Defining Conservatism Downward

Sobran's ^ | January 3, 2002 | Joseph Sobran

[St.Chuck]

On the other hand at least the Reps. will let me keep my gun...

LOL That is a good line. I will keep it filed away under the " If you don't have something nice to say, say nothing." file. Now I will have something nice to say.

[RaceBannon]

Would you please explain how expanding the Dept of Ed and passing the Patriot Act are consistent with Conservatism? If you cannot, are you willing to admit that W is NOT a Conservative (even Rush says he's not acting like one) but a Moderate?

You don't follow my posts very often, do you!! LOL!!

[breakem]

the US constitution is not intended to list the rights of man, merely to limit the powers of the government. If our rights did not include others than what's in the constitution government would control even more of our lives.

Regardless, my original reaction stands. You did not GIVE us our rights.

[RaceBannon]

Behavior that destroys families or even just puts people at risk of harm is behavior that deprives the innocent of their liberty

And that is why drugs are illegal, including smoking dope, because the effects of dope affect those around the person by reducing that persons ambitions, ability to reason, to think, to react socially to those around them, encourage other rebellions against social norms...do I need to go on? Maybe I do, for today's society is so burnt out from previous drug use, they no longer know there can be a difference!

[Little Bill]

The US Constitution is not a divine document, but one written by thoughtful, Christian men.

Try, Divinely insprired, close enough match for me.

[breakem]

"God may have given us those rights, but it is men that guarantee them. Therefore, it is men that gave them to you."

Sorry, forgot to post your blantant contradiction.

The next time you try to show up the libertarians you should take a basic course on the constitution, logic 101, and perhaps philosophy. Then you may not come across so ignorant. Also you were wrong on the morality of libertarians. You're just repeating the same old charges that get refuted here daily.

[RaceBannon]

You did not GIVE us our rights

I usually respond only once to those who play word games like you do. You are playing a word game, you understood exactly what i meant, and I even explained in detail what I meant. You insist on playing word games, though. It's been nice to talk to you today.

[Diago]

Right on, Joe! I never understood why the moderates on this forum are so anxious to call themselves conservatives.

[FreeReign]

They used to oppose needless military intervention abroad; today they equate militarism with patriotism. They used to demand that the U.S. Department of Education be abolished; today they want to expand it. They used to denounce Franklin Roosevelt; today they venerate him.

Sobran refers to the two departments -- defense and education -- in Bush's discretionary budget that grew past the rate of inflation and population growth. That means he neglects to mention the other fifteen or twenty departments that shrunk before the rate of inflation and population growth in Bush's first discretionary budget.

I think that this makes Sobran nonobjective on matters on conservatism and small government.

[breakem]

Just looking for you to admit your error. If you don't like word games you will stop with the immoral libertarian line. Also you should that admit that people who like small and limited government as conservatism espouses would not call upon the government to protect them from themselves.

[1 FELLOW FREEPER]

""So maybe the Dems are actually the lesser of the two evils.""

No. 4 more years of Clinton, and we would all be eating Chinese food, if we liked it or not. But I have to agree that the Republicans have sold us out too......albeit at a slower pace.

[Libertarian_4_eva]

Would that include the 10th Amendment? Would you support the right of each state to have its own laws regulation abortion, sodomy, education, et cetera?

Yes. Thats the whole point. Let the states have the large amounts of power that they deserve. If the states screw up then it is the state that suffers not the nation as a whole.

[BluesDuke]

And here is the crux of the issue: It is us moral conservatives that gave you those rights.

I have a little document in my hand (well, ok, it's reprinted in a small collection of early American political writings, but let's not get technical) that says human beings most certainly did not "give" us those rights. We hold these truths to be self evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness... That wasn't

...and it is those rights and wrongs that libertarians are working to overturn the laws on to allow what you mistakenly call freedom.

A libertarian (and, again, I speak for myself alone) works to overturn nothing of the sort. A libertarian is of the view that there are hundreds of laws which need to be repealed (whenever someone hollers "there oughta be a law," I am always tempted to holler back, "Get the code books out - it'll take you a year, but you'll probably find they already made one"), on the grounds that they have turned the government into not the public protector but rather a public nuisance. And, I repeat, a libertarian is of the view that the government's sole legitimate business is to stay the hell out of your business, of my business, and of every citizen's business, unless one citizen would abrogate a fellow citizen's equivalent rights. That position does not presume or anticipate any sort of overturning of the moral imperative; it merely returns its assignment to the place where it properly belongs - the church, or the synagogue.

