David Brooks, Edmund Burke, and Me

I get the feeling he’s not often read…

From highbrow to middlebrow to masscult to cool blue perspectives of superstition and tribal lore. Reading? An intolerable risk.

“Change should be steady, constant and slow” as best I can tell translates to something like: “I agree that I’ve accumulated wealth and power beyond any measure of fairness or just deserts. But take it up with my kids.”

I too suspect that Brooks has read little of Burke himself and instead relies on the received wisdom concerning Burke. Burke, I fear, has become nothing more than a symbol for what passes as thoughtful conservatism. Pundits like Brooks depend on secondary and tertiary sources for most if not all of their insights, pronouncements and condemnations. Don’t expect a subtle reading.

Burke on the East India Company captures my thoughts about the entire field of economics perfectly. The common thread? Not sure, but both could be taken as reductios of rational maximization, the practice in the case of the East India Company and the belief that it should guide actions on the part of the academy.

I always had the impression a lot of the concepts in Burke’s Reflections were molded around the need to show that the Glorious Revolution was totally justified while the French Revolution was infra dig.

Burke ranks up there with Adam Smith and Thomas Paine for historical figures conservatives like to quote but rarely actually read to find out what they really said.

As a naive youth I believed that there existed “Burkean conservatives” who believed that we should be slow to change existing, working social arrangements. Then, in conversation with people who claimed to believe this, I started to ask them how they could justify their position that we should get rid of Social Security. If we took it as having started in 1940-1945, it was then 40 or so years later. Wasn’t it now organically part of our social arrangements, and shouldn’t we be slow and reluctant to change it? And the answer was of course not.

The same surely went for abortion rights (1973). On the other hand, conservatives seem to have given up on fighting against women’s suffrage (1920). But it’s unclear whether they’ve really given up, or just have so many battles they’d have to win between here and there that they aren’t ready for that one yet.

“Colleges I couldn’t have gotten into”: Brooks got into the University of Chicago, about which people like to say it’s more difficult getting out (he did).

Oops, I said millions when I meant billions.

Burke, East India Company: Burke, Edmund. (1783) Mr. Burke’s Speech, On the 1st December. 4.5.14 http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Burke/brkSWv4c5.html

Thornton Hall @9: if you want to read thoughtful conservatism done right, read Francis Moore Lappe’s “Rediscovering America’s Values” (now out of print). This book ought to mandatory reading in all US high schools and colleges. It offers an extensive, detailed, footnoted and referenced dialog between a prototypical progressive voice (essentially Lappe’s own) and a prototypical conservative voice (drawn from the writings of many in the conservative movement spread across a century or three). Lappe notes that several of the conservatives she asked to read the galley proofs felt that she had done a better job representing their perspective than she done done for her own.

The dialog is brilliant, and even if the conservative voice/position staked out within it is not actually at all representative of the many worms and weasels who might call themselves conservatives these days, I think it will persuade you that there really is such a thing as “thoughtful conservatism” – i.e. a belief that conservative ideas are actually the best way to create a good society, along with a clear vision of what that society’s goals and morals are, and why progressive ideas about this are either demonstrably or conceptually wrong.

Lappe ends the book without attempting to claim that there is some common position that progressives and conservatives can stake out, which is a relief given that the book makes clear the very, very fundamental differences in the two belief systems.

“The dialog is brilliant, and even if the conservative voice/position staked out within it is not actually at all representative of the many worms and weasels who might call themselves conservatives these days, I think it will persuade you that there really is such a thing as “thoughtful conservatism” ”

This is immensely funny. There really is a “thoughtful conservatism”! All it needs is a progressive to articulate it. It’s the worst of both conservatism and progressivism in just half a sentence.

I thought that Holbo had articulated this in his critiques of a decade or so ago, which he apparently never took to heart then or now: if the thoughtful conservatism that you want doesn’t exist, then it’s not up to you to create it.

Real, actual conversations are between actual people — one might be some actually existing representative of conservatism like Ted Cruz. He doesn’t become any less real because he’s incoherent by your lights. This is No True Scotsman-ing gone mad, so that the only real thoughtful conservative is a blend of voices that never existed.

Conservatives aren’t concerned with logical bases of their belief systems. Sometimes they have to pretend to be, for propaganda purposes, but those occasions are few and far between and a lot more rare than they used to be. So progressives create the debating partner that they want, while the actual conservatives go on and do what they have always actually done. The whole thing is comical, but it’s also false to the most basic values of the progressives themselves — which should have a lot to do with seeing the world as it is, not how they imagine it’s supposed to be.

Well, there was one conservative who spoke of “”the only duty of power, the social welfare of the PEOPLE”.

But the idea that this will happen spontaneously through the good will and charity of the well off and through voluntary charity has never been translated into reality.

Lappe cites (random selection from about 1/5th of the book, though many names occur over and over, sometimes on both sides)

Supporting a “conservative” or “classical liberal” position: Andrew Mellon, Thomas Sowell, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, David Ricardo, Bertrand de Jouevenel, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Nozick, Daniel Bell, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Robert Benne, Irving Kristol, Richard Posner, Irving Babbitt, George Gilder, Alan Greenspan, Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, Charles Schulz, Robert Benne, John Locke, James Fennimore Cooper, John Taylor, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham.

And yes, there are even a couple of (old) quotes from George “Rape victims are priviledged” Will.

Supporting a “progressive” position: Bayard Rustin, Thomas Jefferson, John H. Schaar, Lyndon Johnson, Nathan Glazer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lee Iacoccoa (!), Henry Simons, Michael Lerner, Karl Polyani, Arthur Okun, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Adam Smith, Charles Lindblom, Benjamin Franklin, John Dewey

And many, many more quotes to support both sides of her dialog. I think you’re ahistorical if you think you can dismiss the list of conservative/classical liberal writers and thinkers that Lappe drew on as the equivalent of Ted Cruz, let alone if you believe that a significant number of those people didn’t care about the “logical bases for their belief systems”.

I count myself firmly in the progressive camp, but I am willing to grant a level of respect to many (not all) the people Lappe quotes for her conservative voice far beyond anything I would give Ted Cruz or any current elected republican, and I think it is a grievous mistake to dismiss their position so summarily.

@Paul Davis and Rich Puchalsky

Maybe this is a settled issue here at CT based on what Holbo said decades ago, I have no idea, and as much as I enjoy Holbo’s writing, I have a hard time believing he ever settles anything.

Anyway, this is a very live issue right now in my world. I just had dinner with a future law professor who is already making a splash. In discussing electoral politics and the prospects for a schism between a rump GOP confined to Neo-Confederate states and rural voters in places like Kansas, the future professor complained that electoral victory was not enough, that the ideology of Reaganism had to be refuted. I suggested that infinite money for crazy meant the kind of people who can win a GOP primary will always be the kind of people that lose statewide elections in increasingly diverse states. But, to her, it was important that the black and Latino voters knowingly refute the Reaganist ideology.

I think this is the kind of thing that can only be imagined by over-educated elites. But between the press and the academy, that’s who processes all our ideas. So it seems important to get through to elites that the battle needs to be about “what works” and not about “the proper scope of the Federal government.”

I think this may be a point that Corey Robin has made before. It is probably more instructive to think of those who call themselves conservatives today as reactionaries. Today’s “conservatives” are not even in favor of slow deliberate change back to their imaginary golden age.

ZM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

A H,

Singapore seems to have a very different sort of idea of public housing, since that article says 95% of public housing residents own their houses.

In Australia if the government sells public housing to be owned by residents then the housing is not considered public housing anymore.

The closest thing to genuine conservatism in the US is (or was) High Broderism, as memorably described by Atrios in 2007.

