Conservatism is dead. Long live conservatism!

I'm trying to figure out the solutions that *real* conservatives would propose to deal with the health care crisis in our country. I'm wondering how they would deal with Iraq. Are they happy with NAFTA and all of the other free trade agreements that have left people unemployed and lowered the wages for blue collar Americans?

I agree that the Republicans haven't offered anything of value in this country for,at least, the past 10 years. Really, they've been the primary players in running this country into the ground. I'm willing to consider that the past 10 years have had nothing to do with conservatism. So, I have to ask. If conservatives have answers that would be good for the country, what would a *real* conservative person campaigning for President be saying right now?

Many interesting things. I think the biggest problem in the conservative movement presently is they lack a conception of the common good. From that they have difficulty defining a role for government. Ramesh Ponnuru and a few others are starting to see this. Mr. Ponnuru's contribution would be his opinion that conservatives need to address family policy by for example increasing child tax credits. The only blessing for conversatives electorally is that liberals are having their own issues with the common good.

It's more complicated than a shortage of new Conservative thinkers, but complicated in a good way.

By definition, Conservatism holds that the things worth saying have been said many times already in the honored past, so unlike our friends leftwards we don't have a spiritual need to utter the new or novel. In fact, we don't even need to utter anything at all, having a long standing hostility towards "airey systems of speculative philosophy". This is often mistaken for stupidity by our friends leftwards, but they don't understand that we operate on a whole other currency. Book smarts, never mind how clever or brilliant, simply weigh less with us than what you might call our ancient common law: the habits, the deeds, beliefs and prejudices, biases, traditions, opinions handed down by the generations that have gone before. These things are non scripta, and probably would be more eloquently conveyed by a noble work of fiction than by a graduate school thesis anyway.

We don't need no stinkin' intellectuals. But we sure could use a Harriet Beecher Stowe just now.

I understand that you seek to re-construct the conservative movement into a paleo-traditionalist framework, and I would applaud that as a liberal because its far better than the blood thirsty, militaristic thuggery of neo-conservativism.

However, it benefits no one and short circuits constructive political dialog many when you continue to caricature liberalism. When you make these critiques of liberalism, you continuously fail to engage with the arguments that liberals are making.

I understand that you have assumptions about the reasons that people are liberals (they are egoists!!!), but re-iterating your belief that the foundational beliefs of liberalism is a bankrupt ideology that will destroy our way of life is no more helpful then Amanda Marcotte defining traditionalists as the evil patriarchy.

For example, you state "Conservatism's only consolation is that liberalism hasn't found its way out either."

Are you arguing that the reason liberalism "hasn't found it way" is because its not conservative? I don't want this to devolve into a tautological debate, but I find that argument circular and pointless. Essentially, you are arguing that the problem with liberals is that they are liberal.

Need another Harriet Beecher Stowe??? After all the dead of the War of the Slaveholders Rebellion, that damned woman should have been burned at the stake with her book as the kindling.

Rod, I for one am very grateful for your clarification. I have been a registered Democrat (in PA except for a couple of years wanderyahr) since I turned 18, and I have many times voted for a Republican because on balance he or she had a much clearer view of the common good. That experience was pretty consistent from dogcatcher right up to POTUS.

I am just about 100% disappointed in both sides' ability to deliver support for the common good. As Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Dems (make changes) and Reps (preserve status quo) have been stuck in a boringly repetitive cycle of liberal social engineering and conservative opposition and backlash. With rare (notable and laudable, too) exceptions, I haven't seen (in my lifetime, my personal biases assumed) much service from our public servants.

Rod, this post is way deep for me. Thanks for the "Cliff's Notes" version which you appended at the end: "More ISI, less CPAC." That was pretty funny! Are you sure you didn't moonlight on the side as a headline writer when you worked at the NY Post?

Sorry to go off topic, but it happens to be one of the few things in the headlines this week that interests, especially as it relates to religious faith: The 2008 Summer Games hosted by the Beijing regime. Anyone read how the regime told the IOC chairman yesterday to basically get lost? Yup, the Belgian (Dr. Rogge) who chairs the IOC reminded the Beijing regime this week that an improved human rights record had been a condition for granting that regime the right to host the 2008 Games. In response, they told Dr. Rogge to butt out and "not introduce politics into sport." As if politics had nothing whatsoever to do with the decision to bring the Games to Beijing in the first place!!

Meanwhile, members of the underground Chinese Catholic church rot in prisons and other Christian believers over there have to keep glancing over their shoulders.

Please write to the WH and urge President Bush to stay home in Crawford when the opening ceremonies take place on August 8th. He can always show support for the U.S. athletes, if he wants, by hosting them at the White House either before or after the Games (although they better have a lot of good food available -- natural and organic and reflecting "crunchy con" values, after all -- because I'll bet those young athletes have big appetites).

Thanks for indulging me. I don't make it a habit to go off topic, but this issue just makes my heart ache.

