Musing for Conservaties from a real (well mostly, sometimes, 50/50 anyway) Conservative.
Witness:
Wyoming GOP Wants Investigation of Gov. Gordon’s Ties To Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffett
That is, quite frankly, and the only way it can be described, "batshit crazy". This is going to reveal nothing, and it won't happen for that matter, but the fact that the GOP Central Committee endorses it is scary.
And hence the problem. At the same time that across the country a lot of Republican conservatives voted and said "whoooeeee, what's that smell in here. . . " and then marked the ballot for Democrats, the Wyoming GOP, listening only to the right wing edge of the party, has voted itself into total isolation. Right now, the state's party is about as aware of reality as close affiliates of Kim Jong-un are.
You didn't know there had been one, did you?
Hence, my point.
So, as I am a conservative, of a sort anyhow, and feel that generally my sort of conservatism is correct, some unsolicited advice and commentary for conservatives.
With the first being, what is a conservative, anyhow?
In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation . . . the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not . . . express themselves in ideas but only . . . in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.
Lionell Trilling, 1950.
A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.
William F. Buckley.
Defining Conservatism.
Defining conservatism isn't all that easy to do, and we'd submit, it's so frequently done clouded by either a liberal tradidtiion or a reactionary impulse, that its done incorrectly.
Take, for instance.
We, as young conservatives, believe:
- That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;
- That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;
- That the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;
- That the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power;
- That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government; and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;
- That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: Does it serve the just interests of the United States?
One of the real problems modern conservatives face is that they don't know what conservatism is, even if most vaguely have a grasp of it. As a result of this, they've adopted a lot of libertarianism, which isn't conservatism by any means, and a fair amount, recently, of fascism, which actually originated in the radical left.1
Without some sort of existential understanding of what it is, conservatism isn't really anything at all. And indeed, if you look at the current GOP, it is indeed a "big tent", but that tents a real mishmash of people with widely varying ideologies, or no ideologies at all.
The irony of the recent race in Wyoming is that one of the far fight candidates campaigned on the platform of "less government, more freedom". That's not conservative, that's libertarianism. The same candidate has billboards up opposing abortion, which is a conservative position, and one I support, which has roots in theology, philosophy, and natural law, but which doesn't really square with the "less government, more freedom" platform. A guy who is for less government, and more freedom, ought to take the position that you can pretty much do whatever you freakin' want to, which of course he really doesn't.
You can get to being pro life and be a libertarian, I'd note, but its harder.
Shoot, why not legalize dueling? Less government. . . more freedom.
And that defines why the current crop of conservatives make nearly no sense.
I'd propose that Conservatism is this; it's a political/philosophical view that human beings are flawed and in some serious ways, de minimis. We're a creature of some external force, that force being nature, and for those who are believers, nature's God. What we are and how we should behave is defined by that, and as we are imperfect, we should always be extremely careful about departing from something we have conserved, i.e,. tradition, as by and large, tradition and traditional views are highly refined from experience and probably correct. Something we come up with in our own era stands a good chance of being wrong. Because we are imperfect, we can find out that we are wrong on things, and we do over time, but we ought to never assume we've figured it out in our own era. Added to that, as history is conserved knowledge, the past is nearly as alive as the present, and we should consider it and its voices constantly.
Now, going from there.
All reality is governed by, well, reality.
We can know nature, and know a lot of it by observation. But we cannot redefine it.
Modern "ology" fields, outside of the hard sciences, have tried mightily, and indeed enormously succeeded, in shoving out vast piles of crap on our natures for well over a century. Sooner or later, the last crap starts to stink up everything and be revealed as crap, but not before many lives have been destroyed in the process.
Psychology, sociology, sexolgy, all are hugely guilty of this.
Biology, geology, orthodox theology, and physics, are not.
If things aren't grounded in nature, as revealed by the real, i.e., hard, sciences, they are probably wrong.
Now, science doesn't have an explanation for everything, but it has the explanation for a lot. And where it does, it must be listened to. And an awful lot about us can readily and easily be explained by evolutionary biology, which should not be confused with cultural anthropology, another one of the "ology" fields that tends to be in the category of "the self-explanatory flavor of the day rationalizing my own behavior".
