“Conservatives”
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An article today on the blog of the British Daily Telegraph, setting out various views that I have previously expressed on here, has had certain people practically foaming at the mouth. I can summarize the position of my critics.
Being “conservative” has, nothing, absolutely nothing at all, to do with national self-government (the only basis for international co-operation), local variation, historical consciousness, family life (founded on the marital union of one man and one woman), the whole Biblical and Classical patrimony of the West, agriculture, manufacturing, small business, close-knit communities, law and order, civil liberties, academic standards, all forms of art, mass political participation within a constitutional framework, or respect for the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilization to the point of natural death.
Therefore, in today’s America, being “conservative” has nothing, absolutely nothing at all, to do with strictly limited and strictly legal immigration, constitutional checks and balances, energy independence, Second Amendment rights and responsibilities, America as an English-speaking country, foreign policy realism, a strong defense capability used sparingly, abortion reduction, or the maintenance of traditional marriage.
It follows that a “conservative” has nothing, absolutely nothing at all, in common with those who voted simultaneously for Obama and for traditional marriage in California and Florida, with those who voted simultaneously for Obama and to ban discrimination against working-class white men in Colorado, with those who voted simultaneously for Obama and against deregulated gambling in Ohio and Missouri, with those who voted for Obama while keeping the black and Catholic churches going from coast to coast, with those who voted for a Ron Paul supporter and traditional Catholic in South Carolina, or with those who have introduced the Pregnant Women Support Act.
Rather, a “conservative” is concerned about nothing, absolutely nothing at all, except “limited government” and that for which it is a superfluous euphemism, low taxation, which can never be low enough, yet is nevertheless somehow supposed to fund never-ending wars all over the world.
That’s right.
Isn’t it?
Filed under: Uncategorized
Love of country and family and God should not be confused with love for big government. Yes, limited government is the core of the American conservative’s platform. Is this supposed to be newsworthy?
Define “limited government”? Define “big government”? Does the former just mean “ever-lower taxes” and the latter “pretty much any taxpayer-funded activity at all”?
If so, what about when the things set out in my middle three paragraphs call for such activity, as they sometimes do? Surely, they – “love of country and family and God” – are “the core”? They are the ends, either “limited government” or “big government” is merely the means, which may or may not be appropriate under the given circumstances.
Of course, it doesn’t really need to be said to a TAC readership, but there is no more “big government” project than a war. However, that does rather illustrate my point. I yield to none in opposition to the present wars. But war itself can sometimes be inescapable for love of country and family and God.
‘Define “limited government”?’
= U.S. Constitution.
So, whatever the Supreme Court says at the given time, then.
I’d be fascinated to know how many Americans have ever read the Constitution, or how many have ever read it and not found that, funnily enough, it agreed with whatever they had already thought before they did so.
The whole history of the American Republic, from the very start down to the present day, makes it abundantly clear that the Constitution can mean absolutely anything that the circumstances of the day are rightly or wrongly deemed to require.
But hey, it works better than most from the point of view of most people going about ordinary daily life.
David, why do you hate white Protestants? You like black Protestants (for reasons you never explain), and Catholics (of whatever race, I assume) but, as far as I can tell, white Protestants have no place in the strange political alliance you want to see in the United States.
I seems you think American conservatism’s best hope lies in an alliance between Jeremiah Wright and Joe Biden.
Oh wait, that already happened. And that alliance now runs the country. What do you have to complain about? America is already living your utopia, so I guess you should just declare victory and call it a day.
“It seems” … I once again managed to demonstrate the importance of reading your work before hitting “submit.”
In addition to recognizing (as the Catholics increasingly do) that they are being scammed by the GOP over abortion, many of the white Evangelicals also need to get over Christian Zionism, although serious Evangelical theologians have always regarded it as quite beyond derision. So they will take longer.
But they are in many ways the third point of the triangle. They, too, are largely blue-collar. And it is above all the blacks, the Irish Catholics and the Scots-Irish who see their young men systematically harvested in pointless, unwinnable wars.
Oh, and in the meantime, the alliance that I have in mind is not between Joe Biden and Jeremiah Wright, but between Bob Conley and those who delivered him the Democratic nomination in South Carolina.
Joe Biden? The gaiety of British national life would be greatly enhanced by a convenienty useless and harmless position for our own Joe Bidens, Dan Quayles, and so forth. Minor members of the Royal Family fulfil this role ad hoc from time to time, but something more permanent would be a bonus.
