“I don’t want to say that liberaltarianism is dead. But is it endangered? Sure. It deserves to be.” ~ Jason Kuznicki

I think the hopes placed in the Obama administration by libertarians have been fairly well dashed at this point.  On civil-liberties issues and on economic issues, the President has not gone nearly far enough to end the bad practices of the last administration, or to promote anything like market solutions to the many problems facing the country.  Jason goes on to write:

If libertarians seem more conservative lately, it’s not only that we’ve been pushed away by the left. Attendees at this year’s CPAC ranked “reducing size of federal government” and “reducing government spending” as by far their highest policy priorities. They also chose Ron Paul as their preferred presidential candidate. Those same attendees even booed speaker Ryan Sorba for condemning gay Republicans:

I’m not sure the left-libertarian alliance was ever really meant to be anything more than a fragile oppositional alliance to the big-spenders masquerading as conservatives during the Bush years, united by a common antipathy over the wars and the infringements upon civil liberties.  I know Mark has hopes that a populist left-right alliance could rise from the ashes of the current establishment, but I see the fundamental divide between Tea Partiers and progressives as too wide a gap for anything but a similarly tenuous & oppositional alliance.

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Freddie nods approvingly at Conor Friedersdorf’s latest manifesto for conservative writers and entertainers at Doublethink online, and sure enough, it’s a good read. But I wonder if Hollywood’s laissez-faire approach to ideology extends to all stripes of conservatism, not just libertarian-minded fiscal tightwads. As one commenter put it over at the American Scene, would outspoken cultural conservatives get the same treatment as their fiscally conservative comrades-in-arms? One of Friedersdorf’s subjects seems to acknowledge this divide, noting that “hardcore social conservatives might find things a bit tougher,” but that’s about as far as the piece delves into the state of social conservatism in the entertainment industry.

One reason “liberaltarianism” has always seemed so plausible is the close cultural affinity between libertarians and progressive liberals. I’ve always imagined that despite their differences, the editors of Reason and, say, The Nation could get together and smoke a few joints on the weekend. This may be a result of coming up in the Age of Bush, but I have trouble imagining a similar rapprochement between Reason and National Review.

In other words, haggling over marginal tax rates or the stimulus bill seems less contentious than trading blows over abortion or gay marriage. The former is at least supposed to be an empirical question; the latter strikes me as a more fundamental, value-oriented disagreement. As the cultural apogee of crass materialism, I doubt Hollywood would exile anyone disenchanted with forking over piles of cash to the federal government. But what about someone whose worldview is an implicit challenge to the industry’s core assumptions?

N.B. – Freddie’s alternative hypothesis – that art is fundamentally at odds with cultural conservatism – is also plausible. But Hollywood and art aren’t synonymous, and the success of one film in particular implies that there’s a financial incentive to cater to a socially conservative audience.

“By treating any and all social safety nets as irreversible steps on the Road to Serfdom, we allow liberals and progressives to shape those policies in ways that are inefficient, ineffective, and overbroad – even though Adam Smith, Hayek himself, and Friedman each advocated for a form of social safety net, demonstrating that social safety nets can be consistent with libertarianism.” ~ Mark Thompson

“I actually think a certain fusion of the best of 20th Century classical/market liberalism and welfare liberalism is the best political philosophy.  I also think it may be possible to persuade many other people of this, and that they will find it attractive.”  ~ Will Wilkinson

In many discussions I have with liberals there is this common refrain – if there are safety nets, then it isn’t libertarianism. Or it isn’t conservatism – or whatever.  The perception of libertarian economic thought (or modern conservative or classical liberal economics in general) is that it is simply against any implementation of the welfare state.  I know for a long time I was very critical of libertarian economic ideas because I felt that they were:

• A) too impractical or too difficult to implement in our particular system of governance (required purity, etc.) or
• B) did not pay enough heed to the importance of safety nets, or
• C) that they ignored moral and ethical implications leveled by anti-consumerist, protectionists, and others skeptical of free trade and capitalism.

I have been largely disabused of these notions through various debates here at the League, though I still think that the political process we face makes limiting government very difficult and that too much cultural emphasis on profits, consumption, and so forth is socially detrimental.  There is still a need to apply cultural pressure to help Americans see themselves as citizens and neighbors (and fathers and friends, etc.) rather than as merely “consumers.”

