Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Phillip II

Say what you will about the merits of paleoconservatism, but at least its adherents tend to be quite well cultured and funny. Take, for instance, John Zmirak’s paleoconservative bumperstickers. A few of my favorites:

For pessimistic Protestants: “In Case of Rapture This Vehicle will Be… Just Fine.”

For really disillusioned conservatives: “George III was Right.”

For neocons: “America First.” (written in Hebrew.)

For tenured Straussians teaching at Christian colleges:

“God Bless America.” (then, in Attic Greek:) “Except that He Doesn’t Exist.”)

Hat tip to - who else - Helen Rittelmeyer.

One somewhat serious note: it makes sense that paleocons would be well cultured and have a cultivated sense of humor: there hasn’t been a nationally prominent paleocon politician since Robert Taft. If I were in such an anachronistic political movement, I’d be cracking jokes all day too. (Much the same can be said of libertarians, except even more so)

Did Jonah Goldberg Just Call the WOT a Crusade…?

Via Ross Douthat, we get J-Goldberg’s declaration that he doesn’t like “crusades”

Anyway, getting back to Ross. While I have specific criticisms for all of them, my common critique of Bushian compassionate conservatism, Brooksian National Greatness, Buchanism and Crunchy Conservatism is the common sense of crusade to all of them. There are times for crusades, to be sure. But I don’t think conservatism should ever be redefined as one lest it become just another populist fever. And I’ll go a step further. The reason Bush pushed me toward libertarianism is because I think any agenda built on the logic of the crusade is either doomed to failure or destined to be very un-conservative. It’s in the nature of things that you will always leave some children behind.

As for specific reforms, by all means go for it! I’m all for fixing what’s broke, when we can, where we can. Thommy Thompson is a hero for his pioneering contributions to welfare reform (which, contrary to popular understanding wasn’t entirely an exercise in shrinking government). Giuliani saved my home town. But he didn’t do it as part of some warmed-over social gospel, to provide “meaning” to people or as part of some vaguely utopian agenda. He did it out of good old fashioned bourgeois notions of public order, right and wrong and the belief that if government gets out of the way people can manage their own affairs. By all means, conservatives should fix the tax code, shrink the federal government, improve the health care system (hopefully with market based reforms), and help families. I’m even for censorship . But let us have no more New Politics and redeeming crusades. They always end in disappointment, at least for conservatives.

Now, you don’t need a Straussian close reading to think that this exact analysis could apply to the GWOT.  Overthrowing conservative principles in the name of more government intervention? Check!  Talking about a new politics and a new way to look at political issues? Check! Populace fever for ill thought out policies? Check!  Someone get Jonah some The American Conservative, Chronicles or AntiWar.com schwag, he just might be an anti WOT paleo!

Last Post about Palecons for a while, I promise

From Micheal Brendan’s response to a few of my previous posts:

 They [conservatives] must do this at the same time that managerial liberalism begins to suffer from and die from it’s exhaustion and internal contradictions - as it inevitably will. Managerial liberalism will not last forever - no ideology has. When will this all come together? We don’t know.

Who’s the crypto historicist now!

In all seriousness, me and Michael agree on more than than our interchange may show.  Two more points of substance

One - if conservatives try to infiltrate the institutions of liberalism, one of two things will happen.  One, they basically transform in managerial liberals themselves, and do very little conserving, like Mike Bloomberg or the new Newt.  OR they win an election, and just fuck up governance so bad because of their natural contempt for the entire enterprise, and get booted out for their incompetence.  It’s either a Pyrrhic victory or a resounding defeat.

Another thing, about why conservatism is almost necessarily marginalized.  Since it’s a defensive position and since at least Western societies have gotten progressively more liberal since 1789, the ground on which conservatives have to fight gets smaller and smaller.  For example, I think we’re gonna see gay marriage roll on through with the wheels of history, and Ohio’s 2004 election will appear to be a bizarre artifact of a bygone era. I imagine at a certain point, one would just get tired of losing, tired of history and the formation of modern society being fundamentally contrary to your ideals.  It’s like playing defense against the 49ers 94 era offense, on a field infinitely long with no turnovers on downs.  Sure, you might get some stops, tackle Ricky Waters behind the line a few times, sack Steve Young, hell even give a concussion.  But that offense is actually the best offense the NFL has ever seen, it can’t not stop marching down the field.