The lesson of the hard sciences, like orthodox Christinaity, tend to make lot of people hugely uncomfortable, in part because starting with the, yes conservative, Reagan Administration the Federal Government gutted the funding for them. Prior to that we had enlisted the hard sciences in the war effort against the Axis and then later against the Soviet Union. At that point we really needed to know what science, often in the form of engineering (which is applied physics) had to say about things.
By the mid 1970s "Conservatives" had regrown uncomfortable with some things science had to say, particularly in the environmental fields, which I'll address below.2 So they gutted it, and int he process they've managed to make modern Americans woefully poorly educated in the sciences. There's no excuse for it. Here's a good example:
Nobody remembers this as in reality we treated viruses with a massively publicly funded health system and mandatory vaccinations. Treating things with soup and Vitamin C is a trip to the cemetery.
But we're now so freakin' dense that this actually showed up on a recent candidates' website.
Reality, you smart mammal, is defined by nature and evolution. You are formed existentially by external forces, and that is what you are existentially. You, and we, don't get to change that.
Our own appetites don't define right or wrong.
You would think this would be self-evident, but in this era of massive wealth, the concept of restraining your own conduct in any fashion is regarded as passé.
Among the things we are, we are broken. The standards are clear, but we don't always individually orient ourselves to them. That doesn't mean our disorientation should be given license.
Indeed, we don't even know where to draw the line on this. For eons human beings accepted, for example, the norm that sex should be contained within marriage, and that it was between male and female. The only real global divergence on how this worked had to do with whether polygamy was okay or not. That's about it.
This isn't the only example, by any means, but it does show how conservatism isn't libertarianism or progressivism. Progressives would require you to believe that the latest social "ology" items are real legally. You may not assert, for example, that transgenderism isn't real, as that's not socially acceptable. Libertarians don't care if you believe it or not, but they wouldn't have the structure of the state accept the scientific realities that it's far from proven, and up until it is, it's not a state matter to force, and because it's also contrary to long human experience, and frankly science, the burden of proof on it is very high.
Our own economic well-being doesn't define true or false.
But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evils; it is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced their hearts with many pangs.
1 Timothy.
Somewhere along the path of things, conservatives started believing that capitalism is the natural order of things. And beyond that, somehow conservatism began to equate itself with a worship of mammon.
Southerners justified slavery, which was in their perceived economic self-interest, on the basis that the Bible said it was okay, which it does not. The Germans justified invading the Soviet Union on the "ology" basis that the Germans were a master race, and they therefore were entitled to the Slavic breadbaskets of Europe.
Think this doesn't apply to this argument?
Well, right now the GOP in Wyoming, which claims to be conservative, wants the state to investigate Gov. Gordon’s Ties To Bill Gates, George Soros, and Warren Buffett. Why? Well somebody's economic ox is being gored as these men don't have the same view of the economic future as the Central Committee does.
Indeed, among those who are involved in economics and science, it's really clear that the Republican Party in Wyoming has literally walked up to a dead mule and put it in harness on the basis that the mule made us rich in the past, and he better now. That's not how these things work.
Things do change, and you don't have a right to insist that they do not. Railroad crews couldn't demand that the switch from steam to diesel not be made on the basis that steam engines employed a larger crew. Sail mariners couldn't demand that the age of sail not yield to that of coal. But that's what a lot of people in the "conservative" moment are doing right now.
Truth be known, we can learn that our own occupations are not sacrosanct, even though the lesson is hard. Nobody argues, for example, that "I'm a tobacco farmer, and therefore cancer is a fib" anymore, but people did at one time. We hear economic arguments of that type made in conservative circles all the time, however.
And that is not real conservatism. That's reactionary. A real conservatism would realize that economics isn't the same as conserving core human relationships.
Conservatism sometimes has to aim to restore or recall what was already lost.
One of the common failings of conservatives, which opens them up to criticism all the time, is that they are often working at conserving either what is right now, or what was just very recently.
A good example of this is another economic one. Conservatives constantly claim to be preserving capitalism. That isn't conservative at all. Capitalism itself is a government made economic liberal construct designed to promote certain type of business activities.