I think government can work, but it is naturally inclined to not work very well, and seems to stop functioning by degrees the fewer its limitations and the greater its scope.  This is why, in theory at least, a local government completely corrupt with unlimited power within its small sphere is far worse than a big federal government well-restricted by a savvy constitution and responsible lawmakers.  “Big” and “small” are irrelevant terms compared to “limited” and “unlimited.”  Then again, this is also why local governments are generally more adept at running such things as schools and libraries. [Read more →]

Reading over Will’s post about Geert Wilders’ manifesto to save Western Civilization got me thinking.  Not so much about Wilders or the actual manifesto, given that I think he is a Class A wackjob, but it brought to better articulation something that was on my mind (vaguely) in the recent dustup between Brs. Freddie and John Schwenkler.

Their debate started on the issue of Campaign Finance but then broadened to an interesting discussion of competing political philosophies.  The poor man’s version of that debate goes as follows:

–Freddie pointed out that the best intentioned aim of something like a campaign finance law is to prevent a plutocratic form of moneyed interest dominance in governance.  He went from there to say (I think correctly) that libertarianism as a political philosophy does not have built in mechanisms to protect workers/lower classes.

–John then responded (also correctly) by pointing out that the business class would not be interested in a whole swath of other libertarian policies:  i.e. no bailouts, tax loopholes, or favored industries etc.

Now at the risk of roiling the waters here, it was my sense that neither of them was really willing to acknowledge the valid elements of the other’s point of view.

And part I think of why the lack of recognition takes place has to do with power.  Which brings us back to wacky Wilders.  Amidst his xenophobia, racism, and felonious crimes against fashion, he was actually onto a legitimate question, a question which I think will be a very important one for 21st century governance.  Namely, at what point does a philosophy that aims for non-coercive behavior and attitudes need to apply coercion to protect the already well-established levels of non-coercion against coercive (illiberal) realities?  Is there ever such a point? And I don’t mean this in some fantastical Jack Bauer/Dick Cheney ‘we need some to walk on the dark side’ kinda thing.  Nor do I mean in some Mark Steyn hysteria-fest about how the evil Muslims are going to take over Europe and destroy civilization. Nor less the even more ignorant and irrational fear of some worldwide clash against Islamo-whateverism.

There are no Soviet commies around anymore, fascism is dead and gone.   The democratic powers of the world are not seriously threatened by some rising league of autocracies.  And even the global terrorist threat while able to land horrible attacks cannot and does not threaten the US government–unless of course we over-react in response to an attack and choose a path of soft authoritarianism.  [Which btw was precisely Woodrow Wilson's point about making the world safe for the liberal democracies in existence].

We live rather in a post-ideological age with no alternative economic system to dominant capitalism.  So on one level, the question about the degree to which Western governments need to face their own limits to power takes place in a somewhat more relaxed environment.  On the other hand given the nebulousness, the ambiguity of this  age and its players, it is a somewhat more difficult (and therefore I believe more pertinent) discussion to be had.

By examining one’s own coercion, I mean it both more prosaically (with the plethora of daily level stultifying regulatory nonsense) as well as more dangerously realistic (e.g. to publish or not publish photos of torture?) than the fantastical hyped scenarios.   [Read more →]

Thanks to John, I am pointed to these two rather strange arguments in favor of the Drug War and against libertarian use of statistics on race against the Drug War from Jonah Goldberg.  John does a pretty good job explaining why Goldberg’s arguments are so strange.  The only thing I’d really add is that the notion that libertarians don’t normally give a crap about race and poverty is a notion that is borne out of the coalition of libertarians with conservatives - libertarian and classical liberal philosophy, when divorced from coalition politics, actually have quite a bit to say about the problems of poverty and laws that disproportionately single out politically less powerful groups. 

Goldberg also makes this odd statement:

A justly convicted murderer should be punished regardless of his race. A justly convicted drug dealer should be punished, regardless of his race as well. If we’re punishing a disproportionately high number of blacks, that’s a sign we should crack down on more guilty whites, not give up on punishing crimes.

This is particularly puzzling because Goldberg has argued that anti-statism is at the core of conservatism and is also why libertarians should continue to coalition with conservatives.  Obviously, increasing drug prosecutions is not only inconsistent with any conception of limited government, it’s also an expansion of the size of government.  And not an insignicant expansion either, given that this can definitionally only be achieved by pursuing people with enough resources to put up a tough fight against drug prosecutions (a fact that at least partly explains the socioeconomic discrepancies in such prosecutions in the first place). 

