Purge the Right, Not the Left
That seems to be David Frum’s line. After making a career out of attacking paleos and antiwar conservatives, Frum — who was himself purged from AEI — now bemoans the intolerance of the Right as displayed in the apparent firing of liberaltarians Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson from Cato. Says Frum:
in the Lindsey-Wilkinson case, we confront the problem of the closing of the conservative mind in its purest form… . The waters are surging in the conservative world, and conservative institutions must either ride the wave or be swamped. But if wave-riding is all that these very expensive institutions are doing, who needs them? … The right-of-center world is poorer for the dessication of the institutions that used to act as the right’s brains.
There’s plenty of truth in that, but as Tim Carney says, Frum’s newfound concern with diversity of opinion is “a bit rich”:
Perhaps Frum has learned a lesson in the past seven and a half years, when he was the one doing the dessicating; he was the one trying to spur the wave and tell everyone on the Right to get on board with the party line or be damned; he was the one who saw an open mind as a sign of treason.
Clearly the institutions of the Right have shifted their priorities. In the Bush years, criticism of the war and its commander in chief was forbidden — not only did National Review publish Frum’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” but scholar John Hulsman was fired from Heritage for being critical of Bush’s foreign policy. (Note that Frum tellingly fails to mention Hulsman in his litany of think-tank intolerance.) Differences in foreign policy didn’t get Bruce Bartlett dismissed from the National Center for Policy Analysis, but he did commit a capital crime of lese majeste in writing Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.
The recent think-tank firings, by contrast, have targeted anyone who seems insufficiently enthusiastic about the idea of an Ayn Rand Right. Even NR is once again running anti-nation-building articles (in an issue with Rand on the cover, no less). On the one hand, this is about as complete a repudiation of Bush “conservatism” as could be imagined from these institutions — even Cato, which was not at all a bastion of Bushism, has “turned the page” on the era of the 43rd president by scuttling the “liberaltarianism” project that began as a response to his transformation of the Right. And while there’s plenty of reason to suspect that this mood will prove ephemeral, it at least ceates an environment in which arguments against nation-building and big-spending “compassionate conservatism” might get a wider hearing. Enjoy it while it lasts.
On the other hand, the alacrity with which the enforcement apparatus imposes a new conservative/libertarian orthodoxy illustrates the truth of something Austin Bramwell wrote two years ago: “conservatism is not a philosophy or approach to political affairs that inspires the set of institutions known as the conservative movement. Rather, the conservative movement is a set of institutions that inspires the ideology known as conservatism.” Or, as he put it a little earlier with reference to 1984:
First, like Ingsoc, conservatism has a hierarchical structure. Like Orwell’s “Inner Party,” those at the top of the movement have almost perfect freedom to decide what opinions count as official conservatism. The Iraq War furnishes a telling example. In the run-up to the invasion, leading conservatives announced that conservatism now meant spreading global democratic revolution. This forthright radicalism—this embrace of the sanative powers of violence—became quickly accepted as the ineluctable meaning of conservatism in foreign policy. Those who dissented risked ostracism and harsh rebuke. Had conservative leaders instead argued that global democratic revolution would not cure our woes but increase them, the rest of the movement would have accepted this position no less quickly…
Second, conservatism is concerned less with truth than with distinguishing insiders from outsiders. Conservatives identify themselves in part by repeating slogans (“we are at war!”) that, like “ignorance is strength,” are less important for what (if anything) they say than for what saying them says about the speaker. At the same time, to rise in the movement, one must develop a habitual obliviousness to truth, or what Orwell labeled “doublethinking.” Anyone who expresses too vociferously too many of the following opinions, for example, cannot expect to make a career in the movement: that the Soviet Union was not the threat that anti-communists made it out to be, that the current tax system discriminates in favor of the very wealthy, that the Bush administration was wrong about the Iraq invasion in nearly every respect, that the constitutional design itself prevents judges from deciding cases according to the original meaning of the Constitution, that global warming poses small but unacceptable risks, that everyone in the abortion debate—even the most ardent pro-lifers—inevitably engages in arbitrary line-drawing. Whether these opinions and others are correct or not matters little to the movement conservative, even if he knows next to nothing about the topic at hand. If you do not reject these opinions or at least keep quiet, you are not a movement conservative and will be treated accordingly.
As with most things in life, degree matters as well kind — movements by their nature are not comfortable places for independent thinkers, but some movements are more rigorous than others about enforcing conformity. The conservative movement is moving (no pun intended) in two directions at once — substantially it is moving toward the Tea Parties and away from Bush, while structurally it continues to move toward democratic centralism. Dubious as this trajectory may be, it’s a little better overall than what we had a few years ago, when David Frum was commissar.
“The right-of-center world is poorer for the dessication of the institutions that used to act as the right’s brains.”
: from the bright lights in the big city that brought us the Department of Homeland Security, Iraq, Afghanistan, national indebtedness as far as our grandkids’ eyes can see, with economic meltdown for a chaser. My God, this is rich. If this took brains, where would abject stupidity have gotten us? If the Fromrove has not been discredited by now, the question has got to be not when, but how much longer, o Lord?
Conservatism as it has been known is dead. George Bush killed it. All that’s left is the Tea Party/Glenn Becksterites whose sole coherent demand seems to be to “let God back into the country,” and the War Party remnants now cloistered in the little magazines and think-tanks and Republican Party infrastructure hoping to that God for something to happen that they can ride back into credibility and power to make some more war.
Harriet Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court was Bush’s real defining moment: A witless man, having ascended never through any personal quality except his name, naturally mistaking his own fleeting personal instincts for sound and durable policies, doctrines and decisions that others should of course honor. Accordingly, just about every one of his policies, doctrines and decisions have turned out to be about as sound and durable as Miers’ nomination.