While we were a moral people guided by the Bible, like it used to be until this century, we had laws to define right and wrong, but people knew why things were right and why things were wrong. Now, thanks to the immorality of today's society, no one knows why things are right and wrong anymore except to say that they are legal or not, or whether they infringe upon my 'right' of choice or not.

Is it me, or can I think of a near-exact parallel between the deconstruction of society that you have just described and the metastasis of State power into places where the State lacks both the competence and the legitimate Constitutional sanction to exercise? But I will defer to a far wiser mind than mine own who has discoursed very nicely on the subject of choice viz a viz right and wrong; choice viz a viz virtue. You might care to read the following excerpt from an essay, "Freedom, Virtue and Government," by one of the distinguished gentlemen to whom Mr. Sobran alludes, Frank S. Meyer; the essay (I edit out certain references which have only time-and-place interest or connexion; it was first published in National Review in 1957) was published in his anthology, The Conservative Mainstream, in 1969:

...The calamtious socialisation which has descended upon the United States in the years since 1932 is grounded in the very situation against which the framers of our Constitution sought to guard: the use of government to impose upon men positive rules of action.

It has been argued by some conservative opponents of the tendency of contemporary thought and politics that the mischief does not arise at all from the use of government for the purpose of enforcing a putative good, but only from the imputation of good to ends which are in fact evil. Government, they maintain, is the proper agency for the enforcement of proper ends on individual men. It is only that Liberals use it for the wrong ends. Those who argue thus are saying in effect that if only governmental power can be seized and held by governors imbued with true principle, men can be forced to be virtuous.

But, in fact, the only "virtue" that can be so enforced is virtue defined in one of the ways the contemporary relativists define it (acceptance of custom, adjustment to the norm). External coercion could only make men "virtuous" if virtue consisted of conforming one's behaviour to the kind of behaviour those with power prescribe as good. But if virtue is the movement of a man toward an absolute Good exhibited by reason and by love, then by its very nature it cannot be forced, it must be chosen...

Truly to be able to choose good, however, demands a freedom and an autonomy which unfortunately also makes it possible for men to choose evil. Otherwise there is no meaning to choice, and virtue in the true sense is impossible. Therefore, the power of government is a necessary power to prevent the freedom of one man from interfering with the freedom of another. But individual and corporate teaching of the truth and the good is the only activity whereby men can influence other men toward virtue.

The limited government that the founders of the Republic established presupposed a devotion to a common heritage, a common understanding of virtue and the good, based on tradition and reason. The repudiation of the heritage by the Liberal pseudo-libertarians of the day transforms their boasted devotion to personal liberty into wanton presentation of privilege to the beneficiaries of approved intellectual fashion.

But indignation at their misuse of the concept of freedom in the service of the instinct for amoral power will help little if it leads to contempt for freedom and disdain for the concept of limited government which is the political foundation of freedom.

Only men who choose the good freely can be virtuous. It is true that the nature of virtue is not such that men will always bid highest for it in "the free market place of ideas"; but neither is it a cultural badge, like the pigtail of the Chinese of the Manchu dynasty, or the social security number of the American worker, which can be imposed upon the person by the authority of the state. It is best nurtured by the teaching and example of family and church (one could add the school, if our schools had not become creatures of the state); and it is best exercised in a social situation where government limited to the preservation of order and the administration of justice has as its essential aim the guarantee of the maximum possible freedom to each individual person.

And, elsewhere, Mr. Meyer wrote this extract, from a second essay included in the same anthology, an essay called "Why Freedom," published originally in 1962 (in National Review):

Briefly, then: 1) There is great danger to human freedom, and thereby to the achievement of virtue, if any more power than that which is absolutely necessary is lodged in the same set of hands. 2) The state is a necessity as an institution to preserve the freedom of men from infringement by other men through domestic or foreign force or fraud; and to settle the disputes that occur when rights clash with rights. 3) From this necessity are derived the legitimate powers of the state: defence, the preservation of domestic order, the administration of justice. 4) The exercise, however, of these necessary functions requires a dangerous concentration of power - the monopoly of legally and socially accepted force. Any additional control over individual persons in any sphere of their lives adds dangerously to this already dangerous concentration of power. 5) No other activities of men, except these three legitimate functions of the state, require the monopoly of force. All others can be performed by individual persons and voluntary associations of persons. 6) Since the power of the state is dangerous to begin with, and since all other functions beyond its essential three can be performed by men otherwise, the preservation of a truly free political order demands the limitation of the state to these functions.

