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.

The Conservative-Libertarian Debate: An Historical View

Part II (See September 6th post for Part I)

The Conservatives

On the conservative side, we have Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet. The title of Kirk’s contribution, “Chirping Sectaries,” is taken from T. S. Eliot’s term for a “chirping sect,” which Kirk defines as “an ideological clique forever splitting into sects still smaller and odder, but rarely conjugating” (Freedom and Virtue, p. 120). Kirk adamantly rejects libertarians, accusing them of a “fanatic attachment to a simple solitary principle . . . the notion of personal freedom as the whole end of the civil order, and indeed of human existence.” As previously noted, none of the libertarians cited above would agree with Kirk’s contention. He states further that the only thing they share with conservatives is “detestation of collectivism” (Ibid., p 113). Towards the end of his short essay, Kirk lists several areas of disagreement with libertarians, which indicate that in some cases, he is sparring with a straw man, or an extreme version of libertarianism: 1) conservatives believe in a “transcendent moral order” whereas libertarians are materialists; 2) order is the primary need of a society and must precede the establishment of liberty; 3) libertarians view self-interest as being the “cement of society,” whereas conservatives find it in friendship (Aristotle) and Christian love; 4) libertarians believe in the goodness of human nature whereas conservatives view humans as sinful, fallen, and imperfect; 5) libertarians view the state as “the great oppressor,” whereas in the conservative view “the state is ordained by God”; 6) “The conservative regards the libertarian as impious” (pp. 121 – 122). While all or some of Kirk’s claims could be true of extreme libertarians, he makes some rather sweeping assumptions. For example, a libertarian could believe in a transcendent moral order; a limited government libertarian could believe in the importance of law and order for establishing a civil society where the freedoms of others are respected; and the Founding Fathers based the Constitution on self-interest rather than virtue because they believed, considering man’s imperfect nature (#4 above), it was more practical (see George Carey, “How Conservatives and Liberals View The Federalist, The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1989, p. 8). Kirk’s rationale for his position is that if a libertarian “believes in an enduring moral order, the Constitution of the United States, free enterprise, and old American ways – why, actually he is a conservative with imperfect understanding of the general terms of politics” (p. 119). Kirk has a point, if one defines libertarian as someone who belongs to the rather left leaning Libertarian Party, or an advocate of anarcho-libertarianism, but his rather rigid definition of libertarian seems also to give evidence of an “imperfect understanding of the general terms of politics.”

Some of Kirk’s more interesting observations have to do with tolerance, or what Burke has called “licentious toleration.” Those who have read Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) may be reminded of his point that “tolerance” and “openness” are considered to be the primary virtues in modern liberal democracies. Kirk writes:

It is consummate folly to tolerate every variety of opinion, on every topic, out of devotion to an abstract “liberty”; for opinion soon finds expression in action, and the fanatics whom we tolerated will not tolerate us when they have power.” (p. 116)

In a post-9/11 world with Islamic jihadists subverting Western culture from within in Europe and America while demanding the protection of our laws, when in fact, once they are in power, they will deny us the protection of their law, Kirk’s comment seems prescient. The nineteenth-century French writer, Louis Veuillot, wrote the following: “When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle” (Quoted in James Burnham, The Suicide of the West, p. 237). This is rather obviously true in radical Islam’s war against the West: They see Western law and multiculturalism as a weakness and vulnerability that they can exploit until the day that Sharia law can be imposed upon Western democracies. While freedom of speech is foundational for a free republic, does that right extend to our enemies who are trying to destroy us, and replace our free institutions with despotism? Or even closer to home, will the left tolerate the free speech of the right, now that they are in power? They surely haven’t allowed freedom of speech at university campuses where leftists prevail. The free speech of the opposition to Obama’s healthcare plan has come under increasing attack from the left, although the left’s dissent against the Iraq War was surely tolerated during the Bush administration.

Finally, I wouldn’t be doing Kirk justice if I didn’t mention the emphasis he places on tradition. For example, he wrote: In our time, the real danger is that custom and prescription and tradition may be overthrown utterly among us . . . by neoterism, the lust for novelty, and that men will be no better than the flies of summer, oblivious to the wisdom of their ancestors . . .” (Ibid., p. 116). As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has argued in Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? (1988), a tradition of thought is not a dead dogma, but rather a living body of thought that is constantly being replenished by new interpretations. The danger arises, as Kirk points out, when our fascination for novelty and current fads leads to a quality of thought that lacks depth and historical continuity, becoming obsolete in a generation or less instead of withstanding the tribulations of the ages.

Robert Nisbet’s piece, “Uneasy Cousins,” is certainly more conciliatory than Kirk’s; after all, he at least refers to libertarians as cousins. He lists four things that conservatives and libertarians share in common: 1) a common dislike of government intervention in the lives of citizens; 2) “equality before the law”; 3) “the necessity of freedom, most notably economic freedom”; and 4) “a common dislike of war,” in particular the “war-society” under Wilson and FDR. Finally, he notes that “there is a shared dislike by libertarians and conservatives of what today passes for liberalism: the kind that is so widely evident in the schools, the established churches, the universities, and, above all, the media” (Freedom and Virtue, pp. 16 – 18).

In Nisbet’s listing of the differences between conservatives and libertarians, perhaps the most significant difference has to do with the libertarian view of “individualism,” which stands in opposition to all or most social structures, and not just the state, whereas to conservatives like Nisbet, intermediate associations, like the family, church, and local associations are believed to foster both freedom and order as a buffer to state tyranny. The conservative view on this issue can be traced back to Burke’s idea of “little platoons” as being the essential building blocks of society: “To love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections” (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, p. 53). But Nisbet, who was mainly influenced by Tocqueville earlier in his career, when he presented the idea of intermediate associations in his The Quest for Community (1953), considered himself to be a classical liberal like Tocqueville. In Democracy in America (1835), Tocqueville wrote admiringly about the American propensity for forming what he called “voluntary associations”: "Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations” (Vol. 2, p 114). (According to Gary North, it was after reading Kirk’s The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, also published in 1953, that Nisbet began to identify with the conservative philosophy that can be traced back to Burke (see “Robert Nisbet: Conservative Sociologist,” LewRockwell.com, August 15, 2002). However, according to Brad Lowell Stone, who is more authoritative on Nisbet [see “Robert Nisbet: A True Sociologist,” The Intercollegiate Review, Spring 1998, p. 39], Nisbet was simultaneously influence by Tocqueville and Burke, after returning to UC Berkeley after World War II, and prior to publishing The Quest for Community in 1953.) While Tocqueville was enthusiastic about the tendency of Americans to belong to “voluntary associations,” he was critical of the individualistic and egalitarian tendencies in American democracy. In his critique of American “individualism,” Tocqueville wrote: “individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life,” until eventually “it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness” (Democracy in America, Vol. 2, p. 104). He believed that individualism would lead “each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows, and to draw apart with his family and his friends,” and thus, leaving “society at large to itself” (Ibid.).

