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.

Conservatism at Canterbury

In a surprisingly conservative Press article, "Cutting to the Core" (Saturday, February 2), it's revealed that the University of Canterbury is planning a "back to basics" initiative, by axing American Studies and Film and Theatre Studies, in a bid to make the college more financially and academically viable.

As well, as cutting some of its academically light-weight "studies" departments, the college is also breaking up its School of Culture, Literature and Society, with Gender Studies being folded into the school of Sociology and Anthropology.

According to the article, Canterbury's Vice Chancellor Roy Sharp says:

"The Government's "bums on seats" policy, along with a general academic vogue for cross-disciplinary programmes has led to a proliferation of fringe - even "faddy" - study subjects ... "the college will go back to a more traditional look, promoting the central disciplines of "history, philosophy language, literature, the classics."

Pro-Vice Chancellor College of Arts Ken Strongman says, "American studies is going because student demand has dropped, it mixed too many disciplines like history, literature and sociology, and its research quality was not good enough to save it."

Although the College appears to have backed away from ditching Gender Studies, its back-to-basics policy is long overdue and sets a positive example for other universities.

Faddish subjects may have a place in a rapidly-changing field like technology, but they have no place in a funding starved arts faculty. The human condition does not change to the extent that science and technology does, so there is no need to offer dubious courses about pop culture, or films that may be forgotten in 30 years, when a lot more can be learned from studying time-honoured geniuses like Shakespeare and Aristotle.

Some thoughts on the BNP

Perusing the Internet from a conservative perspective, it's clear there aren't many British conservative blogs and websites devoted to issues like immigration and the preservation of western culture, but there are an increasingly number of bloggers who are supporting the British National Party.

This support for the BNP can also be seen in the comments left on centre-right newspapers websites like the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, and the party's strong showing in local elections in many parts of England.

The lack of a "conservative scene" in Britain seems a bit puzzling, given that since the Second World War, ethno-nationalism has been struggling to shake off its associations with Hitler and Mussolini, and has therefore been seen by most Britons as unpatriotic and extremist.

Nethertheless, few Britons appear aware or interested in the kind of populist traditionalism, which is gaining increasing support in the United States.

Nor is the Conservative Party, despite its poor showing in recent elections, very interested in tapping into traditional conservative sentiment regarding issues like Islamic immigration or membership of the European Union. Instead it has decided to become even less conservative by electing it's most liberal leader ever in David Cameron.

This leaves an increasing number of British conservatives with little option but to get behind the BNP and try to mould in into a more conservative party.

While the BNP has made major strides to shake off its fascist origins by denouncing anti-Semiticism and political violence, it still clings to many unworkable ethno-nationalist policies and its antiquated economic platform just isn't going to resonate with many educated middle class voters.

One of the parties biggest stumbling blocks is its racialist policy regarding party membership. Given that races have fuzzy boundaries, and that Britain has a significant number of mixed-race citizens, such a policy can only alienate many potential supporters and provide ammunition for its numerous critics in the media.

Equally unrealistic is its advocacy of corporal punishment, which has not been used in most western countries for over a century, and would probably be strongly opposed by the legal profession. In the economic field the party needs to work out a coherent set of moderate, pragmatic policies, which will be acceptable to both its working class support base and potential middle class voters who support orthodox economic principles like balanced budgets and low inflation.

Although opposition to EU is an important part of the BNP's raison d'etre, the party shouldn't be afraid to follow economic ideas from Continental countries like Denmark and the Netherlands or the Europhile Liberal Democrats. For example, Britain's struggling rail system could arguably be improved by allowing private companies to run the stations and rolling stock while nationalising the neglected network of tracks and tunnels. Making a firm commitment to nuclear power, as France and Finland have done, would also help sent a message that the party was serious about the country's long-term development.

In education, the BNP could take the initiative by introducing IQ testing to help identify working class kids with academic potential and those who are under-performing due to learning disorders. Given that Britain is one of the few western countries where class hang-ups still have a negative affect on academic standards, such a policy could give it a useful edge over its more egalitarian rivals.

Even if the Nu Consevatives manage to scrap through in the next election, the BNP still has an opportunity to draw substantial support from the growing ranks of disaffected voters with conservative or traditional commutarian views.

Tapping conservative sentiment

One of the ironic things about conservative politics, is that while many people still hold conservative views, of one form or another, conservatives make up only a tiny minority of the chattering classes.