Goldberg’s statement does indirectly suggest one point worth exploring, though – that human liberty is increased when laws are enforced more uniformly; unfortunately, he takes this point to be a justification for the expansion of drug prosecutions. 

Much has been written of late about the difference between small and limited government – specifically, small government refers only to the fiscal “size” of the government, whereas limited government refers to the government’s actual powers.  If you accept that the State must exist, as even most libertarians do, then one must have a desire that the Stated do well that which it is authorized to do.  If the State does its job poorly, then it will actually have a more negative impact on individual liberty than if it does its job well, because at that point enforcement of the laws becomes arbitrary and based on one’s ability to curry favor with the State in some other non-germane arena. 

If, on the other hand, the State does its job well, then people may act in reliance upon the law being enforced equally without regards to other issues.  So there may be a marginal decrease in liberty due to the existence of the law in the first place, but this is mitigated by the fact that uniform enforcement ensures that people may act in reliance upon the law and without having to curry favor with the State in some other arena.  This means less State corruption, less connection between wealth and power, and less fear of interference from the State more generally. 

The trouble is that very often uniform enforcement is simply not possible due to the State’s limited resources.  Put another way, in the words of the inestimable Wirkman Virkkala, “regulation is not scalable.” 

In the case of the War on Drugs, this problem is particularly apparent.  For any given drug, there are going to be potentially millions of users spread out over a vast country.  The only way to have uniform enforcement of the drug laws in such a situation is to have an incomprehensibly large budget far bigger than the already-incomprehensibly large Drug War budget we have.  Other programs, some of which may or may not be enforced in a relatively uniform fashion will need to be  scaled back (and thus enforced more arbitrarily).  Short of that, given the nature of prohibitions on the possession of banned personal items, the only way to truly enforce the law uniformly would be to turn our neighbors and friends into de facto secret police.

Still, under some circumstances, I suppose it’s possible to enforce such prohibitions in a more or less uniform fashion without creating a de facto secret police force – whatever Singapore’s flaws (and it has many), drug use is not something that flourishes there.  Part of that, though, is that Singapore is a tiny nation geographically, and another part of it is that it spends very little on many other types of restrictions, such as economic regulation. 

Which brings me to my final point – even regulations that are not outright prohibitions can be uniformly enforced only if they govern a sufficiently small number of actors or if the enforcing agency has the very substantial amount of resources necessary to enforce the regulations uniformly over a large number of actors.  Again, they are not scalable.  If the regulations are to apply to more actors than the agency has the resources to oversee, then the only solution an agency may follow will be to make the regulations so restrictive as to ensure the reduction of the number of actors over whom they have jurisdiction.  In other words, regulatory capture doesn’t just benefit the capturing business – it also benefits the captured regulator.

There is, I think, a solution to this problem: terminate any set of laws or regulations that cannot be uniformly enforced without an unrealistic budgetary expansion, and fully fund those laws or regulations that can be enforced in a relatively uniform fashion.   Unfortunately, this is impossible in a two-party system where the Executive is increasingly viewed by both supporters and detractors as omnipotent and where few are willing to admit the unrealistic nature of their pet programs.

Cross-posted at Donklephant.

ED’s piece yesterday calling for a neo-distributist/localist economic order is  well worth the time.  As coincidence (or synchronicity?) would have it, I have been reading some books on distributism and thinking a  great deal about its  it in relation to this current economic-social climate.

I thought I might supply some historical and theoretical background on distributism for those who are not as familiar with the concept.

Distributism is the name of a little-known, somewhat quirky, branch of political economy/philosophy founded by some early 20th century English (almost entirely Catholics), Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterson most famous among them.

Their work and distributism generally grows out of  a body of knowledge known as Catholic Social Doctrine/Teaching.  (The wiki here, for those with more time here from the Vatican).  While Chesterson was more the evangelist for the movement, Belloc was arguably the real thinker behind the process.  His text “The Servile State” is the first and in my mind pre-eminent distributist text.

The argument of The Servile State is that when capitalism meets socialism and a new third thing is born:  The Servile State.  It is neither fully capitalist nor fully socialist.