Tocqueville, unlike most modern libertarians, did not conceive of the individual and the state as being opposed to one another, rather, as Brad Lowell Stone has written, “he describes ‘individualism’ and the centralization of state power as rising in tandem, both rooted in the passion for equality” (“Mediating Structures,” First Principles, 10/09/08). Undoubtedly due to his knowledge of the excesses of the French Revolution, Tocqueville did not consider equality and liberty to be compatible goals in a free society, and in a democracy, he believed that equality would eventually win out: “The taste which men have for liberty, and that which they feel for equality, are, in fact, two different things; and I am not afraid to add that, in democratic nations, they are two unequal things” (Ibid., p. 100). He believed that equality was the passion of his democratic age, and he noted that liberty was more fragile than equality. As we can witness in our own times, to destroy equality, once it’s institutionalized, is quite a laborious process, as Tocqueville recognized – “Its social conditions must be modified, its laws abolished, its opinions superseded, its habits changed” – “political liberty is more easily lost” (p. 101). The purpose of this rather lengthy digression is to point to the history of this notion that, as Nisbet has argued, intermediate associations have served an essential function in both preserving social order and providing a buffer against the intrusions and tyrannies of the state. Without these social structures, the individual is left at the mercy of the state and its laws, which, as a study of history reveals, can quickly become tyrannical without a more diffuse system of power. In more recent times, Peter Berger and Richard John Neuhaus have taken up the cause of intermediate institutions under the banner of what they call “mediating structures” (Brad Lowell Stone, “Mediating Structures”).

Nisbet mentions a couple of other differences between libertarianism and conservatism: For example, different attitudes about authority and about the nation. About the former, Nisbet has observed, “The existence of authority in the social order staves off encroachment of power from the political sphere. Conservatism, from Burke on, has perceived society as a plurality of authorities” (“Uneasy Cousins,” p. 19). As I argued above, Nisbet believed that libertarians were generally opposed to authority residing in the mediating structures of the social order, and with the collapse of all intermediate authority, all authority would have to reside in either the individual or the state. The libertarian assumption would seem to be that liberty is at odds with authority and law, except to the extent that they guarantee individual rights. But can the state be trusted? If it cannot be trusted, are we left with anarchy? As an example of the breakdown of social order (admittedly not the best of orders): J. L. Talmon has written that during the French Revolution, “Liberty was at war with morality and order. There was a danger of anarchy” (J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 1952, p. 108). After the destruction of the Old Regime, there was no order or authority in France, leading to violence and anarchy in the streets. There can be no freedom for the peaceful and law-abiding when there’s anarchy and violence because the law of the jungle prevails. Robespierre’s solution was to redefine liberty as conforming to the General Will (of the people) and the Revolution, which in practice meant the will of Robespierre and the Jacobins, and to take over violence as a state monopoly of the Committee of Public Safety, to be used against those condemned as enemies of the Revolution. The point being not that the Jacobins were an example of libertarianism gone awry, but rather that with the breakdown of social order, anarchy will generally prevail until it is replaced by tyranny.

Finally, I’ll turn to what Nisbet conceived to be the difference in attitude towards the nation between conservatives and libertarians. Consistent with what has already been said about intermediate associations, authority, and social order, Nisbet referred to Burke’s love of country and “’the smaller patriotisms’ of family and neighborhood” (Ibid., p. 23). According to Nisbet, nationalism, though it could be excessive, was in a rather “tenuous condition” in America and the nations of the West: “Patriotism, the cement of the nation, has come to be an almost shameful thing” (Ibid.). In more recent times, there has been a disagreement between traditional conservatives and Neo-cons over the definition of the nation. The latter group, which has included Irving Kristol, Bill Bennett, and Jack Kemp, has posited that America is a “creedal” or “propositional” nation. Bennett and Kemp have declared: "The American national identity is based on a creed, on a set of principles and ideas." Defining the nation in more traditionally conservative terms, Pat Buchanan has quoted the French philosopher, Ernest Renan:

A nation is a living soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the common possession of a rich heritage of memories; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to preserve worthily the undivided inheritance which has been handed down. (Buchanan, “Nation or Notion?” Conservative Resources)

Buchanan also quotes former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan as follows:

To be a nation, a people must believe they are a nation and that they share a common ancestry, history, and destiny. Whatever ethnic group to which we may belong, we Americans must see ourselves as of a unique and common nationality in order to remain a nation.

I think it goes without saying that people are more willing to defend with their lives "a common ancestry, history, and destiny" than just a proposition or idea, disconnected from any strong cultural loyalties.

To conclude this section on the conservative position, neither Nisbet nor Kirk was enthusiastic about a conservative-libertarian fusion. But it should be clear from their arguments that both men were arguing against a rather extreme version of libertarianism, either the anarcho-libertarianism of Rothbard, who in his later years became more conservative, or the left-leaning libertarianism of the Libertarian Party. Nisbet said that “conservative-libertarian” was “oxymoronic” (Ibid., p. 18), while Kirk, as we quoted him above, described any libertarian who believed in an “enduring moral order, the Constitution of the United States, free enterprise, and old American ways,” to be actually a confused conservative. So despite the disagreeable (cantankerous?) positions of our conservative exemplars, perhaps there is a little more room for a rapprochement than either thinker would admit.

Conservative-Libertarian Fusionism

Representing fusionist thought in Freedom and Virtue are former North Caroline Senator, John P. East, and M. Stanton Evans, an advocate of Meyer’s fusionism. East summarizes traditionalism, with its classical Greek and biblical roots, as valuing transcendence, and piety as the “preeminent virtue,” while critical of the secularism and religious skepticism of the libertarians. He argues that “man is not self-produced, nor is his fundamental nature malleable” (“Conservatism and Libertarianism: Vital Complements,” Freedom and Virtue, p. 82). He does believe, however, that conservatives and libertarians do have some common cause and that they share: 1) the belief in “the central role of the concept of the individual,” and 2) a “unity in opposition to the egalitarian-collectivist bent of the modern age” and its varieties of statism and totalitarianism (Ibid., p. 85). Although he states his position in objective terms, East clearly sides with Kirk and Nisbet in his emphasis on “a sense of history, tradition, and community,” and when he goes on to say that according to traditionalists, “impiety . . . is the ultimate philosophical error”:

The philosopher is no longer to pursue understanding of the world and to attune himself to it; rather, he is to change it to conform to his heady vision of what ought to be; that is, he is to gain dominion over being. (p. 85 – 86)

Of course, East’s criticisms of modern thought apply doubly to progressives, egalitarians, and statists, who, following the Jacobin lead, aspire to mold man into their image of perfection and virtue, as most libertarians are not big advocates of social engineering. But unlike Rothbard, East does not see Meyer as primarily a libertarian, but rather as a Christian theorist with libertarian leanings: “it is the symbol of the Incarnation which establishes the individual permanently and irrevocably ‘as the ordering principle, the fount and end of social being’” (p. 87). Following Meyer, East claimed that the first principle of American conservatism was “the free man seeking Christian virtue in a community of limited government,” but “coerced virtue was a contradiction in terms” (Ibid., pp. 87 – 88).

M. Stanton Evans, as a follower of Meyer, was the greatest advocate of fusionism during these debates, although Evans considered “fusion” to be a “misnomer” because he thought the separation of traditionalist and libertarian to be an “unnatural” separation of what should be a “natural and necessary unity” (“Toward a New Intellectual History,” Freedom and Virtue, p. 125). And like East, Evans points to the Biblical tradition, particularly the Christian Middle Ages in Evan’s case, as the source of the Western tradition of “individual liberty, limited government, and representative institutions,” which he believed to be rooted in the “ psychological individualism” resulting from the Christian belief in the “immortal, individuated soul” (Ibid., pp. 126 - 27). So Evans’ New Intellectual History was essentially an effort to trace our free institutions to the Christian feudal system that was a “network of contracts” proceeding from the Biblical idea of a covenant, from the Magna Carta to the Mayflower Compact and colonial government in America. He concluded that it was a mistake to consider our libertarian institutions to be the invention of the Enlightenment:

[T]he institutions of limited, representative government, far from being products of secular intuition, were derivative from our religious heritage generally and the political practices of the medieval era specifically. It is a conceit of modernity to suppose that these ideas were invented by the theoreticians of the Enlightenment. (p. 131).

