Killer angels and liberal fascists

Well, this is in Newsweek after all, so I know we can't expect much, and the headline is obviously just link bait: "Tea Partiers Are Today’s Slave-Owners". Oh sure -- or, you know, today's Nazis, or the Hun, or psychopathic racist killers, or whatever other bogeyman you can think of. But how did he get to "slave-owners" particularly? Turns out it's because before the Civil War southern whites thought of slaves as property, and now Tea Partiers think of, well, property as property. Or something:

The rhetoric in 1860, as now, was essentially about throwing off the burden of federal authority, getting rid of the tariffs and taxes Washington imposed, and protecting private property from the depredations of central government. There was one essential difference back then, of course: the private property in question in 1860 was human. But the fire-eaters of the Old South never put the emphasis on “human,” they always put it on “property,” and they pointed to their (white man’s) rights enshrined in Article I, Article IV, and the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which declared no person can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

Get it? The important connection here is property, and wanting not to be deprived of property is much like wanting not to be deprived of slaves -- isn't it obvious?

So what should Obama and the anti-slavery/property Democrats do about it? Why, take a lesson from Abraham Lincoln when faced with secession, of course -- call out the troops and crush the slaveproperty-owning Tea Party:

If, in the end, Lincoln did manage to hold the Union together, it was not because of the better angels of human nature, but because he finally found the killer angels among his generals who could, and did, and at enormous cost, crush the secessionists.

These basic facts about a moment of history that Obama obviously holds dear are worth going over again right now because, in fact, the secessionists of 1860 are the ideological forebears of the Tea Party movement today.

 Now, okay, this guy Christopher Dickey is no doubt just a goofy hack and no better than you can expect from a news magazine struggling to keep its head above water. But the problem is he's not alone -- try putting "eliminationist" into the search box at Instapundit (where I got the link to Dickey's little piece) and note the multiple links to left-lib death curses of one sort or another just on his blog alone. And the thuggish behavior isn't limited just to rhetoric, as a couple of recent incidents at Canadian universities illustrate. I'm not above a little link-baiting myself, but if we're going to get into historical comparisons, then comparing today's increasingly frustrated, resentful, and violence-spouting "progressive" left to the sort of liberal fascists Jonah Goldberg wrote a book about makes vastly greater sense than the laughable comparison of today's Tea Partiers to antebellum slave-owners.

Thanks to John at Verum Serum (via Instapundit).

Why I'm not a conservative, again

Every so often I come across something that reminds me why, and here's the latest, a post on the ironically(?) titled Postmodern Conservative blog by Johnathan Jones, called "The Quest for Community". It's a review of a book with the same title by Robert Nisbet first published in 1953 -- a date that, in itself, tells you something about it -- and now re-issued. Back when I was myself a lefty, this was just the sort of thing I abhorred, confirming my fervent anti-conservative, left-wing beliefs:

Humans are, intractably, social creatures built for communion. So prevalent is the belief that an equal satisfaction of preferences is a high social good, and that the purpose of politics and morality is the working toward that supposed good, that Nisbet can be a bit of a shock. As this blog argues, liberalism is very insufficient to maintain social order. Freedom and equality as high principles can harm other realities necessary for social harmony.

And it still bothers me. What, prey tell, is "equal satisfaction of preferences" supposed to mean? If human creatures are "built for communion", then wouldn't communion/community also be a preference? Is "social harmony" really supposed to trump everything else -- freedom, equality (of status), and even justice?  In other words, this seems like vague, abstract, confused, and even somewhat menacing mush.

But, being wiser at least than I was, I can now pick out some threads that do make some sense, even if incomplete and poorly grounded. Here, for example, he brings up a theme I've called "hubristic Reason", originating in the Continental (as distinct from the British/Scottish) Enlightenment, and that is a serious flaw in contemporary collectivist/liberal statist schemes:

... the aspirations that inspired the founders of modern thought – the conquest of nature through science, perhaps even the conquest of human nature, and the emancipation of power from moral restraint – could be “achieved” at a great and unpredictable cost. [my emphasis]

And the emphasis on family and association generally is a good theme, however simple, and a welcome contrast to the sort of politicized "solidarity" that characterizes the left. This I think, as another example, makes a good point about the need to bring together things that contemporary liberal orthodoxies tend always to oppose:

Far too many lifestyle choices and social, political structures shatter what the authentically familial would hold together – consumption and production, sensuality and fertility, freedom and virtue.

