Posted on 11/21/2009 5:19:01 AM PST by Kaslin
It must be difficult to work at The New York Times, surrounded every day by true believers in conservative ideals. Luckily for the rest of us Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the paper’s “Book Review” and “Week in Review” sections, has emerged from that hothouse to write for us, the little people, a small book titled “The Death of Conservatism.”
More in sorrow than in anger, Tanenhaus begins by claiming that, in the realm of ideas and argument, “conservatism is most glaringly disconnected from the realities now besetting America.” Oh? “Conservatives remain strangely apart, trapped in the irrelevant causes of another day, deaf to the actual conversations unfolding across the land, in its cities and towns, in red and blue states, in the sanctuaries of the privileged and tented ‘Bushvilles,’” he writes.
Indeed, I drove my 1930 Chrysler Imperial through a “Bushville” just the other day. It was filled with lean hobos heating tins of lima beans over open fires. Very sad. Most of them used to be Chrysler stockholders, apparently, until they lost their fortunes when the Obama administration raced that company through an extra-legal bankruptcy and turned 55 percent ownership of it over to the UAW.
But speaking of tins, Tanenhaus seems to have a tin ear. It’s liberals, after all, who are disconnected from the conversations going on around the country.
For example, media elites assure us that the economic worst is behind us. “Some companies came through the recently ended recession with flying colors,” opened a story on Slate magazine on Nov. 7. Break out the bubbly; the recession is over! Except -- it doesn’t feel over. Unemployment is 10.2 percent. Americans aren’t living in “Bushvilles,” but most worry about jobs.
How have liberals in Congress reacted? They’ve passed bills that destroyed valuable assets (cash for clunkers), would implement new taxes in an effort to stop phantom global warming (cap and trade legislation) and would impose expensive new burdens on employers and workers (through mandatory health insurance).
Not to worry, though. Once they’ve dealt with health care and saved the planet, they’ll tackle employment. “During the Senate Democrats’ lunch Tuesday (Nov. 17),” The Hill newspaper reported, “Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) announced that an initiative focusing on jobs would soon be a priority.” No hurry, apparently.
Conservatives, of course, have opposed most liberal measures. They voted in lockstep against the 1,900-plus page House health care bill, for example. While this should please ordinary Americans (polls show a majority of us oppose Obamacare), it irks Tanenhaus.
“Conservative opponents of Barack Obama have applied the epithet ‘socialism’ to his ambitious plans to exert greater federal control over health care and energy policy, even though the Bush administration, the most conservative in modern history, itself orchestrated a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street,” he writes.
It’s worth noting that Bush, despite accomplishing some conservative goals, was no patron saint for conservatism. His administration rammed through Medicare Part D, the first new entitlement program in a decade, and jacked up federal spending year after year.
Still, Tanenhaus isn’t arguing honestly if he says conservatives should support Obama’s big tax-and-spend programs because of Bush’s TARP, since many (if not most) of us opposed TARP, too.
Tanenhaus urges conservatives to bow to “the politics of consensus.” Yet later in his book he explains exactly why we need to try to block bad legislation now: Once a big federal program is in place, it’s almost impossible to repeal it.
“Not even the most ardent hater of government was about to scale back a federal civilian workforce that had quadrupled (from 630,000 to 2.5 million) since the GOP had last been in power or slash a budget that had multiplied by twenty-two,” he writes.
He’s explaining why Dwight Eisenhower’s victory in 1952 solidified the policies of the New Deal. But that also serves as a prediction that, if (for example) the government takes over health care this year, it’ll be impossible for a conservative congress to ever roll back the clock, just as Republicans of the 1950s weren’t able to reverse the mistakes of the New Deal.
“The movement conservatives of our time seem the heirs of the French rather than of the American revolution,” Tanenhaus claims. “They routinely demonize government institutions, which they depict as the enemy of the people’s best interests.”
Really? How many heads have tea partiers lopped off?
In reality, conservatives are the most polite protesters in memory. And as far as revolutions go, the American Revolution was explicitly about escaping an out-of-touch, overbearing government that wanted to tax Americans without listening to them.
Just watch. Far from being dead, conservatism will eventually lead our country back to the ideals laid out by the ultimate conservatives -- our Founding Fathers.
