The Philosopher in Winter

The philosopher in all eras must be prepared for disgrace and exile:

In spite of his exile, he had a wide circle of friends and admirers to whom he wrote unbuttoned letters. In the most famous of these, to Francesco Vettori, we glimpse his addiction to hobnobbing with simple people over cards and drinks at the tavern. When in the late afternoon he is through with that recreation, he goes home, dresses in handsome garments, and converses with the ancients, "asking" them about their lives and actions. During these four studious hours he is never bored, he forgets his poverty and disgrace, and does not fear death."

Who was this philosopher who knew how to live in winter? Answer at end of next post.

Salisbury: The Triumph of Reaction

I’ve just finished one of the best political biographies I’ve ever read (David Donald’s Lincoln is the only one I can think of that might be superior), about one of the greatest Conservative leaders in history: Andrew Roberts’ Salisbury. Roberts is a superb writer, and had the advantage of a subject who was just as superb a writer, spent 9 years in full-time political journalism and preserved a full set of correspondence and records.

Robert Cecil, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, won three general elections and was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for almost 14 years between 1885 and 1902. Despite these accomplishments, Lord Salisbury never entered the Conservative pantheon. He was totally eclipsed in memory by the dashing and romantic Disraeli who was by comparison an electoral failure, leaving to Salisbury the job of putting Gladstone away for good His memory has been overshadowed even by such comparatively ephemeral figures as Lord Randolph Churchill, the artificer of “Tory Democracy”. Part of the cause of his obscurity is ideological. Both Disraeli and Churchill were figures from the left of the party, both solid examples of the classic “Red Tory”, in the original meaning of the term. Salisbury on the other hand was an outright reactionary, a High Tory of a kind that had disappeared in Canada decades before. Reaction, in its secondary or vulgar sense of opposition to and obstruction of change, was the essence of his philosophy. Disraeli ‘stole the Whigs’ clothes’ and broadened the franchise in the 1867 Reform Act, seeing increased enfranchisement as inevitable and not wanting all newly enfranchised groups to regard the Liberals as their friend and the Tories as their enemy forever; Salisbury resigned from Cabinet over the measure. (But few conservatives know that Salisbury had done minute calculations of the likely effect on Conservative fortunes of Disraeli’s proposed enfranchisement, finding the calculations Disraeli was passing on to be wrong. The next election after the Bill proved Salisbury right. In 1884, on the other hand, Salisbury was able to insist that the next major broadening of the franchise not be enacted until it was accompanied by a redistribution which made the package as a whole to the Conservatives’ betterment.) Change, he said, was “an evil, and we do not desire to give it any assistance…it occupies time and energies which are wanted for other purposes.’
He has an unlikely personality for a politician: a loner, affected permanently, Roberts thinks, by severe bullying at Eton, reserved, shy and unsocial, to the extent that in his later years there were a number of instances of his not recognizing members of his own Cabinet (they were after all in the Commons, while he governed from the Lords); as unconcerned as anyone could be about being liked, admired or honoured; notoriously sloppy and careless in dress; dismissive of political oratory, writing the Queen that extra-Parliamentary speaking engagements were “an odious addition to the burdens of political life in modern times…a bad fashion introduced by Mr Gladstone.” (Victoria greatly preferred Salisbury to Gladstone, to the extent of, quite unconstitutionally, forwarding Gladstone’s letters to her while prime minister on to leader of the opposition Salisbury, just for his information.) He could never have attained political leadership in our time (for which we are the losers.)
His claim to greatness has multiple supports. Among Conservative leaders in the Anglosphere, he was one of the greatest writers, thinkers and parliamentary and electoral tacticians. One could fill a sheaf of pages with his mordant, witty, sometimes cynical observations and sayings – and I may just do that for a while.

Russell Kirk and the Tyranny of the More Energetic Natures

Russell Kirk sets out two principles in setting out "the general lineaments of the kind of government which seems reasonably consonant with the general welfare." (Kirk has never a man to use 10 ordinary words when 20 words with a few archaisms thrown in would do.)

The first principle is that a good government allows the more energetic natures among a people to fulfil their promise, while ensuring that these persons shall not tyrannize over the mass of men. (33)

It's this last phrase that is of interest coming from an American conservative. With their libertarian bent, they find it impossible that "energetic natures" could "tyrannize over the mass of men"; only governments can tyrannize by definition.

Kirk later adds that "not only should a just government recognize the rights of the more talented natures, but it should recognize the right of the majority of men not to be agitated and bullied by these aspiring talents....there have been ages in which the aristocracy, natural or hereditary, has usurped the whole governance of life, demanding of the average man a tribute and an obedience which deprive the majority of their desire to live by custom and prescription..." (34) He thinks that natural aristocracy is not a problem in his time (1964), though, because it is the era of the mass man, of Ortega's revolt of the masses.