Increased Wealth, Increased Liberalism and the Slow, Painful Death of Conservatism

Michael Brendan Dougherty, the nicest and best dressed paleocon out there, comes to the realization that conservatism probably can’t sustain people getting rich.

I’d like someone out there to list for me the conservative cultural accomplishments that can be credited to electing Thatcher and Reagan. I can’t think of any. In fact, we may soon find more conservatives arguing that the type of market reforms initiated by these regimes did much to erode traditional norms and expectations. I doubt many on the right will defend the managerial economies of the 60s and 70s. But did the reforms of the 80s do anything to enhance the economic independence of the average family? Or did these reforms just enhance Wall Street profits while at the same time discouraged what we now call “family formation”? Is integrating more families into the investor class a solution?

Now, conservatism is two things. The “conservation” of a certain traditional social structure, and the opposition to liberalism. It’s this dual nature, combined with the GOP’s cohabitation with business interests, that lead to these not every conservative structural changes in the 80s. As Marx pointed out, economic dynamism is hardly a conservative or reactionary force, it’s instead a liberalizing, liberating progressive one (in general). Why then did conservatives support an agenda based on dynamism?

It’s because, somewhat contradictorily, as people get richer, in general, government gets bigger. The expansion of government under Johnsnon in the 60s was closely connected with the liberalization and expansion of deliberative and substantive freedom for blacks, as well as the advances under civil rights law for women. Conservatives, of course, were not all too happy about Great Society liberalism, and sought to overturn the “managerial” state, or at least hold it back, under Reagan. Expanded government spending and power in the service of liberal social ideas is any good conservative’s worse nightmare, so it had to be attacked by any “conservative” administration. But after Reagan, the democrats (at least for the 90s) absorbed the conservative critique of massive, managerial government but kept on keeping on with liberalizing social norms, making no efforts to stop it. And so, we have the Bush administration, too far removed from the horrors 70s style paleoliberalism to have the same energy as the Reaganites and too enthralled with preventative war to follow up on the reformist undercurrents of his first campaign.

Conservatives are coming around that all the Reagan and Bush presidencies have given them is lower taxes and greater familial insecurity and instability. Though the Sam’s Club Republicans are promising, as long as big business and reflexively anti government Norquist types remain a large, influential constituency in the GOP, its back to the dark ages for “conservatives.”

Paleocons and Me: Opposites Attract

Mensch D-Larison has a sweet post up why the combined currents of globalization and hegemonic foreign policy are hardly “conservative” in the most simple sense, preserving a nation’s or people’s common cultural heritage. Being both a globalist and occasional supporter of hegemonic, or some sort of globally active foreign policy, I think he has it right on:

there is nothing that strange or marvelous about a combination of social and cultural conservatism and ferocious anti-globalism and anti-imperialism. Indeed, the two pretty much go hand in hand. … The more fiercely conservative you are about your religion, your culture, its habits, morals and traditions, the more likely you are to regard all forms of globalism and globalisation–political, economic, cultural–as perverse, destructive and hostile to your “vision of order” and your way of life. Opposition tohegemonism and globalisation on the one hand and opposition to cultural decay and fragmentation on the other are a natural pair. Support for their opposites (with some qualifications in the realm of foreign policy) forms another natural pair. Thepaleocon combination is the normal, relatively more common conservative response to these phenomena around the world. It doesn’t actually make sense for people who want to preserve tradition to support international capitalism with the enthusiasm that many conservatives do, and indeed some “conservatives” today not only see the contradiction but decide that they are quite happy to let tradition fall by the wayside for the most part.

Though I respect paleocons, and some sure seem to like me, and consider them both more intellectually interesting and coherent than the modern GOP or neocons, I am their opposite.

But not really, I agree that globalization, free trade, and a generally involved and interconnected foreign policy will batter down the artifice of tradition, in the US and all over the world. I, however, do not base my politics around preserving these traditions.

