Posted by Todd Zywicki:
David Brooks on Western Movies and Conservatism:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_05_03-2009_05_09.shtml#1241898670
I don't read the New York Times, but my local newspaper (The Falls
Church News-Press) republishes some of the columns each week (why, I
don't know, but that's a topic for another day). Anyway, this means
that I am usually about a week behind everyone else when it comes to
NYT columns.
Most of you have probably already seen David Brooks's column this week
on [1]Republicans and western movies. I'm a Republican and a fan of
western movies (although I've been much more enthusiastic about being
the latter than the former in recent years). I will leave aside
discussion of the quality of Brooks's appraisal of western movies, a
topic that others (such as [2]James Bowman) have discussed much better
than I could.
Instead, I'll accept for the sake of argument that Brooks has
correctly identified the lesson of western movies.
Instead, I'll focus on what he sees as the lessons for Republicans and
conservatives:
Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the
Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they would not be the
party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice. They
would once again be the party of community and civic order.
They would begin every day by reminding themselves of the concrete
ways people build orderly neighborhoods, and how those
neighborhoods bind a nation. They would ask: What threatens
Americans� efforts to build orderly places to raise their kids? The
answers would produce an agenda: the disruption caused by a boom
and bust economy; the fragility of the American family; the
explosion of public and private debt; the wild swings in energy
costs; the fraying of the health care system; the segmentation of
society and the way the ladders of social mobility seem to be
dissolving.
But the Republican Party has mis-learned that history. The party
sometimes seems cut off from the concrete relationships of
neighborhood life. Republicans are so much the party of
individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the
party of community and order. This puts them out of touch with the
young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them
nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism
has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle
class, who are interested in the environment and other common
concerns.
Now his policy proposals don't seem to follow from the core values he
claims to be recognizing such as the value of neighborhoods,
orderliness, and personal responsibility. Swings in energy costs?
Public debt? Health care costs? All these are surely important
issues--but they are all basically economic issues, not issues about
neighborhood stability and community values.
It seems more plausible that the menu of values that would follow from
his diagnosis of the problem would be the very same social and
cultural issues that provided the core of the traditionalist wing of
the conservative movement for thirty years: crime, divorce,
single-parenting, faith. Local control over schools and cultural
values. National security and concerns about terrorism. Fears about
the coarsening of American culture. Stricter regulations on
pornography and violence. Don't all of these issues--these social and
cultural issues--seem much more to be what Brooks is describing when
he describes the lessons to be drawn from Western movies?
Instead, Brooks seems to have adopted what is more of a liberal
interpretation of social instability and disorder--that it is caused
by economic factors like inequality and energy costs. Perhaps that is
a correct diagnosis of the problem--but it sure doesn't seem to me to
be one that follows in any way from the lesson of Western movies.
Having said all that, I think there is a core point here that should
not be lost. [3]Charles Murray's challenging speech at the AEI banquet
this year illuminated a point that I have been thinking about. For the
longest time, the trump card in the ideological battles has been that
free markets "deliver the goods." This utilitarian argument seemed to
have won the war of ideas in favor of free markets and limited
government.
But what happens now, when people lose faith that the free market
really "delivers the goods"? I think that's the more profound question
raised by Murray (as well as by John Allison, who I've recently heard
speak on these topics). Libertarians have surrendered the moral high
ground on the intrinsic value and goodness of a free society. In the
days of Communism, there was a constant reminder that freedom was both
a superior moral order as well as economic order to totalitarianism.
Brooks does raise the point well, I think:
The Republicans talk more about the market than about society, more
about income than quality of life. They celebrate capitalism, which
is a means, and are inarticulate about the good life, which is the
end. They take things like tax cuts, which are tactics that are
good in some circumstances, and elevate them to holy principle, to
be pursued in all circumstances.
Finally, there is a sense here in which the true disorderliness that
really used to threaten American families is no longer as pressing.
Terrorism and crime have receded as a major concern of many Americans.
The very same concerns about equality and the segmentation of society
that Brooks bemoans has enabled many families to escape the day-to-day
concerns of safe schools and safe streets. In many ways, through
technology (Tivo, dvd's, etc.) families can wall themselves off from
the coarseness of modern culture better than ever before (although, of
course, there are new threats such as the Internet). Neighborhoods
seem to have become more homogeneous over time, enabling communities
to wall themselves off from the rest of the world.
In some sense then I wonder if Brooks's ability to try to redefine
orderliness and community in term of largely economic values reflects
that fact that in many ways Americans have taken many of the formerly
pressing concerns about orderliness off the table by essentially
mooting them out through public policy and private initiative. If we
were still facing regular threats of terrorism at home do we think
we'd be thinking of all of these issues in the same way?
Big picture, though, what strikes me is that libertarians and
conservatives need to construct an intellectual and spiritual vision
of a free society that speaks to its coherence with man's nature and
the conditions necessary for human flourishing. Obama seems to have
tapped into this spiritual void, especially among American youth (in a
way that is sort of creepy to me, to tell the truth, but that's for
another day).
This vein of thought of the moral virtue of freedom has always been
there, of course. It has just been subordinated for the past couple of
decades. But it seems to me that it is time to revisit this well and
think about an intellectual defense of freedom that is more than "it
delivers the goods."
References
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/opinion/05brooks.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
2. http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/A-Ford--not-a-Lincoln-5847
3. http://www.aei.org/speech/100023
_______________________________________________
Volokh mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
