Towards Internationalist Conservativism
Broadly, the three main ideologies influencing major political parties in the most powerful democracies are conservatism, liberalism and socialism.
In my view, nationalist ideas held by both voters and politicians are the main reason why policy making by democratic governments is not optimal for maximising welfare.
Nationalism not only blocks policies that benefit foreign countries at the cost of the native country, but also sometimes blocks policies which benefit both foreign countries and the native country, because of objections to foreign countries enjoying greater benefits than the native country.
EA’s commitment to impartiality makes it internationalist. Internationalist reasoning lies behind many of the problems that EAs want governments to prioritise, and the solutions EAs want governments to choose, from tackling existential risks from AI via intergovernmental organisations, to strengthening intergovernmental infrastructure to tackle existential risks from engineered pandemics, to increasing funding for international development and global health.
Liberalism and socialism have influential internationalist traditions within them, which mean that even with a nationalist electorate, governments are sometimes able to implement internationalist policies, such as increasing budgets for international development, or strengthening intergovernmental organisations to tackle global catastrophic risks.
However, internationalist strains of thought are currently far less influential within conservatism.
In practice, electoral systems mean that a lot of governments swing between implementing social-liberal policies and implementing liberal-conservative policies.
Crudely, about half the time, conservatives are in power. To help promote internationalist policy, which is vital to tackle global catastrophic risk and extreme poverty, we need to promote and strengthen existing internationalist schools of thought within conservatism, or even create new internationalist schools of thought within conservatism.
Internationalist conservatism could comprise a mix of views such as authoritarian views on crime and drug regulation, favouring low immigration, placing importance on religion and on conserving traditions, but still believing in working with and helping other countries, and supporting intergovernmental organisations.
Internationalist variants of conservatism could be promoted by conservatives within the EA/LW/Emergent Ventures blogosphere, or via new think tanks and organisations.
“Internationalist conservatism could comprise a mix of views such as authoritarian views on crime and drug regulation, favouring low immigration, placing importance on religion and on conserving traditions, but still believing in working with and helping other countries, and supporting intergovernmental organisations.”
Being myself quite conservative, I entirely agree. In particular “favouring low immigration”, imply an expansionist developmental agenda, at least for your neighbouring countries! Nothing is more important for Spain than: stability, development and support with migration restrictions by Morocco and Algeria. If you are for a Big Wall in Mexico, you shall support NAFTA too!!.
Unoftunately, politics is not about policy.
Great post! I never had thought about it like that. Thank you for this post! We really need to diversify in ideological terms to reach more and more people.
I’m a left wing socialist libertarian degrowther and I say that in my opinion conservative EAs should form think tanks and networks of fellow conservative EAs. Libertarian socialists should do the same. Right-wing libertarians too.
I’m a firm believer in stability and I believe that conservative ideology bases itself on stability.
A difference between my left-wing ideology and a right-wing conservative ideology is that I want to radically change the status quo to have a more stable country and planet in terms of biophysical limits and that would be achieved through several ways such as: expanding a degrowth mindset (from the fringes of society in the Global North to the mainstream), voluntary simplicity, localism, reruralization, end planned obscelence, end fossil fuels subsidies, reduce energy consumption in the Global North, etc… This I believe would bring more stability on the long term.
An internationalist conservative may disagree will all I said on the previous paragraph BUT if he/she has an EA mindset we can agree that EA brings more stability to this world and even work on a lot of ways. We may agree about a lot of focus areas, perhaps about all of them. We may be more or less long-termists or on a roughly equal degree. We may have the same goals of extreme poverty elimination, reduction of global AI risks, global health improvement.
I want people in the Global South to enjoy the same opportunities that I have had living in the Global North. I think that an internationalist conservative may very well think the same. If there is common grounds between different ideologies image the common ground between fellow members of the same ideology namely conservatism. We must spread EA aligned mindsets on our respective ideologies if we are to have a bigger impact in the world.
I think this gets the causation backwards.
Conservatism, like any other ideological cluster, does not exist independently of the real political movements that constitute it. There is no law of nature that says “conservatives”, in some abstract ideal sense, are going to be in power half of the time. Whatever level of success contemporary conservative parties have is a fact about actually existing conservatives, not “conservatism” as such. They’re not inherently traditionalists and only accidentally nationalists; they just have whatever traits they have, any combination of which might explain their success.
This is true, but not very informative...