Hardly A Conservative Model
Angle has managed to embrace the one Founding Father with a disturbing tolerance for the political violence of the French Revolution. “Rather than it should have failed,” enthused Jefferson, “I would have seen half the earth desolated.” Hardly a conservative model. ~Michael Gerson
Perhaps Gerson remembers the following words:
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
This is hardly a conservative idea, either, and it is even less so when Bush said later that “we have lit a fire as well as a fire in the minds of men,” which is eerily enough the same phrase Dostoevsky used to describe the destructive power of revolutionary ideas in The Possessed. A little later, Bush said, “It [the fire] warms those who feel its power; it burns those who fight its progress. And one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.” Bush didn’t exactly say that half the earth would be desolated, but untamed fires tend to destroy everything in their path. How exactly was any of that conservative or responsible?
Of course, all of these pyrotechnics are supposed to happen elsewhere in the world. Even when constitutional liberties are infringed and undermined in the name of security, as they were repeatedly by Gerson’s former boss, we are supposed to pretend that the threats to liberty are all external and far away. Now the man who helped craft some of the most dangerous revolutionary rhetoric in recent American history wants to lecture others about an excessive fondness for the same. What’s more, Gerson wants to pose as some sort of dour, “responsible” skeptic of violent political change when he helped author many of the speeches that justified a war for regime change in Iraq! The speechwriter for the neo-Jacobins wants us to believe that he is horrified by the excesses of the Jacobins.
Jefferson’s support for the French Revolution is certainly one of the darker blots on his reputation, and it is one of the things that keeps conservatives sympathetic to the Jeffersonian persuasion from being stronger admirers of Jefferson himself. What is remarkable here is that Gerson is pretending that he is some latter-day Burke expressing revulsion at violent revolution when he happily served in an administration whose practical policy and stated goal was to try to export revolution all over the world. Perhaps the most important point to be made here is that Gerson worked alongside the people who ushered in violent political change that devastated an entire country, and they also trampled on the rights of American citizens and subjected suspects to indefinite detention and abuse. For her part, Sharron Angle has indulged in some careless and probably ultimately meaningless rhetoric about resisting tyranny at home. Angle’s rhetoric may be reckless or it may be empty, but so far she has not used her rhetoric in the service of an administration given to starting wars and violating the Constitution.
Of course, the encroachments that prompted the Founders to rebel against their government were incredibly small compared to the intrusions and violations Americans accept every day as a matter of course. What they counted as tyranny, almost all of us regard as the normal operation of a modern government, and some such as Gerson tolerate an even greater degree of government outside the rule of law. Had Gerson lived at the time of the War for Independence, he would probably have preferred remaining part of a centralizing empire, since that is clearly what he wishes for the United States today. His “responsible, governing agenda” will inevitably involve concentrating more power in the capital, expanding the reach of the state into the lives of citizens and entangling our country even more deeply in conflicts around the world for the sake of our “global commitments.” Whatever their mistakes or flaws, the people Gerson has targeted for condemnation are unlikely to do these things, and if they are sincere they will resist them most or all of the time. We had eight years of Gerson’s sort of “responsible” governance, and it was a period marked by unnecessary war, illegal surveillance, detention and torture, executive power grabs, centralization of power, and the creation of staggering unfunded liabilities. The Republican Party was a captive of Gerson’s wing for almost all of the Bush administration’s tenure, and it continues to be defined by the extremism that prevailed during that time.
24 Responses to “Hardly A Conservative Model”
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To give Gerson the benefit of the doubt – or call it charity if you prefer – maybe he’s having a change of heart? Political types sometimes realize they’ve made mistakes. It seems that they usually admit that in subtle ways like this, rather than saying, “I was wrong.” Just a possibility.
This whole “tyranny” thing is a pet peeve of mine on the paleo right. Yes, the current US government is more intrusive than George III’s by various objective standards. I see that you stopped short of calling the current government tyrannical, and you get credit for that. But I think even your suggestion goes a little too far. Whatever we think of the current regime, it isn’t imposed on the people by some tyrannical “elite” against the people’s will. It’s actively, willingly consented to by the American people, every couple years in elections and every day in public opinion polls. The American people actively choose this regime against clear alternatives (Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, et al.). Objectively, it may be a hundred times more intrusive than the government of George III, but it’s in no way tyrannical against the American people.
See The Jefferson Bible, and what an arrogant title that is, from which that Founding Father excised all reference to Christ’s miracles, Resurrection or Divinity. In Jefferson’s own words:
“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814
“In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.”
