Following up a bit on my “General America” piece, I wanted to add that I find the “all markets all the time” position within conservatism to be somewhat unfulfilling as well.  Market solutions are only solutions insofar as they do not necessarily perpetuate problems quite so badly as government solutions.  Choice and economic liberty are only useful instruments within society because they avoid many of the traps that come along with big government picking winners, rewarding rent seekers, and so forth.  To base an entire philosophy of governance along these lines is somewhat short-sighted, I would argue.

Perhaps this comes down, paradoxically, to the philosophy of choice –that very thing which rests at the heart of both liberalism and capitalism and, for that matter, contemporary conservatism.  There is something fundamentally antithetical to conservatism – or to the way conservatism has been classically understood – about the notion that choice should rest at the epicenter of society, should so inform all public debate and should so define who we as a people.  With choice you must also parcel competition, liberty, and a host of other ideas which conservatives and libertarians especially hold dear.  That these things are the best vehicles for our economy is hard to debate, but that a world of limitless choice, fierce competition, and little if any public sector (or ‘commons’ for that matter) is best for society in the long run is a more difficult claim to make.

This is not to say that we should scrap free trade or limited government or any of these things – only that as a philosophy, man cannot live on free trade alone.  A conservatism not rooted in tradition is not really conservatism at all. A conservatism focused too entirely on market solutions inevitably ends up falling short, and may as well be libertarianism with a dash of culture war populism sprinkled on for flavor.

Similarly, a conservatism which takes its first philosophical baby-steps only as far back as the American revolution is doomed to perpetual immaturity.

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 →]

J.L. Wall, writing in response to Scott’s treatise on 21st Century Conservatism, writes:

There’s a danger in a self-conscious tradition, and a tradition in which it’s acceptable to toss off a limb for the sake of the whole — traditions, in addition to being billion-headed rabbis (not letting that analogy go, folks), are like starfish: limbs re-grow after time. (But a limbless tradition, like a limbless starfish, is less likely to survive: it’s probably more a danger with tradition than a starfish.)

The problem, on the other hand, with an ossified tradition is that it has ceased to live and lapsed into reflexive (more or less) dogma. An ossified tradition fails because the existence of a tradition within history inherently causes changes to the circumstances of that tradition — and that can necessitate changes to the tradition itself. To borrow (again) from Eliot’s imagery, the creation of a new work of art, by its existence, alters the relation of all previous works of art within the tradition to one another, even if imperceptibly.   Any tradition that is not dying or dead is a living tradition.

So now on to William Brafford’s debut post here at the League.  In his grappling with the concept of ideology, he writes:

We all need some kind of framework for interpreting the world around us and for guessing at the consequences of our actions, and we need to acquire these frameworks from those who came before, even if we modify them in the process of application. Such a framework I prefer to call a tradition. The key feature of a vibrant tradition is its continued grappling with its own internal problems and contradictions. Traditions always change and grow over time. A tradition that ceases to do this is a dead tradition, and a tradition that is dead or near death I will call an ideology.

So this becomes an exercise in connecting-the-dots.  On the one hand we have Scott urging conservatives to embrace “self-reflective traditions.”  But while this can be necessary and good, J.L. Wall also urges caution against cutting off the “limbs” of our traditions lest they become too fragile to survive.  Then again, a tradition that cannot continue “grappling with its own internal problems and contradictions” risks dying and transforming into an ideology rather than a tradition. [Read more →]

So last week I posted a piece saying that Republicans and conservatives were missing a golden opportunity to engage in a full-throated  reconstruction dialogue under the Obama administration and noted that to date Republicans seemed to be presenting themselves as nothing more than the Party of No. The presentation of what is by all accounts an extremely flimsy budget alternative seems to indicate that not much has changed. In that post, I said that conservatives and Republicans needed to put themselves to the formulation of a conservative movement for the twenty-first century, particularly given the tide of demographics working against them. “Old-timer” Bob rightly asked for some details on what I meant by twenty-first century conservatism and while I’m a bit late in getting back to him, I’ve been tossing the idea around in my head. Below is what I’ve come up with (in no particular order or ranking):

Go populist without going populist: I’ve spent some time warning against the dangers of populism in regards to the AIG scandal and generally, but the fact of the matter is that there is smoldering populist sentiment out there that is not completely off-base in terms of its raison d’etre. People rightly believe that their government has gotten away from them and increasingly has little to do with their everyday lives and addressing the issues present in those lives in a positive fashion and a movement/party that can present a believable narrative about how they care about the challenges facing Americans and are interested in focusing on those issues in a collaborative fashion stands a decent chance of capturing a sizable proportion of the national imagination.

