Richard Posner on the Conservative Intellectual Collapse

All I know is that when I read that post earlier today, every third comment proved Posner’s point. I can’t bring myself to go back.

Posner is arguing that, even though the movement was wrong, it won the political battles, and that is good. In other word, he is arguing that the political power of the conservative movement was more important than the truth of conservative philosophy. It is an astonishing thing for an intellectual to say: glorying in the corruption of himself and his ideals. And yet Posner is a major figure, for all that I dislike him, and may yet sit on the Supreme Court. I am starting to feel like I have fallen into a Spenglerian nightmare: are we to conclude that, in fact, raw power has trumped reason, then, in the modern West?

BTW, the comments are absolutely toxic. Posner & Becker would be well-advised to pay attention to the DFHs on moderation.

Oddly enough, the actual victories of the conservative movement seem to have been largely, well, conservative. The fall of the Soviet Union, but not through any of the mechanisms considered by conservatives. The triumph of capitalism, but still a mixed economic system in which the state still plays a fundamental role, and even that triumph is now short-lived. Balanced budgets for a few years and none after. Redistribution and deregulation seem to have been the only major victories, at least in his formulation.

I’ve never understood why conservatives felt they should get credit for the fall of the USSR. Wasn’t the whole point of Kirkpatrick’s distinction between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” systems of government that the USSR could never, ever reform from the inside? Totalitarian governments had to end in violence? Wasn’t that the basis of Reagan’s foreign policy?

And then, when the USSR did exactly, precisely what conservatives said it could never, ever do, they claim a victory? How did that work exactly?

Raven, no, Posner will not sit on the Supreme Court, not under any remotely plausible scenario. And you have him all wrong.

It is bizarre to read an account of the shifts in US politics over the course of my lifetime that never mentions race. Surely he’s heard of the Southern Strategy. Is there some kind of a Gentleman’s Agreement to abide by it but never mention it? Or did it never make a difference from his lofty intellectual height?

I read the B-P blog shortly after it was started; I characterized it as bullsh*t and blather, with no intellectual content at all. I wasn’t expecting peer reviewed papers, but writing which would appear to from people who were in the 99.99th percentile in IQ and education.

In the end Posner and Becker should be judged pretty much as pundits.

Thomas, how, exactly, do I have Posner wrong? (Complaining that I am unsympathetic does not count.)

Raven, saying that he believes the movement was wrong, but won the political battles, and that’s good, is, as I read it, all wrong. My reading is that he believes the movement was once right and went wrong, and that, as a matter of fact, its successes mean that the political moment now is much different from 1964.

Somebody needs to introduce these two to Rick Perlstein.

Thomas @8

Posner is giving those things as examples of the “causes embraced by the new conservatism”, which was the case, although the conservatives weren’t successful. It’s hard to work out what the Republican aims are right now, but I imagine that all those things are still on the agenda – which is bad for Posner.

“Triumph of capitalism”? Yeah right.

I’m always sort of impressed at how society accepts so many odd things, like the notion that Kirckpatrick was some sort of intellectual, like I’ve really had to wrestle with a justification of hiring death squads to slaughter Central Americans because they were merely “authoritarian” rather than the “totalitarian” monsters against whom we had to hire the death squads.

Posner is a libertarian.

A libertarian who supports universal health insurance for children, supports warrantless wiretaps, takes a dim view of strong conceptions of civil liberties, supports the U.S. ratifying Kyoto (and in general, taking aggressive action on climate change), expresses skepticism about executive compensation, and lately, of course, has come out in favor of the stimulus package and the rescue of automakers.

Conservative intellectuals had no party.

I’ll give him a hint: it starts with a D. At least, if they had a lick of sense, it would. It’s quite more conservative to stick with proven progressive policies even if only as a temporary measure rather than to veer off into crazy capitalism worship!

@28. Pretty much what Joe said, re Libertarians, Republicans and Posner. I’ve long maintained that most so-called Libertarians are just too chicken shit to admit they’re Republicans. As for the “real” ones, best definition of Libertarianism is anarchy for rich people. By and large, a useless lot.