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814
“The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills.”
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814
Likewise, Benjamin Franklin:
“The nearest I can make it out, ‘Love your Enemies’ means, ‘Hate your Friends’.”
“I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.”
“The way to see by Faith is to shut the eye of Reason.”
And so on, through the lot of them.
As John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits; shall we not have swarms of them here, in as many shapes and disguises as ever a king of gypsies himself assumed?” As Jefferson replied, “their restoration makes a retrograde step from light towards darkness.”
The strange popular superstition that the Founding Fathers were devout Christians – prophets and apostles whose works, especially the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, are for all practical purposes part of the Canon of Scripture – urgently needs to be exploded. But 1776 predates 1789. The American Republic is not a product of the Revolution. Nevertheless, it sits under a radically orthodox theological critique, most obviously by reference to pre-Revolutionary traditions of Catholic and Protestant republican thought, on the Catholic side perhaps Venetian, on the Protestant side perhaps Dutch, and on both sides perhaps at cantonal level in Switzerland, where it is possible that such thought might hold sway even now.
Furthermore, Catholics, High Churchmen, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers and others retained, long after any hope of a Stuart restoration had died, grave reservations about the Hanoverian State, its Empire, that Empire’s capitalist ideology, and the slave trade integral to it. Far more Jacobites went into exile from these islands than Huguenots sought refuge here. Very many of them ended up in North America. New York seems the most obvious place to look for them, being named after its initial proprietor as a colony, the future James VII and II. However, there were many Jacobite Congregationalists, such as Edward Roberts, the exiled James’s emissary to the anti-Williamite Dutch republics, and Edward Nosworthy, a gentleman of his Privy Council both before and after 1688.
There was that Catholic enclave, Maryland. And there was Pennsylvania: almost, if almost, all of the Quakers were at least initially Jacobites, and William Penn himself was arrested for Jacobitism four times between 1689 and 1691. Many Baptists were also Jacobites, and the name, episcopal succession and several other features of the American Episcopal Church derive, not from the Church of England, but from the staunchly Jacobite Episcopal Church in Scotland, which provided the American Colonies with a bishop, Samuel Seabury, in defiance of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian monarchy to which it was attached.
The American Republic, as such, therefore stands, in every sense radically, in the same tradition as Britain’s campaign against the slave trade, Radical Liberal action against social evils, extension of the franchise, creation of the Labour Movement, and opposition to the Boer and First World Wars: radical action for social justice and for peace derived from testing the State and its policies against theologically grounded criteria of legitimacy. It still does.
I would be more inclined to believe that Gerson learned something from past mistakes if he spent at least as much time warning against returning to the errors of Bushism. He seems to think that libertarianism is the greatest danger on the right today, but he manages to combine that with his overwhelming contempt for the people of Arizona when their state government tries to enforce the law. Basically, any enthusiasm that happens “out there” in the countryside worries Gerson, when these are far less dangerous than the ideas that prevail in the capital that actually stand a chance of being made into policy.
For many years, I have argued that the more democratic a government becomes the more expansive and intrusive it becomes. The state becomes much stronger when there is broad popular participation in and consent to its rule. It is easy for me to imagine a government that is both democratic and despotic at the same time, so I don’t think it’s a question of misrule being imposed from above. Elites don’t really impose all that much. They may manipulate the people, and they may neglect the interests of the people, but for the most part they are given power when they ask for it because they persuade enough people that it will be good for them to do so.
That said, there is certainly some significant degree of unaccountability for the political class. On the whole, they make poor decisions and never have to answer for them, or they simply spend a short time out of power and return with the next administration. One can argue that this is a normal product of our political system rather than a perversion of it, but it does create genuine and legitimate frustration. The political class can persist in policies that large majorities reject but cannot change, because both parties are committed to continuing them. That is a cause of real alienation and it is the source of a lot of the discontent in the country right now.
As the franchise has expanded, the government has likewise increased the scale and scope of its activities, and in many respects it does this to address the grievances or interests of the newly-enfranchised. That’s one of the reasons why small and republican government is always in tension with and usually losing out to mass democracy. Given the choice, most people don’t really want a small government. European liberals and early American republicans distrusted mass democracy for many of the same reasons, and they saw what it would mean for their interests and their form of government if mass democracy prevailed. As you say, most of what the government does happens with the consent of the governed, and when the government ignores or exceeds the law it often does so with considerable popular support.
