Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought
Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought.
THE DREAM WALKS AGAIN
As the Reagan Presidency enters its final months, a specter is haunting conservatives: the specter of a return to the wilderness. Whether the next occupant of the White House be an unreconstructed McGovernite from Massachusetts or the incumbent Vice President from Texas, increasing numbers of conservatives fear that the new Administration will not be theirs and that political initiative in the Nineties will return to their foes on the Left. Like aging New Dealers after the passing of Franklin Roosevelt, anxious Reaganites have begun to lament that the euphoria of 1981 may not recur in their lifetimes.
The mounting restiveness in conservatives’ ranks transcends their immediate political prospects. As the unifying and invigorating struggles of the early 1980s recede from consciousness, disturbing signs of sectarianism have begun to afflict an always multifarious movement. Spreading, too, among older conservative leaders is the unsettling conviction that far too many “third generation” activists are insufficiently grounded in the historical and philosophical sources of their beliefs. Thus the Heritage Foundation has instituted graduate-level seminars for young rightists on such topics as “Classics of Twentieth-Century Conservatism”–surely an unusual project for a public-policy think tank to undertake. Thus the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has revived its summer-school program for college students–and has been overwhelmed by the response.
Meanwhile evidence accumulates that Academe, never very hospitable to conservative intellectuals and their world view, is becoming even more antagonistic. What do conservatives stand for if not the preservation of the best in Western civilization? And yet, this spring, in a decision of devastating symbolism, one of the trend-setting universities in the country abandoned its required “Western Culture” course for freshmen, and replaced it with something called “Cultures, Ideas, and Values.” Dropping many Western classics from the reading list, the new course will instead emphasize “cultural diversity” and “cultural interaction”–as if the best way for students to learn more about other cultures is to learn less about their own. As the American academy shows increasing signs of sclerosis, the need becomes more imperative to develop alternative means by which at least a Remnant may be educated.
At this critical juncture in the nation’s political and intellectual journey, it is singularly fitting that William F. Buckley Jr. has compiled an anthology of modern American conservative thought, with the able assistance of Charles R. Kesler, a frequent contributor to NATIONAL REVIEW. Although officially a revised edition of American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century (published in 1970), the volume at hand is essentially new. Less than one-third of the material appearing in the 1970 edition is reprinted here, enabling the editors to assemble a fresh, updated, and, in Kesler’s words, “representative selection of the best of American conservative thought.”
Usually, when one inspects an anthology, a few of its components seem marginal. Not here: every one of this hefty volume’s 26 selections truly belongs. Here one finds seminal essays and excerpts from books by such luminaries of the post-1945 conservative renaissance as Richard Weaver, Friedrich Hayek, James Burnham, Milton Friedman, and Russell Kirk. Here, too, are generous samplings from some of the Right’s leading political philosophers (Strauss, Voegelin, Kendall, and Jaffa, among others), as well as such influential younger thinkers as Charles Murray, Thomas Sowell, and George Will. The neoconservative impulse is represented by Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick (although not, oddly enough, by Irving Kristol). And topping off the confection are sublime and moving contributions by Whittaker Chambers and Albert Jay Nock.
Reading this impressive collection prompts many thoughts. First, one is struck anew by the philosophic introspection, literary breadth, and historical learning of most of the contributors. As their frequent and unforced allusions to ancient and modern figures attest, these are individuals who are genuinely at home in Western civilization. For them our heritage matters; it can teach. One wonders whether an anthology of modern liberal thought would disclose the same attributes in such abundance.
Moreover, while some of the essays in the Buckley/Kesler volume are polemical, and nearly all are marked by certitude that the West’s very survival is at stake, entirely absent from these pages are the rancor and shrillness that one associates with ideologues. One does not detect here the pent-up bitterness that seems to drive so many of conservatism’s enemies on the Left.
Keeping the Tablets is more than a timely compendium of estimable writings, however. As part of its scholarly apparatus, Buckley has reprinted “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” (his introduction to the 1970 edition). In it he recounts some of the treacherous intellectual shoals through which the good ship NATIONAL REVIEW navigated in its early years. His essay contains an important lesson in prudence.
Charles Kesler’s introduction is differently focused and more ambitious. After identifying the principal intellectual components of the conservative Grand Alliance, he addresses the disconcerting fact that, for all its recent victories and hard-won status, American conservatism “cannot claim to be successful.” A former student (and now a colleague) of Harry Jaffa at Claremont McKenna College, Kesler contends that conservatism has fallen short because it “has not yet learned the vernacular of American politics”–above all, the teaching of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” According to Kesler, too many conservatives have denied “the first principles of the American founding” and have permitted liberals to pervert the Declaration’s true meaning. Thus Kesler has fired a new salvo in one of the longest-running internal battles on the American Right.
Not surprisingly, the contents of Keeping the Tablets to some degree reflect Kesler’s desire to remedy what he sees as conservatism’s deficiencies. More than the 1970 edition, the volume at hand deliberately emphasizes the continuing intellectual fissures on the Right–in order, says Kesler, “to spur the rethinking and crystallization of conservatism’s first principles.” Thus, for example, Willmoore Kendall’s strictures on Abraham Lincoln and the equality principle are immediately followed by Harry Jaffa’s rejoinder. In a subtle way this anthology attempts not just to represent modern conservatism but to further its self-definition.
Needless to say, many readers of NATIONAL REVIEW will not be persuaded by Kesler’s diagnosis and will be quick to propound other explanations for conservatism’s tenuous ascendancy. But in one sense, at least, his point clearly seems well taken: if conservatives are to prevail in the public arena, they must speak in recognizably American terms. Surely the ability to do this accounts in part for the success of postwar conservatism’s most popular political embodiment, Ronald Reagan, and his continuing hold on America’s affections. Whatever its limitations, his rhetoric and vocabulary are undeniably indigenous–hence comprehensible by everyday people leading everyday, untheoretical lives.
Indeed, after reading Buckley and Kesler’s volume one has precisely this wish: that it somehow could have been even longer and have incorporated more essays in applied conservatism–conservatism accessible to grassroots America. Of all the contributions to this volume, only Joseph Sobran’s “The Abortion Culture” discusses the religious and social issues that have mobilized millions and made possible the Reagan Presidency. Similarly, no contributor confronts head-on the two most revolutionary intellectual currents of our era: feminism and environmentalism. Both have had far more impact on American law and mores than postwar conservatism so far has–a matter worth sober reflection.
How one wishes also that there had been room for the now-classic essay “Goodbye to All That” by the ex-New Leftists Peter Collier and David Horowitz. And if conservatism be best understood in contrast to its principal domestic adversary, one wishes that the editors could have stretched their volume to include James Burnham’s unforgettable dissection of secular liberalism in Chapter 15 of Suicide of the West.
But all anthologies necessarily have their limits. As it happened, the editors of this one were obliged to drop eight essays from their final selection. In any case, this reader’s yearning for even more delectables on the menu does not diminish the feast put before us. Keeping the Tablets is indeed just that: a veritable picnic spread of wisdom and purposive scholarship.
Contemplating its varied riches reminds us of one thing more. The conservative intellectual movement since 1945 has become in a way like a hand, comprising five separate yet associated digits: traditionalist, libertarian, anti-Communist, neoconservative, and New Right. If any one of these is severed and removed, or tries to function to the exclusion of others, the hand as a whole loses effectiveness.
In this season of conservative discontent, then, as the American Right gropes for its compass, those within it who seek to rediscover their heritage now have an excellent place to begin. Buckley and Kesler deserve our thanks–and our readership.
| Author: | Nash, George H. |
|---|---|
| Publication: | National Review |
| Article Type: | Book Review |
| Date: | Aug 5, 1988 |
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Keeping+the+Tablets:+Modern+American+Conservative+Thought-a06542234
We should study conservatism in schools
We Should Study Conservatism In Schools
It’s high time Americans start learning about the conservative movement. For whatever reason, we can identify feminists, Islamists, environmentalists, abolitionists–but very few of us know that conservatism, a coherent ideological movement, even exists. For example, when you open up the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition and look up “progressivism,” you get:
In U.S. history, a broadly based reform movement that reached its height early in the 20th cent.
Yet when you look up conservatism, there is no mention of the conservative movement:
In politics, the desire to maintain, or conserve, the existing order. … By the 20th cent. Conservatism was being redirected by erstwhile liberal manufacturing and professional groups who had achieved many of their political aims and had become more concerned with preserving them from attack by groups not so favored.
No mention of the American political and intellectual movement that has a distinctive philosophy, infrastructure, and policy preferences–and whose thirty-year ascendance (after twenty years in the wilderness) has been one of the defining events of the late 20th century.
As Sean Wilentz notes in this week’s issue of TNR, the conservative era has been longer than the eras of “either Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson, longer than the Gilded Age or the Progressive Era, and as long as the period of liberal reform that stretched from the rise of the New Deal to the demise of the Great Society.” Yet we don’t learn about it in high schools, and seldom–if ever–in college history courses.
This puts the American left–and indeed, the American public–at a disadvantage, because it leads fair-minded people to assume conservatives are basically just people with bowties or people who like guns (or both)–rather than a serious, rather militant ideological movement to be understood and reckoned with.
This is partially the result of inertia. High school history books, for example, are often loathe to discuss contemporary issues. (Although my twin sisters’ 10th grade textbooks certainly mentioned neoconservatism.)
It’s also partially the result of ingrained liberal perceptions. Most liberal thought arose in opposition to entrenched business and political interests, so it’s easy to assume modern conservatism is simply another manifestation of the same.
Finally, it’s Russell Kirk’s fault. His book, The Conservative Mind, tries to establish a genealogy for modern conservatism that stretches back to Edmund Burke and T.S. Eliot–much in the way that the Mormon Church posthumously insists Shakespeare was indeed a Mormon. This gives off the misimpression that modern conservatism is simply a cautious cast of mind, no different from the conservatism of Burke or Eliot.
Yet American conservatism actually has nothing to do with Burke, other than drawing street cred off his deceased personage. The conservative movement began with William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, and Russell Kirk himself during the 1950s, in a magazine called National Review–and it was revolutionary, bombastic, and eager to overhaul American society, not Burkean. Unfortunately, whenever anyone does try to read up about the conservative movement, he is inevitably handed Kirk’s book–along, perhaps, with a copy of Patrick Buchanan’s A Republic, Not An Empire, or something similarly misleading–and hustled off to learn nothing about his intended subject.
It’s a pathetic state of affairs. In political matters, an uneducated citizenry is as good as defenseless–and on this issue, it would seem that Americans are, and continue to remain, uneducated.
Update: Some commenters are asking for a recommended basic text. George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement In America Since 1945 is the authoritative one.
The Very Heart and Soul of Conservatism is Libertarianism
“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.” ~ Ronald Reagan
Read more of Ronald Reagan’s views on Libertarianism from this interview he did in 1975. At that time, Reagan used the term “libertarian-conservative” to describe his political philosophy. Reagan’s record, while generally conservative, was not particularly libertarian, but one’s administrative decisions, constrained as they are by existing laws, institutions, and politics, do not necessarily mirror one’s underlying philosophy (consider Mitt Romney when governing the very liberal state of Massachusetts). This interview gives an interesting glimpse into the real Ronald Reagan.
Another good quote from Ronald Reagan, “I don’t believe in a government that protects us from ourselves.”
Albert Jay Nock: Alternative History
Albert Jay Nock and Alternative History
By Joseph R. Stromberg
Joseph Stromberg is a historian and freelance writer.
Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) was a leading ideologist of the Old Right, a loose collection of individualist intellectuals, journalists, and a few politicians who opposed the growth of government in the first half of the twentieth century. Nock’s writing appeared in the Nation, the original Freeman (1920–1924), which he founded with Francis Neilson, the American Mercury, Harper’s, and elsewhere.
His books include On Doing the Right Thing and Other Essays (1928), Jefferson (1926), The Theory of Education in the United States (1931), Our Enemy, the State (1935), Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), and Cogitations (Nockian Society, 1985).
Nock believed that education, properly understood, was not the same as vocational training, and he famously took a dim view of politics. Conservative political scientist George W. Carey has lately (2004) named him as one of “the great conservative thinkers of the twentieth century.”
Perhaps so; but Nock was also profoundly radical. Jefferson and Our Enemy, the State are the keys to understanding Nock’s system, and inquiry into them sheds light on the relationship between Nock and the Old Right to Progressives and Progressivism and other strains of non-Marxist radicalism.
Nock’s Jefferson
Few would doubt that Nock is a pleasure to read. Jefferson packs interesting detail and observation into an admittedly off-center account of its subject. Thomas Jefferson is skillfully etched, foibles and all, and Nock notes favorably that he never speculated in land. Of his many inventions, Jefferson “never patented one” (being what we would now call a “freeware” inventor).
As ambassador to France, Jefferson supposed that country held 19 million paupers. He commented, “[W]herever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural rights. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.” Adding in royal monopolies, Jefferson ascribed to France’s productive classes “all the oppressions which result from the nature of the general government . . . their particular tenures, and . . . the seigneurial [feudal] government to which they are subject.”
In England, Nock writes, Jefferson “saw a population expropriated from the land, and existing at the mercy of industrial employers, with the enormous exactions of monopoly standing as a fixed charge upon the producer.” The English state was essentially the agent of privileged orders. Jefferson commented that while Englishmen were honest, their constitution (see Paine, Shelley), “from its nature, must render their government forever dishonest”; as politically organized, England comprised “a nation of buccaneers . . . seizing to itself the maritime resources and rights of all other nations.”
Republicanism Is Superior, But Not Ideal
Europe’s monarchies bred such evils naturally. Nock writes that Jefferson saw American republicanism as obviously superior. But ours was “not the ideal system”—Native American anarchism was (Nock’s summary). Leaning that direction, Jefferson sometimes theorized a radical decentralization of the states themselves into ward-republics. In decentralized wards the people could, in Jefferson’s words, “crush regularly and peaceably the usurpations of their unfaithful agents.” Here, Nock writes, Virginia might have “set a good example, most of all to New England, which had the system, but was aborting its fruit.” Jefferson attributed Shays’ Rebellion to (in Nock’s words) “an unfair pressure of debt and taxation, applied by collusion. . . .”
Nock observes that the leading Federalist ideologist, Alexander Hamilton, united “certain broad classes of the ‘rich and well-born’ with the interests of the government,” starting with public creditors. As for “the natural-resource monopolist,” his position, Nock says, “was as impregnable under the Constitution as his opportunities were limitless.. . . Hence the association of capital and monopoly would come about automatically. . . .” The Revolution’s ideals had masked concrete economic interests; what really divided the country was the Federalists’ political means to wealth. As for the Alien and Sedition Acts, Nock writes, “Americans were never sticklers for theory; they have been always more concerned with the inconveniences of despotism than with its iniquities.”
Jefferson thought Hamilton’s national debt could be paid in 15 years, but commented: “[W]e can never get rid of his financial system.” He complained to Samuel Adams of “an artificial paper phalanx overruling the agricultural mass. . . .” Nock wryly notes “unaccountable fires among the Treasury records” just before Jefferson’s appointees came in.