My presentation of Meyer’s fusionism is hampered somewhat by the fact that I’m not directly familiar with Meyer’s work, however Evans, as a close associate of Meyer’s is a reliable exponent of Meyer’s thought. Lee Edwards in “Conservative Consensus” (Heritage Foundation, January 22, 2007, p. 3), has written that Meyer assembled a group of conservative thinkers in 1964, to answer the question, “What is conservatism?” Included in this diverse group were such diverse thinkers as Russell Kirk and Friedrich Hayek, representing the traditionalist and classical liberal poles of the movement. Despite their numerous differences enumerated above, surprisingly enough, they did come to an agreement on several basic tenets as follows:

• They accept “an objective moral order” of

“immutable standards by which human conduct

should be judged.”

• Whether they emphasize human rights and

freedoms or duties and responsibilities, they

unanimously value “the human person” as the

center of political and social thought.

• They oppose liberal attempts to use the State “to

enforce ideological patterns on human beings.”

• They reject the centralized power and direction

necessary to the “planning” of society.

• They join in defense of the Constitution “as originally

conceived.”

• They are devoted to Western civilization and

acknowledge the need to defend it against the

“messianic” intentions of Communism.

Concluding Remarks

One thing that has become clear to me in re-reading these debates is that the conservatives are, in fact, arguing against the more extreme versions of libertarianism, anarcho-libertarianism and the socially leftist libertarianism of the Libertarian Party. The latter is generally perceived as representing the position of libertarianism in America today because of the tendency on the part of the public to equate the Libertarian Party with the voice of libertarianism. There are, however, many small “L” libertarians who do not subscribe to all the positions of the LP. These include followers of the classical liberalism of Hayek, Tocqueville, and some of America’s Founding Fathers. Whatever we call those who have a strong belief in liberty and limited government – classical liberals, libertarians, or conservatives – there does seem to be enough commonality to form an alliance against the radical left and their fellow travelers in America. In fact, I would venture to say that most of those on the conservative right end of the political spectrum have an assortment of beliefs that combine libertarian and conservative elements. It’s only at the extreme, purist range of the spectrum that these uneasy cousins are even aware of their differences for the most part. It is only when libertarianism becomes a doctrinaire belief that isolates liberty from the other ideals of conservatism, or when conservatism downplays the importance of liberty, that the conflicts ensue. There’s also quite a bit of truth to what East and Evans have said: perhaps it was no coincidence that our free institutions arose in the West, with roots in the fertile ground of classical antiquity and biblical traditions, and synthesized in the Middle Ages into a Christian culture, before bearing fruit in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Why is this important, this fusion or alliance of conservatism and libertarianism? In the words of fellow blogger, Francis W. Porretto:

I hope to see a continuing refinement of libertarian-conservative or “fusionist” thought. I do what I can to advance it. Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Larry Elder, and others of greater stature than myself are also working on it, from their particular perspectives. It is the most important effort under way in political thought. Unless it succeeds, and allows us to build a single front—united on critical matters and tolerant of divergence on lesser ones—with which to oppose the statism and special-interest-propelled panderings of the Left, freedom in America is doomed. (Francis W. Porretto, “The Conservative-Libertarian Schism,” Eternity Road, November 23, 2002)

It is important because as Porretto has said, and as I have said in several previous articles, unless conservatives and libertarians can put their differences aside to oppose the statism of the left, “freedom in America is doomed.” Neither conservatives nor libertarians are strong enough to go it alone: United we stand, divide we fall. The left has all the advantages with their control of all the organs of cultural transmission: the media, the universities, the foundations, the schools. All we have going for us is the American people: their common sense, their natural conservatism, and their love of liberty.

The Conservative-Libertarian Debate: An Historical View

Part I

Following up on my recent post, “The Conservative Dilemma: Turf Wars, Fusionism or Alliance?” I re-read Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate (George Carey, ed.), published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 1984. Although as I said in the previous post, few rank-and-file conservatives really care much about Neo-Con/Paleo-Con conflicts or conservative/libertarian disagreements, as Richard Weaver has famously said “ideas [do] have consequences.” The thoughts of those who have formulated these positions do filter down to the masses through the media, journals, and books.

While anti-communism and opposition to welfare-state “liberalism” had provided the glue that held conservatives and libertarians together in the 1950s, their cohesiveness had already begun to rupture when Frank Meyer published his In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo in 1962, in an attempt “to reconcile the libertarian concern for liberty with the traditionalists’ preoccupation with order and virtue” (Carey, “Introduction,” Freedom and Virtue, p. 3). The conflict in the early 1980s, as the above volume assessed the situation, was divided between traditional conservatives such as Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet and libertarians such as Murray Rothbard and Tibor Machan, with fusionists in the middle, who, like Frank Meyer, believed in a possible melding of conservatism and libertarianism into a hybrid movement.

The Libertarians

In the 1980s, libertarians could be divided into limited government libertarians who believed in the “night watchman” state, and anarcho-libertarians, like Rothbard, who were openly hostile to all forms of government. Libertarians generally trace their intellectual ancestry back to John Stuart Mill’s famous “one very simple principle” from On Liberty (1869), where he stated:

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

Both Machan and Rothbard hold that libertarianism is primarily a political doctrine (Machan, “Libertarianism: The Principle of Liberty,” Freedom and Virtue, p. 37): “a political philosophy, confined to what the use of violence should be in social life” (Rothbard, Freedom and Virtue, p. 96). Libertarians are in principle opposed to state coercion of individual behavior unless it is preventative of violence against others. This does not include any right of the state to intrude upon the commission of so-called “victimless” crimes, such as prostitution and drug abuse. Both Machan and John Hospers take a more moderate approach. For example, Machan raises the issue of moral standards and social ethics: If the libertarian is against government coercion to prevent behavior he considers to be wrong, degrading, or vicious, does that mean that he tacitly approves of such behavior? While arguing against state coercion or legal sanctions against such behavior, Machan advocates: “voluntary approaches” including “ostracism, rebuke, boycott,” as societal means of delimiting antisocial behavior (Machan, op. cit. p. 45).

Hospers’ approach is rather conciliatory towards conservatives, and one might say, open to “fusion.” He notes “numerous gray areas” in the application of what has been called the “non-aggression principle.” For example, while generally in favor of drug legalization, Hospers offers that “PCP can turn one into a madman, a danger to everyone in the vicinity” (“Differences of Theory and Strategy,” Freedom and Virtue, p. 60). One wonders what he might think of the current methamphetamine epidemic, a drug which also has the potential to turn one into a violent madman. Significantly, Hospers also raises the issue of those actions that give offense to others: “[I]s there also a right not to be offended?” he asks ((Ibid. p. 61). As political correctness has become the religion of our current establishment, there are now legal sanctions (hate crimes) against giving offense to members of designated victim groups, not to mention the careers that are ruined if even a hint of bigotry is unearthed from a person’s past.

One of the greatest weaknesses of modern libertarianism is in the area of foreign policy, where libertarian options range from defensive wars only to the anarcho-libertarian solutions of private armies or no defense at all. Hospers is critical of libertarian theories of foreign policy, arguing that “many libertarians hid their heads in the sand in matters of foreign policy” (Ibid., p. 67). For example, he criticized libertarians for conveniently underplaying the threat of communism and the Soviet Union, and for actually aiding the process of Soviet “disinformation” perpetuated in the American news media.