Lindsey, this comment is not only way off topic, it is nonsense. You have your own blog, so use it and try to remain coherent when you do.
Because I had nothing better at hand to read, I saw Gerson’s column in the paper. I think he did manage to step over his very low bar of quality, even with the ridiculous statement you pointed out and others like it. Such as feigning interest in “the most basic social commitments to the weak, the elderly and the disadvantaged”. Those commitments weren’t on Bush’s agenda, even before 9/11.
And this statement is correct, even though it is too late, not prescient: “A party that is intimidated and silent in the face of its extremes is eventually defined by them.” Thank you, neocons!
However, he is correct in his statement on Arizona’s law: “a law that is poorly written, ineffective, symbolically toxic and likely to be overturned.”
Even the most deranged neocons, such as Jennifer Rubin, seem to be reflexively in favor of open borders, or at least hostile to limitations on immigration and enforcement of existing immigration laws. Gerson seems to be in this camp, too.
This position is not a product of doctrinaire libertarianism. It’s hard to explain other than as either the sentimental “Grandma was an immigrant, so I must favor unrestricted immigration,” or the Machiavellian “If there are lots of competing ethnic groups, the Jews are less likely to get picked on, so let more minorities in” Both of these views are hopelessly naïve.
Norwegian Shooter, which part of it is “nonsense”?
You can treat the Founding Fathers as if they were the Apostles, or you can treat the Apostles as if they were the Apostles. But you cannot do both. At the end of the day, Jefferson et al were, among other things, Deists and particularly ferocious anti-Catholics.
That does not invalidate everything that they ever wrote. But it does require that their work, including the Declaration of Independence and including the Constitution, be understood, like every other document or artefact in the world, under the higher authority of Sacred Scripture within Sacred Tradition. Where the two conflict, then that of divine as well as human origin and authority (it’s a Christological thing) obviously takes precedence over that of purely human origin and authority. Jefferson, I am afraid, is bound to come out of that particularly badly.
Providentially, there exist Catholic and Protestant pre-Revolutionary republican traditions on which to draw in redeeming the American republican tradition, which is also pre-Revolutionary, since 1776 came before 1789. And there were the doubts about Hanoverian legitimacy within the traditions definitive of communities significant in America both before and after the Colonial period, doubts which undoubtedly contributed to the popular reception of the ideas of the Founding Fathers, since it is very difficult to see what else about them – socioeconomically, culturally, philosophically, theologically – can have had much, if any, popular appeal. Jefferson, frankly, least of all.
Providentially, there exist Catholic and Protestant pre-Revolutionary republican traditions on which to draw in redeeming the American republican tradition, which is also pre-Revolutionary, since 1776 came before 1789.
Mr. Lindsay, could you perhaps elaborate on these traditions, if not here then at your blog or @TAC? Are there any books you would recommend?
Mr. Larison, I agree with most of what you said in your comment, but I think you’re way wrong when you say, “[t]he political class can persist in policies that large majorities reject but cannot change, because both parties are committed to continuing them.” The two political parties fight over the center in every election. The candidates fine-tune their positions based on sensitive public opinion surveys. To take even the strongest example of a disconnect between policy and public opinion, immigration, if the masses strongly favored restriction there would be restriction. How many votes did Tom Tancredo get?
Concerning the alienation we’re seeing now, first of all it’s important to keep in mind how mild it is by worldwide standards. Second, it’s largely a transient rebound after the election of a charismatic presidential candidate whose campaign rhetoric was exceptionally good, i.e., exceptionally misleading.
To repeat, though, I agree with almost everything you wrote in your comment. You’re one of the few reality-based commentators on the paleo right.
First, what does the Founder’s religious beliefs have to do with this post?
Second, this is nonsense: “But 1776 predates 1789. The American Republic is not a product of the Revolution. Nevertheless, it sits under a radically orthodox theological critique, most obviously by reference to pre-Revolutionary traditions of Catholic and Protestant republican thought, on the Catholic side perhaps Venetian, on the Protestant side perhaps Dutch, and on both sides perhaps at cantonal level in Switzerland, where it is possible that such thought might hold sway even now.”
Oh, and the rest of it, too. Including your second comment.
The above to Lindsey. This to Larison:
“I have argued that the more democratic a government becomes the more expansive and intrusive it becomes. The state becomes much stronger when there is broad popular participation in and consent to its rule.”