Rod, an excellent and thought-provoking post. Thank you.

A couple of stray thoughts, unworthy of the column that prompts them.

First, before one romanticizes the Southern Agrarians - as is common among some paleo circles - it is important to recognize that in considerable measure Southern Agrarians were carrying water for a society and a social outlook that certainly accepted the practice of segregation, if it did not move all the way to endorsement of segregation's premises. That is not to say ALL agrarians are segregationists -- far from it. And some Southern agrarians turned against the Jim Crow society in their later years, but then James Cobb has written a fine book on the subject for those who wish to pursue it.

Second, American Conservative IS interesting -- and also frequently flaky. Pat Buchanan's tribalism and isolationism bubble constantly below the surface, and I think it is a fair observation to suggest that the sum of all perspectives encompassed in a typical issue of AmCon is sufficient to fill a tavern with lively conversation, and well short of an equation for governance of any foreseeable American polity.

Third, any political movement (using the term broadly) draws strength and the ability to inspire from its leaders, who are both the product of their times and their associations as well as the occasional bearers of prophetic gifts. Also, any political movement can be diminished in direct proportion to the extent it becomes hostage to functionaries, favor-seekers, and those whose intellectual attributes are derivative rather than original. That this has happened to "conservatism" as we have come to know it is without question. Just the other day, the Wall Street Journal argued that tax breaks for working families (such as restoration of the value of the child credit -- see "The Folly of 'Family Friendly' Tax Policy" by Stephen J. Entin, April 9) is a fiscal strategy for stagflation, and that we need still more marginal tax relief for the hedge fund potentate set. I think that just like business cycles, there are life cycles to ideologies.

I think America needed Rooseveltian socialism (pick your own label) to shake up the status quo in the 30's, and I think America benefited from the reign of big government, big corporations and big unions in the post war years. Then the problems they caused began to overtake the value of the social and economic remedies they demonstrably provided. I think America needed Ronald Reagan in the '80's, and much of the deconstructive work begun during his administration. Now it appears we need something else. I don't know what that something else is, but I sense that it's coming. A couple of months ago, I thought it was advancing on an incoming Democrat tide. Now I'm not so sure -- at least for this election.

But what is apparent is that conservatism as an idea-generating and agenda-setting force, writ large, is so 20th century.

Richard

"he might be surprised to learn where the greatest support for the declarations of war in 1917 came from, to say nothing of the support for all of FDR's war appropriations, neutrality violation excuses, and authorizations of the use of force before 12/7/1941 came from: Southern Democrats"

Don't know if this is true or not, but if it is, I'm sure it could be argued that it was 'New South' policies and ideas (which the Agrarians opposed) that resulted in this support. The 'Twelve Southerners' were cautiously optimistic about FDR and the New Deal, but if memory serves only one or two of them went on to become full-fledged New Deal supporters.

MZ, with much respect, your citation makes no sense in this context. The Vatican sits at the top of an oligarchy, one albeit benign and with aspects of a meritocracy. Your analogy would work only if (for example) the US eligible voters were 85 or 90% registered Republicans.

Mhoram "that's the way economics are reported these days. It's all about quantity, not quality."

Yupp!

Yet it's not the fault of the journalist reporting (or their sources' annual reports). It's the way Northern European economists since the Enlightenment have defined "liberty" as an adventure in "impositional logical positivist" state-subsidized capital efficiency to usurp your personally "reflectively moral efficacious" agency of accumulating wealth unhindered.

They arbitrarily sundered the natural association between the value of exchange (quantity) from the value of use (quality) all the while failing to solve the diamond-water paradox.

The common good is not a fixed cost, minimum dole of zero-sum welfare, its a just price, creative market of marginal productivity.

What distinguishes the two sides? A political liberal considers "brights" ought be used to nail down the cost to society of human depravity's zero responsibility, and the "dullards" pay it as taxes; while the economic liberal considers the able bodied can reconcile society's needs with their human wants by negotiating a price for personal responsibility, the disabled are cared for from excess yields.

Defending "Liberty" for the former
entails intrusive "Big Brother" policing tactics by the "Brights" to ensure that the culture of depravity is not discriminated against by private association of dullards colluding (or cooperating across borders) to contain risks of cost inflation
while defending "Liberty" for the latter
entails a public pledge by the able-bodied to abide by minimum rules for personal responsibility such as "thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbor, thou shalt not covet" and a "caring hand" culture of sharing excess yields with the needy.

Rational people may discern that "justice" is merely a relative concept in the former (it is whatever the "Brights" say it is) while in the latter citizens virtues or lack of them determine the degree of absolute "justice" attained. Faithful people may recognize that reconciliation requires Grace... that in other words, without Religion the latter becomes the former...

I was analogizing the various states as bishoprics and the federal government as the Vatican.