We normally think of “High Broderism” as the worship of bipartisanship for its own sake, combined with a fake “pox on both their houses” attitude. But in reality this is just the cover Broder uses for his real agenda, the defense of what he perceives to be “the establishment” at all costs. The establishment is the permanent ruling class of Washington, our betters who know better. It is their rough agenda which is sold as “centrism” even when it has no actual relationship with the political center in a meaningful way. Democracy’s messy, in Broder’s world, and passionate voters are problematic. It is up to the Wise Old Men of Washington to implement the agenda, and the job of the voters to bless them for it. When the establishment fails, the most important issue is not their failure, but that the voters might begin to lose faith in and deference for their betters. Thus, people must always be allowed to save face, no matter what their transgressions, as long as they’re a part of his permanent floating tea party.

While this basic attitude isn’t unique to Broder, his apparent lack of interest in the actual details of policy makes him a more absurd figure than some. For him it’s not about results, but about the right people being in the right places. It is terribly elitist in all the wrong ways. Arguments can be made for certain types of elitism – you do want a brain surgeon conducting brain surgery – but Broder’s elites are simply aristocrats. It’s their town.

The “permanent floating tea party” Atrios described was soon to be displaced by the reactionary bombthrowers of the Tea Party, who have pretty much succeeded in burying centrist conservatism.

I disagree with T. Hall’s implication above (I think it was @9) that there’s no conservative worldview or ideology.

It’s well established that there are certain old, and to some extent recurring, themes in the conservative worldview (or, if you prefer, worldviews), e.g., the relationship between order and hierarchy. There must be people who give commands and make decisions, and others who obey them; otherwise there will be chaos. But you might ask: What’s conservative about that? Doesn’t any functioning social system or organization require lines of authority? One answer is that what’s conservative is the view that it’s one fairly fixed group of people who, trained or bred or otherwise qualified for the task, give the orders and make the decisions (cf. the Tory notion of a governing class). And, a point Corey has emphasized, the principle extended to, or even originated in, the private realm, so husbands ‘naturally’ gave orders to wives, bosses to workers, etc.

I’m not sure how easily Brooks’s output can be connected to this and other classic conservative themes (it probably varies from one column to the next), but I’m sure there are other conservative writers who try to apply, or who see themselves as applying, certain (putative) timeless ‘truths’ of conservatism to current topic X or Y.

I don’t think any contemporary American politician or public figure – whether conservative, liberal or Merovingian – who fulminated against a multinational corporation with half as much vitriol as Burke did against the East India Company would have any sort of viable career much less the kind of career Burke did. He reads like Matt Taibbi denouncing the octopus.
He was on the wrong side of reform against Macaulay and Ram Mohan Roy, though.

@41 “doesn’t extend back before the 1980’s” On the contrary, Establishment conservatism dominated US politics between the New Deal and the Reagan counter-revolution. The attack from the left in the 1960s was a failure, but it weakened the Establishment and radicalised the right sufficiently to allow the rise to power of “movement conservatism” after 1980s.

24

One doesn’t have to agree with Plato to concede that he was thoughtful. Plenty thoughtful.

@46 and yet, here’s Corey from his cited post:

I wrote The Reactionary Mind for many reasons, but one of them was to show—contra Carpenter, Sullivan, Blumenthal, Tanenhaus, Krugman, and many more—that today’s conservative is in fact conservative. She hasn’t betrayed the traditions of Burke, Disraeli, Hayek, Oakeshott, Buckley, and Reagan: she has fulfilled them.

“John Quiggin is writing that if you wanted to look for something like Burkean conservatism, then you wouldn’t look at actual conservatives […] It means that the radical reactionaries are the real heirs to Burke.”

Or, to clarify a bit further, “Burkean conservatism” is now a sort of term of art that describes a particularly well-known ideal that has little to do with Burke and nothing to do with actual conservatism.

For the future fortunes of right-wing US reactionaries, what is happening in the US midterms is interesting.

Many of the races for the Senate and the state governorships are surprisingly close. From historical observations, the Republicans should be doing much, much better. The Republicans may win the Senate, but they are not doing nearly as well as the combination of the red-state / blue-state demographics, plus the campaign spending, plus the mathematical probabilities would have predicted, even six months ago. If the Republicans win the Senate, they may claim a “wave” election, but it will more likely be their luck in a bunch of close squeakers.

For me, this points to three things:

1. As I have argued here for years, the Republican Party is on the skids, and is sliding into an historical cul de sac. Their most basic problems are that A) their economic ideology — roughly, Reaganomics — is false and now it is finally crashing into reality after 35 years of denial and lies — BUT! the Republican shills must still sell this ideology to their most reliable supporters, the Tea Party, because they are the ones who still believe in it, in order to motivate them to go out to the election booths to vote Republican. The second thing is that B) the demographics of immigration and socially-liberal youth are also moving against the Republicans, more quickly than they can muster an intellectual framework to respond.

2. The other thing is that in the shorter term, a new Republican U.S. Senate will be the thing to watch. Again, this has two parts: A) If the elections are close, the Senate will not push radical reactionary policies, for fear of turning the states bluer, while splitting the party further. Any attempts to squelch Obamacare, for example, will bring into the news the one thing they would hope to avoid: the fact that the law already allows states to go single-payer in 2017. At the same time, B) the Senate is going to be the arena for politicking, scene-setting, and reality-adjustment for one of the Republican’s presidential aspirants, Rand Paul. (Reality-adjustment why? Because the foreign policy establishment does not like his isolationism, and the Wall Street establishment does not really want to get rid of the Federal Reserve, however much the financiers whine. While the rest of us wonder whether his father Ron will be running around the halls of the White House near dinner-time, gibbering about the gold standard.) But! many Senators are egotistical and self-regarding, each a mini-potentate, each a mini-President; and this will not go down well with other contenders.

3. The US Democrats are the true Burkean conservatives now, although that now incorporates the social liberalism that has been building steadily for a century or more due to the mandates of supreme individualism, and with a healthy boost from the 1960’s. I do agree with John Quiggin above (#46) that the first reaction to the ’60s was movement conservatism. Indeed it suggested to the Reagan campaign operatives the mantra, “Get the government off our backs.” But I think that in the end, the hippies are having the last laugh. Yay!

I should add to my #54 above, regarding the Republican’s party’s historical dead-end, a third point: C) that more extreme weather, or any uptick in the GISS surface temp graph, will be the nails in their political coffin.

Lee A. Arnold @ 54, 56

You don’t think it is odd that the Party with an apparently unpopular agenda is favored to win?

And, the Party with the supposedly popular agenda whose base of supporters is so demoralized and discouraged, the popular Party likely to lose, that’s somehow not the Party you think is in trouble?

I think the idea that there’s a political philosophy that corresponds to each side of, or explains, the partisan divide is a category error. This game of antonyms, where we identify the liberals and, therefore, by consulting our Thesaurus, their antagonists, the authoritarians, or we identify the conservatives by looking for those interested in conserving, and then extend that search to find the progressives and the reactionaries is absurdly superficial.

That there will be vested interests in politics is certainly a given. Whether there will be philosophers seems more likely to be optional.

Movement conservatism was never simply about a set of ideas; it was about a program of building up institutions that would match the institutions, which, in the 1960s, supported a liberal establishment. That liberal establishment is long gone, and with it, the cadre of people, who could make a career out of being a political liberal.

The character of the political establishment changed in the course of David Broder’s long career of writing the same dozen columns over and over again, ever if High Broderism never changed. It’s not that it grew any more conservative or reactionary — it is that the political establishment became homogenous, as key industries consolidated, and the conflicts among various interests dissolved, leaving politicians no power of evasion or counterbalance. It became the nightmare Mancur Olson prophesized.

