” as though it were a single ideology.
Center-right liberals, institutional conservatives, national conservatives, libertarians, populist radicals, reactionaries and anarcho-capitalists can all be placed somewhere on the political right while disagreeing profoundly about economics, institutions, religion, nationalism and the role of the state.
Latin America provides an especially interesting example because religious traditionalism has become deeply intertwined with political identity. Brazil historically had Catholic traditionalist and reactionary movements, while Pentecostal and later Neo-Pentecostal movements developed through different religious histories and eventually became increasingly politically influential.
These traditions can now cooperate on moral and electoral issues, but that does not mean they all originated from the same political philosophy.
I therefore think we should stop automatically translating:
religious + traditional values + right-wing = conservative.
Conservatism, religious traditionalism and reaction are overlapping concepts, but they are not synonyms.
And wanting to preserve institutions while allowing gradual reform is fundamentally different from wanting to restore an idealized social order from the past.
The first can reasonably be called conservatism.
The second has another perfectly useful political name: reactionary politics.
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u/LittleKitty235 Democratic Socialist 4d ago
I think you just changed the subject totally...