RSS Feed Menu
It’s perhaps inevitable that when a philosophy transforms into a mass-movement, its subtler points will be lost. It’s difficult, after all, to rally around abstractions that aren’t absolute in nature. There has to be an exciting common denominator; something that is not only new, but bold. Still, the atmosphere that surrounds the Tea Party — just like the atmosphere that surrounded the anti-war protesters of the George W. Bush era — strikes me as particularly intellectually noxious.
I probably agree with Glenn Beck on at least two out of three policy points. He does a lot of good when he gets tens of thousands of people to finally pick up a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. And yet, when I listen to him — or other popular icons of the activist right, such as Sarah Palin or Mark Levin — there’s a dissonant undercurrent that makes it impossible for me to embrace them. It runs deeper than policy disagreements: I’m not a “moderate Republican” and I don’t ally myself with the Olympia Snowes of the world. It’s something more fundamental.
Conservatism proper is a disposition. It’s a tradition that runs through Socrates, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, Michael Oakeshott, and Thomas Sowell. These men disagree on as much as they agree on, but there’s a common current that runs through their thought: it is skeptical, wary of claims to alter or improve the human condition, and — as David Frum brilliantly describes Kirk’s thought — offers us a vision, not a program.
Sarah Palin, Mark Levin, and their allies offer us a program. Levin’s manifesto Liberty and Tyranny, for instance, begins with a bullet-point agenda of what constitutes conservatism in the year 2010, complete with demands concerning taxes, immigration, and the welfare state. It’s incredible that anyone could miss the point so utterly. How did conservatism, which positioned itself as an anti-ideological strain of thought, transform into a bullet-point ideology ready to cast out anyone who isn’t a True Believer?
Russell Kirk aptly described ideology as a drug. Meditate on that. Ideology, in the classical conservative worldview, is something that provides a person with a comfortable, affixed set of dogma that serves itself, rather than the interests of the individual and his community. Traditional conservatives, skeptical that anyone can really remake society from on high, want to pierce through these absolute claims, not come up with their own. Those who want to examine their beliefs ought to act as Socrates did, asking questions even about those beliefs that are taken as axiomatic.
Edmund Burke lambasted Thomas Paine’s incredible pretensions that we can “start the world anew.” We can’t make the world anew. We can’t remake society from on high. We can’t fix the troubles of the human condition with a bullet-point agenda.
“I probably agree with Glenn Beck on at least two out of three policy points. He does a lot of good when he gets tens of thousands of people to finally pick up a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.”
Thanks for publicly confirming you are clueless about the world around you. Paying any attention to the paranoid views of Hayek and Beck makes you as credible as creationists.
I kind of doubt Thomas Sowell will be remembered thousands of years from now like Socrates. Jesus christ. I wouldn’t call him skeptical as much as a raging paranoid.
“How did conservatism, which positioned itself as an anti-ideological strain of thought, transform into a bullet-point ideology ready to cast out anyone who isn’t a True Believer?”
That’s easy, they hitched their wagon to what turned into an Ignorance Movement. You could even argue the party promotes ignorance lest the base wise up to the fact that they’re being cynically manipulated. Past leaders like Reagan, Nixon, Eisenhower, couldn’t win a Senate primary today. They’d be evicerated by the same people who hold them up as icons.
As usual you fail to see the forest for the trees.
The problem isn’t that Glenn Beck’s agenda is a insane, it’s that his agenda is insane. You can’t separate the 2 out of three points if the third point is batsh*t crazy.
And as for those noxious anti-war protesters: We were right.
Iraq is an on-going disaster, a Trillion Dollar boondoggle that has aimed 50,000 troops, killed 5,000 of them, killed and maimed over 100,000 Iraqis based on a lie. Millions of people worldwide said don’t go and because a couple dozen of them compared Bush to Hitler you have decided to totally nullify their point.
You should afford us the same consideration you give to the teabaggers, birthers, and commie hunters, and gay bashers that make up the modern GOP.
>Oldskool: I doubt that more than fifty people in history will be remembered “alongside” Socrates. My point was that this skeptical conservative tradition can be found in modern-day things, as well. Anyone who hasn’t read Sowell’s “Conflict of Visions” or “Quest for Cosmic Justice” should go read it — like, yesterday. He’s maddeningly insightful at times.
>rbottoms: I do give you the same consideration that I do the birthers: None at all, except maybe a light form of contempt. Too irrelevant to hate too much.
“>rbottoms: I do give you the same consideration that I do the birthers: None at all, except maybe a light form of contempt. Too irrelevant to hate too much.”
Congrats Alex, you have now joined Linnane and Guardiano as “writers” on this site who specialize in insulting their readership. Way to go.