Capitalism can be argued to be good or bad, and in varying degrees, in its own right, but the fact of the matter is that its contrary to nature in recognizing what would otherwise be a type of partnership as a "person", giving it a huge economic advantage against real people. If conservatives truly sought to conserve, they'd look back and realize that the corporate innovation has evolved massively and to the detriment of the natural social and economic order. In other words, they'd restrict the use of the corporate business form, which itself would go back to an earlier era.
None of this is radical, it's purely conservative, but because it understands the nature of how this works, and looks back prior to December 31, 1600, it doesn't seem that way.
Another example is in the area of men, women, sex and marriage. Conservatives in our current era are full of horror about the recent developments in the area of sexual attraction, and they should be. But addressing this by taking it back to the pre Dobbs status quote actually isn't all that conservative. Taking things back to when the heart balm statutes still predominated would be.
"But, didn't William F. Buckley say. . .?"
Yeah, so what. He was wrong here.
We're all fallen, but nobody has the right to engage in open hypocrisy.
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Oddly enough, this story was sort of hi lighted by a development that occurred after Cynthia Lummis went up on the decks of the SS Political Fortunes, looked at the weather gauge, and determined that it had shifted, probably resulting in her vote on Dobbs. I've dealt with that extensively here.
What does that statute really say? The Respect For Marriage Act, what it says, what it means, what it means behind what it means, and the reaction to Lummis voting for it.
There's almost no way to deal with this topic without being somewhat crude, but suffice it to say if you are on the current Super Conservative Special, you really can't be proclaiming what people who have unusual attractions are doing if you are shacked up with somebody, or bed hopping, or the like. Quite frankly, you probably can't say anything about family values if you are divorced and don't have a really good explanation or if you are married but childless and seemingly in a well paying career. You can't say that "those people aren't acting" naturally, if you aren't either.
And yes, this harkens back to an age with children out of wedlock was regarded as conveying shame, and being a serial polygamist was frowned upon. But hence the point. This sort of topic is broad, not narrow, and you can't take your social programs off the shelf like cans of pinto beans, and leave the lima beans up there. You are getting a sack of beans, and they're all in there.
"Freedom" may not be just having nothing left to lose, but it's not a defining feature of our beings either. Nor is "liberty".
Freedom and liberty are the two most misused words in the political lexicon.
Conservatives, if they grasp it, do have a better claim on these words than liberals do, but freedom isn't an absolute and liberty doesn't equate with being a libertine.
In Catholic social thought freedom is often noted as being a true positive but only when a true understanding of things is derived. I.e., the framework of the Church doesn't impose shackles on my freedom so much as guardrails, so I don't fall off and lose it. This is true of properly understood social conservatism as well. And that's one of the things that distinguishes conservatism from libertarianism.
Looking at things from a point of view of nature, it becomes clear what things have to be provided with guard rails and which do not. For example, recently, the Obergefell decision opened up same sex unions all over the country. A frequent argument was that this meant you were "free" to marry whom you wanted.
Marriage, however, is simply a natural institution for the protection of children created by male/female interactions. It has nothing whatsoever, as a social institution, to do with "love". The guard rails here are for the protection of kids, and then widows. Nothing else. They've been massively removed over the years to the detriment of society, which hasn't made people "free", but careless and miserable.
Another instance is the massive decriminalization of drugs in American society. Drugs don't make people free, they enslave people to them. The guard rails kept people free by helping them to preserve themselves against self-destructive impulses. Frankly, Prohibition, in this context, was very much pro freedom and liberty. Opening up the weed laws and, in Colorado's case, opening up the shrooms, is pro slavery (as well as worshiping money).
Most conservatives instinctively get this, but don't know why they do. People haven't thought out what this ultimately means. And what it means is that sometimes the expression of the people, legislative bodies, have to enact restrictions, rather than open things up.
This includes restraining some kinds of businesses, and not just those mentioned here. Getting back to what is clearly a distributist bent, restraining some sorts of economic activities promotes freedom, including the right to make a living, but finding a conservative who realizes that isn't always an easy thing to do.
We ought to be honest, and occasionally blunt, but smart.
But at the same time, we ought to be knowledgeable.
We ought to say what we mean, but know why we mean it.
