NZ Conservative on the move

After several years now at Blogger I've finally decided to move NZ Conservative to more dynamic premises on Wordpress.

I'll keep the existing blog up and running until I get around to moving the old posts and links.

Critique of Sam Tanenhaus's “Conservatism is Dead”

I recently saw Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Review of Books, defend his new book, The Death of Conservatism, on Book-TV, at an event that took place at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). I haven’t read the book, but apparently the idea for the book was conceived after Tanenhaus first published an article called “Conservatism Is Dead” in The New Republic, which appeared in February 2009, shortly after the giddy exuberance of the Obama inauguration. Of course, a lot has changed since then, and one may say now that “the reports of conservatism’s demise are greatly exaggerated.”

Throwing down the gauntlet to conservatives in his New Republic article, Tanenhaus boldly proclaimed:

What conservatives have yet to do is confront the large but inescapable truth that movement conservatism is exhausted and quite possibly dead. And yet they should, because the death of movement politics can only be a boon to the right, since it has been clear for some time the movement is profoundly and defiantly un-conservative--in its ideas, arguments, strategies, and above all its vision.

There are numerous flaws in Tanenhaus’s hypothesis about the death of conservatism. I will focus on what I consider to be some of the most glaring inaccuracies and misconceptions.

1) The primary problem with Tanenhaus’s view is that he wants conservatives to go back in the closet and not challenge the “liberal” (I would call it leftist) agenda. Tanenhaus would like American conservatives to become good Tories, like their British counterparts. He calls this “the Beaconsfield position," after Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. He uses Russell Kirk, Whittaker Chambers (Tanenhaus published a well-received biography of Chambers), and Edmund Burke (I don’t think Tanenhaus has understood Burke, who, after all, was a Whig and not a Tory). The problem with this thesis is that America never really had much of a Tory tradition. Our ideals of individual liberty and economic freedom, limited government, and the rule of law, were written into our founding documents, the Declaration, and particularly the Constitution. Thus, Tanenhaus’s attempt to define what he considers to be real conservatism, a melding of elitist, status quo conservatism with collectivism, would have been even more “incomprehensible” to Burke, than what he calls radical or revanchist conservatism. Or perhaps Burke would recognize Tanenhaus’s conservatism for what it really is, a form of conservative Jacobinism. Tanenhaus has merely tried to reverse labels on modern conservatives, claiming that they are the revanchist Jacobins, while the leftist collectivists of the American political scene, like his model conservative President, Obama, are the true conservatives. It’s a neat little trick, but it’s also rather absurd and disingenuous. It’s tantamount to calling the Soviet dictators during the Cold War, right wingers. To the left, not only all enemies, but also all evil, is on the right, by definition.

It’s amazing how little time was needed to elapse to prove most of Tanenhaus’s thesis fatally flawed: No, Barak Obama is not a conservative. He’s a leftist, as his first eight months in office have demonstrated. Tanenhaus’s statement about Obama now appears so ludicrous and absurd that one wonders how any educated person could have held such a view, when he writes about the conservative election defeat: “It ended, at last, with the 2008 election, and the emergence of a president who seems more thoroughly steeped in the principles of Burkean conservatism than any significant thinker or political figure on the right.” Burkean conservatism, are you kidding Tanenhaus? Does Obama even know who Burke was? The only principles our current President appears to be steeped in are those of Marx and Saul Alinsky. If moderates who voted for Obama had been paying attention to Obama’s past and his associations, they would have realized this before the election. And no, conservatism is not dead, as evidenced by the tea party and anti-Obamacare movements. Despite the best efforts of the mainstream media, it is quite alive, thanks to Mr. Obama, who has galvanized the right just as George Bush galvanized the left.