Look, John McCain and Sarah Palin were on to something with their decision to go hyper-local in how they addressed supporters and finished in what was a respectable place given that this election was the Democrats’ to lose and they did very little to actually lose it. The problem is that Palin and McCain practiced actual, base-line populism that appealed to people’s lowest common denominator inclinations. Such traditional populism generally winds up looking pretty ugly as a result and will get you a certain segment of support, but doesn’t offer the means for developing a broad base of support. But if conservatives can find a way of walking the walk of populism without necessarily talking the talk of populism, they might have a recipe for success sooner than we all tend to think. Walking the walk but not talking the talk to me means eschewing notions of appealing to peoples’ lowest common denominators and meeting people where they are but challenging them to bring the angels of their better nature to the game. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam’s arguments around Sam’s Club Republicans come to mind in this regard, as does the kind of localism/regionalism/integrity of living articulated by the likes of Daniel Larison, John Schwenkler, and particularly Rod Dreher (though Rod runs in to his troubles in other areas). [Read more →]

It is entirely possible that I’m missing big pieces of this puzzle in pointing out what I’m about to point out, but if that’s the case then I’m only going to have those pieces handed to me by pointing it out. So in whatever way this thing unfolds, I can’t but feel like I’m winning in some regard.

Offering his mea culpa re: comments about Mickey Kaus’ liberal creds, Freddie writes,

I think these remain key points: first, that though there are all different kinds of reformist conservative movements, they almost universally share the assumption that conservatism is something to be proud of. Paleocons (like Daniel Larison), crunchy cons (like Rod Dreher), pomocons (like James Poulos),  groovy technocratic neo-Hamiltonians (like Reihan Salam)– all of them, to one degree or the other, are looking for major change in mainstream conservatism, and all of them have complaints about conservatism as its popularly understood. But they see themselves not as critics of conservatism as an entity or ideal but as critics of where conservatism has gone, what it has become.

That’s a fundamental difference. Reformist conservatives tend to say “we are the real keepers of the tradition.” Neoliberals, meanwhile, tend to define themselves by how distant they are from traditional American liberalism.

Indeed, that is the fundamental difference, and that Freddie desires for liberals to take the same approach to their ideology as conservatives is, in my mind, a bit of a fool’s errand. By their very nature, liberalism tends to be a forward looking worldview and conservatism tends to be a backwards looking worldview. That is not, of course, universally true in all cases and by saying that conservatism is “backwards looking” I’m not implying any kind of pejorative commentary. All that I’m saying is that it only makes sense that you will find a greater preponderance on the part of conservatives to define themselves as keepers of traditions because conservatives are, in terms of first principles, concerned with the understanding, valuing, and maintenance of tradition — its sewn into the DNA of the ideology, that’s a big part of what conseravtives do.

Liberals, on the other hand, tend to be challengers of tradition. Liberalism is in part born of the liberating impulse from tyranny of tradition and the ugly blind spots of ignorance that the thinking that is the ground from which those traditions sprang. [Read more →]

Downblog, Chris puts together a fantastic post that quite well explains the ways in which modern liberalism and classical liberalism (ie, libertarianism) have a tremendous amount in common at the fundamental “first principles” level, at least if you accept the definition of modern liberalism contained within Chris’ post.  As I note in the comments, arguably the only “first principle” on which libertarians and liberals fundamentally disagree is that of “taste for governance” – and even that is less a first principle than it is a means to the achievement of first principles.  So the differences between an open-minded liberal and an open-minded libertarian should ultimately be resolvable, because both liberals and libertarians generally share a similar vision of a morally just society, even if some policies advocated by either group arguably fail to achieve or even outright undermine these goals.