David, I get your point. Clearly in the grand scheme of things saving traditional marriage has more to do with conservatism than does taxation. But you clearly do not get American conservatism. A conservative should want to conserve things, right? An American conservative should presumably want to conserve the limited constitutional republic left to us by the Founders. That is not all he should want to conserve, but it is part of it. Government should be limited because government should actually follow the Constitution. Quaint idea I know. If the government was only doing what it was constitutionally authorized to do it would be 10-20% of its present size and taxes would be a minor issue. Just because the Constitution has been abuse does not mean it is unclear. Just that scoundrels have subverted it. What the Founders intended is quite clear. For an authentic American conservative, following the Constituion is not optional.
If their is fault with the limited government crowd it is that for pragmatic political reasons it has not always been strictly constitutionalist. Often it has just been less big government than the other guys.
I must defend David.
The spirit of American conservatism as expressed in the media is market-fundamentalist to the point of occasionally using quasi-anarchist slogans about the State (e.g., “that govt is best which governs least”).
At the same time American conservatism is presented, at least in the past few years, as wholeheartedly backing some adventure to make an idyllic myth of a “free America” the reality for all peoples of the world.
In reality, most self-labeled conservatives are, according to opinion polls, economic protectionists who are rather less keen to spread “Americanism” by force. A large proportion of the Republican electorate accepts *certain portions* of the welfare state, and 80% or so of them supported the minimum wage increase. This is really nothing new. They are taken on board by false promises of social conservatism.
Of course neoconservatism plus libertarian economics do not mix, but it is all a plan of using demagoguic rhetoric to support Wall Street and the Pentagon, focusing ire on pathetic small foreign countries, bureaucrats, and minorities, who are not actually so powerful.
For those paleos, however, who lean entirely libertarian: You cannot preserve your culture by destroying authoritative institutions. You cannot run a modern State at the size of what it was in 1800 (in an agrarian society) and expect it to survive. Of course the State should not do much of what it does, but that is not because it has too much power per se, but rather it uses its authority on occasion to bolster liberal principles.
You cannot emphasise that an individual’s “liberty” is derived from escaping authority and then expect to retain cultural and ethical conservatism in your communities. Rather than retreat from the govt and society, conservatives should use the existing institutions to reconstitute traditional family life and promote the best of Christian and Western Civilisation.
By the way, socially conservative Red-voting states have a much larger State sector in the economy as a % of jobs than blue-states. They are also more oriented towards agro-industrial production which sometimes depends on measures of protection. The blue states are not full of welfare queens so much as parasites who work in finance and insurance and their low-paid underlings. Some sort of paleo-constitutionalist revanchism has no political appeal.
An American conservative should presumably want to conserve the limited constitutional republic left to us by the Founders.
Which is defined by both the text of the Constitution and the interpretive traditions used to explicate the Constitution over the course of our history.
Just because the Constitution has been abuse does not mean it is unclear
AFAICT, Lindsay is saying that the Constitution is either unclear or sufficiently flexible to allow for a wide variety of interpretations. I do wonder to what extent the contrary belief, which I gather you hold, is found primarily in Protestants with a strong solo scriptura belief. (My apologies if I’m using that term inappropriately.) In any case, that seems like an enormously strong claim belied, at a minimum, by the Civil War.
But the genius, or certainly the reality, of the Constitution is that it has always been able to mean whatever the circumstances of the time and place were deemed to require.
If, as is often asserted, a constitutionally compliant government would be much smaller than the present one, well, says who? You may think that. But plenty of people don’t. And never have. How can that ambivalence be anything other than the intention of the original authors?
I am not opposed to “limited govenment” (very low taxes) in principle. I am opposed to it as principle. Means are not ends. The things that really matter are such as those set out in the middle three paragraphs of my post, especially the first two of them and above all the first. If limited government serves those ends in the given circumstances, then all well and good. But not otherwise.
And if the Constitution doesn’t say that, then too bad for the Constitution. It also banishes religion from the civic realm, but I can’t imagine too many people on here agreeing with that.
David once again preaching the heavy hand of government. And the Constitution does not band religion from the civic realm. It bans the establishment of an official religion by the federal government.
Why don’t you write on British matters, on which I can only hope you are better informed?
“And the Constitution does not band religion from the civic realm. It bans the establishment of an official religion by the federal government”
And what does that mean? I think, in this case, we all know what the extremely anti-Christian authors intended it to mean, however long it may have taken the Supreme Court to get round to enforcing it.
If you don’t like it, then fine. That just means that, at least on this point, you don’t like the Constitution and its authors. Well, the Constitution is not the Bible. Like anything else, it exists in the service of greater goods. If it serves them, then well and good. But not otherwise.
you’re a nut. Madison, the author, was very religious.