Our politics isn’t driven by anyone’s philosophy, let alone a philosophy fixated on the finer points concerning the size and scope of government, considered in the abstract. In that context, I think “reactionary” is right term, in part because it implies no real philosophy at all. The controlling spirit is greed and power, the attitude that what’s ours is ours, and what’s theirs, is negotiable. (That’s certainly an element with correspondence in Burke’s politics, supremely conscious of conserving class privilege as it was.) The conflicts of interest, the resolution of which in policy is the central task of politics, are suppressed by the homogenization of the political establishment, turned into presumptive privilege of the very wealthy and large corporations and technocrats, on the one hand, and the futilities and despair of the majority on the other, including those aware enough to realize that society seems to have lost its ability to adapt to circumstances, to solve manifest problems, even as the problems manifesting themselves grow in importance and scale with economic crisis, climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, etc.

@57:

Again from Corey Robin, discussing Burke and Hayek:

If nothing else, I hope my book spurs readers to go back to these texts. Not just because they’re great, which they are. But also because we’re having a conversation about modern conservatism in the dark, based on a misapprehension of the what the enterprise is and is not about. If we can get clear on these ancient texts, maybe we can get a little clearer on the contemporary practice.

Conservative thought doesn’t need rephrasing or restating by progressives. The fact that Cruz et al. can’t describe their political philosophy without sounding like self-interested, reality-challenged bigots doesn’t mean that the intellectual underpinnings are not there for the reading in their original form, as Corey notes.

@60:

The controlling spirit is greed and power, the attitude that what’s ours is ours, and what’s theirs, is negotiable. (That’s certainly an element with correspondence in Burke’s politics, supremely conscious of conserving class privilege as it was.)

Absolutely. But … this doesn’t imply the absence of a philosophy, even if the philosophy is the post-facto rationalization for the self-interested greed implied by “the controlling spirit”. I’m not sure that any of us really behave in the ways we do as an expression of political philosophy – rather, our political philosophy is a defense or an explanation or a rationalization of why we do what we do. In this sense, listening to “thoughtful conservatism” is still worthwhile, not because it means that conservatives are not fundamentally motivated by greed and unenlightened self-interest, but because hearing how they try to justify their behaviour in a world that is less tolerant of these characteristics sheds more light on their psychology and worldview than their behaviour alone provides.

@Paul Davis: Trying one more time.

1. There is an idea called “Burkean conservatism”, about slow and gradual change, reasoned scepticism etc described by Brooks in the quoted passage, and much cited by people who call themselves conservatives

2. Modern “movement conservatism” is nothing like this, which has led many to suggest that today’s “conservatives” have deviated from the Burkean heritage into radical reactionary politics

3. (Corey’s big point) In reality, Burke, WF Buckley and most other figures cited as examples of “Burkean conservatism” were actually radical reactionaries, more similar to modern movement conservatism than to the ideas described in point 1.

4. (My observation) If you want to find a political group in the US whose views resemble the imaginary “Burkean conservatism” described in point 1, look at Establishment centrists.

“The Obama Administration is Reaganite to its neoliberal core”

Truly expending medicaid, equal pay for women, raising the minimum wage and raising taxes on the rich were all long objectives of the Reagan establishment……

Your hatred for Obama makes you blind.

Bruce Wilder: “Our politics isn’t driven by anyone’s philosophy, let alone a philosophy fixated on the finer points concerning the size and scope of government, considered in the abstract. In that context, I think “reactionary” is right term, in part because it implies no real philosophy at all.”

Yes. But I disagree that “the controlling spirit is greed and power”: the controlling spirit is something like hierarchy. Conservatives who aren’t at the top levels don’t get many opportunities for greed, and don’t get much power, but they do really like living in a society where they are white and guaranteed to be a step above the lowest class. Those conservatives enable the conservative coalition as much as the oligarchs at the top do.

And that’s why the talk of conservative philosophy is pointless. There’s no way that something like racism can be rationally defended, and the conservative isn’t really troubled that it can’t be rationally defended. If he or she was troubled by that, then he or she would be a progressive. The people who can possibly be convinced by rational arguments have, to a close approximation, already been convinced by rational arguments.

Therefore these arguments only work on people who they’ve already worked on. Conservatives like racism, they like the feeling of inherent power that it gives them, and there is no rational way of talking them out of it, or economic bribe you can give them that will outweigh the psychological benefits they get from vicariously or literally stomping on someone else. If you corner one and ask what their philosophy is, they will parrot something from Burke — actually, they will parrot some liberal who has glossed Burke for them in an attempt to find thoughtful conservatism — but it has no real meaning other than it’s what they vaguely know they’re supposed to say.

“Just cause we can’t stop ‘em doesn’t mean they’re smart.”

Geez, who cares whether they’re smart? Smartness is what progressives value. Conservatives value winning.

“What have they won” other than a chance to shape society in their image and kill hundreds of thousands of people. Conservatism can’t really exist, long-term, in what you would describe as a successful society. Their success has to consist of, exactly, doing to the U.S. what Bremer did to Iraq, complete with warlords, ethnic militias, etc.

According to Alan Ryan, in the classical (and Renaissance humanist) conception, a revolution was a salutary return to first principles. After Burke, political revolution came to be seen as a sweeping away of everything and a total rebuilding from the ground up. Burke saw this as a “blasphemous undertaking”, an abrogation of creative powers that, for a religious person, belong to God alone. Ryan calls Burke’s “Reflections” “the expression of an outraged religious sensibility.” This is probably the aspect of Burke, insofar as he had a philosophy, that was taken up by future reactionaries.

The conservative view of human relations as subordinate to and a reflection of a timeless, and therefore static and unchanging metaphysical hierarchy predates Burke, going back to the Pelagian controversy, if not further — to the Tower of Babel.

Paul, to me you’re playing a version of the game where, when somebody is confronted by their dishonesty, feigns outrage and shock that they should be questioned.

They did what they did.

Laffer’s work was dishonest bullsh*t.

Murray and Hernstein’s was, as well, and Murray has worked hard of living down to it.

Buckley was an unrepentant racist b*stard, and one of those who welcomed unrepentant racists into the GOP, when the Democratic Party was no longer striving to be their home.

I’m commenting around @60 or 61ish, perhaps I’ll have changed my mind by the time I get to @75

I agree with Lee A. Arnold and Rich Puchalsky for the most part. But maybe it’s not the word “conservative” that’s the problem. Maybe it’s “ideology” and “ideological” which I take to mean “a system of ideas”.

The press, in particular, seems to latch onto this out of their need to present every story as having two sides (it’s “bad journalism” otherwise). But if one side is the truth and the other side is a lie? That problem is avoided with the notion of *ideology* which is taken to mean a system of ideas that shapes priorities and values but is neither true nor false.

But when the GOP complains about Obamacare, they don’t simply say “I don’t want the Federal Government involved”, instead they make the related claim “the Federal Government will screw this up.” The first is ideological, the second empirical, but the press treats them as equally non-falsifiable, leaving it to editorials to point out the difference.

@76: I understand and accept (and perhaps even agree) with your verdicts on all those folk. But that isn’t my point. There are people in history who act, come to realize that they behaved badly or unwisely or irrationally and accept that. There are others who continue to believe, despite their critics, that they were correct (or wise or rational). There are members of both those groups who acted out of self interest, and others who genuinely believed they were acting on behalf of a greater good.

I find the dogmatic insistence of some progressives unsettling: conservatives are just wrong, knew they were wrong, and did it anyway. Given that I see conservatives (e.g. on Red State) making the same sort of dismissal of progressives, I’m nervous.

Bruce Baugh: “I think that I’m describing much the same thing that Rich Puchalsky is, and that we’d end up converging on terms in most cases.”

I agree, but there’s part of what I write that I don’t know if we generally agree on. It has to do with “We’ve seen that there’s a significant mass of folks out there from center to left who will go through astounding mental gymnastics to engage with anything presented in intellectual forms they recognize […]” and I agree that it’s wasted effort. But it’s more than that: it’s a failure to accept or believe that other people think in ways that are really different from one’s own.

The bullshitter (to use your term) may want to keep people distracted, so them being distracted is their failure on the bullshitter’s terms. But progressives being incapable of understanding that rational argument doesn’t mean the same thing to other people as it means to them is a failure on the progressive’s own terms. The old Bush administration saw about “we create reality, and you study it” really becomes pretty pathetic if progressives can’t even study it.