“in the sanctuaries of the privileged and tented ‘Bushvilles’”
Does he know that Hoovervilles were makeshift settlements for the poor (hence the tents)? I think the term he’s looking for is “gated communities”.
You would think Lefties would occasionally pick a history book, but I guess that either real history frightens them or maybe they just can't read. The French Revolution was the origin of Marxism / statism, and the bad guys were, you guessed it, the ones supporting the government.
I would also point out to Mr. Tanenhaus that the government and all of its taxes, fines and regulations, is the reason that so many industries have gone overseas. It isn't because of greedy corporations. I might as well tell that to the squirrels that play in my yard, I know. Actually, I do, and they look at me with just as much comprehension.
Could it be we are really witnessing liberalism in its death throes?
“The French Revolution was the origin of Marxism / statism”
I’d say Marxism derives in part from the French, but not in the revolutionary era. Moreso 19th century French socialists/positivists like Saint-Simone and Comte, and most importantly German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. For the nuts-and-bolts economics, Brit David Ricardo, but who follows pure Marxian economics, anyway? After the revolution, everyone makes it up as they go.
As for statism deriving from the French Revolution, I have to heartily disagree. That’s been around as long as there’s been a state, which is a long, long time. Of course, the revolutionists were statists, and influentially so, to an alarming degree.
If American conservatives take after the 1789 revolutionaries, then they aren’t conservative (that’s oversimplifying, of course; there were many revolutionary factions; let’s say the Jacobins, as opposed to the Girondins or the royalists). I wonder if the author realizes that our beloved political spectrum, i.e. Left-Center-Right, derives from this period? On the left were the Jacobins/Moutain, radicals who wanted to expand the government and wage war on the church/aristocracy/monarchy/foreign monarchies. In the Center were the moderates, who maybe were republicans, but didn’t want to go too far. On the Right were royalists and republicans, who wanted as far as possible to keep things as they were, and perhaps to turn back the clock.
That’s the lineup. On one side you have the champions of expanding the central government. On the other, you have the defenders of private power and either defenders of the central state as it is or those who want state power to be more diffuse. A decent book on the subject is Bertrand de Juvenal’s (a Frenchman himself) “On Power”. We are the latter. We are conservatives.
Saint-Simone = Saint-Simon
Moutain = Mountain
If you can read that statement without out of control laughing, you are a better man then me. What rock do they dig these guys out from under to write such absurd crap?
Your knowledge of this period is clearly much deeper than mine, but I believe we are essentially in agreement. I knew of course that Marxism didn't start until the mid 1840's, but my point was, as you would probably agree, that the idea of expansion of government as a cohesive political philosophy got a huge boost from the French Revolution.
Interestingly enough, you and I aren't liberal elite journalists, and we knew this. I'm just a commoner, who didn't attend any elite east coast journalism schools. I don't get invited to elite journalist "Inside the Beltway" parties. I'll bet you don't either. Yet WE knew this. Either the author was ignorant of it, or he made it up. Either way, he's contemptible, and shouldn't be writing so authoritatively about things of which he clearly knows nothing. And I mean NOTHING.
If he were here today, Samuel Clemens might very well say “The rumors of conservatism’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.”
Where do we donate for Sarah’s campaign fund?
“the idea of expansion of government as a cohesive political philosophy got a huge boost from the French Revolution.”
No doubt, and it was hard to even think, let alone extensively write, about revolution, as Marx did, without reference to 1789.
“Either the author was ignorant of it, or he made it up.”
I tend toward the made it up side. Nowadays, the popular conscience (at least here in America) has it that the French Revolution was bad and the American good. Some hold out that the ideals of 1789 were decent, but they cannot escape answering for its excesses. The author wants to blame conservative for holding the potential for similar excess.
On one side you have the champions of expanding the central government. On the other, you have the defenders of private power and either defenders of the central state as it is or those who want state power to be more diffuse. A decent book on the subject is Bertrand de Juvenal’s (a Frenchman himself) “On Power”. We are the latter. We are conservatives.