As I’ve talked about before, I think that capitalism and expanded trade will knock down these traditional structures, and allow people to fulfil their own ends to a much greater degree. I also talk a soft Fukuyaman attitude towards democracy and it’s spread; I feel that as capitalism breaks down the barriers between societies, and as the lure of consumer capitalism lets people know that they can exercise agency and control over their destiny, some sort of democratic arrangements, over the long term, will be inevitable. This view does not endorse the neocons “Leninist” ideas of forcing or catalyzing this process through preemeptive, unilateral warfare, it instead recognizes that traditional arrangements have been rendered irrelevant and necessarily put into decline.

The conservative movement (excluding the neocons and fundies) almost seems necessarily quietest, and with the “wheels of history” rolling all over you, this is a proper response. It is telling that the premiere vehicle for properly conservative thought, The American Conservative, advocates a kind of cultural quietism, a recognition that quotidian political involvement necessarily runs counter to the traditional virtues Anglo-American conservatism tries to preserve and cultivate. If the two planks of your politics are man’s imperfectibility and that individuals can’t really improve society more so than “3000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax,” canvassing for Marilyn Musgrave or debating over whether hedge funds’ carry should be taxed as capital gains or personal income just isn’t going to come naturally. Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosophical leader of the paleocons, advocates a type of retreat into cloisters of virtue, while Rod Dreher sees the essence of conservatism as eating locally grown, organic food.

Paleocons are, as Rod so often hints, the hippies of the right. We politically engaged lefties mock and deride those who see lefitst political invovlement to be along the lines of, well, eating locally grown organic food. This long term anti-ideological cultural politics, may actually be rescued and sustained by global capitalism’s unrelenting drive to destroy all traditional arrangements, and at the same time allow people, enriched by this drive, to follow their own path of selffufillment.

Maybe we are witnessing the end of “conservativism,” maybe entire communities will simply use their global capitalism wrought affluence to live their own conservative life, wear hats, read Brideshead Revisited, and write for the American Conservate. Conservatism always had an uneasy time with politics, maybe they should just give up..as long as they keep on linking to me. Perhaps the resurgence of paleocon views, in response to Iraq is the dead cat bouncing, so to speak. Paleocons have “resurged” so many times, outraged at “liberal” overreach; after the French Revolution, the invasion of the Philippines, WWI, the founding of the UN, GATT, the Civil Rights Movement, the ERA, Gulf War I, NAFTA, Bosnia, Kosovo and now, with Gulf War II. Too bad their very orientation is one that necessitates marginalization and irrelevance.

Two Wrongs Don’t Make A Right - Comparitive Historiography Edition

Robert Kagan, along with his seemingly hydra headed family, is one of the biggest cheerleaders for war, any war, that America can possibly enter. The Kagan-Kristol branch of the Neocons are “anti-pacifists,” They seemingle support any war, at any time, for any reason. Kagan is the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics embodied in one pundit.

Kagan’s book, based on this and other reviews, argues that America, from its founding, was an expansionist power, intent on meddling in other countries’ business and spreading their conception of freedom. I’m not judging the merits of any particular foreign policy here, we can save that for later. I want to point out, however, an odd convergence in the general historical view of the US from the leftist anti imperialist view and Kagan’s. The striking thing is how much they agree. Talk to the Zinns and Vidals of the world and you’ll see that they essentially agree with Kagan. They bag on Lincoln and Monroe as being imperialists, and shed many tears for Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, the South and many other spots for pre or early 20^th century US asskicking. Kagan, in his course to justify that interventionism is as American as apple pie and poorly made cars, largely agrees with this interpretation. From AmSpec‘s review of Dangerous Nation via Sullivan:

Kagan’s America was a place of “ugliness” that provided “fortunes for a few and misery for many…[and] treated men as things” until “laws and institutions modeled after England’s” made it livable.

Kagan deconstructs American history’s protagonists as representatives of impersonal forces and presents them without regard for their own understanding of what they were doing.

He argues that the Founders understood it to mean that they had the right and duty to deprive other peoples of their independence and liberty as they might understand it.

Robert Kagan writes that “despite four hundred years of steady expansion and ever deepening involvement in world affairs, and despite numerous wars, interventions, and prolonged occupations of foreign lands… Americans still believe their nation’s natural tendencies are toward passivity, indifference and insularity.”

