A Lack of Ideas Has Consequences

[Interesting post.  Promoted - Jon Henke]

Winston Churchill once said that the best argument against democracy was to have a five minute conversation with the average voter. So it's no surprise that, despite Obama's promises of "hope" and "change" to the millions of average voters, the only "hope" is for the numerous entrenched insiders already filing applications to join the technocracy of rationalists known in the vernacular as the Obama cabinet. Indeed, Barack Obama, who promised the American people that his campaign was about "them", has apparently decided that the people best qualified to adjudicate "their" interests are people for whom "they" are a sociological category, not a concrete concept. 

Perhaps more troubling, however, is the tendency for panicked overreactions from different corners of the Right, all of whom seem intent on proving that their side is blameless and that it was those bloody (insert rival group here) who let Barack Obama win. "Crunchy" conservative and frequent bete noire of the libertarians Rod Dreher writes sentences like "the greatest threats to conservative interests come not from the Soviet Union or high taxes, but from too much individual freedom", while liberal NYT op-ed columnist Charles Blow piously opines that the GOP should "return to fiscal conservatism and ease up on social conservatism" in order to win. And, of course, according to Rush Limbaugh, it's those damn "wizards of smart" and "elitists" who want to reject conservatism for Neville Chamberlain-style me-tooism.

One of the central battles in this interminable stream of recrimination is whether conservative ideas need to be updated to fit the times, as per writers like Douthat and Frum, or if, as Limbaugh himself would say, "the conservative movement does not need to be rebuilt." This is a false dichotomy, and it is tearing the movement apart needlessly. No conservative, with the exception of a few timid souls who are frequently embarrassed at cocktail parties (David Brooks comes to mind), likely believes that all the conservative thought of the past ten, twenty or even fourty years needs to be completely junked in favor of some new , hypothetical "conservatism". After all, what would an ideology built upon the destruction of an old model have to conserve?

What is at stake here is a question which should be common-sensical: is it a betrayal of principle to apply timeless principles to new questions? The answer is quite plainly "no." Of course, the question of which principles in the conservative pantheon are truly timeless becomes the next problem, and this question is what is really lurking beneath all the rhetoric about "updating" conservative ideas - an "update" in this case means throwing out the principles which the author finds archaic, whether they be the "oogedy boogedy" nonsense which is social conservatism or the  "heartless, soulless" sadistic fantasy that is economic conservatism.

This sort of squabbling is, in its own twisted way, vital to conservative thought - so long as one frames it as a routine debate between two equally rational, if differently prioritized, groups. What is toxic to this debate now is that there is this absurd notion floating around that dissension among conservative ranks is somehow new, or that we are in the midst of some sort of cataclysmic fight for the life of conservatism - that is, if it is even still alive! Such a view of the contemporary right-wing world bespeaks a troubling tendency (especially in a movement based on trust in the past) to forget history.

Let's hit "rewind" on the story of the conservative movement and go back far. Really far. I mean, before the Goldwater campaign was even a glint in William Rusher's eye far. Specifically, let's look at the 1950's, when Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind was still a brand new book, William F. Buckley Jr.'s God and Man at Yale was flying off the shelves and a Republican who described himself as "conservative on economic issues, but liberal on human issues" was President. Now, let's propose a hypothetical situation. Suppose that when Kirk published The Conservative Mind, a bunch of Irving Babbitt fans emerged from the academic woodwork and started hysterically accusing Kirk of being a HINO (Humanist-in-name-only) for daring to apply Babbitt's ideas to the issues of the 50's. "We don't need some reformist Michigander telling us how to believe in New Humanism," these hypothetical academics would squawk.

Nonsense, right? Well, how about another hypothetical situation - suppose that David Brooks  and Kathleen Parker had been alive during Senator McCarthy's hearings before the Senate. You can just imagine Brooks's hysterical column now, can't you? How McCarthy is a populist demagogue who's "appeasing the forces of the hysterical right"?

Oh wait a minute, that's not a Brooks quote. It's from Pieter Viereck, a self-described conservative who once opined in his book Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals that "we need to take conservatism away from the conservatives", and who argued that Adlai Stevenson, the infamously intellectual liberal Democrat, was a more true "conservative" than Dwight Eisenhower! I guess some breeds never die.

But wait a minute, the libertarians might say, at least we had no illusions that conservatism was some Christian big-government wet dream, right?! Alright, I suppose one could make that argument. Hey, I hate it as much as they do when Mike Huckabee calls libertarians "metaphysically mad" and says libertarian doctrine is "political lunacy" and that "Christianity and individualism are at antipodes." Statist jerks like him never influenced conservatism in the good old days, right?

Actually, those are all quotes from Russell Kirk himself.

