Reddit reviews The Conservative Sensibility

I apologize in advance if I don't do this right, first time posting here. I think this is culture since this is part of an ongoing arguementation between "Classical Liberals" and "Liberal Conservatives" vs "Religious/Social Conservatives" to "Post-Liberals"

The True Con

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>Though Will still claims to be a conservative, he has radically changed what he means by that term. In 1983’s Statecraft as Soulcraft, Will argued that government inevitably does legislate morality, and indeed “should do so more often.” He rejected “the idea that governments should be neutral in major conflicts about social values.” He denied that “the public interest is produced by the spontaneous cooperation of individuals making arrangements in free markets.” He confessed his “deviation from laissez-faire orthodoxy,” and announced, “It is time to come up from individualism.”
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>In 2019’s The Conservative Sensibility, Will employs the same gentlemanly prose—to opposite ends. He states that government should refrain from “imposing its opinions about what happiness the citizens should choose to pursue.” He maintains that men should be “free to maximize their satisfactions according to their own hierarchy of preference.” He concludes that the public interest can, after all, be achieved “in the spontaneous order of a lightly governed society.” He frets over the fact that the poor pay no income tax, and describes the rich and corporations as “unpopular minorities.” He champions “individualism and the rights of the individual.”
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>Will has remained remarkably consistent in his self-styling. In 1983, he lamented that America contained “almost no conservatives, properly understood.” Today, he again calls conservatism “a persuasion without a party.” His positions have changed, but his pose has not. He is still the lone True Conservative.
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>In both, America is conflated with liberal individualism. In Statecraft as Soulcraft, Will therefore concludes that America was “ill founded.” In The Conservative Sensibility, he instead celebrates the founding as the first inbreaking of Hayek’s transcendent philosophy. In both cases, America is not so much a nation as an idea. This is Will’s one fixed point—and his fundamental error.
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>Our foundations are broader and deeper than a single “founding” moment, tendentiously identified with the views of a few deistic slavers. William Bradford was one of our founders. So was Lord Baltimore. These men were communalists, not individualists; Christians, not liberals. For Will, they might as well not exist. He has spent his otherwise incoherent career propounding what Barry Shain, a professor of political science at Colgate University, calls “the myth of American individualism”—a myth that cannot survive contact with reality … the overwhelming majority of Americans at the time of the founding considered the individual “radically incomplete living outside an enveloping and ethically intensive community.” They believed that “the common or public good enjoyed preeminence over the immediate interests of individuals.”
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>These Americans believed that property was not an absolute right, but a trust received from God to be used for all. The Vermont Declaration of Rights stated that “private property ought to be subservient to public use.” Benjamin Franklin, the most commercial of the framers, believed men had a natural right to whatever property was necessary “for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species.” But he also believed that “all property superfluous to such services is property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it.”
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>Will labors to discredit Chambers and Kirk because they challenge his claim that America is univocally liberal and ultimately secular. Like many other True Cons, he has chosen to ignore ... what Shain calls the “enduring, democratic, Christian, and communal” tradition of America.
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>Will's praise of liberalism would be more convincing if he did not claim for it the virtues of other things. He opens his book by describing the Battle of Princeton as an “illustration of the history-making role of individual agency.” The selfless deaths of American patriots are thus enlisted for the ­ideology of self-interest.
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>He says that the universe itself is a testament to the godless miracle of spontaneous order, thereby giving his economic ideas an unearned religious sheen. He questions tradition, hierarchy, and religion, but seeks to drape their prestige around his ... philosophy

> much of 'conservative' thought is founded in an unwillingness to contribute ANY money/privilege/power to better the whole of society. That is to say, it is founded in a libertarian fantasy that individuals pursing their own self-interest, without any interference from the state, will lead to greater flourishing for the whole of society.

You seem to be conflating conservatism and libertarianism. Conservatives are generally open to reforms that would better society, provided they are done conservatively.

> This manifests most concretely in an aversion to ... disruption of existing social hierarchies.

The very definition of conservatism is aversion to such disruptions. That's not a drawback of conservatism, it's a feature. Indeed, it's the central feature.

> To me this is an intellectually ignorant view of society, (so much so that it makes me wonder if it is even held in good-faith), as it completely ignores the impact that the pursuit of self-interest has on others, or the existence of societally constructed hierarchies that privilege some individuals over others.

Actually it is a more realistic view of society, as it regards hierarchies as inevitable. Furthermore, conservative ethics includes reasoning about authority, as it is obvious someone must be in charge; whereas progressive ethics tends to only consider harm.

Have you read either of these recent books?

https://www.amazon.com/Conservatism-Invitation-Tradition-Roger-Scruton/dp/1250170567/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=conservatism&qid=1562695659&s=books&sr=1-1

https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Sensibility-George-F-Will/dp/0316480932/ref=zg_bs_5571265011_11?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=3J41NQTHAKT706YBGNQZ