But that’s a political question. I think the point made Bacevich and others is that conservatives ought not restrict themselves to a political expression of conservatism.

HALALUYA!!!!!

Great NEWS, State of New Hampshire Makes STAND TYRANNY, we’re all still in the running.

HCR 6 – New Hampshire Affirms States Rights

http://www.opednews.com/articles/HCR-6–New-Hampshire-Affi-by-Barbara-Peterson-090204-442.html

or Google “HCR 6″

Doesn’t common decency dictate that you keep your mouth shut and not run down your ex-friends? At the least you should have the decency to wait a sufficient period of time before taking shots.

There will always be authority. It is in the very nature of things. The question is from where does authority properly arise and reside. The paleocons answer this the way the ancients answered it. From religion, family, community, etc.

By delegitimizing and downgrading those things, liberals like Linker vest all the authority in the State. So maybe he gets to fornicate without consequence, but he is helpless against an all powerful state that is no longer countered by competing cultural institutions.

So who is really the authoritarian?

Seems to me the state of the union as left by Bush alone clearly shows that it is in trouble, which judgment has now been overwhelmingly seconded by the public in the last election.

Of course one can say that Bush wasn’t really a conservative, but at some point it seems to me one has to concede that this argument reached the point of being not even of much academic interest anymore: After all what *difference* does it make if one can validly say that Bush’s policies deviate from the ideas of Burke? Who even cares anymore? If all of Bush’s policies concerning international and military affairs, the economy, civil rights and liberties, immigration and so forth could be so easily accepted by the Party that calls itself “conservative,” and probably 99.999% of the public indeed unshakably considers that Party to *be* “conservative,” well then good luck trying to change that perspective. For all practical intents and purposes, those policies *were* “conservative.”

And indeed even on that academic plane one can look to the past and say that there *were* antecedents and etc. that gave Bush and Co. the plausible idea that they were being “conservative.” Iraq? “A robust national defense/conserving America’s position as leader of the world!” The assault on privacy and civil rights? “Since when have conservatives been liberal bleeding hearts?” Throwing open the doors to immigration? “Conserving America’s historically open and welcoming arms to immigrants and conservatism’s unbounded belief in providing opportunities” and blah blah blah. Spending money like a drunken Kennedy? “Necessary to fund our historic leadership position in the world, and besides Reagan showed that boundless unregulated opportunity in the economy can easily pay it off!”

I.e., as a practical matter what *can’t* be plausibly be described as “conservative” anymore? Indeed, what *hasn’t* been, by the Republican Party itself, just in the past eight years? It’s like entering into a debate with a drunk, taking the position that no, the drunk isn’t really a drunk, with the drunk gleefully admitting they are a drunk. A pretty tough argument to win in the public’s eye.

I think we’ve reached the point where the Republican Party and indeed the label “conservatism” ought to be regarded for what they manifestly are: No friends whatsoever anymore to those who really embrace the central, important tenets that this country was established upon and/or that have been shown to be smart. Thus I for one would be much happier seeing this magazine, for instance, rename itself “The American Libertarian,” or “The National Libertarian” since I think a thoughtful, moderate nationalistic libertarianism can indeed provide not only the right answers to so many of the issues today, but answers that are instinctively *attractive* to the American public too.

E.g., libertarians don’t go around the globe searching for monsters to destroy. Nor do *national* libertarians go about going to war for other countries’s interests nor indeed lightly forming *any* alliances and blocs and etc. Nor do they lightly go about infringing on people’s privacy such eavesdropping on them (esp. without court orders), nor do they believe in lightly taking money out of one set of people’s pockets to pay for the enthusiasms of another set. And, lastly, being both nationalists and libertarians, they see libertarianism as being beneficial for their *own* fellow countrymen and *not* the rest of the world so commanding them to throw open the borders to whomever has the shoe-power to jump over same.

Are there intellectual problems with a libertarian party? You bet, not least in that self-identifying itself as a party of a certain ideology you are always going to be fighting the Jacobins arguing purity purity purity. And even a moderate, reasonable libertarianism may well require one to swallow the kind of “licence” for others to engage in things you abhor. But at least it gives one the rock to stand upon to argue against anyone forcing *you* to do things you abhor.

And those problems are exactly why some body of thinkers are needed for any sort of “national libertarian” movement. Much more so than people (like us here?) who are already and anyway already oriented along nationalistic and libertarian lines sallying forth to argue the beyond-lost cause that Republicanism /”conservatism” has been hijacked and laboriously fighting issue by issue to try to show that’s true, against people who *are* Republicans and who people *do* regard as true “conservatives. (I.e., those “drunks” I mentioned above.)

And for anyone not convinced, here’s a question: Accepting that for all practical purposes the Republican Party not only is presently identified as the “conservative” one but likely will be for at least the next decade, do you *really* believe that in that time it is going to reform itself to truly get back to what you regard as “true” conservative principles? That if by some miracle it gets into power again in that time instead of just miming those principles (like Bush did, like McCain did), it will *really* fight for same?

If so, all I can say is good luck. Because it seems to me all that means is that you’re willing to see at least another decade wasted.

Perhaps. Or perhaps it is because the pursuit of appetite underlies both liberalism and libertarianism. In any event, Bacevich made no special mention of sex, including a reference among several others. Yet his critic framed the question of “authoritarianism” (after first falsely conceiving it) in terms of sexual peccadilloes.

And, once again, Bacevich’s point is that our culture has abandoned restraint and the gov’t has encouraged that abandonment (most notably in fostering a consumerist economy.) “Conservatism” as expressed by the GOP (while perhaps presenting itself as favoring restrain in sexual matters) certainly fostered profligacy in numerous other areas.