Re 25: “Triumph of capitalism”? Yeah right.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1989/01/23/1989_01_23_098_TNY_CARDS_000351619

You’re right about the comments. This has inspired me to invent a standard way of assessing thread toxicity. Simply count the comments until a Godwin’s Law event occurs. This gives you the Godwin score. The higher the score, the more value the thread has. This should work for large values of n, as the original formulation of Godwin states that the longer the debate continues, the probability of Nazis asymptotically approaches one, but for short threads it is of course possible that Gs=0, which should be taken to mean that the thread isn’t long enough yet.

On a point unrelated to the post, but related to Alex’s tangent, I increasingly believe that Mike Godwin had the right rule but wrong target. I’ve seen plenty of discussions which continued in a reasonably coherent manner even with a couple of Nazi-analogies, but once the phrase “reading comprehension” has been typed, take it to the bank, nothing interesting is going to happen here.

although thinking about it, “take it to the bank” isn’t quite the ringing endorsement of something’s suitability as collateral these days.

Becker-Posner must be one of the last blogs not to turn off trackbacks. And – lo and behold – there’s one from Beldar, that I take to be a nice confirmation of Posner’s thesis:

http://beldar.blogs.com/beldarblog/2009/05/beldar-on-posner-on-conservatism.html

Re: Posner’s claim that he was satisfied that conservatism triumphed after Bill Clinton.

“What an incredible non sequitur in the very first sentence of that paragraph — as if the Clinton Administration had been an instrument, rather than an opponent, of “the triumph of conservatism”! Bill Clinton, of course, has never acted out of any other principle than what would promote the career of Bill Clinton, and he famously “triangulated” himself into claiming credit for welfare reform and (compared to what came later and to the Democratic Party’s reflexive defaults) fiscal sanity. But to mention Bill Clinton’s name in the same context as Goldwater, Rand, Kirk, Buckley, Friedman, Hayek, Kirkpatrick, or Reagan is a terribly bad joke.

So, too, is it to assert with a straight face that “the essentially conservative policies, especially in economics, of the Clinton administration, and finally the election and early years of the Bush Administration, marked the apogee of the conservative movement.” Bill Clinton won’t be remembered in history for a few years of budget surplus (enabled jointly by the economic boom resulting from the transition to an information economy and taxation and spending policies forced upon him by a GOP Congress), nor for welfare reform (enacted, again, despite the resistance of most of Clinton’s own party), but for disgracing the presidency with a tawdry sex scandal which he turned into perjury and obstruction of justice, leading to his impeachment. Just a few lines earlier in this same post, Judge Posner had already written, mostly accurately, that the conservative movement, as exemplified by Reagan …”

Shorter Beldar: the conservative movement can’t be intellectually bankrupt because Bill Clinton got a blowjob in the Oval Office.

Yep. Party of ideas.

#39–

ditto for charges of “mind reading”.

after that, it’ stupids from there on down.

He isn’t describing the conservative movement, or a conservative “movement” at all. He’s describing a particular policy program that some people on the right were pushing at a particular time (approx. Goldwater to Reagan). He’s claiming that people like him were the conservative movement, and the other groups involved were just tagging along, when in reality the reverse was true, and people like him deceived themselves into believing “the conservative movement” was something they could live with because for them “conservative” was a compliment. He’s complaining the conservative movement no longer meets his standards, and also claiming he was an intellectual in the movement at a time when he might have been one source for those standards. What he misses is that “cultural” conservatism, especially of the kind he supports, makes intellectual standards impossible.

“(“Cultural” in quotes because I don’t mean thinking the ABT ought to keep producing Swan Lake, or thinking everybody ought to finish high school, which is not what anybody means when they say “conservative.”)

although thinking about it, “take it to the bank” isn’t quite the ringing endorsement of something’s suitability as collateral these days.

No no, it’s perfect: You’re monetizing something that’s about to become worthless. The only modification you should have made is, “bundle it with ten other threads and take ’em to the bank, …”

The difference really is stunning.

Well, when you start thinking about the blatant and admitted intellectual dishonesty of the likes of David Stockman- maybe not so much. Iran-Contra doesn’t help your case much, either.