You asked recently if you were a pervert, maybe you are, who cares. However you definitely are a child. You need to grow up and soon.
Fine. Sorry. Anti-war protesters are all brilliant, good-looking, and love their mothers with all of their hearts.
Can you explain what makes Socrates in essence a natural conservative icon in a way that would make liberal minded people say “oh, no, I wouldn’t support that”. Just curious here – strikes me that there are components of Socratic thinking that could easily be pointed to as fundamental to both sides’ beliefs, not just one.
Socrates naturally fits in with the classically conservative disposition — he doesn’t believe he’s got all of the answers to life’s problems, let alone the ability and know-how to administer solutions from on high. He had a wonderful way of tearing apart people’s language games. He would have had a field day with, say, Marx (“to each according to his ability and to each according to his need” is one of the most disastrous word games ever unleashed upon mankind).
Obviously the counterpoint to that would be to say “read the freakin’ Republic,” but I refer, of course, to the actual Socrates, and not the one who Plato stuffed words into. I like the Socrates of the Apology, of Euthypro. The Republic has elements of conservatism but its practical politics are authoritarian, if not totalitarian. Karl Popper’s critique remains the most relevant.
It’s widely accepted that the Socrates of the early round of Plato’s works is a legitimate representation of the man’s thought (compare Xenophon), while the middle and later works are basically just Plato using Socrates as a character. No question in the latest works (the Laws and such). At least, that’s what I’ve read.
Forget the comparison to Socrates. The more apt one in this context is to say that the conservatives are like Aristotle: unlike Plato, the Aristoteleans took Plato’s larger way of thinking and miniaturized it, fixed its components disallowing them to consider all points of view.
Alex,
I’m not so sure I see how the liberal disposition is one that claims to “have the answers to all of life’s questions.” This seems overly broad and a bit cartoonish. Moreover, “having a wonderful way of tearing apart people’s language games” is a description that could easily be applied to thinkers of either tradition against thinkers of either tradition. No political disposition has the corner on philosophical capacity. The Republic is a work whose proper interpretation is widely argued by many, but it doesn’t matter — this is Plato’s work, not Socrates’, and no one thinks this is the actual Socrates anyway. I realize the early works are considered more representative of the historical man.
So I’m still not at this point clear on what makes Socrates a definitive conservative thinker. What specifically in Euthyphro or Apology makes him a conservative in a way that captures — to use a Socratic meme — the essence of the man such that no liberal minded thinker could possibly agree with what he represents?
So (putting aside the “all the great thinkers in history were Conservative” aspect, as it makes even less sense than the “Jesus was a liberal” bumper stickers), the biggest problem that I have is not only does the current right-wing not tolerate dissent of any kind, but it’s actually mandating what I believe are anti-conservative principles…
For example, you cannot be a “good Conservative” if you’re not for lower taxes. Well, last I checked, we’re broke, we’re spending more than we can take in, and we’re never, EVER going to balance the budget solely by cutting spending. GWB’s income-tax cut has meant that while our income taxes are lower, just about every other tax is UP (property taxes funding schools, sales taxes funding road repair, etc). What about those of us who care about fiscal responsibility?? What about those of us who would give up the majority of the GWB tax cuts in return for a balanced budget (when combined with drastic cuts to spending)?
Or along those same lines, the massive spending on our bloated, overstretched military? I can remember a time when “conservatism” was about an isolationist policy, and restrained foreign involvement (remember a “humble foreign policy?” Remember “no nation building?”). We went from spending $300b on our DoD in the beginning of the decade to $800b now, and not only do “Conservatives” not want to cut our military spending, they want to INCREASE it.
Or how about the insistence of government intrusion into our social lives? The party of limited government suddenly wants the government poking it’s nose into what you’re doing in your own bedroom, or your own body, or who you’re marrying, or what sexual orientation you are. Sharon Angle doesn’t want the government interfering with our health care system, but will gladly vote to prohibit you from drinking alcohol?? WTF? Sarah Palin insists that no Government entity should come between you and your doctor, unless you’re considering an abortion, in which case ALL of Government should come between you and your doctor.
So yes, you’re being judged by how well you adhere to the party of limited government based on how insistent you are at having the government be expanded into people’s personal life. Just another reason why the hypocrisy of the right means I’m staying far, far, FAR away from anything with an (R) after it’s name.