In ED’s words:

What strikes me about this is how similar this concept of modal monopolization is to the concept of an increasingly all-powerful centralized state.  Big government and big business seem to grow apace;

This is in fact the very thing Belloc predicted in 1912 (zomg 1912!!!).  Now fans of F.A. Hayek will recall hearing this argument from The Road to Serfdom.  Hayekians sadly tend to forget how much Hayek himself credited Belloc with the idea for that work.  Hayek undoubtedly added a mathematical and economic precision, a social scientific underpinning to Belloc’s more philosophical argument.  The most important of those additions being Hayek’s insight that a central planned managerial mindset simply can not deal with the complexity of so many events occurring across space and time.

But Hayek’s alternative was free market capitalism. And here Hayek breaks radically with Belloc. Hayek only took half of Belloc’s argument.  The other half of Belloc which ED picked  up on and which Mark (as the Hayekian of the group) questioned in the comments.  Namely that self-described free market capitalism tends towards monopoly.  That monopoly will lead towads a certain kind of (usually financially driven) disaster, which will create a giant vacuum which will invitably be filled by increased governmentalization.  See The Great Depression I and II for evidence to that claim. [Read more →]

I honestly thought I was done on this topic, and for the most part I am.  But given the misunderstandings that seem to have developed (e.g., arguing that it’s “big-government libertarianism,” or that the idea is just an attempt to allow us evil cosmotarians to feel comfortable hanging out with the cool kids), it’s worth calling attention to Will Wilkinson’s writing of the last 24 hours, which draw some really compelling connections that I’ve been struggling to make ever since I started seeing the appeal of liber-al-tarianism almost a year ago. 

Start here, and then look here and here.  Trust me – you’ll learn a lot; I know I did.   This paragraph from the first post is especially enlightening:

The fact that a government is small doesn’t rule out the possibility of egregious restrictions on non-economic liberties or of incredibly burdensome economic regulation. Suppose it takes two years to fill out all the paperwork, get all the licenses, etc. to start a small business, but once you do that, your profits aren’t taxed all. Suppose many forms of exchange are simply prohibited. You might have small government, low taxes, and very little economic freedom. Of course, a small government can ban abortion, prostitution, drugs, a free press, etc. just as well as a big one. Such a government may need to spend a lot of its modest budget on police and prisons instead of on genuine public goods. The size of the budget as as percentage of output doesn’t tell you anything about the composition of spending. This is a really important point. The United States spends a lot on prisons, the military, drug law enforcement, border patrol, etc. A lot of this is the opposite of rights-respecting, and a lot of it is downright wasteful. The composition of spending is important both as a matter or morality and a matter of economic growth (which I happen to think is also a matter of morality.)  Which is all to say, the fact that a government is small logically implies almost nothing about either liberty, justice or efficiency.

This is a point I tried to make, albeit far less successfully, here.  Wilkinson goes on in that first post to note that qualitatively there is little difference between minarchists, liber-al-tarians, and most modern liberals on the issue of “limited” government at least insofar as we are discussing the welfare state and the legitimacy of the government’s authority to tax and spend. 

But to get the full idea, it’s really worth reading all three posts. 

One conclusion that I draw from Wilkinson’s posts, and which I think was implicit in much of my writings on this subject, is that the real difference between libertarians and modern American liberals is over the competence of the government to regulate in a way that does not unnecessarily infringe upon individual freedom.  It is this concept of regulation, far more so than the issue of the legitimacy of a social safety net, that has the greatest effect on economic liberty.

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Amongst several others, Ross Douthat has some really good thoughts on my arguments for a more liberal libertarianism.  So good are a lot of these responses that I could probably spend the next month discussing them (don’t worry, I won’t).   But Ross’ points are probably the most comprehensive.  I can’t do Ross’ post justice by just block-quoting, so read the whole thing.  But his points amount to:

1.  My conception of liber-al-tarianism has a lot in common with the ideas he and Reihan Salam propose in Grand New Party, at least on economic policy, so there’s a good basis for reform conservatives and reform-minded libertarians to work together to reform the American Right.

2.  While liberals and libertarians have an awful lot in common on principle, that’s true of most Americans; the differences on implementation are the real problem.

