RSS Feed MenuThe United States in 2009 is living through the fiercest challenge to market institutions and limited government since the mid-1970s.
Defenders of free institutions will need the utmost energy, courage and perseverance for the work ahead. And yet at just this moment, the prevailing tone among those defenders is one of the most extreme despair.
The big conservative book of the moment, Mark Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny is suffused with this message of doom. “Liberty, once lost, is lost forever,” intones Levin in one of the book’s many dire assertions. The same tone is expressed in more urbane form in an elegant essay by Mark Steyn in the June issue of the New Criterion.
Driving north out of New York the other day, I heard a caller to Mark Levin’s show discuss his excellent book Liberty and Tyranny. The word she kept using was “inevitable”: The republic felt exhausted, and there was an “inevitability” to what was happening. A quarter-millennium of liberty seemed to be about the best you could expect, and its waning was—again—“inevitable.” As she spoke, the rich farmland of Columbia County rolled past my window. To many of its residents, the caller would have sounded slightly kooky. Were any of the county’s first families suddenly to rematerialize from their centuries of slumber, they would recognize the general landscape, the settlements, the principal roads, and indeed many of the weathered farmhouses. And they would be struck by the comfort and prosperity of their successors in this land. So what’s all this talk about decay and decline?
Ah, but I wonder if those early settlers would recognize the people, and their assumptions about the role of government…
When President Bush used to promote the notion of democracy in the Muslim world, there was a line he liked to fall back on: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Are you quite sure? It’s doubtful whether that’s actually the case in Gaza and Waziristan, but we know for absolute certain that it’s not in Paris and Stockholm, London and Toronto, Buffalo and New Orleans. The story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make their own decisions about health care, education, property rights, and eventually (as we already see in Europe, Canada, American campuses, and the disgusting U.N. Human Rights Council) what you’re permitted to say and think.
Steyn perceives the predominant conservative mood with characteristic sensitivity. I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard similar remarks over the past 9 months – probably hundreds of times. It’s not just talk radio chatter either: I was in the audience recently for an almost morbidly gloomy assessment by a person who had served at some of the very highest levels in the US government.
Ubiquity however is not the same thing as acuity. Repetition may improve a false idea’s plausibility, but it does nothing to enhance its truth.
The apocalyptic despair heard from today’s conservatives is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong as a description of reality, wrong politically, wrong psychologically, wrong morally.
It’s wrong first because it denies and traduces the successes and achievements of the conservative movement. The story of the world since 1975 has been a story of the marvelous return and spread of liberty, in the United States and around the world.
In 1975, the federal government set the price of every airline ticket, every ton of rail freight, every cubic foot of natural gas and every barrel of oil. It controlled the interest rates paid on checking accounts and the commission charged by stockbrokers. If you wanted to ship a crate of lettuce from one state to another, you first had to file a routemap with a federal agency. It was a crime for a private citizen to own a gold coin. The draft had ended only two years before, but not until 1975 itself did Congress formally end the state of emergency (and the special grant of presidential powers) declared at US entry into the First World War.
In 1975, the British government still owned automobile factories, steelmills, and shipyards. Many European governments still regulated the amount of foreign currency their citizens could hold. The world’s two most populous countries, China and India, stagnated under state control – coupled in the Chinese case with soul-crushing political totalitarianism. Half the continent of Europe was governed by communist police states. Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey were governed by dictators or juntas, as was almost all of Latin America, as were almost all of America’s most important East Asian allies.
1975 saw the launch of the terrible auto-genocide in Cambodia and the reach of communistic terrorist attacks against democracies from Uruguay to West Germany.
Over the next 30 years, a new wave of conservative governments would accept these challenges and overcome them. In almost every way that can be assessed or measured, the world is a better, freer place in 2009 than it was in 1975.
Soft despotism? It was only yesterday that the world was oppressed by hard despotism, and plenty of it! When conservatives lament the rise of despotism, we deny our own greatest achievements, our own claim to the applause of history. We reveal in this lament a childish lack of perspective and a dismal ingratitude for the work of the generation before our own.
Not to mention – and more about this in the next post – we sound like a hysterical clutch of sore losers.
This is part one in a series. Read the other articles here.
Fall and Declinism - The Plank // Jul 28, 2009 at 1:41 pm
[...] of reason in the midst of the conservative crackup. Here he is offering some perspective on the bitter declinism sweeping the GOP:The apocalyptic despair heard from today’s conservatives is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong as [...]
bethunedaja // Jul 28, 2009 at 1:58 pm
David, thou doth whine too much!!
Mark’s book is not a long whine nor a surrender and Instapundit is correct when Glenn, per Jonah Goldberg, reminds us that you sound more like someone raising the white flag and not Mark. Whining does not become you , David.
Heal thyself.
Kaz // Jul 28, 2009 at 2:11 pm
@sinz54
Liberals will never explain in detail what they believe the “proper role of government” is because they know the majority of Americans would reject them.
For the proper role of government, and the rationale of such, you should start here: http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html
Kaz // Jul 28, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Some great American whiners:
Abraham Lincoln
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
Martin Luther King Jr.
James Madison
Booker T. Washington
Mark Levin Fan » Blog Archive » David Frum is like a bad rash // Jul 28, 2009 at 2:42 pm
[...] Levin was once again targeted by David Frum in one of his articles. Yesterday, Mark hit back calling Frum a petty, insignificant fraud with a horrific record who [...]
ottovbvs // Jul 28, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Chekote // Jul 27, 2009 at 8:54 pm
“The financial market did not collapse. As far as I know, the Dow Jones is still trading every week day. And no, TARP did not save anything. They still have not bought one toxic asset.”
