E.D. mentioned Julian Sanchez’s “ressentiment” rant from Coldcocked the other day. Don’t miss Julian fleshing out his thesis.

Scott: So, ’tis the season where we annually get into the inimitable argument over whether people should be saying, “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”, whether there ought to be school plays involving the birth of the baby Jesus or not, and where everyone gets a little twitchy from hearing the same old songs mind numbingly lilting out of every speaker in ear shot. It’s time for the War on Christmas/Pluralism — depending on your point of view.

As a long defunct Christian, I’ve never really understood why the arguably most dominant religious pocket on the entire continent gets so bent out of shape over the idea that some folks would like to not feel pressured or forced into participating in a holiday that their religion just doesn’t recognize. I mean, as one friend once said to me, “We swim in a sea of Christianity here in North America.” So why the big brouhaha over some folks pushing back and saying, “You know, that’s not my bag. Decorate your home however you like, but don’t make me sit through your religious rituals. I don’t make you sit through mine!”

Am I missing something here?

Erik: If you haven’t read Julian Sanchez on the “politics of ressentiment” then you should. I think the idea of a “war on Christmas” is largely grown out of this sense of ressentiment (which also animates much of what drives the conservative base in the larger cultural/political wars. [Read more →]

Conor Friedersdorf has posted another entry in the “sprawling, muddled debate about the state of the right, the role dissident conservatives should play, and the wisdom of attacking talk radio hosts” that’s been playing out recently, with Conor and Rod Dreher on one side, and fellow Gentlemen Freddie, Mark, and E.D. on the other, with a special appearance by Julian Sanchez. I myself was a little bit unclear on what Freddie meant by “taking responsibility” when he started this whole thing, and I think the debate has defaulted to Julian’s interpretation:

It’s not that opinion writers should have bad consciences about not being party activists, or that a fondness for Edmund Burke actually makes one “responsible” for whatever some racist loons shout at a town hall, which would be silly, but is also an easy way to read the claim on a first pass. Rather it’s that there’s an actual conservative base out there supporting the political actors, they’re not going away anytime soon, and if the conservative movement’s going to pull out of this toxic death spiral, someone who’s not an imbecile or a psychopath is going to have to identify with them enough to lead them out of the fever swamps.

And so we’ve been focusing on the relationship between dissidents and the base, and gotten into issues of leadership and tone and rhetoric, with Mark and E.D. offering their advice. Now, the League is more of a confederation than a union, so I don’t have to join up with my co-contributors on this line of argument. And so I’m actually with Conor on the idea that, in Mark’s phrase, “conservative wonks aren’t doing their job”:

Put another way, tweaking Rod Dreher for his failure to fully invest himself in reforming “the conservative movement” with wonky solutions acceptable to the base makes about as much sense as criticizing Reihan Salam for failing to abandon his cosmopolitan tendencies long enough to convince culturally conservative Texans to raise backyard chickens in the name of spiritual fulfillment and environmental sustainability. What a shame it would be if everyone who understood and embraced conservative insights uniformly turned their attention toward or away from politics! It is preferable that folks who identify as conservative adopt different postures toward “the conservative movement,” play greater and lesser roles in shaping it, wield influence in different places, and make varying contributions to American culture, political and otherwise, more generally.

All of which is to say, I have no interest in telling conservative wonks or dissidents what they should be spending their time writing or arguing about. I do, however, want to try out another angle on “taking responsibility,” and I think it might actually be more in line with what Freddie was ranting about.

In his piece, Conor reiterates a point he’s made before:

…I insist on reaffirming the distinction between the political philosophy conservatism and “movement conservatism.” The flaws that are so evident on the right are entirely due to the latter. [emphasis added - wrb]

This distinction can be made for any political philosophy that gains enough popularity to become significant in the halls of power. (Although when I try it for liberalism, I feel like I have to drop in a modifier like “Millean” or “Rawlsian.” Can we really take it for granted that “the” conservative philosophy needs no such modifier?) Since politics is a realm where concern for the common good has to contend with every kind of individual or communal interest, only rarely does a political philosophy find anything approaching a pure representation.

It seems obvious that no one would subscribe to a political philosophy if she believed that philosophy would ruin the world. But it’s not so hard to believe that someone could endorse a political philosophy without considering the problems that will come from imperfect instantiations of that philosophy.

To take a small-scale hypothetical: let’s say I become convinced that deregulation is generally good for the economy, with only rare exceptions, and that the widget industry has been under heavy regulation for years and years. Now, I conclude that a comprehensive deregulation of the widget market will lead to lower costs for consumers, lower barriers to market entry for would-be widget makers, and more innovation in widget design. It seems like I should advocate deregulation, right? Except — WidgetCo Inc. has a powerful lobby in Washington. If they manage to get their hooks in the deregulation process, they’ll skew it so that the rules they like stay in place and the rules they don’t go. It still counts as deregulation, but it redounds to the benefit of WidgetCo. If it turns out that partial deregulation is worse than the status quo, and it’s apparent that partial deregulation is ever so much more likely than comprehensive deregulation, my anti-regulation stance starts to look a little bit, well, irresponsible.

