I get a kick out of Patrick Deneen. He's a charmingly impassioned fuddy-duddy, and as such one of the best articulators of a kind of principled, romantic conservatism which, like Quixote, compels him to tilt at windmills that spin on unperturbed with little awareness they've been attacked. I admire him for that, I guess because I'm similarly engaged in futile tilting for another cause. Because while I value much that he values and dislike much that he dislikes, the banner under which I ride is different from his.
Deneen, being the conservative that he is, takes for his most common target social Liberalism, but I think he's particularly good when he starts pointing out that what passes for conservatism in America is anything but real conservatism, and the idea that Reagan and Reaganism is conservative is laughable:
Where is the harrowing self-examination in conservatism's complicity in what can only be regarded as the massive defeat of most recognizable core beliefs and commitments of a conservative disposition over the past thirty years, often of Republican party ascendancy? Have we strengthened our communities? Have localities gained more opportunity and capacity for self-rule, with power devolving from the center to the peripheries? Have we enacted robust forms of subsidiarity? Are families at the heart of our personal and national commitments? Have ideals of morality and virtuous character been maintained, much less been strengthened? Have religious commitments deepened, and in particular, provided strong resources against a dominant culture of hedonism and materialism? Have our schools and universities aided in supporting these and similar commitments? . . .
If "conservatism" over the past thirty years has achieved anything, it has been the evisceration of older virtues such as thrift, moderation, self-sacrifice and a certain stoicism that might have prevented broad swaths of the population from gorging themselves in a credit fiasco generated in the belief that we could forever have something for no money down. It has been in the forefront of efforts in the international realm to remake the world in our own image, a neo-liberal paradise of hedonic-based markets, the wanton exploitation of nature, and the destruction of those communities and cultures of stability and continuity that provide not only "family values," but the proper understanding of what constitutes living well. The progressive John Dewey argued that the aim of all life was "growth"; have conservatives, so-called, argued otherwise? Or are we all now partisans of a process that can only be said to culminate in cancer?
However the Republican Party might represent itself to the gullible folk willing to accept its nonsense propaganda, it cares not a whit for these conservative concerns listed above by Deneen. Movement conservatism is a form of zombie traditionalism, traditonalist mores animated by the alien spirit of corporate consumer capitalism to produce one of the most bizarre, intellectually incoherent, insane undead political movements in American history.
Deneen describes conservatism using Emerson's phrase as the "party of memory," and I understand and appreciate what that means to him. My contention, though, is that there is no longer 'living memory' that we Americans can live from. It simply no longers informs our mainstream culture, and the project to try to sustain or conserve one's cultural heritage as a given "living memory" is as futile as the Irish trying to sustain Gaelic as their national tongue. That ship has sailed, and now the best we can be is the party of re-discovery, of re-membering, resurrecting, the treasures from the past that most lay strewn about in shards, and of using them in a future-oriented project to build something new.
And I'd also argue there's nothing wrong with growth metaphor so long as it's understood as organic rather than engineered. All living things grow, not just cancers. Cancers are aberrational. Societies and cultures grow, and they can grow in healthy ways. We've grown, for instance, beyond the widespread acceptance of chattel slavery. Problems arise when the growth is forced or when some imbalance develops.
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