Mytheos_Holt's blog

If you'd told my hardline libertarian, militantly atheistic Objectivist self of the past that I'd be ever write a defense of socially conservative political views, I'd probably have called you crazy in between fits of laughter and remarks about how that particular group of people was a roadblock to human evolution. Which goes to show that everyone must sometimes eat crow.

There's been a lot of talk about how Governor Sanford's recent scandal impugns the authority of social conservatives to discuss how terrible infidelity, abortion, homosexuality and post-1960's sexual morality are. The usual suspects have already got in their obligatory sneers, but what's more surprising is how quick various members of this website have jumped on the bandwagon. No accounting for taste, but they're wrong.

As I never tire of reminding people, most of the conflicts on the Right today have happened before. The desire to rid our side of social conservatives is no exception. Frank Meyer actually wrote an essay entitled "A Rebel in Search of Tradition" in which he savaged Russell Kirk for being culturally authoritarian and thus socialist by proxy. Friedrich Hayek leveled the accusation that "conservatism has compromised with socialism and stolen its thunder" at traditionalists. In the end, Meyer's fusionism resolved the dispute, but the tensions remained, to the point that Murray Rothbard and Russell Kirk both tried to write each other out of the movment in the same issue of the same magazine. Kirk accused Rothbard's libertarians of being "chirping sectaries" who could never agree and were Satanic in their opposition to authority, whereas Rothbard wrote that fusionism was really a "libertarian manque" intended to keep those stupid traditionalists quiet. And even though any time social conservatism was dumped, it resulted in disastrous political alienation (see also the rise of the New Right in response to Gerald Ford), and anytime fiscal conservatism was dumped it resulted in political failure and division on the Right (George W. Bush), people still try and write both sides out.

But enough about history. Let's deal with the question at hand - why should the infidelity of Mark Sanford merit the expulsion of social conservatives? Perhaps I'm being willingly obtuse, but I can't remember a single time when any socially conservative Senator, Representative, Governor, President or dog-catcher has suggested that adultery be made illegal. I've also never heard a single Democratic Representative, Senator, Governor or President advocate adultery as a social good - in fact, unlike Sanford, some of them will even put themselves at the risk of impeachment to avoid admitting to it. Hypocrisy? You bet. But if we threw out every political idea that had a high profile hypocrite advocate it at some point, then we'd have nothing left to advocate at all.

The impulse to throw hypocrites out is a healthy one. The impules to throw out everyone but the hypocrites is not - it is a symptom of desperation. Suppose the Republican party followed the advice of all the people who said abandoning social conservatism because of the Mark Sanfords of the world was a good idea. Imagine the message that sends - "Alright, you've got us, husbands can't keep their pants up and we're not going to claim they should." Imagine the fun Robert Gibbs would have with that. Imagine how many voters, both socially conservative and otherwise, we'd never be able to get on our side again.

The mere fact that Sanford's so-called "hypocrisy" is getting so much airtime is the best argument for believing in a politics of morality one could ever want. As Rush Limbaugh pointed out yesterday, "Hypocrisy does two things, both at the same time: Hypocrisy shows -- and you're not going to want to hear this. You're not going to want to agree with me on this.  I know you're not.  But hypocrisy shows that there are moral values in a culture.  Without moral values in a culture, it would not be possible for anybody to be a hypocrite.  The fact that we are calling Sanford a hypocrite is the proof that there are still standards of dignity and morality that apply in our society." Or, to put it even more bluntly, hypocrisy is the one thing which liberals have not been able to turn into a lifestyle choice. 

It's true that social conservatism puts us in a difficult position. You never hear about the pro-choice Democratic "hypocrites" who forbid their daughters from getting abortions. You never hear about the college professors who are rich and still say property is theft. Even when you do, it doesn't do anything. You don't see the Democrats arguing that they should drop opposition to corporate corruption because Chris Dodd got caught. When Bill Clinton cheated on Hillary or when Elliot Spitzer paid to become "Love Client Number Nine", you may notice there was just as much outrage, if not more, than what has accrued in response to Governor Sanford. Whatever we may do on blogs, putting partisan spin on a personal tragedy alienates average people because it looks cynical, heartless and petty. Making partisan spin on a personal tragedy the basis for a massive philosophical shift is politically and philosophically counterproductive because it makes your party look like a collection of gutless wimps who allow the worst members of their party to dictate moral standards.

In his article, Max Borders argues that while cheating on one's wife is a morally disastrous act, "there are egregious moral acts the discovery of which no politician should survive...legal bedroom behavior between consenting adults ain’t one of them." It is lucky, therefore, that nobody on the Right, Left or anywhere in between is suggesting government rationing or regulation of sex. They simply suggest that sexual habits and character may be linked. It may be true that, as Mr. Borders says, Jerry Falwell's form of public moralizing has caused the GOP more harm than good. This is not an argument for abandoning one's argument. It is an argument for changing the rhetoric and presentation of it, because we no longer live in the age of moral panic that characterized the 80's. Pro-choice advocates do not abandon their argument because Margaret Sanger once took their side on the grounds that blacks should be exterminated. One can be right for the wrong reasons, and there are plentiful examples of more "libertarian" Republicans who are anti-abortion or even anti-gay marriage who are not cheating scum.