Nock is no unreserved admirer of Jefferson. He finds Jefferson’s assessment of the Federalists inexact: “[W]hat really animated and held these people together was a predatory economic interest.” Jefferson suspected English influence but saw only its “external and superficial aspects.” The Federalists, Nock writes, devised their fiscal system “by no means because it was British, but because there was money in it” as “the most effective engine of exploitation by the ‘rich and well-born’ ” (italics added).
Jefferson was slow to see the Constitution “as an economic document of the first order. . . .” “The four great general powers” it granted were over taxes, war, commerce, and control of western lands. Mercer of Maryland, John Taylor of Caroline, and Jackson of Georgia were quicker “to assess the economic implications of Hamilton’s fiscal system.” They were correct, and Hamilton’s funding scheme created new assets amounting to an eighth of the national “wealth” out of nothing and gave them to “a single vested interest.”
In Nock’s opinion, Jefferson’s “legalistic” opposition to Hamilton made him seem “a doctrinaire advocate of State rights and of strict construction; whereas he was really neither.” Nor was he opposed to commerce in general; he understood the difference between everyday banking and public credit. For reasons of trade, Jefferson had supported the new Constitution, provided that “the United States should be a nation abroad, and a confederacy at home.”
Taylor had a superior grasp of free-trade principles and of how taxes are shifted back to productive factors. When Jefferson complains to Taylor about political patronage, Nock writes laconically, “[T]he Constitution was meant to work that way, and it did.” Jefferson’s plan of paying off the public debt by selling western lands served to create “unlimited private land-monopoly.” As for his Louisiana Purchase, “if it was a boon to the agrarian producer, it was a godsend to the speculator.” Jefferson’s unconcern about land monopoly aided the interests created by the Federalists.
Worse, Jefferson had an unfortunate faith in economic warfare—retaliatory tariffs and embargoes.
“He never anticipated,” Nock writes, “the appalling economic consequences brought indirectly upon the country in 1807.” Discussing the background of the War of 1812 (and with 1914–1917 fresh in mind), Nock writes that instead of informing American shippers that they took their own risks in sailing into the Anglo–French naval war zone, Jefferson backed an embargo “wholly subversive of the principle of liberty”—“the most arbitrary, inquisitorial and confiscatory measure formulated in American legislation up to the period of the Civil War. . . .” It made three states solidly Federalist and raised threats of New England secession.
Jefferson also failed to foresee the Federalists’ permanent lock on the Federal courts. In 1800 he predicted that “a single consolidated government would become the most corrupt government on earth,” exclaiming: “What an augmentation of the field for jobbing, speculating, plundering, office-building and office-hunting would be produced by the assumption of all the State powers into the hands of the General Government.” Yet Jefferson was not “a doctrinaire enemy of centralization.” He did not see his own constitutionally doubtful actions, as president, as comparable to things his enemies did (in Nock’s words) “for the final purpose of putting the legality of economic exploitation forever beyond the reach” of electoral politics and “official responsibility.”
In a “land of unprecedented monopolist opportunity,” Nock writes, men strove “to get out of the producing class and into the exploiting class as quickly as possible.” Jefferson “never seemed aware that the prospect of getting an unearned dollar is as attractive to an agrarian as it is to a banker. . . .” His Republicans kept their name while resisting “any tendency within the party to impair the system” that made extra-economic profits possible; hence, over time, “the essential identity of the parties.”
Our Enemy, the State
Nock deployed and criticized Jefferson in aid of reinterpreting American history. He made his theoretical ground explicit in Our Enemy, the State. Nock wrote that work in the shadow of the New Deal, which he treated as part of a two-century process of American state-building.
In Nock’s terminology, government serves society. But the state intervenes positively to divide society “into an owning and exploiting class, and a propertyless dependent class.” Only “incompetent observation” from Aristotle to Paine, had obscured this distinction. Franz Oppenheimer found the state’s origin in conquest, making every historical instance “a class-state”; but the state game only paid where economic exploitation could arise. For Nock, access to land was the key to preventing exploitation. Nock cites Turgot, Benjamin Franklin, John Taylor, Theodr Hertzka, and Henry George on the point.
The burden of Nock’s “theorem” is simply that few people with alternative economic means would beat down factory doors for mere “employment”—and at abysmally low wages, under miserable, dangerous conditions and quasi-military “discipline,” and with long, arbitrarily set working hours. The best alternative means was a plot of land and, short of that, access to traditional commons, “wastes,” and so on. These access rights were not especially tragic-because-common, but were in fact collective private rights held by specific persons in well-defined, once-feudal jurisdictions. All England could not show up one day and dissipate these resources. These little rights, however, gave people an edge, a minimal independence useful for avoiding abject dependence on would-be employers. The latter hated these arrangements and duly enrolled the state to destroy them. Nock’s insight is that conquest, land engrossment, and destruction of economic options are not a one-shot deal, done in 1066, but can be repeated as needed, in an ongoing process favoring those with the best access to the state. This is why Nock uses the inflammatory word “exploitation.”
In actual (non-Whig) history, commercial interests gradually refit the state “to their own special interests, and strengthened it immeasurably.” Later, republican forms allowed the individual to imagine “that State action is his action. . . .” Following Oppenheimer, Nock contrasts the economic and political means to wealth. Feudal and merchant states were “higher integrations of the primitive State”; while states as such, “primitive, feudal or merchant [were] the organization of the political means.”
America’s colonial period unfolded in the period in England when merchants and financiers “saw the attractive possibilities of production for profit, with the incidence of exploitation gradually shifting to an industrial proletariat.” This, Nock says, was “the actual inwardness of . . . the Puritan movement. . . .” Growing individualism and social power coexisted with a “weak” state, but one strong enough to oversee “a thorough-going economic exploitation with relatively little apparatus of legislation or of personnel.”
The “Merchant-State”
John Locke justified this new state and sought “to copper-rivet . . . a doctrine of the sacredness of property” blocking state confiscations of the private property of important persons. Under Locke’s Whiggism-with-a-vengeance, the rights of property “took precedence even over those of life and liberty.” Even war powers, Nock writes, were to intrude on men’s lives and liberties “but not on their property” (italics added). Popular sovereignty provided additional leverage “for ousting . . . status to make way for the regime of contract . . . displacing the feudal State and bringing in the merchant-State.” Like everyone else, merchants felt the disutility of labor and wanted a better “access to the political means.” Parliament was their chosen instrument.
In America, colonial states developed from the chartered trading company as “an autonomous State.” Indeed, “the merchant-State was set up complete in New England long before it was set up in Old England.” As a result, “the merchant-State is the only form of State that ever existed in America”—“a purely class State,” benefiting particular commercial interests. (This was also true in Virginia, despite a feudal-patriarchal overlay.)
The merchant-State’s exploits were limited by the above-mentioned theorem that successful exploitation requires prior expropriation of surplus lands. In America, Nock says, the state-system of land tenure—“monopoly of the use-value of land” and “monopoly of the economic rent of land”—provided the expropriation needed. Nock seems to be saying, first, that states tend to grant more land than the title holder can actually use; second, that in such cases, the title holder realizes illegitimate profits from selling or renting the land to those who do use it. His third point would be that by encouraging the existence of large landed estates, the state and its beneficiaries take away from other potential users a livelihood they could otherwise have had. The bourgeois state let “men of all sorts . . . climb into the exploiting class,” and with “a practically limitless field for speculation in rental-values,” Nock writes, “land speculation may be put down as the first major industry established in colonial America.” If land use rather than speculation had determined American settlement, “our western frontier would not yet be anywhere near the Mississippi River.” Hence all theses on “over-population,” beginning with Malthus, were “utterly incompetent” because deduced from “legal occupancy instead of actual occupancy.”
Pro-English commercial legislation cramped American would-be wielders of the political means to wealth, as did the King’s attempt in 1763 to curb colonial land grabs. Such interference irritated American elites no end. Political independence would provide them with full access to (and control of) state power.
Feudal elites “bequeathed” the idea of the political means to the bourgeoisie. “No other view of the State was ever held in colonial America,” Nock writes. He observes that since English policy limited colonial use of “both the political and economic means” (italics added), the language of natural rights and popular sovereignty had great appeal. The Declaration of Independence spoke to those who wished to combine “unlimited economic pseudo-individualism on the part of the State’s beneficiaries, and a judiciously managed exercise of political self-expression by the electorate.”
After American independence in 1783, Nock writes, “administration of the political means was not centralized in the federation, but in the several units. . . .” The federal level “had no taxing power, and no coercive power,” while each state had its own “bounties, concessions, subsidies,” and more. All 13 states continued the monopolistic state-system of land tenure defined above.
The struggle over a new constitution pitted “speculating, industrial, commercial and creditor interests” against “farmers and artisans and the debtor class generally.” The new plan widened the field of the political means, or of a specific mix of economic and political means. The outcome was free trade inside a bigger tariff zone: “the closer the centralization, the larger the exploitable area.” (This is Nock’s reading, in effect, of Federalist 10.) The classes behind the Constitution wanted “the British system . . . on a nation-wide scale”; they prevailed because mercantile interests were compact and agrarians dispersed—an early Public Choice insight. The Constitution provided republican forms with little democratic content. Under it, “the rights of life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional formality left open to eviscerating interpretations,” and sometimes “to simple executive disregard.” The point was to serve large property, however gotten, indiscriminately.
The 1789 Judiciary Act tied up the bundle, and with John Marshall’s able help the Supreme Court became “the highest law-making body.” Nock comments on the later “fetiches” of the party system and such “constitutional principles” as “strict construction,” always abandoned in practice. Jefferson’s dubiously constitutional Louisiana Purchase aimed at strengthening “agrarian control of the political means”—an achievement reversed after 1861. Nock scorns the embedded dishonesty of the system, even when defended with slogans involving “states rights” and “rugged individualism.” Over the long haul, business had “most eagerly urged on the State to take . . . the successive single steps that lead directly to collectivism.” Similarly, he says, modern farmers were not family farmers, but manufacturers and speculators typically clamoring for state intervention.
Nock was not optimistic about the future. Characterless “mass-men” were helping the state absorb society. Alongside ideological factors, he remarks on the state’s “overweening physical strength.” In any case, “reforming and revolutionary movements” showed an “incorrigible superficiality,” especially when “the only modification . . . necessary is that the smallest unit should reserve the taxing power strictly to itself.” History’s usual logic went as follows: “Conquest, confiscation, the erection of the State,” and ending, after a regular series of internal developments, with the victory of state power over social power. Social dissolution came last. A few “alien spirits” would record the tale.
Three Strands of Nockian Thought
It will be useful here to note key elements of Nock’s thought. (Unless noted, quotations are from Our Enemy, the State.)
Jeffersonianism. In 1787–1788, Americans chose between 13 predatory organizations and a large one at the center. Nock sided with the defeated parties. Echoing John Taylor, he writes that Federalists “aimed at bringing in the British system of economics, politics and judicial control, on a nation-wide scale.”
Progressive History. Nock dedicated Jefferson to Justice Louis Brandeis and wrote, too, that as “an old friend” of historian Charles Beard, he followed Beard’s interpretation of the politics of the early Republic. To this “economic interpretation,” Nock brought a breadth and resilience sometimes under- or unemployed by his successors (if any). When Nock says that ideological lags sustain institutions, or that the American Whigs of 1776 did not care deeply about popular sovereignty and natural rights, he adopts Progressive views containing considerable truth.
Georgism. Nock did not take Progressive history uncritically, but creatively modified it. His grounding in Henry George gave systematic character to his work. This should not astonish us. Edmund Opitz, long-time FEE staffer and member of the Nockian Society, thought George’s followers were “among the best libertarians we have,” and Murray Rothbard commended Georgists for seeing there is a land question. Georgism gave Nock somewhere to stand outside the existing order. The central claim about primal state allocation of resources gave Nock great theoretical leverage (but does not require belief in George’s single tax).
In Nock’s hands, these three strands afford the basis for startlingly radical historical conclusions. Thus individualism and laissez faire had not produced the “horrors” of English industrialization, “for no such regime ever existed in England.” The horrors arose instead from “the State’s primary intervention,” which expropriated peasant producers and kept land from competing “with industry for labour,” while Adam Smith preached the gospel of “landowners and mill-owners.”
Like Oppenheimer, Nock posits “an original allotment of the political means,” or “original intervention,” in place of Marx’s “primitive accumulation.” So armed, he calls American railroads “speculative enterprises enabled by State intervention.” Transportation was “purely incidental”; the railroads were really about “land-jobbing and subsidy-hunting.” Nock follows the trail of plunder. The French aristocracy, he notes, was “a closed corporation”; but a republic, “by an indefinite expansion of the cohesive power of public plunder, admits a steady accession of outsiders.” This made Britain a predatory republic rather than traditional monarchy (Jefferson).
Seeing the “cohesive power of public plunder” as a near-law of history, Nock anticipates the “mode of predation” analysis pursued by Pierre Bourdieu, Sir Ernest Gellner, Joan Dyste Lind, Rothbard, and others. Here the state becomes “an anti-social institution,” establishing injustice through law, “which the State itself manufactures for the service of its own primary ends.”
Nock also attended to ideology, noting that “certain arrangements of words” kept Americans (“the most unphilosophical of beings”) from seeing “how far the conversion of social power into State power has actually gone.” Americans cared nothing for “the theory of things.”
“State” and “Government”
To bare such mysteries, Nock distinguished “state” from “government.” This language probably owes something to late nineteenth-century Hegelian–American political science, but Nock repositions the absolute, totalizing state as a great evil, and takes government as a mere, limited mechanism of local self-rule. The state-concept becomes a critical tool, whose Hegelian content withers under Nock’s surgery. From within Nock’s radicalism, we see the need to understand the system as a whole, where the test of any public measure is, “What effect has this upon the sum-total of State power?” This sets a critical standard of sorts, to say the least.
In the end, our interest lies not merely in the task Nock undertook, but in what we could learn by following his lead.
Additional Bibliography
- Charles A. Beard, The Economic Basis of Politics and Related Essays (1957 [1922]), 192–193.
- George W. Carey, “America’s Founding and Limited Government,” Intercollegiate Review, Fall 2003/Spring 2004.
- William T. Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Phone Company: Why the Nation-State Is Not the Keeper of the Common Good,” Modern Theology, April 2004.
- Edward S. Corwin, Total War and the Constitution (1947), 78–84.
- Raymond Crotty, When Histories Collide: The Development and Impact of Individualist Capitalism (2001).
- Frank van Dun, “Political Liberalism and the Formal Rechtsstaat,” http://tinyurl.com/66vytd.
- Bruce P. Frohnen, “Individual and Group, Natural and Acquired Rights: On the Need for Unclear Distinctions,” Ave Maria Law Review (2005).
- George Gale, “John Locke on Territoriality,” Political Theory, November 1973.
- David Gross, “Temporality and the Modern State,” Theory and Society (1985).
- Jonathan R. T. Hughes, The Governmental Habit: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (1977), and American Economic History (1983).
- Walter Karp, Indispensable Enemies: The Politics of Misrule in America (1974).
- Karl Marx, Capital, I (1967 [1887]), Ch. 33.
- José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1957 [1932]).
- Thomas Paine, Selected Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. R. E. Roberts, (1945), 10–12 (English constitution).
- Michael Perelman, Classical Political Economy (1984); Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology (2006).
- Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market (1970).
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Political Writings, ed. R. A. Duerksen (1970), 43–45 (English constitution).
- Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988).
