"Acton said, "It isn't a
question of a particular class being unfit to govern. All classes are
unfit to govern." But despots and demagogues can agree that
the
consent of the governed is easier to achieve if the governed are
uninformed. Major media prioritizing has accommodated that whim for a
generation.
"Twenty-four-hour news programming imparts less new factual
information daily than we used to get in an hour. Much of today's
professional television "news" revolves around name calling,
subjective characterization, innuendo, one-upmanship, distorted context,
and other gimmicks that get no one any closer to the truth or to valid
conclusions. Dissenters are shut down with the
"conspiracy-theory" bludgeon by the very people finding plots
against their vague ideals lurking in every shadow. Cable news continues
to strive for the dignity of pro wrestling, even if Bill O'Reilly has
learned to stop telling his guests to "shut up."
"The so-called conservative movement, unmoored by any true desire
for limited government, can only evolve into a party of national mythos.
Lacking any lodestar, it must eventually return to the fold of elite
institutions that have repeatedly failed in their duties. Any idea of US
"exceptionalism" that isn't rooted in limited government is a
deranged political voodoo."
What Is the Conservative
Movement?
Thursday, April 19, 2012
by Tim
Hartnett
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) sponsored what it called a debate
on February 8 over the question "Are libertarians a part of the
conservative movement?" The contenders (although orators would be
more accurate as it was frequently difficult to determine who was arguing
what), were Matt
Welch, editor in chief of Reason magazine and
Jonah Goldberg,
National Review Online editor, syndicated columnist, and AEI
fellow.
The names of all the usual suspects were invoked: Locke, Hayek, Mises,
Rand, Paul, Rothbard, Meyer, et al., along with allusions to their
principles. References to actual developments in American law, policy,
and everyday living over the last several decades, however, were sparse.
An otherwise uninformed observer might get the impression, based on the
content that night, that any distinctions between libertarians and
mainstream Republicans were remote, abstract and ideological ones with
little potential impact on the human condition.
Media celebrities like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann
Coulter, Dennis Miller, and others calling themselves conservatives were
never mentioned. Since these public figures have scores of millions of
listeners and readers who go by that name, that gives them a considerable
stake in the word's popular definition. Prominent libertarians such as
Lew Rockwell, Jacob Hornberger, James Bovard, Sheldon Richman, William
Norman Grigg, and Glenn Greenwald are in near perpetual opposition to the
public positions of the aforementioned, but these kinds of real-world
differences never came up in the "debate" for some reason.
Goldberg argued that both camps have common roots in the classical
liberalism of the 19th century. Welch left that notion uncontested
ostensibly because he believes it himself.
The idea that there is political kinship between people calling
themselves "dittoheads," buying copies of
Who's Looking Out For You, or missing the last President Bush
and those who can faithfully paraphrase
Nock is
essentially propaganda in this election cycle. Prospects are grim for a
Republican presidential nominee if he cannot rely on the antistatist vote
in November. But the memory hole isn't deep enough to bury the fact that
Obama's most authoritarian and supraconstitutional policies were
inherited nearly verbatim from George Bush Jr.
Even a J.K. Rowling grand wizard wouldn't know the newspeak incantations
it would take to make the GOP appear as a party of fundamental liberty.
The AEI "debate" and the Koch brothers move to seize control of
the Cato Institute may be desperate stabs at this impossible task. A
postcoup Cato, aligned with FOX, the RNC, and the Weekly Standard
would be a political animal as startling as a chimera out of the book of
Revelation, but it could never succeed as an organ of persuasion. The
only advantage the right-wing establishment has on the Democrats in
winning over sincere opponents of big government and centralization is
nonincumbency. Goldberg portrays undecideds as morons who don't get it,
but they certainly aren't as stupid as people who fail to recognize
Leviathan as a bipartisan creation. The latter category surely accounts
for the bulk of his daily readership.
During the debate Goldberg referred to
Hayek's
"Why I am Not A
Conservative"
in describing the supposed mutual ancestors of the two ideologies.
He declares that "conservatives in the American political tradition
are trying to defend, preserve, and conserve those institutions of
liberty represented by the founding fathers and the Constitution,"
but he fails to provide a single example.
Political nomenclature is a purposefully inexact system. Mass movements,
like fugitives on the lam, have a talent for fantasizing about their
pasts on those occasions when they can't blot them out altogether. Some
tell us that the story of American "conservatism" begins
post World War II. Others claim a lengthy pedigree with roots in Smith,
Burke, Acton, Bastiat, Locke, and all of the proponents of laissez-faire.
Do the facts really bear this out? Is the right-wing establishment truly
concerned about the legitimate deployment of force in the world? And is
that the legacy of its political ancestors?
What political camp would be best suited for the imperialists who
promoted war against Spain, the Phillipines, and other imperial projects
of the early 20th-century era? On what channel would men like
Henry Cabot
Lodge, John Hay,
Alfred Thayer
Mahan,
Albert
Beveridge, and Teddy Roosevelt feel most at home and away from
hostile inquiry today? They never called themselves classical liberals
and it isn't difficult to imagine any of them enjoying the rapt attention
of Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, G. Gordon Liddy, or Oliver North. They
are exactly the kind of "experts" that are guaranteed op-ed
space and airtime today whenever the nation's martial spirit is deemed
insufficient.