And yet to many, the differences on policy prescriptions between libertarianism and liberalism seem even larger than the differences on policy prescriptions between conservatism and libertarianism.  Why?  The answer is, I think, quite simply the messy problem of coalition politics in a two-party system.  In such a system, the various ideologies that make up each coalition will inevitably cross-pollinate as they unite behind a handful of core issues on which the constituent ideologies have a unity of interest.  But, as I’ve argued time and again over the last year and a half, eventually those core issues fade to the background and one or more of the constituent groups gradually leaves the coalition and maybe even joins the other coalition, starting the cycle anew.

I argued earlier that the current political alignment has corrupted libertarianism in a way that has caused it to forget too much of its classically liberal roots (this is true even though it has also helped give libertarians influence in excess of our numbers, that being the Catch-22 of coalition politics), and that libertarianism at this point needs to find a way to sever its ties with conservatism. 

But it’s also important to recognize the way that libertarianism has corrupted conservatism to a fairly large extent, resulting in a “movement conservatism” that is ideologically incoherent.  “Conservatism,” at least as it was historically defined, represented a political philosophy that existed to put the brakes on social and economic upheaval.  It was not an ideology that was per se opposed to any kind of cultural change; but it was an ideology that insisted upon respect for long-established cultural, societal, and political traditions, and upon stability as a moral imperative.  Obviously, these are not values that are at the core of a libertarianism built around the maximization of individual freedom.

And yet, libertarians and conservatives for a very long while – even before there was a term for “libertarian” – made natural coalition partners against a New Deal coalition that must have seemed hell-bent on imposing fairly radical changes that were also anathema to core libertarian principles on economic freedom.  And with the subsequent looming threat of international Communism, a valid raison d’etre for the alliance remained.  But after the fall of the Berlin Wall?  Not much.  And yet the coalition largely remained in tact, perhaps mostly because of the way that cross-pollination had obscured the fundamental philosophical differences between libertarians and the dominant varieties of conservatism.

So why should libertarians remain in the fold if there is no longer much cause to ally themselves with conservatives?  Ross Douthat and Jonah Goldberg have suggested that leaving would deprive the coalition of the Right of its most intellectual component, making it more explicitly anti-intellectual, nationalist, and nativist, while failing to exert much influence on the coalition of the Right. 

[Read more →]

Scott coins an interesting term: post-postmodern.  The essence of the post-postmodern man, it seems, is a sort of meshing of Reason and Tradition that eschews both the ignorance and outdatedness of many old practices and traditions, as well as the arrogance and certitude of the modern man of reason.

While it has generally been conservatives who have been associated with the embrace and love for tradition, liberals too now are looking back to see what lessons can be learned from tradition. On both sides, rather than a blind acceptance of the inherent correctness of tradition, both conservatives and liberals are re-inhabiting traditions in, as Wilson suggests, in a self-aware and reflexive manner that seeks the wisdom that endures from such grooves and rejecting the ignorance that pervaded the thinking of the time.

This, of course, can be seen in writers such as Rod Dreher who advocates tirelessly his vision of “crunchy conservatism” as well as in the hippie family that lives across the street from us, or the one that lives two doors down, selling organic honey from their home.  Or in my own family, as we struggle to evaluate the pros and cons of modernity, the traditions and time-worn practices that have been lost along the way that actually worked, whether or not they made sense–whether or not modern ways seem better at first glance.  We have abandoned the television to the scrap heap, but we can’t part with our computers.  We have covered our walls with books, and choose to spend time reading to our daughter rather than planting her in front of a screen.

The unintentional casualties of modernity are revealed subtly, after all.  All our gadgets and “time-savers” seem to keep us busier then ever.  Families have gradually become more disparate affairs.  What once was a collective, mutli-generation experience, has devolved into isolated units, often separated not only by the expanse of miles, but by a more metaphysical distance.  What has this achieved–this very American independence?  Once upon a time three generations pooled their resources to make a family work.  The old were tended to by their offspring or communities, rather than Social Security and nursing homes.  The dead were laid out in the parlor.