There’s a reason why conservatives will often pick up a book written by a progressive (as Paul Davis describes upthread) and say that the progressive really did articulate their philosophy well. It’s because the progressive did it with a note of sincerity that the conservative can’t really duplicate. I’ll choose an example: Paul Davis wrote that the book he referred to cited, as part of its composite view, George Gilder. I haven’t read the book that Paul Davis referred to. But I would bet that it didn’t present George Gilder as saying that women are inferior, or that native american or africans cultures are inferior, or that evolution is wrong and the world was created by intelligent design, or that secular culture leads to Satanism. I’ll bet that it quoted him on supply-side theory. No doubt Paul Davis can tell me if I’m wrong. But I will guess that what he said about economics was what was deemed important, by a progressive, in making a synthetic thoughtful conservatism, and all the rest of his organic thought was not.

So what changed? The variable that’s different is the post-war press. Before they sold newspapers, but most people didn’t actually believe that George Washington committed treason.

The dawn of post-war objective reporting and the professionalization of the press is the big, obvious change that no one notices because they assume it was a change for the better. But Buckley et al hacked the press, and took advantage of the automatic credit they got as “the other side of the story.”

Then you think that someone pranked his wikipedia entry?

@86: I was insufficiently familiar to Gilder, and shouldn’t have used him as an example. Thanks for the push to become acquainted with this apology for a thinker.

In addition to the objective media, another think that causes the ongoing confusion about conservatism is the metaphor of a spectrum. People talk about sexuality existing on a spectrum when they want to validate a wide range of preferences and behaviors as having equal status (and I agree). That’s the same thing that happens when you put political preferences on a spectrum.

The problem is, supply side economics is not like being gay. Supply side economics is an empirical claim that is false.

Damn Cold War, really screwed up people’s thinking about politics.

Rich: Oh, I agree with you a lot there. I was commenting to someone just the other day on how, when I was growing up, it never occurred to me that you could really have a worldview without some form of “When you say that something must/can’t happen, and then events prove you wrong, you need go back and adjust your claims and the stuff underlying them to stop being wrong.” But of course you can, and you can do so while being a modern movement conservative just as much as while being a Stalinist air brusher.

You’ve saved me a lot of posting this thread by writing so much I can just look at and go “Yup, Rich got it.” One of the ways I’ve changed in the last…let’s say 14 or so years, just to grab a convenient interval…is realizing how many people there are who can’t be engaged in anything I recognize as actual honest debate.

For those unfamiliar with Harry G. Frankfurt’s work, here’s On Bullshit in PDF form.

Paul Davis: Brooks and Douthat have both written in strong support of overtly sexist arguments that include a basic female incapacity to engage in some characteristically male kinds of reasoning, leadership, etc. Douthat very much believes in the similar lack of capacity in people of color; Brooks probably does too, but with more weasel words. Douthat likely is a creationist, even though his church teaches it others – it teaches against the death penalty as well, and that doesn’t stop him or the bloodthirsty barbarians on the Supreme Court. And Brooks and Douthat both agree that truth is simply irrelevant when it comes to what we the enlightened leaders need to teach the masses, in a very Leo Strauss kind of way. Examples of them doing all these things are in the Crooked Timber archives.

This gets back at something Rich has been hammering on: the actual facts of what they do and say provide a constant refutation of the idea of any single one of these scoundrels being that legendary beast, the reasonable or moderate conservative. On very nearly every issue of substance, the differences are only ones of style/temperament. But you have to look at what they’re saying and doing and not grant them repeated cover of the “oh, that can’t be what they really meant” sort.

The only good [flexing finger quotes] conservative is a dead [flexing finger quotes] conservative…

It’s always interested me since I started studying Attic decades ago that “logos” in ancient Greek is the masculine declination, not feminine or neutral.

Although I don’t write much like john c. halasz and accordingly would not phrase his comment @87 in quite the way he has, I agree with what I take to be its main point, namely that dismissing *all* conservatives as irrational, thoughtless people uninterested in anything resembling rational argument is silly and self-defeating.

Rich Puchalsky, it could be argued with some cogency, has it exactly backwards: the problem is not that progressives have taken conservative ideas too seriously; the problem is that in many cases they have not taken them seriously enough. Wm F Buckley had ideas, inconsistent and self-serving as many of them were, and to dismiss him simply as a “racist bast*rd” as someone did upthread (I think Puchalsky) is silly.

Rich Puchalsky is also wrong about hierarchy. It does not refer to the pleasure anyone above someone else in some pecking order takes in “stomping on” the person below. As I pointed out in my comment @42, hierarchy as a principle of order refers to the belief that there is an identifiable, albeit not necessarily completely closed, group of individuals uniquely suited to govern, to rule, to wield power. See S. Beer’s discussion of the idea of a governing class in British Politics in the Collectivist Age (pb ed 1969), from which I was cribbing. Corey R. makes a similar point, albeit not identical or in precisely the same context, about order and hierarchy in the opening pp of The Reactionary Mind.

A confusion here, evidenced in Bruce Baugh’s comment @92 supporting R. Puchalsky, is to equate “moderate” with “rational” and “thoughtful.” Thus Bruce Baugh suggests that because there are few or no ‘moderate’ conservatives, we are left with simply crazy, irrational ones. This is a mistake. Radicals, of both Left and, pertinently here, Right, can be rational, can engage in reasoned argument (some of them esp. on the Right are nuts, true, but not all).

So the fact that, as JQ correctly says, “movement conservatism” is not gradualist or moderate in any sense does not mean that every adherent of movement conservatism can be summarily dismissed as a gibbering idiot, a fascist, a white person who likes “stomping on” non-whites, or an entirely deluded victim of false consciousness.

The smugness and self-righteousness implicit in R. Puchalsky’s summary dismissal of *all* conservatives as fools or knaves or Machiavellian connivers completely uninterested in and unconversant with anything resembling rational argument, and only able to function at all in political discourse because they somehow magically have been persuaded to allow progressives to reconstruct their arguments for them, which reconstructions progressives then tear down while conservatives snicker behind their backs — this whole picture is very, very dubious and does not, IME, help the Left. It also ignores the well-documented contribution that well-funded think tanks, trafficking after all in ideas and policy proposals (however misguided), made to the right-wing revival in the U.S.

“The other standard left-liberal assumption is that politics is all about morality and should be thoroughly moralized, (on the further assumption that liberals are possessed of a systematically complete universal morality, which their opponents simply refuse to accept because of failings amounting to original sin). ”

The part of the left that descended from Marxism likes to speak against moralizing this way, as if politics was about the material interests of different classes. That kind of scientism failed. It enabled a whole structure by which leftists of a certain type could pretend that they weren’t making moral claims, but instead speaking about reality, while their detractors were informed by demonstrably false consciousness. That whole ideology was foundationally grounded in truth claims that turned out not to be true, and there’s no particular reason why people on the left should still have to pretend that they aren’t moralizing.

Of course there are going to be competing moral claims. Saying that conservatives don’t think of rational argument in the same way that progressives do doesn’t mean that they don’t make moral claims — they just don’t back them with the same appeal to rational universality that progressives like to use.

LFC: “The smugness and self-righteousness implicit in R. Puchalsky’s summary dismissal of *all* conservatives as fools or knaves or Machiavellian connivers completely uninterested in and unconversant with anything resembling rational argument”

I’m willing to hear about counterexamples. Who are they, exactly? All it took to get Paul Davis to give up all George Gilder in favor of no particular individuals was to get him to read his wikipedia entry. And no, I’m not willing to accept example from among the older-day “classical liberals”, who were not really conservatives in any sense that I recognize. The contemporary descendants of the classical liberals are the left-liberals and neoliberals.