In short, it is political suicide to abandon social conservatism at a time when our most zealous supporters are socially conservative, and when a good majority of even the fiscal conservatives hold socially conservative views. It is also logically fallacious to suggest that because one person violates a set of standards, the standards are therefore invalid. Finally, it is philosophically disastrous to conflate a refusal to regulate certain things because they are not capable of being regulated with abandonment of the moral arguments against them as reflections of an individual's character.

"Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality of never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity."-William F. Buckley, Jr.

And so the civil war begins on the Right. And it has wasted no time in coming to this website - already we are seeing everything from arguments in favor of a more Ron Paul-style party to reminders of just who is really to blame for all this , and sometimes even posts containing the extraordinary idea that conservatism needs to die so that it can live again! It's often difficult to sift the snake oil from the genuine medicine in these posts, and they are frequently complicated by the endless search for liberal saboteurs, a fear which is not altogether unreasonable in a medium which is admittedly dominated by Leftists.

Now, at this point, it's no secret that I have a stake in these fights, and it is with the small Goverment, stick-to-basics, conservatism-hasn't-been-tried folks. However, I do agree to a limited extent with the people who believe that conservatism looks like it's outlived its usefulness. Or, to put it another way, the rhetoric selling conservatism has outlived its usefulness. The Republican party's old associations with George Wallace Democrats are now completely useless at best and counterproductive at worst, so the old race-baiting "fear the other guy" style of rhetoric has been blunted. The country is in the middle of a recession, so the Republican impulse to throw up our hands (of which I myself am frequently guilty) admittedly looks rather weak, if not hypocritical. You got us into this mess, you'd better have a way to get us out seems to be the sentiment on this website among our detractors.

Now, admittedly, I don't believe conservatism go us into this mess, but looking back on it, I can see an argument for why it might have. It wasn't that conservatism's ideas were wrong. It's that they were hammered out and debated over half a century ago! As I've alluded before, even the first conservatives had to do some updating, and fix up the decrepit corpses of humanism and classical liberalism before they could start reasserting their value. These two forces transformed into Catholic traditionalism and libertarianism, respectively, As such, when the old "fusionism" was created, therefore, it was built on a union of these two ideas.

To put it bluntly, that fusion is no longer workable. Catholic traditionalism is dead. Long live Protestant traditionalism. For all their rhetorical similarities, the Religious Right is not Russell Kirk. Mike Huckabee is not Richard Weaver, and he never will be. Rick Warren is not Brent Bozell, and he never will be. We need to craft a new mixture of ideas for the new mixture of people that now comprise the conservative movement, even if we still draw on some of the old ones from our past.

And unfortunately, the fusion of the two ideas looks increasingly difficult. Huckabee has, with the aid of the exultant "Crunch" conservatives blasted libertarians as "faux-cons" and as "heartless and soulless." Meanwhile, libertarians sneer at the "Huckster" and claim he's trying to deflect blame from his own Statist, heretical wing of the party. It would be easy for conservatives to throw up their hands and exclaim, "Frank Meyer, where are you now that we need you?!"

Actually, it's not impossible to reconcile these two views. Most of their disagreement consists primarily in raised hackles over rhetorical excess, rather than actual disagreement.

Firstly, let's look at the entirety of Huckabee's infamous quote:

"Republicans need to be Republicans. The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it’s this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it’s a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says “look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government. If it means that elderly people don’t get their Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go without education and healthcare, so be it.” Well, that might be a quote pure economic conservative message, but it’s not an American message. It doesn’t fly. People aren’t going to buy that, because that’s not the way we are as a people. That’s not historic Republicanism. Historic Republicanism does not hate government; it’s just there to be as little of it as there can be. But they also recognize that government has to be paid for.

If you have a breakdown in the social structure of a community, it's going to result in a more costly government ... police on the streets, prison beds, court costs, alcohol abuse centers, domestic violence shelters, all are very expensive. What's the answer to that? Cut them out? Well, the libertarians say "yes, we shouldn't be funding that stuff." But what you've done then is exacerbate a serious problem in your community. You can take the cops off the streets and just quit funding prison beds. Are your neighborhoods safer? Is it a better place to live? The net result is you have now a bigger problem than you had before."

Now, there are a couple of things to take note of before we begin deconstructing this quote. Firstly, Huckabee is a politician, and politicians try to appeal to any audience they can get their fingers on. So who was Huckabee's audience for this quote? Well, a reporter from the Huffington Post. Now, assuming that Huckabee wanted to appeal to such an audience, does anyone really believe that a strict, doctrinaire defense of conservative theory as it had been practiced since Reagan was going to win any hearts and minds? No, it bloody well wouldn't have. So let's forgive Huckabee a little of the rhetorical excess here - after all, he was trying to win over people most libertarians (and indeed, most conservatives) think of as the enemy. That may not excuse the quote, but it certainly explains it.

Now, what is Huckabee saying here? Only part of the quote is disparaging this "new type of libertarianism," and frankly, it's all dull rhetorical boilerplate and it criticizes more the implications of the idea than the message itself. Moreover, Huckabee's vision of "historic Republicanism" would not necessarily anger anyone other than an anarcho-capitalist. "Historic Republicanism does not hate government; it’s just there to be as little of it as there can be. But they also recognize that government has to be paid for." That sounds like fiscal conservatism to me!