At the start of the Twentieth Century the term "liberal" meant the same in America as it still does in the rest of the world - essentially, what is called "conservatism" in American Newspeak. Of course we "American Conservatives" are not the ones who oppose development and liberty, so in that sense we are not conservative at all. We actually are liberals.But in America, "liberalism" was given its American Newspeak - essentially inverted - meaning in the 1920s (source: Safire's New Political Dictionary). The fact that the American socialists have acquired a word to exploit is bad enough; the real disaster is that we do not now have a word which truly descriptive of our own political perspective. We only have the smear words which the socialists have assigned to us. And make no mistake, in America "conservative" is inherently a negative connotation just as surely as marketers love to boldly proclaim that the product which they are flogging is NEW!
He does.
Part of his problem is the Obamamania that was so common among liberals last year, and the idea that somehow liberals were going to be dominant for another 40 years or so.
Part of it is that it became so common to criticize Bush as a "radical" that people who do don't apply the same standards to Obama.
Surely there is something "un-Burkean" about all the czars, the health care bill, and cap and trade.
It's the inability to analyze the faults -- or even the characteristics -- of one's own side with anything like the acuity that one brings to dissecting the opposition.
Part of Tanenhaus's deafness involves the habit polemicists have of just throwing anything they can find at the opposition.
Leon Wieseltier, who's as liberal as Tanenhaus if not more so, did a pretty good dissection of Sam's "Burkean" chatter:
We are all Burkeans and all not Burkeans, all preservers and all reformers, all liberals and all conservatives; we all have our preferred acceptances and our preferred remedies; we all do not wish to create or to destroy the world. We must all climb down from our glittering generalities and justify what we propose in the particular.
And part of it may be that he may not be that bright or that well educated.
Certainly his book doesn't bear up to much serious scrutiny.
People had better wake up, our current foe will try and remove us from the scene and I mean physically..
“Of course we ‘American Conservatives’ are not the ones who oppose development and liberty, so in that sense we are not conservative at all. We actually are liberals.”
Yes, one could say that. Especially if you are narrowly focused on politics. Never let it be said that American conservatives or even British tories have no regard for liberty. And, oh please, never forget that liberals are at least, if not more, in love with political order.
Things get confusing when you stretch terms over time. There’s an inbetween-world where libertarians like John Stuart Mill drift into socialism and hardcore arch-turn back-the-clockers drift into radical freedom. Why is a libertine different from a libertarian? Why is a devotee to the American Founding Fathers different than a British royalist?
To know who’s who in different countries at different times, one has to draw lines somewhere. I suggest the easiest way is to determine their devotion to the central government. If you want it to expand, you belong on the left (our “liberal”). If you want to keep it where it is or shrink it, you are on the right (our “conservative”). Likewise, you can look at people’s feeling toward private authority, i.e. the aristocracy, the church, the family, etc. If you suspect it, you are a leftist. If you trust it, you are a rightist.
That settles that (as if). However, there’s a wider meaning to the term conservative. One which Edmund Burke traditionally best fits. Hard to stretch the line back into the past, though it does indeed go back. Burke is the forefather of conservatism since the end of the Enlightenment. The fault line between the irretrievable past and the present—socially, culturally, and politically—may be the French Revolution. Who knows? But we definitely trace our thought, as it exists today, from the end of the Enlightenment to the high romantic age. Modernism is an afterthought, methinks. Too difuse and random to be meaningful. Find its meaning in its recapitulation of the ideas of the late-18th to 19th centuries.
Therein lie Burke and Rousseau, the essential tension, in my opinion. All the others, as between Smith and Marx, are a different version of the same. Burkean conservatism, as described by Russell Kirk, is multiform. Boil it down to his six points (I find them helpful, anyway):
1. Belief in transcendant order
2. Affection for the variety and mystery of human existence
3. Conviction that society requires classes and orders, as opposed to the undifferentiated mass
4. Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked
5. Faith in prescription (or prejudice, you could say) instead of philosophizing and intellectualizing
6. Fear (for lack of a better word) of change
All this surpasses mere politics, and might be used to compare men of different ages. I think it works, and am glad to say that I am a conservative.