“It also ignores the well-documented contribution that well-funded think tanks, trafficking after all in ideas and policy proposals (however misguided), made to the right-wing revival in the U.S.”

What contribution is that? I’m quite familiar with the historical period in question. Were those ideas and policy proposals serious, rational attempts to solve political problems, or were they — as I’ve described them — merely propaganda designed to convince people that conservatives really could think rationally within the progressive sphere?

If your standard is “conservatives in any sense that I recognize” then you’re offering a circular argument, no?

Colin Danby: “If your standard is “conservatives in any sense that I recognize” then you’re offering a circular argument, no?”

I have a specific argument about the classical liberals in mind, which people are free to accept or reject. I don’t think that people like John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, or David Ricardo (to choose some names from Paul Davis’ list of conservative sources from the book he cites) are connected to conservatism in some way that’s more meaningful than how they’re connected to liberalism. How about if we stick to the last 50 or 100 years?

The supposed distinction between classical liberals and contemporary left-liberals is one that libertarians like to make. (“Libertarians” in the U.S. sense of that word, meaning propertarians, not meaning socialist anarchists.) It’s intended to cut off anything that smacks of the New Deal from anything that came before. But liberalism went through specific historical events that convinced classical liberals to become left-liberals or neoliberals. There’s something ahistorical in now holding up the classical liberals as part of the sequence of conservatism.

@LFC I’m with Rich. If there are movement conservatives (in the US sense) who are worth engaging with, or even who propose ideas that are worth debating, I haven’t found them. There are some people on the right who are worth engaging with, but most of them would reject the term “conservative” or at least the conservative movement.

Feel free to point out exceptions, but don’t rely on the centrist assumption that, given two opposed viewpoints, each must have some validity.

Let us remember the signature domestic achievements of the last republican president: doubling the budget of the department of education in a bill co-authored by Ted Kennedy, dramatically expanding medicare with a prescription drug benefit, dramatically increasing financial regulation with Sarbanes Oxley and Basel 2, and engaging in multiple efforts to promote home ownership among groups with low rates of such. He also led a nearly successful effort toward immigration reform.

What an utterly silly claim! While Bush was in office, his Congress held their noses and agreed to everything you say, against all their principles and ideals. After he left in disgrace, how many Republicans consider him an adequate or even acceptable GOP president? Basicly none.

It’s plausible that a lot of the reason McCain did not get enough GOP support to win the 2008 election was that too many Republicans were concerned he would be “Bush lite”. That was what I heard a lot of Republicans say after the election, to explain the loss.

Arguing that Republicans still believe in making small, slow changes because the last GOP president made big, liberal changes that they hated, is utterly ridiculous. Do you think about what you say, or do you just toss out whatever talking-points that particular keywords remind you of?

But then, that approach can work here. To the extent that people ignore their previous discussion and start discussing your talking points, advancing into your prepared minefield/artillery-zone-of-fire, you win by distracting them from whatever conclusions they were approaching.

The general argument of this thread is that conservatives don’t have principles to betray, that they are motivated by nothing besides greed and racism?

See, the people here do not consider greed and racism to be actual principles. But those are the principles that the GOP supports

And by agreeing to big wasteful liberal government actions, Bush and his GOP congress betrayed those principles.

(Except of course for the crony capitalists who sucked out the government money.)

The whole point is to let rich people keep their money and keep that money valuable. Bush, with the biggest government deficits ever up to that time, with giant wasteful programs that helped no one except the people who administered them and the private contractors who were paid to fail at them, was rightfully considered not a real Republican at all — once he was out of office and could no longer deliver the goodies.

It sounds like you are somehow trying to defend him, as if Republicans consider him an adequate president.

You make no sense.

“I have a very simple theory of the bush presidency that explains why he did a bunch of progressive things, that he actually believed in them.”

Nah. Things don’t happen because politicians believe in them. Politicians represent their constituencies (and those who bribe them), trade favors with other politicians (representing their own constituencies and their own bribe-givers), and – voila – things happen.

I was going to do a search and see who it was who introduced “women are illogical” as a topic for debate, but just want to say:

@30: Wait, what? Daniel Bell (of “we must oppose the modern antinomianism of the market” fame) as a classical liberal? Did I go to sleep on one planet and wake up on another?

When you’re reading something like that, there may be something to engage with, somewhere, hidden in the book–and beyond “we’re all human beings and all our opinions matter”–but it isn’t that sentence. It probably isn’t anything that can be found by examining the book itself. It probably isn’t anything that’s worth the effort, especially if the result has to fit into a comment box.

@Rich P. and JQ:
I confess I didn’t have specific names of ‘rational’ conservatives in mind. I don’t hold what JQ @108 calls “the centrist assumption that, given two opposed viewpoints, each must have some validity.” A viewpoint can be invalid and still within the realm of something not totally insane; perhaps JQ will view this as a hair-splitting distinction. I agree w/ Rich, btw, on the value of progressives arguing w/ people further to the left.

On right-wing think tanks: My sense is that some of the output was propaganda, some was serious (albeit almost always wrong) policy proposals. The general outlook that favored deregulation (really begun in earnest during the pd of the Carter admin) and then the bad economic and social-policy ideas that flourished in the Reagan/Thatcher era and after were given added credibility in some circles by the output of think tanks and the agenda of certain journals, e.g. The Public Interest, now no longer in existence, afaik. Regardless of what label one applies to this (e.g. ‘propaganda’), it was aimed at people in academia and elsewhere who had some interest in ideas and intellectual debate. The aim was less “to convince people that conservatives really could think rationally within the progressive sphere” (Rich P. @102) than to shift the tone and reigning assumptions of policy debate, an effort that regrettably was, for a time, quite successful by all accounts. The large amounts of money poured by business into AEI and similar orgs. were not ill-spent from the businesses’ standpoint.

So the question is less ‘are there any honest conservatives’ (of course there are, somewhere) but are there any useful conservative positions.

JQ 108:
If there are movement conservatives (in the US sense) who are worth engaging with, or even who propose ideas that are worth debating, I haven’t found them.

I don’t know enough about ‘movement conservatism’ (however defined) to have opined on it, so I’ll withdraw that aspect of my comment above. What to do, however, w a figure like Brooks (whose column I don’t read v. often, but whom I listen to on the airwaves regurgitating his columns)? He can be and often is an infuriating jerk, esp. in print and in his pop-sociologist mode, but strikes me as someone w whom it wd not be impossible to have a rational argument, once one got past the ritual throat-clearing, posturing, and faux adorning of one’s position w (pseudo-)intellectual antecedents that seem to constitute a fair amt of what he and a number of other media commenters do.

Conservative reactions to Bush while he was in power demonstrate the “there’s no principle” point well, and also call attention to other things that happened.

Bush got the Bush v. Gore ruling, for starters. This remains, as nearly as I can tell, crucial in how a lot of conservatives with power think about the levers they’ve got – and indeed, events have borne them out when it comes to expecting that the Supreme Court will often just proceed with utter disregard or active hostility to the text of the law and to precedent. Bush got Roberts and Alito on the Supreme Court, who’ve both had a grand old time keeping that expectation gratified.

Bush got the war in Iraq. Now granted, this was more “Cheney got it”, but then whether Cheney’s seizure of temporary command authority while Bush was flaking off was actually constitutional has not, so nearly as I know, gotten any official scrutiny. I’ve read that it doesn’t begin to conform to the standards for incapacity or unavailability of the president, but lack enough clues to say anything more than “wouldn’t surprise me, given Bush and Cheney”. In any event, we got trillions down the rathole, fantastic profits for key individuals and corporations, and a genuinely hideous toll of death and misery, with ongoing consequences.

The education reform that Ted Kennedy was so proud of for some reason has been a really useful tool for accelerating public school degradation, making it necessary and desirable to take away more and more that doesn’t fit a particular set of master tests, subjecting school children (and their families) to the well-documented consequences of escalating stress around high-stakes testing, feeding the growth of privatization efforts, and providing many more excuses for turning what remains of the public system over to corporate authorities.