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=8368
What Conservatives Believe
WHAT CONSERVATIVES BELIEVE
By PHIL VALENTINE
August 3, 2008 –Conservatism is not only viable, it’s essential for a free society. The difference between liberalism and conservatism is best summed up in the old Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.” Liberals have been handing out fish. Conservatives have been handing out fishing poles.
1. Conservatism makes for a productive society. Alexander Tytler said of democracy: “It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.” Liberalism has raided the treasury to take from the producers and give to those less productive, leaving neither side with an incentive to work for either themselves or a nation.
2. Conservatism is compassionate. Liberals measure compassion by how many people are on the government dole. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people are off of it. While liberalism, by its very nature, looks down its nose at the less fortunate, conservatism sees all people as worthy of making it on their own. Conservatism is about preserving one’s dignity, not robbing it.
3. Liberals are pessimists by nature. The currency of liberalism is fear. It trades on the fear that something disastrous will happen unless liberals are there to stop it. Global warming, losing Social Security, banning guns; they all work from the vantage point that if liberals aren’t in charge something horrific will happen. The allure of Ronald Reagan was his positive message. He spoke of America’s greatness. He inspired pride and patriotism instead of trying to tear the country down and blame it for all of the world’s problems as many liberals do.
4. Military strength deters aggression. Peaceniks look upon our military as a war machine, and use any moment of calm as an excuse to cut its budget. It is a peace machine. Each time we fail to back our military, it emboldens those who would undermine our democracy or that of our allies.
5. Belief in God is a cornerstone of our republic. Try as the liberals may to separate them, there is no Constitutional separation of church and state, only a protection of religion from the state. Our founders believed this country was divinely inspired and it was only by remembering our religious roots that we would survive.
6. Conservatism believes in the entrepreneur. People who start companies take huge risks and they deserve everything they get if they succeed. Liberals want to punish entrepreneurs through confiscatory taxes. That’s why the IRS tells us that the top 5 percent of wage-earners pays more than 50 percent of the income tax. If you want to create jobs and, in turn, more money in the treasury, you must lower taxes on the rich and allow more people to take more chances.
7. Political correctness is the liberal version of fascism. Liberals have attempted to control the debate in America by attempting to control the language, and they’ve succeeded to some degree. There’s been no bigger muzzle on free speech than political correctness.
8. Guns are good. Liberals are quick to defend our freedom of speech, press and our right to protest but they ignore our right to bear arms, which figures prominently into our Bill of Rights. These selective constitutionalists will erode all of our constitutional rights if they succeed in being able to cherry pick them when they’re convenient.
9. Quotas are wrong. Society seems oblivious to the obvious solution to discrimination: strict enforcement of antidiscrimination laws. Making innocent people pay for the sins of previous generations runs counter to our fundamental principles and undermines race relations in our society.
10. Conservatism is still relevant today. Both Democrats and Republicans have veered from the basic philosophy of less government and more personal responsibility. Government is these to do only what the private sector won’t, can’t or shouldn’t do. That means the government shouldn’t be subsidizing professional sports or multi-million-dollar corporations any more than it should be subsidizing an able-bodied man who can work but chooses not to. Government must return to the basic conservative philosophy, as Jefferson said, “The government is best which governs least.”
Phil Valentine’s forthcoming book is “The Conservative’s Handbook: Defining the Right Position on Issues from A to Z” (Cumberland House).
Where are we going?
John Willson
Hillsdale College
Where in the World Are We Going?
Sunday Morning Session
The Philadelphia Society National Meeting
Philadelphia, April 2, 2006
I begin with a parable. A sixty-two year old blond haired grandmother forgot to take off cross-stitch scissors as she approached an airline check-point. She was patted down. She was virtually strip-searched. They took her scissors away. She looked at me for help. I failed her. In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson announced what he said was his “overriding rule”: “Our foreign policy must always be an extension of our domestic policy. Our safest guide to what we do abroad is what we do at home.” It will come as no surprise to members of this society that foreign and domestic policies always reflect each other. It is a truism.
Progressives usually reason from the domestic to the foreign, but that doesn’t mean that the truism doesn’t work the other way around. LBJ wanted to make a Great Society in Vietnam and prove it by what he called “coonskins on the wall;” proofs of “good things” we were doing to create democracy. We became as great a destabilizing force in Southeast Asia as the communists.
Walter Lippmann warned us in 1938 that the “dominant dogma of the age” was that government has the ability to make us happy. If government can make us happy, then using our military might to make other people happy should not, it seems, make Americans less happy. I’m afraid, however, and we have ample evidence of this in the history of every policy adventure since the Philippines: that those who think that “regime change” is a proper and valid goal of foreign policy almost always think that our republic is made of play-dough. Social engineering abroad leads inevitably to social engineering at home, and vice-versa.
The opposite of “conservative” is not “liberal” or “progressive,” The opposite of conservative is “ideologue.” I’m with Forrest McDonald on this point. America’s great achievement, our only real achievement, is limited government. The march away from limited government is led by the band playing the dominant dogma of the age, conducted by ideologues, who used to call themselves liberals but most recently
insist that they are Republicans and conservatives.
I had a good talk with David Hackett Fischer (a great historian) after he had read a piece I wrote called “World War II: the Great Liberal War”. My argument was that although Robert Taft may have been a little gloomy when he said that going into World War II guaranteed the demise of the Constitution, he wasn’t far off. David argued that World War II “unleashed the full potential of American democracy.” I replied that the way we fought the war wounded the American constitutional republic nearly unto death. Both of us may have been right.
Our foreign policy failures since World War II—and there have been many (except for one)—are almost all due to sound principles being transformed into ideology, sometimes intentionally, sometimes by circumstances. If one reads NSC-68 carefully, a document that bound us to one folly after another for twenty-six years before it was declassified shortly after the last helicopter left Saigon; or if one reads carefully Prospect for America, a frightening book funded by the Rockefeller family that sent one ideologue after another into top policy positions from Kennedy to Bush II, one would understand why Peggy Noonan and my wife get strip-searched at airports. Ben Franklin, whose contributions to our republic I sometimes quibble with, said famously that “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
National Security Strategy 2002, widely acclaimed (and criticized) as a statement of conservative foreign policy principles, in fact stands directly in the tradition of NSC-68 and Prospect for America. NSS2002 is supposedly innovative because it warns that the United States “will exercise our right of self-defense by the first use of armed force.” In fact the earlier documents implied this same doctrine, and all three spend far greater amounts of ink putting together comprehensive political, economic, social, and educational plans to democratize the
world. This used to be called “Liberal Internationalism.” Now that it’s associated with Republicans and conservatives, it must mean that we have all bought into the Dominant Dogma of the Age. George Kennan was the greatest of our foreign policy conservatives. Thank God that the ideologues didn’t transform his measured, humble, prudent “containment” into nuclear war, although they came close. Such limited government as we have left is probably due to him, or to his way of thinking. If we any longer wish to maintain a constitutional republic, what is our proper “role in the world?” As small a role as possible.
Mountains beyond Mountains
Sarah Bramwell
The Philadelphia Society 40th Gala! National Meeting
May 1, 2004
In your program, you will read that I am a freelance writer. This was true at the time the program was printed, but it is no longer. I am in the employ of Colorado Governor Bill Owens as his deputy press secretary. I tell you this not only because of the obvious benefits of self-aggrandizement, but because my position obliges me to say that the following opinions are my own, and do not reflect those of the Governor.
Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things: defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism. A half century later, these goals are no longer relevant. The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?
Many conservatives, especially since September 11, believe that a major, if not the major calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy. Let me say that I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement.
It is mistaken because the truth of the matter is that conservatism neither has nor ought to have a particular foreign policy. I certainly do not mean to say that conservatives should cease to be interested in foreign policy. But the role of conservatives qua conservatives in foreign policy, as in every other area, is to resist the temptations of ideology. Everything else, like so much in politics, is a matter of prudence and judgment, on which there is wide room for legitimate disagreement.
I suspect that confusion exists today on this rather elementary point in large part because the Cold War created an artificial situation in which all conservatives agreed on the same foreign policy goal and strategy. Communism was an armed, international ideology that threatened to obliterate civilization. All conservatives, therefore, were obliged to fight it and buck up the West’s resolve in the struggle against the Soviet Union. In sum, anti-Communism was not a question on which conservatives could reasonably disagree, but an essential conservative principle.
No similar principle, however, exists today. Despite this, many conservatives have continued the Cold War habit of making foreign policy into an ideological battle. On one side we have conservatives who believe that the United States has a moral obligation to spread democracy anywhere and everywhere around the globe; on the other, we have conservatives who believe that an activist foreign policy betrays conservatism’s isolationist or “America First” roots.
Neither view will wash. Isolationism in the 1930s was nothing but a logical deduction from conservative anti-Communism. Right-wingers argued against intervening in World War II because Nazi Germany, as unappealing as it was, thwarted Stalin’s ambitions. With Nazi Germany gone, therefore, hardly a single conservative isolationist remained by the time the Cold War was in full swing. All quondam isolationists either died like Nock, or converted, like Buckley.
Isolationism, in other words, was a strategy, not a guiding principle. Today, it wears a no less utopian guise than pro-democracy triumphalism. What do we do, after all, with our myriad deployments and alliances around the world? To back out on them all immediately would be disastrous. It is all very well and good to say that in some Platonic Empyrean the United States would only worry about its own liberty and not that of others, but here in our fallen state, such a scenario is unimaginable.
We likewise have no moral obligation to spread democracy around the world. After all, democracy is not even the best form of government. Conservatives, together with the weight of the Western tradition, have always favored a mixed constitution that balances the interests of the one, the few, and the many. It goes without saying that “We must make the world safe for mixed constitutions” is not the most euphonious rallying cry.
None of this is to say that some form of isolationist or interventionist foreign policy cannot be endorsed by conservatives. On the contrary, my very point is that both policies could be seen as properly conservative grand strategies for achieving American interests. For some time now, conservatives have enjoyed the liberty to disagree on important questions of foreign policy. What I would like to see is that we be allowed to do so without fear that someone else in the movement will declare us anathema.
My own opinion is that while Islamist-inspired terrorism is the most immediate threat to our security, in the long term our major struggle is against the international class of technocrats that in the name of “international law” seeks to efface our bitterly-won rights to self-government. Conservatives must fashion a strategy not only against terrorism but also against the international New Class, and our strategy for defeating the one must not be inconsistent with our strategy for defeating the other.
In any case, the important point is once again that articulating and defending some kind of international policy is not the major goal of conservatism in the next forty years. How about the second founding goal of the conservative movement, namely, halting creeping socialism? Like it or not, the administrative state is here to stay. Conservatives can continue to nibble away at it, and the past decade has seen a small wave of reforms that leaves one with some modest hope for the future. We’re not going to abolish social security, but we are going to see private health accounts that give Americans more freedom. The public-school system will clatter along in all its disastrousness, but charter schools will become more and more popular. These and other improvements on the margins should continue, but there are other things that are more important.
So, when the two founding goals are no longer relevant, what is left for us as conservatives to do? Well, since the 1960s, the conservative movement took on a third goal, namely winning the culture wars. By culture wars, I mean everything from preserving traditional morality, to passing on the Western inheritance, to preserving a distinctly American common culture, to resisting the threat posed by biotechnology to human nature itself. To win these wars, conservatives must make the case against such things as gay marriage, stem-cell research, open borders, and our hideous suburban sprawl. All these battles are really part of the same war—a war, unfortunately, that we seem determined to lose.
Since my time is limited, I’d like to examine our losing ways by looking only at one issue: gay marriage. In college, even as we conservatives would lament the inglorious decline of the West, even as we steeped ourselves in doom-and-gloom conservatism like so many Romans in their baths, still we could not help but be mightily optimistic about the future of conservatism. Never had conservatives at Yale been so many and so active; never had conservatives had such a wealth of opportunities for writing, bringing in speakers, and influencing the debate on campus.
And yet in the past nine months, this has all appeared quite hollow to me. Why? Because of the amazing disappearing act conservatives have pulled in the face of gay marriage. After so many advances, it seems, we have rolled over and played dead.
The most rigorous and intellectually impressive conservative writers—the ones we depended upon to articulate the conservative position on such controversial issues as stem cells, abortion, and affirmative action—have, it seems, been struck dumb. They have relegated themselves to reporting on the political reaction to gay marriage or critiquing the vicissitudes of federal marriage amendment proposals. Virtually everyone has avoided the basic issue of whether sodomy ought to be normalized.
It used to be that, when challenged in the culture wars, conservatives only gain in strength. The conservative movement benefited greatly from an infusion of intellectual firepower and initiative from disenchanted liberals and democrats during the 1960s and ’70s. Ronald Reagan extended this crossover effect into the political arena, solidifying the intellectual gains that conservatism had made in a very public and concrete way. Conservatism has continued boisterously to defy the aftershocks of the 60s and 70s.
Now, by contrast, as gay marriage becomes a reality, we have amazingly only become weaker. I have no idea what accounts for this extraordinary lack of nerve. What I do know is that no sooner had the Lawrence decision come down from on high but conservatives, discouraged before the battle had even begun, lamented the inevitability of gay marriage, posited a new world of alternative arrangements, and even urged that family law be in some sense privatized. It seemed that the fighting spirit had all of a sudden departed from even the most reliable conservative organs.
That few prominent conservative thinkers and writers are making the intellectually difficult and socially risky case against homosexualism has had a devastating effect. Thousands of conservatives—college students, housewives, activists, even President Bush and members of Congress—rely on the pundit class to make the controversial arguments not just so that they know what to think and say, but because the pundit class has given them the intellectual cover to do so. The most important job of polemicists is constantly to move—or, at the very least, defend—the boundaries of debate. In effect, they are expanding and securing the perimeter for the footsoldiers to occupy. Well, when the advance guard goes AWOL, the whole conservative side in the culture wars collapses.
To say that the institution of marriage is important to Western civilization and therefore worth fighting for is an understatement. And yet when this institution is under attack as never before in Western history, conservatives are silent. One need look no further than the covers and tables of contents of the most prominent conservative journals for evidence of this. Of 50 articles, probably 40 of them will be on the War on Terror, and only two or three on gay marriage. This is the cultural battle of our age, and we write an article here and there on the subject. There is no precedent for this disappearing act in the history of the conservative movement.
This is precisely what the other side wants. This is a fight, mind you, not only for traditional sexual morality, but for the very liberty that conservatives have always prided themselves on defending. With the advent of government-mandated gay marriage, what is taught in the public schools will change: gay sex will have to be taught just as heterosexual sex is. The words “husband” and “wife” will have to go. Meanwhile, the full power of federal anti-discrimination laws will be brought to bear, making discrimination against gays illegal. Catholic charities and Christian schools may be forced to hire and teach against their religion. I am not being hysterical, for these things have already come to pass in other Western nations. Sure, we have the free speech clause of the First Amendment to protect us, but that only goes so far, and it is subject to the vagaries of Supreme Court interpretation. There is a chance that we conservatives will no longer even be allowed our saving remnant, much less be a major political and moral force.
Once we lose the gay marriage fight, the hard-won gains that have been made with regard to traditional sexual morality will be lost. How do you argue for abstinence and monogamy when there’s a whole population of people who can get married but don’t bother? Once heterosexual and homosexual sex are equated, all the arguments for traditional sexual morality—from prudence, from nature, from religion—collapse.
