"Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican"
--Reagans Law
Posted on 04/27/2003 12:31:21 PM PDT by quidnunc
-snip-
The second major split within modern conservatism involves the Straussians in a rather different way. For over a decade, the clashes between Harry Jaffa and such partisans of the Confederate cause as Willmoore Kendall and M. E. Bradford have marked the forward lines of the North-South controversy. Jaffa has defended the hallowed ground of reason, equality (of natural rights), Abraham Lincoln, and the Union; Bradford has taken his stand on behalf of tradition, inequality, John C. Calhoun, and states' rights.
Recently, new armies have entered the field. The dispute between "paleo-conservatives" and "neo-conservatives" has generated not only smoke and noise but headlines, on account of Pastor Richard John Neuhaus's expulsion by the "paleo-con" Rockford Institute. Aside from that ungentlemanly action, the debate has centered around "global democracy," "secularism," immigration, and charges of envy and religious bigotry. These bitter disagreements occur in the context of two massive facts. One is that, in abstract terms, the paleo-cons and neo-cons agree on far more than they disagree on. Both sides agree that rationalism in politics leads quickly to Jacobinism; that universal truths of the sort expressed in the Declaration of Independence (or in twentieth-century liberalism: they tend to see the two as continuous) are ultimately destructive of authentic, historically rooted human communities; that history or experience is therefore a better guide than reason in political affairs.
Where paleo-cons and neo-cons disagree is over what is to be done. Strongly influenced by the Eastern Straussians (with whom they overlap), the neo-cons take a more or less Tocquevillian approach, reasoning that modern capitalist democracy is here to stay, that despite its anomie it has brought substantial benefits, that incremental improvement of our condition is possible and desirable. Their politics tends therefore to be utilitarian and meliorist but also strongly anti-utopian.
Both paleo- and neo-conservatives put a great deal of reliance on the idea of history (as their names, borrowed so to speak from the theory of evolution, attest). For the latter, it is liberal democracy's very success — the fact that, however uninspiring it may be, it has outlasted its foes — that proves its superiority; indeed, that makes it worthy and capable of propagation to the rest of the world. For the paleos, democracy's success, no matter how expansive, is hollow precisely because it cannot match the glories of traditional societies, especially that of the Old South. Thus the neo-con's cautious historicism shades over into a calculating utilitarianism, while the paleo-con's historicism rejects calculation in favor of a romantic appreciation of passion, the grandeur of the past, personal and national idiosyncrasy.
It is the peculiar nature of this dispute, the fact that the sides have so many premises in common, that helps to account for its second major characteristic: the allegations of nativism and anti-Semitism that color it. In the absence of a clear philosophical difference between the paleos and neos, the obvious ethnic and religious difference between them comes to the fore. That the neo-cons are mostly Jewish, and the paleo-cons emphatically not, is seized upon by both sides in weak moments as the secret explanation of the controversy. Of course, none of the policy questions that are being controverted here (immigration, "global democracy," etc.) can really be reduced to these terms. But the temptation to reduce them will be there so long as better arguments are not forthcoming.
This is particularly the case with the neo-conservatives, who have not responded as well as they should, I think, to the paleo-cons' criticisms. For the real issue is not whether there is room for Jews in a proper American conservatism, but whether, as the paleo-cons define it, there is room for America in conservatism. According to the traditional American understanding proclaimed in the Declaration, all men are created equal, and equally deserve to have their natural rights secured by a just government instituted and operating with the consent of the governed. The first purpose of conservatism would thus be to keep American government just, to make sure that it secures the common good and preserves the rights of its citizens. These rights, deriving from natural right, are based essentially on the citizens' humanity, and have no proper reference to their race, religion, ethnicity, class, or any other secondary or accidental characteristic.
This is not quite the America celebrated by the paleo-cons, who emphasize the regnant inequalities in American life as it has actually been lived. The older traditionalists like Willmoore Kendall were not at home with this America, either, but some of the new or second-generation traditionalists go even further in their rejection of all natural-right arguments. M. E. Bradford is perhaps the best known of these. Whereas most of the older traditionalists (e.g., Kendall, Russell Kirk) saw some harmony — however tenuous — between natural law and tradition or history, Bradford and his followers denounce any appeal to rational, transhistorical principles. To put the difference plainly: whereas Richard M. Weaver traced the decline of the West to William of Occam's attack on universals, Bradford blames our current degeneration on the prevalence of universals in politics and morals.