I used to be of the view that many educated people with conservative views were unwilling to express their views in public, but the Internet now provides anonymity and easy accessibility for those who are concerned about personal privacy and whether expressing unfashionable views may harm their career.

Let's face it, the lack of a media voice can no longer be used as an excuse for disinterest in conservative politics.

If there were a high number of literate, educated conservatives in the 20-60 year age range (which covers the overwhelming majority of those who blog, or comment on blogs) then this would probably be reflected in a healthy number of conservative sites.

However, it's not all doom and gloom. For one thing, I suspect there may be a fair amount of untapped interest in conservative weblogs among the over 60s (ok , it's not a "sexy" demographic, but don't underestimate it).

Over the past few years there have a lot of conservative-sounding comments left on mainstream newspaper website stories about emotive issues like immigration, crime and terrorism and, as an extension of established mainstream media, these websites receive a high number of hits from retired citizens, as well as being a first port of call for many of those who are new to the Internet.

While the number of "silver surfers" is on the rise, very few retirees have any familiarity with weblogs. For a start, there's the teen-centric name "blog," which conjures up images of juvenile computer geeks talking about frivolous games and gadgets rather than serious commentary or unfashionable thinking.

Even among generation-Xers, you will get a lot of eye-rolling if you suggest that blogs can be a source of intelligent analysis of politics and current affairs.

For example, I have been regularly reading mainstream news sites for over a decade, but it is only in the last 2-3 years that I have started taking an interest in weblogs. Whenever someone mentioned blogs to me, I automatically assumed they were just teen gossip vehicles like Myspace, and never bothered to investigate further.

Identifying a market for conservative blogs among retirees is one thing, but getting them to actually start reading and writing them is another. About the only constructive thing I can suggest at the moment is conservative bloggers post comments on mainstream newspaper sites, in which they mention ideas/opinions put forward by prominent conservative bloggers.

However, I don't suppose newspaper sites will appreciate rival media trying to poach patrons, so I think we need a more a viable long-term strategy.

Any ideas?

Traditionalists, realists and commutarians

As the number of conservative bloggers on the Internet increases, it's becoming necessary to distinguish between those of a secular, scientific disposition, such as Randall Parker, John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer, from those with more strongly entrenched religious beliefs such as Jim Kalb, Lawrence Auster and Patrick Buchanan.

At the same time, there is also a need to differentiate economic egalitarians, who are critical of globalisation and cultural Marxism, from those on the liberal-left with more radical, anti-western agendas. Therefore, in writing my posts, I've decided on the following labels to identify these three types of liberal skeptics: "realists," traditionalists" and "commutarians."

Among other things, traditionalists (aka traditional conservatives or "reactionaries") believe in the importance of established religious and social practices, the fragility of prosperous civilisations, and the influence of inherited traits on human behaviour. Traditionalists are skeptical of progress and respect the wisdom of previous generations. Whilst not necessarily opposed to social or economic reform, they acknowledge that civilisation does not progress in a linear manner and that human nature cannot easily be influenced by education or social engineering. In foreign policy matters, traditionalists emphasis prudence and national self-interest over ambitious policies designed to spread particular ideologies or interfere with the politics of other countries. The traditionalist position is well-articulated by Mark Richardson at the Conservative Central Website.

Realists tend to be secular conservatives who are disillusioned with the increasingly ideological nature of modern liberalism. In common with traditionalists, realists believe in the importance of inherited traits in influencing human behaviour, and share the traditionalist's skepticism of progressive social engineering. Realists see technological change as inevitable, and have a high opinion of empirical science, but do not believe scientific progress inevitably leads to human betterment, and acknowledge progress depends on having a cohesive culture to support it. Subsequently they usually advocate a piece-meal approach to social and economic reform, which takes account of human nature and genetic variation. Potential sources of conflict between realists and traditionalists are controversial scientific matters such as birth control, eugenics, and genetic engineering. On foreign policy issues realists share the traditionalist preference for prudence and self-interest. Although the realist position has not yet been explicitly articulated, realist views on various issues can be found in the posts of bloggers such as Sailer and Parker.

Various other suggested labels for realists include:

"Darwinian conservatives," "scientific conservatives," " empirical conservatives" and "post-liberals".

Commutarians tend to be traditional socialists who believe in moderating economic inequality through established institutions, such as unions and cooperatives, whilst preserving the role of the sovereign state and established social norms and religious practices. They tend to dislike modern social engineering, which they see as unnecessary and undemocratic. They tend to believe that the mainstream liberal-left have abandoned the working and lower-middle classes and now operates in the interests of special interest groups and state bureaucracies. Commutarians are skeptical of globalisation and critical of aggressive foreign policies which unnecessarily interfere in the affairs of other countries.