3a.  Deneen, Dreher, and Larison-style traditionalist conservativism would not come to dominate the Right if libertarians left because the “appeal of dynamism, to borrow from Virginia Postrel, is too pervasive to admit of an effective political coalition organized in opposition to it”

3b.  Instead, the Right would become even more the Party of Rush Limbaugh, who is very much a liberal/dynamist on economics. 

4.  Meanwhile, it is highly unlikely that a libertarianism absorbed into liberalism would have much effect at all on liberalism.  More likely, it would just result in a national-scale California.

On points 1 and 2, I completely agree.  On point 4, I also actually agree – at least for the near future, which was a central point of my first foray into this arena the other day.  And I also think he’s right, at least in the short-term, that the departure of libertarians from the Right (though I jump to add that this is not quite the same as joining the Left) would make the GOP even more the party of talk radio.

Where I disagree is in the long-run.  I also disagree that a more traditional conservatism would fail to be a politically viable alternative to liberalism. 

An essential element of why I think this is that libertarian-conservative fusionism, despite (I’d say because of) several decades of political strength, has ultimately corrupted both worldviews to the point that it has formed this kind of incoherent, inflexible dogmatism that more or less lays claim to being a master ideology of the Right – even though it is barely representative of any of the ideologies that make up the Right.  

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Jonah Goldberg argues that a left-libertarian fusionism is not only doomed to failure but is in fact likely to lead to a less libertarian, more “statist” society:

As for it being undesirable, I am consistently amazed when liberals and libertarians (and even some conservatives) want the right to abandon its dogmatic aversion to statism in favor of some more nuanced and compassionate gumbo or some kind of rightwing progressivism. If the right ever loses its anti-statism, we will have a race-to-the-bottom between two statist parties, one cosmopolitan and socialistic one nativistic and nationalistic. Neither is very appealing to me. And bipartisan consensus between nationalists and socialists is never pretty.

If Will can persuade progressives to be more libertarian, huzzah and wahoo. But I fear liberaltarianism — if it ever makes it out alive from Will and Brink’s drawing board — is more likely to become a mechanism for making libertarianism more progressive, without  getting much, if anything, in return. If libertarians think they’re treated like cheap dates in the Republican tent, just wait until they spend some time in the Democratic tent.

Will Wilkinson and John Schwenkler respond, arguing that at the end of the day, anyone other than an anarchist is a “statist” of some sort, that the real distinction between liberals, libertarians, and conservatives is simply over the type of state we want.  Thus, Goldberg’s premise, that conservatives have a “dogmatic aversion to statism,” is demonstrably false. 

Wilkinson and Schwenkler are obviously correct in their assertion, but I think they miss Goldberg’s point, which seems to be more that liberals really aren’t any less statist than conservatives on social issues and are demonstrably more statist – and becoming more so - on economic issues (though John correctly notes that conservatives have become more statist on military issues and civil liberties).   Goldberg’s bigger point thus seems to be that conservatives are fundamentally opposed to the growth of government, and in fact want to shrink it, while liberals are fundamentally supportive of the growth of government; he notes, somewhat correctly, that conservatives outside of Congress opposed much of the Bush-era growth of the federal government and that therefore it’s not entirely fair to lump conservatism in with the performance of GOP politicians.  On the other hand Goldberg alleges that not only have Dem politicians become ever-more statist, but that this change is representative of liberalism as a whole. 

I know enough liberals at this point to know that Dem politicians really are not much more representative of liberal attitudes towards government than Republican politicians are of conservative attitudes.  But that aside, I think Goldberg’s argument still winds up largely missing the point. 

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K. Anthony Appiah writes:

Alan Wolfe is the sort of social theorist who would rather be plausible than provocative. Eschewing the lunacies of the left and the right—avoiding even their slighter sillinesses—he hews to a sensible, if unexciting, center.

Which is a nice thing to say.  It would be nicer still if it were correct.  Sensible is open to debate I suppose, but center (or centrist) not so much.  Exhibits A and B and C to that point.

Wolfe, whatever else he is, is a liberal not a centrist.  I would have thought Appiah would have figured out that rather central piece of information from the title of Wolfe’s book that Appiah reviews:  The Future of (wait for it) Liberalism.  Why can’t we call a spade a spade on this one?  Back at League Headquarters, I think I can hear Freddie’s about ready to throw down over this inability/unwillingness to use the dreaded “L” word–”progressive” “sensible center” (dear sweet JS Mill anything but liberal).