His administration had the Katrina debacle and its ongoing utility as a case in point for conservatives arguing that the feds are no damn good and the whole thing should be privatized. He got the firings of US Attorneys, a handy ratchet in the return to completely overtly partisan politics throughout the three branches. And so much more, as the ads used to say.

Furthermore, if you go look at the conservative think tanks and press of 2000-8, you’ll find anything that we might think of as a deviation from traditional conservative usage lauded and defended, with critics subject to general brow-beating. Everything was great because it was Bush. Then Bush went away, and now anything unwanted – mostly meaning “doesn’t still seem useful right now” – is bad because it was Bush. But at the time, there were plenty of people (like Brett) to explain how it all was terribly conservative.

Oh, and then because ideology doesn’t matter, we can give over all the policy discussion forums to the poor guys displaced by Gamer Gate.

The conservative policy has consistently been to dismantle FDR’s New Deal and allow laissez-faire (Providence) to take over. Also to give more money to cronies in the Military-Security complex.

Some really, really annoying errors:

@111 & 110: the slippery difference between policy preferences and “principles”. “The solution to every problem is cutting taxes.” is a policy preference. “Small government governs best” is a principle. Imagining that Reaganist dogma is an ideology leads to confusion. But the pieces of dogma are perfectly compatible:
-The solution to every problem is cutting taxes.
-Medicare benefits are earned by people who get out what they pay in. They are not welfare.

@119 Ronan: why not quote me @105?

@125 Wait, parties either represent ideology or nothing? The concept of ideology is younger than the US Constitution. Plenty of political scientists correctly pay attention to interests and identity, not the clever fiction of ideology.

RP: There’s something ahistorical in now holding up the classical liberals as part of the sequence of conservatism.

If we are talking about conservative politics from the late 20th century to the present, it seems to me that it is fair and accurate enough to say that conservative movements have inherited much of their rhetorical/policy framework with regard to economics from the classical liberalism of the late 18th century. It is certainly not an exclusive inheritance — liberalism was the surprise big winner in the winnowing of ideologies in WWII. After two world wars, the Great Depression and 60 years of Jim Crow — all of which were the direct consequence of conservative politics militant — many of the old ideas of conservatism, the characteristic ideas embracing authoritarianism, hereditary aristocracy, unquestioned tradition, anti-rationalism or irrationalism, were so thoroughly discredited that they could not usefully be revived. A new source of slogans had to be found, and people like Hayek and Friedman found them, quite self-consciously, in classical liberalism.

I don’t think it was completely dishonest. Hayek was quite clear that he didn’t think of himself as a conservative, even if he was very clearly selling his intellectual services to the wealthy. Friedman’s project to create a counter-narrative to discredit the New Deal by “explaining” the good economy of the 1960s as a product of the natural evolution of the competitive market economy was wildly successful, precisely because he was drawing from the same heritage of 19th century liberal ideas as his hapless opponents among the successors to New Deal liberalism. Friedman took up the challenge to create a conservative ideology that fit within the frame of progressive/liberal rationalism, within the “progressive sphere” as RP put it, and he won not just the trick, but the game: the dialectic between conservative libertarians and neoliberals that drives so much “thinking” behind current public policy framing is a product of Friedman. Every time a soi disant liberal takes up the premise that conservatives are intellectuals obsessed with the principles governing the proper size and scope of government, and not bandits grabbing for opportunities to despoil the wealth and income of the country and the vast majority of people, that liberal is a slave wearing the chains fashioned by Friedman, proving Keynes oft-quoted observation about the role of economic scribblers in public life.

Friedman’s economics was dishonest, in that his narrative analysis deliberately distracted, in much the way a magician deliberately distracts, to disguise the mundane details of cause-and-effect, while creating an illusion of magic — in Friedman’s case, the magic of the market. But, he drew honestly enough, I think, from late 18th century and early 19th century liberalism, the spirit of which was often hostile to what we might call working class interests and activist government. In historical context, the classical liberals were threading a needle on behalf of the rise of a haute bourgeoisie, who were interested both in overthrowing the last remnants of a decadent hereditary landed aristocracy, with its claims on religious authority and feudal privilege, and also with enabling the exploitation and domination of a wage-earning class in the emerging, new industrial economy.

As iconic an event as the Great Reform of 1832 in Britain was no aid to the political power of the working classes. The subsequent New Poor Law of 1834 was squarely based on the doctrines of Malthus, Ricardo and Bentham, and a more vicious and cruel scheme than the system of workhouses could scarcely be imagined, but we don’t have to imagine it, because the same Liberals gave the world the spectacle of their response to the Great Famine, where their policies starved a million people to death in a country exporting grain.

Classical liberalism did not shy from cruel consequences of abstract principle of the sort that led to Anatole France’s observation about the majesty of the law and living under bridges. The claim that conservative libertarianism derives from classical liberalism (as well, of course, from the Marginalists of the next generation of economists) is amply supported.

Thornton Hall: Plenty of political scientists correctly pay attention to interests and identity, not the clever fiction of ideology.

Plenty of political scientists are idiots then.

Ideology, as a political concept, is the insight that interests and identity are often the clever fiction. Not that people do not have interests, but that their own concepts of their interests can be fictions that mislead them.

Thornton Hall @130
The concept of ideology is younger than the US Constitution. Plenty of political scientists correctly pay attention to interests and identity, not the clever fiction of ideology.

The notion of a political worldview encompassing one or more general propositions loosely (or not-so-loosely) connected is a handy one, and historians of political thought would prob. find their work difficult w/o it. Hence I don’t quite get why you have a bee in the bonnet about the word “ideology,” since in most daily usages that’s all it means. I realize one cd, if able (which I’m not) do a disquisition on the word’s origins and nuances, but prob. not that helpful in this context.

thornton – because i was being lazy and hadnt read every comment (i see now we mostly agree)

BW – “Plenty of political scientists are idiots then. ”

But your comments (afaict) generally stress the importance of interests over ideology. (ie ‘The controlling spirit is greed and power’)

Im (personally) not saying ideology is unimportant (ideas are important, tribal affiliation is important etc – so ideology works as a handy heuristic) But I think it’s wrong to argue that broad categorisations are coherent ideologies (even at the elite level) and then dismiss a group of people as ‘irrational’ based solely on the vague label they attach to their politics.
I’d say as well, it’s just lazy. What people should be trying to do when looking at political behaviour (even that which they find objectionable) – whether in Sierra Leone, Syria or Alabama – is try to explain or understand it.

“True, but so what? ..Are political outcomes influenced by those few among the elite who do hold consistent positions? If not, then there’s certainly no reason to argue about them. If so, then it doesn’t matter whether most people don’t hold them: the politicians or the people who advise the politicians do.”

But I dont believe politicians or their advisers (mostly) hold coherent worldviews. Who is the most important adviser to a politician ? The one who tells her how to get re-elected. Yes a politician might have a specific frame that they look at X through (and numerous advisers with different ideas who they talk to, interest groups who put pressure on them, constiuents who expect certain benefits for electing them etc) I dont see how this all adds up to anything that could be dismissed as irrational.

Rich: Many people seriously believed that religiosity shouldn’t be questioned, not because they really believed that God existed, or that they knew which religion was right, but because of the social effects of religion and the potential harm of calling them into question.

That’s a terrible argument. People who believe “religiosity shouldn’t be questioned” don’t mean people of the wrong religion(s) shouldn’t be questioned. People who believe “religiosity shouldn’t be questioned” who belong to a minority religion aren’t making the same kind of argument as people who belong to the most mainstream sect, either. How can you possibly decide (on that argument) not to question religiosity that manifests itself as intolerance of others’ religiosity? And “gender relations” could be substituted for “religiosity” with no loss of sense. No one’s going to continue to argue with someone who continually finds reasons not to talk to them, even if they “generously” offer suggestions about how they can change to make themselves “better.” People who want to make allowances for themselves in the name of religiosity can’t really expect everyone else to go along with them.