@Chris — I’m really just focusing in on his skeptical disposition, here; his penchant to penetrate claims to have come to a Solution to a Problem. In this sense, I’d group him with people like David Hume, who I almost put on the list. Left-wing thought tends to say something like: “We’ve got our ideal; now we just need to find the right people to implement the right program” — But as I see it, this whole notion of universal health care is just a total fraud. Universal world-class education: another fraud. I mean, these things are just impossible. Everyone gets to go to college — another ridiculous piece of nonsense. I see contemporary left-wing political thought as being shrouded in language games. Start asking questions — “what do you mean by ‘x’”?, “who decides?,” “at whose expense?” — and it all collapses upon its own utopian incoherence. I have a deep distrust toward people who use language for a living — writers, politicians, lawyers, philosophers — and try my hardest to write for clarity. In that sense, Socrates is my guide. I do believe that clear language inevitably leads one to a skeptical sort of conservatism.
@dante — No! Not all of the world’s great philosophers were conservatives. That is not my point at all. Do you think I just pulled those names out of a hat? Voltaire, Paine, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Russell, Sartre, Rand, Foucault — these people were NOT conservatives. I like a couple of them, but they were manifestly not conservatives.
Anti-war protesters are all brilliant, good-looking, and love their mothers with all of their hearts.
So then length of ones hair or their choice of footwear make a difference whether one is correct?
We told you so.
We said there were no WMD, that Saddam was no threat to us and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. We said that war would be a strategic and financial blunder and we were right.
Even now you can’t seem to bring yourself to address the Trillion dollars shoveled into a furnace and the thousands maimed & killed for no measurable gain.
Iraq was a blunder, one that has endangered our ability to succeed in fighting the one war that actually had something to do with 9/11.
Afghanistan may yet fail, due in great measure to it being starved for resources for eight frakking years during which George Bush poured men and treasure into a war he started so he could prove to his father he was not really a f**kedup alcoholic with a short attention span.
President Obama has put more troops and money into that war that GW ever did and still he’s attacked for insufficient commitment to salvaging that mission by a barely post-pubescent know-it-all who doesn’t have the balls to put on his country’s uniform and go defend it.
The Republican Party. The gift that keeps on giving.
Republican Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana says he supports conservative organizations challenging President Barack Obama’s citizenship in court.
Vitter said at Sunday’s event that the only direct information he has about the issue is what he’s learned through the news media “filter.” His spokesman did not respond to a question Monday about whether the senator questions Obama’s citizenship.
A spokesman for Rep. Charlie Melancon, a Democrat challenging Vitter, called the birth certificate issue “nonsense.”
“While Louisiana families are suffering from the biggest man-made disaster in history, David Vitter is trying to score political points by perpetuating a completely debunked conspiracy theory,” spokesman Jeff Giertz said.
Surprised he had the time to consider the issue. In between visits to hookers willing to dress him up in diapers of course.
ACK! The Road to Serfdom? Really? Hayak is of course a genius and has much to teach us, but TRTS is by far his least compelling work. His central claim in it is that successive Labour governments will cause Britain to slide into totalitarianism. No matter what the excesses of pre-Thatcherite UK were, they were certainly not totalitarian. The only reason it comes up all the time now is this absurd claim that Obama is leading us in a slide towards tyranny. Please, do these people even know what these words mean?
For Hayak’s actually important work, you can all start here:
http://tinyurl.com/243kers
You daily teabagger a**wipe.
So to bring us around to my point today, Allen Coniglio, a self-appointed “leader” of the Ostrowski wing of the local tea party, sent this around to his small group:
If you do nothing else in your life, you must see this. It may be the funniest thing you ever see. Hurry. They have taken this down half a dozen times but thankfully, someone keeps putting it back up.
Allen
I won’t embed the video, because it depicts Farina as Obama, makes jokes about Joe Lieberman and the Holocaust, and likens Nancy Pelosi to a whore (she is a powerful woman, after all).
I’ve only been alive for a little more than 40 years, and I can categorically say that I’ve seen literally thousands of funnier things. There’s clearly a reason it gets taken down constantly, and preservation of an 80 year-old copyright isn’t the reason why. This is the same crowd that supports an angry horse-porn aficionado and sender of racist emails whose entire platform consists of being angry.
Russell Kirk aptly described ideology as a drug. Meditate on that.
You are correct. Look at the frenzy of the Tea Partiers. They are definitely high on self righteousness. It’s no chance coincidence that these people are also strongly religious in the blind rule following sense.
To many, a black and white world is significantly less scary than one that is shades of gray. After all, the bad guy always wears a black hat (or turban).
“Left-wing thought tends to say something like: “We’ve got our ideal; now we just need to find the right people to implement the right program” — But as I see it, this whole notion of universal health care is just a total fraud. Universal world-class education: another fraud. I mean, these things are just impossible. Everyone gets to go to college — another ridiculous piece of nonsense. I see contemporary left-wing political thought as being shrouded in language games. Start asking questions — “what do you mean by ‘x’”?, “who decides?,” “at whose expense?” — and it all collapses upon its own utopian incoherence.”