So, where do I think conservatism will be in the next 40 years? I must confess that I am not exactly full of hope. The danger in the next 40 years is not losing the battles but, for want of fighting them, becoming irrelevant.
The issues with which we will grapple in the coming decades—chief among them cloning and other matters biotechnological—will require our focus and our unity. If we can but put aside our differences for a while, we stand a chance. If we cannot, then we don’t deserve that chance.
Thank you.
Gottfried vs. Frum
Fatuous and Malicious
by Paul Gottfried
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Responding to David Frum (who may soon become the first non-Catholic editor-in-chief of National Review) is a bit like wading through a cesspool. His writing is wall-to-wall toxic waste, though apparently smelly enough to scare Bob Novak into denouncing the “unknown” paleos with whom he was being linked. Novak assured his readers, before Frum went after him a second time this Tuesday, that he thoroughly “abhors” the “racist and anti-Semitic” paleos Frum had just excoriated. Although Novak strained to distance himself from the evil ones, he gave himself away by defending one of the neocons’ favorite whipping boys, Charles A. Lindbergh. That may have driven Frum into launching his second attack.
The question that goes begging in any case is whether Frum proves that any of his targets is a racist, except by implication. Expressing reservations about the fetid personal life and leftist demagogy of Martin Luther King, a practice that Bill Buckley, George Will, Will Herberg, and even Ronald Reagan once pursued, now qualifies as “racist.” And somehow all paleos, including Tom Fleming, who is perpetually denouncing racial nationalism, are linked to explicitly racial nationalist publications. As for the anti-Semitism raging among the paleos, has Frum bothered to notice all the Jews lined up on the paleo side? One could furnish several minyanim (prayer quorums), including Israelis. Speaking of Israelis, Frum should read the acidic comments about his bad manners published on this website yesterday by Ilana Mercer. In contrast to the NR editorial board, Ilana is not impressed by David’s slipshod accusations or his endorsement of Jewish interests.
Another relevant issue that comes to mind about Frum is selective amnesia. Certainly he knows me and not only as a “relentlessly solipsistic” and “unfocused” professor. My late father-in-law rented commercial property to his family; and my late wife knew his mother, a famous leftist TV personality on CBC. I first met David (before he became a neocon echo) in 1986, when I was a featured speaker at the Philadelphia Society panel to which he makes portentous references in his screed. In fact, the speech that he (Ed Feulner and Emmett Tyrrell) objected to most strenuously at the time was mine; not surprisingly, I was never invited back to inflict my rhetoric on another national meeting of the Philadelphia Society. What I said tout simplement is that neocons are social democrats and that except for their rightwing Jewish nationalism, it is hard for me to see how they fit into any kind of Right. This judgment came from my investigations as an intellectual historian, who had written books on the European and American Right. At that time, however, I had not yet encountered the Trotskyist fury of the Frum-Goldberg-Podhoretz gang.
The speech by Stephen Tonsor, which the Frum claims “startled the room by anathematizing the neocons and their work,” is falsely depicted as a statement of Catholic anti-Semitism. For those who are interested, William Campbell of the Philadelphia Society has available for distribution tapes of this oration, which should make the following facts clear: Tonsor was attacking the neocons (counterfactually) as rightwing Nietzscheans, “whose ideas, as even the guards at Auschwitz knew, led to the death camps.” Tonsor was speaking as a Catholic democrat, who based his belief in constitutional government on Catholic and Anglo-Catholic natural law teachings. Supposedly the neocons were dangerous to the American Right because they believed in pagan elitism, which Tonsor considered as incompatible with American conservative values. While the speaker went on to criticize the self-assertiveness of neocons trying to take over and redefine the American Right, it is unclear to me what was anti-Semitic about his presentation.
Note this speech was full of dubious assertions: that Nietzsche’s thoughts led ineluctably to the Holocaust, that the neocons are (utinam fuisset) rightwingers, and that the conservative movement until the 1980s was Catholic and Anglo-Catholic. (What the hell do you do with all those Protestants who predominated in the interwar American Right?) What Tonsor was not doing, however, was venting anti-Semitism on his Jewish listeners.
A few other observations may be in order concerning the dishonest way in which Frum pads his brief against the paleos. Mel Bradford did not come “to the government hiring window with certain disadvantages” in his bid for the directorship of NEH in 1981 simply because he was too far to the right for a “balky Congress.” He underwent months of character assassination at the hands of Frum’s neocon pals, including George Will, Ed Feulner, and the Kristol family, the result of which was to make him unconfirmable. One of the most effective smearers was the far-left historian Eric Foner, whom, as I show in my history of the conservative movement, was awarded under Bill Bennett’s tenure as director close to a half a million dollars in personal grants. The incriminating statement by Bradford, which Foner and his neocon sponsors turned against Bradford, comparing Lincoln to Hitler, was yanked out of context. It came from a crabbed footnote about messianic rhetoric in a number of political figures, among whom were listed Lincoln and Hitler. By the way, it is not clear why Southerners like Bradford, whose ancestors had been devastated by invading federal armies sent to overrun them by President Lincoln, should share the admiration for the same heroes as a Canadian global democrat resident in the US. Why can’t Frum and Bradford have their own separate list of heroes? Although I personally regard Cromwell as a protector of my own Jewish ancestors and as an inspired nation builder, I do not expect my wife, who had Irish ancestors, to share this admiration.
And even assuming that I am “relentlessly solipsistic” and “unfocused” as a teacher, neither of which charge Frum demonstrates, why should I not “repeatedly complain” if neocons kept me from a graduate professorship at Catholic University? If that charge is true, which happens to be the case, why should I not be ticked off, even if the Frum judges me in a malaprop to be “solipsistic”? What he means to say is that I’ve been graceless enough to go after my attackers, who left fingerprints all around the scene of the crime.
Since a number of young defenders have weighed in on our beleaguered side, I shall skip over the rest of Frum’s baseless accusations. But I would like to underline, as Myles Kantor began to do a few days ago, that the most lurid examples of unpatriotic conservatism and rightwing racial and ethnic insensitivity can be found in Frum’s and Goldberg’s magazine of choice. In the sixties National Review, and its flamboyant editor-in-chief, defended segregation and the civilizational right of white people to keep Negroes, as they were then called, from gaining political power. One of Buckley’s best-remembered editorials of the sixties took this position emphatically. During the Eichmann trial in 1961, the unreconstructed NR lamented “Jewish vengefulness” and the harmful effect that this alleged German-bashing would have on the “struggle against Communism.”
Only God knows what Frum (or perhaps Novak) would say about us paleos if we sounded like the old Bill Buckley, before he was taken over by the neocon body-snatchers! And on the subject of the unpatriotic American Right, what about this statement, ostensibly on white identity politics, that Jonah Goldberg placed on NROnline: “After all the United States took land from the British. And, no matter how you slice it, America’s claim to Texas and the Southwest is certainly far less compelling than Israel’s to its land. When European Jews not already living in Palestine arrived there after World War II, the area was largely empty. Meanwhile, when colonists came to North America, they had no historic claim to the land whatsoever and, besides, it was occupied.”
This last assertion is so unmistakably stupid that Goldberg should be “envious,” as he told us in a recent blog, of Frum’s relatively elegant polemics. For the record: Arabs were far more densely present in Palestine and stood at a higher level of civilization when Jewish settlers arrived there from Europe than were those 3 to 3.5 million Amerindians who were roaming North America when the European settlers came. The pristine character of Palestine when the Jewish settlers arrived is even more questionable than the image of American pioneers building their homes on totally uninhabited American land. But why would a “conservative” and “patriot” sound like the Nation in challenging the American claim to what is now American territory, while pushing a chauvinistic Israeli fiction that most sensible Israelis have rejected?
Shall we try to guess? The answer, I would submit, is not that Goldberg and his fellow-neocons are real or wannabe agents of the Israeli government. I doubt such an explanation can account for why Frum this morning announced on public radio that the US must revolutionize Iran, because women there are being “punished for wearing lip stick.” The neocons are serious about their doctrine of permanent modernizing revolution spearheaded from Washington, quite independently of their commitment to the Israeli Right. Moreover, their place of origin and activity is in this part of the world and not in the Middle East; and their chief sponsors have been those who enabled the neocons to take over the American Right. It is these enablers, and not Mr. Sharon, who produced the American conservative debacle. This disaster on the Right has now morphed into something even worse that is polluting the entire body politic. Bob Novak’s attempt to protect himself from being identified with those who have noticed the problem will help neither his moral reputation nor his journalistic credibility.
Paul Gottfried is professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author of, most recently, the highly recommended Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt.
Frum vs. Conservatives
| Unpatriotic Conservatives A war against America. EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece appears in the April 7, 2003, issue of National Review. |
“I respect and admire the French, who have been a far greater nation than we shall ever be, that is, if greatness means anything loftier than money and bombs.”
— THOMAS FLEMING, “HARD RIGHT,” MARCH 13, 2003
rom the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves “conservatives.”
These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world — the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine — in favor of a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.
And they are exerting influence. When Richard Perle appeared on Meet the Press on February 23 of this year, Tim Russert asked him, “Can you assure American viewers . . . that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?” Perle rebutted the allegation. But what a grand victory for the antiwar conservatives that Russert felt he had to air it.
You may know the names of these antiwar conservatives. Some are famous: Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak. Others are not: Llewellyn Rockwell, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming, Scott McConnell, Justin Raimondo, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Jude Wanniski, Eric Margolis, and Taki Theodoracopulos.
The antiwar conservatives aren’t satisfied merely to question the wisdom of an Iraq war. Questions are perfectly reasonable, indeed valuable. There is more than one way to wage the war on terror, and thoughtful people will naturally disagree about how best to do it, whether to focus on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah or on states like Iraq and Iran; and if states, then which state first?
But the antiwar conservatives have gone far, far beyond the advocacy of alternative strategies. They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation’s enemies.
Common cause: The websites of the antiwar conservatives approvingly cite and link to the writings of John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Ted Rall, Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, and other anti-Americans of the far Left.
Terror denial: In his column of December 26, 2002, Robert Novak attacked Condoleezza Rice for citing Hezbollah, instead of al-Qaeda, as the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization: “In truth, Hezbollah is the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization from Israel’s standpoint. While viciously anti-American in rhetoric, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah is focused on the destruction of Israel. ‘Outside this fight [against Israel], we have done nothing,’ Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the organization’s secretary-general, said in a recent New York Times interview.” The sheik did not say, and Novak did not bother to add, that Hezbollah twice bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, murdering more than 60 people, and drove a suicide bomb into a Marine barracks in October 1983, killing 241 servicemen.
Espousing defeatism: Here is Robert Novak again, this time on September 17, 2001, predicting that any campaign in Afghanistan would be a futile slaughter: “The CIA, in its present state, is viewed by its Capitol Hill overseers as incapable of targeting bin Laden. That leads to an irresistible impulse to satisfy Americans by pulverizing Afghanistan.” And here is Patrick Buchanan that same day gloomily asserting that the United States would be as baffled by Osama bin Laden as the British Empire was by George Washington: “We remain unrivaled in material wealth and military dominance, but these are no longer the components of might. . . . Our instinct is the strongman’s impulse: hit back, harder. But like British Lobsterbacks dropped in a colonial wilderness, we don’t know this battle, and the weapons within our reach are blunt.”
Excuse-making: On September 30, 2002, Pat Buchanan offered this explanation of 9/11 during a debate on Chris Matthews’s Hardball: “9/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and where we are not wanted. We were attacked because we were on Saudi sacred soil and we are so-called repressing the Iraqis and we’re supporting Israel and all the rest of it.”
Conspiracy-theorizing: Justin Raimondo, an Internet journalist who delivered Pat Buchanan’s nominating speech at the Reform party convention in 2000, alleged in December 2001 that Israel was implicated in the terror attacks of 9/11: “Whether Israeli intelligence was watching, overseeing, collaborating with or combating the bin Ladenites is an open question. . . . That the Israelis had some significant foreknowledge and involvement in the events preceding 9/11 seems beyond dispute.” Raimondo has also repeatedly dropped broad hints that he believes the October 2001 anthrax attacks were the work of an American Jewish scientist bent on stampeding the U.S. into war.
Yearning for defeat: On January 30, 2002, Eric Margolis, the American-born foreign editor of the Toronto Sun, appealed to the leaders of the Arab world to unite in battle against the U.S. “What could Arabs do to prevent a war of aggression against Iraq that increasingly resembles a medieval crusade? Form a united diplomatic front that demands U.N. inspections continue. Stage an oil boycott of the U.S. if Iraq is attacked. Send 250,000 civilians from across the Arab World to form human shields around Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. Boycott Britain, Turkey, Kuwait, and the Gulf states that join or abet the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Withdraw all funds on deposit in U.S. and British banks. Accept payment for oil only in Euros, not dollars. Send Arab League troops to Iraq, so that an attack on Iraq is an attack on the entire League. Cancel billions worth of arms contracts with the U.S. and Britain. At least make a token show of male hormones and national pride.”
Raimondo was more explicit still on March 12, 2003. Speaking of the negative consequences he foresaw of even a successful American campaign in Iraq, he wrote: “It is a high price to pay for ‘victory’ — so high that patriots might almost be forgiven if they pine for defeat.”
The writers I quote call themselves “paleoconservatives,” implying that they are somehow the inheritors of an older, purer conservatism than that upheld by their impostor rivals. But even Robert Taft and Charles Lindbergh ceased accommodating Axis aggression after Pearl Harbor. Since 9/11, by contrast, the paleoconservatives have collapsed into a mood of despairing surrender unparalleled since the Vichy republic went out of business. James Burnham famously defined liberalism as “the ideology of Western suicide.” What are we to make of self-described conservatives who see it as their role to make excuses for suicide bombers?
“While paleos sometimes like to characterize their beliefs as merely the continuation of the conservative thought of the 1950s and ’60s, and while in fact many of them do have their personal and intellectual roots in the conservatism of that era, the truth is that what is now called paleoconservatism is at least as new as the neoconservatism at which many paleos like to sniff as a newcomer.”
— SAMUEL FRANCIS, IN THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, DECEMBER 16, 2002
I HAPPEN to have been in the room when “paleoconservatism” first declared itself as a self-conscious political movement. It was in the spring of 1986, at a meeting of the Philadelphia Society, and Professor Stephen Tonsor of the University of Michigan read the birth announcement.
The Philadelphia Society is a forum where the various conservative factions met (and meet) to thrash out their differences: libertarians who believed that parks should be sold to private industry, traditionalists who regretted the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, and — most recently — neoconservatives who had cast their first Republican ballot in 1980. At first, the neoconservatives were warmly welcomed by the veteran members. But the warmth did not last long, and at a panel discussion that day, Tonsor startled the room by anathematizing the neocons and their works.
True conservatives, Tonsor said, were Roman Catholic at root, or at a minimum Anglo-Catholic. They studied literature, not the social sciences. And while he was very glad to see that some non-religious social scientists were now arriving at conservative conclusions, they should understand that their role in the conservative movement must be a subordinate one. “We are all delighted,” he said (I am quoting from memory), “to see the town whore come to church — even to sing in the choir — but not to lead the service.”