I think the Reagan Administration was the beginning of a lot of the march-off-the-cliff stuff that W just continued and perhaps heightened, but certainly didn’t originate.

There hasn’t been an intellectually honest or consistent right-wing movement in this country for a long, long time. I DO agree with you that that’s a real loss to the country, but the loss can’t be made good by pretending that the right is, or within living memory was, something that it manifestly isn’t.

Steve – I share your dislike of Reagan. But the Bush administration really was incredibly pathological even by prior standards. I like Krugman’s analogy with the Jacobins: the Bush administration was so extraordinarily radical that they simply obliterated the informal restraints that were a traditional part of the system. We’re engaged in a public debate about medieval torture; public voices of the GOP are downright feral. That is fundamentally different from “I disagree with party X about marginal tax rates or military spending.” They are *nuts* now.

right: the core is nixonism.

and what the nixon gang learned from reagan was the importance of a charismatic front-man.

(imagine if nixon had looked and sounded like jfk: then he would have won those damned debates!)

so their ideal route to executive tyranny was to have an inner core of nixon-veterans, fronted by a reagan-like amiable dunce. maybe someone that people thought they’d like to have a beer with.

having bush out front made the program more politically viable. but the program was the nixonite dream of executive tyranny. the rot goes at least that far back.

Thomas: oh, I see. The post doesn’t say one thing: at the beginning it claims to be right; at the end it admits some “weakness.” For values of weakness which include “wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong,” I suppose. (That admission is with regard to economic policy.) The post is an argument from a lawyer with a weak case: pretend the past is unconnected to the present, deny what can be denied, minimize the rest, and bury any admissions of error. Posner does not say, “We won, so who cares about being right?” but the attitude is there, along with a deep contempt for the critical faculties of his readers.

I wonder if any of the neo-conservative leaders and theoreticians will ever admit to being wrong and act on their admission? Hmmm, Fukayama I suppose.

Marc@50:

To the extent that “the conservative intellectual tradition” consists of stating the ideology that tradition==conservatism, then, no, there is no conservative intellectual tradition. There is the cooptation of philosophy per se by people who call themselves conservatives.

To the extent that “the conservative intellectual tradition” consists of people like Hayek who made up their own ideologies while defending themselves from the charge of radicalism by calling themselves conservatives and supporting the status quo, no, there is no conservative intellectual tradition.

To the extent that what might otherwise be called a “conservative” tradition in the United States is supported by people who call themselves conservatives only to the extent they oppose feminism and affirmative action, who failed at training a generation to follow them, and who (in the United States!) take the truth of marxism as a given, again, no.

The intellectual wing of the conservative party is now catholic. Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy still form a majority in the Supreme court and they are all influenced by a catholic view of conservatism.

For a late-comer like Posner, who is no Lincoln and is no Teddy Roosevelt, to dump on the intellectual traditions of the party is just silly. At heart he’s a bureaucrat, pure and simple.

Barbar: I am not an economist and have no familiarity with Becker’s early work. My concern is with his application of economic ideas to marriage and family issues with the intent to support a existing viewpoint and not even a pretense of an attempt to falsify a hypothesis. This work was used as support for conservative ideology without any protest from Becker (that I’m aware of, correct me if I’m wrong) that his papers were too preliminary to guide policy decisions.

We seem to agree that data played no great role in Becker’s success. His acclaim came from providing intellectual cover to conservative ideology. The rise of sociobiology certainly reinforced Becker’s appeal. The irony is that Becker’s papers were still being touted for policy support long after biologists had debated and rejected sociobiology’s more extravagant claims (I was a graduate student of Randy Thornhill at UNM in 1978 and had a front seat on the fight).

It took me a while to figure out what AFAICT stands for. At first I thought it was some data set I should know about!

Picador, Alexander Hamilton, who wanted a President for life. And Washington delivered the coup-de-grace to the idea when he resigned after two terms.