I was hoping you were going to flesh this out. I think you are taking what amount to value judgments and inventing an argument of Utopianism. Are universal access to roads a fraud, or police, or universal K-12 education? None of those are “impossible” – they’re simply what we want. The left has no interest in the enormous defense spending that conservatives have favored for decades. Isn’t that absurdly large expense Utopian – not even mentioning the neoconservative impulse.
But I’d like to focus down on education. Conservatives, yourself included, tend to view individuals as “self-made”. As such, achievement gaps, even correlated as they are with socio-economic status, simply represent human failure as a human condition – some people will just never do as well. So the idea of universal “world class” education, or college attainment is viewed as Utopian. Liberals are seen as naive do-gooders who lack insight into their own limitations. Poverty has always been with us, and it always will be, etc. Just look at attempts A, B, C, etc. (Marxism, Unions, War on Poverty, etc.).
But the problem with this is it is completely wrong. And what I don’t understand is that while it correlates with ideological values, it is a completely empirical question. Can we take poor kids and educate them to perform as well as middle class peers? Can we erase the achievement gap? Is it possible to send nearly every child to college?
Yes. We are doing it now. The Harlem Children’s Zone, serving primarily poor students, sends nearly all of them to college. These are students conservatives would generally cite as evidence of the flawed human condition (put aside the racial, etc. issues involved in that assumption), and therefore give up on. They would say it is the teachers, or the unions, or the parents, or the students – but somehow the result is inevitable (don’t ask me if this appears incoherent, it’s not my ideology). What the HCZ does is spend roughly 3x the money per student, and reshape the community by bringing in parents from birth and essentially helping them see what they what they need to do to be good parents, and then take the kids and give them whatever they need to be successful.
The reason this works is not a mystery. It is based on the theory of social and human capital. Poor kids, their parents and communities simply have less of it. Isolated geographically, this deficit feeds on itself, creating a social “black hole” of sorts that no one has ever really figured out how to rectify. Until now. See, while conservatives were busy kvetching about liberals and their schemes, liberals were busy doing the hard work (propelled by that “Utopian” belief in social justice) of figuring out what the problem is and how to fix it.
Social research in a variety of fields was done, and factors were identified that strongly correlate with success. Human development is anything but simple, but by focusing resources in critical areas, we can change people lives. Just to give a couple of s example, it was found that children in poor neighborhoods are at much higher risk for lead exposure, which evidence overwhelmingly shows to cause cognitive deficits. Children from poor homes are much less likely to receive the type of stimulation that leads to increased vocabulary, cognitive ability and emotional development. By Kindergarten, poor kids can have 2-3x smaller vocabularies. Again, this is all empirical evidence of structurally reinforced reduction in human and social capital.
What we have then developed are targeted, evidence-based programs designed to reduce this lack in capital. What this ultimately means is nipping social problems in the bud, so-to-speak. Most social ills can be traced back to a relative lack of social capital, and the generational poverty and dysfunction it breeds.
As afar as universal college attainment – we know how to get the students ready. But what would that look like? Well, we’ve never been faced with such a problem. I don’t know what the answer is. But there is no reason why we can’t expect every student to at least be capable of going. The HCR’s budget is $300 million, spending about $30k a year on each kid. That means enrolling 1 million poor kids in a similar program would cost around $30 billion dollars a year. Can you think of *any* investment that pays such incredible social, economic – and moral – dividends?
This isn’t Utopian. This is data-driven. And the only reason we aren’t doing it is a conservative mind-set that says “we shouldn’t”.
Can you think of *any* investment that pays such incredible social, economic – and moral – dividends?
Yes, but… Obama… Kenya… Bell Curve… Poverty Pimps… Rugged Individualism.
Better to spend that money preserving tax cuts for people who matter. You know, those making $250,000+ a year.
Are you happy Alex??
Here you attempted to criticize various conservatives and it is served as “red meat” to the Lib. lions on this blog.
Go ahead post all the explanations you want, you will not penetrate their ideology.
I will chalk this inexperience up to your youth. Your attempt at examinations of the conservatives will always be met with derision from the Lefties posting here. As you may learn their reason for being here is not discourse but derision. Not reason argument only insult, and racism.
I encourage you to keep posting, trying to explain, for only through exposure will you actually see why Levin responds to Libs the way he does, without remorse because they will not be reasoned with. Please keep trying, I dare you.
Here Alex let me show you.
Vidoqo, I goggled your Harlem Children Zone and like you, I find it a remarkable and inspiring enterprise. I also noticed they had their own charter schools which enable them to immerse their students in an atmosphere of excellence.