Now, let's back up a bit here. A lot of libertarians and even fiscal conservatives are probably straining to leave nasty comments along the lines of, "Have you forgotten what a populist piece of s--t Huckabee was during the primaries?!" Or, perhaps more importantly, they might be desperate to point out all the logical fallacies in Huckabee's quote. Let me pre-empt them. Yes, the portion of Huckabee's quote that deals with libertarians is chock full of logical fallacies, ignores private charity completely, sets up a strawman version of libertarianism and insults everyone's intelligence.

But--and this is a big but--despite all of that, it's still more persuasive to most people than all the praxeological austrio-economic analysis in the world. When you cut through all the logic, Libertarians do sound like what he describes a lot of the time. They're so used to arguing with reasonable people that they tend to have a tin ear for what appeals to the average voter, who doesn't so much care about perfectly logical academic consistency, but more about what appeals to his/her gut.

And what about the second bit of Huckabee's quote, which deals with communities? How many libertarians (and I mean real libertarians, not Jon Stewart and Bill Maher style libertines) would disagree with the idea that a vibrant community is essential to small government because it keeps tacit premises of good conduct upheld? How many people in general would disagree with such a statement? I wouldn't, and my idea of an ideal Government is one that only has a monopoly over nuclear weapons and sidewalks, with everything else either subcontracted, partially privatized or entirely privatized.

Now, I don't mean to be harsh on the libertarians. I'm simply pointing out what their blind spots first. I'll get to what the religious people should compromise on in a second. But for now, the biggest blind spot that libertarians of even the most radical objectivist stripe have is their indifference and/or hostility to the idea of community as essential to healthy individualism. Objectivists (Mike Huckabee's true bete noire)  tend to want nothing more or less than the freedom to be great Nietzschean capitalist uebermenschen who crush all in their way and can live out whatever hedonistic existence they like.

Much the same way other people want to live lives that are pure leisure where everything is provided for them by the State. It will never happen. And there's a real theoretical reason why it will never happen, not just because it's not "American" or not "historically Republican", but because it's basically incoherent. Speaking as someone who came to the Right because of Ayn Rand, I wish it were coherent. But it's not, because the idea that you want the freedom to be great depends upon an objective definition of greatness. The Randians try to claim that such a thing exists, but their definition undermines the system they want to create. According to Rand, all that is necessary to be great is that you reach a State where your own individual, rational happiness is maximized. But this is just another logical black hole!

The fact is that in order for one to have the freedom to be great, two things must be true: Firstly, society must have a communal sense of what is good and bad, and what is great. Secondly, society must be healthy enough that it can afford to aspire to greatness. These are both goals which the Randian view of the world completely ignore. And unfortunately, libertarians tend to agree with them. This is a mistake, and the void needs to be filled. That "filler" is what the Religious Right can offer to the conservative movement. The Religious Right is concerned primarily with the preservation of a shared moral ethos, and make no mistake, it is a preservation. They see Christianity as the basic moral ethos of American society. And given that the entire Western intellectual tradition is defined half by Christianity and half by Platonic/Aristotelian ethics, I think there's little doubt that the Religious Right is at least half correct.

Moreover, given that the Religious Right is predominately Protestant, it actually has fewer quarrels with libertarian views of moral self-determinism than does Catholocism, since the Protestant legacy springs from the idea that salvation comes through faith alone, with the niceties of Biblical interpretation left up to the worshipper.

So what do the libertarians need to compromise on? Well, for starters, they need to stop being such half-hearted friends of social conservatism. It is not impossible to construct a libertarian case against abortion rights. It is also not impossible to construct a libertarian case against gay marriage, at least the way the Left wants it practiced. The bigotry, boycotts and witch-burning tactics of anti-Proposition 8 protestors should anger libertarians far more than the civil, staid people who supported Proposition 8, if only because those people had no intention of destroying society or the rule of law just to prove their point. The libertarian case against the war on drugs needs to be made with more tact, possibly with an eye toward reform rather than outright destruction. Decriminalizing marijuana may win a few friends, but try arguing for decriminalizing crystal meth, PCP or heroin, and you will lose the majority of people. Suggest devolving the control of these substances of the States, and then pick your battles carefully. The liberals have been very successful with creeping socialism. Try a little creeping capitalism.

Another thing libertarians need to understand is that there is always going to be a tradeoff between government control in one place, or government control in another place. Or, to put it another way, if you want the Federal Government to be non-instrusive, be prepared for State Governments to get a lot more intrusive to transition out. Sure, you might see some regulations die at the State level too, but then those will devolve to the local level, and maybe even eventually will die. But causing massive instability by repealing everything at once is not going to fly with anyone. In short, libertarians need to understand that until people trust each other, they're not going to repeal laws. Yes, the Government is made up of people who may be even more untrustworthy. That doesn't mean people will stop trying to elect trustworthy people. If that impulse is going to exist, libertarians need to devote time to proving that the more trustworthy people are further down the food chain, and that corruption can do a lot less to hurt people because local restrictions are much easier to escape than national restrictions.

So community is the libertarian blind spot. What's the Religious Right's blind spot?

The problem with the Religious Right is twofold - they often come off as misanthropes with a purging instinct. That is, they view us all as sinners (very correct), and can't stand to have that be the case. The Religious Right often seems completely uncomfortable with the idea that they can't save everybody, and this leads to a hysterical, messianic style of rhetoric which tends to make them sound like a frothing mob straight out of H.L. Mencken's nightmares.