…………To start with that’s not true…….they bought AIG which is one huge toxic asset………it’s true the main initial strategy changed from buying up toxic assets to investing directly in the banks but there were sound reasons for this……it was also possible to switch strategies because the Fed has taken roughly $1.8 billion of toxic assets onto its balance sheet in return for cash injections into the banks…….it’s the main reason why the money supply spiked in the second half of last year……subsequently the treasury in partnership with private investors has started buying toxic assets but the market has been weak…….there are various articles and books out there describing all this you might like to read
Mark Levin Fan » Blog Archive » Frum and the Squishes vs. Levin and the Conservatives // Jul 28, 2009 at 4:19 pm
[...] wrong first because it denies and traduces the successes and achievements of the conservative movement. The story of the world since 1975 has [...]
Audio: Mark Levin calls David Frum is an ass, idiot, lardass, and moron | Mofo Politics | Hoping Obama Fails // Jul 28, 2009 at 9:17 pm
[...] Levin, in response to David Frum’s article “Quit [...]
jfhaney // Jul 29, 2009 at 12:42 am
David, you mention the “freedom to make…decisions about health care, education, property rights, and eventually (as we already see in Europe, Canada, American campuses, and the disgusting U.N. Human Rights Council) what you’re permitted to say and think.”
To take them in turn, I wonder first what decisions about health care you’re referring to, and how you believe the current proposed legislation (which I’m not an avid fan of) threatens them. As a general observation, I’m sure you understand that many people in need of health care currently have no choice as far as health care is concerned, so this much vaunted freedom vis a vis health care is rather irrelevant for a large number of Americans. Moreover, a “free market” in health care seems to be as irrational and wasteful as you accuse Medicare and Medicaid to be. To take only two aspects of this, first, fee-for-service health care apparently only encourages doctors to multiply services in order to augment their income. In short, what is market “rationality”, isn’t rational health care, and while it may benefit an “industry”, it ultimately isn’t good for society. Second, a fundamental principle of free market economics – the rational choice model of the consumer – doesn’t operate very well in health care: most people are not competent consumers of health care, being medical non-specialists; are in most high-expense episodes unable to “shop-around” (if you’re having a heart attack, you probably want the nearest, not the least expensive, hospital); and finally face inelastic medical choices (if you want transportation, a $50 bicycle might serve as well as a $50,000 Mercedes, but a liver transplant is a liver transplant – an aspirin won’t get the job done). For those aspects of health care where the free market operates well, I’m all for it. I wish it worked for all aspects, but I don’t believe it does.
As for education, I’m not sure what liberal plot endangers education. I would, however, be interested to know.
As for property rights, I think we can both agree that they are not absolute – as no right is. The rights of one individual must be considered in the context of those of another – a concept with which I believe conservatives are comfortable – but also of those of the effective community, which for conservatives is more problematic. I think a thoughtful and honest conversation is possible on this topic.
Your last item, that of free speech versus its regulation in the interest of not offending individuals or groups within society, is an area with which we almost certainly agree. I am a liberal – one I’d like to believe that does not make a fetish of freedom: that all may do as they please without responsibility to others, which is the overthrow of law and humanity, of the simple human virtues of self-discipline and forbearance – but in this I am an ideologue, a characteristic for which I endlessly castigate conservatives, and for which in this instance I plead guilty. It isn’t the speaker who must be regulated – speech should be free because to allow all speech, even the most repellent, is to guarantee a forum wherein the truth may be told – but the hearer. The hearer is allowed the same freedom to speak as the speaker, but no one should be allowed the freedom to silence (outside the – no freedom is absolute – constraints of slander and libel, when you demonstrably damage an individual with intended falsehoods).
I’m happy to know that you have made yourself an independent conservative voice. Unfortunately, it will probably make you less effective than more. Mavericks – left and right – own the margins, not the mainstream. They prefer light when everyone else responds to heat. It’s the way people are. Maybe the “light” people should talk more. Wha’ d’ya think?
jfhaney // Jul 29, 2009 at 1:12 am
And by the way, what may be a major difference between liberals and conservatives occurred to me in reading your article. I think we agree that democracy is a process, not a result; and that as long as we honor and maintain the process, we needn’t worry too much about what it produces. It is the process that is important.
This seems to hold true for conservatives in economics as well: the process, the free market, is primary. On the other hand, for liberals, outcomes may be more important. And liberals, unlike conservatives, do not equate market freedom with political freedom. Indeed, liberals may see them as sometimes contradictory.
drhagedorn // Jul 29, 2009 at 5:57 am
Dear sinz54,
I have read this several times, and I have no clue where you (Americans) get it from – so let me say this once loud and clear (I’ll use all caps):
SWEDEN IS NOT A SOCIALIST COUNTRY!
And it never was. Right now it is parliamentary constitutional monarchy, a trait it has in common for example with the UK. If you look up wikipedia’s list of scocialist countries you will not find Sweden among them, you will find it among the countries listed as liberal democracies, where you will also find the United States.
However, as Sweden has been governed for long stretches of its history by the major “left” party (currently they are not in power) you might make a case, that this makes the country “socialist”. The awkward fact that gets in the way of this reasoning is, that Sweden’s left party isn’t a even a socialist party – they are Social Democrats.
And yes, it does make a difference!
Quit Whining 4 // Jul 29, 2009 at 8:27 am
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