Like you I think its wonderful, and certainly shows that charter schools have a place.
Which political party do you think supports charter schools??
You have taken an example of charter schools and twisted it into an accusation against conservatives when you know they are the only ones currently in the political spectrum which support charter schools. You want funding for you charter schools be prepared in Nov to vote for people which support them.
I seriously doubt you will.
Go ahead post all the explanations you want, you will not penetrate their ideology.
Yeah, because we’re the party obsessed about birth certificates, zombie Lincoln, FEMA death camps, and a secret Marxist takeover of the USA led by ObamaHitlerMao.
Thank you Rbottoms, a more fitting example I could not have imagined.
sdspringy asked… Which political party do you think supports charter schools??
Stanford, CA – A new report issued today by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found that there is a wide variance in the quality of the nation’s several thousand charter schools with, in the aggregate, students in charter schools not faring as well as students in traditional public schools.
While the report recognized a robust national demand for more charter schools from parents and local communities, it found that 17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts, with 46 percent of charter schools demonstrating no significant difference.
The problem with charter school advocates is that they think the charter school concept in and of itself is a magic bullet. The fact is that they can be a great tool when used properly, but they are only a tool. The program surrounding the charter school, as in the example given by RBottoms, sounds great and used the charter school as a tool, not the other way around.
BTW, remember when GW breathlessly talked up the success of charter schools in Texas? From the same source as above, there is a press release entitled:
CHARTER SCHOOLS IN TEXAS PERFORM SIGNIFICANTLY BELOW THEIR TRADITIONAL PUBLIC SCHOOL PEERS.
@Alex:
I don’t think anyone on either side of the political spectrum doubts the advantages of a skeptical disposition. I don’t even think liberals would object to the skeptical questions “so who benefits from universal health care?” or “what are the unintended consequences?” There may be specific liberals in public politics who reject the questions, but they aren’t rejecting them due to some theoretical commitment to dogmatism on liberalism’s part.
Similarly, one might ask – as did Socrates – “what is the value of this traditional practice?” or “does this religious belief really seem rational?” or whatever. Socrates might have been relatively traditional, but he challenged quite a bit. Moreover, I don’t think a conservative in theory needs to reject these lines of skeptical reasoning about tradition, though some do. When they do, I don’t see it as a theoretical commitment to the dogmatism of conservative doctrine. It’s more about politics, or about the emotions that demand that one keep one’s own belief system intact. In fact, I could envision your opponent using Hume, for one, to argue quite the opposite of your point. Is it conservative to pick away at settled intuitions and beliefs that have been around for ages and which seem to be doing no one any harm at all? I don’t see why not, just as much as I don’t see why a liberal couldn’t easily argue the same thing.
In the end this is just a Socratic point: your own intuitions about how ancient sages easily (and so somewhat suspiciously) line up with this or that rigidly defined political division is likely due to a set of beliefs that you yourself might be holding onto a bit too tightly and which you are projecting onto the past. One of the things I’ve often found so particularly interesting about many ancient sages is that they seem to resist such easy categorization.
With a few deft phrases, Ann Coulter may have ended their whole game. “Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney have demanded that Steele resign…” she wrote. “Didn’t liberals warn us that neoconservatives want permanent war? I thought the irreducible requirements of Republicanism were being for life, small government and a strong national defense, but I guess permanent war is on the platter now, too.”
She added, “if Kristol is writing the rules for being a Republican, we’re all going to have to get on board for amnesty and a ‘National Greatness Project,’ too—other Kristol ideas for the Republican Party. Also, John McCain. Kristol was an early backer of McCain for president—and look how great that turned out!”
The usual smears that foreign policy hawks use to discredit their critics simply cannot work on Ms. Coulter, and as a result, everyone inside the conservative movement who harbors secret doubts of their own about Afghanistan is thinking, “they can’t question her ideological loyalty, or her patriotism, or her hatred for liberals. I guess being anti-war isn’t verboten anymore.”
That’s a problem for the hawks. When even Ann Coulter is calling you a warmonger, it tends to frighten people.
This is fun.
LFC, I do not doubt your statistics however you miss a very important point concerning charter schools.
The parents has the option to remove their child and seek other alternatives. Significant option, wouldn’t you agree.
Do students else where have such an option, No.
You strike me as someone who would take issue with the Declaration of Independence as being too “programmatic” and not quite visiony enough. As if conservatives only set out broad philosophical armchair principles and leave the acting to lesser, less intellectual, sorts.
We are not talking about metaphysics here but a more practical philosophy (rooted in the enduring nature of man) which has as its utmost expression: true and right action.