Of course, the social conservatives probably have their reservations as well. After all, libertarians today are so damn condescending. And besides, they're not real conservatives, like the old breed. Those old libertarians back in the day understood that it's not anti-intellectual to distrust pompous elites with too high an opinion of themselves, or to want to make sure traditional institutions aren't kicked around by judicial fiat. And come on, they can't have been as heartless and elitist as the current crop, right?

Okay, fine. You got me. It was irritating as hell when Andrew Sullivan said that "fear of change" was the mark of modern conservatives, and cracked jokes about how they didn't understand "the refinements of the toilet." And who can forget Grover Norquist's absolutely intemperate statement that social conservatives have "compromised with socialism and stolen its thunder"?

Never mind. Those are quotes from Friedrich Hayek, author of The Road to Serfdom, the 1940's era version of Liberal Fascism and HL Mencken, an infamously anti-Roosevelt columnist.

Now, I want to make a distinction. There's no doubt that a lot of what held conservatism together has vanished - the most obvious example being anti-communism. Unless the sole purpose of the conservative movement is to boycott talks by Slavoj Zizek, this element is obviously gone, and let's not kid ourselves - terrorism has been a distinctly non-glamorous replacement. It's much more fun to fantasize about liberating Moscow than to get excited about firing "a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent" and hitting a camel "in the butt." I don't mean to demean the seriousness of the terrorist threat - at the point where Iran can wipe out all the electricity in the United States, it's clearly a deadly and pressing existental threat. I'm simply pointing out that fighting terrorism looks like a less glamorous goal because terrorists are terrible at marketing. There's no Pravda, no giant statues of Uncle Joe, no endless lines of marching stormtroopers, no Solzhenitsyn. Moreover, the American people are clearly sick of Bush, and since one of the centerpieces of Bush's policy is the "War on Terror", the threat is probably an electoral dud in the near future.

So yes, anti-communism is gone and there's no apparent heir to its place. But so what? Is it really true, as so many liberals have taken to claiming, that conservatism was merely a disparate group of intellectuals with nothing in common who were held together by common fears? Is that all there is to this movement? I don't believe so. But I can think of a movement for whom that is the case, and it’s not the conservatives. In fact, I’m speaking of the contemporary progressive movement, whose adherents seem held together by only one consuming, reactionary form of hate: namely, anti-Bushism.

Yes, yes, I know that Markos Moulitsas and his friends would disagree. To them, liberals do have ideas – ideas about social justice, about personal freedom, about equality, etc etc etc. It’s ironic that these are the same people who are telling us that conservative ideas are out of date, since almost every policy prescription put forward on a left wing blog today is at least forty years old, in principle if not in actual specifics. The Democratic party, for its part, is rhetorically stuck in the 60’s and politically stuck in the 90’s. Just look at some of President Obama’s cabinet appointments, and you’ll see what I mean.

This conspicuous failure to generate new ideas on the Left is relevant not only because it can give those of us on the Right hope, but because it is a fatal weakness in the Left’s strategy. Moulitsas himself makes no secret of the fact that he is trying to model the contemporary progressive movement after the Goldwater movement, and even feels obliged to tell his followers to read books about the same subject. Indeed, like Goldwater before him, Moulitsas has pioneered a brilliant approach to political technology. But there’s something crucially missing – Goldwater’s movement grew up after 20-30 years of rigorous academic debate between the traditionalist, New Humanist conservatives and the small-government libertarians. Goldwater’s book, Conscience of a Conservative, was ghost-written by a participant in these debates. In other words, conservatism didn’t start with politics. Conservatism started with ideas, hammered those until they made cast-iron sense, and then moved into politics.

Markos Moulitsas and his brethren have tried to do this in reverse, a decision which may set their movement back years in the long-run, despite its current short-run victories. As Michael Gerson points out, the supposed progressive Messiah, Barack Obama, “is finding the limits of leading a movement that never had much ideological content” and is “wispy and indistinct” because he “brings no ideological vision cultivated in think tanks for decades.” This means that whatever the actual policies the hard-Left would like to see in place are very unlikely to get anywhere, precisely because their obsession with winning elections coupled with a fatal instinct to dismiss conservatives with rhetorical questions and ad hominem attacks has prevented them from seriously entering the battle of ideas, and thus has also removed their ability to claw their way up to influence. A lack of ideas has consequences, and those consequences will be especially damaging to the Left, since in the absence of any contradictory ideas, Obama will have nothing with which to re-align the country.

Conservatives, thankfully, are nowhere near as afflicted by tunnel-vision, as the current debates on the Right show. However, it is essential that, being conservative, we remember that these debates were not settled in 1964 or 1980 and are not going to be settled in 2008, 2012 or any other year. These debates are timeless elements of the American conservative tradition, and will probably never be resolved completely. However, another timeless element which we must also be careful not to forget is the fact that these debates have always ended with an affirmation of what we have in common, and for my part, I hope that such an affirmation will be short in coming, rather than preceded by eons of squabbles and mutual recrimination.