Freddie is once again on Mickey Kaus’ case. He writes:

What percentage of his posts contain anything at all that you would call sympathetic to the liberal cause? That bother to demonstrate an attitude of anything other than contempt and derision for the party and the ideology he claims to be a part of? Yes, people should broadly be permitted to define their own political identity. But if Kaus wants me to call him a liberal, I can say that he is an incredible [sic] ineffective, counterproductive and useless one.

If you were to replace the word liberal with conservative and make this criticism about me, I think a movement or party loyalist could make the same argument, and I think the argument would still be misleading. The strange thing is that Freddie does not normally attack people for their lack of fidelity to “the cause” or the party. Surely he has not forgotten the debates he had during the Gaza conflict when he contested the conventional definition of what it meant to be pro-Israel and argued that being critical of the side with which one sympathized was an important kind of service and support.

When conservatives have gone after their own for alleged disloyalty, Freddie has tended to be sympathetic to the dissenters and supportive of those interested in critical thinking over singing with the choir. My guess is that Freddie doesn’t care for Kaus’ preoccupation with card check, teachers’ unions, welfare reform (or immigration, for that matter) because Freddie is coming at all of these questions from a much more liberal position and moreover probably thinks that neoliberals such as Kaus serve no purpose in an era of more assertive and successful liberal Democrats. This is roughly the same attitude that conservatives and Republicans cultivated about Pat Buchanan, Rep. Paul and their supporters during the mid-to-late ’90s and throughout the Bush Era, which was when they most needed to heed the warnings of traditional conservatives and libertarians if they were going to make sound policy and perhaps also avoid electoral disaster. As it happened, this was the era when traditionalists and libertarians were most ignored in recent history, and the results speak for themselves.

Kaus is preoccupied with his neoliberal reform agenda in the same way that I am preoccupied with the dangers of interventionist foreign policy. These are the subjects that interest him, and they are the ones he follows most closely, so it is also possible that these are subjects where he might have some useful insight. Kaus is a veteran of a time when liberalism and the Democratic Party seemed almost as badly beaten then as conservatism and the GOP appear today, and I imagine he also remembers that the only Democratic President to win re-election in the last thirty years was someone who signed welfare reform and governed generally more like a neoliberal. That might be a practical political reason for continuing to focus on neoliberal themes even after the collapse of Republican ascendancy. The complaint that Kaus was not more anti-Bush during the last eight years is one that I assume others on the right will make in the coming years about some of the conservatives who were fervently anti-Bush–why aren’t we more enraged by this or that about the Obama administration?

It all depends on what the administration does, and in my case it will probably depend on the area of policy involved. Kaus’ interest in immigration policy is evidence that he was capable of being extremely critical of the administration when the administration pursued what he considered bad policy in one of the areas that he follows closely. Likewise, I am already far more critical of Obama’s Afghanistan/Pakistan policy, or lack thereof, than most of the hawks who once pretended to believe that he was the second coming of Jimmy Carter. I will be very critical of the ways that this administration perpetuates the abusive practices of the last, such as its apparent perpetuation of the abusive interpretation of the state secrets privilege. On the other hand, I am almost certainly not going to ridicule Obama if he actually brings all of our forces out of Iraq, even though this is what the “team” or “tribe” mentality will dictate and even though you can all but guarantee that the standard attack will be that Obama is endangering us all.

There will be plenty of partisans and ready-made hacks to do all of that, and I will not be a “fraud” of a conservative if I point out the flaws in their arguments and continue to resist the pro-war sentiment that continues to prevail among a majority of conservatives. The reason why any of this matters at all is that we have seen the distorting and limiting effects that uncritical solidarity with one’s own party or “cause” can have on our political discourse, and our policy debates are always in danger of being reduced to nothing more than the establishment consensus view. We need more eccentric, dissenting and idiosyncratic voices on both sides, not fewer, just as we generally need more diversity of ideas in our political debates and not less.