So fine, but where does that leave us? If Jones' answer is that it leaves us stuck in a 50's style time warp, then he's no help, and this perverse mock rallying cry -- "Down with the statist-individualist symbiosis!" -- just underlines his confusion and haplessness. It also points to his crucial mistake -- to accept, uncritically, the left-wing denigration of the individual, leaving him with the only apparent alternatives of leftist collectivism or an antique conservatism. But the modern individual is a much more complex, and still evolving, phenomenon, that is at the heart of new and potentially richer sorts of community. Like any emergence, this process is not without its tribulations, but the true progressives are those who support the individual and the freedom that defines him -- and resist the reactionaries on both the left and the right that would try to re-submerge her in collectives either traditional or statist (or both).

Rehabilitating Herbert Spencer?

This is a curious but interesting sequence -- starting, approximately, with this post by Brian Tamanaha, "Racist Progressives, Meet Hard-Hearted Libertarians", which references, going back a further step, a couple of posts by libertarians asserting that the forebears of contemporary left-liberals or "progressives" were often bigoted and racist. Okay, says Tamanaha, but your forebears were often cold-hearted social Darwinists willing to let the poor starve in the streets, and he uses Herbert Spencer, apparently the originator of the phrase "survival of the fittest", as exhibit one -- e.g., taken from Spencer's Social Statics:

It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence—the same beneficence which brings to early graves the children of diseased parents, and singles out the low-spirited, the intemperate, and the debilitated as the victims of an epidemic.

As Tamanaha says, "That's cold".

Now, as a tu quoque argument this is maybe a bit silly, but it does go to the way in which older and uglier predecessors continue to affect or influence contemporary inheritors. Ilya Somin, in a response post on Volokh, "Of 'Racist Progressives' And 'Hard-Hearted Libertarians'" largely agrees with Tamanaha about Spencer's social Darwinism, but argues that

Few modern libertarians even cite Spencer or other social Darwinists at all. By contrast, modern liberals do often cite early 20th century progressives as inspirations for their ideology. And until recently, few of them paid much attention to the more unsavory aspects of early 20th century Progressivism (though I should add that some far left radical scholars, such as Gabriel Kolko, were much more critical).

The other noteworthy point that Somin makes is that bigotry against whatever minority group is out of favor at the moment becomes much more dangerous when backed by an interventionist state, and along these lines he quotes his colleague David Bernstein:

“[a]s a matter of American history, activist government was often used to oppress minority groups. As a matter of world history, the record of “activist government” with regard to minorities is even worse. And as a matter of political theory, it’s not at all clear why one would expect public policy in a democracy to necessarily be helpful to minority groups.”

And then Damon Root steps in with a defence of Spencer himself, in a post on Reason's blog, "Battle of the 'Embarrassing Grandparents': Racist Progressives vs. Herbert Spencer" (that Somin referenced in an update):

As for the much-abused phrase “survival of the fittest,” Tamanaha seems ignorant of what Spencer actually wrote. By fit, Spencer most certainly did not mean brute force. In Spencer’s view, human society had evolved from a "militant" state, which was characterized by violence and force, to an "industrial" one, characterized by trade and voluntary cooperation. Thus any increase in private charity and “the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other” count as prime examples of the “survival of the fittest” as articulated by Spencer.

 So, I have a couple of responses myself to this little teacup tempest. First, I'll admit I've never read Spencer and never thought to do so, but I think Root makes an interesting case for him -- enough that I'm inclined now to look him up. But I also think that the extended passage Tamanaha quoted is indeed "cold", as he says, and what's worse, wrong. It's wrong in the same way that the cruder versions of contemporary evolutionary psychology are wrong, in overlooking or dismissing culture as the primary system for environmental adaptation, as opposed to the biological organism -- and cultural adaptations that build upon  compassion or a desire to help the weak may well make for a stronger or "fitter" social structure within which we all can thrive. What Root says about Spencer above mitigates this criticism, but doesn't eliminate it.