Right liberalism - the fool's gold of the centre-right

While the popularity of the centre-right is on the wane in many western countries, centre-right parties should not get sucked into the idea that right-liberal policies are the way to win back voters.

The decline in support for centre-right parties over the last 20 years basically comes down to three factors:

1. unmarried women are tending to support the centre-left

2. declining home ownership is having an adverse impact on support for centre-right parties

3. ethnic minorities are voting for the centre-left.

The basic strategy of mainstream conservative parties since the early 1980s has been to try and contain left-liberalism through neo-liberal economic policy, and abandon the supposedly less important social sphere to the centre-left.

Unfortunately, this has resulted in increased immigration of left-leaning minorities and an accompanying increase in property prices which has made it harder for people to get a foot on the property ladder.

Since property owners are more likely to favour low taxes and economic stability, this decline in home ownership had undermined the traditional support base of the centre-right. Making things doubly bad is the fact that, as Steve Sailer points out, property affordability is also a decisive factor in family formation.

Most potential centre-right voters are rational people who are unlikely to start a family until they have a reasonable chance of getting an affordable mortgage. While the marital or property status of men does not have a particularly big bearing on their political views, it often has a decisive impact on the voting patterns of women.

The longer women stay unmarried, the less likely they are to vote for the centre-right and the more likely they are to be swayed by the generous welfare policies of the left. This is a point highlighted by Democrat pundits Jon Judis and Ruy Teixeira in their new book The Emerging Democratic Majority. According to Judis and Teixeira, during the 2000 congressional elections, single women backed the Democrats over the Republicans by a massive 63 percent to 35 percent.

The centre-right's strategy of liberalising the financial sector, while increasing non-western immigration, may have helped it gain short-term support from big business, but it has done massive damage to its electoral base. The sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US, in which taxpayers are having to bail out bankrupt lending institutions, is likely to further undermine popular support for the centre-right.

In recent decades, centre-right parties, such as the New Zealand National Party and the Australian Liberal Party, have tended to assume they could count on the support of economically successful minorities. However, recent evidence suggests that this assumption is no longer valid. For example, in California and Australia, East Asian voters are tending to vote for centre-left candidates, which seems counter intuitive from a class interest perspective. Part of the reason for this may be that Asian immigrants support the well-funded health and education services found in many English-speaking countries, but are able to avoid paying for the full cost of these services through taxation by earning a lot of their income overseas.

The current strategy of the centre right, as typified by National leader John Key and Conservative leader Duncan Cameron, is to move further to the left on social policy, so as to attract voters away from the now dominant centre-left, whilst maintaining a neo-liberal stance on economic issues. However, since centre-left parties have already moved towards the centre on economic issues, the centre-right is effectively chosing to campaign on territory where the centre-left is already well entrenched, and in so doing is failing to provide voters with a distinct alternative.

Since the Iraq War has done serious damage to the right's reputation for handling foreign policy issues, the most promising area where centre-right parties can recover lost ground is by moving to the right on immigration. Opinion polls show that the majority of voters in western countries are in favour of immigration restrictionism, and the social and economic externalities of immigration are probably the hotest topic on talk radio.

Given big business's involvement in promoting immigration expansionism and its tarnished reputation for passing on externalities to consumers, as seen in the blundering inefficiency of many national telecoms, and the corruption of companies like Enron, centre-right parties should not be promoting neo-liberal ideologues like libertarian Ron Paul to lead the charge against the centre-left.

In 2005, the National Party went to the polls with a libertarian ideologue of its own, former reserve bank governor Don Brash ( New Zealand's answer to Alan Greenspan) and despite a reasonable showing in the provinces, failed to regain office for a third time.

Sadly though, the centre-right is still not yet learning from its mistakes. In the US primaries many conservative voters and pundits are chosing to back the neoconservative canditate Rudy Guliano over the more conservative Fred Thompson, while limited immigration advocate Tom Tancredo has already pulled out of the running.

How many more electoral defeats will the centre-right have to suffer before it swings back to conservatism?

Quiet on the Commonwealth front

Going into 2008, it's apparent that the gap in the quality and quantity of blogging output between conservative bloggers in the English-speaking Commonwealth and their counterparts in the US, is showing little sign of narrowing.