And what about this, the largest bullet point ever written by a group of conservative political philosophers: “We . . . solemnly publish and declare that these United Colonies are and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown. . . .” I’ll stop there because you might be getting offended at the practicality of it all.
I don’t know what your intellectual customs or habits are but they could use some considerable reflection.
SDSpringy, I have no problems with charter schools (or magnet schools, for that matter), I’m just saying that they are simply a tool and not a program. And the programs wrapped around charter schools have not always done all that well.
I support finding options to standard public schools, but there is one thing that I would want addressed when pushing towards a greater use of privately run charter schools, school vouchers, or any other alternatives. Since these schools are run privately, they are able to fail. So if the programs become very popular, they could siphon off a fair percentage of students from the standard public schools. So far, so good. I have NO problem with that.
Where I get scared is what happens if/when one of these organizations fails. Am I, as a local taxpayer, then responsible for paying whatever it takes to ramp back up the public school infrastructure and staff to finish out the education of the stranded kids? And if another group comes in and pulls them back, am I on the hook for the relatively new but now unused infrastructure?
I think that any private entity responsible for school students should be forced to carry a bond so if then go belly up (and some of them most certainly will … and have), I’m not penalized for an experiment in privatization.
SD, I think I should have made something clearer. I am not impressed that one party (or person, or group, etc.) advocates charter schools because they aren’t an answer. I want to hear somebody advocating a better way of educating students. If that method happens to require charter schools to function, no problem. But advocating charter schools simply because they are a choice doesn’t impress me very much.
I’ll stop there because you might be getting offended at the practicality of it all.
Yes, the founders were a model of perfection. Especially the part where they personally owned slaves and left that little twist in the creation of the USA in place.
A more irrelevant response I could not imagine. The blogger’s point appears to be that the true conservatives are not men of action who define specific plans. Well he’s wrong as a matter of history and as a matter of political philosophy. Whether you are a conservative or a liberal the bottom line, rbottoms, is always — how can we make our vision a reality.
Whether you are a conservative or a liberal the bottom line, rbottoms, is always — how can we make our vision a reality.
Yes, but you don’t have to deify the people involved in the creation of our system in the process. I can simultaneously hope Jefferson is roasting in Hell for his role in the sale of people like animals and support how the Constitution, as finally amended to remove the blight of slavery, operates.
So-called conservatives like Alex find it impossible to believe we liberals can make that distinction and still be able to serve as soldiers, members of our representational government, and interested observers in our Democracy.
I find his excuses for not going off to soldier just that. His cocooning himself in the safety of Kant and Socrates is just so much bullsh*t. Not atypical to a horde of super patriots in this country.
But then I served just so the youngster could make such choices.
“It’s perhaps inevitable that when a philosophy transforms into a mass-movement, its subtler points will be lost. It’s difficult, after all, to rally around abstractions that aren’t absolute in nature.”
Tiny nitpick – all philosophy is abstract in nature. Nothing’s changed about the advisability of grappling with those abstract issues. The only thing that HAS changed is your other Radical Mouths don’t want to play with you anymore and call you bad names.
“There has to be an exciting common denominator; something that is not only new, but bold.”
Since this is the part where the camera pans thru the crowd and slowly zooms in on you, sell this scene for me. Is there swelling music? Do you have a score in mind? Now, are you an ACTUAL superhero like KickAss, or just The Humble Beginnings Of The Next Buckley+Rand+Nitczche? If there is a costume, do you pull your shirt open like Superman? That would be cool.
I do like the narrator voice-over, though. “Not only new, but bold”. It’s got zazz, you know? I like it. More importantly, the kids’ll like it. Oh, you learned about this in your “Intro To Theater Marketing” class last semester? Well, you’re certainly applying the lessons of that class here. Thank god you’ve had all those extra credits. You’re so much more well informed than like a high-school senior!
“Those who want to examine their beliefs ought to act as Socrates did, asking questions even about those beliefs that are taken as axiomatic.”
This is a lovely statement of belief, all the more so because your whacko club membership card got ripped up two days ago for violating the “Coulter is unimpeachable” axiom. How fortunate you were coming to the conclusion that they just couldn’t handle your Young Firebrand Bold New Views at just the same time. This doesn’t come off as self-serving. At all.
“Russell Kirk aptly described ideology as a drug. Meditate on that.”
Wow. And God spelled backwards is doG. Blow yer freakin’ mind, man.
Don’t teach grandpa how to suck eggs, boy. Go meditate on THAT.
“Fine. Sorry. Anti-war protesters are all brilliant, good-looking, and love their mothers with all of their hearts.”