Well I have to fessup that that a certain militia from my homeland, the Shropshire Regiment, burned down the Whitehouse in 1812, so perhaps "perceived slights (War of 1812)" is a little unfair as stated, did not the "perceived slights" of the Pentagon going up in flames on 9/11 sent us all into paroxysms of righteous indignation?

MZ, I don't disagree with your point, so I'll just avoid the dizzy-making prospect of examining your analogy further (and I must say, on the face of it, it looks fascinating). ;-)

PB: is there anything statists understand beyond their agendas? :-(

Wow, great post. Some random thoughts:

One of the reasons conservatives have largely abandoned the seeking of intellectual credentials in the form of higher degrees etc. is that conservatives are aware how little tolerance there is for a conservative viewpoint in the noted institutions of higher education. The choice for many conservative scholars is to engage in a series of draining battles with professors and advisers for the right to present conservative arguments and perspectives in theses and other papers, or to keep the conservative perspective under the radar and write what the liberal professors want in order to obtain the degree. Some would say that this situation has improved in recent times; I'd love to ask a current Ivy-league student if that is true, but it wasn't true in the recent past, and made the whole pursuit of degrees beyond the bachelor's seem little worth the struggle.

The point that discussions end up ceding the liberal viewpoint is a good one. Take the health care debate: once conservatives allowed the debate to be framed along the lines that everyone has a "right" to "free" health care the battle was pretty much over. We're going to spend a few years fighting over the details, but questions like personal responsibility, the wisdom of creeping socialism, the insanity of our health care cost structures in the first place, and the crushing tax burden that this "free" program will inevitably require have all been drowned out by the voices demanding free health care for all, now, and telling stories of families devastated by medical costs. The point isn't that those stories aren't terrible; the point is that once could just as easily use those stories to demand insurance reform and health care cost oversight plans--but "free, for all!" is so much more palatable to the bulk of the public who doesn't ponder how any of this will work, so long as they get theirs.

We don't really have a "federal" government any more--we have a "feral" government, driven by the appetites of the people for more and bigger slices of their neighbors' pies. But conservatives, who have helped to create an economic structure which favors and rewards giant corporations with vast profit margins and huge salaries at the top, share some of the blame for this--when your company has sent your job to Mexico or overseas, and you've been underemployed for a decade, it's pretty hard not to covet your neighbors' goods, or to think that the federal government is giving everyone a handout but you--and this is especially true when the voices of conservatism that you encounter in the media make it seem as though everyone has been doing well, raking in profits from stock-market investments, and that only a few lazy people have NOT become rich.

Going forward, I see the job of conservatives not to *voice* conservatism (with or without the proper credentials) but to live it. And this means jettisoning the idea once and for all that there was ever anything conservative about the Rolls-Royce Republicans, who see the pursuit of wealth as the ultimate virtue.

Well I have to fessup that that a certain militia from my homeland, the Shropshire Regiment, burned down the Whitehouse in 1812, so perhaps "perceived slights (War of 1812)" is a little unfair as stated, did not the "perceived slights" of the Pentagon going up in flames on 9/11 sent us all into paroxysms of righteous indignation?

IIRC, the White House was burned in 1814, two years after the war began. As for 9/11, Pearl Harbor strikes me as a better historical analogy than 1812.

I do sometimes wonder whether Americans' response to 9/11 would have been different had only the Pentagon been attacked.

Man from K Street,

Please don't take this to be a snottier reply than I mean it to be, but has it ever occurred to you that congressional voting is by no means the only, let alone the best, measure by which to characterize a whole region, containing millions of people, containing, in fact, something like 1/3 of the U.S. population.

I hope it doesn't come as a shock to you for me to say that the South has as much diversity of opinion within it as any other place.

The Southern Agrarians -- known in their role as poets, novelists, and literary critics as the Fugitives -- held a range of opinions just among themselves and their views usually differed quite markedly from those to be found among the Southern Democrat congressional delegation of their day -- a group which also had a diversity of opinion within itself, like all other groups.

There is a tradition of skepticism toward military interventionism as well as a tradition in favor of military interventionism among Southern thinkers.

The Southern historian C. Vann Woodward's essay "The Irony of Southern History" is as skeptical a critique of American hubris at home and abroad as one could hope to find. Woodward tries to imagine what lessons could be learned by the U.S. as a whole if it viewed its own history from the South's point of view, or from a point of which placed the South and the Southern experience at the center rather than the periphery of American life. The main such lesson -- and a salutary one today -- would be about the need to abandon precisely the sense of moral innocence that underwrites the moral self-righteousness that has sometimes lead the country to overreach in foreign affairs. Woodward's claim is that Americans view themselves as "winners" and as "good guys," but ought sometimes to view themselves as "losers" and "bad guys" as well -- i.e. that that ought to view themselves with the same moral ambiguity as citizens of every other country tend to do. Southerners have so far been the only Americans forced to adopt this ambiguity in how they see themselves, because they are the only Americans who have ever lost a war on their own soil and the only Americans who have ever been forced as a consequence of losing a war to taste humiliation and shame in the visceral way that most other peoples have done.