Other second-generation traditionalists take a different tack. Thomas Fleming, the editor of the Rockford Institute's Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, understands the natural law not as a law of right reason (as Aquinas did), but as a "law of nature" in the modern scientific nor deterministic sense: he uses sociobiology and anthropology to prove that gender and class differences are natural. Attempting to combine traditional natural law with some version of the philosophy of history, Claes Ryn and Paul Gottfried try in different ways to find a philosophical basis for the role of reason within the historical process.
The real issue here is not whether particular paleo-cons are nativist or anti-Semitic, much less whether particular neo-cons are hypersensitive. Everyone involved in this debate agrees that anti-Semitism is wrong. It is a doctrine without defenders. But this consensus cannot endure if its grounds are allowed to be undermined. Paleo-cons as well as neo-cons have an interest in keeping this consensus and the conservative movement itself intact. The problem is that such vices as anti-Semitism and nativism are a constant temptation whenever virtue goes unexplained and unchampioned. When reason, equality, and natural rights (including the right of religious freedom) are contemned in the name of a monolithic and unrestrained "tradition," the ground for evil has been prepared.
As I say, the neo-conservatives in particular have not been very successful at articulating the larger questions at stake, partly because they have been unwilling to undertake the positive defense of American principles that is required. They need to say in broad daylight why nativism and anti-Semitism — errors with which they charge the paleo-conservative movement — are un-American, hence also unconservative. Such a declaration would invite a reconsideration of some of the principles they have shared half-heartedly with the paleo-cons. After all, the neo-cons have always stopped short of the paleo-cons' and the Old Right's open break with Lincoln and his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. Yet only Jaffa and the Western Straussians have vigorously contested this attack on Lincoln and the role of equality in the American political tradition. The neo-cons, like the Eastern Straussians with whom they have so much in common, have been content to keep their discontents private, and to hope for the best. But the logic of the debate carries it more and more clearly in the direction of the classic North-South struggle within conservatism. And the border states must eventually choose sides.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at claremont.org ...
Of course Bradford is dead wrong. It is in fact the prevalence of anti-universals that has caused degeneration. This the substance of the political fugue, flaw in the application. It's so simple. Why not just shout "Republic!" a few times and go home?
ArchConservative btt
I don't know what this guy's idea of a paleoconservative is, but no one I've come across who identifies himself as such, comes even close to the description above.
For paleocons, the success of republican government is so resounding that it can spread purely by example. It's the neocons that seem to have such little faith in it that they need to militarily impose it everywhere they can.
Hogwash!
You're the one who dotes on philosophers and what do they do if not make sweeping generalities.
Iris7 wrote: With enormous risk of being uncharitable, your point of view reminds me of Henry Ford's "History is bunk." That reminds me of "Ignorance is bliss." If I were mean spirited it would remind me of "Freedom is Slavery."
Now you're being — and I'll be charitable here — silly.
History is a window to the past, not a blueprint for the future.
You can put as much lipstick on the paleo-con pig as you wish, but the past that they so greatly admire was — for all it's gentility and romantization — deeply bigoted and cruel.
It gave us, for instance, slavery, Bleeding Kansas and lynch law.
Look at America. Our philosophers were Locke, Hobbes, the rest of the Enlightenment philosophes. Just like "Old Europe." "This tendency gave us just in the last 100 years fascism, Marxism/communism and most lately postmodernism which — along with its handmaiden, multiculturalism — insists there is no such thing as objective truth."
The "tendency" of societies to base themselves on Western philosophy is the rule, not the exception. As a matter of fact, the only countries currently free of Western philosophy are theocratic dictatorships in the Middle East.
Those are concerns of a far more specific and secondary nature; as such it's entirely proper to consult experience local to both time and place. Learning about the basic foundations of human nature, and about how to apply them, is an inquiry of a primary and general nature; as such one should look over a somewhat wider compass in order to pursue it.
The Founding Fathers established the U.S. upon a set of principles from a number of sources, not upon the work of one particular person.
They borrowed freely from the enlightment but were not slaves to it.
They were practical men who started with one simple precept, that all men are created equal, and built uopn it.
In between the primary and the general...is how Reagan put it.
Otherwise honest debate is needed.
... two camps of Straussians ...
If I'm not mistaken, that was an endless back-and-forth in National Review.
The Bolsheviks built their society and economy according to the dictates of Marx, Engels and Lenin, and by and large they adhered to those dictates regardless of their workability.
Those were your BEST efforts!?
And what little they do disagree on is made up.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.