In the 1980s, Rothbard presented the most extreme version of libertarianism. In “Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian Manqué,” Rothbard takes the position that Meyer was basically a libertarian who was conciliatory towards conservatives due to the expediency of putting together a political movement. Rothbard observed that Meyer, like other libertarians, believed that “to be virtuous in any meaningful sense, a man’s action must be free”: “no action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen” (Ibid., pp. 92 – 93). And while individual freedom was the necessary and highest political end, it was not “the highest end of man per se” (Ibid., p. 95). Thus, Rothbard’s response to conservatives who accused him of holding individual freedom to be the highest value was that he did not (nor did Machan or Hospers): Libertarianism was a political philosophy only that held that freedom of choice was a necessary condition for a moral life and a good society, but it was not a philosophy of life or an end in itself.

Although Rothbard had an antagonistic relationship with traditional conservatives such as Russell Kirk, whose contribution to the above volume, “Libertarians: The Chirping Sectaries,” was dismissive of Rothbard’s view, in the late 1980s Rothbard reconciled with some of the younger members of the new Paleo-Conservative movement, such as Thomas Fleming, editor of Chronicles magazine. This occurred after Rothbard had a falling out with the more establishment (or left leaning) libertarians of the Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party. At some point in the early 1990s, he actually supported the Republican Party. Rothbard died in 1995 leaving leadership of his organization, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, to his associate, Lew Rockwell. In January 2008, Paul Kirchick of The New Republic wrote a piece, “Angry White Men,” exposing the so-called bigoted past of Ron Paul, in which a newsletter with Paul’s byline made some derogatory statements about black Americans, including Martin Luther King. As it turns out, Rockwell was reputed to have been the author of those letters, so after both he and Paul performed their necessary mea culpas to the altar of political correctness, Rockwell is reported to have abandoned Paleo-Libertarianism “the once-promising intellectual movement that stayed true to libertarian principles while opposing open borders, libertinism, egalitarianism, and political correctness” (see Arthur Pendleton, “Lew Rockwell and the Strange Death of Paleolibertarianism,” vdare.com, May 14, 2008).

Next Week: The Conservatives, and Conservative-Libertarian Fusionism

The Conservative Dilemma in America: Turf Wars, Fusionism or Alliance?

With the two major election losses of 2006 and 2008, the Republican Party has respectively lost Congress and the Presidency and now finds itself adrift and in search of a new identity. It seems at this point, with the Tea Parties and anti-ObamaCare movements, that conservative leadership is coming more from the grassroots than from the Republican Party. But while I’ve supported third parties in the past, when conservatives were in power instead of a statist left wing regime, this is not a time for such advocacy if conservatism is to survive, as the statist transformation of American society and government promoted by the Obama administration is in the process of inflicting irreparable damage on the Republic. At its inception in the 1950s, the conservative movement had a common foe in Soviet Communism abroad and Progressive statism at home. I think we live in similar times, although the threat at home is currently drowning out the threat of Islamic jihadism abroad.

In the 1960s, Frank S. Meyer, a communist before converting to libertarianism and joining the staff at William F. Buckley’s National Review, promoted the theory of “fusionism”: a political philosophy that unites elements of libertarianism and conservatism (See Wikipedia). Meyer argued his theory in his book, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (1962), although he had not yet dubbed his theory “fusionism.” It is fair to say that Meyer’s thesis was not received with undiluted acclaim as none other than Russell Kirk, one of the father’s of American Conservatism ‘retorted that “individualism” (the term then used for libertarianism) was “social atomism” and even anti-Christian. The political result of individualism, he said, was inevitably anarchy.’ Kirk also criticized Meyer’s fusionism and individualism for its rationalism, and countered that ‘Custom, tradition, and the wisdom of our ancestors . . . constituted the firm foundation upon which a society should be built.’ (Lee Edwards, “The Conservative Consensus: Frank Meyer, Barry Goldwater, and the Politics of Fusionism,” Heritage Foundation, January 22, 2007, p. 1). Meyer had previously criticized Kirk’s seminal The Conservative Mind (1953) for lacking any “clear and distinct principle,” or a comprehension of the institutions of a free society (Ibid.).

Friedrich Hayek joined in the fray with his essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (The Constitution of Liberty, 1960), where he criticized Kirk and fellow conservatives for not understanding economics, for “strident nationalism,” and for a lack of “any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments” (Edwards, p. 2). Needless to say, while fusionism wasn’t perfect, it worked well enough to help nominate Goldwater in 1964 and elect Reagan to the Presidency in 1980. I’ve written previously in “Political Definitions: Conservative, Liberal, and Libertarian” about how I think Hayek’s classical liberalism or libertarianism can be reconciled with conservatism, as Hayek was an admirer of Burke, the father of Anglo-American conservatism, and his theory of “spontaneous order” was respectful of traditions that evolved historically. George Carey has also written about the compatibility of Hayek’s “evolutionary” theory of society with traditional conservatism (“Conservatives and Libertarians View Fusionism,” Modern Age, Winter 1982, Vol. 26, No. 1, p. 12).

Reflecting upon my own political philosophy, which combines elements of conservatism and libertarianism, there is an uneasy contradiction inherent in such a point of view. For the modern libertarian, freedom or liberty is the highest virtue, including political, economic, and social liberties, whereas for the conservative, while freedom may be important, tradition has earned a higher place in his sentiments. Of course in America, where our tradition is one of classical liberalism, liberty and freedom are at the core, making it a bit easier to entertain inconsistencies. We, after all, do not have a tradition of Toryism or monarchism, as do the Europeans. But there’s definitely a difference between classical liberals, such as Edmund Burke, a Whig who was also religious, and modern Progressive Liberals, who are influenced by Marxism and other socialisms, and tend to be irreligious. But even classical liberals or libertarians are often irreligious and ready to overturn traditional cultural institutions when they obstruct economic freedom or individual liberty, and there lies the rub. It is also significant that those of us on the Right always have to consider this contradiction between freedom and tradition, some of us embracing one or the other, but many of us struggling with the contradiction, while those on the Left almost universally embrace equality as the primary political virtue. Thus, rather than a contradiction, their thought exists on a continuum of Statist egalitarianism, from Progressivism and social democracy on one end to democratic socialism and the absolutism of communism on the other end of the scale. As my readers may have observed in their own experience, for the left, the enemy is always to the right, seldom if ever on the left.

Contemporary internecine disputes are complicated by the ascendency of Neo-Conservatism in the Republican Party power structure, although with recent election defeats, the Neo-Con standard has been in some disrepute, as Bush’s foreign policy was largely designed by Neo-Con strategists. While in the course of my own conversion to conservatism in the late1980s, as an avid reader of Chronicles magazine, I have felt more affinity for the traditional conservatism espoused there by Thomas Fleming and fellow travelers such as the late Sam Francis, Paul Gottfried and Pat Buchanan, than I have with Neo-Conservatism, but I must say, I’ve never liked the term Paleo-Conservative and find the conservative infighting between the Paleos and Neos to be rather tedious. Beyond a few well-known examples, I’m often not sure, nor do I care, who is a Neo and who is a Paleo. (I confess as well to disagreeing with the Paleos about Israel, while I agree with their stance on illegal immigration, and to some degree, on economic matters. But to complicate my own political affinities further, I was also influenced by so-called Paleo-Libertarians such as Murray Rothbard and his mentor, Ludwig von Mises, Hayek as I’ve previously noted, and Ron Paul.) That aside, the average conservative American voter really doesn’t give a damn about the Neo-Paleo conflict, and such academic politico squabbling reminds me of Freud’s phrase, “the narcissism of minor differences,” which he used to describe “the phenomenon that is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other” (Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 61). This is not to say that there are no real points of contention between Neo-Cons and Paleo-Cons, but disagree or not, if they don’t unite to battle their common foe of left wing statism, the battle will be lost before it begins.