Although the population of the US dwarfs that of Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, the English-speaking Commonwealth still has a population of over 110 million from which to draw upon. However, we are still failing to produce many bloggers in the class of US traditional and scientific conservatives like Daniel Larison, Steve Sailer, Randall Parker, Jim Kalb, Lawrence Auster, John Savage, and John Press.

As well as being a regular blogger, Mr Press has also produced a substantial book Culturism, which tackles the weighty issue of western cultural survival. Steve Sailer's blog appears to attract the lions share of reader comments, although Auster and Larison also appear to be attracting significant web traffic. (Hat tip to Daniel Larison for being my best referrer, with Oz Conservative second, and mainstream NZ blogger David Farrar third).

Among many others worthy of mention include the lucid and entertaining Dennis Dale, and punchy empiricist Audacious Epigone.

The most consistent and accomplished conservative blogger in the British Commonwealth remains Mark Richardson of Oz Conservative, who is now into his 5th year of lucidly and persistently de-constructing liberalism. However, he is conspicuous for the being the only conservative blogger in Australasia to consistently produce quality commentary on a regular basis.

On this side of the Tasman I regret to report that the Internet scene continues to be dominated by libertarians who seems to think defending western civilisation goes no further than ranting about tax rates.

Canadian output is similarly limited. Immigration blogger Hogtown Front stood out for the quality and accuracy of his postings on Immigration in Ontario, but ceased blogging on a consistent basic earlier this year. Similarly, Vancouver blogger Kevin Michael Grace has been pretty quiet this year, although he is no doubt making a valuable contribution through his work with the American Conservative.

Britain is producing some good bloggers with a law and order focus, with Laban Tall of UK Commentators one of the best in this regard. Unfortunately though, there are few UK bloggers who are willing to offer serious, original analysis of the type that US writers like Kalb and Sailer deliver on a regular basis (a possible star in the making, though is teenager Sam Tarran, who is already producing some good posts at a ridiculously young age).

Although Continental conservatives appear to be preoccupied with current events concerning Islamic immigration (and who can blame them) there are a few European pundits like Fjiordman and Conservative Swede who are going the extra mile and producing some serious critiques of modern liberal thinking.

Perhaps 2007's most important site from a Conservative perspective though, was not a political blogger, but a non-partisan Internet lobbying site, Numbers USA, which played a vital contribution to the downfall of George Bush's unpopular illegal immigration amnesty.

Culturism

With Internet debate heating up between ethno-nationalists and traditionalists over how to protect western culture from threats such as Islamic terrorism, illegal immigration and the excesses of post-modern liberalism, US academic and blogger John Kennneth Press has produced a timely work, Culturism: A word, a value, a future, which advocates a culturist approach to protecting western culture.

"Multiculturists say diversity concerns food and fashion, but deep down think all cultures are interchangeable. Culturism takes cultures and their impact seriously, " says Mr Press

While there have been a number of Internet articles on the subject of culturism, such as the series of exchanges between Steve Sailer and Jared Taylor on the merits of "citizenism versus white nationalism," this is one of the first books I am aware of that specifically articulates a culturist stance.

Culturism is a pretty substantial and ambitious publication, which runs to nearly 300 pages and includes over 300 endnotes. Through the work, Press demonstrates how culturism can be found in fields as diverse as global history, anthropology, theology, philosophy, the natural sciences and evolutionary psychology, and provides some interesting insights into the cultural development of the United States.

He argues that the West has a relatively liberal and individualist culture, revolving around principles such as the separation of church and state, individualism, and free speech, which make it very different to those cultures, which have evolved in the Middle and Far East.

In contrast to individualistic western culture, Press sees Oriental culture as being defined by race and community, and Muslim culture as being defined by religion dogma and the union of church and state.

Taking his working definition of culturism as the "science and art of protection majority cultures," Press argues that cultures are locked in a competitive struggle with one another, and that people have a right and a duty to defend their culture.

"If we lose economic power to China are vocational opportunities will be undermined. If Islamic terrorists attack us we will lose even more basic freedoms."

While arguing that the West has a right to protect western values within its own borders, the culturist principle that others cultures have a right to protect their own cultures, within their own lands, counters the neo-conservative idea that the West has a right to promote western values by force. Subsequently, Press’s culturism ties in well with the principles of prudence and self-reliance, advocated by foreign policy realists, paleo-libertarians and traditional conservatives.