6. Fear (for lack of a better word) of change
Maybe "suspicion" works better than "fear"?Yet there is a confusion I see between "change" as such and change of process. Take fossil fuel, for example. Al Gore's position that we (not him personally, of course - but the rest of us) should freeze in the dark rather than mining any coal is reactionary conservatism of the sort which predates the Enlightenment. I read somewhere that people knew about coal as a fuel long before they exploited it in the modern way. They were just too conservative to be comfortable with the idea of digging it out of the ground.
But now we have the process of coal mining in place - and it is "conservative" to continue mining coal. Not only so, but we have in place the process of training people in the disciplines of engineering - and engineering is nothing but the process of devising new processes and new products. So is it conservative to continue the process of creating new processes and products, or would it be conservative to shut those schools down?
“Maybe ‘suspicion’ works better than ‘fear’?”
I hate to be one of those reductionist, who tries to bol human emotions down to their simplest forms, but one culd say fear is at the base of suspicion. Of course, “fear” has a connotation of being irrational. But there is such a thing as rational fear.
“So is it conservative to continue the process of creating new processes and products, or would it be conservative to shut those schools down?”
It would be stupid to shut them down, let’s put it that way. That’s one reason why John Stuart Mill’s appelation of the Tories as “The stupid party” stuck. Conservatives’ enemies like to paint us as old men on porches waving their canes in anger at “You damn kids!”
However, there’s more to conservatism than conserving things. There’s what to conserve, for instance. I’ve always thought it was completely arbitrary for the Amish to forsake electricity. Why? You use other tools. I don’t know enough about their history to know why they froze time where they did. But I do know it’s a weird way to live. No doubt destined, like the ancient Spartan way of life, to die suddenly and painfully, though it endure in glory for a period.
Your isolation of the tension between change as such and change of process—or paradigm shifts, perhaps?—is intstructive. As a general rule, conservatives will be suspicious of little change, but it won’t disturb them much, so long as the big picture remains constant. When things change suddenly, they rebel, in mind or action. But that passes, and new conservatives emerge under the new paradigm, ready to preserve it as others preserved the old.
Conservatives don’t hold one set of principles, true in all ages, and forever to be true. That smells of intellectualism, which they hate. Even our view of the Ten Commandments—which are really old and yet retain much force—changes over time. In short, conservatives aren’t always conservative, and more than liberals are always for liberty.
Allow Abraham Lincoln to explain it for me. Paraphrasing, conservatism is prefering the tried and true over the untried and untrue. We go with what’s worked in the past. Tradition is our guide, for if a certain rule didn’t work, it wouldn’t ave become part of tradition.
Its always tricky, and especially tricky in times of precipitous change. With some things, like say a call for universal free love, we can say with confidence, “That’s not going to work.” As for engineering, let the bold try the new way out. If it works, maybe will go with it. Prove yourself, New Coal.
“Al Gore’s position that we (not him personally, of course - but the rest of us) should freeze in the dark rather than mining any coal is reactionary conservatism of the sort which predates the Enlightenment.”
There was this 19th century Frenchman, Frederic Bastiat, who wrote in his short book “The Law,” if I recall correctly, that the socialists considered themselves progressives, but were in fact 2,000 years behind the time. This applies to Al Gore, who thinks that he’s ushering in a New Age of “green technology,” but as we all know, there is nothing that can replace fossil fuels—with the possible exception of nuclear fission—and maintain civilization at its current standard of living. What Al Gore has in mind, without knowing it, is a huge leap backward, which hints that he may be a secret reactionary.
Is it really that secret? A lot of environmentalists would be happy to be compared to Luddites. I’ve heard people suggest that conservation ought to be natural to conservatives, for more reasons than that they have the same root word. To an extent, it’s true. And there’s a strong tradition, call it Romantic Conservatism, of a reaction against society since the Industrial Revolution. Russell Kirk, who I previously quoted, was one of those, I think. He lumped Marxists and Mill-Benthamite Utilitarians into the same mass of narrow materialists, philosophically responsible for the banal aquisitiveness of modern man.
In my opinion, if our age is more consumerist than previous ages, it’s only because we have the opportunity to be. But that’s neither here nor there. What is to the point is the Scottish Enlightenment, which I’ve always thought to be the convergence point of modern American conservatism and libertarianism. Both believe in economic freedom, to a certain extent, but libertarians are further interested in sorts of political and social freedom that make conservatives balk.