Well, that could be, I’d like a couple of examples. However, it certainly is not if and only if. The counterexample is that governments can become more expansive, intrusive and stronger while becoming less democratic. More likely, modernity has increased democracy, the power of the state, and totalitarian rule together. I know using “modernity” is a fudge, but the point is increased democracy is not the main cause of increasing the power of a particular state.
“Elites don’t really impose all that much. They may manipulate the people, and they may neglect the interests of the people, but for the most part they are given power when they ask for it because they persuade enough people that it will be good for them to do so.”
The first two “people” are obviously the voters – the democrats, small d. But the third isn’t. When Bush 43 asked for a surveillance state, he didn’t ask the voters. He asked Congressional leaders. And he only told a few about what he was really up to, and they weren’t allowed to talk about it with anyone. That seems imposing to me. In the broader picture, elites certainly define the range of debate that is “serious” far too narrow to call it democratic.
“As the franchise has expanded, the government has likewise increased the scale and scope of its activities, and in many respects it does this to address the grievances or interests of the newly-enfranchised.”
Again, I don’t think one directly and mostly caused the other. Perhaps the second part has some truth, but again there are good counter-examples: what scale and scope has increased due to women’s suffrage and the Voting Rights Act? And certainly this doesn’t apply at all to foreign policy.
And as for Jefferson, his relatively brief support of the French Revolution isn’t a major blot on his reputation, and certainly shouldn’t prevent conservatives from being strong admirers of him. BTW, the full quote is “My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to the cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated.” And he wrote this before Louis XVI was executed, a result which Jefferson did not support.
In his autobiography, Jefferson wrote:
“I should have shut up the Queen in a Convent, putting harm out of her power, and placed the king in his station, investing him with limited powers, which I verily believe he would have honestly exercised, according to the measure of his understanding. In this way no void would have been created, courting the usurpation of a military adventurer, nor occasion given for those enormities which demoralized the nations of the world, and destroyed, and is yet to destroy millions and millions of it’s inhabitants.” (1821, p. 93)
Far more a blot on his reputation is his ownership of chattel slaves.
Which is of course exactly what the first couple of rounds of revolutionary government tried, until they discovered that the King would not honestly exercise government or rights, and kept attempting to regain sole power.
Not to say the early revolutionaries made good choices in how to construct a government, but old Tom could talk out his ass sometimes.
The American war of independence was a mistake. The new government shortly after engaged in similar tyrannies, and it’s not like things turned out terrible for Canada.
“The American war of independence was a mistake. The new government shortly after engaged in similar tyrannies, and it’s not like things turned out terrible for Canada.”
I wholeheartedly agree. We Americans missed out on the opportunity to fight in WWI from the very beginning in August 1914 instead of waiting until March 1917. It could have been us dying at Gallipoli, instead of those Australians. We could have been in WWII right from the start instead of waiting over two years. We could have declared war on Hitler (or at least have had our Mother Country do it for us), instead of waiting for Hitler to declare war on us. I see lots of missed opportunities.
Canada came into World War I automatically because it was part of the British Empire. But it entered World War II because its own government chose to do so.
Canada also fought both world wars with a force made up largely of volunteers, while the United States relied on a draft to supply the manpower for World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam–wars that must have killed around half a million Americans in just over 50 years. So, if you’re worried about being dragooned into the military and killed overseas, history seems to indicate that you’d be happier as a Canadian than as an American.
There are plenty of good reasons to be happy the United States won its independence, but a less blood-spattered history compared to Canada isn’t one of them.
[...] So I have to disagree with Daniel Larison when he writes that Michael Gerson is wrong and hypocritical to be frightened by Angle: [...]
Balloon Juice, I took Daniel’s blog to be less a defense of Sharron Angle than a well-justified attack on Michael Gerson. As he points out, the political views of Gerson and his former boss George W. Bush have produced and will continue to produce more harm to the U.S. than anything Angle is likely to produce even should she be elected to the Senate. Personally, even though I am not a resident of Nevada and had no say in the selection process, I was pulling for the woman who was advocating paying doctors with chickens since I thought the continuing debate over healthcare in our country needed fresh thinking.
tbraton, I completely agree and have said so in the comments at BJ, which is my favorite short-posts-general-political-topics blog.
As for paying doctors with chickens, I too am all for fresh, although convenience would dictate that patients should pluck and dress the chicken before heading to the doctor’s office.