Yes, we saw the dead up close, and we tended to them.  We were not afraid of our mortality, and we weren’t so numb to it either.

Then again, as Scott reminds us, the past is not filled only with traditions that strengthened us, but also with horrors and ghosts.  The new world has provided us with longer lives and more comfortable beds, faster carriages and unprecedented warmth.  Yet it is a warmth without a fire–or perhaps a warmth without a need to tend to the fire.  There is a fire still, but it is so easily gotten: flip a switch, and you create heat.  “Let there be light,” and there is light.

What I’d like to add to Scott’s theme of “Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should” is that just because something is easy, or sensible, or cheap, doesn’t mean it’s healthy, or wise, or aware of the long view.

This spans all subjects.  New Urbanism is a concept birthed out of the neo-traditionalist mindset.  New urbanist city planners and architects look to tradition to see how communities were built before freeways, before zoning laws separated our homes from our shops, and then attempt to intermingle these older traditions with green technology, with what came naturally long ago, but has been abandoned in favor of progress and efficiency.  Nobody used to consider building a town “walkable” – there was simply no other good option.  Now we are cognizant of the repurcussions–now we have, as Scott terms it, directionality.

And on and on, we are living in a time of self-evaluation as a society, as a civilization, as individuals and families.  Or at least we should be.  The financial crisis begs many questions of us, not the least of which should be our faith in free markets.  The rising disparity in class should force us to question the wisdom in supply side economics, or voodoo economics as George the Sr. once termed them.

We are still charging forward at a breakneck pace, conservatives and liberals alike, toward that dream of progress, freedom, choice, modernity.  Perhaps it’s best we slowed our pace a bit.  We don’t need to turn back any clocks.

Some time ago I started revamping my diet to cut some of the less than beneficial elements of my consumption out. The impetus for doing so was quite banal: my partner came home and said that she had seen a herbalist who had suggested a particular type of cleanse and would I do the cleanse with her?

I agreed to do so and we proceeded to cut dairy, refined carbs, sugar, vinegars, sugary fruits, and all yeasty foods from our wheelhouse, while at the same taking a regimen of herbal supplements. The effects of this dietary shift were surpisingly pronounced. While on the cleanse I felt physically, emotionally, and mentally more clear and more energized.

Once the cleanse ended we tried to be slow in reintroducing banished foods back into our system, but Christmas loomed large and we both indulged more than we should have. After a particularly hearty dinner at my future in-laws I immediately felt the effects of what I had eaten and proceeded to curse myself, downing as much water as I could to flush out my system.

While flushing, I wrote the following post over at the Politics of Scrabble, noting,

It occurs to me that there are a myriad if things we put in our body without ever really thinking about it, much of it due to modern technology. Just like me prior to this cleanse, we have no sense of what the affects on our well-being are because we’ve rarely experienced life without these additives. But the effects can be stunning. I felt 120% better without all the stuff in my system that I cut out and I had no real idea how bad I felt before. I don’t count myself an enemy of modernity, but I think this points to the insight that postmodernity offers us in either its liberal/progressive or conservative flavours: just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

Having now gone to see the same herbalist and been put back on the cleanse diet for the past two weeks, I am feeling the same healthy effects and that notion of “just because we can, doesn’t mean we should” is back front and centre in my mind.

Much of the drive of modernity is towards progress. In the eyes of modernity, progress solves all. With progress we move forward, we build bigger and better things, we create more for more people. It is a constant march forward, but often feels like we don’t take the time to either look back or look around to see where it is that we’re going.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for progress and I do see a lot of the benefits that the progress of modernity has provided. I don’t deny that there is, on the whole, less war and more prosperity amongst more people now than there has been in the past. I think those are good things. But I think the ethos of our day is also pointing to the need to ease our constant movement forward and to balance that movement with a careful consideration of what the impacts of that movement are. What do we damage along the way? What do we shunt to the side without even realizing it? As summed up above, just because we can do something, doesn’t necessarily means that we should. [Read more →]