That said, what are some of the policy implications inherent in a Republican coalition that includes traditional conservatives, libertarians, and neo-conservatives? Several issues emerge. In the economic sphere, the conservative dilemma is whether to pursue a global free trade policy despite the fact that the U.S. has a huge trade deficit with China and Japan, or whether to pursue a more nationalistic economic trade policy. Paleo-Cons tend to prefer the latter course whereas Neo-Cons and Libertarians tend to prefer the former policies. Both sides do believe in free markets; the Paleos however, want reciprocal trade agreements. As I’ve said elsewhere in “Is the Republican Party Really Conservative?” Adam Smith did not promote the idea that a free market nation should tolerate huge trade deficits. But as we’ve all discovered with the recent global financial collapse, when it comes to modern global economics, nothing is simple. I recently began reading David Smick’s The World Is Curved (2008) because I wanted to understand, from an insider’s point-of-view, what happened in the economic meltdown of 2008. While I am personally in favor of some kind of return to the gold standard and have been influenced by Austrian economics (see “Inflation, the National Debt, and Monetary Reform”), Smick does make some good points: For example, without all the easy capital flows and credit, the global economic expansion of the past 25 years would not have been possible. That doesn’t change my views as to the need for monetary reform because I don’t think the bubble to bust cycle is good for the average American, but it does point to the fact that now that we have a Democratic Congress in favor of increased government regulation of the economy, redistributionism, and protectionism, there could be drastic unintended consequences following economic tinkering by clueless politicians. Smick wrote:

The problem, however, is that in a highly entrepreneurial economy, it is difficult, if not impossible, to micromanage wealth distribution without negative countereffects. To some extent, the system must tolerate a certain amount of ugly distributional “unfairness” with the greater goal of producing an explosion in wealth creation, greater job creation, and broad-scale poverty reduction. (p. 88)

Another area of dispute between Paleo-Cons, Neo-Cons, and Libertarians is in foreign policy where Neo-cons tend to prefer an internationalist/interventionist and Pro-Israeli foreign policy whereas Paleo-Cons and Libertarians prefer a more Nationalist America First policy in the case of the former and an anti-war policy in the latter case, both of which tend to be non-interventionist. These are real differences that won’t disappear in the near future. Both sides of the conservative movement do, however, believe in a strong national defense.

In summary, all of these policy differences make a right wing coalition government much more problematic than a left wing government, which is at least fairly united in the goal of increased statism and greater government control in the lives of individual Americans: On the left the question is generally how much and how fast to increase government power, not whether to be for or against globalization or illegal immigration or interventions in the Middle East. While these differences do exist on the left, particularly on the issue of globalization, they do not generally elicit the passionate infighting that is apparent on the right. Of course, we shall see, with Democratic control of Congress and the Presidency, how Obama will handle the dissatisfactions of the extreme left, and more moderate Dems on the center-left of the Party.

While I think it’s essential to have thinkers who take principled Paleo-Con, Neo-Con, and Libertarian positions, to win an election in a democratic republic like the United States involves winning over a broad coalition to your point-of-view. So while a fusion of the three positions may not be possible, after all, people with differences do not melt into a common stew, a coalition that includes Paleos, Neos, and Libertarians is possible: a coalition or alliance against a common enemy, left wing statism. As I argued in “Is the Republican Party Really Conservative?” we can agree about our values in favor of individual liberty, economic freedom, limited government, opposition to political correctness in our cultural institutions, and pro-American rather than anti-American foreign and domestic policies, despite the significant disagreements enumerated above. Without such an alliance, which as I’ve argued in “Conservative Populism,” must also include Reagan Democrats, an appeal to youth, and hold on to most of the Religious Right, America will end up being a mere shadow of its former self, a socialistic mess of a third world banana republic.

Political Definitions: Conservative, Liberal, and Libertarian

Liberalism, Conservatism, and Statism

So-called “Liberalism” is in the very air we breathe; it permeates the air with the media, newspapers, TV, the entertainment industry, movies, and music. Schoolchildren are imbued with the air of liberalism from their first day of school right through to their graduation from colleges and universities. Unless one is brought up in a deliberately conservative Christian environment, it is the worldview we grow up with. But what is often forgotten is that liberalism has a history; a history marked by a dramatic change in the meaning of liberalism and how it is defined. Prior to the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, liberalism in America connoted belief in liberty and limited government, the Rule of Law in which equality before the law was a core principle but equality of condition was not because only by government intervention and redistribution of wealth could the latter be achieved, at the cost of economic freedom. Political liberalism first arose out of the English “Rule of Law” tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was this tradition that was transplanted to the American colonies, and eventually gave birth to constitutional government in America. Hayek wrote that the rule of law is “sometimes confused with the requirement of mere legality in all government action”:

The rule of law . . . presupposes complete legality, but this is not enough: if a law gave the government unlimited power to act as it pleased, all its actions would be legal, but it would certainly not be under the rule of law. (The Constitution of Liberty, 1959, p. 205)

Unlike the French tradition of 1789, the Anglo-Saxon tradition did not trust absolute power in the hands of a legislature (as in majoritarian democracy), and thus set up a system of judicial review, to limit legislative power (Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty). Thus, liberty or freedom was the dominant abstract principal, whereas with the ascension of the Progressive movement, liberalism was redefined to include and even to prefer, the ideas of socialism and Marxism, so that equality became the guiding light of the new liberalism. As the well known American historian, Will Durant, has commented (I think he took the notion from Tocqueville), freedom and equality, taken to their logical extremes, are contradictory.

In Suicide of the West (1964), James Burnham described how classical liberalism, with its belief in individual liberty, had been transformed (or morphed) into modern liberalism, with its primary principle of egalitarian social justice (and hence influenced by Marxism and other socialist doctrines):

This difference in human character type corresponds to a theoretical conflict within the ideology of modern liberalism: the conflict between the principles of free speech and the other individual freedoms on the one hand, and the principle of egalitarian social justice on the other. Essentially, it is a conflict between individualism and regimentation: the individualism that the liberal ideology derives from its past and the regimentation it has absorbed in the present. This conflict is real, and can be hidden but not solved by discussion, negotiation and compromise. It is a fact that liberalism’s inherited principles correspond to individualism, and a highly atomistic individualism at that. It is equally a fact that the Welfare State and plebiscitary democracy mean a good deal and an increasing deal of regimentation. One or the other must give way; and, on the evidence of the past generation, there is little doubt which is the tottering horn of that particular dilemma. (p. 171)

In the 1960s, the New Left established an even closer allegiance to Marxism, with the Civil Rights movement, the anti-War movement, radical feminism, the counter-culture, with an ideological spectrum that spanned the distance between Progressivism on one end, to Maoism on the other. The political correctness movement also appeared on the scene at American colleges in the 1960s, as campus radicals argued which Marxist ideology was the most politically correct. According to Wikipedia, the term can be traced back to Mao’s Little Red Book. What many, perhaps most, Americans are unaware of, is that the Conservative movement did not exist prior to the 1950s and did not really become a political force until the 1960s, with the Goldwater for President Campaign. Nixon was elected for a second term in 1972, largely as a reaction to the 1960s New Left and counter-cultural movements, which supported McGovern. With the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979, the New Right came to the fore as a political force, helping to elect Reagan in 1980. But throughout the Progressive era, World War II and the early post-War era, there really was no Conservative movement. There were of course, libertarian and conservative thinkers, and a few conservative politicians, such as Robert Taft, but there was no large-scale Conservative Movement.