You should read Woodward's essay and in general you should look beyond K Street for better ideas than the ones that you've been voicing here of late.

"having a long standing hostility towards "airey systems of speculative philosophy" is blatant bigotry against Catholic scholastics attempt to reconcile pagan metaphysics with Christian charity. Such logical positivism won't work since it enslaves itself to an earthly vantage point of an ideology discerned by "brights" (progressives or neocons whatever you call them, they're equally constrained). Human transcendence is an economic good even if classical liberals or progressive historicists couldn't (or wouldn't) agree on worldly terms to define it. Luckily, modern advocates of phenomenological personalism, even those who exterminated in WWII such as Edith Stein, point the way to universal means to attain man's true end, freedom of conscience.

David TC "The whole idea of inalienable rights is very liberal" if expressed in terms of traditional Christian mercy, true, if expressed in terms of Calvin's divinity of labor/Luther's human depravity you're stuck in a philosophical black hole... good luck!

Reaganite in NYC: its not off topic, quite the opposite:
"...especially as it relates to religious faith."
it IS the topic! Did you hear that the San Francisco police went undercover as "agents of a foreign government" to perform their duty to protect... - the liberty of San Franciscans to be spectators of their city's leg of a public torch relay? Wrong! The corporate interests of the clients of the communist Chinese propaganda machine to private televised images of athletes carrying torches! The chunky chaps in blue aren't amateur athletes recruited for a patriotic pageant, no they're Chinese military payroll paratroopers in Olympic camoflage - barking orders in broken pidgin at the British athlete on the leg in London "You run!" "Stop now!" as they directed the staging of a political deceipt of humongous proportions. And in California, the kind Americans mercenaries offered "extra security" services, dressing themselves up in the deceiptful camoflage to circumscribe the freedoms of their own citizens...!!! And kept the final ceremony SECRET...!

What in the world are we playing at here? Sport? Fairplay?
... seems more like a mock spectacle worthy of the Colliseum to me... and we all know where that ended - feeding the Christians to the lions...

'The Southern historian C. Vann Woodward's essay "The Irony of Southern History" is as skeptical a critique of American hubris at home and abroad as one could hope to find.'

Indeed. And one will also find a similar view among many Southern conservatives who would disagree with Woodward on other issues; M.E. Bradford and Andrew Lytle come to mind, and I think even Flannery O'Connor said something similar somewhere.

Duncan: I would suggest the problem is not that Americans view themselves as "winners and good guys" but that too many people treat victory and defeat as proof of virtue or evil.

What I mean is, the morality of going to war with Iraq has absolutely nothing to do with how well the war is going. If the war is immoral, it would STILL be immoral if our occupation were going swimmingly. And if the war is just, it remains just even if it's going very badly.
Sometimes, the side fighting gallantly for a noble cause is defeated. Sometimes, the cruel, sadistic, immoral side wins. Intellectually, we all know that, but somehow, we persist in viewing the results of a war as God's judgment upon each side. WW2 ended with an American victory? Why, that proves we were the good guys. The Korean War ended in a stalemate? That proves our side was morally flawed, somehow. The Communists won in Vietnam? Why, that MUST mean we were the bad guys.

And to some extent, that's what's happening in Iraq. Yes, SOME Americans were adamantly opposed to the Iraq war all along, but many more came to see the war as wrong only aftr it started going badly, and casualties started mounting. That strikes me as both cowardly and wrong-headed.

*

Me, I was in favor of the war solely because I believed (wrongly) the original stated premise for the invasion: that Saddam Hussein had (or was on the verge of obtaining) a nuclear arsenal. THAT, I thought, was a good reason to take him and his war machine out.

Now, of course, we know that the original premise was horribly wrong. And THAT is my reason for turning against the war. Once we learned that the stated reason for going to war was erroneous, hte proper response from conservatives SHOULD have been, oh... I dunno, a little EMBARRASSMENT? A little humility? An apology to Hans Blix, perhaps?

Instead, we've redoubled our efforts in a war it's now clear we had no reason to start.

It is odd that I can agree with much of Erin's comment but then find her example cuts against her point. Without knocking this conversation off course, those who advocate getting the feds out of health care are to me similar to people who advocate privatizing fire departments. I'm inviting a large tangent here. Mater et Magestra says there is a right to health care. People would find it offensive if EMTS checked wallets before offering treatment. Of all the examples to use...

oops I meant "skiing" (but could just as easily be sky-diving or bungey-jumping for all the logic of providing health insurance for those with a death wish!!!)

