Deneen has put up an interesting post in which he points out that Liberals are more conservative when it comes to the environment than people who call themselves conservatives. He talks, I think, accurately about the fundamental incoherence in both the liberal and conservative positions, and the post is worth reading here.
What interested me more, though, was a response to his post by Empedocles who has this to say:
He certainly seems to see the Republicans and the Democrats for what they are. But what struck me was his seeing the Republicans as having more potential to engender a politics of sustainability than the Democrats. I don't think that there is even the slightest vestige of the old Republicanism left in the GOP that makes it possible to take GOP even remotely seriously. But I think it's legitimate to ask if the Dems should be taken seriously either.
I've written several times here about what I call the Whig spirit. (See here.) I realize that the use of this term has problems, not the least of which is its historical failure, but it comes closest in representing to me what Empedocles is talking about: A principled, forward looking, sustainability-oriented politics that understands that restraint and limits are essential elements of the human condition and at the heart of the meaning of political virtue.
I think some of the paleo-cons like Larison and Deneen are struggling with this, but in my opinion they mistakenly assume that tradition still has enough of a presence in contemporary society that we should still worry about conserving it. I accept that the meaning of modernity was to disembed us from traditional forms which we can no longer accept naively. For this reason there are no "forms" to be conserved. There is, however, the underlying life and spirit that shaped those forms that must be continously rediscovered worked with in an ongoing effort to grow forward. Tradition no longer mediates the discoveries of the past for us. They have to be rediscovered or uncovered, and I see that as primarily an interior process with social effects.
I believe in progress, but I think of it as an organic process rather than as an engineering project. The Aristotelian idea of entelechy is one of those ideas we need to rediscover and retrieve. For me it's a key idea for understanding what it means to be human. We are not beings who can invent and reinvent ourselves in whatever way we whimsically desire. People try, of course, but it's a disease. We are meant to become–to grow into–who we most deeply are, and as a Christian I believe that's someone created in the image and likeness of God. And if we are as individuals entelechies, we are entelechies together, as a species. Our individual growth and health depends on the growth and health of everyone. This is the root idea lying beneath everything I write about meaning in history.
We're all in this together, and the question is whether the balance tips toward those who are healthier working to heal those who are sicker or whether the healthier are being sickened by those who are ill. The way I see them, both conservatism and liberalism are forms of illness–Conservatism because to obsess about conserving dead forms causes a kind of soul stagnation that results in extreme cases in what I've called zombie traditionalism, and Liberalism because humans are not open-ended, reprogrammable machines, who can do or be anything they imagine. There hasn't yet emerged a constituency with a worldview that embraces in a robust way what I imagine as health. If such a thing emerged it would have a Whig quality in the way I have discussed that in other posts.
Unlike Empedocles, I think there is reason to feel more hopeful that a healthy alternative can emerge from the Democratic side of the political spectrum before it will the Republican side. I could be wrong about that. It could be just a question of one's own experience, because in the end it is just about common sense and common decency, and most of the people I meet who have common sense are Democrats and most of the people I know who are rigid, crazy ideologues are Republicans. Maybe if I lived in Omaha, most would be Republicans. But here's the litmus test: Did most of the people in Omaha vote for Bush in '04? If so, it's proof they have little or no common sense–at least with regards to politics.
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