Conservative Libertarianism

America was founded as a noble experiment. Once independent of Great Britain, we had no monarchy, no titled aristocracy. We were to be a “government of laws, not of men.” Liberalism, as stated above in its original meaning, was the ideology of the republic. The orthodox way of presenting the political spectrum is based on the French model, originating in the Estates General which seated from right to left, First Estate (clergy), Second Estate (nobility), Third Estate (bourgeoisie and commoners). That arrangement eventually became obsolete, but in Europe, monarchists and the Church came to represent the right wing whereas the capitalist bourgeoisie became the left wing, espousing liberal ideals. Eventually, with the advent of the socialist movement in the nineteenth century, the proletariat became associated with the left and the liberals moved to the right. The Libertarian Party has argued that this old world political spectrum no longer applies to the modern world, that in fact Hitler and Stalin had more in common than not (for example, the Hitler-Stalin Pact), and shouldn’t be on opposite sides of the spectrum. For the libertarians, the political spectrum should run from the government with the most individual liberty, on one end, to the most state control at the other. A liberal republic with limited government would be at one extreme, and totalitarianism would be at the other extreme. (While some might argue that anarchy should be at the extreme end of complete liberty, I would argue that without the Rule of Law, it would be survival of the fittest, and the thug with the mightiest gang would prevail. For those who would argue that that is our current system, I suggest they move to a country were such conditions actually prevail, such as Somalia, and report back.) So my argument would run thus: since we had no tradition of monarchy and America was founded as a liberal republic, to be a conservative in America is to conserve that tradition of liberalism. Conservatives in America are, for the most part, classical liberals. New “Liberals,” on the other hand, tend to embrace various forms of statism, from social democracy, to democratic socialism, to political correctness and Marxism.

As a result of confusion around the term “liberal,” classical liberals in the modern age have adopted the identity of libertarian. There are, indeed, differences between libertarians and conservatives, in particular, libertarians tend to be more socially liberal and less religious. But both groups do share similar roots. For example, Gary North, has argued in an article entitled “Robert Nisbet on Conservatism” (LewRockwell.com, April 1, 2005) that both the conservative, Robert Nisbet and the classical liberal, F. A. Hayek had roots in the Whiggism of Edmund Burke, generally considered to be the father of conservatism. Although Hayek includes an essay entitled

"Why I am Not a Conservative?" in his Constitution of Liberty (1959), he concludes that he would rather be called a Whig, after Burke. Hayek was a classical liberal, but so was Burke (he was a Whig, after all, and not a Tory). Burke was also an admirer of Adam Smith, generally considered the father of free market capitalism. So there are many points at which conservatism and libertarianism (or at least the classical liberal version of it) converge, and one could argue that most American Conservatives are actually classical liberals, that being our tradition going back to the Founding Fathers. Unfortunately, the label "liberal" has been polluted by the Progressives and socialists, who have re-defined it to mean something entirely different. While New “liberals” are constantly accusing conservatives of Orwellian Newspeak, changing the meaning of the political term “liberal” from one who believes in the Rule of Law, limited government, and economic liberty to one who believes in unlimited state power to micromanage the economy, redistribute wealth, and privilege certain classes of people before the law to the detriment of others, is a classic case of Orwellian Newspeak known as doublethink. And yet, the redefinition of liberal is seldom challenged.

What the conservative brings to the table (in addition to the above), a respect for tradition, can peaceably coexist with Hayek’s classical liberalism because traditions due tend to evolve naturally like Hayek’s “spontaneous order.” Traditions evolve through trial and error, and they continue to exist because, from a pragmatic perspective, they work (even though they may be in many ways irrational). Robert Nisbet in his Quest for Community (1953) has emphasized the importance of intermediate (local) associations, such as families, churches, guilds, and community groups as a necessary buffer between the individual citizen and the absolute power of the State. This notion also came from Tocqueville, who was a French classical liberal theorist if we are to venture a political categorization, and it is also a conservative position. It is also perfectly consistent with libertarianism (although not often emphasized) because by creating a buffer between the individual and the state, freedom is furthered. Unfortunately, many Enlightenment and modern liberals have actually looked askance at intermediate associations such as religious organizations because, particularly during the Enlightenment, such associations were considered to be enslavers of mankind, whereas the modern liberal state would become the guarantor of liberty (see Voltaire, for example). Remember that in the eighteenth century, the Church and the aristocracy were on the right in Europe, in opposition to the liberal bourgeois class that was on the left. It should have become abundantly clear, however, with Twentieth Century totalitarianism that the State could not be trusted to be the sole guarantor of liberty.

Two Types of Rationality

Another way to distinguish the classical liberal from the new statist “liberal” has to do with their stance towards rationality. As both the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) and the economist Friedrich Hayek have stressed, the left tends to rationalize economic and political systems to a degree that is incompatible with human freedom. (It should be mentioned that Oakeshott and Hayek had their differences, as Oakeshott rejected all forms of rationalism while Hayek did not. As Oakeshott said of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom: “A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics” Ibid., p. 26). Hayek, on the other hand, believed that there were different types of rationality, some more conducive to freedom than others. North noted that “Hayek argued in his 1952 book, The Counter-Revolution of Science, that there are two kinds of social rationalism: "constructivist" rationalism, or top-down rationalism, and the rationalism of the free market, a bottom-up rationalism.” I think this gets to the difference between the Rationalist and the believer in reason as a necessary tool of human intelligence. The “constructivist” Rationalist always believes that he or she can design the perfect socio-political and economic system to order all human behavior. This is what the utopian socialist or Marxist, or the Jacobins of the French Revolution believed. Hayek wrote: “Those who believe that all useful institutions are deliberate contrivances and who cannot conceive of anything serving a human purpose that has not been consciously designed are almost of necessity enemies of human freedom. For them freedom means chaos” (The Constitution of Liberty, p. 61). As Austrian economists, such as Hayek and Ludwig von Mises demonstrated, you cannot perfectly plan an economy because there are too many variables. No central planner can have perfect and complete information required to manage a whole economy. The Soviet Union always produced too much of what people didn’t want and too little of what they did because they had no way of pricing goods according to market demand. It was a command or top down economy. Surplus food often rotted on trains and eventually the system broke down (see The Economist, “A Survey of Perestroika,” April 28, 1990). An old Soviet quote was, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” Hayek, on the other hand advocated “spontaneous order,” an order that naturally evolved over time through the trial and error of human experience, often from the bottom up. I think a similar logic applies to social and political arrangements. When government thinks it can legislate or order by judicial fiat such arrangements, individual freedom is lost.

Political Correctness: A Vast Left Wing Conspiracy?

