Recently in Conservatism Category

Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe identifies four young conservative thinkers who might just revamp the moribund movement: Reihan Salam, W. Bradford Wilcox, Megan McArdle and Luigi Zingales. I'm tickled to know Reihan, and to link to his stuff. I don't know Megan, but I link to her material too. I sort of know Brad Wilcox, from ages ago, when I lived in Washington. Here's what Bennett writes about Brad:

For social conservatives, it is the family, not the individual, that is society's building block. When the family breaks down, they argue, so does the nation. Today, however, the term "family values" has taken on the whiff of Bible-Belt moralizing - a relic of the 1990s culture wars that's certainly conservative, but hardly intellectual. But there may be an strong empirical basis for conservative family values, some sociologists are arguing. The field of sociology hasn't traditionally been friendly to conservatives, but when it looks at the impact of fractured families on children and neighborhoods, the results are striking: Children not raised by their married mother and father are more likely to drop out of high school, be depressed, and even commit suicide. Boys from broken homes are more likely to end up in jail; and girls more likely to be teen mothers. Some researchers, not all of them conservative, blame the decline of the two-parent family for much of the increase in economic inequality and child poverty in recent decades.

An emerging major voice in this field is W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia who studies religion, marriage, and the nuclear family. In both his scholarly work and in popular conservative venues like the Wall Street Journal editorial page and National Review, he has pressed the case that Americans should be working harder to preserve traditional family structures.

The threat for Wilcox is not gay marriage, but two old taboos that have lost much of their force in modern America: divorce and single parenthood. He suggests creating tax and welfare incentives to make marriage more financially attractive than mere cohabitation. He is also a believer in "social marketing" - billboards encouraging parents to make sure the family eats dinner together, or prime-time TV commercials about how divorce affects kids.

The issue, as he sees it, is not a matter of preserving traditional moral values, but of insuring equality of opportunity. He argues that it is counterproductive to insist, as many liberals have, that all types of families are equally good for kids. Overwhelmingly, he points out, it is poor and working-class families who are grappling with the effects of divorce and single parenthood.

"The retreat from marriage in the United States over the last four decades has been important in fueling increases in inequality as well as child poverty," he says. Marriage needs defending, in other words - not because of what it represents, but because of who it protects.

Luigi Zingales I'd not heard of, but he sounds really interesting. Here's a bit from Bennett's piece:

Luigi Zingales says it's time for conservatives to fall out of love with businesses, and fall back in love with the free market. In an argument that's begun to catch the ear of a few conservative thinkers, Zingales suggests that it's often business itself, rather than the government, that the market needs protection from.

"I'm very strongly pro-market and very strongly against business," says the Italian-born economist, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Separating the support of free markets from the long Republican alliance with business isn't easy, says Zingales, but it's important. As he and colleague Raghuram Rajan laid out in their 2003 book, "Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists," powerful companies, given the chance, work hand-in-glove with government officials to craft laws and regulations that protect them while limiting competition and transparency.

I like this Garry Wills remembrance of William F. Buckley, which appears in the current issue of The Atlantic. Wills, as a young man, was a National Review golden boy, but as he moved to the left, he and Buckley became estranged. I was happy to read at the end of this piece that they made up before Bill died. Excerpt:

Hour by hour, day by day, Bill Buckley was just an exciting person to be around, especially when he was exhilarated by his love of sailing. He could turn any event into an adventure, a joke, a showdown. He loved risk. I saw him time after time rush his boat toward a harbor, sails flying, only to swerve and drop sail at the last moment. For some on the pier, looking up to see this large yacht bearing down on them, it was a heart-stopping moment. To add to the excitement, Bill was often standing on the helmsman's seat, his hands clutching the shrouds above his head, turning the wheel with his foot, in a swashbuckling pose. (He claimed he saw the berth better from up there.)

I once saw the importance of his swift reflexes on the boat. We had set out for a night sail on the ocean, and Bill's Yale friend Van Galbraith--later President Reagan's ambassador to France--had got tipsy from repeated shots of Tia Maria in his coffee. He fell overboard while the boat was under full sail. In a flash, Bill threw overboard a life preserver with a bright light on it, and called for us to bring the boat about. We circled back toward Galbraith, found him in the darkness, and fished him out. It was a scary moment, one that only Bill's cool rapidity kept from being a tragic one.