I think Kirk was missing the creation of an oppressive aristocracy right under his nose. Not the aristocracy of businessmen or capitalists that leftists might perceive. Aren't our new aristocrats the masters of the media, of Hollywood, of television, of popular music, even of newspapers as long as they're still around? From the time a child is sentient, they surround Kirk's fortresses of custom and tradition and besiege them with a 24/7 barrage of cultural and moral decadence. They ensure that those opposed to their rule must fight a guerilla war against a hostile culture in every area of life. Especially noxious is the insidious influence they exert over children, insistent upon asserting their control from the time they are first sentient. Unless parents or church or experience protect or rescue them, their worldview will be formed by their media overlords and they will be tyrannized by them until their dying breath.

And a tyranny is something that exists to be overthrown and destroyed.

(Quotations from "Prescription, Authority and Ordered Freedom" in Frank Meyer, What is Conservatism? (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964) 23- 40. Frank Meyer was the great apostle of "fusionism", an attempt to find, in philosophy, a dialectical synthesis between traditionalist and libertarian conservatism, and, more practically, to stop these two factions from destroying each other. I'm reading this collection of essays by folk such as Kirk, Kendall, Hayek, etc. to see if it has any relevance to the war going on today between libertarians and social conservatives.)

Rod Dreher Working on Discovering Fire

Chief CrunchyCon Rod Dreher likes occasionally to mull over things and make "discoveries" which are utterly obvious to anyone who has thought about social conservatism for more than the last hour or so. He asks whether his readers have ever wondered why the poor and working classes tend to adopt the more conservative forms of religion. Why yes, I wondered about that back when I was an undergraduate and so no doubt has everyone else who has ever had conservative instincts and the slightest interest in political theory or philosophy. I suspect that this manner of approaching this stuff fulfils a didactic function for Rod; for some reason he has and has retained a large number of liberal commenters who have never thought seriously about these things and is trying to break them in gently. Sure enuf there were a few commenters who seemed to be transmogrified by this brilliantly original line of thought.

Rod buries the lede further by launching into a digression about the superior personal appeal of charismatic varieties of religion over liturgical ones to the most poor and oppressed. He finally gets to the answer to the question: the poor and marginalized are drawn to religions with rules and moral structures because they have the most to lose through moral dissoluteness. If you descend into the depths through drugs, promiscuity and self-indulgence, and you are wealthy, dad and mom are always around to subsidize you in university for a few extra years until you can get your head together and straightened out. The poor have no such cushion. If you as a young man get in hock to bookies you can always get dad to bail you out at least one more time before the legbreakers pay you a visit. If you're struggling when starting out in the workplace, dad has contacts; later on if life just hasn't gone the right way you can at least look forward to inheriting the family's property when they pass on to give you one more chance or spree, however you decide. The wealthy and powerful have a larger margin of error.

There are other reasons as well, looking at the question from the obverse side. Why do the wealthy tend towards the liberal forms of religion? Well, what's distinctive about conservative religion? It counsels and demands self-restraint, restraint on one's use of power. Who has the most power to be restrained? The wealthy. Therefore they have the most to give up by adherence to conservative religion, and can be more easily assuaged by liberal religion which puts its restraints on others, demanding they refrain from cutting down trees or contributing to global warming.

Rod cites James Poulos over at the American Scene who, discussing the appeal of the odd new sect known as liberaltarians, refers to the Sex Vote, that segment of "people who are generally willing or even eager to trade away political and economic freedoms for broad (in terms of scope, variety, protection and enforcement) social and cultural freedoms". I think Poulos misunderstands what these people want, though. The cultural and sexual freedoms these people want they already have, and have had without threat for decades now. What they want now is to achieve cultural hegemony for the libertine approach to life and marginalize those who oppose it, through their control of mass media and elite institutions plus the occasional unbaring of the heavy hand through boycotts, firings, and the ministrations of the Human Rights Commission.

David Frum's NewMajority.com

This week brings the launch of David Frum's new website NewMajority.com. If you haven't read Frum's 2008 book Comeback, the new venture's statement of purpose will leave you in doubt about just what these people are up to. The key words are these which sum up the basic attitude expressed in Comeback:

Our party has now taken two bad beatings in two consecutive cycles. It looks very likely we are heading for a third. It's not a sign of lack of commitment to our party or our movement to acknowledge these hard facts.

Our goal here at NewMajority.com is to renew and reform our Republican party and the conservative philosophy so that we can again earn the confidence of the American people and govern responsibly and effectively. We don't claim to have all the answers. We are sure that we are asking the right questions.

Comeback ruffled some feathers in the conservative aviary. There are three components to the worldview expressed in Comeback; at least two if not three of them challenge the default position, or at least the default for-public-consumption position, of the conservative establishment. First is an assessment of the future prospects of the Republican Party as they appear at the moment. Frum's is bleak. Significant portions of the electorate, portions that are growing, seem to becoming increasingly hostile to the party. Aversion to Republicans by Hispanics, women, suburbanites, the college-educated -- these things are not going to magically melt away. Many of the GOP's signature issues have exhausted their appeal. For example, income tax cuts? Further significant middle class tax cuts are unsustainable economically; almost 40% of Americans pay no income tax at all and have no need of reductions; 80% of American workers now pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes.