On a different subject related to discussion of “theocons,” I noticed Dave Banack at Times and Seasons has a post on the implications of the failure of the Romney campaign for political cooperation among religious conservatives of different religions. As longtime readers already know, Romney’s candidacy and the question of anti-Mormonism during the presidential campaign were my hobbyhorses for more than a few months in ’07 and through Romney’s withdrawal in early ’08, so I have some thoughts on Banack’s argument. Some preliminary points need to be made before I get to the rest of his claims.

Contra Banack, there was nothing surprising about the role of anti-Mormonism in the primaries. As I kept observing during the primaries, anti-Mormon sentiment in America is considerable and widespread and not at all limited just to conservative evangelicals, but it is particularly strong among the latter. People who do not want a Mormon President are very comfortable saying so (there was no issue here of respondents who gave false answers to pollsters), and the only groups whose candidates meet greater resistance with the electorate as a whole are Muslims and atheists. No one would say that it is surprising if a Muslim candidate could not win a presidential nomination or national election, because I think everyone understands that the electorate is not going to support such a candidate precisely because of his religion. Call this identity politics, call it sectarianism if you must, but it is all but unavoidable in a mass democracy in a country where the majority belongs, broadly speaking, to the same religion.

Candidates of minority religions are not going to fare well in national elections here until a considerable majority is non-observant or simply not religious at all. This observation tends to annoy politically active ecumenists who seem to think that religion could not possibly matter so much that it would affect voting or political alliances. It seems to me that this rule about minority religion candidates is true in pretty much any Western-style democracy with a large observant religious population. Indian secularism seems to offer the exception to the rule, as the elevation of Manmohan Singh to the post of PM there shows. Parliamentary systems can be more immune to this rule to the extent that one of the leading parties, as in India, is self-consciously not aligned with any particular religion, and presidential voting involves more of a personal identification with the candidate that makes this issue more significant.

In any case, the opposition was similar, albeit less intense, with a Mormon candidate. The difference is that surprisingly few in the media and the pundit class seemed willing to believe that respondents actually meant it when they said this. That was the fundamental political obstacle that Romney could not have overcome and will not overcome in the future if he tries again. In the event that he somehow prevailed in the primaries, he could never have won a general election with so much built-in opposition to his candidacy. Looking back on the embarrassing campaign and the final result, Republicans might regret McCain’s nomination, but given the intense hostility to Huckabee from the leadership and the movement elite (including many of the very people who later conveniently became devoted Palinites) Romney was the only viable alternative. The presidential vote would have been an even greater defeat for the GOP with Romney at the helm, and a significant part of this would have been on account of his religion.

This does not touch on the flaws that Romney himself had as a candidate, which would have made winning difficult even without the problem of anti-Mormonism, and which complicates the story by using a deeply-flawed candidate and his campaign as the evidence for the limits of political cooperation among different kinds of religious conservatives. It complicates the story because there was good reason to doubt how much Romney actually shared social and religious conservatives’ political goals. Having no pro-life record worth mentioning, given his extremely convenient discovery of the evils of ESCR around the time he began preparing his presidential campaign, he seemed to offer pro-lifers little more than lip service in a campaign against a number of other candidates–including MCain!–whose pro-life credentials were far superior. Perhaps realizing that he had no credibility, Romney was constantly on the attack against his rivals by trying to paint them as insufficiently zealous in the cause. This wasn’t just a case of the zeal of the convert, but it was more like a con-man pretending to be a zealous convert lecturing long-time devotees on their lack of fidelity while trying to convince them to join his pyramid scheme. There were other liabilities, not least of which was his career in private equity firms and his identification with corporate America, which would have become huge drags on the ticket as the financial crisis unfolded.

Now on to Banack’s main points. Referring to Linker’s The Theocons, he writes:

The Theocons book relates the moderate success conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants (i.e., Evangelicals) have achieved while suppressing sectarian differences in the pursuit of conservative political objectives. There’s no reason that approach could not be extended to other religiously minded conservatives.