...The principle that the political order must be a free order if men are to have the maximum possibilities of achieving virtue is, I maintain, inextricably linked, in the tradition of the West and the tradition of the American republic, with the principle that the goal of men is virtue. ..Conservatism, therefore, unites the "traditionalist" emphasis upon virtue and the "libertarian" emphasis upon freedom. The denial of the claims of virtue leads not to conservatism, but to spiritual aridity and social anarchy; the denial of the claims of freedom leads not to conservatism, but to authoritarianism and theocracy.


Frankly speaking, I trust not the State to tend a damn thing. I would trust a properly construed and minimalist government, and not the improperly consecrated State under which we now live, to tend to precisely that mission which Mr. Meyer enunciated above, a mission whose strict tending would leave the government the hell out of trying to tend that which is most properly tended by our churches and synagogues. We have indeed granted the State its opportunities to teach, enhance, and mandate what right and wrong mean, above and beyond the limited and legitimate coordinates of a properly construed government, and the State, as always it does, has screwed up the job royally.

I say again: There can be no coincidence between the decline and deconstruction of society's cumulative sense of right and wrong and the rise and metastasis of the State over, above, and beyond properly construed government.

[FreeReign]

Moral Conservatives" give no rights nor do governments.

The people of this country give legal rights in this country, the U.S. Constitutions gives U.S. Constitutional rights and objective reason, or the creator gives unalienable rights.

[St.Chuck]

....that means he neglects the other fifteen or twenty departments that shrunk

I'd be interested to know what departments were "shrunk." Am surprised the media wouldn't be on top of that one. Can you give a few examples?

[1 FELLOW FREEPER]

""I say again: There can be no coincidence between the decline and deconstruction of society's cumulative sense of right and wrong and the rise and metastasis of the State over, above, and beyond properly construed government""

No coincidence...and growing more worrisome EVERY DAY.

[FreeReign]

I'd be interested to know what departments were "shrunk." Am surprised the media wouldn't be on top of that one. Can you give a few examples?

Spending increases by department
Agriculture -1.4
Commerce -0.4
Defense +14.1
Education +4.6
Energy -0.5
HHS +2.8
HUD +1.9
Interior -0.4
Interntl Affairs+1.2
Justice -1.1
Labor -0.6
Transportation -2.1
Treasury -0.7
Vet Affairs +1.0
Corp of Eng. -0.6
EPA -0.2
FEMA -0.2 (NWO enforcfement)
NASA +0.3
Nat. Sci Fd. +0.1
Sm Bus Admin +0.3
SSA +0.3

Now factor in the 2001 rate of inflation(not including energy) and add the 2001 1.5% population growth increase which gives you about a +4.2% baseline.

[RaceBannon]

First, show me how Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness are defined through drug use, prostitution and homosexuality. Then, you must openly deny that Libertarians do NOT openly call for the removal of laws that outlaw these practices. Since you cannot, I'll remove that second requirement. And, just beacuse you as an individual do not call for these to be legal, does NOT remove the calls of libertarians everywhere else!

Second, since it is God Himself who gave us those inalienable rights, show me again how this same God who defined prostitution, Drug use, and homosexuality as great moral wrongs, expects those who claim to be conservatives or libertarians should allow these things to be a legal protected practice that society openly allows?

Third: Since it is God Himself that granted us life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and, allowed the governing of societies through government based on moral laws through His word, How is a moral basis that defines laws and outlaws behaviours and practices wrong and depriving of liberty? Governments are created for that very purpose: To place constraints on human behaviour through definitions of right and wrong and are granted power to punish those who fail to comply with what society deems punishable. It is only a moral society that grants liberty, because a moral society does NOT engage in that which is immoral!! If a society becomes immoral, it will reach apoint where this 'liberty' will be removed and tyranny will be the norm! It is not the changing of laws that will bring this to an end, but a renewal of morality.

4th: Since governments have the responsibility of defining right and wrong for the betterment of the people at large through the illegalization of practices that are historically proven to be harmfull to society if left unchecked, why is it wrong to have a WAR ON DRUGS? If you have a problem with certain police tactics, take it up with them. The effects of drugs caused all these laws to be put in place, so did libertarian thinking that made populations believe they had a right to do anything they pleased no matter what society defined as right and wrong, because they believe they have a right to do anything they want! If you have a problem with drug usage, blame it on a pattern of thought that says
'LEAVE ME ALONE, I HAVE THE FREEDOM TO DO WHATEVER I WANT BECAUSE I HAVE LIBERTY'
Libertarian thinking to the core, my friend, and the laws that men passed to stop this nonsense were right then, and they are right now, and it is only because of an increase inthis 'LIBERTARIAN' thinking that increases this perversion of drug use, pornography, and prostitution.