Bill wrote the way he sailed, taking chances. Once, he called me up to ask about some new papal pronouncement. He had got into trouble with fellow Catholics by criticizing papal encyclicals, and I had become a kind of informal adviser on Catholic matters. The statement at issue that day was obscure.

He wanted to launch an immediate attack on it. I asked why he did not wait to see what impact it would have. "Why not wait? Because I don't have falsos testes." He was referring to an earlier discussion, in which he asked whether even papal defenders admit the pontiff can err. I said that medieval commentators claimed that such an error could happen if the pope was given imperfect evidence (propter falsos testes). He asked, "Isn't testis [testifier] the same word in Latin as testicle?" Yes. That was all the warrant he needed.

This makes a lot of sense to me, and I'm more or less where EDK is.

The thing is, I have problems with the word "neoconservative," because the sentiments and policies and stances that typically get described as "neoconservative" really describe mainstream conservatism. The only conservatives I know who can't be called neocons are people like Larison and the AmConMag gang, who consciously and philosophically dissent from the conservative mainstream. When I hear the word "neocon," and it's not obviously being used as a veiled jab at Jews, I wonder where these non-neocon conservatives are. Neoconservatism is the mainstream expression of American conservatism right now.

Anyway, more good stuff from E.D. Kain. Excerpt:

This is the fundamental flaw in modern economic theory. It touts the creation of cheap goods via cheap labor and resources as the purpose of prosperity in and of itself. Never mind that this requires shipping all our manufacturing jobs overseas. The once well-paid auto workers will be able to buy such inexpensive goods from China that, if they are lucky enough to find them, jobs in fast food restaurants and retail outlets will be enough to subsist - nay, prosper - upon.

What a farce! Such a brilliant hood-winking of the American people! Such a plot can only be accidental, but even so, even such a conspiracy of happenstance has the same effect. The tragedy is that conservatives have bought into this scheme so completely. The only difference between the two Parties now is that one believes in taxing and spending, and the other believes in not taxing and still spending. One pretends to address the moral concerns of poverty and equal rights and the other pretends to address the moral concerns of the Religious Right. In the end, both ignore the moral concerns of a society driven by the express goal of building wealth, by excess and debt over thrift, and above all else, identifying as a society not of workers, builders, or citizens, but of consumers.

The cries of "socialism" leveled at Obama from the Republicans seem odd, given the Republican propensity toward enlarging government, even privatized government. I'm as troubled as the next by this massive spending, but then again, massive spending has been the status quo for years. Only, instead of spending trillions on health care reform, we've spent it on wars in far off lands. Apparently the moral concern of expansionary militarism is less significant than the the expansion of our social safety nets; the sequestering off of our freedoms under the guise of a War on Terror is less worrisome than the building of high speed rail. Perhaps our priorities have been skewed by our isolation from each other.

Individualism leads to the growth of the State because individualism denies the need for community and family; it abandons such antiquated notions as God and tradition and favors reason and wealth over history and modesty. In the end, however, individualism inevitably falls short; reason inevitably contradicts itself. A nation of individuals is inherently chaotic, and will gravitate, sometimes consciously, oftentimes not, toward a bigger and stronger and more all-encompassing State.

Which brings to mind, of course, John Gray, on the Strange Death of Tory England:

An American-style stance of cultural fundamentalism has attractions for many British conservative thinkers, nonetheless, because it enables them to avoid confronting the central contradiction in their thought and policy -- the contradiction between endorsing the permanent revolution of the global market and the preservation of stable forms of family and community life. If, as is manifestly the case, the effect of unfettered global market institutions is to overthrow settled communities everywhere, to undermine the stability of families by imposing on their members the imperative of unceasing mobility and to dissolve traditional practices and institutions in a flood of novelty, neo-liberal conservatives are compelled to ascribed these changes to factors other than unchecked market forces. The explanation is then sought in antinomian or relativistic doctrines supposedly propagated in schools and universities, in the legacy of 1960s libertarianism, in media bias or similarly absurd conjectures. The social -- and for that matter economic -- failures of market fundamentalism are patched up, or at least obscured, by recourse to the atavistic fantasies of cultural fundamentalism. Only by invoking a conspiratorial elite of liberal intellectuals can the conservative intelligentsia explain to itself why -- after seventeen years of neo-liberal hegemony -- the ordinary people it claims to speak for in Britain show every sign of consigning to electoral oblivion the party whose policies they continue to support.