What I’ve said above explains part of the reason why it cannot be extended to “other religiously-minded conservatives.” Unlike Catholics and Protestants, whose confessional differences are still quite significant for all of the ecumenical cooperation of the last few decades, most of the other religiously-minded conservatives are not Christians, and many belong to religions that not only teach radically different theological doctrines but are also founded on the assumption that the Christianity of Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox (and Armenians, Assyrians, etc.) is fundamentally false. As significant and enduring as confessional differences within Christianity are, there is still a common ground, common tradition and shared theological language to which Christians can all appeal (the so-called “Great Tradition”). Most of the “other religiously-minded conservatives” do not share any of this, which makes dialogue, much less political collaboration, much more difficult. The number of people who are deeply concerned about a social conservative agenda but who have no problem endorsing a candidate from such a different religious background does not make up a large percentage of the voting population. Even within the Republican primary electorate, it comes to perhaps 30-33%, and declines considerably outside of Republican primary voters.

Banack:

The religious affiliation of candidates is discussed in media coverage of candidates more now than a generation or two ago, but it has always been one issue among many, not a defining issue. For Romney it became a defining issue. It’s not clear to what extent the media controlled that framing or simply took cues from what readers were interested in reading, but clearly as a result the sectarian edge is sharper and more cutting now and going forward than it has been in the past.

Religious affiliation is more discussed now because America is more religiously diverse, and there are more public policy issues that directly relate to the moral teachings that religiously observant Americans consider important. The media may emphasize the elements of this that generate conflict and drama, but journalists are largely reflecting the changed political landscape. A generation or two ago a self-conscious religious backlash against certain cultural and political changes had not occurred. 40 years ago evangelicals and conservative Catholics had not rebelled against different aspects of the cultural revolution and had not yet altered their voting habits as a result, and even 30 years ago this reaction was still in its early stages. The success that evangelicals and conservative Catholics had in “suppressing sectarian differences in the pursuit of conservative political objectives” led more or less directly to the greater political salience of religious affiliation. To the extent that conservative Catholics and Protestants have succeeded in burying the hatchet, or at least setting aside doctrinal arguments for the sake of political cooperation, they have made their shared Christianity all the more important as a marker of common identity, which necessarily works against religious conservative candidates from other religions.

In other words, religious affiliation has become more prominent in electoral reporting as it has become more politically significant, because it now matters what church and what doctrines a candidate holds for the purposes of understanding voter mobilization, electoral results and certain dimensions of public policy debates. A generation or two before, it mattered less. Increasing religious diversity, political mobilization of religious voters and cultural transformation have made the religious identity of candidates relevant in a way that it has not been since before WWII when confessional lines mattered politically far more than they do now.

Banack then makes an odd, seemingly unrelated claim:

Second, this has legitimized sectarian religious criticism in general, which was then directed at VP candidate Sarah Palin in the general election.

To the extent that Palin was criticized because of her evangelical Christianity, Huckabee received just as much, if not more, criticism along these lines because of his previous role as a minister and his grassroots efforts at mobilizing his supporters through churches and their social networks. Many of Palin’s later defenders joined in the attack on Huckabee–perhaps Southern Baptists make a more appealing target for some conservatives than Pentecostals. This kind of criticism of Palin was not a result of anti-Mormon reaction against Romney, but came from an entirely different source, namely a hostility to conservative Christians in general.

Banack concludes:

My general point is simply a recognition that the election of 2008 showed that the religious conservative or theocon movement was, in the end, not political enough to bury its sectarian differences, and that as a result that movement is effectively at a political dead end.