During the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998, Hillary Clinton used the phrase “vast right wing conspiracy” to describe and label her husband’s political enemies on the right. While there may have indeed been a concerted effort on the right to bring Clinton down, in point of fact, if any conspiracy in American politics deserves to be called “vast” it would be the “vast left wing conspiracy,” which has at least since the Progressive era attempted to redefine American politics in a leftward direction. While the early Progressives had some success in that effort, the left in America really came into its own during Roosevelt’s New Deal. As I have stated elsewhere in “What’s in a Word?” , the very term “liberalism” was redefined by Progressives during that period to mean something entirely different. As James Burnham so aptly described this redefinition in Suicide of the West (1964), classical liberalism, with its belief in individual liberty, had been transformed into modern liberalism, with its primary principle of egalitarian social justice (based on the influence of Marxism and other socialist doctrines). I’ll risk quoting Burnham again because he so appropriately describes that redefinition of liberalism:

This difference in human character type corresponds to a theoretical conflict within the ideology of modern liberalism: the conflict between the principles of free speech and the other individual freedoms on the one hand, and the principle of egalitarian social justice on the other. Essentially, it is a conflict between individualism and regimentation: the individualism that the liberal ideology derives from its past and the regimentation it has absorbed in the present. This conflict is real, and can be hidden but not solved by discussion, negotiation and compromise. It is a fact that liberalism’s inherited principles correspond to individualism, and a highly atomistic individualism at that. It is equally a fact that the Welfare State and plebiscitary democracy mean a good deal and an increasing deal of regimentation. One or the other must give way; and, on the evidence of the past generation, there is little doubt which is the tottering horn of that particular dilemma. (p. 171)

Of course, why rely on the opinion of a conservative about the nature of that transformation when we have no lesser authority than that perennial candidate for the Socialist Party, Norman Thomas, who said in a speech in 1944:

“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of “liberalism,” they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.” He went on to say: “I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democratic Party has adopted our platform.”

But it was with the 1960s and the emergence of the New Left that the vast left wing conspiracy really came into its own. The anti-Vietnam War protests really pitted the New Left against the Old Left social democracy of LBJ, while conservatism did not really become a prominent political force in America until a reaction emerged to the excesses of the 1960s New Left and Countercultural revolts. The Political Correctness movement was both a cause and an effect of the New Left in that the origins of the New Left can be traced back to the cultural Marxism that was Political Correctness, and it was the triumph of the New Left that brought Political Correctness to the fore in American cultural and educational institutions such as schools, universities, and the media.

In 2004 the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative think tank, published “Political Correctness:” A Short History of an Ideology, Edited by William S. Lind. Lind, who wrote the Introduction to that work, stated the following:

While some Americans have believed in ideologies, America itself never had an official, state ideology – up until now. But what happens today to Americans who suggest that there are differences among ethnic groups, or that the traditional social roles of men and women reflect their different natures, or that homosexuality is morally wrong? If they are public figures, they must grovel in the dirt in endless, canting apologies. If they are university students, they face star chamber courts and possible expulsion. If they are employees of private corporations, they may face loss of their jobs. What was their crime? Contradicting America’s new state ideology of “Political Correctness.” (p. 2)

In Chapter II of the above mentioned work, “Historical Roots of ‘Political Correctness,’” Raymond V. Raehn has defined the problem of Political Correctness as follows:

America is today dominated by an alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values that we have come to know as “Political Correctness.” Political Correctness seeks to impose a uniformity of thought and behavior on all Americans and is therefore totalitarian in nature. Its roots lie in a version of Marxism which seeks a radical inversion of the traditional culture in order to create a social revolution. (p.1)

How did this come about? Lind and Raehn trace the origins of Political Correctness to the cultural Marxism of the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, with his theory that to be successful and dominant in the West, Marxism needed to “march through [take over] the [cultural] institutions” of the West, and Georg Lukacs, a Hungarian Communist who in 1923 with other fellow Communist Party intellectuals founded the Frankfurt School in Germany. Lukacs, stated its purpose was to answer the question, “Who shall save us from Western Civilization?” (Lind, ‘What Is “Political Correctness”’? p. 5). Their goal was to undermine and destroy the foundations of Western civilization: Christianity, capitalism, and the so-called patriarchal-authoritarian family. The Frankfurt School became very influential in American universities after its leaders fled to the United States in the 1930s to escape Nazi Germany. Members of this group included Theodore Adorno (co-author of The Authoritarian Personality), Herbert Marcuse (author of Eros and Civilization and mentor of Angela Davis), Erich Fromm (author of Escape from Freedom), and Max Horkheimer. The Frankfurt School blended Marx and Freud and in the ferment of American universities in the 1960s, gave birth to “Critical Theory” and Political Correctness. The term Political Correctness has a long usage with the Communist Party and is synonymous with “the General Line of the Party” (Lind, Introduction, p. 2). I recall first hearing the term used in the 1970s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in disputes between various Marxist factions – Maoists, Trotskyites, and radical feminists – as to which group was most politically correct. What Political Correctness as cultural Marxism shares with classical, economic Marxism is the vision of a “classless society”: A vision which, since it “contradicts human nature,” must be forced. Thus, Lind concludes that both classical and cultural Marxism “are totalitarian ideologies”: “The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness can be seen on campuses where ‘PC’ has taken over the college: freedom of speech, of the press, and even of thought are all eliminated” (‘What Is “Political Correctness”’? pp. 5 - 6). In a similar vein, Raehn has concluded: “Political Correctness is Marxism, with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social order and, ultimately, a totalitarian state” (p. 5). For those who express disagreement with the politically correct status quo, the left has been masterful at using name-calling – racist, sexist, homophobic – as a substitute for rational argument, especially when their Marxist agenda is exposed.

Another parallel between classical and cultural Marxism is that both “declare certain groups virtuous and others evil a priori, that is, without regard for the actual behavior of individuals” (Lind, p. 6). Thus, white males are automatically oppressors while members of acknowledged minority groups, such as blacks, Latinos, women, homosexuals, the Third World, are automatically deemed to be oppressed victims, and therefore, by race, gender, or ethnicity, granted the moral high ground. This is the morality of victimology: your moral status is assigned according to which oppressed or victim group you belong to and has nothing to do with your personal conduct. As Charles Sykes calls this “politics of victimization” a form of Orwellian doublethink, he poses the question: “How else can one describe the insistence that victims not be held responsible for their personal behavior conjoined with the belief that all members of so-called oppressor groups are responsible for crimes they themselves did not commit?” (A Nation of Victims, 1992, pp. 204 – 05). In other words, if you are a member of a victim group, as O.J. Simpson was, and you commit the crime of murder, you cannot be held responsible, but if you are a member of an oppressor group, you are held responsible for crimes you did not personally commit, such as the enslavement of African-Americans in the nineteenth century. For Political Correctness to succeed, belief in the Rule of Law, defined as equality before the law as principles universally applied to all citizens, must be undermined and eliminated. Both Affirmative Action and Hate Crimes are contrary to the rule of law and equality before the law, because they privilege certain favored (victim) groups.

Despite its championing of minorities, the oppressed, and victim groups, Political Correctness did not originate with such groups. Rather, it originated with Frankfurt School émigrés to the United States, as stated above, and their protégés on American university campuses. Christopher Lasch in The Revolt of the Elites (1995) has argued that unlike the 1930s, when Ortega y Gasset wrote The Revolt of the Masses (1930), which inspired the title to Lasch’s work, the current revolt was a revolt of the elite classes from the norms of Western and American civilization. Lasch has argued that despite Affirmative Action and the pretence of a socially mobile meritocracy of the educated elite, the “New Class” of what Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Bill Clinton, has called “symbolic analysts,” this new class of managers, professionals, and policy makers has become increasingly isolated from the rest of American society (Lasch, pp. 28 - 41):

The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational debate, as to create parallel or “alternative” institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all. (Ibid., pp. 20 – 21)

While the evidence, as I have been arguing thus far, contradicts the claim that the left wing elite “seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority,” the point is well taken that they do view the unenlightened with disdain and seek to isolate themselves from contact with this majority. The electoral victory of Obama has given this class new found hope that they can indeed remake America into their own image of what they think it should be. Of course Lasch is not entirely ignorant of the proselytizing tendencies of this new class of upper-middle class “liberals” who “have mounted a crusade to sanitize American society” of tobacco, pornography, “hate speech,” and various chemical additives and pollutants. Lasch continued: “When confronted with resistance to these initiatives, they betray the venomous hatred that lies not far below the smiling face of upper-middle-class benevolence. Opposition makes humanitarians forget the liberal virtues they claim to uphold” (p. 28). As I’ve argued here and elsewhere, there’s nothing liberal about this new elite, at least to the extent that they subscribe to the tenants of Political Correctness and kowtow to the establishment of their peers. So the point being that the new elite, despite their professed belief in radical egalitarianism, do not themselves often rub shoulders with the great unwashed and unenlightened masses, but rather prefer to stay in their enclaves of privilege.