While it’s true that conservatism in America has been radicalized, this was inevitable due to the fact that it has been under assault from the left throughout the last century. In Tanenhaus’s conceptualization of conservatism, conservatism is re-defined as defense of the status quo, which is quite convenient from Tanenhaus’s leftist perspective because conservatism has not been the status quo of the establishment in America since before the New Deal. The election victories of conservative candidates have had very little impact on the culture, defined as the media, the educational and university systems, most professional organizations, and the government bureaucracy. There is some basis for Tanenhaus’s claim that conservatism has become uncharacteristically overly ideological, but certainly not to the degree that this is true of the left. In Andrew Sullivan’s rebuttal to Tanenhaus, “Conservatism Lives!” (The Atlantic, February 5, 2009), he refers to what he believes to be “the core conservative insight,” which is “the distinction between ideology and politics.” Sullivan brings up the subject in relation to British philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s criticism of Hayek; while Oakeshott rejected all forms of rationalism, Hayek did not. In Rationalism in Politics (1962), Oakeshott criticized Hayek’s Road to Serfdom as follows: “A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics” (p. 26). The old cliché, “imitation is the highest form of flattery” is applicable here. Yes, conservatives did have to adopt some of the strategies and style of the left to compete. But notice the phrase, “a plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite.” That doesn’t sound to me as if Oakeshott was approving the collectivist plan and recommending submission to it. Sullivan agrees with Tanenhaus that conservatism has become too idealogical: “And so the right was in danger of committing the core error that Burke worried about: ideology.” But one could easily conclude that in order to survive at all in a very ideological, collectivist, and totalitarian century, the right needed an ideology to combat their collectivist opponents. And only a conservatism without any core principles could be defined as a defense of the status quo, and a leftist status quo at that. The classical liberal philosophy of Hayek is an alternative to the collectivist vision, which has been able to compete in the modern world of ideas because it isn’t just backward looking; it looks forward to an abundant future with vibrantly free political and economic institutions. Hayek’s vision, which is worth conserving and is consistent with the principles of America’s Founders, defines the core principles of conservatism as individual liberty and economic freedom, limited government, and the rule of law, along with the traditional mores of a society that evolve spontaneously over time, but can never be imposed by design without negative and despotic consequences, which has been the strategy of the left: For example, using the judicial system to impose the leftist social agenda on the population when the legislative will or wherewithal is lacking.

Tanenhaus quotes Burke: "A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation," Burke warned. The task of the statesman was to maintain equilibrium between "[t]he two principles of conservation and correction." But Hayek’s vision of change is just as dynamic as Tanenhaus’s collectivist vision, if not more so; it’s just that Tanenhaus, being a good statist himself, doesn’t agree with the classical liberal view. He only wants one kind of change, the collectivist kind; once the apparent collectivist utopia is achieved the status quo must be maintained. What better way to achieve this than to have one dominant party, the Democrats, as there was in the United States from the 1930s to 1980, and a loyal opposition Me-too Party. What really seems to gall Tanenhaus about his contemporary conservatives is that some of them want a “counterrevolution, the restoration of America's pre-welfare state ancien regime.” When he was accused of wanting to “turn the clock back,” Hayek replied: “One cannot help wondering whether those who habitually use this cliché are aware that it expresses the fatalistic belief that we cannot learn from our mistakes,” that “we are incapable of using our intelligence” (Constitution of Liberty, 1960, p. 284). Hayek was quite critical of the welfare state because he saw it as a slow slide on the “road to serfdom,” and eventually soft despotism if not totalitarianism. In “Revisiting Hayek,” Andrew Foy and Brenton Stansky (American Thinker, May 25, 2009) had this to say about the soft despotism associated with democratic socialism:

To many who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters the connection between the two systems has become increasingly obvious, but in the (Western) democracies the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined. They do not realize that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something utterly different - the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: ‘What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.' (F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, United Kingdom: Routledge Press, 1944)

It should also be noted that Tanenhaus has little understanding of the divisions within the contemporary conservative movement, for example, when he paraphrases Arthur Schlesinger’s criticism of Russell Kirk’s failure to support school lunches and social security: “Where in this, Schlesinger asked, was even a hint of classic conservatism, with its concern for the social and moral costs of unchecked industrial capitalism?” The Paleo-Conservative position as exemplified in Thomas Fleming’s Chronicles magazine is highly critical of “unchecked industrial capitalism,” as were Pat Buchanan’s Presidential campaigns in the 1990s.