This "someone has to do something to STOP THE SIN" style of rhetoric unfortunately has much in common with liberal rhetoric, which further complicates things. I can see where the libertarians get their view of the Religious Right as a bunch of interfering big-government types, especially with respect to their attitudes towards things like Stem Cell research and Intelligent Design. The fact that the Religious Right tends to disdain libertarians as "hippies of the Right" or apologists for atheism doesn't help at all. The most representative sample of the rhetorical weakness of the Religious Right is the book Slouching Towards Gomorrah by Robert Bork. Large sections of the book are permeated by a hysterical, ranting style which is reminiscent of a very old-fashioned, strict grandparent at a modern high school prom: "How dare you do that?! How dare you?! How dare you even argue with me over your RIGHT to do that?! YOU FOUL LITTLE CREATURES, GO TO YOUR ROOM!"

As I've said, I believe this attitude is primarily rhetorical. I think most people in the Religious Right don't actually want to force their views on others. Rather, I think they see themselves as attacked constantly, and I speak from personal experience when I say that people say stupid things when they feel attacked. And I think the Religious Right has good reason to feel attacked. Firstly, they're already predisposed to feel persecuted, given that their religion began with persecution, and that Protestantism itself was born out of persecution. But secondly, much of American "cosmopolitan" society, both of the Right and of the Left, really has inherited the eminently modern disdain for religion. Libertarians can complain all they want about Huckabee, but imagine how preferable he would look to a socialist version of Richard Dawkins!

So despite the accusation that they "control" the Republican party, the Religious Right doesn't really feel that they control anything. They feel used, abused, mocked behind closed doors and irrelevant, and they just want someone to trust. Who can blame them?

But one can blame them for their proposed remedies. As already mentioned, I don't mind the Religious Right's attitude towards abortion, and while I don't buy their arguments about gay marriage for a second, I think the attitude is reasonable. However, I and I suspect many libertarian-leaning conservatives find their remedies to be positively barbaric! A Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage? Don't these people know that the Constitution is meant to constrain the Government, not the citizens?! A ban on all abortion? Where's the right to determine what's right and wrong for yourself?! And so on, and so on, as we scream back and forth across the barricades while the liberals cackle.

So what's the remedy? Well, the Religious Right needs to be reminded of the distinction between God and man, and especially of the distinction between Caesar and God. They need to learn that sin is inevitable, and that the danger of vice is essential to prove the saintliness of virtue. God was not a utilitarian, or he wouldn't have given man free will. Moreover, virtuous people (and even virtuous cosmic entities) can disagree - Moses managed to convince God not to wipe out the Israelites for worshipping the Golden Calf, for instance. Finally, they need to remind themselves very strongly that the Bible condemns theocracies run by men, rather than by God himself - especially when those theocracies are run by mobs. After all, one such society was Pharaoh's Egypt, and the more dangerous mob-based one was the Jewish Priesthood which forced Pontius Pilate to execute Christ. In short, if libertarians need to start trusting local government and community more, the Religious Right needs to stop trusting the Government so much while simultaneously mistrusting their fellow citizens. The same Government that can make Jesus the official God of America can also make Satan the official God, and surely that is not a preferable condition.

I can anticipate one objection to this - Religious conservatives may ask the rhetorical question: "Well, America's a Christian nation, so what's wrong with writing Christianity into law?" This is actually a rather silly argument if you concede its premise. If America is a Christian nation, why do you need to force people to be Christian? Aren't you in effect conceding the existence of pluralism when you suggest that an officially religious law is needed?

Now, there is one more point to answer - even if these two aren't necessarily in disagreement, they're not necessarily in agreement either. Do Religious conservatives really care about liberty, one might ask. Or do libertarians give a hoot about virtue or communal happiness?

Yes, and yes, but neither one of those is the point. The real point is that both of these groups do believe in the same thing, and that is ordered liberty. They disagree over what the constraining "order" in question is, but they agree that the concept is good. For libertarians, your liberty is constrained by your own responsibility. If you spend your life drinking yourself into a stupor, for instance, you have no one to blame but yourself. For the Religious Right, your liberty is constrained by the threat of Hell, which you'll face if you don't obey the Bible. Are these reconcilable? Absolutely. I can think of two ways to reconcile them.

The first is opposition against radicalism. Radicalism, in its purest form, believes neither in personal responsibility nor in Biblical morality. The radical argument is firstly, that there is no Hell and that God is a construct designed to control the lower classes and secondly, that the idea of personal responsibility is cold and callous because everyone is just reacting against the cruelty and oppressiveness of modern human society when they behave "badly." It's easy to see how a force like this could unite the Religious Right and the libertarians, and for a while it did. But Obama does not look like a radical yet, so this method is going to be less effective in the near future.

The second way to reconcile them is to remember why fiscal conservatives are called fiscal and why social conservatives are called social. It's because they compliment each other. Fiscal conservatism is the conservative approach to the material world, while social conservatism is the conservative approach to society. Fiscal conservatism aims to keep budgets balanced, money sound and the economy as free as possible. Social conservatism aims to keep society healthy by preserving moral standards, communal ethical premises and traditions. Either of these on its own is insufficient. Social conservatism without fiscal conservatism devolves to a Messianic concern with saving every soul regardless of whether you can afford it or whether it's even possible. Fiscal conservatism without social conservatism lacks a moral and ethical basis with which to claim that its concern for practical economics is anything other than the arbitrary aesthetic preference of a few misers. These two need to work together again by recognizing that at bottom they want the same thing - a Godly, economically realistic order where responsibility to oneself and to God takes precedence over utopian visions and fevered nihilism.