A recent populist Interim Secretary of State had, on his failed campaign platform material, that the United States Constitution was ordained by God. He didn't say it that way, but was pretty close. I'd have to look it back up.
That's not a conservative position, that a theocratic one, and it tends to indicate membership in one of several minority religions. I note this, however, as I hear people relate their political views loosely to God all the time and often in a poorly thought out way.
I don't think the United States Constitution was ordained by God, and I also think that God loves Russians and Ukrainians every bit as much as Americans. Americans may be exceptional, and right now we're not exceptional in ways that aren't universally positive, but simple unthinking citations such as this don't cut the mustard.
If your conservatism is founded in religious beliefs, fine, you ought to say so. But you probably need to go a bit further and really explain it in a thinking fashion.
Likewise, conservatives constatly spout "less government, more freedom" now days. What does that mean? The logical conclusion to "less government" is no government, which is called anarchy of course, and which isn't very conservative.
What people who say that probably really mean is that the best government is the government that governs the least, a phrase attributed to Thoreau and to Jefferson, but which in reality nobody knows the author of. The Thoreau quote is as follows:
I heartily accept the motto, — “That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which I also believe, — “That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
Thoreau, it might be noted, was in fact an anarchist, and was arguing for that.
Of course, Henry David Thoreau lived in an era in which you could wonder off in the woods and hang around there pretty much unimpeded, if you were a European American. The prior occupants of the same territory had been forcibly removed by the government. Those aboriginal occupants, it might be further noted, had their own form of government.
Given all of this, we can say, for instance, that stating phrases like "less government" and the like sound really nifty until you realize that a lot of them are bankrupt and always have been, if not explored more completely. Less government? Is that conservative, or is it simply anarchic?
Let's look again at the Sharon Statement:
- That foremost among the transcendent values is the individual’s use of his God-given free will, whence derives his right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force;
- That liberty is indivisible, and that political freedom cannot long exist without economic freedom;
- That the purpose of government is to protect those freedoms through the preservation of internal order, the provision of national defense, and the administration of justice;
- That the Constitution of the United States is the best arrangement yet devised for empowering government to fulfill its proper role, while restraining it from the concentration and abuse of power;
- That the market economy, allocating resources by the free play of supply and demand, is the single economic system compatible with the requirements of personal freedom and constitutional government; and that it is at the same time the most productive supplier of human needs;
- That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: Does it serve the just interests of the United States?
Every nation's foreign policy should be so dictated, but with the understanding that the United States isn't its own planet. Like it or not, advances in travel, technology and the conservative insistence on the globalization of trade now mean that actions anywhere impact people everywhere, and we're all in this together. In other words, have bat soup one day in China and the next thing you know, people are sick and Rome and Sacramento.
There are a lot more examples of how that works, but what the drafters of the Sharon statement were really after, at the time, was the Democratic inclination to intervene in foreign wars. Conservatives of the 1950s had never really gotten over the US entering World War Two, which they didn't fully approve of but which thanks to the Japanese Navy they had no choice but to agree to. They weren't keen on the Korean War and they weren't all keen on the Vietnam War. There was an odd conservative sense at the time that we could let the world slide into the Red Menace but protect ourselves through B-36s and B-52, not realizing that in the modern world Harley Davidson was about to get a run for the money from Honda.
All of which gets back to this. Yes, maximum personal liberty is a conservative principle, but not up to the point of self-destruction. The basic ethos is that we can provide a societal and cultural structure and hope that people succeed, and try to help them when they fall. Pretending that we're the first person on virgin soil, however, isn't reality, and it in fact it never was.
Probably another way to put this is this. Liberty can only travel with subsidiarity. Freedom only travels with responsibility. Success travels with duty. And conserving means existential conservation, not reaction.
We don't really have fellow travelers.
Conservatives aren't populists. Indeed, to some degree the old charge against conservatives as being elitists, a charge made against liberals as well, is true. So what?
Populism works just as well for left-wing mobs as right-wing ones, and in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries the American Populist Party was a liberal party that American conservatives fought against. Thomas Jefferson, who was a conservative, feared the day when populists would arise in the US, which he felt inevitable, as it meant the end of democracy. He may well have been correct.