This was a fantastic post (and, as someone else has said, my response is not worthy of it, as usual), and it hit the nail right on the head in that all of our discussions follow from the assumptions and principles of philosophical liberalism. While it is great to see that conservatism is shedding its political baggage and going back to its roots, I have to admit I'm pessimistic about it going anywhere in the future. Philosophical liberalism-and many of the more problematic theories to arise from modernism, really-just seems to pervasive. Anything that can't be measured or explained in rational terms, which much of conservatism can't, is considered suspect, nothing more than blind obedience or blind faith or even oppression. This is part of the reason that I think Erin had a great point in saying that it should be lived and not just spoken about. A lot of it is intuitive and difficult to articulate and it's easier and probably more attractive to see it actually being lived out. I think it would really draw people because it responds to so many basic needs. And I think conservatism is more attractive and refreshing outside of a political context. It's not really about politics anyway. We need more real life examples, more art and literature and music, not just speeches.

Another problem is that a lot of modern ideas are also much more attractive. Modernism promises steady progress, perhaps even a not-too-distant utopia. It doesn't accept limitations, hierarchies, restraint (at least not too much), difficulties. It tells us we can define ourselves, be whoever we want to be and get whatever we want and that anything that gets in our way is oppressive. Conservatism, by contrast, certainly promises no utopia; it doesn't even promise that everything will be easy (could it ever be?). It affirms and celebrates the equal worth of everyone under God and under the law, but it knows that in abilities we are not equal, with all that entails, and that nothing will ever make it so, and not only that, but accepts the reality that we all discriminate, and that when it deals with differences that really do matter, like sex differences, it is usually not a bad thing. And even though many of the things late modernism rejects are inevitable and it denies, misunderstands, or distorts many realities of human nature and thus can never work, it has a way of thriving off of its own failures. Feminism is a stark example of this; it has returned relations between the sexes to a more primitive, and thus more crude and cruel state, left children and women poorer, taken away all the most positive aspects of manhood and left men and boys alienated, apathetic, less well off, and some more violent, (of course, it is not the only force responsible for all this, but it is a major factor) and yet it somewhat successfully (more successfully here in Canada than in the States, I think) blames these things on the continued effects of sexism and oppression and continues to attempt to remake human beings in their own image. And yet to speak against it and be taken seriously, you must use the basic language and assumptions of feminism. I really hate to think of how many more people are going to have to suffer, and how bad it is going to get, before we realize how gravely mistaken we were. Communism and Nazism may have spurred great action and genius in response, but they were clearly atrocious.

I am more optimistic about the U.S than Canada. There's less of a difference between the Conservatives and Liberals than between the Democrats and Republicans, and the only viable third parties in most cases are the NDP, who are soft socialists, and the equally radical Green party. If you say certain non-liberal things or discriminate where it really matters and someone gets offended, you go before the Human Rights Commission, which has a conviction rate of almost one hundred percent, and must pay your own legal fees, which the claimant does not have to pay. Organic, dynamic family and community life has fragmented and atrophied and been replaced by rational, bureaucratic structures like public schools where teachers double as psychologists and social workers, day cares, community centres, and other government organizinations, along side of chain stores and the stuff they sell (big government and big business are truly the twin faces of Janus). The culture is as bland, homogenous, and crude as the U.S, if not more so. Religion has been tightly confined to the private sphere and rendered irrelevant and unwelcome in the public. I hope and pray the U.S does not go the way of Canada, or an influential, dynamic conservative movement will be very difficult to achieve until things get very bad.

And re-reading Simon's post, I realize he said exactly what I did about the New Deal in his first paragraph. Sorry. Somehow I just read the last one. We're both in agreement, the screwup in the New Deal wasn't the socialist policies, although those were very stupid, it was, ironically, the lack of government spending, because FDR was stupidly keeping the budget balanced.

That may be going a bit too far. I do agree that exalting Federal budget balancing over all other goals was insanely foolish under conditions of 25% unemployment. But the problem was FDR's way of achieving that goal -- massive tax increases on businesses and investors. Which, of course, only depressed the job market even further.

But the New Deal also included the NRA's minimum price and wage rules and FDR's personal, intentional destabilizing of the dollar (while admitting privately that he had no idea what he was doing). That cocktail was pure economic poison.

"Liberalism and progressivism have blended together so fully that talking about 'Modern liberalism' like it's an actual political entity is sheer nonsense."

True enough -- for all intents and purposes, right or wrong, the terms have become interchangeable. In effect, the liberals of today are really progressives, and the conservatives of today are really liberals, in the old sense.

"But you have people sitting on the radio and blog screaming about 'tax and spend liberals living on welfare' and whatnot that have rendered the world unusable, at least on the right, hence the invention of 'classic liberalism'."