It is debatable whether these differences have ever really been buried. It is more that they have been papered over, and for the most part they could be kept out of sight. This was mostly because, as a practical matter, there were not usually many non-Protestant candidates for President running in Republican primaries. Orrin Hatch in ’96 or Alan Keyes in ’96 and 2000 barely registered, and were not serious competitors, which made their religious identity irrelevant to the shape of the race. 2008 was just about the first time that there were major national Catholic Republican figures (Brownback and, technically, Giuliani) and a Mormon candidate and an evangelical candidate all in the same primary contest. Pre-Iowa sniping between Brownback and Huckabee supporters pointed to the limits of the alliance between Catholic and Protestant Republicans when both sides have presidential candidates who are “one of their own.” 48 years after Kennedy’s nomination in the other party, it remains the case that no Catholic has ever been at the top of a Republican presidential ticket, and the only Catholic named to a Republican ticket was Goldwater’s running mate. It would be rather bizarre if Republicans nominated a Mormon candidate before they nominated a Catholic, especially when there is much to be lost with the former and much to be gained with the latter.

It is not at all clear that 2008 shows that “theocons” are at a dead end politically, or at least they are no more at a dead end than they have been for the last eight years. What it might mean is that the overwhelming degree of support Mormon voters give to the GOP is never going to win them the sort of inclusion or acceptance that they think they should have. Then again, given the focus of the public policy debate at present on economics, it is possible that as culture war issues recede the religious identity of presidential candidates will become somewhat less important. Given his reputation for being relatively more moderate on culture war issues, Gov. John Huntsman of Utah could test that proposition with a 2012 run. If he were to run, it seems likely that Huntsman is destined to travel the same road as Romney and meet the same skepticism from social conservatives given his recent stated support for civil unions. Indeed, because Huntsman is going in the opposite direction that Romney went late in his term as governor on at least one issue (i.e., Huntsman is going against the views of his state electorate to adopt a position to their left), we might see Huntsman flame out even more quickly. Were Huntsman to run, he would certainly need culture war issues to matter less in the primaries, because he will also face anti-Mormon sentiment that is unlikely to have diminished that much when primary voting begins in three years’ time.

Oleg Gordievsky writes about how many Russians behave as toadies to Putin, but the examples he cited, while embarrassing and often ridiculous, seem positively tame compared to the praise regularly heaped on our Presidents by their partisans. To my knowledge, no one has speculated, jokingly or otherwise, about Putin’s potential to be a Messiah or a “Lightwalkerworker,” and I am skeptical that there has ever been any Putin sycophant so delirious as Hinderaker when praising Bush as a “man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius.” Maybe Putin has similarly fawning admirers, but I have to assume they are somehow on the government payroll. Perhaps systems with strong roles for presidents inevitably lead to this sort of flattery of the quasi-monarch, as our cousins in the parliamentary democracies do not usually fall into such excesses of leader-worship. Parliamentary leaders are readily replaceable and the electorate is not involved in raising them up to their leadership position in the same way.

It seems to me that our bad habits might be worse in that they often seem to be more expressions of real enthusiasm in praising mediocrities rather than self-serving celebration of someone who can give you patronage. Nominating conventions here in the U.S. are elaborate pieces of staged propaganda for something very much like a personality cult. While many of the speakers no doubt craft their remarks to advance their political careers, that still cannot really explain the zeal of most of the delegates and other partisans around the country. This staged propaganda moment was not always the case, but as the conventions have increasingly become more of a formality and a televised performance than a necessary political gathering the sycophancy of the attendees seems to have grown apace.

Republicans rolled their eyes at the stagecraft of Obama’s acceptance speech in Mile High Stadium, obsessing about the “Greek temple” look that was actually a reference to the Lincoln Memorial (talk about a personality cult!), but this was, I think, mostly a function of jealousy after their own relatively technically inept convention centered around an uninspiring speaker. The response to Palin seems to confirm this. There is nothing particularly edifying or attractive about flattering people in power. However, unlike in Russia’s populist authoritarian system where there may be some clear incentive to do this as a way of gaining access or employment, there is not necessarily any reward for abasing oneself before party leaders here and yet thousands and millions of people here do it on a regular basis.

Ross’ post on the Bacevich-Linker-Deneen debate makes a good point:

It always struck me that the small coterie of intellectuals surrounding First Things were exceedingly unlikely candidates for the role Linker cast them in – a near-existential threat to the liberal order, etc. – but at least he was overhyping people who had some claim to political influence. In his latest jeremiad against the illiberal menace, on the other hand, he’s moved on to targeting “paleoconservatives” like Daniel Larison, Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher, all of whom are notable not only for being marginal to American politics as its currently practiced, but for liking it that way.