What unites them, besides hatred of socialists? Adam Smith. Or Edmund Burke, for that matter, who also believed in what I’m going to outline, in one form or another. Smith is little more than a symbol for what I’m driving at, so don’t think I’m suggested he invented it or anything. Smith apologized for the new economic and social order known as capitalism. Before him were some, like the French Physiocrats, who attempted to replace the prevailing merchantilism (a sad carry-over from the previous feudal age) with some quasi-scientific if not philosophical justification for the emerging free-enterprise capitalist order.
What was his best contribution? The Invisible Hand. What did it say? That something mysterious guides decisions and makes for a better outcome than we could have produced on purpose. What seperates this, rather radically, from traditional wonder at the mystery underlying human nature inherent to conservatism I spoke of above is that it’s materialistic, rather than divine. Which would make most conservatives of the time, including Burke, suspicious.
However, Smith piled on guides for proper action, in addition to whatever action happens to happen in the marketplace, in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments”. Nevermind that, however. Capitalism is the new “process” of which you speak, and conservatives could grow to love it, in part because of the way Smith taught it. Extended order arises as a result of millions of tiny decisions by millions of individuals over time. It’s trial and error. It did not pop out of the head of a Lawgiver. It was gradual.
Now we’ve hit on it. Gradualism. That’s what modern conservatives believe in. If there need be change, make it gradual. The Founding Fathers didn’t approach their problems gradually, though their forefathers had. But that’s the exception that proves the rule. Despite what Jefferson said, we don’t want any more revolutions. It wasn’t a “5,000 Year Leap,” or at least the parts that still matter weren’t. The best the revolution gave us was the culmination of centuries of wisdom. Centuries from which we could pick out the best and the worst and put the best into action.
Which brings us to the answer as to why I am a conservative, as most people know the word, and Al Gore is not. In his zeal to leap into the future, Gore chucks us back into the Dark Ages. I, on the other hand, have the perspective to see what works and what doesn’t. Not that I’m going to rationally pick and choose, mind you (a pinch of Athens, a dash of the British Empire, and two pints of colonial America works, but the odds that I’d be able to come up with it all on my own are small). I’m going to trust in what has been chosen for me because I know it works.
That explains why conservatism was chosen to describe people who defend a social and political system, dedicated to liberty, unique in the history of human civilization, which was mostly based on security. Because we had the good fortune to see liberty work.
Now we’ve hit on it. Gradualism. That’s what modern conservatives believe in. If there need be change [I would say, there will be change, but], make it gradual. The Founding Fathers didn’t approach their problems gradually, though their forefathers had. But that’s the exception that proves the rule. Despite what Jefferson said, we don’t want any more revolutions. It wasn’t a “5,000 Year Leap,” or at least the parts that still matter weren’t. The best the revolution gave us was the culmination of centuries of wisdom. Centuries from which we could pick out the best and the worst and put the best into action.
Which brings us to the answer as to why I am a conservative, as most people know the word, and Al Gore is not. In his zeal to leap into the future, Gore chucks us back into the Dark Ages. I, on the other hand, have the perspective to see what works and what doesn’t. Not that I’m going to rationally pick and choose, mind you (a pinch of Athens, a dash of the British Empire, and two pints of colonial America works, but the odds that I’d be able to come up with it all on my own are small). I’m going to trust in what has been chosen for me because I know it works.
That explains why "conservatism" was chosen to describe people who defend a social and political system, dedicated to liberty, unique in the history of human civilization, which was mostly based on security. Because we had the good fortune to see liberty work.
That's what I want to hear a Republican presidential candidate say! (Are you running in 2012?)
I haven't read Marx's books, but I'm curious: to what extent does he put forth the theories attributed to him in such a fashion as to suggest they will produce a society beneficial to anyone, and to what extent does he suggest that such theories may be useful to produce a society which is beneficial to an "elite"? It should be noted that the former notion was in fact experimentally disproven at Plymouth before Marx was even born.
Thanks for the ping cIc.
Excellent post Tublecane!
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