Uh, 'fraid not. The distinction between 'classical liberalism' and 'modern liberalism' dates at least to the 50's, and possibly earlier. It was already fairly common usage when I first became interested in politics in the late 70's. To ascribe it to talk radio is ridiculous.

qwenwhyfax: may I develop your "Feminism is a stark example" trope and illustrate how a male-dominated Reformation led to political liberalism's sundering of "use" value from "exchange" value encouraged women to ignore the diamond-water paradox and to trade their solitaire for an STD:

Discounting women's inate genius for community nurturing, their "use" value was taken for granted as a given, reducing their price to an "exchange" value that might be deflated when too many births reduce her availability. The market provided the ardent consumer (hte male) with a service much to the satisfaction of his needs: contraception. When this service proved to be less reliable than advertized, the market produced an innovative service to hedge his bets: abortion. And how well did the woman fare under these liberal economic schemes?

Well consider her marginal utility: "An increase in the quantity of a good a person has almost always, other things remaining the same, causes the use value of each unit of the good to diminish and its exchange value to become the more important" Her genitals are now available 24-7 for exchange of "sexual favors" at an attractively economical price to the consumer - the proverbial "one night stand." Competition in the niche market segment of male consumers who want the "marrying kind" of girl, those consumers who value the fiducary trust of an exclusive role as mother of his children, have driven the price of wives out of the reach of most workers. Women who can't rely on their partners to provide for their children will prefer to rely on themselves. The men who denied Jesus's mother the role in our salvation He gave her at Calvary, are the very same who set our culture on the path it is currently travelling... blame women if you must, but grant mother's their due... everyone owes their liberty to a female human willing to accept the lucrum cessans (opportunity costs) of a 9-month, rent-free occupation of her person, and the risk ofdamnum emergens (damage loss) to future pregancies, and the real threat of periculum sortis should insolvency cause her death before the completion of the terms of gestation...

Recall that (male) economists declined to include a valuation for domestic work when they designed the metric of Gross National Product, since in their infinite wisdom there was no "price" that could be determined in the units of currency of "money" minted by the State for that kind of "labor"....
Why did Conservatives accede to such blasphemy? Because after sliding armpits-deep into recession, they needed Rosie the Riveter to man the manufacturing while their menfolk went to war...

Is there anything new under the sun?

Erin,

As a conservative graduate student myself at an Ivy-equivalent program in my field (theology), I'm happy to report that at least in my circles, the old stories of combat between conservative students and liberal professors are easily avoidable these days. Much academic theology has been taking a turn towards "post-liberal" thought, and many, many younger scholars are now starting to take a more tradition-centered approach to their theology.

Included in this trend has been a large number of young scholars and current students of theological ethics, receiving their training under people like Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank, who are making some pretty incisive critiques of liberal culture and trying to (re)construct more classical visions of social life that are in many respects quite in line with the kind of conservatism promoted on this blog. These are folk who are hot right now, the ones who are really dong the creative and exciting work in theology.

Of course, precisely because they're in theology, they're not exercising as much influence as people in some other fields might, but the more future church leaders get trained by people like this, the better things are bound to become.

"What is there to conserve (beside the environment?)"

Liberty?

No one has the right to be healthy;

Conservatives just cant quite (in public) bring themselves to say that they are willing to let people die if they cant afford health care.

Steve

Yes, Steve, I'm wondering what being "treated with respect for their human dignity" looks like, if it doesn't involve actual medical assistance. Being laid out on a cot in an open ward, with a nun to sponge your brow while you die, like in Calcutta? Admittedly it beats dying on the street where the people with good jobs have to step over your body, but that kind of thing went out of fashion awhile ago in America. At least I hope it did.

If you really have a method of improving access to health care that doesn't require money to pay for it, Erin, I think you owe it to the rest of us to make it public!

But any attempt to ask the question: why should the Federal Government take over the health care industry and pay for the health care of all Americans including those who can afford it either outright or through private insurance? gets answered with the tiresome charge that the person asking that question just wants poor people to get sick and die.

Actually, I think most Christians dont want people to die from lack of healthcare. I just think if you really want to discuss health care its good to have a starting off point. If you arent willing to let people die, even if due to their own negligence it takes the discussion down different paths, mainly how to pay for it and what that care will encompass. If you are willing to let people die because they didnt take responsibility for their own lives then its a totally different discussion. Then theres the group that cant take care of themselves for various reasons.

So, you dont have to answer, no one does, but until that question is answered the discussion seems dishonest/artificial to me. Then we can determine what system we should set up and if the care should be free. For the record, I believe a multi-tiered system where not everyone gets the same care is part of the best solution.

Steve

the possession of good health is in fact good for society,

In what way? Economically? Actually, no.

Obese people die sooner than non-obese. The old-age income they would have otherwise consumed is thereby freed up to be used by others.

Ditto with smokers.

http://www.slate.com/id/2184475/

Indeed, the analysis in PLoS Medicine revealed that lifetime health expenditures were highest for healthy-living people of optimum weight.

"The humiliation the South has suffered since the Civil War is an opportunity to cultivate *humility.* It's not an opportunity that Southerners have taken as often as they should."