And who do you suppose they'd be smearing and opposing? Who'd be dubbed
anti-American, radical, and pin-headed? Does anyone possessing a modicum
of literary judgment imagine Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce yukking it up
with Bill O'Reilly, Dennis Miller, and Greg Gutfeld? Today they would
probably be banished to publishing in blogdom and written off as
crackpots. The unmatriculated Mencken, who refused to write on an
elementary level, would probably never be heard of in today's market of
semiliterate alums spilling ink on the pages of conservative
rags.
Consider the case of
William
Graham Sumner: a classical liberal renowned among libertarians who
delivered a speech,
"The Conquest of the United States by Spain," in New Haven
in January, 1899, criticizing American conduct in the Spanish-American
War, the negotiations that ended it, and the subjugation of the millions
of people and thousands of square miles appropriated. The town's
prominent middle-class citizens reacted at once by petitioning the
administration of Yale, where Sumner taught, to banish the
"un-American" professor. Hence we are not to confuse the
anti-Sumnerites of 1899 with present-day Fox News viewers and talk-radio
listeners, who are often up in arms and demanding academic heads. The
"great American's" who call Sean Hannity (from a penitentiary
somewhere for all we know) are waving a new, improved flag with more
stars on it.
A simple way to demonstrate the chasm that separates libertarians from
"conservatives" of the 21st century is to use news incidents
and media images as Rorschach inkblots and consider how differently each
would respond.
When a libertarian witnesses an emaciated destitute, confronted, seized,
and roughly rifled by the constabulary under dubious pretenses on
"reality" TV, he is not immediately elated. Most of us question
the necessity of such an action even if a joint, crack pipe, or penknife
is found. We are offended by the image of a man abject -- on the ground
and in the clutches of enormous, armored, and heavily armed men --
without substantive evidence that he has harmed someone else. That these
same public servants can bust into people's homes, terrorize their
children, kill their pets, shackle their persons, and destroy personal
property on the flimsiest of pretexts is repellent to anyone placing even
a modest value on the word liberty.
In the spring of 1999, NATO was sending 400 aircraft twice a day to bomb
the tiny nation of Serbia. In the thick of it, three American soldiers in
uniform were captured and held for a month. General Wesley Clark declared
them "abducted" and the talking heads did not shy away from
words like "war crime" and "atrocity." It was the
first war ever where the United States was so humanitarian that the enemy
became criminals if they returned fire to defend their own soil. At one
point Milosevic referred to the Geneva Convention, his comment was
roundly shouted down by a panel on CNN. One commentator averred that he
"would not be manipulated by Milosevic's propaganda machine."
All three were returned to us intact well before hostilities ended. The
fact that Milosevic's wasn't the only propaganda machine out there was
not a point with any traction in the American media.
Rush Limbaugh got his turn at righteous indication on behalf of the
military five years later. This time US forces were holding the prisoners
and photographing them in various poses the conventioneers in Geneva
wouldn't have been keen on. As most everyone now knows, many of the
depictions from Abu Ghraib included bizarre sexual scenarios. Limbaugh
compared the victims to college fraternity pledges, exposing the
fantasies of a man that eschewed higher education. By his lights,
apparently, these pranks were merely examples of the kind of American
liberty we were fighting to export. The only things missing were the kegs
and strippers.
Recently a former navy SEAL,
Chris Kyle, has
written a book about his experience as a sniper in Iraq, boasting 255
kills with at least 160 of those officially confirmed. The book describes
sucker punching Jesse Ventura at a SEAL watering hole in San Diego for
comments the author did not approve of. He also makes the claim that each
of his targets was deserving of the death sentence. So far the assault on
Ventura has been subject to greater media scrutiny than any question of
moral certainty in this multitude of executions.
In each of these instances of skewed perspective, and numerous others
like them during controversial military action, the classical liberal is
overwhelmed by voices he cannot respond to and no qualified
representative is there to do it for him. Kosovo was Clinton's war, with
endorsements from the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street
Journal, and the idea that it could be a risk-free war was selling at
the time. Abu Ghraib took the notion of impunity further still for people
like Coulter, Malkin, and Limbaugh. Not only may we invade nations that
never attacked us, but now anyone defending his homeland risks becoming
the subject of the sadistic whims of federal agents. People who get
offended hate America; judging by demeanor it is only for lack of
developed biceps and a good right cross that Michele and Ann haven't
cracked some recalcitrant heads. Now we meet the great American sniper
who shot bad guys from afar, and we know that none of them were any good
because Mr. Kyle says so. It isn't like any of us are accustomed to
errors on the part of intelligence "experts" or lies from the
military establishment, after all. We are simply to accept that the
informants that fingered all those targets were without motives of their
own in each case. Audible skepticism could be hazardous in the hero's
presence; he might not be inclined to punch and run against opponents
less formidable than Jesse Ventura.