We either accept this or we take the first step into a thousand years of "hope" and "change."

In my last post, I made the point that conservatism has historically been connected to the fight against a metaphysical force which I called "chaos." This bit of nomenclature caused a good deal of confusion among my readers, some of whom thought that I was condemning liberty as a source of chaos - an argument which I took some time to refute before continuing.

Admittedly, my definition of chaos was underdeveloped (which is to say, nonexistent) in that note, and that was not due to intellectual laziness on my part, but rather due to the necessity of using examples to explain what chaos is. This would have taken far too long to do in one post, which is why I have split my examples into separate posts, the first of which follows:

Unless you've been living under a rock for a while (and I wouldn't blame you, considering the state of the world), you've almost certainly heard conservatives like David Horowitz, Jonah Goldberg or any of the fine authors over at Phi Beta Cons complain about something called "postmodernism." This concept, the argument runs, is a dangerous, anti-Western, anti-American, Nazi-inspired bit of intellectually incoherent desperation put forward by academics still in shock over the fall of communism/the election of George W. Bush/pretty much anything that pisses off extreme Leftists.

Whenever I read these polemical explanations of postmodernism, I always chuckle and mutter, "Would that postmodernism were so simple." It's not that the definitions are wrong. It's that they're futile. Yes, postmodernism's exponents frequently utilize it for anti-Western and anti-American purposes. Yes, one of postmodernism's first influences was Martin Heidegger, an infamously pro-Nazi philosopher. Yes, politically oriented postmodernism evolved largely during the eighties, when the young revolutionaries, finding themselves stuck in cushy academic jobs in a still-capitalist, still-racist, still-conservative society, had to produce adjusted versions of their incoherent rants from the old days. But is that all there is to the concept? Dear God, no.

Like most bewilderingly strange ideas that gain their hold in the political sections of academia, postmodernism started in non-political areas, such as architecture, art and most of all, literature. Though the term was first coined in the late 19th century, it didn't really catch on until the 1960's, and much of its ideas have their origins in French literary theory of the kind championed by Jacques Derrida. Because Derrida's theories are basically an attack on the "socially constructed" nature of language, therefore, it's no surprise that postmodernism has no definition. The concept is itself partially an attack on definitions, so such a thing would be strange indeed.

Now, it's easy to look at postmodernism as a foreign movement imported to America by Leftist academics desparate for a way to maintain their sophisticated disdain for the rest of society. However, the evidence doesn't bear this argument out. Since it's fashionable inception, postmodernism has certainly made more inroads on the Left than on the Right, but that doesn't mean its right-wing exponents are somehow tangential. Alasdair Macintyre, a contemporary philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, and one of the more influential intellectuals of today, might be rightly called a right-wing postmodernist and some scholars have even suggested that Russell Kirk himself was a closeted postmodernist.

But still, one has to ask - what is postmodernism? I can think of two definitions off the top of my head, and they have to do with different elements of the concept. If one had to define postmodernism's purpose, then I think the most blunt and accurate definition would be to call it intellectual chemo-therapy. Postmodernism, whether of the Left or the Right, aims to root out all the weaknesses and contradictions in intellectual life, sometimes destroying even the most morally admirable concepts on the way. To that end, postmodernism can be defined as a philosophy of pure negation, and that negation is always applied to modernism, hence the word "post" (which is really a euphemism for "anti").

Since one of modernism's biggest themes is the idea of universal truth discoverable by abstract reason, the postmodernist frequently makes this concepet his target. There is no universal truth in the postmodern mind - no universal human nature, no universal virtue, no universal facts, not even universal science. All is solipsism, and all attempts to universalize are by their nature doomed by the limited nature of the human mind. Interestingly, both postmodernism of the Left and postmodernism of the Right agree on what limits the human mind this way, though they differ on the remedy. Right-postmodernism calls this limiting force "tradition" and Left-postmodernism calls it "social constructs."

Now, because of the Left-wing nature of the academy today, it's no surprise that of these two views, Left-postmodernism dominates. This has led to the conception of a left-postmodern educational style whose purpose makes the word "education" laughable. Postmodern education aims to destroy what a student has already learned, rather than teach them new things. It is the systematic installation of a creed of absolute negation. And if it actually worked as intended, it would be the most deadly weapon for chaos in the modern world.

Now, it's time for me to begin to define chaos. I suppose a better but less sexy word for it would be "incoherence." Pure chaos is the complete absence of predictability, of discernable order and of understanding. It is the rebellion against cause and effect, and when combined with the American political ethos, it often manifests as what some commentators have called "radical individualism" - namely, the desire to divorce liberty from responsibility. It manifests both in excessive government control and in too much government control, for the former is unenforceable and the latter in unsustainable, and both contain the seeds of revolution, which, when not governed by the principles of the regime it seeks to escape (as per the American revolution), is the ultimate force of chaos. It is, in short, disequilibrium.