I wish I could say that Tonsor’s outburst was motivated by a deep disagreement over important principles. Certainly principles had their place. But as the paleos themselves tell the story, the quarrel that erupted into view that day in 1986 began as a squabble over jobs and perks in the Reagan administration — from the perception that, as Francis later put it, neoconservatives had arranged matters so that “their team should get the rewards of office and of patronage and that the other team of the older Right receive virtually nothing.”
A quick reality check here: It is not in fact true that the ambitions of the paleos fell victim to neocon plots. Paleo Grievance Number 1 is the case of Mel Bradford, a gifted professor at the University of Dallas, now dead. Bradford had hoped to be appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981, but lost out to William Bennett. Unfortunately for him, Bradford came to the government hiring window with certain disadvantages: He had worked on the George Wallace campaign in 1968, and he had published an essay that could plausibly be read to liken Abraham Lincoln to Hitler. In the spring of 1981, Ronald Reagan was trying to persuade a balky Congress simultaneously to enact a giant tax cut and to authorize a huge defense buildup; to slow inflation, end fuel shortages, and halt Soviet aggression, from Afghanistan to Angola. It was not, in other words, a good moment to refight the Civil War.
Bradford could never accept that it was his own writings that had doomed him. As Oscar Wilde observed, “Misfortunes one can endure: They come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one’s own faults — ah! There is the sting of life.” Easier and less painful to blame others and pity oneself. And so Bradford’s friends and partisans did. When this one was passed over for a promotion at his newspaper or that one failed to be hired at a more prestigious university, they detected the hand of the hated neoconservatives.
Perhaps the most relentlessly solipsistic of the disgruntled paleos is Paul Gottfried, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania who has published an endless series of articles about his professional rebuffs. Gottfried teaches at Elizabethtown because, as he repeatedly complains, “in what is literally a footnote to conservative history . . . I was denied a graduate professorship at Catholic University of America by neo-conservative lobbying.” Nor did the neocons stop there. When a routine outside professional evaluation of the Elizabethtown faculty reported in 2002 that Gottfried often arrived in class “unprepared or with little thought as to what he would say” and that his students found his classes “unfocused, with often rambling discussions,” he responded by posting an article on the LewRockwell.com website complaining that he had been the victim of, yes, a “neocon attack.”
“[Clarence] Thomas calls the segregation of the Old South, where he grew up, ‘totalitarian.’ But that’s liberal nonsense. Whatever its faults, and it certainly had them, that system was far more localized, decent, and humane than the really totalitarian social engineering now wrecking the country.”
— LLEWELLYN H. ROCKWELL
FRUSTRATED ambition is not a propitious foundation for an intellectual movement. “Jobs for the lads” may be an effective slogan for a trade union, but the paleos needed to develop a more idealistic explanation for their resentments, if they were to have any hope of influencing the main body of the conservative movement. They needed an ideology of their own.
Developing such an ideology was not going to be an easy task. There was no shortage of disaffected right-wingers; but what did Samuel Francis (who had spent the early 1980s investigating subversives for Senator John East) have in common with the economist Murray Rothbard (who had cheered when the Communists captured Saigon)? What connection could there be between the devoutly Catholic Thomas Molnar and the exuberantly pagan Justin Raimondo? It didn’t help that people attracted to the paleoconservative label tended to be the most fractious and quarrelsome folk in the conservative universe.
Yet the job had to be done — and thanks to a lucky accident, there was a place to do it. In the 1970s, Leopold Tyrmand, an émigré Polish Jew who had survived the death camps, scraped together some money to found a magazine he hoped would serve as a conservative alternative to The New York Review of Books. He called it Chronicles of Culture, and based it (for Tyrmand was not a man to do things in the obvious way) in the rusting industrial city of Rockford, Ill. Tyrmand died suddenly in 1985. His successor, Thomas Fleming, shortened the magazine’s name to Chronicles and redirected its attention from cultural critique to ideological war.
Fleming was in at least one way a poor choice for the role of paleoconservative ideologist-in-chief. He is the very opposite of a systematic, deliberate thinker: a jumpy, wrathful man so prone to abrupt intellectual reversals that even some of his friends and supporters question his equilibrium. But Fleming proved himself a nervy and imaginative editor. He recruited Samuel Francis as a columnist and collaborator, and Francis was a man nobody could accuse of inconsistency.
Francis advocated a politics of uninhibited racial nationalism — a politics devoted to the protection of the interests of what he called the “Euro-American cultural core” of the American nation. He argued that the time had come for conservatives to jettison their old commitment to limited government: A “nationalist ethic,” he wrote in 1991, “may often require government action.”
So, Chronicles advocated protectionism for American industry and restrictions on nonwhite immigration. It defended minimum-wage laws and attacked corporations that moved operations off-shore. And it championed the Southern Confederacy of the 1860s and the anti-civil rights resistance of the 1960s.
The decisive year for both the magazine and paleoconservatism was 1989. Until then, Chronicles had managed to coexist with most of the rest of the conservative community. This coexistence was symbolized by the Rockford Institute, which sponsored not only Chronicles but also the Center for Religion and Society in New York, headed by Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran minister who had been involved in both the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam protests.
Neuhaus’s experiences as a pastor in the New York slums and his passionate opposition to abortion had led him rightward in the 1980s. But he was disturbed by the racial politics of Chronicles, and also by what he termed its “insensitiv[ity] to the classical language of anti-Semitism.” Neuhaus contemplated severing the connection between his institute and Rockford. Word of his dissatisfaction filtered back to Illinois, and, one day in May, Rockford struck back. An executive from the institute jetted out to New York, fired Neuhaus and his entire staff, ordered them literally out onto the streets, and changed the office locks. The paleos at Rockford exploded in dumbfounded rage when the foundations that had been supporting Neuhaus’s work refused to switch the money over to them instead.
The shuttering of Neuhaus’s offices brought the emerging paleoconservative movement to national attention. The incident was covered by the New York Times and commented upon by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. It was, however, events across the Atlantic that gave the shuttering a larger importance.
At the same time that Fleming was sacking Neuhaus, the people of Leopold Tyrmand’s native Poland were engaged in their country’s first free elections since World War II. Solidarity won all but one open seat in the lower house of parliament and 92 of 100 seats in the Polish senate. Over the next six months, the Communist governments of central Europe would collapse.
The conservative movement had come to life in the 1950s to goad the governments of the West to wage the Cold War more energetically and skillfully. When NATIONAL REVIEW declared in its founding editorial that it would stand “athwart history, yelling Stop” the history it had in mind was Marx’s “History” — the “History” with a capital H that was supposed to run inevitably toward Communism. By November 1989, that History had indeed stopped — was rapidly running backward — and the great question for conservatives was, “What now?”
“How horrible to realize, ten years after the Cold War, that the real evil empire is not some foreign regime, but the U.S. military state. It bombs buses, bridges, factories, churches, and schools, expresses ‘regret,’ and then continues to do the same. A host of innocents have died from U.S. attacks — a fact which should make every patriot wince. The propaganda should also make us wonder to what extent the old Communist Threat was trumped up to plunder the American taxpayer.”
— LLEWELLYN H. ROCKWELL, “THE END OF BUCKLEYISM,” IN SPINTECH, JUNE 12, 1999
IN August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait. Iraq plus Kuwait and prospectively Saudi Arabia would possess the world’s biggest reservoir of oil. With this vast new oil wealth, Saddam could at last acquire the nuclear weapons he coveted — and thus dominate the entire Middle East. President George H. W. Bush quickly decided that the conquest of Kuwait “will not stand” and assembled a global coalition against Saddam. The paleoconservative repudiation of the Gulf War would be their first major independent ideological adventure.
Three weeks after the invasion, Pat Buchanan declared his opposition to war in one of his regular appearances on The McLaughlin Group: “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East — the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”
It would be hard to come up with a more improbable idea than that of George H. W. Bush of Kennebunkport as warmaking servant of the interests of International Jewry. Yet over the next six months, Buchanan and the Chronicles writers would repeatedly argue that America was being dragged to war in the Gulf by a neoconservative coterie indifferent to true American interests: the “neoconservatives,” as Buchanan said, “the ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyists who signed on in the name of anti-Communism and now control our foundations and set the limits of permissible dissent.”
Early in 1990, Buchanan published an article in The National Interest (a journal founded, ironically enough, by Irving Kristol, who sometimes seemed to be the only person in America willing to accept the “neoconservative” label), in which Buchanan called for a new foreign policy of “America First.” And “America First” would be the slogan of Buchanan’s presidential run in 1992: more irony, because by 1992 the paleos were frankly disgusted, not merely with the rest of the conservative movement and the Republican party, but with much of America. “Last month,” Buchanan wrote in 1991, “during a week at CNN in New York, I rode nightly up Eighth Avenue in a cab. It was like passing through a different world. We are two countries; and many Americans in the first country are getting weary of subsidizing and explaining away the deepening failure of the second, and want only to get clear of it.”
Fed up as they were with the Second America, however, the paleos felt sure that they spoke for the First America with an integrity the traditional conservatives, let alone the neos, never had. Francis in particular scolded NATIONAL REVIEW’s conservatives for their isolation from America’s “grassroots.” He chose an interesting means of illustrating his point: “Of the twenty-five conservative intellectuals whose photographs appeared on the dust jacket of George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, published in 1976, four are Roman Catholic, seven are Jewish, another seven (including three Jews) are foreign-born, two are southern or western in origin, and only five are in any respect representative of the historically dominant Anglo-Saxon (or at least Anglo-Celtic) Protestant strain in American history and culture (three of the five later converted to Roman Catholicism).” No wonder then that these fringe characters were able to achieve nothing more impressive than the election of Ronald Reagan and victory in the Cold War.
Now Francis had the helm of an ideological movement of his own. “[A] new American Right,” he wrote in 1991, “must recognize that its values and goals lie outside and against the establishment and that its natural allies are not in Manhattan, Yale, and Washington but in the increasingly alienated and threatened strata of Middle America. . . . A new Right, positioning itself in opposition to the elite and the elite’s underclass ally, can assert its leadership of Middle Americans and mobilize them in radical opposition to the regime.”
Buchanan, inconveniently, was himself a Roman Catholic. But his skills were manifest, and the writers at Chronicles convinced themselves that his 37 percent showing in the 1992 New Hampshire Republican primary was the long-awaited breakthrough for their Middle American Revolution. It was a false hope. Bill Clinton won the presidential election of 1992. And Newt Gingrich, impeccably Anglo-Celtic though he was, soon proved himself just another neocon: He even helped Clinton enact NAFTA in 1993. With this final betrayal, the Chronicles crowd’s last faint hope for political triumph through Middle America died.
“It is clear that neither laws nor any sense of fair play will stop this rampant U.S. arrogance. The time may soon come when we will have to call for the return of the spirit of the man who terrified the United States like no one else ever has. Come back Stalin — (almost) all is forgiven.”
— GEORGE SZAMUELY, IN “TAKI’S TOP DRAWER,” NEW YORK PRESS, JULY 11, 2001
HUMAN beings yearn to identify with something bigger than themselves. That’s why patriotism sways the heart. When patriotism falters, something else takes its place. For a good many of the paleoconservatives, that something was, for a spell, Serbian nationalism.
The Yugoslav civil wars divided conservatives. Some — William F. Buckley Jr., Richard Perle, John O’Sullivan, and Republican political leaders like Bob Dole — advocated an early and decisive intervention against Slobodan Milosevic. Others — Charles Krauthammer, Henry Kissinger, and (to drop a few rungs down the ladder) I — argued against.
Pat Buchanan, one can say, permitted a dual loyalty to influence him. Although he had denied any vital American interest in either Kuwait’s oilfields or Iraq’s oilfields or its aggression, in l991 he urged that the Sixth Fleet be sent to Dubrovnik to shield the Catholics of Croatia from Serbian attack. “Croatia is not some faraway desert emirate,” he explained. “It is a ‘piece of the continent, a part of the main,’ a Western republic that belonged to the Habsburg empire and was for centuries the first line of defense of Christian Europe. For their ceaseless resistance to the Ottoman Turks, Croatia was proclaimed by Pope Leo X to be the ‘Antemurale Christianitatis,’ the bulwark of Christianity.”
Chronicles, though, along with most of its writers, followed Thomas Fleming into a passionate defense of the Serbian cause. Even if all the war crimes alleged against the Serbs proved true, Fleming argued in 1997, “they are trivial in comparison with anything done not just by the Germans, but by Americans in recent years.” When the U.S. and NATO finally went to war against Serbia, Fleming identified himself with the enemy side: “[W]e have to be as faithful as the Serbs in preserving our heritage,” he said in a June 1999 speech, “as brave as the Serbs in fighting our enemies.”
To an uncharitable eye, Fleming and his magazine appeared to have succumbed to what George Washington might have condemned as a “passionate attachment” to a foreign country. The origins of this attachment are mysterious to me — and they clearly baffled Chronicles readers as well. At the time that Milosevic launched his wars, Chronicles had nearly 20,000 paid subscribers. By the time the Kosovo war ended in 1999, the magazine’s circulation had plunged to about 5,000. One guesses that the readers of Chronicles were not so much affronted by Fleming’s Serb advocacy as they were simply bored by it. Yet for the Chronicles writers, opposing their government in time of war seems to have been a liberating experience. In 1991 Pat Buchanan had accused the neoconservatives of enforcing the “limits of permissible dissent.” The paleocons were now defying those limits with ever-increasing gusto and boldness.
“The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people.” — SAMUEL FRANCIS, SPEECH AT THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE CONFERENCE, MAY 1994
OF all the limits against which the paleoconservatives chafed, the single most irksome was the limit placed by civilized opinion upon overtly racialist speech. Francis’s speech at the 1994 conference of the white-supremacist American Renaissance organization, for example, ultimately cost him his job as a staff columnist at the Washington Times. Today he earns his living as editor-in-chief of the Citizens’ Informer, the newspaper of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor group to the White Citizens’ Councils of the segregated South; he moonlights as an editor of The Occidental Quarterly, a pseudo-scholarly “journal of Western thought and opinion.”
Conservatives have had a vexed history with the topic of race. In the 1950s and early 1960s, many conservatives, including the editors of this magazine, questioned and opposed the civil rights movement, sometimes for high-minded constitutional reasons, sometimes not. Race, though, was not in those days central to conservative thinking, if only because, as Francis himself noted, the early conservative movement was so urban and northern. For the paleos, however, race and ethnicity were from the start essential and defining issues — and so they remain to this day.
Now, in one respect, the paleos have a point: Race and ethnicity are huge and unavoidable issues in modern life, and the liberal orthodoxies on the matter tend to be doctrinaire and hypocritical. But the paleoconservatives took a step beyond debunking when they advanced orthodoxies of their own. Buchanan, for example, gave an impressive speech on immigration at the Nixon Library in California in January 2000: “The last twenty years of immigration have brought about a redistribution of wealth in America, from less-skilled workers and toward employers. [Harvard economist George] Borjas estimates that one-half of the relative fall in the wages of high-school graduates since the 1980s can be traced directly to mass immigration. . . . Americans today who do poorly in high school are increasingly condemned to a low-wage existence; and mass immigration is a major reason why.” His words were persuasive, even moving, but they would have been far more convincing if they had not been spoken by the same man who had written nine years earlier that he wished only to “get clear” of those high-school graduates who had been born with dark skins.
