A Starter Pack for Conservatives

Convert Your Friends For Fun and Profit

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As a Book Guy in the scene, I regularly get a question that looks like the following:

I have this friend. He’s socially conservative and kind of race realist, but he’s a classical liberal. He thinks that democracy and liberalism produce the most prosperity. Whenever the government does anything, he calls it “fascist”. He’s a good guy but obviously he needs some help. Do you have any reading suggestions?

I’ve been asked some variation on this question ever since IP launched, so I’ve given many recommendations over the years. Many of them are books we ended up publishing, because if it’s important, we publish it. In reality, all the major theoretical questions over liberalism were settled centuries ago and almost all the great illiberal philosophy since then has simply been elaborations on that older material.

In this article I’ll list some books that you can use to nudge your friends over to our side. I’ll also give quick summaries of these books. Most are now IP releases, but not all. Crucially, there are no one or two books that will convert every “based liberal”. Different people need different things depending on their priors and intuitions. You can’t just hand everyone Filmer and expect it to work. You have to tailor your recommendations, so I’ll give some indication of which books will work best for whom.

The first thing to keep in mind is that nobody’s reason is ever convinced unless his gut is convinced first. Every argument finally succeeds or fails by reference to an intuition. Whichever argument activates the deepest and most secure intuition, wins. Even if the argument is unsound.

An important element of a truly illiberal worldview is that logos is not a thing—humans are not motivated by reason; even the world itself is not underpinned by a universal rational order. Polite society convinces people by social proof, but we don’t have that. We’re exiled from polite society. Our views are seen as ugly and low-class. If you want someone to come around to your view, you have to show him how your view is what he already believes, just made clearer and more consistent. You’re on his side. He just hasn’t realized it yet. Keep this in mind when choosing your recommendations.

The best way to convince classical liberals to discard liberalism, especially ones with conservative views, is to show that classical liberalism isn’t really a thing and never was. It’s not that your friend needs to reject modern science. It’s not that he needs to become a jackboot-wearing thug. He simply needs to see that the freedom and prosperity he loves followed from something other than constitutionalism, rule of law, parliamentarism, balance of powers, etc. And freedom and prosperity cannot have followed from something that never was.

Another important approach is to occupy the default position. Liberals claim this position by creating a myth and projecting that myth back into the deep past. The fundamental liberal myths are a) the social contract, b) progress, and c) freedom, all of which liberals claim have been with us since the dawn of mankind. It’s hard to think of one or two books that dispel all these myths at once, so it’s best to just focus on one myth. We’re swimming in an ocean of liberalism and it can be hard to show the fish the water—the fish just thinks freedom has been around forever and everything else must be argued for.

Lastly, and this is perhaps the most important point, it’s usually a mistake to try to turn someone from their most cherished belief, or the belief that pays the bills. Often even their own parents can’t do this. A much better approach is indirect. Rather than tackling your friend’s deep love of freedom head-on, explain how the “march of progress” hasn’t yielded freedom at all. Instead of browbeating him out of his love of modernity, explain how authoritarianism begat all genuine progress. Liberalism isn’t one thing, but a complex of related ideas. As the preponderance of evidence begins to tell against the complex as a whole, the keystone belief will go with it. For this reason, I’ve appended to each recommendation a list of what kind of conservative is likely to appreciate that book, and what kind isn’t.

Now, on to the list.