The crowd at Fox has lately been telling us that Obama was wrong to
apologize for the Koran burnings. Matters of military practicality are
always more evident to the "conservative" leadership with a GOP
president on the job. Instead we have been told by Newt Gingrich, et al.,
that once again it is the native who shoots back who ought to be
apologizing. Only unbalanced observers will tell you that W would also be
apologizing, and with soldiers in the field anything else would be
irresponsible in the extreme. It's the "fair-and-balanced" crew
taking the bizarre view that Obama is showing weakness here. While a
libertarian would hold that no symbol -- be it a flag, a book, or any
other supposedly sacred thing -- has a value higher than human life, a
recurrent fact of foreign interventions, especially long ones, is that
principles must be sacrificed to save lives and in pursuit of the
abstruse goals entailed in such adventures.
Ultimately we can find no principle that anyone identifying with the
broader "conservative" movement feels compelled to uphold. They
supported the Pentagon over the New York Times in Ellsberg's case,
and that vehemence has been redoubled against Bradley Manning. Similar
contempt for the First Amendment has been demonstrated in cases involving
flag burning, free-speech zones, the Congressional Medal of Honor, and
others less clear-cut. George W. Bush signed a campaign-finance-reform
act that suppressed expressive rights for common citizens at critical
election times while allowing business as usual for corporate media
entities.
"Fair and balanced" is a great goal to work toward but
declaring that achievement is a psychotic delusion. No mortal is without
bias, and pretensions to absolute objectivity are equal to claims of
divinity. The Western world has acknowledged this limitation on the human
race for centuries now with extensive rules for courtroom procedures and
scientific experiments. Significant errors of justice and research occur
even when the regulations are observed. Fox has yet to explain to the
world what elaborate process it utilizes to eradicate from programming
the most universal of all human weaknesses. If Mr. Murdoch really could
demonstrate such a capability, he would render competitors
obsolete.
The clearest distinction between believers in constitutional true
religion and members of major parties is the willingness to question
authority. "The reason power corrupts," said Kyle Rothweiller,
"is that sooner or later its possessor comes to believe he deserves
it." The "liberal is fundamentally a skeptic," Hayek tells
us. This obviously does not refer to the ones that stood behind Clinton
when he said, "You can't say you love your country and hate the
government." Libertarians do not believe in giving the empowered the
benefit of doubt. Government must perpetually justify itself and convince
the ruled of its fitness. Power drunkenness is not uncommon in the
pettiest spheres of human interaction. Most of us have seen it in our
lifetimes in elementary-school teachers, DMV clerks, labor foremen,
bartenders, low-level bureaucrats, and even teenagers imagining
themselves at the vanguard of a clique.
Still pontificators from the right would have it a sad day when the
Church Committee let out the fact that the CIA was testing LSD on
unwitting human guinea pigs. That was the 1970s, around the time
counterintelligence chief
James Jesus
Angleton returned from multiple-martini lunches at the Madison to
find moles at every other desk. He was the same guy who always
entertained Kim
Philby whenever he was in town. During that era, the FBI, along with
local police forces, infiltrated political movements they found unsavory
with agent provocateurs. Many conservatives would prefer that nasty
little tales like these remained swept under the rubric of "national
security." Presently it is a bipartisan coalition that, if they
cannot hang the boy, would combine the sentences bestowed upon Philip
Nolan and the man in the iron mask for the special case of Bradley
Manning. Meanwhile murderers like the ones he exposed enjoy substantially
better conditions in military prisons. That excludes the ones still on
the street barhopping with the likes of Chris Kyle.
People who feel entitled to rule, whether they are Democrat, Republican,
bureaucrat, diplomat, or regulator, feel entitled to do much of it
secretly. People who are okay with that are probably overwhelmed by too
much barely relevant information already. This helps account for the
willingness of so many to populate one of the two major parties.
Acton said, "It isn't a question of a particular class being unfit
to govern. All classes are unfit to govern." But despots and
demagogues can agree that
the
consent of the governed is easier to achieve if the governed are
uninformed. Major media prioritizing has accommodated that whim for a
generation.
Twenty-four-hour news programming imparts less new factual information
daily than we used to get in an hour. Much of today's professional
television "news" revolves around name calling, subjective
characterization, innuendo, one-upmanship, distorted context, and other
gimmicks that get no one any closer to the truth or to valid conclusions.
Dissenters are shut down with the "conspiracy-theory" bludgeon
by the very people finding plots against their vague ideals lurking in
every shadow. Cable news continues to strive for the dignity of pro
wrestling, even if Bill O'Reilly has learned to stop telling his guests
to "shut up."
The so-called conservative movement, unmoored by any true desire for
limited government, can only evolve into a party of national mythos.
Lacking any lodestar, it must eventually return to the fold of elite
institutions that have repeatedly failed in their duties. Any idea of US
"exceptionalism" that isn't rooted in limited government is a
deranged political voodoo.
Tim Hartnett is a private contractor and a freelance writer in
Fredericksburg, Virginia.
https://mises.org/daily/6007/What-Is-the-Conservative-Movement
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