In The Foundations of Morality, Henry Hazlitt quotes at length a few famous passages from the essay “Joseph Conrad” by Bertrand Russell (reprinted in Portraits from Memory and Other Essays). They bear on Deneen’s points quite nicely; I have added to them further bits from the essay:

“Of all that he had written I admired most the terrible story
called The Heart of Darkness, in which a rather weak idealist is driven mad by horror of the tropical forest and loneliness
among savages. This story expresses, I think, most completely
his philosophy of life. I felt, though I do not know whether
he would have accepted such an image, that he thought of
civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous
walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any mo-
ment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.
He was very conscious of the various forms of passionate
madness to which men are prone, and it was this that gave
him such a profound belief in the importance of discipline.
His point of view, one might perhaps say, was the antithesis
of Rousseau’s: ‘Man is born in chains, but he can become
free.’ He becomes free, so I believe Conrad would have said,
not by letting loose his impulses, not by being casual and un-
controlled, but by subduing wayward impulse to a dominant
purpose…

“Except for love of England and hatred of Russia, politics
did not much concern him. What interested him was the individual human soul faced with the indifference of nature, and often with the hostility of man, and subject to inner struggles with passions both good and bad that led toward destruction…

“Conrad’s point of view was far from modern. In the mod-
ern world there are two philosophies: the one, which stems
from Rousseau, and sweeps aside discipline as unnecessary;
the other, which finds its fullest expression in totalitarianism,
which thinks of discipline as essentially imposed from with-
out. Conrad adhered to the older tradition, that discipline
should come from within. He despised indiscipline, and hated
discipline that was merely external.

“In all this I found myself closely in agreement with him…

“I had some charming letters from him, especially one about my book on China…

‘…after reading your extremely interesting view of the Chinese Problem I take a gloomy view of the future of their country.’ He went on to say that my views of the future of China ‘strike a chill into one’s soul,’ the more so, he said, as I pinned my hopes on international socialism.

‘The sort of thing,’ he commented, ‘to which I cannot at-
tach any sort of definite meaning. I have never been able to
find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything convincing
enough to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated
sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world.’ He
went on to say that although man has taken to flying, ‘He
doesn’t fly like an eagle, he flies like a beetle. And you must
have noticed how ugly, ridiculous and fatuous is the flight of
a beetle.’ In these pessimistic remarks, I felt that he was
showing a deeper wisdom than I had shown in my somewhat
artificial hopes for a happy issue in China. It must be said that
so far events have proved him right…

“Conrad, I suppose, is in process of being forgotten. But his intense and passionate nobility shines in my memory like a star seen from the bottom of a well. I wish I could make his light shine for others as it shone for me.”

See also the book Joseph Conrad Today by Kieron O’Hara:

“This book argues that the novelist Joseph Conrad’s work speaks directly to us in a way that none of his contemporaries can. Conrad’s scepticism, pessimism, emphasis on the importance and fragility of community, and the difficulties of escaping our history are important tools for understanding the political world in which we live. He is prepared to face a future where progress is not inevitable, where actions have unintended consequences, and where we cannot know the contexts in which we act. Heart of Darkness uncovers the rotten core of the Eurocentric myth of imperialism as a way of bringing enlightenment to native peoples lessons which are relevant once more as the Iraq debacle has undermined the claims of liberal democracy to universal significance. The result can hardly be called a political programme, but Conrad’s work is clearly suggestive of a sceptical conservatism of the sort described by the author in his 2005 book After Blair: Conservatism Beyond Thatcher. The difficult part of a Conradian philosophy is the profundity of his pessimism far greater than Oakeshott, with whom Conrad does share some similarities (though closer to a conservative politician like Salisbury). Conrad s work poses the question of how far we as a society are prepared to face the consequences of our ignorance.”

Personally, I think I have a pretty broad conception of liberty. Perhaps we of a libertarian or liberal bent appear to spend a lot of time talking about sex because many conservatives insist on a conception of liberty that disincludes sexuality.

Indeed, well said. The other interesting element of the potential “movement” you identify, is its potential to splinter the Left, as its elements which favor localism and individualism (in its real sense) come to recognize greater dissonance with their collectivist brethren than with “conservative” bugbear used to unify the Left.

Certainly, trotting out the tired old bugaboo of authoritarianism reflects an exhausted intellectual liberalism (stretched to the point of citing to the Mexican priest who founded a Catholic religious order–if only Franco were still alive to be kicked around!) Indeed, from the intellectual standpoint, where is there any vibrancy in either movement liberalism or movement conservatism? Liberals only crow because they’ve won an election. But what do they have other than a pile of policy proposals? (Most of which have the stale whiff of the familiar, as if pulled out of the House hopper where Delay had consigned them.)

As you rightly point out, Prof Bacevich focused his critique on the indulgence of appetite and whim. And the Professor is correct that to oppose such culture cannot occur in the corridors of power. (Witness the silly rationalizations that movement conservatives and their politicos make for profligate spending, tax cuts and consumerism.)

Frum’s latest “journalistic” endeavor (now that he’s taken a break from hagiography and propagandizing of Bush II) is simply to try and put the wheels back on the broken “conservative” bus so that he and his ilk can get back into power. The “conservative movement” is simply a cynical political manipulation by men (like Gingrich, Delay and Bush II) who are unworthy of the support of the ordinary people who vote for them. Using the manipulations of social issues to gain votes and political power that is then used to advance the “Conservative” elite and their corporatist sponsors.

I say, *raspberries* for the lot of the “Movement.”