Given this, why are conservatives sitting in the corner of the club car holding their tongues but watching the populists hit on the bar maid? They shouldn't be.
They are, of course, for the same reason that right wing German political parties held their nose and went along with the Nazi Party in the early 30s. They had a place they wanted to go, and they thought the Nazis would bet them there. They didn't. The populists won't get the conservatives get there either, and the populists have no desire to do so. Their nearly open declaration of war in Wyoming against conservatives, and the six-year campaign that they are "RINO's" should be lesson enough on this point.
Conservatives should be guided by Kipling (a conservative) on this point and take from The Winners, although it certainly isn't true on everything.
What is the moral ? Who rides may read.
When the night is thick and the tracks are blind,
A friend at a pinch is a friend indeed;
But a fool to wait for the laggard behind
Down to Gehenna, or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.
White hands cling to the tightened rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel,
Tenderest voices cry, "Turn again,"
Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel,
High hopes faint on a warm hearth-stone
He travels the fastest who travels alone.
One may fall, but he falls by himself
Falls by himself, with himself to blame;
One may attain, and to him is the pelf,
Loot of the city in Gold or Fame
Plunder of earth shall be all his own
Who travels the fastest, and travels alone.
Stayed by a friend in the hour of toil,
Sing the heretical song I have made
His be the labour, and yours be the spoil.
Win by his aid, and the aid disown
He travels the fastest who travels alone.
Conservatism isn't a man and can't be reduced to worshiping a human being.
I've already mentioned a fellow here who was a conservative, Thomas Jefferson.
He was a great man.
He also kept slaves, one of whom he was bedding, and he kept the kids born of that union enslaved. That's creepy and reprehensible.
A person we quote here frequently and whom we admire is G. W. Chesterton. He was a polymath and great thinker. A great man.
He was also anti-Semitic.
Ideas aren't people, and once the two are confused, you are in real trouble.
Some parties evolve towards cults of personality, and at that point, they're always on the verge of failure. Once the party is defined by Il Duce's poster, it's pretty pointless.
Donald Trump is one man, and if a person strives to find what cogent philosophical positions he's held on anything, you'll be striving all day and night, for months, and fail to find them. In truth, love him or hate hm, Trump was a mere vessel for those with certain hopes, many of whom he failed, rather than the originator of anything brilliant himself. Trump didn't dream up the list of conservative names for the Supreme Court, Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society did. Economically, we had good times, but how much of that was Trump, and how much of it was his staffers who came in with him as he declared himself to be a conservative.
Now, you can take this too far. No doubt there were ideas that originated with Trump, some good, and some bad, but he certainly wasn't an overarching intellectual titan that defined a movement. No, rather, a series of movements, some very poorly defined, simply saw him as their vehicle.
That's been seemingly forgotten.
"Heroes" almost never meet their hype. Political heroes exist, but where they do, they should be intellects that have contributed real thought. And even when they arise, they can't be the definition of a movement.
Theodore Roosevelt, a great liberal President came to define Liberal "Progressive" Republicans after he left office and a cult of personality developed around him. That lead to the Republican Party splitting and Woodrow Wilson entering office. After that, as a heroic figure, Roosevelt did the right thing. He reentered the GOP and was pretty quiet.
Footnotes
1. This is, I'd note, a debatable point. I'd start off, however, noting that Mussolini had been a Socialist. A Russian refugee of friend of Whitaker Chambers, as another example, who had been a Soviet general felt Communism was a species of fascism. The Nazi Party had been a radical socialist party very early on, but once Hitler entered the picture its socialism rapidly waned.
2. I've said "regrown" as the first real instances of conservatives becoming uncomfortable with science seems to have occured with Protestants becoming uncomfortable with the theory of evolution when it was first introduced. While evolution, as a scientific theory, is so well demonstrated it is clearly fact, some are still uncomfortable with it as this late date and occasionally there are efforts to preclude it from schools. Apostolic Christians tend to be baffled by this, unless they've been heavily protestantized, as many in the US have been, as there really is nothing contrary to the Faith as they conceive of it in regard to evolution. However, like going down a rabbit hole, rejecting evolution tends to end up as a rejection of all sorts of other science and, in the end, make Christianity weaker by making it look contrary to science, which it need not be.