–runs thru GoogleTranslator—
“I’m being a mouthy snot by badmouthing people just to do it, so I’ll ‘apologize’. But, since I’m really smart (my mommy told me so, and Mr. Frum said so too!), what I’ll do is make the ‘apology’ the mirror opposite exaggeration, and that’ll actually still insult them (by pointing out how the word ‘DisagreeWithMe’ should be associated with ‘Insane Exaggeration’) and allow me to be snotty! I bet nobody even notices! This is what I used to do in study hall, and I TOTALLY got away with it!”
. . . Oh, to be in my low 20s again. Enjoy it Alex.
To Andrew’s lament: When conservatives gave in to the religious rights demand for a moral platform based on taking away freedoms (not protecting them) the Right started its long journey to incompatible ideas. Where is the logic in demanding economic freedom from government, while demanding ethical/medical freedom be legistlated by the government? It’s apparently OK to hire an illegal immigrant to cut your lawn, but don’t give one an abortion.
Thomas Sowell–really? He may have written something intelligent in the past. But that must be way in the past. My local paper carries his column because it is one of the least expensive right-wing columnists (they also carry Michelle Malkin). Almost everything he writes uses very faulty logic. There is nothing informative in his writing. It is Obama-bashing only. He’s become to writing what Palin is to speaking.
Wait a minute… Wasn’t the Declaration of Independence by definition a radical, revolutionary document? Wasn’t it written by activists who wanted to overthrow the current powers, and proved their desire by actually doing so?
It was revolution, not conservatism, that won the day in 1776.
At least it did in 1776
SD Springy, I’m a little confused by your response. You either agree with Alex that liberals are Utopian in their conception of excellent education for all (in which case whether Charters or not, the entire enterprise is flawed), or you disagree, in which which case you agree with my premise.
Now, you must have missed in my post where I explicitly pointed out that the HCZ spent *three times* the money that traditional schools do. This is generally the *only* thing about their being a charter that is important. Public schools have just as strong a record as charters, except in cases where charters are able to do things they can’t, which is A)attract private donors (HCZ) or B)Cash in on prestige and attract teachers willing to work many more hours for insubstantial pay (KIPP). In neither case is the model scalable.
The fact is that *neither* party is pushing for the kind of paradigm shift in thinking happening at HCZ. Liberals and conservatives are at this point largely coalesced around a model that is essentially doing nothing transformative. HCZ isn’t successful because it is union-busting, raising standards, and testing. It is transformative because it is targeting a large amount of resources effectively, and concentrating on the structure problems that contribute to inadequate student capital.
“Charter” is essentially a meaningless buzzword at best, a dog-whistle for cranky know-nothing union-bashers at worst. As others have mentioned, many charters hide their success behind strategic advantages they create for themselves through selection bias and the ability to drop students for low performance – something traditional public schools simply can’t do.
I hope I’ve demonstrated that I know something about education. And believe me, while I’m very frustrated with Arne Duncan and the neo-liberal educational model’s lack of basis in reality, I have even less faith in conservatives’ capacity either for simple advocacy for poor children’s education, or any subsequent competency in addressing their needs.
This should have been clear from my response to Alex’ post, which expressed an explicit aversion to the very principle of egalitarian education. But anyone who knows anything about conservatism would understand that this has always been their perspective. Basically, I don’t care, just keep the bastards off my lawn. It’s not my fault. It’s my money, I earned it. Go blame their parents. Etc. Etc.
Good post, Alex.
Sorry for your recent unpleasantness. Purgation on the Right is no sign of mounting strength and vigor; just the opposite. The Reformation ushered in years of bloodshed between Christians, and ultimately the terribly embarrassing fissiparity in the Protestant Churches. The Thirty Years War reduced the population of Germany from 21 to 13 million. If a movement or party cannot hold both “The Courtier and The Heretic” it’s neither large enough nor vibrant enough. Heresy isn’t necessarily error it’s the raising of one point of doctrine to the detriment of the whole, and purgation is no way to get to 59%.
In Essays in Understanding Formation, Exile and Totalitariaism, Hannah Arendt writes the following:
Liberalism, the only ideology that ever tried to articulate and interpret the genuinely sound elements of free societies, has demonstrated its inability to resist totalitarianism so often that its failure may already be counted among the historical facts of our century. Wherever free bodies politic and free societies still exist and function, reasonably free from immediate danger -and where do they function except in the United States and possibly Great Britain?- they owe their existence to the customs, habits and institutions formed in a great past and cultivated through a great tradition. Yet whenever people of good will and sometimes of great intelligence have tried to stem the tide of totalitarianism with them, the great past and the great tradition singularly silent and uninspiring.