The second point, though, is just to point out that the state is by no means the only way we have of acting together, being social, exercising compassion, or helping the weak. Indeed, the state, because of its inescapable connection with force, will always have a tendency to devolve into either tyrannies large or small, or wasteful, dehumanizing, dependency-inducing bureaucracies, or both. This too Spencer apparently saw, and partially integrated into his case. And here is where we can really use some of that willingness to think outside of accustomed limits that we saw in the parable of the traffic lights, to find more creative and human approaches to providing for human needs than the state.

"Nutrition or character?"

Mickey Kaus makes an interesting point in the course of an argument that sides with Gingrich against Pelosi about the apparently minor issue of food stamps: "Pelosi's Wrong About Gingrich and Food Stamps". It starts out like this: Gingrich says Republicans should campaign for "paychecks" not "foodstamps"; Pelosi accuses him and the Republicans of trying to divide people between those who need foodstamps and those who don't; Kaus says Pelosi is wrong about Gingrich in that he's really saying everyone is in danger of becoming too dependent on government handouts, of which foodstamps are just an illustration.

But Kaus expands on his point by arguing that a sign of this spreading dependency is the loss of stigma associated with accepting such handouts, and an associated loss in work ethic, an aspect of character. So, Kaus says:

The real issue isn't whether food stamp use goes up during a vicious economic slump--that's what they're there for. The issue is whether, thanks to the justified stigma, food stamp use goes down again when the recession ends.

Gingrich, rightly, worries that it won't. It's a valid left-right point of disagreement. A few months ago, I thought I was stacking the deck when I phrased the disagreement like this:

If you came across two societies--Society A, in which food stamps were stigmatized, with families reluctant to go on the dole even if they were eligible, and Society B, in which they weren't, you would want to bet on (and live in) Society A.

To my surprise, blogger Matt Yglesias of the liberal Center for American Progress immediately chimed in on behalf of Society B, if it produced better-nourished children who became a "better-educated workforce" with "lower crime" and "less disabilty."

Well, there you have a choice. What's America's bigger problem--nutrition or character? "Which future do I want?" asks Gingrich. "More food stamps? Or more paychecks?" Society B or Society A? But not "us" versus "them."

Remember that Churchill quote about those who would trade honor for peace ending up with neither? Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that a similar fate might befall those who would trade character for nutrition?
 

Labels and Llosa

David Boaz, at the Cato blog, has an interesting post on the Nobel prize winner in literature, entitled "The Politics of Mario Vargas Llosa". Interesting, because of what he calls a "missing word" -- "liberal". That's the political label that is never used by others to describe Llosa's views, though they might resort to such various terms as right-wing, conservative, or even -- the latest scarecrow put up by the atavistic left -- "neoliberal", but never simply "liberal". Yet, curiously, that's the label that Llosa himself uses. Why? No doubt part of the answer would involve the international context of his politics, as distinct from the more parochial and peculiar usages that have come to prevail in the US. But the more important part, the reason that underlies that globalized context, is that he refuses to to abandon the meaning that made the label such a powerful political force from its origins -- that "liberalism" is, as Boaz quotes from the Encyclopedia Brittannica, the "Political and economic doctrine that emphasizes the rights and freedoms of the individual and the need to limit the powers of government", or, as Llosa himself puts it, with a little more economy and force, a liberal is "a lover of liberty, a person who rises up against oppression".

Here's a little more from Llosa on true liberalism:

...the liberal I aspire to be considers freedom a core value. Thanks to this freedom, humanity has been able to journey from the primitive cave to the stars and the information revolution, to progress from forms of collectivist and despotic association to representative democracy. The foundations of liberty are private property and the rule of law; this system guarantees the fewest possible forms of injustice, produces the greatest material and cultural progress, most effectively stems violence and provides the greatest respect for human rights. According to this concept of liberalism, freedom is a single, unified concept. Political and economic liberties are as inseparable as the two sides of a medal.

...