Take out the obvious normative differences (Zinn: Intervention all over the place is bad, Kagan: No, you knave, it is good!) and you basically have the same story. This of course, is an insight into why Zinn and Kagan are both wrong. While it may be fun to look at US history as just capital vs labor or wanting to kick ass vs. wanting to kick more ass, there are individuals involved, and major, consequential policy decisions that could or could not have been made. It is no surprise why this simplistic view of history produces what, in my view, is bad foreign policy. Either, “the US is an imperialist beast and always has been and that’s evil ergo I oppose US imperialism” or “The US is an imperialist beast and always has been, but interventionism is sweet, ergo I support all US interventions.”

Remember, just because Zinn and his lot were right about Iraq, that doesn’t mean they have a sound approach to foreign policy. All it means is that the neocons are clearly out of their minds, when they make Zinn’s or Cockburn’s ill-advised, reflexive foreign policy look good.

Of course, there is a similar, and related, historical convergence on the Civil War, with Marxist Perry Anderson and most paleocons on one side vs Henry Jaffa types. It goes basically like this. “Lincoln was an imperialist, authoritarian, war monger” Anderson and the paleocons think this is awful, Jaffa likes it. Birds of a feather… (ed - maybe now is not the time to belittle paleocons by comparing them to Marxists)

UPDATE: Blogfather Larison chimes in, and contra Sullivan, informs us that:

Angelo Codevilla is wildly, intensely hawkish and hegemonist; he is one of those people who will bear the label imperialist as a badge of honour. No one who has any sense of the various factions and arguments on the American right would ever confuse a Codevilla piece with anything related to paleos.

Of course, I’ll trust that Larison knows more than me (ed - you’re damn right you will) on who is and isn’t paleo. I think most of my analysis holds up (ed - with all the standard caveats: you have no qualifications, you don’t really know what you’re talking about etc) Which is odd, of course, because your standard Struassian loves to gloat about how only he knows the true, esoteric nature of America and, if you’re at Claremont, how Abraham Lincoln was totally sweet and truly American is his habeas stripping, pseudo authoritarian ass kicking of the South; (I don’t necessarily disagree with this, but the Civil War is for another day) basically, I’d expect them to agree with Kagan’s analysis, but then again, I’m capable of being suprised. Of course, you have famed Straussian Harvey Mansfield revealing to us that Machiaveli is really the hidden founding father equal to Jefferson or Hamilton and how an executive above the law is the sweetest thing ever. So you can never really be sure what these Struassian neocons are up to.

Daniel Larison is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

The Whippersnapper struggle continues. Too bad Jean Baudrillard is dead, because getting any attention for one post with no analytical content and a hastily written ‘about me’ is clearly something that’s only possible with layers upon layers of simulacra and fantasy. But I’ll let blogosphere superhero Daniel Larison speak.

As a young fogey who supports the aspirations of whippersnapper bloggers (isn’t that a redundant description?) to trouble the more esteemed and well-known pundits, I point you to the blog of Matt Zeitlin:….

[whippersnapper] is in one sense a perfect word to use for all bloggers, who are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty insignificant and who also presume to hold forth on matters great and small, but it might just as well be applied to all columnists and pundits. An important part of good blogging, it seems to me, involves reminding better-known pundits and columnists that they are not necessarily all that important and authoritative and that they have no monopoly on driving the debate.

In all honesty, I really like Daniel Larison’s stuff and I’m really interested in the crack up between paleocons and neocons on foreign policy, and he’s, in my humble, uninformed opinion, one of the best for the paleo view on most things. So yeah, thanks a lot Daniel, you’re really my first blogospheric fan. I guess I might be getting some love from the TAC and Chronicles crowd, so it looks like I’ll need to bone up on my Kirk, Chesterton, Maistre and Eliot. I already like Burke, and I’m not a huge fan of this Iraq fiasco, so maybe being a paleocon is the way to go. On second thought, maybe no, I’d probably just end up like Alexander Konetzki.

Again, another post with no real content of the type I hope to provide soon. I was literally in the midst of writing a post about Robert Kagan, but I guess that will have to wait.

Daniel Larison, don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not a hero.