I would have something to say about last week’s episode and the developments of the last couple of weeks, but SciFi has opted to embargo the latest episode for some indeterminate period of time. So, as soon as I see the new episode, I should actually have some comments.

Reading Freddy’s post on Philip Delves Broughton, I came across Broughton’s assessment of the value of MBAs:

MBAs in the public mind have become expert at extracting value from an economy, through fees, bonuses and exorbitant salaries, without knowing how to build value. They use their management voodoo to suck the blood of the real value creators in an economy. But really they are of less practical use to society than a decent carpenter or accountant.

In light of this, it is very appropriate that Mr. Bush was known from the beginning as our first MBA President. We had some warning. “Extracting value without knowing how to build value” could very easily have been the administration’s motto. It is certainly how they governed.

Yuval Levin wrote a column that has prompted somedebate that is worth looking at a little more. First, Levin’s core argument:

Our deepest disagreements coalesce into two broad views of human nature that define the public life of every free society. In a crude and general way our political parties give expression to these views, and allow the roughly like-minded to pool their voices and their votes in order to turn beliefs into action.

Reihan comments:

This suggests that individuals who identify with a party have an obligation to argue with and persuade those in their own faction about how best to realize their shared worldview. Loyalty to a party recognizes that politics is an iterative game, and that loyalty is rewarded over time with trust.

Perhaps this is what Levin means, and I don’t doubt that there is such an obligation, but I very much doubt that party loyalty is all that frequently rewarded with trust. If the experience of social conservatives and restrictionists with the GOP is any indication, loyalty is rewarded with a mixture of neglect and contempt. Touching on one issue that does seem to center on fundamental definitions of human nature, consider the politics of abortion. If pro-lifers have been voting for the GOP to “pool their voices and their votes in order to turn beliefs into action,” I submit that they have wasted their time. Indeed, as Dr. Fleming argued last week, the political strategy has not only been unsuccessful, but has been little more than a distraction:

The cumulative effect of much of the professional pro-life ideology is to distort and deflect the question, away from the really important thing, which is how to convert nonbelievers, who will then be far less likely to kill their babies, toward comparatively trivial legislative policies and judicial agendas.

For our purposes here, the point of citing this is that even in those cases where there might be political activism driven by fundamental differences over human nature that activism is often fruitless and misguided.

More to the point, Levin proposes that there are deep philosophical divides between the groups of people who make up the voting coalitions of the two parties, which then function roughly as the organizing vehicles for opposing understandings of human nature. This sounds plausible, but if we dig a little more I think we will find that this is not really true. In what way do the two coalitions of voters and their respective intellectuals and politicians disagree about human nature, how do the disagreements define the coalitions and how do these disagreements readily bear on public policy questions? It seems to me that there are many believers on the American political right in a malleable, manipulable and perfectible human nature, and arguably there are quite a few on the political left who believe that we are fallen creatures in need of God’s grace. Where the two sides broadly differ may be in how they apply these understandings to public policy debates, or it may be in how seriously people on either side take their understanding when making ethical and political decisions. Even these alternatives do not account for the diversity within coalitions and the conflicting impulses inside individual voters, and they probably credit the two parties with more philosophical coherence than they really possess.

Someone may confess a certain belief and formally belong to a church that teaches the dignity and sanctity of human life, which would presumably then have certain implications for policy and voting as these things are usually framed, but it is in the nature of coalition politics and in the habits of most voters that a person could end up endorsing a platform containing a number of other views that are arguably directly antithetical to his religious teachings, but which he chooses to minimize or ignore as a matter of expedience or self-justification. Single-issue voters may fixate on one particular question where they find a party to be in line with their religious teachings while carefully ignoring or rationalizing their support for other policies promoted by that party that are directly at odds with those teachings. To return to a more concrete example, you could have pro-lifers who reliably support a party that backs aggressive war even as these voters take pride in being opposed to the culture of death. In such cases, party loyalty and partisanship can be pernicious because they have ceased to function as channels of existing beliefs and have instead become substitute markers of identity and loyalty that detract from earlier and definitely more important loyalties.

Levin:

To ridicule these disagreements and assert as our new president also did in his inaugural that “the time has come to set aside childish things” is to demean as insignificant the great debates that have formed our republic over more than two centuries. These arguments—about the proper relationship between the state and the citizen, about America’s place in the world, about the regard and protection we owe to one another, about how we might best reconcile economic prosperity and cultural vitality, national security and moral authority, freedom and virtue—are divisive questions of enormous consequence, and for all the partisanship they have engendered they are neither petty nor childish.