2) Another related flaw in Tanenhaus’s thesis is the assumption that conservatives have abandoned any concern for civil society. He makes this claim by focusing on the anti-government wing of conservatism, much as one could discredit the left by focusing on leftist anarchism. He blames this phenomenon on the fact that ex-marxists have assumed leadership positions in the New Right. “The result,” he claims, “is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare.” But this is disingenuous. If anything, the right has carried out a defensive war against the assaults of the left upon traditional American society. As James Piereson has written in his critique of Tanenhaus’s essay: “As for the culture war—well, most conservatives would be glad to have it over with, if only cultural liberals and radicals would call a halt to their provocations” (New Criterion, September 2009). Again, Tanenhaus, I suppose, expects the right to behave and accept wholesale the agenda of the radical left, whether it be abortion, gay marriage, or drug legalization. He says further that ‘It made no sense for conservatives to attack “statism" when it was institutions of "the State" that formed the bedrock of civil society.’ This is quite revealing and at odds with classical conservatism as espoused by Burke and Tocqueville (a classical liberal in his day, but conservative in modern terms), and modern conservatives like Robert Nisbet. First of all, conservatives don’t tend to confuse the state with society; they’re not the same as the institutions of the latter tend to evolve spontaneously over time. Nisbet, who was influenced by both Burke and Tocqueville, emphasized the importance of what he called “intermediate associations,” building on Burke’s idea of “little platoons” and Tocqueville’s notion of “voluntary associations” (See my “Conservative-Libertarian Debate” ). Nisbet defined intermediate associations as those smaller social units, like the family, church, and local associations that he believed could foster both freedom and order as a buffer to state tyranny. Social policy, through much of our nation’s history, was carried out by these intermediate associations. Things change, of course, but the left’s assault on traditional American values has continued unabated.

An even more absurd claim by Tanenhaus is the assertion that conservatism has promoted its own brand of anti-Americanism. He makes this argument when discussing the conservative theory of the “new class,” which actually comes from Milovan Djilas’ critique of the Communist Party ruling class apparatchiks in The New Class (1957). Tanenhaus quotes Neo-Conservative Irving Kristol, who used the term to designate the new knowledge class in America:

[S]cientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their careers in the expanding public sector, city planners, the staffs of the larger foundations, the upper levels of the government bureaucracy.

In Tanenhaus’s view, the right cannot be conservative if they’re in revolt against the elite professional classes in America. How could they be? What really seems to annoy Tanenhaus about the “new class” theory is that it gives rise to a sort of conservative, right wing populism, pitted against the cultural and intellectual elitism of the left. After all, conservatives are supposed to be elitists! (And I might add, in Tanenhaus’s view, paternalistic.) Tanenhaus does admit that “The radicalism [of the new left], such as it was, originated inside the Beltway.” I would add college campuses and the entertainment media as well. Christopher Lasch in The Revolt of the Elites (1995) elucidates how the more recent (new) left arose amongst the well-educated urban professional classes, unlike the old left revolt of the 1930s, written about by Ortega y Gasset in Revolt of the Masses. (This is not entirely accurate, as the leadership of the socialist and labor movements of the 1930s largely came from the intelligentsia also. The difference is that the rank-and-file of the more recent revolt was largely middle class, not working class or poor.) Significantly enough, this more recent revolt was a rebellion against the norms of Western and American civilization. Yet Tanenhaus goes on to claim that the populist revolt on the right against the new left mores was itself anti-American! “This formulation mirrored ‘the antinomianism and anti-institutionalism’ Bell had attributed to the countercultural left,” Tanenhaus asserted. “The right, it appeared, was nursing its own version of anti-Americanism.” What Tanenhaus fails to mention is that the “new class” criticized by Kristol and others on the right had itself been radicalized since the 1960s, moving from Progressive and social democratic ideologies to outright Marxism and political correctness. Is it really a radical notion to dissent and rebel against the Marxist takeover of American cultural institutions? A takeover, by the way, by a group that itself hates America, and “blames America first,” in Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s words. If so, I’m a proud radical for America’s traditions of liberty and limited government. Interestingly enough, according to Tanenhaus we now have an exemplar of Burkean conservatism in the White House whose wife, the First Lady, was never proud of her country until the election of her husband to the Presidency. All narcissism aside, we now have a President who tours the world apologizing for America’s past sins while cozying up to communists like Chavez and Castro. “You can’t be serious!” Mr. Tanenhaus. Will the real anti-American please stand up!

3) Another major issue that I take with Tanenhaus’s thesis is that he gives no evidence of an adequate understanding of economics, and just repeats Democratic, leftist platitudes like the following:

There is instead almost universal agreement--reinforced by the penitential testimony of Alan Greenspan and, more recently, by grudgingly conciliatory Republicans--that the most plausible economic rescue will involve massive government intervention, quite possibly on the scale of the New Deal/Fair Deal of the 1930s and '40s and perhaps even the New Frontier/Great Society of the 1960s.

