Proposals for a Nation gone off--Defining Some Terms

 Roots and meaning of words:   a symptom of decay

A conservative is presumably one who wants to preserve something already in existence just as a liberal would be someone who wants to promote liberty.  These terms however, in their juxtaposition of root and contemporary reference, seem today to be misaligned since those who would conserve the fettering apparatus of the welfare state call themselves liberal and those who would to varying degrees reverse course and renew individualism and limited government are called conservatives.  Poor language often leads to worse politics and makes defining and furthering a just cause, perhaps even by the willful misuse of language by those who would rule, that much harder.

Of course we keep a careful eye on various people styling themselves conservative.  Some depraved conservatives, for instance, of a European mold, savor each petit-mort of slowly, fatalistically, and with loud anguish giving in to what horrifies them most.  These souls seem to us more interested in enacting a drama where they display their essential beauty before being torn apart by Maenads, which might just be what they were after all along.  After all it is so much easier to establish one’s superiority to our bad times (at least to one’s own satisfaction) than to confront those evils and forge a better polity.  Those who enjoy slow torture might be better left chained in some sad dungeon.  They are welcome to call themselves what they want however.

Let us also not forget that peculiar conservative, the Night Watchman.  This helpful creature always stands ready to scream from the bell towers, to promulgate far and wide and put in the mind of each citizen any event or trend he considers a lethal danger to public morality.  He will announce that for a girl to read even a single page of la Nouvelle Heloïse is to be lost forever and then proceed to publicly read the first ten pages to show just how right he is.  Whether or not obscure cultural artifacts are as dangerous as made out, his role in making them renowned and world famous proves him to be little more than a clownish nuisance and the unfortunate public face of “true blooded” conservatism.  Heaven help the doulish mob egged on by his toxins.

Then we have the those sad accountants who look upon their continuous political defeat and point to what little is still left as a trophy of their victory.  In 2001 there was a miserly tax cut down to some 37 percent for some earners.  The President at the time called for the rate to drop to all of 33 percent since “no one should pay more than a third of their earnings to the government.”  One third.  How about 15 percent?  How about an even tithe of ten?  That used to be the figure for generous giving.  And yet for much of the last decade, conservatives have had the odious public obligation to shill for one of the weakest tax cuts in history.  A freer age would have called it a slap in the face.  No matter the political defeat however, the diminution of the individual or compulsive nature of the state, this conservative will look upon what remains unscathed and consider themselves dignified for still having a mouse-hole when the house has been emptied by robbers.  To paraphrase Hegel, “the extent of our satisfaction is a measure of our loss.”

Others who are lumped in with the cause of liberty in fact merely lack imagination.  Take Chief Justice Renquist for instance.  When those property deeds were prevalent that restricted the sale of homes to blacks, he had such a deeded property.  When cohabitation became prevalent, he had a “girl-friend.”  When Miranda was new he opposed it, when it was old he supported it.  Such individuals are poor allies to the friend of liberty since they are not so much conservative in the good sense as just plain slow.  Their trajectory is determined.

Should we call ourselves conservative at all?  And really what about this world should be conserved?  Not the UN or a past its prime NATO, not social security or the present state of the monetary system, not our spiritually corrupt courts, not the unionized and politicized schools or much of anything really.  Those who look to emulate our nation’s founding ideals and founding practice are not conservatives in this day and age: radical is the word.  The world of 1776 is no more.  The freedoms and guarantees of 1787 are today passed over by the government in embarrassed silence, and even the dim reflection of our ideals in the present political arrangement is laughable.  The following then is a set of proposals for the instauration of liberty in the United States of America.

What government do we want? Here we advocate the twin pillars of individual self-determination and self government as the political basis of the good life.  Ultimately, so far as politics is concerned, this spells limited government.  Although few dispute the relation of individual self-determination and limited government,  it is worth rehearsing the argument that self government also is necessarily related to limited government.  

As one example, no one alive today voted for social security and it would be unlikely to pass if it were brought up for a vote (knowing what we now know), and yet it is impossible to get rid of because of the human damage it has occasioned in creating permanent dependency to the state.  There are now millions of people in this country at the most vulnerable point in life this side of birth and infancy who would (at least for rhetorical purposes) likely starve to death in the absence of a federal pension.  The result being that once passed such a program cannot be repealed* and its very existence becomes an anathema to self government.   Only those decisions which can be just as easily reversed should be taken by Congress, anything else will lead to the diminution of freedom.  That is the perniciousness of the socialist gradualism -- what is done in advance of its goals can be easily started and only with greatest difficulty arrested or reversed.  The net result however and despite its origins is not self government.

With an eye to both the ideal and the constrictions of the present we will sketch a series of worthwhile victories to move closer to what is our proper birthright.  Not to spend a life living under somebody else's bad ideas and to have our political life bound by the idiot mistakes of others but to be the author of our own happiness through the highest degree of individual liberty.  Let it be remembered in every generation, as Machiavelli noted in the Discourses on Livy, that a nation is preserved by a continuing return to its roots.  

We can discern a double purification in this return: we clear away all the detritus that has accumulated in the natural daily failings of a nation; and, also, although self-interested critics of such a return try to hide this reality, we purify the past itself be seeing what in our own roots was historically conditioned and best dispensed with.  Our nation has experienced one such return during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln and the Reconstruction era.  Some might argue that the New Deal was another such episode, but be that as it may, from the standpoint of liberty and self government we are rightly today looking askance at the past that stays with us.  The Reconstruction Era amendments have provided the basis of an imperial judiciary, the later progressive amendments have greased the wheels to massive government expansion and the New Deal made real the possibilities inherent in any government power.  Today let us only think of liberty.  The past is not only our present enemy but a witness to the origin of our principles.

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footnote:  *Except perhaps through a plan detailed below -- and that over the course of 50 years.