Taken in isolation, Levin’s defense of principled disagreement is correct. I would go beyond that and say that the trouble with our politics is not an excess of division and partisanship but rather that we suffer from stifling conformity on most major questions. Leaving aside whether the two parties disagree that deeply over human nature, which is not nearly so clear-cut, it is less and less the case that the two parties disagree that deeply over most major policy questions; the range of real options in policy debates is kept very limited.

The intensity of partisanship as pose and maneuver is harmful to the extent that it conceals this conformity and allows people, such as Levin, to be able to make plausible-sounding arguments that the two parties genuinely represent widely-divergent, deeply-held views that endure over time. It is especially dangerous when Levin can set up partisanship of the sort currently practiced as some kind of remedy to “elite technocratic consensus,” when the one thing that partisan debates almost never do is challenge that consensus. It is true that Obama was wrong to dismiss political disagreements of the past as petty and childish–presumably he would not have included opposition to the invasion of Iraq or opposition to the torture regime among the examples of “stale” arguments–and as I said last month his own statement on the non-negotiability of certain principles revealed that he holds some principles do not permit “pragmatic” compromise:

Contrary to the praise he heaped on pragmatism in other parts of the speech, in this section Obama was clearly making a statement of political principle and made clear that there are some political divisions (i.e., between those who want to compromise civil liberties and those who want to preserve them) that are worth maintaining. It is not actually just a matter of what “works,” because people with different principles disagree about what to do and they disagree about what being pragmatic means. Instead, the important question is one of what the government should and should not be permitted to do. In other words, Obama ended up endorsing the views of some of the very “cynics” whose “stale political arguments” he said were obsolete.

It seems to me that Andrew’s problem with the GOP leadership, and also with Levin’s implicit defense of their conduct, is that the party leadership has been exceedingly, er, pragmatic in their adaptation to the new political era and have “rediscovered” principles that were not much in evidence when they possessed power and had the ability to adhere to those principles when it mattered. In other words, having failed the test, they and their defenders would like some credit for knowing the answers when it is of no use, and then, as if this were not enough, acting as if they have the monopoly on knowledge and wisdom.

Obviously, it is easier to remain principled in opposition, which is why the GOP leadership in Congress deserves so little credit and some criticism for suddenly becoming “principled” at the moment when it makes absolutely no difference either politically or substantively. Having practically burned down the house, the top GOP leaders now strut and pose as fire-fighting experts when scarcely a year or two ago they denied that the house was even flammable. For the rest of us on the right who were opposed to the Bush administration early and often, it is more than a little annoying to see the sudden discovery of fiscal responsibility and austerity measures at a time when they have the least political traction and their messengers have the least possible political relevance.

Levin elaborates on his theory more elsewhere in the essay, and makes a number of debatable claims:

It is not a coincidence that people who believe in traditional values also tend to believe in a strong military: both views express an underlying premise about the intractability of human nature.

Actually, it is something of a coincidence and to some extent it is an accident and legacy of Cold War-era partisanship. This is made even more clear by the acquiescence of the voters who “believe in traditional values” (and perhaps even those who live according to them, but let’s not get carried away) in grand projects to reorganize settled societies on the other side of the planet according to foreign blueprints. Indeed, conservatives generally believe, or at least most would claim to believe, that human nature is not something that can be changed, but to be consistent such people would not support a militarized social engineering program. In fact, most of these same people did and continue to support such a program. In practice, “support for a strong military” means support for projecting power and using force. Thank goodness that Levin at least spared us the usual euphemism of “strong defense“!

There is an at least equally plausible argument that traditional conservatives would not tend to support a strong military, and definitely not one that facilitates global hegemony, because they above all others understand the dangers of putting so much power in the hands of fallible men and the temptation to use overwhelming power arbitrarily to the detriment of customary rights at home and the lives of those in other countries. Of course, that would then create problems for understanding partisan loyalties as a function of one’s views about human nature.

The next claim is even less credible:

It is not a coincidence that people who favor a large welfare state also tend to believe that diplomacy can resolve most global conflicts: both views express an underlying sense that most human problems are functions of an imperfect distribution of resources.

Confidence in diplomacy has little or nothing to do with a belief that “most human problems are functions of an imperfect distribution of resources.” Confidence in diplomacy stems from a belief that state actors have relatively rational and limited objectives that can be successfully negotiated. Confidence in diplomacy relies on the belief that pretty much all human beings respond to well-crafted incentives and that they will act in their perceived self-interest given the chance, which it seems to me is a view much closer to the critics of the welfare state than it is to the views of its strongest supporters.