And it's what all Left -postmodernists aspire to create. The reason for this is relatively complex. For Left-postmodernists, all of modern thinking (or most of it) is based on false, systematic, "socially constructed" lies which appear neutral, but are actually in place to oppress particular groups because of the interests of ruling elites. This need not be conscious manipulation on the ruling elites' part, and it doesn't necessarily begin with contemporary elites. In fact, most post-modernists trace these socially constructed lies back generations, or even centuries, to an event like colonization or slavery, which is so traumatic that it defines a race/nation/gender/oppressed group for hundreds of years. These social constructs are often things that we take for granted, like logic or economics or basically anything that gets in the way of a utopian vision. The idea that something like capitalism might be rooted in human nature is sheer nonsense to a Left-postmodernist, since the very idea of "nature" is socially constructed and thus biased. As such, Left-postmodernists aspire to use the premises of these social constructs to tear them down and leave nothing but epistemological chaos, which they hope will be formed into something much more inclusive and liberating and Left-wing than the current system. To put it bluntly, Left-postmodernists argue that we should create nihilism and then hope something nice(r) emerges from it.

Now, despite my somewhat disdainful description, this strategy is very effective and deeply dangerous because Left-postmodernists are often extremely smart people with wide knowledge bases. The more stupid ones do things like attack physics  for being too masculine, but the really dangerous ones can use things like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to undermine the idea of universal physical truth, or can exploit Goedel's theorem to make mathematics look false. Their mission is, in short, to reduce anything "scientific" to nothing but a brand of literature, and then show how that literature was written by oppressors.

And because postmodernism is so well-versed in reason, modernism is powerless against it. And I don't have an ounce of pity for it, either. All right-wing postmodernists saw this coming, and the first person to expose it was Cardinal John Henry Newman in his book "Idea of a University," way back in the 19th century. Among other things, Newman complained about the tendency of the education establishment of his day to reduce everything to science at the expense of theology. This, he argued, was dangerous because science was inherently constrained by its own premises, and needed theology to balance it. He also mentioned that science was far too aesthetically austere to stand on its own, and that without concern for the Godly as its ally, the concern for truth would be utterly overturned by the concern for beauty, embodied by literature. And (arguably) unlike virtue, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, which means all hope for dialogue will disappear.

So what is to be done? Surely, this isn't a campaign issue to work with. Well, no. It isn't. The more relevant political version of chaos would be terrorism.

But that doesn't mean postmodernism is irrelevant to the Right. The postmodernism of the Left has been used by political handlerse, in a really bitter turn of irony, to produce convincing illusions about candidates so that they look better than they actually are. "Perception is reality" has become the guiding reality. This is not something the Right should be bemoaning, however - concern with the beauty of politics goes back to Edmund Burke. But we do need to make some incursions on the academic level. Conservatism started in the academy, and now it's almost dead there, having been exiled to think tanks.  Think tanks cannot educate students, and focus on issues of policy, not theory. This focus is  completely understandable and correct.  But we need  theoretical arguments as well, and that means we need to make our theoretical elements make sense again. In my next note, I will try and lay out a way  for the new fusionism to be created along the social and economic  wings of the Right, and I encourage everyone to think about how it might be achieved in the meantime.

It's always tempting for those who study the American Conservative Movement to brush us off as a bunch of situational ideologues held together by anticommunism, and who were doomed to collapse with the Berlin Wall. Much as I believe this narrative to be wrong, it has an interesting point with regard to the fundamental nature of conservative criticism. That is, conservatism aims to "conserve." It has historically been a defensive ideology, which tries to beat back encroaching hordes by its nature. It was this defensive nature of conservatism which repelled the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, who once wrote that conservatism was "a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change" while also noting, perhaps sadly, that "There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called "liberalism" was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense."

We can quibble with Hayek's usage of the word "liberal" to describe the American tradition, but even if he is correct, by his definition, even "liberal" conservatives seem to still fight with their backs to the proverbial wall. Thus, when there is nothing to fight, conservative ideology runs into the difficulty of flailing at phantoms. As such, along with the question of what we are fighting for (what to conserve, in other words), we also have to ask what we are fighting against.

In this regard, I believe the modern conservative movement has become confused. Stripped of  communism, we have reverted to the most obvious option and decided that liberalism is not only an enemy, but the enemy. This is an absurd belief. Liberalism is not the enemy. Liberalism (or progressivism, depending on your choice of words), at least in its modern form, has neither the spine, the principle nor the conviction born of that principle to be the enemy. Indeed, even in the days of communism, liberalism was never the enemy, even domestically. The Alger Hisses of the world, the Owen Lattimores of the world, the Stalins, the Kruschevs, the bought-off newspaper columnists who opined about how they'd "seen the future, and it worked" - they were the enemy, and whatever else they were, they were not liberals. The liberals were men like Edward R. Murrow, who was too busy being angry at Joe McCarthy to spare a few nasty words for the real traitors in our midst. The liberals were men like Dean Acheson, who famously said "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." To be sure, these people were counterproductive, but they were only useful idiots, not the puppet masters pulling the strings.