Political democracy and the free market are foundations of a liberal position. But, thus formulated, these two expressions have an abstract, algebraic quality that dehumanizes and removes them from the experience of the common people. Liberalism is much, much more than that. Basically, it is tolerance and respect for others, and especially for those who think differently from ourselves, who practice other customs and worship another god or who are non-believers. By agreeing to live with those who are different, human beings took the most extraordinary step on the road to civilization. It was an attitude or willingness that preceded democracy and made it possible, contributing more than any scientific discovery or philosophical system to counter violence and calm the instinct to control and kill in human relations. It is also what awakened that natural lack of trust in power, in all powers, which is something of a second nature to us liberals.

 And here is his description of collectivism, or the anti-liberal:

Collectivism was inevitable during the dawn of history, when the individual was simply part of the tribe and depended on the entire society for survival, but began to decline as material and intellectual progress enabled man to dominate nature, overcome the fear of thunder, the beast, the unknown and the other--he who had a different color skin, another language and other customs. But collectivism has survived throughout history in those doctrines and ideologies that place the supreme value of an individual on his belonging to a specific group (a race, social class, religion or nation). All of these collectivist doctrines--Nazism, fascism, religious fanaticism and communism--are the natural enemies of freedom and the bitter adversaries of liberals. In every age, that atavistic defect, collectivism, has reared its ugly head to threaten civilization and throw us back to the age of barbarism. Yesterday it was called fascism and communism; today it is known as nationalism and religious fundamentalism.

Which, to speak of another political usage often mentioned alongside "liberalism", is the reason I always try to put "progressivism" in scare quotes -- given its tendency to share in that "atavistic defect, collectivism", it would be far more accurate and honest to label it "regressivism".

The problem with conservatism: the debate continued

This is the continuation of the last post, which was concerned with a debate surrounding William Voegeli's book,  Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State. In that post I wanted to make the point that contemporary liberalism, from early in the last century, and under pressure from its socialist left, had largely abandoned the vision of the emergent individual that had previously defined it, and has been captivated by a competing but reactionary vision of technocratic state control ever since. Here I want to look at a problem with the other side of the debate, as stated by Will and Voegeli.


This has to do with the admittedly problematic notions of "progress" and social/cultural "evolution" -- conservatism is right to be skeptical of these ideas, but wrong I think simply to oppose them. Will, for example, is on target here:

... the name ["progressivism"] is tautological: History is progressive because progress is defined as whatever History produces.... 

The cheerful assumption is that "evolving"must mean "improving." Progressivism's promise is a program for every problem, and progressivism's premise is that every unfulfilled desire is a problem.

But misses here:

The name "progressivism" implies criticism of the Founding, which we leave behind as we make progress. 

"Progressivism" per se doesn't or shouldn't imply criticism of the Founding except in the sense that we can recognize that the Founding didn't leave us in some final state of perfection. It's not only possible, it's desirable, to view the Founding with respect as the foundation, so to speak, upon which we can build, indefinitely. Trying to stand athwart history, yelling Stop has a melodramatic appeal, I suppose, especially in the darker days of massive liberal dominance, but it's also a recipe for futility -- and it needs to be said that it's no less a reification to see history as a hostile thing than as a benevolent one. We don't need to make an "autonomous thing" out of history, in other words, to understand that, however well we've done, we can always do better.

But to do so, we also need to do better than the "unprincipled pragmatism" of the modern-day liberal -- indeed, we'll need to progressively undo the baneful effects of liberal recourse to state power as a means of, as Will says, providing "a program for every problem". Here Voegeli's response to Lind is again just about right:

C. S. Lewis wrote that since progress means getting closer to your goal, when you’ve taken a wrong turn and are getting farther and farther from your destination, the truly “progressive” response is to turn around and go back to the right road. Most conservatives believe that America took a wrong turn in 1932, one that has led us farther away from the goal of preserving and strengthening republican self-government....

The conservatives now reviving constitutionalism are rightly insistent on the need to retrace our steps, and to undo the mistakes that have supplanted limited with unlimited government. The point is not to go back to 1932 and stay there, compiling a list of things government cannot do and problems it cannot address. The point, rather, is to resume progress on the road not taken: toward a government that is both limited and vigorous, scrupulous about upholding the principles of republicanism but energetic and prudent about working within the framework created by those principles to respond to economic and social changes with policies that advance the people’s prosperity and security.