The second issue is what to about all this. Here's where the participants take off their coats and the brawling begins. Much of the movement believes that all that is needed is to return to true conservative principles, to march as in days of yore behind banners of bold colours not pale pastels, to be the party of Ronald Reagan again. Frum isn't buying it, and neither am I. Ronald Reagan didn't prevail by urging his party to ask "What would Barry Goldwater have said? What would Robert Taft have done?" The retrenchment purists are people whose plan if they could redo the Charge of the Light Brigade would be to try to think of a way to make the horses run faster. Frum urges a full, ruthless, corner to corner and ceiling to floor review of the policies the GOP has been running on. This is where Frum is right, and Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and the official voices of the conservative movement are wrong. Why do we laugh at the way Democrats acted during the Reagan years? Because they refused to look at and think about their now vote-losing positions and kept on losing as a result, always unwilling to believe that their ideas had been rejected again because the public didn't agree with them. There's a chasm here between those who want to be or at least look thoroughly orthodox and those who want to win elections.

The third component of the approach is a grab bag of new policies and strategic revision of old ones to recapture the public imagination. This isn't the place to go through them. I'll just say that Frum certainly used his imagination. I would never have thought of prison reform as a big vote-winning issue, and a government led "war against obesity" seems likely to be effective only in giving Letterman, Leno and every other comedian in the land a free joke every day of the week. I probably disagree with two-thirds of Frum's policy prescriptions, but that's not the point. I think that he's got the right attitude, the willingness to strip down the whole machine and reevaluate the design of every part, and that's what matters. Since the book Frum has gotten into issues that conservatives never touch such as income equality and the failure of the middle class to gain anything from the income growth of the Bush years, even before the meltdown.

About the future of Frum's new website and movement I have no prediction. I confess to know nothing about Frum's stable of opinioners and journalists or whence they have been rounded up. Frum has closed it up at NR and it looks like he's going to be prolific here so the site will always be worth looking at for that alone. Skimming the titles and summaries of the hefty pile of opinion pieces in the first week there might be some danger that the website become something of a nest of social liberals, malcontents and defeatists. In the worst case scenario Frum could be written off as someone who's "gone over to the liberals", and marginalized and ignored.

But I'm wishing the New Majority good health. A lot of the next 4 years is going to be a defensive trench war. It's nice to have someone thinking about new weapons for when we can go on the offensive again.

Libertarians or Libertines?

David Boaz of the Cato Institute takes on folks questioning whether there can be a political alignment when self-professed conservatives so outnumber liberals in the electorate, calling the liberal/moderate/conservative spectrum a "crude and one-dimensional view of the political spectrum". Libertarians, you see, don't fit within any one of those categories; in the Cato Institute's preferred formulation libertarians are "fiscally conservative and socially liberal". Wait a second, David. Didn't you just tell us that the liberal/conservative distinction was crude and one-dimensional? How does it suddenly become more sophisticated when it is applied to the whole grand tableau of social policy? The fact is that principled libertarians do not find themselves wholly on either side of the social liberal/conservative divide. Yes, on abortion and drugs libertarians find themselves aligned against conservatives. But as Matt Barnum notes:

On the other hand, conservatives and libertarians find themselves aligned on matters such as gun control, affirmative action, political speech (i.e. campaign finance reform), environmental regulations, education policy (generally), health regulations (i.e. smoking and fatty food bans), and freedom of association.

Randall Hoven offers a libertarian's defence of social conservatism The American Thinker. Seems he's not afraid of social conservatives when he looks at the agenda of the true liberty killers, the social liberals, and their massive planned expansions of government power.

Now it's up to libertarians to decide how they're going to describe themselves. But this sally from Boaz is just another salvo in the war for the soul of the Republican Party. It's quite understandable that libertarians want to pull the GOP in their direction. And reasonable and practical libertarians are an essential part of any conservative coalition, although the true believers are too ornery to become a permanent part of anything. But why is Boaz hyping the "social liberal" tag for libertarians? Boaz blew the gaff right after the election, when he described the ideal candidate for the future as "a candidate in either party who presented himself as a product of the social freedom of the Sixties and the economic freedom of the Eighties"

Say what? Boaz is expecting the GOP not only to move in the direction of limited government, but to buy into the Zeitgeist of the Sixties. In the culture wars this is a demand not just for surrender, but surrender and betrayal. Libertarians should ask themselves if they want to hitch their wagon to leaders who want to saddle them with an attachment to a culture that is distasteful if not repugnant to people with a conservative bent, when libertarianism as such need not take any position on whether America should be more like 60s San Francisco or 50s TV sitcoms.

Libertarians absolutely have to be respected by fusionists and others as the Republicans pull themselves together and reorganize, all in the midst of what will be a bloody fight to stave off at least the worst elements of Obama's radical agenda. But there is an element of the movement that is libertine, not libertarian, and they will be sabotaging the effort to fuse the various components of the conservative coalition. Innocent flower children as they may look in their bellbottoms and granny glasses, they need to be watched.