The same goes for the strife on campuses that occurred in the 60's and 70's. The Eldridge Cleavers, the Huey Newtons, the Bill Ayerses, the Bernadine Dohrns and the Tom Haydens - these people were many things, but if you think they'd ever call themselves "liberals," you'd be mad. These people were radicals reacting against liberalism. They hated it. The only reason they got away with so much when attacking it was because of who the liberals actually were. They were the tolerant university Presidents, like Clark Kerr and Kingman Brewster, who dutifully caved in to every demand the radical exponents of negation made. Again, these people were not only counterproductive, but spineless and pathetic in their worst moments, but they were by no means the primary threat.

And even today, at the close of the war of culture and at the beginning of the war on terror, the liberals still cannot rightly be called the primary threat for a very simple reason - liberals are just too darn reasonable to threaten anyone intentionally. They're too obsessed with their own sophistication. Too blinded by their own (often imagined) intellectual superiority. Too "scientific." Too morally apathetic. These characteristics make them great toadies, but are poor qualities indeed to have in muscular ideological leaders. Throughout history, liberals have been at worst the battered wives of the enemies of conservatism, constantly protesting that their bedfellows are just misunderstood and that they don't hurt them that badly, while ignoring the bruises which slowly accumulate all over the body of civilization. If you want to look for the roots of this gutlessness, look at one of the founding members of contemporary liberalism, John Stuart Mill, whose faith in the power of rational discourse to change minds was perhaps the defining nature of his political philosophy. It's no surprise that his wife, a much more principled radical socialist, eventually ended up defining her husband's worldview.

To explain why liberals tend to assume this role would take too long, though I will suggest one option: for all their claims not to be superficial, liberals do have a shocking shallow and naive vision of human nature. For evidence of this, look at the contemporary liberal view of Sarah Palin, or the constant sneers that liberal comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert threw at George W. Bush for "thinking with his gut." For liberals, human beings are defined by two things - their capacity for reason and their capacity for empathy. Sarah Palin, who believed in such seemingly absurd things as creationism, and who could argue with a straight face that she supported small-town values while arguing for economic policies which were (in the liberals' view) shamelessly royalist, appeared so severely challenged in both regards that she was unacceptable. It was inconceivable to a liberal that a woman who couldn't rattle off Supreme Court cases she disagreed with could ever claim to be a fit potential leader of a country, because liberals simply don't understand any concept of superiority other than the purely intellectual. Some conservatives have this problem too, but it's much more pronounced among the "reasonable" exponents of center-Leftism. Their sense of morals, being defined primarily by emotive urges, is far too underdeveloped for them to use as an argument against someone, though they may mutter about it among themselves at cocktail parties.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that an emphasis on intellectual capability and knowledgeability is at all wrong. It's entirely  reasonable, and quite desirable, and its absence  can be potentially disastrous. But it's not the only thing that matters, and making a fetish of it is sheer stupidity. Liberals tend to side with the enemies of western civilization for a very important reason - frequently, the people supporting it are just too...well, vulgar. Worse yet, tradition is very difficult to defend intellectually as an end in itself (I've tried), and most liberals don't like the idea that something as potentially irrational as human experience could or should be allowed to trump scientific rationality. Sometimes (see also: segregation) they have a point. But that doesn't mean you should throw out tradition entirely. In fact, as postmodern radicals are far too fond of pointing out, the rules of logic and reason themselves are traditions which have evolved with time. Liberals are thus trapped in a completely self-refuting argument - they are trying to defeat tradition using tradition.

But if liberals aren't the threat, then what is? Unlike communism, there's no concrete "evil State" for conservatives to oppose, so the confusion is understandable. The threat we conservatives face today is something much more abstract, much more insidious, and doubly dangerous, especially in the age of international terrorism and postmodern education. This threat, much like communism (the "second oldest religion," according to Whittaker Chambers), is also timeless.

With all due respect to Mr. Chambers, communism is not the second-oldest religion (the oldest being worship of God and his Creation). It's actually the third oldest. God, in creating the universe, had to do it by forcing an amorphous, "formless and void" existence into patterns. To put it bluntly, God created the world from Chaos, and as such, the worship of Chaos is actually the oldest religion. It is this force - Chaos - that conservatives now have to  fight.

And some conservatives - not the ones I usually like best - have recognized this threat, albeit incorrectly. Rod Dreher has written that "Today, the greatest threats to conservative interests come not from the Soviet Union or high taxes, but from too much individual freedom." With respect, I obviously disagree that individual freedom is to blame. The threat today comes not from too much individual freedom, but  from the wrong individual freedom. To explain this, I offer the following hypothetical:

Suppose that, in a hypothetical society, people had the legal right to murder each other, but no right to free speech, or property, or assembly. Surely we couldn't criticize this society for having too much individual freedom. Rather, we would reproach it for protecting the wrong freedoms. Mr. Dreher's argument essentially boils down to the idea that because corporations are behaving irresponsibly, economic liberty is a dud. He's wrong. What is at fault is that we have rampantly deregulated some elements of corporate life while keeping other regulations in place which punish small businesses and shield larger corporations from competition. In other words, we've created an economic system where wealthy "philanthropists" can defund peoples' entire life savings using fraud, but where banks are still required to give bad loans to people who can't pay them back because of a redundant, obsolete economic policy from about three decades ago. This is not a system that protects too much individual freedom. This is a system that protects the wrong freedoms. And a society that protects the wrong freedoms is doomed to slide into chaos, which is what Dreher seems to be rightly reacting against.