Gray wrote that in 1995, during what would be the final years of Tory rule before the New Labour sweep. I wonder what he would say now that Labour is on the ropes, and a much-changed, de-Thatcherized Conservative Party looks to take power sometime in the next year. Anyway, I think cultural factors have significantly more to do with the wreckage than Gray does, but it's critical for today's American conservatives to face squarely the contradiction between believing in an unfettered free market, and preserving social and cultural stability.

Conor Friedersdorf continues to struggle with right-wing heretic hunters, who seem to think that the first and last word in conservatism is a neo-liberal market fundamentalism. He asks them to explain exactly what they think a conservative is:

Are there actually other standards being used to decide who must not invoke conservatism -- or to determine which so-called pseudo-conservatives must not be engaged on the substance of anything, because apparently it is better to plug one's ears and close one's eyes when someone you deem to hold a different political ideology speaks? Is there anything beyond gut level judgments and Red Team tribal loyalty guiding these decisions?

Alas, there isn't. The fact is, there are multiple conservatisms, and that's fine -- except that the heretic-hunters insist on treating conservatism like an ideological religion, instead of a disposition and general approach to life and politics. I suppose they'd call the Tory political philosopher and skeptic John Gray a liberal too, inasmuch as he has the common sense to understand how free-market fundamentalism undermines conservatism. From his book "Black Mass" (follow that link to buy a copy of the American edition, well worth the money):

In a television interview in January 1983 Thatcher declared her admiration for Victorian values and her belief that they could be revived. Actually, the country of Thatcher's nostalgic dreams was more like the Britain of the fifties, but the idea that unleashing market forces could re-create this lost idyll was strinking paradoxical. The conservative Britain of the fifties was a by-product of Labour collectivism. Thatcher tore up the foundations of the country to which she dreamt of returning. already semi-defunct when she came to power in 1979, it had vanished from memory when she left in 1990. in attempting to restore the past she erased its last traces.

Thatcher propagated an individualist ethos of personal responsibility, but in the type of society that is needed to service the free market old-fashioned virtues of saving and planning for the future are no longer profitable. A makeshift lifestyle is well suited to the incessant mobility of latter-day capitalism. Chronic debt has proved to be a mark of prudence, and a readiness to gamble is more useufl than diligent application to the job at hand. Though an earlier generation of social theorists anticipated that as capitalism developed it would foster embourgeoisement -- the spread of a middle-class ethos throughout society -- it has done the opposite. Most of the population belong in a new proletariat, with high levels of income but nothing resembling a long-term career. The deliquescence of bourgeois society has come about not through the abolition of capitalism but as a result of capitalism operating without restraint.

By the way, did you see Barbara Ehrenreich's remarks to the graduating class of UC Berkeley's journalism school?. Excerpt:

"You are going to be trying to carve out a career in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. You are, furthermore, going to be trying to do so within what appears to be a dying industry. You have abundant skills and talents; it's just not clear that anyone wants to pay you for them. Well, you are not alone. How do you think it feels to be an autoworker right now? And I've spent time with plenty of laid-off paper mill workers, construction workers and miners. They've got skills; they've got experience. They just don't have jobs. So let me be the first to say this to you: Welcome to the American working class."

And do not miss Kara Hopkins' reflections on the localist, kitchen-table future of conservatism.

Joseph Lawler at The American Spectator blog responds to my criticism of the magazine for touting a piece on Hitler's banker as "Obama's national socialism." Lawler:

So is Dreher prepared to deride the work of Liaquat Ahamed, Adam Tooze, and The New York Times for looking like "scream-sheets of the loony right"? If not, he should back off his criticism of Srodes's article.

Lawler misses the point of my critical remarks. I wasn't criticizing the article per se, but it's framing, linking the president to the Nazis in that explicit way. I'm pretty sure I know why they did what they did, but I think it cheapens the magazine, which, as I said in my initial post, is a good magazine overall. I hated it when the left called Bush a "fascist," because despite the egregious power grabs the Bush administration engaged in, to resort to that kind of language to describe an American president says more about the unseriousness of the person deploying it than it does about the president.

I would be interested to hear what Lawler thinks of the real substance of that post of mine, which was about the way we talk about the other side in American political discourse, and the temptations it poses.