It was hardly a monograph.
But I say again, the Constitution is not the Bible. Like anything else, it exists in the service of greater goods. If it serves them, then well and good. But not otherwise.
Have you ever read The Jefferson Bible? How many people have ever even heard of it? What do people think that the Founding Fathers were? Puritans, I suspect. They were not. They would have been a lot less keen on religious liberty if they had been, although they themselves really only meant what they saw as liberty *from* religion.
“But I say again, the Constitution is not the Bible.”
Yes, I believe that’s intentional. Religion and politics are two different areas.
And the latter is subordinate to the former.
So we should be under political rule of Diocese. Anybody in America, much less England, favor that? Hello??? Do we have 1 more supporter?
What an utterly ridiculous, hopelessly outmoded, and regressive idea to advocate. Do you conceive it as only coincidence that nobody, not even at TAC, supports these ideas?
That wasn’t what I said. Constitutions and the like are of value insofar as they conserve and advance that which is of absolute value. Which derives from the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire. That far. And no further.
David, did it ever occur to you that the three traditions you cite contradict each other in many ways, in many areas?
Not when recapitulated in Christ and His Church, they don’t. And that recapitulation simply *is* Western civilization.
OK alright, sounds like a plan!
David, your ignorance of American History is so comprehensive as to constitute an insult to American readers. If you believe that the founders were irreligious you have no deep understanding of the foundation of my country. Before you embarrass yourself any more, please consider writing about UK politics here or something else you know about.
Actually, politics and religion are inseparable, just as ethics and theology cannot be fully divorced.
And the Founding Fathers were not particularly religious on average. The late 18th century was quite a secular time in both Britain and America. Church attendance was very low. Among the Fathers (and early presidents) you find a disproportionate number of deists and Unitarians. This was occasionally an issue in politics then, as John Adams accused Jefferson of atheism in the 1800 election.
Of course, this situation was largely reversed in the US (and somewhat UK) by the time of the American Civil War. (Formal) religiosity comes in waves.
David’s point entirely stands, even if it challenges the National Myth that the Founding Fathers took orders directly from God and wrote the fifth Gospel.
Thanks, Thomas. I have done a full post on this today. America wasn’t very religious at all in the late eighteenth century, but went that way in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because of immigration and revivals.
It is a quintessentially liberal position to venerate the American Republic as the simple product of the Enlightenment that it is, because it is the quintessentally liberal position to venerate the Enlightenment just as it stands.
The conservative position is to test the Enlightenment and its legacy, including to destruction where necessary, by reference to the whole Western tradition and (judged according to that tradition) the whole of human wisdom, and thus to recognize as part of that tradition and of that wisdom those parts which pass that test. And the Western tradition is fundamentally and ultimately the Christian recapitulation of the Hebrews, the Greeks and the Romans.
The American Republic is a key part of the Enlightenment and its legacy, as are the writings of the Founding Fathers.
“A large proportion of the Republican electorate accepts *certain portions* of the welfare state”
Thomas, it doesn’t matter what the electorate “accepts.” What matters is what the Constitution authorizes. If the electorate thinks it should authorize more then they should bother to amend it.
I get what you are saying and agree with much of it. And I do think it is sometimes the case that Constitutionalists allow the cart (strictly following the Constitution) to get ahead of the horse (conserving our civilization). (Especially libertarian Constitutionalists whose highest value is freedom vs. conservative Constitutionalist whose highest value is preservation.) One could also criticize the Constitution from an anti-Federalist standpoint. But strict construction and originalism are simply not negotiable conservative positions. (They are negotiable libertarian positions because constitutionalism for the libertarian is a position of convenience.) To abandon them is to abandon a significant part of what we are trying to conserve.
“Which is defined by both the text of the Constitution and the interpretive traditions used to explicate the Constitution over the course of our history.”
SCMT, no. It is defined by both the text of the Constitution and the ORIGINAL INTENT of the people who wrote it and the States that ratified it. Constitutional interpretation is at least as much the job of the historian as it is the lawyer.
There is a name for the “living and breathing” constitutional jurisprudence that you describe. It’s called liberalism.
“Interpretive tradition” is not irrelevant, but it is secondary to text and original intent. It is appealed to after these, never before. And interpretive tradition can never trump them.
David might want to read this
http://mises.org/story/3674
I’ve figured it out. The ramblings of David Lindsay are the equivalent of listening to an apologist for King George III. A Tory, through and through.