That aside, Appiah nicely lays out Wolfe’s thesis:

Wolfe’s distinctive claim, however, is that the key to liberalism is a set of dispositions, or habits of mind—seven of them, in fact, each of which gets its own chapter. Four of these dispositions will be quite familiar: “a sympathy for equality,” “an inclination to deliberate,” “a commitment to tolerance,” and “an appreciation of openness.”…But Wolfe’s sketch of the liberal adds three unfamiliar elements to the picture: “a disposition to grow,” “a preference for realism,” and “a taste for governance.”

Arguably the first four (and #6 “realism”) could be said of conservatives as well–or at least some kinds of conservatives (e.g. Beaconsfieldians).  Ditto, even more so, classical liberalism.

Now the fifth one “disposition to grow” acts as a transition:

What he means to resurrect is the faith that we can remake ourselves…The response of liberalism—epitomized, for Wolfe, in Kant—is that “we are not merely what God ordains us to be, but what we create through our own deliberate acts.” Far from being at our best when we follow a nature that is already given, we human beings are creatures destined to remake the world by shaping ourselves.

Classical liberalism would accept this point (classical liberalism in fact is nothing perhaps but that point), while a good many conservatives here begin to be worried if not outright in rejection.  Which is why Mark and Will Wilkinson are saying libertarianism lost its classical liberal side by aligning with movement conservatism.

But #7, here comes the juncture and the separation it seems to for liberaltarianism:

It is this conviction [ed: the view that humans can constantly remake themselves for the better] that explains the connection between liberalism and an optimistic commitment to politics.

Classical liberalism accepts the optimism of being able to change while seeing it more properly manifest through non-regulated, non-coereced action say in the market, in civil relations and the like. 20th century liberalism seeing that ability for positive change most powerfully through government as an agent of the democratic will.  Liberalism and libertarianism then are two various modifications of the same basic modern-era stance.**

Adopting Wolfe’s notion of liberalism as a series of habits/dispositions would I think go a long way to answering Freddie’s excellent challenge laid out here:

But I am left, reading John’s [Schwenkler] post, and many like it from what we might call the American Scene strata of contemporary conservatism, with a deep dissatisfaction and sense of injustice. Because I think that John and Will Wilkinson and many other reformist conservatives have the unfair habit of judging conservatism entirely from the lens of their notional ideals of what conservatism is, but judging liberalism, and the Democratic party, from the lens of vulgar politics.

And further this: [Read more →]

Scott and Chris each take issue with my post on Liberaltarianism in a Liberal Age, Scott on the grounds that a coalition of liberals and libertarians holds the greatest promise for advancing a libertarian agenda, Chris on the more substantive grounds that libertarianism does not offer a way of providing social safety nets in an era of increased marketization (of which libertarians obviously approve). 

Despite the vastly different viewpoints of these critiques, I think they both help suggest why the concept of liberaltarianism is so essential even as I think it has taken a massive body blow the last few months due to the turn of influential liberals back towards support of broad brush regulation such as the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, a general belief that all or nearly all deregulation is undesirable, and a general belief that any government spending is – almost by definition – good, “stimulative” spending. 

Ultimately, as I suggested in my earlier post, I think libertarianism will be best off if broadly defined libertarians become regular swing voters to whom both parties are willing to regularly pander.  However, I expect that at various points in time, libertarians will find relatively long-term alliances with the Left or the Right to be appropriate much as the libertarian alliance with the Right was generally deemed politically beneficial for much of the last 50 years or so. 

But in order for libertarians to more consistently act as political free agents, or even to sign on to a coalition with the political Left, something else will need to happen to free libertarian philosophy from the predispositions that have resulted from such a lengthy alliance with the political Right.  

I would propose, then, that the “something” to which I refer is “liberaltarianism,” “soft Hayek” as Jim Henley calls it, or “actual Hayek” as I like to call it.  The promise of this derivation of modern libertarianism is not that it attempts to paint libertarianism in a light that is palatable to modern liberals/Progressives, which our friend Kip rightly fears; instead, its promise is that it can help to rescue the fundamental worldview of libertarianism from the prejudices instilled in it by such a lengthy alliance with the Right.

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My former political editor at the late-great Culture11, James Poulos makes an excellent contribution to a roundtable discussing Sam Tanenhaus’ piece declaring the death of movement conservativism.  Tanenhaus’ original article is here.  The roundtable discussion is here–Br. James’ contribution is fittingly the final one.