She maintained that liberalism and conservatism, even at that time, were failed ideologies and I came to that conclusion recently but before reading her chapter on The Eggs Speak Up. Title referring to Communist truism that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
The greatness of Maha Rushie is that he refuses to be brow-beaten into accepting liberal presupps even if he dishes out conservative presupps of his own. And one of the reasons for his success is that he was a pioneer who stood and stands against the bullying and hate and historical grudge-keeping of the Left. And Rush is the man who invited Elton John to entertain his wedding guests. Where is the Left’s equivalent to that great and open gesture?
Burke and Hayek were mindful of the struggling classes. They saw that ‘creative destruction’ had a devastating and brutal side too. Neither was against assistance. What each was against was feeding a man’s drive for distinction -felt equally by poor and rich- with the inferior fare of envy and resentment, thereby starving discipline, creativity and growth. And the struggling classes include the low-middle or low-labor class that’s one rung above the abject poor, and that you artificially prop up into the middle class only to find you can’t keep doing that. I’m not sure the abject poor even exist anymore in the US.
When Keynes read The Road To Serfdom, he said he agreed with nearly everything written within, and then of course began to argue against certain assertions. But you see how great minds cannot really deny each other?
Hayek [what a great face he had!] saw the traditionalist right as a danger, but one far less worrisome than the Total Society -See Paul Johnson’s History of Christianity. Wonderful Historian and democrat to the marrow. Sort of like Hitch but different.
- of the Left because its existence and exertions were as old as man and barter.
I’m less favorably disposed to Kirk. While reading The Conservative Mind I discarded as much as I gathered, and what I did gather was repetition because it had already been gathered for me by my Dad and Mom. I didn’t find him bullish on America, and he was an American. I couldn’t envision his “heart leaping” at the beautifully masculine sight of American Firemen raising Old Glory how many hours after 9/11?
Alex, keep writing. You’re young and there’s so much to learn, to express and so many you may one day be able to influence. Can’t remember the exact quote, but St. Augustine said that he learned as much when he wrote, as he did when preparing to write about what he had learned.
Anyway, here’s the great and irreplaceable George Orwell from the essay the The Lion and the Unicorn:
Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between the future and the past. No real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist.
Burke may have been saying something similar when he noted in Reflections that conservatism had to allow for reformation because it had to have a way to deal with entropy.
Finally, I do apologize for droning on. I do try to pare down.
Cheers, then, and TLWR (too long won’t read) is very useful on the Web.
“And Rush is the man who invited Elton John to entertain his wedding guests. Where is the Left’s equivalent to that great and open gesture?”
You can’t be serious. Rush?
There are few people more responsible for ginning up false acrimony on both sides. He categorically refuses to take his opponents seriously, give them any credit for anything, or be self-critical in any way. The man is childish, ill-tempered, dishonest and shrill.
Oh, so how about Obama’s selection of Rick Warren to speak at his inauguration? But I disagree with the premise. It’s a worthless play to ad hominem to try to define some sort of character in conservatives or liberals. Both can be just as rabid and petulant, as a previous comment summed up nicely in a recent list of batshit conservative memes.
This post is completely absurd. How would Knepper assemble a political platform?
Why is every writer on this site literally a half-wit?
Not sure I agree with the very cynical approach that we cannot change the human condition. I am 54. We sure have changed the living conditions of the entire world in that time. I prefer pragmatism over political labels such as liberal or conservative. If it works, lets do it. If it does not work, stop doing it. If you have a convincing argument and can back it up with facts, you got a deal. The key is agreeing on what is desired as a result of this activity. That takes me back to the cynicism of this piece. Levin is a hack, we all know that but at least he thinks there is a solution. What is said here is that it is hopeless to even try.
@Willy — Great counter-argument!
@Vagabonda — Kirk is good if you rummage through his work to find the good stuff. I found myself discarding a lot, too. Also, that Augustine quote is great and rings true: I find that when I try to piece my thoughts together on paper, it does a lot of good and forces me to get rid of clutter.
Alex,
What do you want from me? I was responding to an attack on the “bulleted list.” What do you have against this method of organization? I make and utilize them all day long for reports and plans. Would you prefer numbers?
Scholarly books are filled with lists, as are policy recommendations, and memos. It’s how people choose to visually explain information. You know, rather than writing long paragraphs.
On that note, Levin’s book is filled with longer paragraphs that serve to expound the basis of these principles. You might consider how that works in general: short point followed by exposition. And so people conduct affairs in all areas of planning, including politics.
So honestly, a stupid post clearly intended to draw attention does deserve a derisive retort.
Classical vs. Modern Conservatism // Aug 9, 2010 at 5:07 pm
[...] [...]
The Angry Right | The Liberal OC // Jan 30, 2012 at 4:38 pm
[...] [...]