I do want to clarify that the personal military inclinations of such men as Teddy Roosevelt and Poppy Bush has little relevance to the Army paradigm I speak of; I speak of it as an Institution, not just of persons. In Britain and in Prussia, there existed between the ruling classes and the armed forces an sort of fused affinity that was institutional rather than personal, and had thus a social impact, whereas the personal militarism of Teddy Roosevelt left no lasting social institutions.

What I find baffling is Posner’s claim that the Clinton years somehow represented the closest approach to the Conservative ideal — so much so that only smallish improvements were even possible.

How could a Conservative so define their body of belief in a coherent way so that the apparent mess of compromises and inconsistencies of governance in the Clinton years might be regarded as its best, and nearly optimal, expression?

Of course, Posner makes that claim without any explanation of the underlying set of principles that might sense of such a highly counterintuitive and controversial assertion. Yet, if that’s how he chooses to proceed, how might he possibly have a right to chide other Conservatives for lapsing into an intellectual decline?

Trackbacks, which were arguably a bi-directional non-phallologocentric mode of bloggly discourse, were unmade by spam, largely for penile enhancement products, appropriately enough.

Myles, the South may be Baptist but it most definitely had and too some extent still has a martial tradition that in a lot of respects fits your “Army Conservatism”. The times they have been a’changing for awhile but places like the Citadel, VMI and even to a significant degree West Point are institutions in the direct meaning of that word, that also comprise an institution in the abstract one you’re talking about.

Of course, when I was in college I had a roommate I’d get into all kinds of arguments with, mostly because he always made these sweeping generalizations about what “America is” and how “Americans are” etc. And the South can pretty much serve as a good counter example to any such claim simply because, for all its faults and messed upness, it’s a way more complex place than any other region of this country. Even John Emerson’s Minnesota.

So if you say something general about America, or about American conservatism, you can always find something about the South that contradicts it. Eventually, my roommate, totally exasperated threw up his hands and said “But the South was never American! That’s why they had to be conquered!”. It was actually the first decent argument he had made.

“Isn’t this Posner speaking as a “small-c” conservative? A Burkean, let’s-not-get-drastic-here, muddling-through kind of conservative?”

IIRC, he led the law&economics movement, which did a lot to radically alter court interpretations of some areas of law. He’s a radical, but he probably felt that his desired radical changes were achievable without losing control.

A Burkean, let’s-not-get-drastic-here, muddling-through kind of conservative?

If only there were more of those. Call me naive, but to me conservatism is supposed to be about preserving traditional ways of life, belief in social order and skepticism towards change. I can live with that. But what we get instead under the label of conservatism is a bunch of crazy, militaristic free-market ideologues who judge everything except gay marriage and christmas in economic terms, want to remake the world in their own image instead of just letting people be and have no respect whatsoever for nature or traditions.

novakant:
to me conservatism is supposed to be about preserving traditional ways of life, belief in social order and skepticism towards change.

Perhaps that’s what it’s *supposed* to be, but IMHO what conservatism actually *is* is the motivating desire to conserve something. The question is, what are you conserving?

If, like Posner (I guess) you’re most motivated by conserving existing hierarchies of power and money (=”belief in social order”), you’re a political/economic conservative. People who are focused on conserving existing gender roles and hierarchy are social conservatives. Raging free-market ideologues are *also* conservative, because they’re trying to conserve their ability to act economically without restraint. Militaristic neocons are conservatives, too, because they want to conserve the US’s ability to physically coerce people who disagree with them.

They’re all conservatives, IMHO.

I don’t know what the word means where Richard Posner lives, but around here “conservative” means someone who feels his/her personal choices are more moral than those of other people, and who feels this is because the way they were raised or the school they attended was “old fashioned,” and this is what explains why they and people like them are the successful ones (or otherwise visibly “better”). So in politics they feel the country needs to support or extend their kind of school or their kind of family.

(Of course, the word has other meanings, and I can refer to “a conservative estimate” without praising or denigrating my own estimate with reference to my actual political beliefs and my feelings about the existing order of things (whatever that might be), no problem. :)

If, as a couple commenters have implied, Posner is basically a Burkean liberal who’s willing to move (forward), slowly, when it’s time — if he doesn’t see the way he was raised or the way he lives now, with the institutions that have underwritten that, as essential for good things’ happening, and threatened by even those gradual changes — I don’t know why he prefers to align himself with conservatives.