While asserting that the Unites States needs an overriding majority culture to function effectively, Press argues that the multi-racial make up of its population, make it dangerous and impractical to define the countries culture along racial lines. Contrary to left liberal thinking, Press argues that the US is actually one of the world’s least racist countries, and that culturism provides a means of promoting social stability and national solidarity, whilst avoiding ethnic conflict.

Culturism is a controversial and challenging book, which is likely to draw both praise and criticism from scientific conservatives and ethno-nationalists, to economic globalists and multiculturalists, whilst making an important contribution to the increasingly urgent task of defining and protecting western culture.

Politics and Relationships

Prior to the late 1960s, politics wasn’t really a big consideration in people’s choice of partner. It was generally thought that woman were less interested in politics than men, and in any case, differences in political views were not a big deal.

Today though, people are increasingly seeking partners with similar jobs and opinions.This trend emerged began in the 1970s with fashionable magazines like London’s Time Out running singles columns for young urban liberals. Now conservatives have got in on the act with on-line dating agencies like Conservative Match - ‘sweethearts not bleeding hearts’.

One reason why politics has become more important in relationships it that women have become more educated.

When women were first given the vote, conservatives were surprised that most of them didn’t vote for socialist parties. It was assumed that women would vote with their hearts, rather than their heads, and support the left. Subsequently, conservatives were dead against universal suffrage. However, it soon became apparent that once women have families they become more conservative and vote for economic stability and pro-family policies.

Today, women are spending more time in university (soaking up politically correct ideas) and are waiting much longer to have families. The result is that many of them are becoming more liberal and less concerned with economic stability and ‘affordable family formation’.

In general, educated women are more concerned with social and environmental issues than economic issues like tax rates. This may be one of the reasons why a lot of young males are libertarians and neo-conservatives.

Males with traditional conservative views appear insensitive and unfashionable. Conversely, male libertarians and neo-conservatives, with milder views on social issues, are less likely to clash with educated liberal women. At the same time they can express their ‘manly political incorrectness’ through economic liberalism. Hence, neo-conservatives and libertarians males may think they are politically tough and unfashionable, but they are unconsciously conforming to the desires of liberal women and workplaces dominated by women.

In contrast, socially conservative males are arguably today’s true 'conservative' rebels - standing up for free speech, political integrity, and putting their jobs (and possibly sex lives) on the line.

The Iraq war however, is bad news for male neo-cons. Women hate wars and attitudes towards paleoconservatives may soften as events unfold according to their predictions.

Centrist or Conservative?

Originally, this blog was titled ‘New Zealand Centrist’. I chose that title because I wanted to distinguish my blog from those written by economic libertarians and centre-left liberals. At the time, I was also focusing mainly on economic and environmental issues. In this context, I took issue with mainstream left and right wing pundits that fail to acknowledge limits to such things as population levels, resource consumption and government bureaucracy.

As I have started to focus more on issues like culture, immigration and foreign policy though, the ‘centrist label’ has become a liability. Mainstream dialogue on issues like immigration is almost totally dominated by liberal views of one form or another. Hence, someone who describes him or herself as ‘being in the centre’ is effectively defining themselves as a liberal. As someone who is critical of the core values of liberalism, it would therefore be misleading for me to describe myself as ‘centrist’.

Perhaps the key features of modern liberalism are a failure to acknowledge limits, an aversion to discrimination and a denial of tradition. In moderation, these may be good qualities, but taken too far they can do considerable damage.

In is interesting that few so called ‘right-wing’ bloggers identify themselves as ‘conservatives’. Looking around New Zealand sites, I can’t find any serious bloggers that describe themselves as conservative. Most describe themselves as ‘libertarians’ or ‘defenders of liberty’- clearly such bloggers are still trapped inside a liberal world-view.

Political commentators who define themselves as ‘traditional conservatives’, ‘paleo-conservatives’ or ‘evolutionary conservatives’, are effectively outside mainstream political opinion, even though, in their own minds, they may think of themselves as moderates. However, with liberalism now completing dominating mainstream debate, those who are critical of liberal values needs to have the courage to adopt unpopular, old-fashioned labels like ‘populist’ and ‘conservative’.

In the new blog title I have chose the words ‘alternative’ and ‘conservative’ to differentiate myself from right-wing liberals (aka, ‘libertarians’ and ‘neo-conservatives’) and because my thinking has elements of several non-liberal streams of political thought: ‘traditional conservatism’, ‘evolutionary conservatism’ and elements of progressive populism.