It is almost entirely an accident of post-1968 domestic politics that the greatest advocates of the welfare state have ceased to be equally strong advocates for the warfare state, just as it was fairly accidental that critics of the welfare state became the most ardent advocates for expanding the warfare state. Except perhaps for a contest over revenues, there is no underlying or coherent logic for why someone should have seemingly boundless confidence in the state to raise up foreign populations (sometimes against their will) while denying that it has any ability to do so at home. There is at most a temperamental or psychological predisposition to prefer “soft” rather than “hard” means, but the two are not mutually exclusive. What is no coincidence is that those on the right who would like to preserve the welfare state in some form are also not much troubled by the continuation of the warfare state.

Perhaps you will say that Levin chose poor examples, and that there is some deeper philosophical coherence that explains partisan loyalties that he has not effectively demonstrated, but I am doubtful. What makes the entire argument so frustrating and what makes it seem less than credible is that it was precisely partisanship and partisan loyalty that tended to blunt or mute what few mainstream conservative critiques of the Bush administraton there were when they did not positively contribute to the administration’s monstrous and revolutionary policies.

Someone might say, “Well, okay, but that’s all in the past.” The point, however, is that neither the GOP nor most mainstream conservatives have reckoned with the meaning of these things. Now that the other party is in power, everyone is supposed to return to their previously-assigned roles c.2000, as if the last eight years never happened, and we are all supposed to return to pretending that the GOP’s deep disagreements really derive from a profound set of beliefs that drive their political leaders to do the things that they do. It’s a bit like Romney’s act during the primaries. It might not be so bad that the politicians are engaged in rank opportunism to the extent that this shows that the pols are listening to their constituents and representing their views, but could we at least be spared the pretense that the pols are merely bearing witness to their strongly-held convictions? For that matter, can we agree that the GOP, even when it happens to get this or that policy right, should not be allowed to forget its role in creating or acquiescing in the creation of the current predicament? Could we also agree that permitting the GOP to evade responsibility for its failures would be an example of the pernicious sort of partisanship and partisan loyalty that deserves no defense?

Greg Scoblete has a good post pondering the question of air strikes in Pakistan in light of revelations (which were, I would add, incredibly unwise to make) that U.S. forces are launching the drones from bases inside Pakistan. Scoblete acknowledges the concerns that some of the critics of the strikes, including myself, have had, but then poses this challenge:

Throughout all these revelations runs the persistent thread that the government in Pakistan, whatever it says publicly, is very much on board with America’s military campaign on its territory. This puts critics of this campaign in the odd position of being more concerned about the stability of Pakistan than the actual government of Pakistan. And unlike the Musharraf regime, the current government has a degree of democratic legitimacy.

This doesn’t make American military action inside Pakistan any less problematic. Zardari could be miscalculating and popular unrest over military action could very well bubble over. But it could be that Pakistan has decided that U.S. military action inside their country is the worst possible option – except for all the others.

This brought to mind something that Spencer Ackerman was reporting earlier, which is that the Pakistani military chief of staff, Ashfaq Kayani, prefers U.S. training of some of his soldiers in counterinsurgency tactics to these strikes. That suggests that allowing the U.S. to launch strikes from bases in Pakistan is not the preferred approach of the Pakistani military, which means that this practice is probably a function of a weak civilian government that feels obliged to acquiesce to pressure from Washington over these strikes in practice while maintaining its public stance of opposition. Far from correcting the basic dependence, real and perceived, of the Pakistani government on Washington’s direction, which contributed so powerfully to Pakistani public discontent with Musharraf, the civilian government seems to have become more dependent, which will probably tend to define its policies in the west in the public’s mind not as a pursuit of Pakistani interests but rather as merely doing Washington’s will. This is not a sustainable arrangement. If we assume that our forces are going to be engaged in this region for the foreseeable future, the democratic civilian government cannot be seen as little more than our puppet, or else it will fall and a new government that will be automatically less inclined to support U.S. efforts will replace it.

If the report about Kayani’s views is accurate, this would mean that the civilian government is willing to cooperate in a policy that the military chief of staff regards as mistaken, or at least as less desirable, and which the public vehemently opposes, which risks throwing the civilian government into disrepute as essentially a puppet regime no different than Musharraf’s now that the use of Pakistani bases is public knowledge. This would tend to undermine the argument that U.S.-Pakistan cooperation has worsened since Musharraf’s resignation and the election of the civilian government, which makes the reflexive support for Musharraf during the last few years of his rule seem even more unnecessary in retrospect. However, it also suggests that the tactic favored by both the last and the current administrations is one that the Pakistani military regards as less effective and it also happens to be one that seems to have negligible effect on the strength of Taliban forces on both sides of the border. Indeed, the much-lamented arrangement struck in Swat province suggests that the Pakistani government has hardly gained ground in the last few months even as these strikes have been successfully killing their targets.