140 “People who want to make allowances for themselves in the name of religiosity can’t really expect everyone else to go along with them.”

I imagine most of these religious conservatives don’t want you to argue with them or go along with them. They just want to be left alone. Here, I think, classical liberalism clashes with modern liberalism that insists on universality and conformity (e.g. the French ban on hijab).

Going back to 63,

“Optimism is cowardice”

What is this supposed to mean? Pessimism is courage? Being a Bah-Humbug sort of guy is a badge of valor? And, seriously, Bruce, is optimism the only alternative to pessimism?

Neither Party is willing to make a genuine populist appeal, even though such appeals have growing electoral potential, as economic conditions deteriorate for the vast majority.

Why do you suppose that is (if it is true which I don’t necessarily accept)?

To the general discussion: I think the arguably ‘rational’ conservative philosophy is simply that “the elite should rule.” The problem with this guiding principle is there is no point in being honest about it if lawmakers are being elected by the general population. Oftentimes the dishonesty is below the conscious awareness of the people practicing it.

Another grain of truth in the morass of conservative rhetoric is roughly, “people should take responsibility for themselves.” Here again, the people most vociferously advancing this message are often utter hypocrites, but that doesn’t damage the validity of the message. From my perspective the problem with this message coming from the mouths of conservatives is that it isn’t being balanced by another fundamentally valid and complementary idea, that we should all take some (we can argue about how much) responsibility for each other as well.

If we don’t have conflicting ideologies, why would that mean only one party?

No, I’m saying the exact opposite. In the glorious future, we’ll have ideologies, but we’ll all belong to the same party. There won’t need to be an opposition party. Why would anyone want to be in opposition? Ideology will be used for other things, like organizing debates (need to have a pro and con or they don’t get very far). Yes, this is sarcastic (though your puzzlement by my comment is reflected by my puzzlement about Rich’s).

ZK: happy to leave people alone, as long as their definition of being left alone doesn’t mean I have to shut up or leave when that’s possible, and play along with them when it’s not. And running for office, then asking to be left alone, is a silly thing to do.

mattski: “To the general discussion: I think the arguably ‘rational’ conservative philosophy is simply that “the elite should rule.” ”

I think that this is not true. The concept of a defined elite assumes, as LFC writes @42 and later and Harold@ 74 , that the idea of hierarchy is there as a kind of principle of order, rather than as a principle of power. When Bush said that he was the Decider, he didn’t mean that he had the Mandate of Heaven in the Chinese sense.

As I’ve remarked before in this thread, seeing the greed and power at the top doesn’t explain the middle or the bottom. I don’t believe that a poverty-level white conservative believes something like “the elite should rule”. He is making an implicit trade: he supports the top of the pyramid, and they support his much more limited but still valuable power over others that he gets merely by being white or male. He can’t rationally justify racism or sexism as abstract principles, but he can enjoy power, and that’s the important part.

I think that “people should take responsibility for themselves” is most often used as cover for “I like to vicariously punish people”, which explains why the people advocating this idea are so often visibly hypocritical. There is, strictly speaking, something irrational in the conservative reaction to e.g. “you didn’t build that”, in their insistence that social connections do not exist.

Much as I like what Corey Robin writes, in general terms, there is something dispiriting about this post and thread. It is the general message ‘if you want to participate in serious debates about political ideas (or ideology), you have to go back and read more of those tired old dead old white males that you could hardly stand reading in your undergraduate degree’.

Ugh. Can’t. Seriously, you should think about this, if you don’t want these to be just conversations amongst privileged white men.

bianca steele: “And the sarcasm is in part triggered by my reading something a week or two ago that said assumed progressives were all Republicans.”

I’m totally confused about what you mean. Was there something that I was supposed to have written that said that progressives were Republicans?

Because that makes no sense. “Republican” is a party affiliation, and progressives generally aren’t Republicans. Nor do I think that progressives are conservatives. Are you referring to the mini-play that I wrote in a previous thread? That just pointed out the obvious: that progressives support all of the bad foreign policy, domestic security, and secret law things that Bush did now that it’s Obama doing them, where “support” has the ordinary political meaning of voting for Obama to be reelected, telling other people that they have to vote for Obama, not protesting, etc. I can write mini-play “Act II: Lesser Evil” if you like.

The view from Edinburg: PRAGMATISM BEATS IDEOLOGY, http://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2014/10/pragmatism-beats-ideology.html

Leftists believe that the State is a solution to a country’s economic problems. Rightists believe the State is the problem, and a free-enterprise capitalism would solve the State’s problems. Both are wrong in important parts of their analyses and their remedies for the other’s failures.
There are no easy remedies and no neat solutions to these problems.
Adam Smith was pragmatic; he was interested in what worked and recognised that both State and Markets had roles to play. Political economy is about melding the positive contributions of both States and Markets, not choosing one to the exclusion of the other.

mattski: “I find your rhetoric difficult to penetrate. What are you trying to say?”

You’re trying to describe an arguably rational conservative philosophy. Given that it’s made up, and not something that conservatives actually say, I don’t think “the elite should rule” is good enough. “Elite” is a word that could mean all sorts of different elites. Historically, conservatives supported rule by a hereditary elite. A lot of contemporary conflict in the U.S. is between an oligarchical elite and a self-identified meritocratic elite. Without some idea of what you mean, “the elite should rule” is too vague and does not really separate conservatives from a wide range of other political philosophies. For instance, someone could say that a Democratic President who worked his or her way up through the ladder of competitive politics has proven him or herself to be one of the elite, and therefore should rule.

I also think that you’re giving LFC’s and Harold’s idea of hierarchy as a kind of mythic principle of order short shrift, but I’ll let you argue it with them.

“It isn’t productive to focus on malicious intent, especially that of the ignorant proles.”

Unless you want to basically not think about it, your choice is between malice and ignorance, and therefore between an attitude of opposition and one of condescension. Thinking of proles as having intent at least gives them the dignity of having intent. I think that all of the theories about how proles are ignorant or fooled makes people out to be a lot more ignorant or easily fooled than they actually are.

Rich Puchalsky @ 139: “. . . the part that I wanted to stress is that it’s not an exclusive inheritance.”

I got that, and I think I reinforced that general point.

RP: “The argument that I object to goes something like this: 1) Hayek and Friedman were conservatives (questionable, but I’ll leave that aside for now), 2) Hayek and Friedman were influenced by classical liberals, 3) therefore classical liberals were conservatives.”

I thought you were objecting to the narcissistic practice of progressives, who construct “thoughtful conservatives” in their own image, ignoring the actual right-wingers in their midst.

My point about Hayek and Friedman was that they were very self-consciously constructing a kind of “thoughtful conservatism” for an era in which a Liberal Consensus had taken hold. They weren’t doing it as progressives, but as apologists for the political agenda of private wealth, which sought increased power and privilege at the expense of the public interest and the welfare state. It seems to me that idea of the “thoughtful conservative” has a lot to do with the success of their model . . . and, of course, the utter failure of the establishment centre-left to refute or ridicule that model, a failure that culminated in the capitulation that created neoliberalism in both its Charles Peters and Washington Consensus meanings.

Ronan(rf) @ 138: . . . your comments (afaict) generally stress the importance of interests over ideology. (ie ‘The controlling spirit is greed and power’)

I think of this as cutting to the chase.

This game of dress-up, where David Brooks pretends that he spends his days thoughtfully pondering Bobos and Burke is a illustration of the truth that the most influential “conservative” political thinker for our time wasn’t Edmund Burke or Milton Friedman — it was Edward Bernays.

If the political discourse is the managed flow of a chaos of images and associations through uncritical, untutored minds, and the hope of a rational political discourse seems to fade into an inverse totalitarianism of passivity and atomistic futility, . . .