For some of the paleos, the difficulties of non-white America provoke amused condescension. For others, this America inspires only horror. The United States, Thomas Fleming predicted in 1989, would soon be “a nation no longer stratified by class, but by race as well. Europeans and Orientals will compete, as groups, for the top positions, while the other groups will nurse their resentments on the weekly welfare checks they receive from the other half.” Some of the paleos’ racial animus is expressed via their obsessive — and even obscene — denunciations of Martin Luther King. “King bedded other men’s wives, other wives’ men, underaged girls, and young boys,” raged a columnist in the newsletter Rockwell ran before he started his website. “[M]y guess is that even holes in the ground had to watch out.”
Racial passions run strong among the paleos. And yet, having read many hundreds of thousands of their words in print and on the screen, I come away with a strong impression that while their anti-black and anti-Hispanic feelings are indeed intense, another antipathy is far more intellectually important to them.
White racialists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have to resolve a puzzling paradox. On one hand, they believe in the incorrigible inferiority of darker-skinned people. On the other hand, they perceive darker-skinned people to be gaining the advantage over whites. How to resolve the contradiction? One solution is to posit the existence of a third force, a group that is cunning and capable but, for reasons of its own, implacably hostile to America’s white majority.
“Jewish intellectuals initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual and political movements during the 20th century. I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies . . . to weaken the power of their [the Jews'] perceived competitors — the European peoples who early in the 20th century had assumed a dominant position not only in their traditional homelands in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada, and Australia.”
The author of those words, Kevin MacDonald of the California State University at Long Beach, does not quite belong to the paleoconservative club, although he does publish in The Occidental Quarterly. Yet MacDonald’s name and ideas do keep turning up in paleo conversation. On March 17, 2003, for example, VDare.com prominently posted on its homepage an anonymous letter celebrating MacDonald’s work and quoting his allegation that the Iraq war “is being fomented by Jewish neo-conservative activists based in the Bush administration, congressional lobbying organizations, and the media.” More generally, MacDonald said — and VDare.com repeated — “the most important Jewish contributions to culture were facilitated not only by high IQ but by closely cooperating, mutually reinforcing groups of Jews who were centered around charismatic leaders and excluded dissenters.”
Erstwhile NATIONAL REVIEW editor Joseph Sobran also seems to have been greatly influenced by MacDonald’s writings. After the defeat of his friend Buchanan’s second presidential campaign, Sobran wrote: “The full story is impossible to tell as long as it’s taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely as we discuss those of the Christian Right. Talking about American politics without mentioning the Jews is a little like talking about the NBA without mentioning the Chicago Bulls.” Sobran was following MacDonald’s advice: “It is time to be frank about Jews.”
“The Bush administration should not only ignore the advice of such characters as Mr. Ledeen and Mr. Podhoretz but consider placing them under surveillance as possible agents of a foreign power.” — SAMUEL FRANCIS, IN CHRONICLES, DECEMBER 2002
WHO was the first paleo to blame Israel for 9/11? It’s a close call, but Robert Novak seems to have won the race. His column of September 13, 2001, written the very day after the terrorist attack, charged that “the hatred toward the United States today by the terrorists is an extension of [their] hatred of Israel.” Novak lamented that, because of terror, “the United States and Israel are brought ever closer in a way that cannot improve long-term U.S. policy objectives.”
The next day, Scott McConnell quoted Malcolm X on Justin Raimondo’s website: “The chickens have come home to roost.” Raimondo himself soon began work on a book that alleged that 9/11 was in the broadest sense an Israeli plot.
“Whose war is this?” Buchanan demanded to know on September 26, 2001: “Powell’s war — or Perle’s?” “Judging from President Bush’s State of the Union message,” Sobran lamented on January 31, 2002, “what began as the War on Terrorism will now be broadened to become a War to Crush Israel’s Enemies.”
“In private conversation with Hagel and many other members of Congress,” Robert Novak wrote on December 26, 2002, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon “leaves no doubt that the greatest U.S. assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime. That view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason U.S. forces today are assembling for war.”
The accusations culminated in a March 2003 article by Buchanan in The American Conservative that fixed responsibility for the entire Iraq war on a “cabal” of neoconservative office-holders and writers: “We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.”
Who were these war-mongering “neoconservatives”? At a June 2002 conference sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review, the leading Holocaust-denial group, Joe Sobran defined “neoconservatism” as “kosher conservatism.” And in his March cover story, Buchanan seasoned Sobran’s definition with his own flavorful malice. “Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.”
The echo in that previous paragraph of the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” is unlikely to have been unintentional. Yes, it was indeed time to “be frank about Jews.”
Having quickly decided that the War on Terror was a Jewish war, the paleos equally swiftly concluded that they wanted no part of it. It’s odd: 9/11 actually vindicated some of the things that the paleos had been arguing, particularly about immigration and national cohesion. But the paleos were in no mood to press their case. Instead, they plunged into apologetics for the enemy and wishful defeatism.
On September 16, 2001, Samuel Francis suggested that America deserved what it got on 9/11: “Some day it might actually dawn on someone in this country that the grown-up but unwelcome answer is that the terrorists attacked us because they were paying us back for what we had started. Let us hear no more about how the ‘terrorists’ have ‘declared war on America.’ Any nation that allows a criminal chief executive to use its military power to slaughter civilians in unprovoked and legally unauthorized attacks for his own personal political purposes” — Francis is referring here both to Operation Desert Fox in 1998 and to the Kosovo war — “can expect whatever the ‘terrorists’ dish out to it.”
It seems incredible, but there is actually more. “If, as President Bush told us this week, we should make no distinction between those who harbor terrorists and those who commit terrorist acts, neither can any distinction be made between those who tolerate the murderous policies of a criminal in power and the criminal himself.”
The 9/11 attacks sent Patrick Buchanan plunging into handwringing and pessimism. He wrote on September 28, 2001: “We are told the first target of America’s wrath will be the Taliban. But if we rain fire and death on the Afghan nation, a proud, brave people we helped liberate from Soviet bondage, we too will slaughter hundreds of innocents. And as they count their dead, the Afghans too will unite in moral outrage; and, as they cannot fight cruise missiles or Stealth bombers, they will attack our diplomats, businessmen, tourists.”
The week after the fall of Kabul, Raimondo acknowledged that though the Afghan war seemed to have succeeded, disaster lurked around the corner: “The real quagmire awaits us. . . . When the history books are written, Operation Enduring Freedom will be hailed as a great success — provided it doesn’t endure much more than a few weeks longer.” Llewellyn Rockwell would not tolerate a war that lasted even so long as that. By October 2002, he was calling for immediate and unconditional surrender — by the United States. The right approach to the War on Terror, he wrote, “as to all government programs, is to end it immediately. . . . The War on Terror is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot cause immense amounts of bloodshed and destruction and loss of liberty, but in the sense that it cannot finally achieve what it is suppose[d] to achieve.”
“The U.S. government has probably killed more people outside its own borders than any other. Or am I overlooking something?”
— JOSEPH SOBRAN, SPEECH TO THE JOHN RANDOLPH SOCIETY, HERNDON, VA., JANUARY 1992
And now it is time to be very frank about the paleos. During the Clinton years, many conservatives succumbed to a kind of gloom. With Bill Bennett, they mourned the “death of outrage.” America now has non-metaphorical deaths to mourn. There is no shortage of outrage — and the cultural pessimism of the 1990s has been dispelled. The nation responded to the terrorist attacks with a surge of patriotism and pride, along with a much-needed dose of charity. Suddenly, many conservatives found they could look past the rancor of the Clinton years, past the psychobabble of the New Age gurus, past the politically correct professors, to see an America that remained, in every important way, the America of 1941 and 1917 and 1861 and 1776. As Tennyson could have said: “What we were, we are.”
America has social problems; the American family is genuinely troubled. The conservatism of the future must be a social as well as an economic conservatism. But after the heroism and patriotism of 9/11 it must also be an optimistic conservatism.
There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen.
They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.
War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.
Advice of Friedrich Hayek
Advice of Friedrich Hayek‘s: “We must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty…, which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible. We need intellectual leaders who are prepared to resist the blandishments of power and influence and who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote. … Unless we can make the philosophical foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark. But if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best, the battle is not lost.”
Let’s Quit While We’re Behind
Let’s quit while we’re behind
By Christopher Buckley
“The trouble with our times,” Paul Valéry said, “is that the future is not what it used to be.”
This glum aperçu has been much with me as we move into the home stretch of the 2006 mid-term elections and shimmy into the starting gates of the 2008 presidential campaign. With heavy heart, as a once-proud—indeed, staunch— Republican, I here admit, behind enemy lines, to the guilty hope that my party loses; on both occasions.
I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. In 2004, I could not bring myself to pull the same lever again. Neither could I bring myself to vote for John Kerry, who, for all his strengths, credentials, and talent, seems very much less than the sum of his parts. So, I wrote in a vote for George Herbert Walker Bush, for whom I worked as a speechwriter from 1981 to ’83. I wish he’d won.
Bob Woodward asked Bush 43 if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq. The son replied that he had consulted “a higher father.” That frisson you feel going up your spine is the realization that he meant it. And apparently the higher father said, “Go for it!” There are those of us who wish he had consulted his terrestrial one; or, if he couldn’t get him on the line, Brent Scowcroft. Or Jim Baker. Or Henry Kissinger. Or, for that matter, anyone who has read a book about the British experience in Iraq. (18,000 dead.)
Anyone who has even a passing personal acquaintance of Bush 41 knows him to be, roughly speaking, the most decent, considerate, humble, and cautious man on the planet. Also, the most loving parent on earth. What a wrench it must be for him to pick up his paper every morning and read the now-daily debate about whether his son is officially the worst president in U.S. history. (That chuckling you hear is the ghost of James Buchanan.) To paraphrase another president, I feel 41’s pain. Does 43 feel 41’s? Does he, I wonder, feel ours?
There were some of us who scratched our heads in 2000 when we first heard the phrase “compassionate conservative.” It had a cobbled-together, tautological, dare I say, Rovian aroma to it. But OK, we thought, let’s give it a chance. It sounded more fun than Gore’s “Prosperity for America’s Families.” (Bo-ring.)
Six years later, the White House uses the phrase about as much as it does “Mission Accomplished.” Six years of record deficits and profligate expansion of entitlement programs. Incompetent expansion, at that: The actual cost of the President’s Medicare drug benefit turned out, within months of being enacted, to be roughly one-third more than the stated price. Weren’t Republicans supposed to be the ones who were good at accounting? All those years on Wall Street calculating CEO compensation….
Who knew, in 2000, that “compassionate conservatism” meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research?
A more accurate term for Mr. Bush’s political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism.
On Capitol Hill, a Republican Senate and House are now distinguished by—or perhaps even synonymous with—earmarks, the K Street Project, Randy Cunningham (bandit, 12 o’clock high!), Sen. Ted Stevens’s $250-million Bridge to Nowhere, Jack Abramoff (Who? Never heard of him), and a Senate Majority Leader who declared, after conducting his own medical evaluation via videotape, that he knew every bit as much about the medical condition of Terri Schiavo as her own doctors and husband. Who knew that conservatism means barging into someone’s hospital room like Dr. Frankenstein with defibrillator paddles? In what chapter of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind is that principle enunciated?
The Republican Party I grew up into—Dwight D. Eisenhower, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon (sigh), Ronald Reagan—stood for certain things. It did not always live up to its ideals. Au contraire, as we Republicans said in the pre-Dominique de Villepin era—often, it fell flat on its face. A self-proclaimed “conservative,” Nixon kept the Great Society entitlement beast fat and happy and brought in wage and price controls. Reagan funked Social Security reform in 1983 and raised (lesser) taxes three times. He vowed to balance the budget, and drove the deficit to historic highs by failing to rein in government spending. Someone called it “Voodoo economics.” You could Google it.
There were foreign misadventures, terrible ones: Vietnam (the ’69-’75 chapters), Beirut, Iran-Contra, the Saddam Hussein tilt. But there were compensating triumphs: Eisenhower’s refusal to bail out France in Indochina in 1954, Nixon’s China opening, the Cold War victory.
Despite the failures, one had the sense that the party at least knew in its heart of hearts that these were failures, either of principle or execution. Today one has no sense, aside from a slight lowering of the swagger-mometer, that the president or the Republican Congress is in the least bit chastened by their debacles.
George Tenet’s WMD “slam-dunk,” Vice President Cheney’s “we will be greeted as liberators,” Don Rumsfeld’s avidity to promulgate a minimalist military doctrine, together with the tidy theories of a group who call themselves “neo-conservative” (not one of whom, to my knowledge, has ever worn a military uniform), have thus far: de-stabilized the Middle East; alienated the world community from the United States; empowered North Korea, Iran, and Syria; unleashed sectarian carnage in Iraq among tribes who have been cutting each others’ throats for over a thousand years; cost the lives of 2,600 Americans, and the limbs, eyes, organs, spinal cords of another 15,000—with no end in sight. But not to worry: Democracy is on the march in the Middle East. Just ask Hamas. And the neocons—bright people, all—are now clamoring, “On to Tehran!”
What have they done to my party? Where does one go to get it back?
One place comes to mind: the back benches. It’s time for a time-out. Time to hand over this sorry enchilada to Hillary and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Charlie Rangel and Harry Reid, who has the gift of being able to induce sleep in 30 seconds. Or, with any luck, to Mark Warner or, what the heck, Al Gore. I’m not much into polar bears, but this heat wave has me thinking the man might be on to something.
My fellow Republicans, it is time, as Madison said in Federalist 76, to “Hand over the tiller of governance, that others may fuck things up for a change.”
(Or was it Federalist 78?)
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0610.buckley.html
Buckley’s Program
Buckley’s Program
by Donald Devine
Issue 103 – March 12, 2008
William F. Buckley Jr. was the single person most responsible for creating the conservative movement. The modern conservative synthesis was formed under his tutelage during the 1950s and 1960s at the editorial meetings of the magazine he founded, National Review, crafted with a diverse and thoughtful crew that included Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham and many other creative intellectuals. But Buckley was the center.
His book “Up From Liberalism” was one of his earliest and survived to be the most comprehensive and inspiring statement of his program.
I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I will hoard my power, as I see fit. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it not? It is certainly program enough to keep conservatives busy and liberals at bay. And the nation free.
Bill Buckley’s dual attachment to freedom and traditional moral values—he said the critical battle between individualism and collectivism was merely a “struggle on a different level” of the more fundamental one between Judeo-Christianity and atheism—this was the formula that won the hearts of the movement that developed around his towering personality. His call for the revival of individualism and moral responsibility in the face of the dominant and repressive welfare state bureaucratic paternalism of the modern age was the spark that ignited all that followed.
The enemy of freedom was state power and its bureaucracy, especially when it was corrupted by real evil such as under communism and Nazism. Even in the more benign form of democratic welfare statism it was morally corrupting and produced dependence. As the great 19th Century observer Alexis de Tocqueville predicted long before, once the populace obtains “free” benefits from government, it becomes dependent on them. As Buckley put it, “There is an inverse relationship between reliance on the state and self reliance.”