Not being a Southerner I can't speak for them, but this is a point that Robert Penn Warren makes in "The Legacy of the Civil War." Instead of allowing their defeat to teach them humility and such, they have tended to fall back on it as 'The Great Alibi,' the omnipresent and handy excuse for all failures.

'Americans have tended to assume that they are "the good guys" because they've usually "won," and because they tend to assume that they are "the good guys" they also tend to assume that they willl always "win."'

Yep, and Warren in the same book calls this attitude the "Treasury of Virtue." As Andrew Lytle put it, for the North (and thus by extension the whole U.S. as the 'victor'), there's been no pain or shame of loss, only a mounting ever onward and upward in success and 'progress.' This, says Lytle, is a dangerous place for a nation to be in because of the hubris involved.

I'd give the exact quote but I don't have the book handy. It's in the last paragraph of his essay, "How Many Miles to Babylon."

Rob G:

This discussion of yours and others is fascinating. Northern hubris vs. Southern humility. All of it is great. My one reaction to this, however, is that few people today (especially those who make everyday decisions in government offices, businesses, schools, churches) are conscious of these distinctions or even unconscioulsy influenced by them. This is not to criticize people for pondering them.

It is just to note how homogenized American culture and attitudes have become. I doubt that, outside of the study of American literature, that there is any longer a "Southern sensibility" or a "Yankee sensibility" at work in American life. However sad that realization may be for some, our country today -- and the culture -- would be unrecognizable to Robert Penn Warren were he to miraculously return. TV has wiped out all that was once familiar to previous generations. We live in a "Disneyland" culture.

Conservatives used to be skeptical about ideas like these.

Darn right, but not anymore, unfortunately. Look what's happened now that the Federal government took over our military defenses, controlled all air traffic, made us all use the same currency, etc, etc. The same fate is likely to befall us if the Federal government tries to administer a so-called "universal health insurance pool." They will try to make it apply to everybody in the country.

Rob G
True enough -- for all intents and purposes, right or wrong, the terms have become interchangeable. In effect, the liberals of today are really progressives, and the conservatives of today are really liberals, in the old sense.

Well, no. The conservatives used to talk like they were liberal in some aspects. Second amendment, talking about how FISA allowed wiretaps without warrants, talking about how Clinton had 'jackbooted thugs' infringing people's religious rights at Waco and Ruby Ridge, etc. I even thought they had a point.

We all learned how all hollow that was when the Bush-worship started, though. Any party that even vaguely thinks torture can fit in is not 'liberal' in any meaning of the word, and the right to habeas corpus and a trial by jury of peers is so liberal it actually predates liberalism and is arguably the basis for the entire concept of the 'rights' liberals want.

So, no, I flatly reject that the right is, in any way, liberal. Yes, sometimes they made liberal arguments when fighting progressivism, and even I thought they were liberal, but in the end their true color showed up. Now the only 'right' they fight for is the right not to pay taxes. (Which isn't a right according to any liberal theory of government I've ever heard of.)

The most liberal party is still the Libertarians. They have a very anti-progressive agenda WRT to business and taxes, so I don't like them much, but as for liberalism they're dead on. (They even take liberalism over progressivism in a few places the left and society in general don't, like drugs and prostitution.)

If you go and look at which party the Libertarians are fighting now, it's not the Democrats.

As for whether or not the Democratic party is still 'liberal', that's somewhat tricky. Most Democrats regard abortion as a 'women's right issue', so fighting for it is, indeed, liberal. (Of course, I'm sure the right would try to frame it as 'unborn rights' and say they're the liberal side. But both sides can be correct, if that is the premise they are working for, they are both working from a liberal viewpoint, simply thinking different people's rights come first.)

And there's gay rights, which is certainly framed as a liberal issue on the left. (And the counter argument is, tellingly, not framed as one by the right.)

All the racial civil rights have gotten entirely entangled in progressivism, though.

Uh, 'fraid not. The distinction between 'classical liberalism' and 'modern liberalism' dates at least to the 50's, and possibly earlier. It was already fairly common usage when I first became interested in politics in the late 70's. To ascribe it to talk radio is ridiculous.

Yeah, it showed up exactly when the Democratic party decided that, despite the unions being protectionist, racism was stupid idea and they should pull minorities in and 'progressivate' them also, and the Republican party decided to work with the leftover racists. Strange, huh?

When the GOP gave up liberalism and it got sucked into another party sorta by default, it changed somewhat. But it changed all the time. The liberalism of the 1930s wasn't the liberalism of the 1860 or the liberalism of the American Revolution or the liberalism of the Commonwealth of England. It's all liberalism. They all agree there are inherent rights of man that governments must respect. Sometimes we get new ones, or different ones are emphasized, but it's all liberalism.

Pretending there's some broad disconnect is just a way for Republicans to keep from facing the fact they gave up on liberalism. At this point, it's questionable if there are any rights Republicans think people have.