What I like in some ways most about James’ response is that in my mind he is the only one who you can’t basically guess what his response will be to the question by looking at his biographical/affiliation blurp.  Some of the other responses I find interesting and on point, others maybe less so, but the rest all strike me as quite easily if not predictable at least guessable based on the individual’s place within conservo-world.

A (very) cheap and dirty version of Tanehaus’ argument is that movement conservatism is dead and should be replaced by a form of Burkean conservatism (so-called Beaconsfield conservatism).

Here’s Poulos:

When Tanenhaus cuts deeper, however, he complicates this easy narrative. Foreign and market policy concern little of the internecine warfare between ideological movement conservatives and their classical Beaconsfield foes. For both factions admit or champion the necessity of internationalism abroad and the free market at home—unlike a third, less popular or publicized strain of conservatism. More importantly, conservatives of this third strain most stridently reject the idea that cultural change is necessarily open-ended, progressive, and inevitable. Classical and movement conservatives alike, by contrast, concede—at a minimum—that we live in “a culture of continual novelty.” Yet they hesitate to consider that cultural change itself may have been commodified as a shared psychological and economic imperative.

This point is a further elucidation of James’ distinction between what he calls cultural (or what ED calls civilizational) conservatism and social conservatism.

For Poulos then, the difference between the Beaconsfieldians and the movement conservatives is really more just two various articulations of a common core assumption. (Ed: Does this apply as well to Grand New Party Conservatism? I’m guessing it does).  The Beaconsfieldians (that’s a pleasant word to say, just rolls off the tongue btw) argue for a more so-called organic, skeptical, open-ended, flexible, adaptable kind of conservatism.  The movement conservatives by attaching themselves so closely to (among others) social conservatives (as well as neocons I would add) embrace ideology described by Poulos as:

[an ideology] purports to comprehensively standardize and synthesize non-political convictions and commitments with political objectives…

This criticism I think lands quite successfully in many regards.  I hear a whole mess of MacIntyrean echoes in this graf.  Which leads me then to the ending to this piece:

Tanenhaus admirably invites conservatives to explode ideology—with its central myth that religious convictions, cultural commitments, and political objectives can be purified into a programmatic and comprehensive creedal unity. But he cannot explain how post-movement conservatives can successfully oppose movement liberalism, which effectively instrumentalizes economic and political policies that advance our cultural pathologies in such a way as to celebrate them.

Having made what I think is this crucial distinction between these various strands of conservatism (even adroitly applying that insight to the liberaltarian discussion), I want to nudge JP to begin answering his own hanging question: how would post-movement conservatives respond to movement liberalism?  Especially given the (in my mind) rather sound critiques of the alternate Beaconsfieldian types.

It seems to me that James has not gone in for the Benedict Option–at least not totally, though I doubt he’s opposed and potentially somewhat sympathetic to that route. James while I sense some MacIntyrean influence is more influenced by Philip Rieff (I feel like there is something wrong with wiki-ing Philip Rieff. Oh well).  If not Benedict, then what for cultural conservatism?

–

Bonus Coverage: In the previous link on the Benedict Option, Rod Dreher also talks about a Cincinnatus option.  Now being a native Cincinnatian, the child of multiple generations of born, raised, dyed in the wool Cincinnatians–of the proper or West Side Variety (people from The ‘Nati will know of what I speak)–I have to say a word or two on this.

Re: Cincinnatus option according to Rod:

I conclude that if we are Rome, we can either take the Cincinnatus Option, and work to rebuild our flagging institutions and restore our republican (small-r, nota bene) vigor …

Depending on one’s point of view fortuntaely or unfortunately, the Cincinnatus Option (as I recall my local civic history) would entail a partial period of dictatorship.  The Cincinnatus Option (at least historically and mythically) like The Benedict Option has a strong agricultural ethos to it.  [i.e. Emphasis on the crunchy in crunchy conservative.].  Cincinnatus post-dictatorship and military victory, returned to plowing his field rather than being life long dictator.  [Sidefact: My hometown is therefore named after George Washington considered the American Cincinnatus].   This agrarian imagination is generally what I don’t see in James’ work.  So when I’m asking JP to tease out the implications of his own theory, I partially mean that given an urban context.

* Also check out Larison’s piece in much the same vein.