Bruce Wilder: “I thought you were objecting to the narcissistic practice of progressives, who construct “thoughtful conservatives” in their own image, ignoring the actual right-wingers in their midst.”

I was objecting to that as well, so you’re right about both objections.

It’s not always what I’d describe as a narcissistic practice, though — it gets back to what you were writing about optimism. “How could there be a whole group of people who don’t think rationally about their politics?” could be answered not by “They must be just like me” but with “I refuse to stereotype a whole group of people based on what I’ve observed, they must really be better than that.”

Rich,

Without some idea of what you mean, “the elite should rule” is too vague and does not really separate conservatives from a wide range of other political philosophies.

Well… “elite” IS vague, but so are peoples beliefs. Sometimes the search for beliefs may lead us to conclude that behavior is primary and beliefs are imputed afterwards. Perhaps this is what you are suggesting? But even still, history suggests that conservatives as a rule favor keeping the status quo (rule by some elite or other) rather than risking chaos in a search for something more equitable. So, the classic conservative preference for stability over equitability is for all practical purposes a presumption of deference to whoever has successfully seized power. The elite, pretty much by definition.

I also think that you’re giving LFC’s and Harold’s idea of hierarchy as a kind of mythic principle of order short shrift

“Mythic principle” smacks of over-intellectualizing to me. Ie, the sin of imputing belief where really there is only behavior x10.

I think that all of the theories about how proles are ignorant or fooled makes people out to be a lot more ignorant or easily fooled than they actually are.

It’s not a ‘theory.’ It’s a manner of speaking, it’s shorthand. You like to say there isn’t any point in engaging conservatives in debate. To me that sounds disrespectful. I can’t predict the future, and I wouldn’t want to council despair with regards to listening and responding to people we disagree with.

mattski: “So, the classic conservative preference for stability over equitability is for all practical purposes a presumption of deference to whoever has successfully seized power. The elite, pretty much by definition.”

This fails the test of actual observation. Conservatives did not, once Obama won the Presidency and the Democrats won both houses of Congress, defer to the people who had successfully seized power. Instead, they adamantly refused to cooperate in any way. In addition, their own propaganda classically depicts Obama as the wrong kind of elite — he’s Kenyan, he’s a Muslim, he wasn’t born in the U.S., etc.

Rich 166

Yeah, but now you’re just playing on the ambiguities with the word “conservative” in the contemporary US, because most of us understand that todays GOP is conservative in name only. Reactionary is more like it.

Thornton Hall @ 167: What was the Walmart and Wall Street of the 1860s?

The correct answer is that there was no Walmart in 1860 and Wall Street, though it existed, had little of the character or none of the dominance we associate with it today.

Basic preconditions for creating Walmart and Wall Street are barely begun to develop in 1860, though some of those developments would accelerate during the course of the war. Finance of the Union war effort was handled predominantly by the Philadelphia firm, Cooke and Company, founded in 1861, and notable for its pioneering use of the telegraph to confirm transactions. It was a remarkably efficient underwriter for Union finances. The Union demand for uniforms would accelerate such developments as standard sizes for manufactured clothing. The development of national markets for branded goods would only begin to emerge in the 1880s, and the modern industrial corporation with shares marketed on the New York Stock Exchange was a development of the 1890s.

All four Parties that contested the 1860 Presidential election strongly supported a transcontinental railroad. Lincoln did have ties to the group that became the Union Pacific and chose the unlikely eastern terminus of Council Bluffs, Iowa, which they preferred. Lincoln’s northern Democratic rival for the Presidency and debating partner in 1858, Senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas was even more strongly associated with railroads, being a founder of the Illinois Central. Douglas is sometimes credited with devising the land grant system for the Illinois Central, which would become part of the means of financing the first transcontinental railroad (and all transcontinental railroads, except arguably, J.J. Hill’s Great Northern).

A better question to ask about 1860 would be what was the dominating ideology that motivated the Union to mount a Civil War on an unprecedented scale. The answer can be found in Eric Foner’s classic, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War.

“Yes, that explains their picketing the funerals of gay soldiers”

But that is not typical, is it; must be some extremist sect, no? Abortion would be a better example. Yes, indifference to the outside world has its limits.

That goes beyond narcissism or optimism to something that sPh referred to @ 131. Platonism.

Are you kidding?

Are you denying that the meaning of words shifts over time? I mean, this is a perfect example the phenomenon. If you don’t acknowledge the difference between the Republican party in, say, 1970, and the Republican party of today, then you might think you’re arguing about important political ideas but you’re playing games with words instead.

Seriously.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/24/let-the-democrats-rot/

And then Halasz with the Counterpunch link? Ugh.

I’ll say. Show me Alexander Cockburn and I’ll show you a hateful SOB.

“The meaning (use) of words shifts over time”

Did you even read the thread, mattski? Did you read the Corey Robin posts / book / whatever that the thread is basically arguing about?

The question of whether conservatives are reactionaries, and *have always been* reactionaries, is a major part of what we were talking about.

“You boys been schooled.”

Have not. In fact it is you who have gone to the educational institute of your choice!

/declaring yourself victorious is seldom very convincing to outside observers….

Well, since there have been so many circular, sophistical and utterly trivial arguments on this thread on how “we” have all the arguments and they have none, I thought I might post something on the real “bottom line”. You boys been schooled.

I don’t get it. Sure, in the middle 1800s everybody wanted railroads. Like they want the internet today. Railroads created a whole lot of wealth, in the sense that a bushel of corn that could not get to market was worth much less than one that could. Everybody wanted that. A few men amassed giant fortunes by figuring out how to suck out a share of that wealth. It was something new and nobody could be sure ahead of time what the rules of the game would be — like nobody knew ahead of time that Bill Gates would amass his fortune, or that Amazon and Google would succeed at whatever they might be succeeding at.

So OK, pretty much every politician wanted to facilitate railroads, like every politician today claims to want the internet to work. So what?

And I have the strong impression that New Deal Democrats actually tried to create something worth having for their voters. See, Marx predicted that unregulated capitalism would have a series of depressions, each deeper than the one before, and we were in the deepest depression ever, and they thought they could make the economy work for everybody without having a communist revolution. But their approaches didn’t work all that well for people who wanted to stay rich without taking any risks, it was better for rich people who invested carefully in new production, and that got a lot of rich people terribly angry at them. Recent Democrats don’t seem to have any new ideas and their old ideas left over from the Depression don’t get much support, but there used to be something there.

Anyway, isn’t it pretty much true that the liberals have all the carefully-worded arguments? Academics are mostly liberals, it’s been that way for a long time. They’re good at that kind of thing. “Conservatives” don’t need that kind of argument because it doesn’t get them votes, it’s something that academics do and there aren’t enough academics for their votes to be that important and they’re mostly liberals anyway. Once they write off academics they can also write off making arguments that academics will respect.

I get the impression you think you’ve made an important argument, but I can’t see what it is.

MPAV:
I commented here exactly once before. It was a kind of meta-comment. Rich Puchalsky’s response, in which he fails to grasp the point and them precedes to accuse me of doing the very thing that he “interprets” me as doing is a case in point, of the circular, sophistical and trivial. Later, he apparently fails to realize that “Obamacare” was an AEI proposal that had previously been adopted by Mitt Romney. I’m just not interested in trolling for votes and thinking that that amounts to “the political spectrum”. Nor am I interested in arguing about the opinions of pundits, journalists and think-take sinecurists. Nor do I take CR as some ultimate authority on the history of political thought. But you can find quite “reasoned” accounts of conservative and even reactionary thinkers in that history. And you can re-construct the animating “reasons” of conservatives, if you make the effort and know where and how to look. No one has a monopoly on “reason”, least of all those who agree, however back-handedly, with Ronald Reagan, that he was the beginning of everything, in aboriginal innocence.

So you now know in which bodily orifice you can put your snark.

@186 I guess we didn’t go to as good a school.