This is a fair description up to a point–we certainly are marginal and do not seem terribly concerned about this–but Ross gets even closer to the truth when he understands that the “radicals” in question understand our conservatism as “a cultural project first and a political project a distant second, if at all.” As I see it, the political project has been tried and has not only failed but has turned conservatives into supporters of many of the forces that are wrecking all those things that they should want to preserve. In the meantime, while conservatives have been preoccupied with the political project or complacent in the assumption that cultural problems had political remedies, cultural change has overwhelmed or badly compromised many of the institutions and habits conservatives sought to defend. On the whole, I think it is fair to say that we see few, if any, political solutions as these are conventionally understood. The indictment of pernicious “theocon” influence is flawed in a different way: it exaggerates the power of the theocons, who did at least have some and were actively engaged in the political process, and badly misunderstands the theocons’ own objectives.

Whenever Linker scratches a religious conservative, he thinks he finds an authoritarian underneath, much as Andrew believes he is always uncovering a fundamentalist mentality among us, and he is usually wrong. This leads Linker to identify the theocons, most of whom are actually politically liberal in a broad sense, in the same terms that he uses to describe “paleoconservatives,” many of whom are hostile to much of the broader liberal tradition, largely because both groups are often focused on questions of culture and morals. The latter are probably less likely to fling authoritarian as an epithet or an insult, and also probably less likely to conflate authoritarian regimes with fascist or totalitarian ones, but that is not very significant. Historically, authoritarian systems have been politically centralist, state capitalist in economics, have tended to be militaristic or to place inordinate importance on the role of the military, and in many cases have sought to embrace the latest modern fads and technology to demonstrate that they were on the cutting edge. All of this turns “radicals” and paleos against tendencies towards such authoritarian government when we see evidence of them here in the United States.

Blogging is still going to be very light over the next day or two. In the meantime, take a look at Prof. Fox on Red Toryism, John Schwenkler on the Linker-Bacevich debate, and Linker’s response to Prof. Deneen. My comment on the debate today is to note that Linker is correct that a society where freedom is rightly understood in terms of obedience would not be a liberal society, which is rather the whole point of conservatives’ critiquing the problems and failings of liberal society. Speaking for myself, it would be pointless to pretend that my understanding of freedom as obedience is not derived directly from Christian doctrine and specifically from Orthodox tradition. Whether this is strictly necessary or not in order to understand freedom in this way, its connection to traditional Christianity is hardly something that needs to be concealed or denied. In the end, this is what worries Linker about Bacevich and Deneen and the rest of us “radicals.” It is not that, as he claimed before, that we are hostile to “the human condition itself,” but rather to the disordered state of fallen human nature that a certain sort of liberalism celebrates as normal.

There is also Linker’s accusation that Bacevich and Deneen don’t really reject the “culture of choice,” but simply object to certain kinds of choices, which is a common refrain I have heard countless times in the often futile debates over “crunchy” conservatism. “You are just imposing your own preferences on us,” the criticism goes, which is what you would expect to hear from people who cannot grasp or do not accept that there is a natural order that is not concerned with whether you would prefer to live a certain way or not. There are limits built into our nature and into the nature of things that point to the cultivation of virtue as the sane course, but as long as we believe it to be in our power to manipulate and control nature we will delude ourselves into believing that these limits can be stretched indefinitely without consequences. Acting contrary to nature will bring its own costs, regardless of what one does or does not prefer.

Of course, there will have to be someone or some body enforcing discipline to a degree, and if Linker wants to water down and redefine authoritarianism enough to classify this as authoritarian I suppose he can do so. It is a measure of how limited and poor our understanding of politics is nowadays that the only thing Linker envisions as an alternative to laissez-faire morality is legalistic intrusion into personal behavior by the government. This fails to take into account the possibility of social regulation through customs and concepts of honor mediated through natural and religious institutions. Social stigma, reputation, protecting the family name–these are decidedly not part of the “culture of choice,” according to which none of these things has any real importance, but they are effective means of conditioning behavior without recourse to coercion or an appeal to the law.