So, if you advocate for a political philosophy, taking responsibility means that you ask yourself: what does it look like when this philosophy goes wrong? What happens when it’s taken up by self-interested people? How will it be twisted by power? When Freddie says he takes responsibility for liberalism, I think what he means is that he can look at his how his political philosophy worked out in the real world, even in its Carter-years excesses and mistakes and say, “It was worth it.” Not: “They called themselves liberals, but it’s like they never even read Mill!”

In 2009, at what may or may not turn out to be the close of a conservative era, I’m not sure what I can say. The excesses and missteps of Buckley-style conservatism (which conceives of itself as in opposition to and separate from contemporary liberalism) strike me as fearsome indeed. But, really, that’s neither here nor there for this post. The point is that a person bears some responsibility for making sure the political philosophy she advocates isn’t an unstable equilibrium, prone to breaking down into something bad when deployed in the mess of political reality.

I have a confession to make.  Despite all my criticisms of waterboarding, American foreign policy interventionism, and a whole host of other aspects of the modern federal government, not to mention my refusal to consider most of Europe to be a socialist hellhole, I am a proud American exceptionalist.  Which is to say that I do believe there is something exemplary about the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and that as a result the United States can and should be a “shining city upon a hill.” 

Don’t get me wrong – I fully understand the roots of those documents in European intellectualism.  But so far as I know the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation were the first attempts to implement all these ideas on a truly wide scale, albeit a scale with an unforgivable oversight, allowance of slavery.  That these ideals have since taken root to varying degrees throughout the world is a tribute to their power. 

The difference between me and other exceptionalists is that I’m serious about it.  If the US of A is to be the “shining city upon a hill” rather than merely a mirage in the desert, it must act that way.  If it wastes precious resources trying to force other cities to be just as shiny, it will find that it has lost some of its own shine in the process; if it tries to, chameleonlike, change its colors to defend against jealous neighbors, it will likewise lose some of the very shine that made those neighbors so jealous; and if it builds its walls too high, no one will see the glow that lies within.

To be sure, at some point that city has to have walls and archers if it is to protect against those jealous neighbors.  Compromises sometimes really must be made if the shining city is to retain any shine whatseover.  But the proud citizen will recognize that this tradeoff is being made and will lament it; he will not pretend that the city’s shine will be unaffected, only argue that the shine will lessen more if the tradeoff is not made.  He will not begrudge his fellow citizens their opposition to the tradeoff but will instead seek to convince them, as friends and neighbors, that the tradeoff is truly necessary.   Perhaps most importantly, the truly proud citizen will not do anything to dull the city’s shine without the approval of his fellow proud citizens.

It is this idealism of mine, this deeply engrained belief in American exceptionalism, that drives me to such anger and sadness over the interrogation and detention programs, amongst many other things, our leaders have implemented – in secret, usually – over the last several decades.  Being a shining city takes a lot of work to keep the shine polished – it is not, as Julian Sanchez explains so magnificently,  cost-free:

If you refrain from savage acts in wartime only when brutality would gain you nothing, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same. Vague talk about “saving lives” obscures a vital question: What kinds of costs are you willing to bear, what risks will you accept,  in order to avoid doing evil? If you’re prepared to discard a principle as soon as there’s some significant benefit to be gotten by doing so, then it’s a principle of expediency, not morality. If you’re ready to resort to torture, or to targeting civilians, as soon as there’s some chance it would “save American lives,” then you’re declaring a commitment to abide by moral constraints, so long as observing them is free.

We are required, it seems to me, to choose: We can accept that we’re one more country like any other, guided by pure rational self interest, in which case “if it might save even one American life…” is as much justification as we can ask for any policy, and the only question (though still, of course, a difficult and complex question) is how we go about it.  If, on the other hand, we think there’s something exceptional about the United States—that we’re defined by a particular moral vision beyond the universal desire for comfort and safety—we need to accept that hewing to a moral vision sometimes comes with costs, and then ask how much ours is worth to us.

I couldn’t agree more.  If you think the United States is just another country, or even just another Western country, then the moral issues of whether waterboarding is torture, or whether it was a war crime to drop the atomic bomb, can and perhaps should be either irrelevant or only of minor significance compared to whether those actions saved more lives than they cost.  But if you are a true believer in American exceptionalism, then you must accept that maintaining that exceptionalism comes with costs, perhaps sometimes in human lives. 

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