The current phase of Political Correctness is Multiculturalism, which advocates that our own Western and American cultures should not be privileged above any other world cultures, a form of cultural relativism. As undermining as that might be for our own culture, in point of fact, Multiculturalism privileges all non-Western cultures while it denigrates the Western and American cultures it intends to destroy. I will conclude with a statement from a previous article I wrote, “The Clash of Civilizations or the Suicide of the West?” :

Although Multiculturalism claims to promote diversity (of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender), what it does not promote is diversity in thought. Instead, it promotes a New Left, Marxian version of race, class, and gender warfare against America and the West; a new left wing monoculture that excludes, prohibits (when able to), and condemns all opposing viewpoints. As this ideology, through Political Correctness or the idea that one must conform to its tenants or be ostracized, has become dominant in American universities, schools, media, government, and even businesses, one could argue with some confidence that while America won the Cold War with the Soviet Union, she lost the war at home with Marxism.

I hope that I’m proven wrong in the near future.

A View from the USA: Bush, Palin, and the Attack of the Snarks

Isn’t it ironic that the far left, who promote laws against hate (Hate Speech) are so filled with hate? No President in recent memory has been the recipient of more anger, rage, and hatred than George Bush. While not a Bush supporter myself, as a conservative I always became strangely defensive when exposed to the anti-Bush vitriol of friends and co-workers on the left. The blogosphere was and is, of course, filled with angry diatribes from both sides. It’s so easy to attack your opponents anonymously with name calling and slurs when you don’t have to meet them in person. In a review of anthropologist Peter Wood’s "A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now," George Will wrote in 2007:

Many people who loathe George W. Bush have adopted what Peter Wood describes as "ecstatic anger as a mode of political action."

Wood . . . says the new anger "often has the look-at-me character of performance art." His book is a convincing, hence depressing, explanation of "anger chic" -- of why anger has become an all-purpose emotional stance. It has achieved prestige and become "a credential for group membership." As a result, "Americans have been flattening their emotional range into an angry monotone." (“Anger Is All the Rage,” realclearpoliltics.com, 3-25-07)

In another review of Wood’s book by Stanley Kurtz, Kurtz quotes Wood’s characterization of the New Anger, which he deems is applicable to the blogosphere:

[New Anger involves] deriding an opponent for the sheer pleasure of expressing contempt for other people....New Anger is a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted....If in your anger you reduce your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange, real politics come to an end....Whoever embraces [New Anger] is bound to find that, at least in the political realm, he has traded the possibility of real influence for the momentary satisfactions of self-expression." (“Angry Talk,” eppc.org, January 2, 2007)

The left has long embraced anger: the self-righteous rage of angry feminists, angry demonstrators against war or the latest political cause, “primal scream” therapy. There’s a bumper sticker now that proclaims “If You’re Not Angry You’re Not Paying Attention.” The belief that anger is good probably has roots in Romanticism and the belief that “feeling is all,” expressed fully in the bloodbath of the French Revolution. And now we have the new Romanticism of the Countercultural left. “Rage Against the Machine.” Limp Bizkit and the violence at Woodstock 1999. Rage is good, violence is good. Kurtz maintained in the above article that the “formative political moment” for the New Anger was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and it took until the Clinton era “to bleed over to the Right.” The Right has tended to favor the old American ideal, “the modest heroism of Gary Cooper's Sargent York” rather than “something much closer to the Incredible Hulk.” But if the left has its Al Frankens, the Right can now boast its Ann Coulters.

It seems that once Bush was on his way out, the left needed someone else to transfer their hatred and anger to and who better to serve their purpose than Sarah Palin: She looks like the All-American girl, the former prom queen, the girl who wouldn’t date you in high school, as Douglas MacKinnon opined in a recent Huffington Post. A strong woman that could “do it all,” family and career, as a conservative woman she was a poke in the eye to radical feminists, who react like black radicals to a black conservative: any deviation from politically correct gender and racial politics is viewed as a heinous betrayal.

'It's not that they're ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn't so.'

New Yorker film critic David Denby recently wrote Snark, a book that takes a swipe at “snark,” which in my humble opinion (I confess I haven’t read the book although I have seen Denby promote it on Book-TV) typifies the kind of smirky ad hominem attacks perpetrated on Palin by such darlings of the left as Bill Maher or David Letterman. Amazon.com had the following definition of “snark” in a review of Denby’s book:

What is snark? You recognize it when you see it -- a tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true. Snark attempts to steal someone's mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness.

I think people like Maher and Letterman prefer or are reduced to ad hominem attacks on conservative figures because that way they don’t have to address conservative arguments. I doubt that either one has ever read a conservative or libertarian author such as the Founding Fathers, Burke, Hayek, James Burnham, Robert Nisbett, or Thomas Sowell. In fact, I doubt that either one has read much of anything that isn’t contemporary book-of-the-month club type pabulum. Their half educated smirkiness doesn’t give one the impression that they’ve ever bothered to read the classics of history and literature. Brent Bozell, in an open letter to Oliver Stone, that well known leftist director of anti-American movies, wrote the following:

You were back on [Bill] Maher's show the other day talking about historical figures. Maher wanted to know why you haven't done a film about Ronald Reagan, since "that is the type of character you could do very well with." God only knows what he meant by that, but when you gave your answer, you were pretty blunt.

"Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch," you said, and the audience laughed, and you smiled and decided to take that statement further by agreeing with it. So you said, "You know, I think that he was," and the audience cheered and hooted and applauded.

See what I mean when I say you're a lousy historian? Don't take my word for it, Oliver.

I turned to Frank Donatelli, the White House Political Director under President Reagan from 1987 through 1989. I asked him what he thought of your observation. Here's what he has to say:

"Bill Maher and Oliver Stone have both made careers of ad hominem attacks on their political opponents. As Reagan would say, 'It's not that they're ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn't so.' The literature as written by conservative and liberal observers is overwhelming in concluding that Ronald Reagan was fully engaged in implementing policies during his presidency that resulted in the longest economic expansion in our history and the end of the Cold War and the defeat of communism. His presidential reputation is growing and history will remember Reagan as one of the great presidents in our nation's history."

I went to Richard Allen, Reagan's national security advisor and asked him what he thought. Apparently he didn't think much.

"Every respectable academic and popular analysis in the large and growing literature of the Reagan presidency and Reagan's presence on the national scene proves beyond any doubt the utter foolishness of the Oliver Stone remark. Stone has made an unsuccessful career of falsification, especially when it comes to Ronald Reagan. The actual dumbsumbitch is easy to identify." (“Oliver Stone, Lousy Historian,” Townhall.com, July 3, 2009)

If you fill your mind with half truths and falsehoods of a partisan political nature, there’s no room left for the real thing. One’s world view becomes one vast self-fulfilling delusion, but because it is shared by others, maybe by everyone you know, there’s no reason to question it. And with enough money to secure a plush lifestyle, reality can hardly intrude; there’s no cognitive dissonance to rear its ugly head. As Harry Stein has written in I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican, many upscale New Yorkers have never met anyone who thinks differently, and certainly not a Republican.