Why are we mixing foreign with domestic policy? What is wrong with promoting liberty around the world?
Let’s ignore humanitarian impact of tyranny on the US and simply evaluate economic impact:
Tyrannies create instability regionally and globally causing aggregate problem of refugees as well as uncertainty for international trade. Example:
a. China. Authoritarian regime in China exploits its citizens for cheap labor, cheap energy (coal mining), and restricts their financial activity by restricting them from investing in foreign economies and institutions; this is done simple to guarantee that the policy of currency manipulation doesn’t cause internal inflation or deflation. Every one of these practices impacts jobs and businesses in the US who find themselves unable to compete with Chinese.
b. Venezuela. Nationalization of rigs owned by American companies has direct impact on citizens who work for those companies as well as those who invest in them.
c. Iran. A band of crazy misogynistic fools could start a nuclear weapons race in a volatile region such as the Middle East and Persian Gulf which in return will drive oil prices through the roof.
There are numerous other examples such as Russia, North Korea, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, etc where each of these regional authoritarian regimes directly or indirectly impact the US citizens welfare. I hate to use a tired old cliché but “Democracies do not go to war with each other”; shared values and institutions ensure that the problems are resolved in a predictable environment. Same cannot be said about authoritarian regimes because they, unlike their liberal democratic counterparts, concentrate on maintaining power and an aura of “invincibility” instead of welfare of citizens as the means of staying in power.
Freedom is fire. That fire is the very reason why our great country exists today. If not for Thomas Pain’s ideas of life, liberty, and property I doubt we would have had life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for ourselves today. If not for French support, god knows if founding fathers would have succeeded in the Revolutionary War. If we hadn’t gotten involved in WWII, we would have to face either Stalin or Hitler by ourselves on our own land. So spreading the liberty around the world is a sound policy. What is arguable is the means by which this liberty is spread.
I agree, the US military isn’t the ideal means for accomplishing this goal. I think we should empower local population to increase plurality of their own governments, however, there are instances where critical interests of the US demand military involvement and we must leave room for those exceptional circumstances in our foreign policy considerations.
As far as domestic politics, I think Bush was entirely wrong on this front in pretty much everything he did. I think Department of Homeland Security is about as useful as Department of Education in its current form. I think Patriot Act was all harm and no good; it made us look scared, panicked, and incompetent, willing to give up liberty for security. Terrorism, in general, is aimed at trading security for some other considerations; Islamic terrorism is aimed at forcing us to trade some of our values of liberty for security: I believe their message is “convert and you will have peace”. Well, at least they give us a choice, President Bush and cowards in Congress didn’t even ask.
“As for paying doctors with chickens, I too am all for fresh, although convenience would dictate that patients should pluck and dress the chicken before heading to the doctor’s office.”
Norwegian Shooter, your suggestion indicates that you favor the Obamacare appproach to healthcare reform. Why, the next step would be to have unionized government animal inspectors stationed at each doctor’s office to make sure the chickens passed inspection. That smacks of a typical Democratic approach: take a good, sound Republican idea and make it more complicated and expensive. I believe that would only cause our healhcare costs to rise even more.
tbraton, nice. Although I can’t tell if you’re tongue in cheek: are you saying paying doctors in chickens is a good, sound Republican idea? If so, how do you feel about the other white meat?
“Although I can’t tell if you’re tongue in cheek: are you saying paying doctors in chickens is a good, sound Republican idea? If so, how do you feel about the other white meat?”
Completely. As to whether it’s a “good, sound Repuiblican idea,” it was a Republican candidate for the Senate in Nevada who came up with idea, so it would be hard for the Democrats to claim it was a good, sound Democratic idea, wouldn’t it?
As to “the other white meat,” you hit on the problem with pork in this country: we have taken all the taste out of pork by trying to make pigs like chickens and breeding all the fat out of them. It’s fat that gives pork its taste. The best pork I have had in many years was served at a Greek tavern Athens in 2001 several blocks from the Athens Hilton (it was named “Kafenion”). It was so delicious that my girlfriend insisted on going back there again before we left. I attribute it to the fact that they still raise pigs in Greece the old-fashioned way, instead of in “factories,” the way we do here in the U.S. The chickens were also much tastier there than here, probably for the same reason.
tbraton,
I was questioning the “good, sound” part, not the Republican part. On port, you’re totally right. I heard that scientists are now trying to genetically alter pigs by giving them wings to fly. We must stop Obama from achieving this before Armageddon!