The market is a wonderful tool for social improvement, but like most competitive games, economic action only improves the world when the rules make sense and in our rush to deregulate, we haven't considered the effects on the whole system, which has made the market an unwitting agent of chaos and caused it to become the scapegoat for all sorts of undeserved blame. I'm no friend of regulation, and I defy most people who tell me it's necessary, but it's only wrong situationally, not conceptually. Most free market economists support antitrust laws, for instance.

But as instruments of chaos go, financial deregulation is the least of our worries. There are much more conscious agents of chaos floating around. I have already alluded to two - postmodern education and terrorism. But these topics are so big (and this post is already so long) that I will save them for later. For now, it suffices to say that conservatives need double their usual amount of creativity to fight these threats, and more than anything else we need unity. As I did in a previous post, I will close on a plea to all those who use this site to think about how this unity might be achieved.

Cross-posted at California Independent Voters' Project.

Proposition 8's opponents seem to be quite intent on riding the Alienation Express all the way into the last stop on the railroad of irrelevance. However, it may be instructive to reflect on the reasons for their behavior before condemning their most recent antics. By that I do not mean the question of what they hope to achieve (they obviously want the bill overturned), but rather why they have chosen these specific tactics.

The answer seems self-evident on one level. In reading a recent article about Proposition 8's opponents, one has difficulty not being reminded of the actions of two notable lobbies; one historical and the other contemporary. To see which groups I am referring to, think of the tactics Proposition 8 opponents are using: Engaging in mass boycotts so as to bankrupt the organizations that are intent on denying them their so-called "rights", while simultaneously producing lists of  businesses and private individuals who have donated money to the pro-Proposition 8 cause. Obviously, the boycotts are meant to invoke the Civil Rights coalition of the 1960s, and the Montgomery bus boycotts specifically, but what might the publishing of names and addresses signify? Intentional or no, this behavior is reminiscent of anti-abortion groups that publish the names of abortion-providing medical professionals on their Web sites.

Leaving aside the irrelevant question of whether one agrees or disagrees with either of these movements, they both have one thing in common. They are (or were) both dedicated to the idea of expanding civil rights for previously disenfranchised groups. It would be unnecessary to dredge up quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. proving as much, but if articles like this are any guide, the pro-life movement considers itself very much to be part of the same legacy.  Even as Martin Luther King Jr.'s niece has joined the pro-life cause because she sees it as part of her uncle's struggle, the idea that pro-life activists see themselves as heirs to the Civil Rights movement is beyond question.

I shall not consider the question of whether such a comparison is unnecessarily self-indulgent. That is irrelevant and up to the reader to decide. What is relevant is that whether the comparison is accurate or not, the fact remains that if such a comparison were accurate, it would provide the group utilizing it with a great deal of rhetorical firepower, as well as some level of license to take more extreme protest measures. (After all, whoever stands in the way of the heirs of civil rights will almost certainly end up on the wrong side of history). As such, an incentive clearly exists for all sorts of groups to try and frame themselves as continuing the fight for civil rights.

This incentive is not a bad one, rhetorically, but it becomes dangerous at the point where a group such as the pro-life movement (or the opponents of Proposition 8) believe so strongly that the comparison is true that they mistakenly believe that everyone else also believes it is true. If such a belief enters the collective unconscious of a political movement, then a very dangerous implication also begins to grow, which can best be laid out in the following syllogism (with Movement X signifying the group who believes the comparison):

Proposition 2: Movement X = The Civil Rights movement

Proposition 3: Therefore, Movement X is on the correct side of history

Such a syllogism is logically correct, but morally dangerous because most activists who believe themselves to be on the "right side of history" therefore believe that whatever excesses they go to can be excused by virtue of the fact that they are, a priori, on the right side of history. Such a belief can and often does lead to ruthlessness, political tone-deafness and alienation of one's allies, all of which appear to dominate the current anti-Proposition 8 movement. This is unfortunate, because whatever ideological vision one holds, Proposition 8 is not a settled question and should not be treated as such. The seeds of backlash are being sowed, and the opponents of Proposition 8 should take some humility before it is too late and they are crushed.

Perhaps most dangerously for their cause, the proponents will then have the authority to write the history books.

[Interesting post.  Promoted - Jon Henke]

Winston Churchill once said that the best argument against democracy was to have a five minute conversation with the average voter. So it's no surprise that, despite Obama's promises of "hope" and "change" to the millions of average voters, the only "hope" is for the numerous entrenched insiders already filing applications to join the technocracy of rationalists known in the vernacular as the Obama cabinet. Indeed, Barack Obama, who promised the American people that his campaign was about "them", has apparently decided that the people best qualified to adjudicate "their" interests are people for whom "they" are a sociological category, not a concrete concept. 

Perhaps more troubling, however, is the tendency for panicked overreactions from different corners of the Right, all of whom seem intent on proving that their side is blameless and that it was those bloody (insert rival group here) who let Barack Obama win. "Crunchy" conservative and frequent bete noire of the libertarians Rod Dreher writes sentences like "the greatest threats to conservative interests come not from the Soviet Union or high taxes, but from too much individual freedom", while liberal NYT op-ed columnist Charles Blow piously opines that the GOP should "return to fiscal conservatism and ease up on social conservatism" in order to win. And, of course, according to Rush Limbaugh, it's those damn "wizards of smart" and "elitists" who want to reject conservatism for Neville Chamberlain-style me-tooism.