Conservative Populism in the U.S and N.Z

Over the last 30 years many working and lower-middle class Amercians that previously supported the Democrat Party have now switched allegiance to the Republicans. According to Thomas Frank in Whats the Matter with America these 'populist' voters are largely oblivious to economic issues and vote with the Republicans on social issues like abortion to spite the nation's liberal elites. In so doing they have allowed economic policy to shift further to the right. According to Frank, the primary reason for this change in voting behaviour has been a misguided policy by the Democrats to appeal to white-collar liberals over traditional blue-collar voters.

Since 1984 the New Zealand Labour Party has shifted to the right on economic policy whilst trying to appeal to white-collar liberals through its 'Nuclear Free' policy as well various social reforms in areas like gay rights. During this time voter turnout has declined as increasing numbers of voters have become disillusioned with the two main parties. However, it is only in the last few years that a conservative populist backlash along U.S lines had started to occur. The emergence of Destiny Church and the urban/rural split in the 2005 election are a direct reaction to the social policy initatives of Labour's second term. Perhaps even more significantly, the new urban/rural devide looks very similar to the coastal/hinterland divide in the U.S.

At the start of 2005 Labour was in a strong position with little support for National's economic proposals. However, Labour stuck its neck out with some controversial policy initatives such a proposal to legalise prostitution. Come election time and Labour received a sound thrashing in the provinces, including some previously safe seats like Palmerston North. Although Labour recovered to win the election by a narrow margin it duly took notice of the conservative backlash by turning to the centre parties, New Zealand First and United Future, at the expense of the more fancied centre-left Greens.

Since New Zealand has followed so many U.S fashions in recent years, from credit cards to personalised number plates and cheerleaders, it seems likely it will develop some backlash fashions from the U.S as well. Hopefully the Labour Party, unlike the U.S Democrats, will start to pay some attention to working and lower-middle class voters who are suspicious of progressive social policies.

The Iraq War - Incompetence not Cunning

Left-wing critics of the war in Iraq, such as Noam Chomsky, have criticised the Bush administration for being ruthless and Machiavellian in its decision to go to war. They argue that Bush's goal was to drive down global oil prices by capturing Iraq's oil fields and forcing the country to increase its oil exports. Eventually, this would allow the U.S to control most of the world's accessible oil and give it an unassailable economic advantage over competitors like China for many decades.

While I agree that securing Iraqi oil and increasing the U.S presence in the Middle-East were the primary reasons for American involvement, I think the Bush administration was far from ruthlessly calculating in its decision to go to war and in its conduct of the campaign. In going to war without U.N support, Bush has shown himself to be naively optimistic. Since his advisers had no plan for the reconstruction of Iraq they thought it would be relatively easy to create a favourable democratic regime and get oil steadily flowing again.

However, after three years oil prices have increased significantly while oil flows are still below pre-war levels. Clearly the Bush administration has underestimated the difficulty of reconstructing the Iraqi State and protecting oil installations from sabotage.

In the First Gulf War there was a clearly thought out rationale for intervention- stopping Iraq from capturing foreign oil supplies and then using increased oil prices to fund military expansionism. Since the U.S, and U.S culture is widely hated in the Middle East, it is only sensible for America to intervene militarily when its Allies are actually attacked, or if global oil supplies are disrupted on a massive scale due to military unrest. Since the costs of military intervention are so large, intervention can only be justified from a self-interest pespective when there is a truly serious threat to U.S interests.

The neoconservative philosophy of pre-emptive attack and regime change is wishful fantasy, not realipolitik. The world is too complex and too disfunctional to be remodelled in America's image.

Bush made a serious mistake in deciding to give U.K and U.S companies public preference for reconstruction contracts. This has only served to further alienate the Europeans and increase anti-American feeling in the Middle-East. If Bush were a cold, calculating pragmatist he wouldn't make such an obvious blunder as this.

The United States has only limited experience policing fractured states and its military is mainly designed for blitzreig type operations. American army equipment tends to lack durability and U.S tanks and planes are ludicrously expensive to run. Countries like France are probably superior to the U.S in occupation operations. Hence, the Americans would have been wise to try and get countries like France involved in the reconstruction process.

With the U.S occupation of Iraq now causing increasing problems with Iran, the original 'Machiavellian' goal of cheap, secure oil, now looks even more utopian.

-For some spectical, conservative opinions on the war in Iraq check out the American Conservative website.