Yes, notsneaky, but the South is still missing the two aspects of Church and State. Those are fairly important.

And also, even if the South were to have the requisite conservatism, its impact on American political philosophy is limited. A regional thing is very likely to be limited in impact; that is its nature. Much like Welsh Liberals had only a brief period of impact on the United Kingdom, so does the South only have a very short time in the sun.

The emergence of a High Catholic conservatism, additionally, is bound to be more strict and less liable to wavering. Alito or Roberts, for example, will not waver simply to feeling; their reliance on non-temporal sources of authority prevents them from acting in an overly empowering manner.

The morally, intellectually bankrupt Republican party reminds me of a verse by that old lefty Ewan MacColl: “Geldings programmed his energy. Dead men told him how to live”. (“Kilroy Was Here”)

“followed by a thread of Republican radicals shouting ‘OMGZ TAXGAYABORTIONZ!’ at the top of their lungs.”

I much take offense at your characterisation.

novakant:

I suspect we’re saying the same thing (maybe), which is that *all* of these attitudes are conservative.

The great dilemna faced by anyone who’s trying to be conservative — in any of these senses — is that it’s no longer possible to think you can conserve *everything*. It’s not that “conservatism has been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism and technology”, it’s that we’re all riding the capitalism and technology trains whether we like it or not. Conserving “ways of life that have developed over hundreds of years” — what does that even *mean*, when we’re talking on the Internet? You have to pick and choose what you’re trying to conserve, or else turn into super-Amish — and even that doesn’t work, because there are other people in the world and they *will* be changing without you, which means your world will change will or nil.

My beef is with people like e.g. Andrew Sullivan, who goes on and *on* about what a Real True Conservative is, with no reference to actual human beings and their behavior. Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative is distilled essence of defining conservatives by assertion: “a conservative believes X, a conservative does Y” — without dealing with pesky details of fact.

bianca:

My observation is that *conservatives* are hung up on the definition of “conservative”, and have been for many years (see: Goldwater, Wm.F. Buckley). I observe a *lot* more discussion among conservatives about “what counts as” than there is among liberals (or progressives), and this is true regardless of whether they’re in or out of power. On the left, the comparison is more to the old “what counts as Marxist/socialist/communist” parsing, but less coherent.

Doctor Science: conservatives are hung up . . .

Okay, that’s obviously true. But we have plenty of evidence just in the comments section on this blog that this doesn’t translate as “Republicans, and only Republicans, are hung up on the definition of ‘conservative.'” Yet it’s almost a given that “conservatives vote Republican” (in the US where there is nothing called a “Conservative Party,” unlike in Canada and the UK): everyone who says “conservatism is always true” is automatically taken to be saying, “voting Republican makes more sense.”

Then you get people who say, “I have no real politics, and generally support the liberal status quo, and I’m a conservative, and I’m a conservative because I believe cultural conservatism is the true meaning of ‘conservative,’ both as regards art and literature, and also as regards ways of life (which does imply religion, if you’re religious, but not necessarily for those who are not).” But if they went out past the circles where this makes sense, they would have to choose, I think.

And–as I think was shown during the Scialabba/New Criterion discussion a little while ago–there really are very few “culturally conservative” media outlets that are not also politically conservative to the point of partisanship. Roger Kimball supports the conservative movement and Republican candidates and National Review. To argue that people can have progressive politics and be “conservative” is–in a sense–to push them towards those partisan publications.

It sounds like you’re saying people who don’t want to be mistaken for “conservative” should go to solidly left-wing places where they can debate the true, ideally rational meaning of “the Left.” But you’re also showering contempt on this kind of discussion, so I’m not sure what you mean.

I don’t know what the word means where Richard Posner lives, but around here “conservative” means someone who feels his/her personal choices are more moral than those of other people

This perfectly describes several progressives with whom I am acquainted. “More moral according to Biblical tradition” is perhaps more correct?