The Classic Liberal Blog

The American political process has become its own worst enemy. It divides people. It pits us one against one another. Far from being the "solution" to anything, politics creates conflict.

Politics is an immoral, zero-sum game of theft and control. The "left" claims virtue is found by stealing other people's goods and services to "spread them around," while the "right" claims virtue is found by limiting rights and controlling vice. And both sides will gladly pursue their version of utopia down the barrel of a gun.

Disagree with the "left," you're a hate-filled racist. Disagree with the "right," you're a libertine anti-Semite.

Fun, isn't it?

It's amazing our country has lasted this long.

The Rise of the Authoritarian Right

I'm not going to bother getting into the authoritarian impulses on the "left" right now. Why? Because most of my readers are on the "right." So consider this post self-reflection.

According to George Nash, author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, "American conservatism is not, and never has been, univocal." The intellectual movement began in earnest with libertarians in the 1940's, particularly economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, with novelist Ayn Rand bringing it more popular appeal.

Around this same time, traditionalists (known at the time as New Conservatives) like Russell Kirk arose, men who were "appalled by totalitarianism and total war," along with the rise of New Deal liberalism and its mass culture. A third group of intellectual conservatives later arose in the sixties - the anti-Communists like Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, and William F. Buckley.

While the traditionalists and libertarians found more than enough to work together (fusionism), the ideologies of these 3 different groups of conservatives ultimately proved incapable of holding together a successful coalition. So when the neoconservatives first appeared in the late 1960's, the movement was permanently torn apart by these "liberals who had been mugged by reality."

Neoconservatism

Neoconservatism is a political philosophy that draws heavily from the teachings of Leo Strauss (9/20/1899 - 10/18/1973), an American philosopher who specialized in the "relativism" of classical philosophy at the Universty of Chicago. Strauss taught such things as the importance of Plato's "Noble Lie," and that the masses can be kept complacent through the use of religion, as both a distraction and as a powerful voting bloc. Thus, the Religious Right movement was born.

Neither the traditionalists or libertarians were fond of the neoconservatives. They found them to be "secular, Wilsonian internationalist, and welfare statist." They didn't like the Religious Right either, complaining that they were "insufficiently anti-statist." History has proven them correct too. The conservative movement has done nothing during my lifetime to stop the growth of the state.

The Old Right (traditionalists and libertarians) considered itself a Remnant (borrowed from the Prophet Isaiah). Now, according to Nash, there’s a "conservative conglomerate," yet "even as conservatives escaped the wilderness for the promised land inside the Beltway" the culture has turned away from what conservatives desire and thus, right-wing sectarianism was born - neocons, paleoncons, social conservatives, Big Government conservatives, compassionate conservatives, and so on ...

The Noble Lie

The weak thread that held these factions together for as long as it did was anti-Communism - or more specifically, war. But the thread was broken on November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall fell, and with it the anti-Communism that held the conservative movement together. So without communism to define itself against, the Right sought new enemies around which to coalesce.

According to Nash, "the functional equivalent of the Cold War," are other metaphors of war – particularly useful, the Culture War. "The contest for our culture may be the great unanswered question," one that has given conservatives "a new sense of embattlement and identity."

In contrast, the Old Right was shaped by its opposition to the New Deal, FDR, and war. Both traditionalists and libertarians shared an instinctive animosity towards the welfare/warfare state. The anti-Communists were a mixed bag, with intellects such as Frank Meyer remaining relatively anti-statist, and others like James Burnham who was a certified Rockefeller Republican.

The rise of neoconservatism ultimately changed the conservative movement forever. Instead of rebelling against militarism and welfarism, the conservative movement was recast as the opposition to the culture of the New Left.

A new war was born.

The Culture War

Under the tutelage of neoconservatives, opposition to the welfare/warfare state was replaced by opposition to both the Old Right and New Left. The Jeffersonian ideals of "unalienable rights," turned into demands for authoritarian order. The antiwar tradition of the Old Right, suddenly became "anti-American." In fact, the traditional right-wing anti-government views are now considered "anti-American," "libertine," and even "anti-Semitic." The statist neoconservatives have won.