My new column on Turkey’s relations with its Western allies is up at The Week.

For quite a while I have raised objections to trying to read specific political messages into film and TV, and more generally I have always been skeptical of the sub-set of conservative arguments dedicated to appropriating elements of pop culture. On the whole, I think the exercise is mostly futile, and to the extent that these assessments of pop culture products are at alll accurate they tend to dissuade conservatives from their own non-kitschy cultural production. “We don’t need to go into cinema or television–look at all the conservative movies and shows we already have!” These efforts tend to reinforce the “this is a center-right nation” complacency that assumes that some core cultural conservatism exists as a given in America and does not need to be actively cultivated. Worse than that, it causes conservatives to start to define what makes a film or television show “conservative” largely by how much it is loathed or criticized by their opponents, such that 24 receives embarrassing praise when it depicts a near-omnicompetent security state that breaks the law at will so long as the targets of its violence and lawlessness are terrorists.

I started thinking about this earlier this afternoon when I happened to be scrolling through The Corner and noticed their “25 best conservative movies of the last 25 years” series of posts. Besides all of my usual problems with this appropriation game, what struck me as odd about the list was how many war and terrorism movies there were. United 93, Team America: World Police (no, I’m not kidding), We Were Soldiers, Heartbreak Ridge, Master and Commander, Red Dawn (natch), Braveheart, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (which is a sort of war movie, I suppose) are among those listed, and they still haven’t reached the top ten. The Dark Knight makes its appearance on the list with a reprise of Andrew Klavan’s surreal idea that the plot had something to do with Mr. Bush and the “war on terror.” The Lord of the Rings trilogy is framed entirely in terms of being a pro-war epic, which misunderstands the trilogy about as badly as one can:

The debates over what to do about Sauron and Saruman echoed our own disputes over the Iraq War.

Like the silly efforts to invest 300 with some contemporary political significance, this cuts both ways and could be interpreted in a way that would not suit war supporters.

[Correction in bold] John Miller cites A.O. Scott’s review of Master and Commander to give a more straightforward application of the idea of little platoons:

It imagines the [H.M.S.] Surprise as a coherent society in which stability is underwritten by custom and every man knows his duty and his place. I would not have been surprised to see Edmund Burke’s name in the credits.”

Of course every man knows his duty and his place–it is set on a Royal Navy warship! Military regimentation and conscription maintained by the discipline of the lash do not seem to me to be exactly what Burke had in mind when he was thinking of a society ruled by custom and prescription. It is telling and depressing that some movement conservatives seem to think that this is supposed to be a perfect expression of Burkean ideals. Correction: It was pointed out to me that Miller was quoting Scott’s review, not making the statement himself, which was quite evident in Miller’s post and which I missed. I apologize for the error. It is still not very encouraging that Miller thought Scott’s description to be worth quoting in the context of defining the film as conservative.

It is not just that there are many war stories included on the list. If I included films from the last 30 years, I could come up with my own list, which still would not make the films that I list “conservative” movies, but I might include on my list a few war films that offer other lessons (Gallipoli, Breaker Morant, and Bang Rajan come to mind). In themselves, the stories are not the problem. There is nothing necessarily wrong with films that try to show all aspects of warfare, including the admirable virtues of the men who fight. What is troubling is the “conservative” interpretation of many of these films and the automatic identification of reasonably positive depictions of warfare with conservative themes.

