I’ve been telling some of my more skeptical readers that I see myself as a conservative. A conservative is not necessarily a man of the right. Rather the essence of the conservative is his understanding how fragile civilization is, that
we’re all walking through history on a thin sheet of ice which
separates us from the barbarism that lies beneath. Occasionally a
society breaks through the ice. We saw it in Germany in the thirties
and the Balkans in the nineties. We saw it in Rwanda and Somalia. We
saw a glimpse of it as parts of our society broke through in New
Orleans. The best kind of conservative understands that you have to
tread softly. That the ice is composed of religious, political, and
economic traditions and institutions that keep barbarism walled out.
The barbarians aren’t at the gates; they are us. We are all
barbarians once the ice breaks and we plunge into what lies below. We
won’t think of ourselves that way, of course. We will think of
ourselves as doing what it takes to survive, of protecting our property
and our family. We’re all potential Michael Corleones–idealists until
our "interests" are threatened.
Conservatives tend to be pessimists about human nature. They see
themselves as attuned to how precarious and insecure our civilized life
is. They understand how important it is to shore up those traditions
and institutions that prevent the awful rather than promote the good.
Since they don’t believe that politics can do much good, they are
inclined to support only those policies that will do the least harm.
Conservatives are profoundly distrustful of any top-down engineering
projects. But they are not averse to modestly scaled progams that meet
real needs. But they are allergic to an ambitioius Jacobinism that
seeks to sweep away the old to make way for the new.
That’s the substance of my argument against Libertarianism. This idea that markets should rule is an idea that makes sense within a limited sphere but becomes perverse when made into an absolute. With lots of things, maybe most things, the principle that those who use should pay makes sense. But it becomes perverse when it leads to the undermining of a health public spiritedness. The attitude that characterizes the mentality of older people once their kids are grown: Why should I approve the local school levy? Let those with kids pay for the schools. If people want to improve the county or city parks, public transportation, or the road system, let those who use them pay, and leave me out of it. And God forbid that we should think of providing any kind of social safety net for those who are crushed by the market forces. Why should I pay for that? It’s every man and woman for him or herself–that’s the kind of cranky America our country is evolving or devolving into under the influence of this Libertarian mentality.
Lots of ordinary Americans are seduced by the Libertarian logic, with the deregulation, privatization, and minimal tax policies that follow from it without understanding the implications. They don’t see how it contributes to the inevitable social stratification that will be defined by money. The rich will live in their gated communities, their own private sanctuaries with first-class parks and roads and transportation that they will indeed pay for, but it will be for their own private use.
Why shouldn’t they? some might ask. Behind the question is the hope that everyone could have that for himself if they work hard enough to become rich enough to buy their way in. We assume that social mobility will always be a feature of American society. But the barriers between classes are going to rigidify. They always do, and they are already. It’s in this sense that I and others are justified in saying that we are evolving or devolving into a Latin American- styled oligarchy. You can say that you don’t believe that will happen, but what are the counterbalancing forces that will check this trend?
The curious thing about our present situation in America is that the Democrats are the conservatives and the Republicans are the Jacobins.
The Liberals in the Democratic party are the stodgy party of stability,
and the radicals in the Republican Party are doing everything they can
to dismantle the domestic infrastructure established by the coordinated
effort of both Democrats and Republicans in the last seventy years. And
they are working to destabilize the multilateral international order
that had been developing since the fall of the Soviet Union.
So the political choices that are available to us are, on the one
hand, the stodgy conservative/liberalism of the Democrats, and on the
other, the unhinged Jacobinism of the Republicans who are doing
everything they can to jump up and down on the ice so that we will all
have the pleasure of a plunge into the babarism below.
So it is to be hoped that Americans will come to their senses and in
the Congressional elections vote conservatively for the Democrats.
These Republicans are drunken good old boys who have driven the
country off road and into the swamp. They are reckless fools, and they
need to be reined in. That’s the first order of business, but assuming
we are able to push these guys out of the pickup truck of state and get
the rig back on the highway, then what?
I would say then that the focus shifts from the political sphere to
the cultural. I don’t mind having stodgy, conservative leaders running
the political shop–that’s what the Democrats have become. I’m fine with its having the primary responsibility
for keeping us from plunging through the ice or into the swamp. Where
the important stuff needs to happen is in the culture, and politics
will follow. And my quarrel with Liberalism is not for its role in
shaping what happens in the political sphere–it’s fine there. I think
that it needs to be confronted in the cultural sphere. Ultimately a healthy forward looking politics must grow from impulses that arise in the cultural sphere. In the mean time it’s enough to prevent the politicians from not making more of a mess of things.
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