So how has the Buckley program to expand liberty and reduce bureaucracy worked? For many years his conservatism grew quietly in the wilderness but it did finally come to power under Ronald Reagan. The program was successful–for a while. By the end of his term, President Reagan had reduced non-defense federal employment by 75,000 full time equivalent positions (about 100,000 employees). The bad news is that the federal bureaucracy has been increasing ever since. The end of the Cold War did allow the reduction of 330,000 defense civilian employees but non-defense bureaucracy—that which fuels welfare state dependence–increased by 13.6 percent or 145,000 from the time the Gipper left until the current estimate for the last of the Bush years.
The program has retrogressed so far that President George W. Bush could famously demand that “when someone hurts, government must act.” Unfortunately, when government acts, it needs bureaucrats and bureaucracy. Consequently, President Bush has increased domestic government employment more than any other post World War II president, although all of the others have tried. His final (and labeled his most frugal) budget for 2009 seeks an increase of 26,000 additional federal employees. It is true that it is predominantly for homeland security but increases have been across the board, over time in every department except Treasury.
So, has the Buckley program failed? That is not so clear. Polls show that the overwhelming majority of Americans prefers a smaller government that does fewer things to a larger one that does more. Americans once really believed “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Today, partially under the critique from Buckley’s movement, this is a national joke. Most people just do not think big, national government works. They are correct. Since 9/11, as noted, the Department of Homeland Security has been lavished with the most funds and personnel. But the additional employees just cannot seem to make the new bureaucracy work. The official Government Accountability Office audits find that DHS met only half of the performance objectives set by the president, the Department and Congress, only on 78 of 171 tasks. Even moderate progress was made on only eight of fourteen major benchmarks.
More important, it is now clear that DHS procedures actually exacerbated the number one challenge it met, the Katrina hurricane. Before 9/11, Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief overwhelmingly relied on volunteers and local government for funds, leadership and personnel. But when it was incorporated into DHS, FEMA not unnaturally adopted the security orientation of its parent. When the hurricane hit, the prime directive of security is always to “secure the area.” As a result, the main potential emergency assistance was kept away from the scene. The president’s own brother sent a flotilla of boats with medicine and supplies that were kept out because they did not have the proper security clearance. Another was sent from Shreveport and turned away. The same fate was met by thousands of other potential helpers.
It is going to get worse. DHS is preparing a more secure control system that will not allow rescue workers to “swarm”—as a “professional disaster relief expert” put it to a reporter–into disaster areas without a federally-issued secure identification tag proving their disaster expertise. Government officials admit most assistance is provided by volunteers but they claim they are without the “special skills” that are required and will be recorded on the IDs. Perhaps, but what is certain is that no one without a badge will be admitted to the next disaster to help. It will be Katrina squared. Even more, what happens if the scanners do not arrive or break down? When people hurt, no one will be able to help anyone.
All of the federal programs are breaking down. The three biggest, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are nearing bankruptcy and the new prescription drug benefit just moved up the end. Education spending has increased 99 percent without any discernable improvement. Each year tests of the transportation security system show that it is easily breached at airports and ports. The agriculture support program is mostly spent on mega-farmers who do not need it. Veterans get lost in the gap between military and civilian health and benefits coverage and often receive inferior care. After a great investment in border security, illegal drugs and laborers still slip through with impunity.
So citizens are correct to question whether government officials can really help. But as Buckley recognized, the greater problem is the dependency the programs produce even if they did work. Not only is great wealth squandered on inefficient or even counterproductive programs that could be used effectively elsewhere but people come to believe at the insistence of the politicians and bureaucrats that only more federal “help” will solve the problems that the Feds themselves have often created–so the rot seeps throughout society to the remotest hamlet.
A California school district recently banned tag, cops-and-robbers, touch football and all other “bodily contact” between children to promote “self esteem” and outlaw “violence;” but actually it outlaws independence and creativity. The Cincinnati Little League has banned chatter on the baseball diamond to prevent “frustration” among the players. A Colorado Springs elementary school eliminated tag, although allowed running as long as no one was chased! At Mascoutah middle school in Illinois, a 13 year old was given detention for hugging her friends before the weekend, violating the school policy against “public displays of affection.” The result of this bureaucratic nonsense, of course, is flabby children. But the bureaucracy has an answer. Call it “obesity,” label it as another national crisis and create another government program (with more employees) to combat the “crisis” they themselves created.
The dependence Buckley feared has become so profound there is not enough will even to have children and create the next generation. With its welfare state more developed, Europe is leading the way. While it takes 2.1 children per childbearing aged woman, Europe is down to 1.3 and the birthplace of the West will soon be depopulated (or become Muslim). The U.S. is doing better but European-Americans are below replacement at 1.8 and, according to a new major study, 80 percent of future population growth will come from immigrants or their children, primarily Hispanic.
While Bill Buckley’s program has not succeeded, his analysis remains even more relevant than when he first wrote because people are more dependent. It is too late to turn to Mr. Buckley, however. He is now gone to his God, obedient to the end, still subservient to the wisdom of his ancestors. He was, in fact, the most generous person I have ever known. But he cannot help us any longer.
It is now up to us to continue his struggle up from liberalism. When the moral and fiscal bankruptcy of the welfare state finally cannot be ignored any longer, people will seek another answer and someone must be there to propose the Buckley program. As he reminded us, no matter how fundamental the challenge, “despair is inappropriate for a culture as buoyant as our own.”
Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.
“Birkenstocked Burkeans,” “Crunchy Conservatives,” and “Granola Conservatives”
Birkenstocked Burkeans
Confessions of a granola conservative.
By Rod Dreher
Boston College professor Peter Kreeft discovered this phenomenon a few years ago. Kreeft said he and three friends fit John Courtney Murray’s four American political types: radical, liberal, traditionalist, and conservative. One day, Kreeft, a traditional Catholic, discovered a close affinity with the Marxist atheist in the group. What did it was driving around Cambridge and judging everyone’s reaction to a new housing development the conservative Republican had moved into. It was clean, well lighted, green, and spacious, with attractive amenities.
Kreeft and his friend Dick, the radical, thought it was an abomination, because it was ugly and therefore inhuman. The conservative said the fact that they cared about how the place looked marked them as “artsy-fartsy,” but the traditionalist and the radical argued that beauty was one of the most important things there is.
Soon, Kreeft and his radical friend found out that despite the gulf that separated them on politics, they shared a number of areas of agreement (suburbs bad; nature good; big business and big government bad; small business and small government good). Kreeft determined from this that “beneath the current political left-right alignments there are fault lines embedded in the crust of human nature that will inevitably open up some day and produce earthquakes that will change the current map of the political landscape.”
Well, maybe. All I can tell you is that the crunchy-granola lefties are often right about little things that make life richer. Take food, for example. After we married, Julie and I had to teach ourselves how to cook. We quickly discovered how much better food tastes if it hasn’t been processed. We’d go to farmers’ markets in the city to buy produce, and before we knew it, we were making and canning our own apple butter. Not only did the stuff taste dramatically better than what was on offer in the supermarket, but there was a real sense of pride in knowing how to do these things for ourselves, like our grandmothers did. We realized one day that pretty much the only young to middle-aged people we knew who cared about these things were … lefties.
We were also startled to discover how large the homeschooling movement is here in New York City, and that it’s primarily a phenomenon of the left-wing counterculture. Given our backgrounds in Texas and Louisiana, we assumed religious conservatives were the only folks interested in homeschooling. I did some reporting on homeschoolers in Manhattan, and learned that most of them did it for the same reasons we plan to: an unwillingness to trust the state schools here with something as important as our children’s education.
All sorts of things started to occur to us. The music we like — jazz, hard country, bluegrass, Cuban son — is something you can only hear on, umm, public radio or see on public television. When we began talking about buying a house, we realized we wanted something old and funky, in the sort of neighborhood that your average Republican would disdain. We found that though the Shiite environmentalists drive us nuts, there was also something off-putting about the way many conservatives speak with caustic derision about environmental conservation. Two weeks ago, some conservative friends were driving me down the Pacific Coast Highway, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty, as they are. “I’m afraid we have to tip our hats to the tree-huggers,” said one. “If it weren’t for them, much of what you see would be covered with tract houses and malls.”
Here’s something else I’ve noticed: The Granola Conservatives I know tend not to be wealthy, but labor in the creative and intellectual vineyards as writers, professors, and artists. They also tend to be religious. It’s foolish to go too far in metaphysicalizing questions of taste, but a big part of it, at least for those of us who are part of older Christian traditions, comes from learning to see the world sacramentally. In the sacramental vision, which is shared by Catholics and the Orthodox, the spirit world is mediated through the material world, which is another way of saying we experience God in creation. To someone imbued with a sacramental vision, qualities inherent in things — from the food we eat to the buildings we live in — matter in profoundly spiritual ways.
Admittedly, this is very close to what David Brooks identified as classic bourgeois Bohemian (“Bobo”) behavior. “Marx once wrote that the bourgeois takes all that is sacred and makes it profane. The Bobos take everything that is profane and make it sacred,” he writes in Bobos in Paradise, his highly entertaining foray into pop sociology. “We take the quintessential bourgeois activity, shopping, and turn it into quintessential bohemian activities: art, philosophy, social action.”
In Brooks’s view, the Bobo will spend lots of money on things he believes (though not consciously) possess the power to transfer spiritual or moral qualities to its owner. This debased form of sacramentalism is an ersatz, consumerist version of the real thing, which doesn’t fetishize objects themselves, but which is really a way of thinking about the importance of aesthetics to the good life. This may be a distinction without a discernible difference; Brooks told me that conservative writers just have to live with the fact that we share certain tastes with the predominantly liberal intellectual class. But if there’s nothing to it, and the consumer choices people make are purely a function of social determinism, then it leaves no room for the person who purchases certain products simply because the products look good, taste good or offer superior value, despite costing more. It means accepting bad beer, lousy coffee, Top-40 radio, strip malls, and all popular manifestations of cheapness and ugliness as proof that One Is Not an Effete Liberal. And that’s just as phony as anything the Bobos stand for.
Curious about the possible spiritual aspect of this phenomenon, I wrote to my crunchy-right friends Julianne Loesch Wiley (a Catholic) and Frederica Mathewes-Green (Orthodox), both of whom have long been active in the pro-life movement, to ask them how they reconciled their conservatism with their countercultural tastes. Frederica responded first, saying that she embraced her “mother-earth hippie aesthetic” in her liberal youth, and has stuck with it even though she’s now firmly in the religious conservative camp.
“What hooked me then, and continues to hold me, and what is the underlying theme of the contemporary liberal side of this aesthetic, is authenticity,” she said. “I read a piece in American Demographics a few years ago about this, that the hook for progressives is this concept of ‘authenticity,’ the distrust of mass-produced sentiment or materials.”
She thinks secular leftists, having emptied the world of God, hunger for something to anchor their lives, and seek it out in various manifestations of Boboism. As a believing Christian and a religious conservative, though, Frederica still feels a kinship with this longing, “because I find in the presence of the old and funky furniture and things I live with a reminder of the goodness of the material world God made, and visited, and fills.”
“Every single thing that comes into my house, down to the salt shakers, have to first pass a test of being persuasive, winsome, original, odd — ‘authentic.’ I think that this is a cousin to what you and Julie are doing with food and other tastes. You’re looking for true quality and refusing to be satisfied with Purina People Chow. You have your antennas up for what is real, original, worthy. And to many conservatives, that sounds stuck-up and suspiciously lefty.”
Catholic Julianne says she absorbed a lot of her “natural” ideas through her anti-abortion activism. Awe over the miracle of birth led her to study natural-childbirth practices, which hooked her up with herb-savvy Earth Mother types in Birkenstocks — “and before you know it, I was eating nutritional yeast on my baked potatoes. Eeuh! Liberal!”
Teaching her kids to read early made Julianne think that maybe the intellectually deadening public school wasn’t the best thing for them, and she became a homeschooler without quite realizing what was happening. “That’s supposed to be right-wing,” she wrote. “But I was first introduced to homeschooling by John Holt, who was left-wing. How do I know? There were certain telltale phrases he used. He didn’t trust the Establishment. He didn’t trust the government schools. But that’s right wing now. Funny how I went straight from left wing to right wing without ever once passing through a phase where I trusted the government.”
That’s an amusing line, but it also points out how so many of us depend on labels to frame our experiences so as not to be disturbed by the idea that somebody on the other side might be on to something good, beautiful or true. Somebody’s got to pioneer these things. My wife gets a kick out of the fact that she’s the only housewife in the neighborhood who carries home her organic vegetables in a National Review Online tote bag. Who knows, one of these days, maybe one of the liberal housewives doling out the Swiss chard on delivery day will ask her about the flat tax. Dare to dream, you Birkenstocked Burkeans, and pass the hippie carrots.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTFmYmUzNGZiMGFjN2EwMDlhODk1MDg0N2UzOTlkYWE=
Celebrating Our Ignorance
CELEBRATING OUR IGNORANCE
Honors Convocation Address
Calvin College
April 25, 1996
Dr. David A. Hoekema
Academic Dean and Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College
The purpose of this Honors Convocation is to recognize the remarkable achievements of students at Calvin College and to offer thanks for the gifts and talents with which you have been entrusted. I have a slightly different purpose in mind in this address, however. First, I want to celebrate how little you have learned. And then, before I conclude, I will point out with gratitude how little you have achieved. In fact I am speaking as much to my colleagues on the faculty as to those of you who are students. To be sure, we have spent even more of our lives and our fortunes in the pursuit of knowledge than you have thus far. Books and articles on our shelves attest to our professional accomplishments, and diplomas on our walls confer the right to attach little bouquets of letters behind our names–Ph.D., M.F.A., M.B.A., Th.M.–that impress the folks back home and may even help get a bank loan. Yet it is the ignorance of the faculty no less than that of students that I celebrate this evening.
Exactly two weeks ago at this very hour of the evening, Madeleine L’Engle sat right here, in the wheelchair to which recent surgery has confined her, and offered us at Calvin a glimpse of the joys and challenges of her vocation as a writer of fiction that explores the spiritual dimensions of life. All her life, she said, she has been obsessed with hard questions about who we are, what happens when we die, and why God permits so much suffering. Yet she has recoiled from those who pretend to have wholly satisfactory answers to such questions, from theologians and preachers who claim more wisdom than anyone can truly offer. This week on “All Things Considered” I heard a strikingly parallel warning against the dangers of facile answers to difficult questions–this time in the voice of the popular writer Erma Bombeck, whose passing was marked by clips from previous interviews. A friend, she recounted, sought to comfort her daughter when a favorite pet died by assuring her, with more compassion than theological warrant, “We shouldn’t be sad–after all, Frisky is in heaven with God.” “But Mom,” her five-year-old philosopher answered in a matter-of-fact tone, “what does God want with a dead dog?”