So conservatives dropped their anti-New Deal (anti-socialist) heritage, adopting Democrats as their domestic enemy instead. As Iring Kristol wrote in "America's Exceptional Conservatism":

What happened, I would say, were two things. First in time, though certainly not in order of political significance, was the emergence of an intellectual trend that later came to be called ‘neoconservatism.’ This current of thought, in which I was deeply involved, differed in one crucial respect from its conservative predecessors: Its chosen enemy was contemporary liberalism, not socialism or statism ...

The Culture War provided cover for the rise of right-wing statism. For example, the church has historically been the most fundamental tool in protecting man from statism, but neoconservatism changed this too.

Prohibitions on flag-burning, gambling, and drugs gave reason for churches to get behind the state. "Conservative" faith-based initiatives eroded the important separation of church and state even further by establishing the pro-Christian welfare state. Millions of dollars of "abstinence education" has replaced overturning Roe v. Wade.

The Religious Right has adopted statism. Sin is now a cause for the state, and spirituality has been dropped for electoral politics.

Tradition Sucks

Today, most conservatives aren't even familiar with the writings of traditionalists like Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver or Robert Nisbet, while libertarians like economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek are considered nothing more than "soulless" idealogues. Accordingly, the long held tradition of conservatism has been discarded, because after all, "no one cares."

In his 1986 book, Conservatism: Dream and Reality, famous traditionalist Robert Nisbet let it be known what he thought of neoconservatism:

Conservatives dislike government on our backs, and Reagan duly echoes this dislike, but he echoes more enthusiastically the Moral Majority’s crusade to put more government on our backs, i.e. a moral-inquisitorial government well-armed with constitutional amendments, laws and decrees. Moral Majoritarians do not like governmental power less because they cherish Christian morality more – a characteristic they share with those Revolution-supporting clerics in France and England to whom Burke gave the label "political theologians" and "theological politicians," not, obviously, liking either.

From the traditional conservative’s point of view, it is fatuous to use the family – as the evangelical crusaders regularly do – as the justification for their tireless crusades to ban abortion categorically, to bring the Department of Justice in on every Baby Doe, to mandate by constitution the imposition of ‘voluntary’ prayers in the public schools, and so on. … the surest way of weakening the family, or any vital social group, is for the government to assume, and then monopolize, the family’s historic functions.

The single most influential traditionalist, Russell Kirk, opposed conscription, voted for Norman Thomas in 1944, and had been influenced by Albert Jay Nock’s cultural elitism and disdain for statism - a heathen by today's standards. As Nash writes:

Kirk’s wartime letters showed the persistence of his libertarian convictions; his correspondence was replete with disgust at conscription, military inefficiency, governmental bureaucracy, ‘paternalism,’ and socialist economics. He denounced liberal ‘globaloney’ and feared that America was doomed to live in a collectivistic economy.

As the war came to a close, Kirk, anxious to return to civilian life, grew increasingly worried that the army, unnecessarily alarmed about Russia, would strive to perpetuate conscription. … [Eventually] he predicted, the New Dealers would deliberately create an enemy abroad; it could only be the Soviet Union.

Even after Kirk began to reject "unalienable rights" and style himself a Bohemian Tory, he maintained his anti-statist convictions.

Prominent traditionalist Richard Weaver described the true conservative as follows:

I maintain that the conservative in his proper character and role is a defender of liberty. He is such because he takes his stand on the real order of things and because he has a very modest estimate of man’s ability to change that order through the coercive power of the state. He is prepared to tolerate diversity of life and opinion because he knows that not all things are of his making and that it is right within reason to let each follow the law of his own being.

Traditionalist conservatives have more in common with libertarians than they do with modern "neo" conservatism, and that's why they've been swept under the table.

"Active" government and authoritarian power have become the new mantras of the the right. Antiwar and anti-statism has officially been replaced with the legislation of morality and Wilsonian-internationalism.

What goes by the name of conservatism today, is a new authoritarian movement - a strain of the progressivism it claims to object. It has successfully killed the traditional conservative movement, and has no viable claim to a tradition of its own.

Conservatism is dead.