"Yeah, it showed up exactly when the Democratic party decided that, despite the unions being protectionist, racism was stupid idea and they should pull minorities in and 'progressivate' them also, and the Republican party decided to work with the leftover racists."

Nope. The difference between 'modern liberalism' and 'classical liberalism' was originally framed to distinguish between traditional liberalism and the newer sort that arose with FDR, the New Deal, and big government-type programs -- pro-welfare state vs. anti-welfare state, in other words. Initially the terms were seen primarily as economic in nature, not cultural -- that came later.

"So, no, I flatly reject that the right is, in any way, liberal."

Again, not so. If you accept the idea that the birth of the "liberal" came with the Enlightenment, then what you have is the conservatives' acceptance of some aspects of the Enlightenment and rejection of others. For example, while both are liberal, conservatives tend to be much more sympathetic to the Scottish Enlightenment than to the French.

Socialism - ownership of the means of production by the State.
Single Payer Health Care - a welfare scheme to provide health benefits to its subscribers.
Socialism!=Single Payer

As to autos, we have the national highway system as a public good paid for by the government. As to homeowners' insurance we have the national flood insurance program.

Cute. I'll know next time you aren't interested in serious debate.

But why is it un-serious to point out that the federal govt. has a HORRIBLE track record when it comes to the management and administration of its programs?

I'm not sure how universalized this opinion is. This would be like me dismissing any critique of government by claiming we don't have riots in the streets every four years. For better or worse, most government programs run how they are designed.

Do we point to the I.R.S. as the model of friendly customer service? No. We don't hold AT&T and a myriad of other places up to that standard. Analogy wise, we certainly don't believe collection agencies are the model of customer service.
Do we hold up the interstate highway system as an example of modern innovation and technology? Yes. The Eisenhower System in many circles is credited for a significant portion of our progress in the 20th century. The Autobahn system was hailed in Germany and admired abroard.
Is the Department of Defense known for its tight control of budgetary spending and its simple, clear communication ability? No, but possibly the latter in a sarcastic instance. I can give you plenty of examples of private sector large organization waste. Regardless, the mission of the DoD is to kill people and break things, something unparalelled by any other nation.

Single-payer health care plans all put the management and administration of our access to health care in the hands of the same people who run all of these things.
Not in any implementation I'm aware. Such isn't the case with Medicare, an example of single payer for the elderly. In particular, access is controlled by doctors, even in Britain's NHS, an actual socialized system. Depending on funding, there can be capacity issues. This is true presently here though as we witness more and more inner city hospitals closed due to insufficient funds.

What will single-payer health care look like? Most likely like a larger Medicare.

Why should we NOT expect it to look like everything else the federal government administers and controls in terms of complexity, bureaucracy, innovation, clarity, and friendliness? We would. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be better than our present system. A COBRA plan with an HSA in a preferred provider with a non-preferred doctor with pre-approval from a utilization review committee doesn't meet any of the factors you list.

Steve: "Why isnt it ok to insist on some personal responsibility? Overweight, obese? Pay more."

Why insist only the consumer has some personal responsibility?
What about the market-manipulators? "Obscenely profitable? Charge less."

There really is no "free-market" in the conventional sense in health care, or for that matter most insurance benefits associated with employment. When the Fed can take the money out of your pocket by force and redistribute it to the pockets of its private_financial_service_firm_friends (by dictating an interest rate below the inflation rate) what incentive does anyone (customer or merchant) in the markets have to be "responsible"?

Most can't imagine the alternative: a free exchange between acting persons thus:

A medicine man has six doses of potion. His neighbor has six bags of rice.
The medicine man will trade his potions for the price of a bag of rice, until he's down to his last three doses - the ones he needs for his wife, his baby and himself. Then the price changes...
His neighbor may convince the medicine man to part with a small portion of his fourth dose by arguing that the remainder will still suffice to protect a little baby. To induce the sale, the neighbor increases his offer to two bags of rice, since he can divide his last one, planting some for a later harvest. And so long as he is healthy, he can go work in someone else's rice paddy to feed his starving family in the meantime.

See how marginal utility works?
Why we need free markets to set prices justly, ie at a price that both consumer and merchant consider win-win?

And why Obama's advisor Austan Goolsbee considers it so important but so little understood that he would add it to a test for political office? see http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/070215/opine.shtml

If politicians had to pass an exam before they were allowed to serve in public office, what question would you add to the test?
Do you understand marginal cost?

Reaganite in NYC -- forgot to mention it yesterday, but another good book on the Agrarians & Southern Conservatives is Christopher Duncan's "Fugitive Theory." I found the first half of the book a little rough going (indepth discussion of political philosophy, which I don't know much about) but the second half, where he gets more into the specifics of the "Fugitives," is well worth a look.

Conserativism is a joke There are no longer a clear definition of it anymore. A confused bunch.