There are wide swaths [sic] of Chicago that look like something out of Mad Max ~Shawn Macomber

There are large parts of south and west Chicago that suffer from a number of problems, but I have driven around the South Side and between Hyde Park and downtown on surface streets many times over the years and I have yet to see anything that would remind me of Mad Max. Naturally, this remark is being made as part of a complaint that the city won’t permit Wal-Mart to set up shop here, which prompts me to turn John’s question around: wouldn’t it be great if many on the Right could apply to Wal-Mart’s supposed ability to “create” jobs even half of the skepticism that they constantly (and sometimes rightly) apply to the federal government’s?* Pay no attention to the independent, small businesses that Wal-Mart’s arrival may adversely affect, but focus instead on how many low-wage service jobs it will provide–opposition to making your community heavily dependent on one company for its employment and needs must simply be irrational. Just keep the goods cheap and keep ’em coming! I believe this is the approach to economics and politics that both Bacevich and Deneen find so ruinous.

*On a related note, is Michael Steele kidding when he says that government has never, as the saying goes, created a job? It seems to me that one of our long-standing complaints against all levels of government is that it has been only too good at creating them and preserving them, and one of the reasons that calls for abolishing various departments have become less and less common even on the right is that there are so many people with a vested interest in keeping these sources of employment from disappearing.

Andrew Bacevich has a short post on a future conservatism, and Patrick Deneen has a long and very interesting related response to Damon Linker at the main blog. I want to discuss this debate at greater length, but I am probably going to be too busy for most of the rest of this week to give it the attention it deserves. Briefly and not surprisingly, I agree with Bacevich’s prescription:

When it comes to the culture, conservatives should promote an awareness of the costs of unchecked individual autonomy, while challenging conceptions of freedom that deny the need for self-restraint and self-denial. When it comes to economics, they should emphasize the virtue and necessity of Americans, collectively as well as individually, learning to live within their means. When it comes to foreign policy, they should advocate a restoration of realism, which will necessarily entail abandoning expectations of remaking the world in America’s own image.

Certainly, there is a degree of radicalism in this. It is correct to say that self-restraint has to be governed by deference to authority. Deference and the unquestioning, unthinking servility Linker tries to link to it are, of course, entirely different things, and one thing that I think that paleoconservatives, or simply radical conservatives, have shown over the past several decades is a respect for lawful authority that requires resistance and criticism of abuses of authority. In practice, this means that those who defer to lawful authority are less inclined to embrace what one would recognize as authoritarian practices of the state or any other institution, because they do not judge those in positions of authority merely according to their possession of office and power but also according to their right use of these things.

Individual autonomy, based in pride, is the root of our fallen condition. Indeed, it is the cause of the Fall. That is precisely why it has to be restrained and governed. If we do not cultivate restraint and self-government within ourselves, it will eventually be imposed from without. This is why the culture of choice is so antithetical to genuine freedom, and why deferring to lawful authority is the surest protection against tyrannical abuses by all those who hold positions of authority. Prof. Deneen says this more elegantly than I have:

Again, the irony is that self-rule is the means of preventing and thwarting the expansion of the military-industrial State. It is, in fact, the greatest avenue of preventing the likelihood of an all-encompassing Leviathan. Such an alternative conception of liberty is deeply premised upon the very anthropology that Linker claims it to be uncognizant of – our propensity to “depravity,” including self-deception, pride, greed, self-aggrandizement and a willingness to reduce good to those things reducible to the monadic body. A culture that would seek to reign in our propensity to depravity would not rest either on private liberation nor “authoritarianism,” but the inculcation of the faculties and abilities of self-government. Only one who seeks private liberty in all respects would regard such cultivation of self-government as oppressive, and would ultimately have to face the reality that such thoroughgoing private liberty is purchased by means of the expansion of public power and a truly frightening prospect of authoritarianism. Already we can see that much of the American public would be willing to sacrifice liberties in the name of sustaining a growth economy that encourages near-infinite, but never fulfilled, personal satiation. This, however, is not liberty.

It is time to think differently and beyond this reigning paradigm: to think of liberty in terms of self-government; to consider that freedom is best preserved when institutions are smaller and less concentrated with destructive power; to live within the means that nature affords, without seeking its pillage or mutilation; to act with stewardship and responsibility in the world and toward our neighbors and future generations.