Universal agreement indeed, maybe on the left: Yes, Greenspan and Bernanke were largely responsible for the financial collapse, but because of the Fed’s irresponsible and inflationary expansion of money and credit. “Massive government intervention,” however, will only exacerbate the problem: the solution for the boom-bust cycle created by inflationary monetary policies is not more inflation (See my “What Caused the Financial Collapse?” and Thomas Woods, Meltdown, 2009). And contrary to Tanenhaus’s implied belief, the New Deal did not rescue the United States from the Great Depression. There is a great deal of research to the contrary, including Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man, Murray Rothbard’s The Great Depression, and Harold L. Cole & Lee E. Ohanian, “New Deal Policies and the Persistence of the Great Depression” (Journal of Political Economy 112, August 2004: 813).

Tanenhaus’s main objection against his so-called radical, or as he’s so fond of calling them, “revanchist” conservatives is their desire to repeal all or part of the New Deal. Yet this is hardly universally true, although a true conservative might hope it was. For example, Newt Gingrich, one of Tanenhaus’s radical exemplars, has often delivered laudatory praises of Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan also made positive comments about FDR. But Tanenhaus doesn’t note these heresies on the right. In his rather skewed view of history and politics, support for the New Deal is a definitive mark of a true conservative. For example, as Tanenhaus has claimed, Whittaker Chambers refused to join William F. Buckley at his newly founded National Review in the 1950s because, while Chambers sympathized with “the magazine's opposition to increasingly centralized government, . . . in practical terms, he believed challenging it was futile. It was evident that New Deal economics had become the basis for governing in postwar America….” Chambers’ defeatist attitude apparently endeared him to Tanenhaus. Like many in his age, Chambers believed the Marxist critique of capitalism, that industrial capitalism made socialism inevitable. But if as Tanenhaus quoted Chambers, "The machine has made the economy socialistic," in the first half of the twentieth century, more recently it seems that post-industrial capitalism has shifted the dynamics to make socialism and unionism anachronistic. While not as enthusiastic about the Great Society as the New Deal, Tanenhaus concedes that “Perhaps the Great Society could be retooled, tamed into a legitimate extension of the New Deal. But, to accomplish this, the right would have to deal honestly with capitalism and its many ambiguities.” It doesn’t seem to bother Tanenhaus in the least that all levels of government in the U.S. now consume about 61% of GPD (Heartland Institute ). He apparently welcomes the increasing size and intrusiveness of government, despite its growing corruption and inefficiency, and the transfer of various social and economic functions from the private to the public sector.

While the above sums up my major contentions with Tanenhaus’s thesis, there are several minor points of disagreement, such as his claim that “Bush, so often labeled a traitor to conservative principles, was in fact more steadfastly devoted to them than any of his Republican predecessors--including Ronald Reagan.” This is a patently false claim. Although Bush had strong support amongst Neo-Conservatives and evangelicals, many traditional conservatives and libertarians, including myself, did not even vote for Bush. If it wasn’t for the Iraq War, Bush’s Big Government and “compassionate conservatism,” might have appealed to many on the left. Other than his tax cuts, the invasion of Afghanistan, and his Supreme Court nominees, there was not a lot about Bush that was appealing to conservatives or libertarians.

In conclusion, Tanenhaus’s thesis that conservatism is dead because it has abandoned true conservatism, what Tanenhaus describes as the Beaconsfield conservatism of Disraeli, in favor of the revanchist politics of counterrevolution is either disingenuous or very ill-informed. His definition of Beaconsfield conservatism equates conservatism with an elitist defense of the status quo, a collectivist status quo, with little or no attention or awareness of conservative core principles. Only with such an unfair and absurd definition of conservatism could Tanenhaus possibly assert that Obama, who was politically weaned at the foot of Marxists and anti-Americans like Frank Marshall Davis and Reverend Wright, was “more thoroughly steeped in the principles of Burkean conservatism than any significant thinker or political figure on the right.” He may have as accurately asserted that Burke was a closet communist. Thus, I would assert in conclusion that Tanenhaus’s use of political labels is deceptive, dishonest, and unconscionable to say the least.