Excellent post. To some extent, there’s been a claim by a few to own “conservatism” and its related adjectives. To the extent that this isn’t ridiculous, I believe strongly enough in private property rights that I think those who assert control and cull the herd have a right to do so. I’ve deferentially stopped calling myself conservative and welcome others to do so. You don’t have to give up a single principle to make the change.
“Harriet Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court was Bush’s real defining moment: A witless man…”
An observation smack on the mark in every particular that follows it, with profound implications regarding how frightening an institution is our Presidency.
Dan,
I’m all for making the next CPAC conference look like a scene from “Machete,” but, unfortunately, there’s little prospect of a Great Purge happening.
1) The neocons control the money, the big foundations, and the big think-tanks; paleos, foreign-policy realists, and libertarians within the movement are simply in no position to “purge” people on whom they depend for sustenance.
2) There’s really no crisis within the movement’s rank-and-file gentiles. Walk around CPAC, read the less demanding publications (Human Events, Townhall and on down). Do you encounter anyone mad or ready to attack their leaders? I don’t. Normal conservatives are content in their subservience to their neocon overlords.
There were small crises within movement conservatism in ’06 and ’08, with Bush Final Days, McCain, Obama etc., but now conservatives expect the rising tide of the ’10 elections to lift all boats.
I reached the conclusion long ago that the conservative movement must be abandoned and that a real Right can simply not emerge from within it.
Prisoners of Corporations that parrot their bought and paid for media cronies..see Hannity Limbaugh Ingaham Malkin etc. What is conservative about that? I really hope like hell there is no global warming or we’ve conservatised our way into wrecking the joint for politics.
Now that Richard mentions it, parallels between the conservative movement and “Machete” are striking. In both cases,the bad guys respond to failure by shooting or garroting their henchmen. I wonder if Paul Gottfried was ever a Federale…
I’m all for formation of a “liberalitarianism” caucus, but for different reasons than Frum. I suspect that Frum wants the liberals to pollute the libertarian meme pool in terms of economic thinking, to essentially co-opt libertarians into becoming progressives. Instead, I’d be for co-opting “sincere” so-called “progressives” by getting them to realize that on many economic issues, not merely the drug and neocon wars, libertarians and liberals can be allies (e.g., Milton Friedman’s ideas on having more doctors so as to lower the price to consumers as well as reducing income inequalities since doctors make twice as much as lawyers who are not exactly paupers). I’d be tempted to ignore the need for “liberalitarianism” if the Tea-Partiers I was meeting “got it” on foreign policy, but they’re usually worse than the neocons. It may be easier to teach left-Dems economics than to teach Republicans to be decent human beings instead of intolerant cowardly bullies.
Two points, the first a bit of quibbling and the second a look at the genius of a Nazi thinker.
As to the bit of quibbling: how the HELL can ‘surging waters’ and a ‘storm wave’ even be mentioned in the same sentence as a ‘dessication of institutions’? To be dessicated is to be DRY, for chrissake. If I were dessicated and saw a storm wave, damn, I might want to go for it. Could balance things out for me – maybe even leave me invigorated and… moist. Is somebody editing these metaphors out there? is there an adult reader in the house?
Now to the Nazi genius(yes, there were geniuses among the devils and we ought to listen to them): Carl Schmitt. Here was a man who looked at politics from the viewpoint of polarities. In art, he said, there are two polarities: the Beautiful and the Ugly. (I know, it’s nineteenth century stuff, but bear with me). In music the two polarities are Melody and Dissonance. In the matter of politics, the two polarities that Schmitt wrote about figure nicely into what moved Daniel McCarthy to write his article . McCarthy is bedevilled by the fact that Conservatives are not principle-based but inside vs. outside based. According to Carl Schmitt, this is elemental and necessary. His two polarities in politics (his real interest, not music or art) were Friend and Enemy.
With those two contraries, politics gathers its force and its fire. Some people enter politics via the door of thought, others by the door of habit, still others by the door of upset with the existing order. But all, once they are in the room, distinguish themselves from others by means of Friend or Enemy. Therefore, no one theory – or even a panoply of theories – holds a man or woman to a party. The leaders of the party make the theory to suit themselves and whatever that theory is becomes in turn, the walls of the room that is called politics. In the meantime, the followers of the party accept the theory because they are friends of friends (un amico degli amici?). Those outside the room, however, are all enemies.
Therefore, to be disgusted by the idea of insider vs. outsider in politics is to be disgusted by politics itself. Or, to put it better, it is like asking a dessicated man to stand in a storm-surge – and stay dry. It’s disputing the basic nature of things.
Robert Edward Johnson,
I think you might find that there are a fair number of youngish people who are pretty darn liberal about “social” issues, are against the ridiculous foreign policy (wars, “security state” madness) & military overreach, but are not socialists. Wanting to, for instance, help the poor or the sick or whatever may be a goal, but the means… hey, it should be about what works. If there’s something that works, it should be part of the toolkit, whether it’s “liberal” or “libertarian” ideology.
The GOP has absolutely NOTHING to say to me. The Tea Party has very little. The Dems are effing useless.
I’m not so naive as to believe that there can be a really broad liberalatarian concensus such that there would be a political party, but alliances on particular issues really should be possible. War on Drugs, War on Terror/Military spending, Executive Power, Corporate Welfare, Subsidies…
Are liberals and libertarians likely to agree on the appropriate size/scope of government and (therefore) the taxation required to fund it? Highly unlikely, it’s true. And that’s a big deal. But I think it can be worked around, if people want to try.
That said, from my (admittedly liberalish) viewpoint, the Tea Party = disgruntled Republicans who are just down b/c Bush wrecked the Republican brand. Give them a few years and they’ll be stalwart Republicans again. I hope I’m wrong about that, but I doubt it.