In your programs of study at Calvin you have asked a great many difficult questions, and for some of them you have found answers. Let us suppose that you are a senior and have had the good judgment and courage to complete a major in philosophy, for example. No doubt you can tell me, if I ask you, about Heraclitus’ conception of the natural world as the interplay of opposing forces in perpetual flux, and you can describe Parmenides’ insistence that an eternal and unchanging unity can be discovered by the soul. You can recount Socrates’ search for a ground on which to build our moral lives. You can explain, too, how Plato united Heraclitean plurality and Parmenidean unity in his system, which held that the true, the good, and the beautiful lie concealed beneath the surface of the world of experience. You can explain further how Aristotle took the world apart once more and put it back together, shaped neither by a personal God nor by an eternal realm of the Forms where the soul dwells but rather by an all-pervasive orderliness in nature. And with all this you have only begun to tell me what you know. You can describe the interplay between Greek metaphysics and Christian theology in the medieval period, the irruption of quantitative methods and scientific reason in the philosophies of Descartes and Locke, and the reconfiguration of all claims to knowledge in light of Kant’s critique and Hegel’s historical perspective. You can trace the ways in which the thinkers of our own century continue to probe the nature of the person, the relationship between us and our world, the place of language and the meaning of history. Think back to the first weeks of your first philosophy course–remember how puzzled and frustrated you were by your first Philosophy 153 test?–and you can measure how far you have come. But do you have any answers yet to the really important questions? Can you tell me who we are as persons, and whether there is a self that is distinct from the body? Can you explain what makes the testimony of our senses a reliable basis for knowledge? Can you even give a satisfactory answer to the question that Socrates put to his fellow Athenians so many centuries ago: what sort of life ought a human being to strive for? If you know this, Socrates implied, you should surely be able to persuade everyone else to follow your lead. Can you? Alas, you cannot, and neither can I, nor any of your professors. There is a kind of progress discernible in the history of philosophy, each generation correcting the errors and blind spots of its predecessors. Yet the questions persist. Those for which we still have no fully satisfactory answers are at least as numerous, and perhaps more important, than those we can answer. But not all of you are philosophy majors, more’s the pity. And the rest of you may be thinking to yourselves: Yes, yes, that’s why I didn’t major in philosophy. At least in history, or biology, or engineering, we can get some answers! But let’s look a little deeper.
First, what about you history majors? No doubt you could provide a brilliant and lucid account of the economic and social forces that drove European explorers out onto the oceans in the sixteenth century, of the ways in which the African-American family has been shaped by the experience of slavery and Reconstruction, and of why Japan closed its ports to European vessels for so many centuries and finally let Commodore Perry break the wall of isolation in the 1850′s. But these are easy questions, warm-up pitches for the real game. Try your hand with some real questions. Can you explain why the world today is characterized by close international cooperation and moving inexorably toward a single global economy, while at the same time ethnic and tribal animosities cause the streets of Bosnia and the rivers of Rwanda to flow with blood? Can you tell me why the Western societies that have attained the highest levels of individual freedom and prosperity still struggle with deeply rooted divisions of race and class, or why the growing wealth of some seems only to plunge their neighbors a few miles away deeper into poverty? Why is it that human societies seem never to live up to the promises that emerge from the brightest moments of their history?
Perhaps we need to leave the domain of the humanities for the sciences, where both questions and answers lie nearer to hand. Take a look sometime at your parents’ biology textbooks, for example. You will be astonished at how much of the content of your biology courses was not known a generation ago. We all noticed the political transformation that caused the breakup of the Soviet Union, but many of us parents have been startled to discover, when our children sought help with high-school biology, that the two kingdoms into which we thought the whole world of living things could be divided–animals and plants–have undergone a strange sort of taxonomic mitosis, and now there are five. In an article I read recently I saw four successive diagrams of the structure of the cell, drawn from textbooks dated approximately ten years apart. Thirty years ago, the picture was simple and elegantly functional. Within the clearly drawn boundary of the cell membrane, cytoplasm filled the interior. Apart from the strands of genetic material coiled up in the nucleus, there was nothing much else of interest–only a few assorted bits and pieces whose functions were little understood but could safely be ignored. Subsequent textbooks at ten-year intervals added more and more details of organization and function. The most recent of these was breathtaking in its complexity, resembling a schematic diagram for a computer chip more than a traditional biological drawing. What once appeared to be simple parts with a few readily described functions–the cell membrane, the nuclear membrane, the mitochondrial bodies–have now become as complex and intricate as was the former picture of the entire cell. The sophisticated tools of biological and biochemical research have yielded a detailed and nuanced picture of the internal economy and organization of the cell, uncovering the many ways in which each cell responds to the needs of the living organism and contributes to its ability to cope with the challenges of the environment. But how much more there is that we do not know! We can only guess at the precise functions of many of the substructures within the cell. Just within the past year geneticists have completed an accurate and comprehensive map of the human genome, thanks to an extraordinary worldwide collaborative effort. Yet we have only begun to be able to guess at which genes are linked to specific traits of appearance and behavior or to the development of disease. What is it that causes some cells to ignore the normal internal signal to stop multiplying, causing the fatal excesses that we know and dread as cancer? Why do some individuals destroy their own pancreatic cells for the production of insulin, causing diabetes? In response to such questions we can offer enormous quantities of data but no real answers. What is the impact of environmental pollutants on human and animal reproduction? We are scarcely any farther along the path to an answer to this urgent question than the ancient Greeks were in trying to explain communicable diseases.
By now the senior engineering majors may be sitting smugly in their seats–those few whose senior design project is far enough along so that they could attend this event, at any rate. In Engineering, you may be thinking, we tackle concrete problems and find real solutions. We don’t spend our time worrying over the nature of knowledge, the meaning of history, or the functioning of biological structures too small to be seen. We make stuff, and we make it work. Sure, there are lots of questions we cannot answer. But give us an appropriate question and we’ll give you the answer. Can you build a bridge at this spot to carry four lanes of traffic, within the limits of this year’s county road budget? Can the structural supports in that bicycle rack be made of composite plastic instead of steel? Will the pollutants we have detected in the topsoil leach into the aquifer from which the wells nearby draw their water? Give us the facts–the capabilities of the materials and the relevant specifications–and we will find the answer. But do these answers really provide the whole story? Will the bridge simply help move people to their destinations more efficiently, for example, or will it open up a delicate ecosystem to heavy use that may destroy its character? What is an acceptable level of pollution in a drinking water source? Does technology itself sometimes threaten the quality of human life? Are some projects technically feasible but morally objectionable? Should a Christian accept a job designing trigger devices for tactical nuclear weapons? Is it appropriate to devote one’s talents to the design of elaborate gadgetry to control the interior climate of luxury cars or the zoom ratios of home video cameras? Or should those of us who know how to make things, and make them work, all be trying instead to find solutions to the persistent problems of urban decay, polluted groundwater, and industrial smog?
A week ago I put the following question to my colleagues on the faculty and staff by means of the “Town-Crier” electronic bulletin board: I am working on a draft of my address for the Honors Convocation, knowing that the faculty expect something witty, profound, and uplifting, or failing that, something that will keep them awake some of the time. I find myself wondering how a sample of my colleagues would answer the following question: “What is the most interesting and important question in your discipline or field of research for which there is no satisfactory answer?’ In very short order I received 30 responses, from nearly every department and several administrative offices. Some have already been incorporated into what I have said. Here are some additional samples:
* Why hasn’t increased emphasis on business ethics in undergraduate and graduate education resulted in a significantly better record of ethical decisions?
* What should we make of Paul’s virtual silence about Jesus’s life and teachings before his Passion?
* What is the nature of intelligence–which is to say, who is really retarded?
* Why is there sex–which is the basis for much of the social behavior of animals, yet whose origin remains a perplexing puzzle for biologists and ecologists?
* How did life arise on the earth? By what means and what processes were inorganic compounds transformed into organic compounds, and in turn into amino acids, proteins, and the complex communities of the cell? Can any coherent story that can be told about this without invoking direct divine manipulation of millions of individual molecules? Does a more coherent story emerge if we do invoke such direct intervention?
* How is it possible for events such as the Holocaust, the African slave trade, and the Rwandan massacre to occur? Can we even begin to understand how human beings can cause such evil, or how it can occur in a world created and sustained by a loving God?
* How do liquids and gases flow in enclosed spaces? How is turbulence created, and what does it look like at the smallest level?
* Qu’est-ce que si passe quand l’on apprends une langue nouvelle–comment est-ce possible? Oder, wenn Sie diese Frage besser verstehen kûnnen, was gescheht als man eine andere Sprache lernt, und wie ist es mûglich, da zu tun?
* What sort of remapping of the brain and retraining of the mind makes it possible to learn to speak, and eventually even to think, in another language?
* Why does mathematics work? Why does a completely abstract symbolic system not only provide accurate tools for explanation of what we observe but also offer accurate predictions of matters we have never observed?
* Why is it that the fundamental principles of physics are all entirely indifferent to the direction of time’s passage, and yet in all the phenomena that we observe in the world around us it is obvious that time can move only forward and never backward?
* Can we truly understand the past, or can we only understand what one observer or another believed was occurring? Can history ever yield truth, or only a succession of different perspectives?
* What is the nature of the “missing mass” that we must posit in order to explain the behavior of the stars and galaxies but that has eluded all attempts at detection?
* How can we reconcile the conflicting claims of freedom of expression, on the one hand, and the rights of individuals and groups to respect in society, on the other?
* What makes music beautiful, and how does it touch our emotions?
* Why have real wages in the United States remained stagnant for twenty years?
* And, inevitably, one of my philosophy colleagues identified the most important question to which we have no satisfactory answer as this one: “What counts as a satisfactory answer to a question?”
How should we respond to this rich sampling of the puzzles and perplexities that occupy members of Calvin’s faculty and staff? Let me return to my title and invite you to celebrate with me how very little we know. We can give thanks for such a wonderful profusion of ignorance, such a rich offering of questions that demand our attention even while they yield no satisfactory answers. What a blessing it is, after all, to have come so far in our learning that we can understand and puzzle over these questions and their importance! Before you began your college study, how many of these questions would you even have understood? How many do you understand now? (I will not answer that question myself.) We might think of education as adding valuable items to two baskets, a basket of answers and a basket of questions. If the former becomes filled while the latter is frequently empty, you are not truly receiving an education in the liberal arts, an education that lays the foundation for a life of learning and for spiritual and intellectual growth. As you carry on your studies and follow your vocation in later life, you should strive to keep adding to the contents of both baskets.
Once in a while you may hear a professor or even a resident advisor–trying to persuade you to spend less time in the coffeeshop, perhaps–tell you that most of what you need to learn in college is between the covers of your textbooks. Don’t believe it for a moment. Textbooks are not divinely revealed sources of authority: they are highly selective attempts to persuade you that what the author thinks you should study is what you should really study. What you find between the covers of the text is deeply shaped by the author’s questions. Its value lies as much in the questions that the text leads you to ask as in any information it contains. You cannot learn biology or engineering or philosophy without careful study of the assigned texts. But you will not really obtain the benefits of your study until you reflect on what they contain, recognize their limitations and occasionally their outright mistakes, and articulate your own questions. So your education may indeed begin with careful study of texts. Learning to read critically and intently is an essential discipline in every field of study. But texts come to life and have meaning when you interpret and apply the information and the ideas that you find there. This process begins in the classroom, no less when students are speaking than when the instructor holds the floor. By no means does it stop when the class disperses. The real work of learning–formulating questions, seeking answers, testing ideas against those of others–goes on also in the residence hall, library lounge, the dorm Bible study, the van heading for the track meet, and the planning meeting for a service-learning project. Most of our learning comes not simply from reading texts but from conversation with each other, students and staff and faculty alike, and above all by putting our growing understanding to use in class presentations and writing. Bit by bit, lab by lab, assignment by assignment, coffee-shop session by coffee-shop session, termpaper by termpaper, we become more deeply aware of who God is, who we are, and what sort of world we have been placed in. And the more we learn, the more clearly we discern how vast is our remaining ignorance.
Recall the excitement when, months after the Hubble space telescope was launched, and its repaired mirror at last yielded images of breathtaking clarity from the farthest reaches of the universe. And what did these images show? Did they finally penetrate to the limits of space and show us everything that there is? Far from it: instead we saw millions more stars and galaxies than we can see from earth’s surface, a profusion of richness in the created order that boggles the imagination. It is the same with all learning. The finer our tools of analysis become, and the greater the reach of our means of inquiry, the greater the number of unknown regions and unanswered questions that will come into view for the first time. If you have caught the spirit of love for learning that underlies everything we do at Calvin College, you will never stop challenging yourself to consider questions that you cannot answer–to ensure that your basket of answers does not become full while the other basket empties out. You who are about to graduate are nearly done making tuition payments. You may even come to the end of your loan payments, possibly even before you retire. But if you truly understand how splendid it is to be ignorant, you will never cease asking questions of yourself and of others that you cannot answer.
I am nearing my conclusion, but I have not forgotten my promise at the beginning to speak in appreciation not only of your ignorance but also of your lack of truly significant achievements. It is not that you have been idle or have no fruits of your labors during your studies to exhibit. Many of you have received highly competitive scholarship and fellowship awards, enumerated in tonight’s program. Three of you have completed the college’s honors program, which speaks well not only for your intellectual gifts but also for your persistence. Some of you have completed significant programs of research in collaboration with your instructors, while others have contributed to the campus environment by writing for Chimes and Dialogue. The achievements of others include schoolchildren whose hearts and minds have been lifted up by your example as a student teacher or a volunteer, children who are far less likely today than they were a year ago to yield to the forces that perpetuate despair and poverty in our cities. Others among you have worked to bring hope and comfort to your fellow students when they were in distress and need, as resident advisors or simply as friends. Some have built houses for poor communities during spring breaks, while others have worked to build up the lively worshiping community that gathers in our chapel each Sunday evening. All of these are splendid things to have done, and I salute you for them all.
Yet I insist that in a larger sense you have really achieved nothing of lasting significance. The reason is that, for all our ignorance, there is one thing that we know at Calvin College, and it is this: we know that every human endeavor, no matter how grand or how trivial, how successful or how disastrous, fades into insignificance in comparison to the glorious transformation that God works in our lives through the teaching, the sacrifice, and the living presence of Jesus Christ. Of course we should strive to do our work well, and help each other when we fall short. Certainly we do well to acknowledge and celebrate the outstanding achievements of some among us. But even as we do this we need to remember that in the largest sense not a scrap of all that we do is of ultimate importance. Of our own initiative and by our own powers, we can accomplish nothing of lasting significance. Yet in all that we do God works through us, reconciling us to God in Jesus Christ and advancing the kingdom of righteousness and peace. Let me underscore my point by a passage from a new book by popular religious writer Robert Farrar Capon, The Astonished Heart (Eerdmans, 1996): To begin with, Christianity is not a religion; it’s the end of all religion. Religion is a human activity dedicated to the job of reconciling God to humanity and humanity to itself. The Gospel, however–the Good News of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—is the astonishing announcement that God has done the whole work of reconciliation without a scrap of human assistance. It is the bizarre proclamation that religion is over, period. All the efforts of the human race to straighten up the mess of history by plausible religious devices–all the chicken sacrifices, all the fasts, all the mysticism, all the moral exhortations, all the threats–have been canceled by God for lack of saving interest. More astonishingly still, their purpose has been fulfilled, once and for all and free for nothing, for by the totally non- religious death and resurrection of a Galilean nobody. Admittedly, Christians may use the forms of religion–but only because the church is the sign to the world of God’s accomplishment of what religion tried (and failed) to do, not because any of the church’s devices can actually get the job done. (p. 2)
Please join me, therefore, in a joyful celebration of how little we know and how little we can achieve. For from that knowledge flows the joy of a life dedicated to hard tasks and hard questions, confident in the knowledge that neither our wisdom nor our achievements are finally in our hands but in the hands of the One who made us and sustains us daily in love.
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/writings/couri.htm