In short, the head of Pakistan’s military believes that launching drone air strikes is not the best tactic available, it is deeply unpopular in Pakistan, it does not seem to be weakening the main threat to the stability of the Pakistani and Afghan states and threatens now to discredit the already weak civilian government in Pakistan. On the other side of the ledger, Al Qaeda leaders are indeed being killed. Evidently, the new administration is as convinced as the previous one that the gains from the latter outweigh the costs of the former, but this seems profoundly and completely wrong. The risks to regional stability and U.S. interests in the region from the destabilization of Pakistan are far greater, and as far as I can see these drone air strikes are exacerbating the fundamental problems of the Pakistani state in unacceptably dangerous ways. Last month I suggested that the new administration did not have a Pakistan policy, but only a Taliban policy; now I am beginning to wonder whether they even have a Taliban policy. If they remain wedded to using these strikes despite the very real dangers to regional stability the strikes pose, I will have to conclude that whatever Taliban policy they do have is badly flawed.

I think I understand Damon Linker’s argument against the “theocons” better than I did earlier, but as I read his latest post on this question I am even more puzzled by his hostility to the “theocon” project. If it is true that theocons believe that “America must be recognized as a Christian nation in the sense that its form of government — its regime, liberalism in the first sense — is essentially, ineradicably Christian,” no one should be more pleased by this than political left-liberals. If it prevailed, this mythology would invest the liberal constitutional order with the sort of legitimacy that would make it impossible for Christians to question.

Of course, it isn’t true that liberalism-in-the-first-sense, the liberal constitutional order of the United States, is essentially Christian, and it is an anachronism of the worst kind to make this claim, so I can see why someone might object to this conflation on philosophical and historical grounds. However, Linker’s objection is not merely that this mythology is wrong, but that it is threatening to the liberal order. What Linker continues to miss is that this effort to baptize liberalism is aimed at shoring up liberalism-in-the-first-sense and it is also aimed, I think, at preventing religiously-grounded critiques of liberalism-in-the-first-sense, which inevitably also blunts religiously-grounded critiques of political left-lliberalism. It ensures that political discourse will remain confined to the fairly narrow limits of different forms of liberalism, which effectively disarms the right and perpetually puts illiberal groups and their institutions on the defensive. Not only does this preclude any possibility of a “theocon”-led turn towards theocracy or anything remotely like it, but it would have to mean that the “theocons” would have to insist that theocracy or any kind of political theology that invests a non-liberal political order with religious sanction is more or less antithetical to Christianity. There are myriad reasons why Christians and especially Christian conservatives should fiercely oppose such a project, but there are very few reasons for a defender of secular America to do the same.

I am going to have more to say about this in another venue, so I won’t say much right now, but I would just point out that an important part of this Krauthammer indictment of Obama’s allegedly failed diplomatic approach is not correct. The causes for the end of U.S. access to Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan were many, and most of them were related to internal Kyrgyz politics and U.S. actions in connection with the base, as the former Kyrgyz ambassador to the U.S. under the old Akayev regime makes clear here. The wise thing would be to spend less time whining about Russia’s so-called “brazen provocations” and to spend more trying to understand how Washington lost the goodwill of the Kyrgyz government. One way to start would be to acknowledge that the Kyrgyz government is not merely a puppet, but it will drift into the orbit of whichever major power it finds most aligned with its interests.

Patrick Deneen had an important post on the similarities between New Left critiques and some contemporary “radical” conservative arguments, and observed in the writings of several contemporary conservatives, including himself, “a more sweeping condemnation of the broad sweep of American political history and its basic self-congratulatory narrative.” In passing I might note that this is why earlier paleoconservatives and many of us still today remain critical of or even hostile to certain episodes in American history, because so many of these episodes derived from this habit of self-congratulation and were valorized in historical memory as part of the same habit to glorify ourselves as exceptional. Many of us are more skeptical of the ‘Good Wars’ in our past because we see plainly how the mythology of the ‘Good Wars’ covers over gross injustices and feeds into national self-righteousness that is in turn used to justify other exercises of power.

Sean Scallon has followed up with a post on the shift towards optimism on the right, which is one of the failings of modern conservatism–and American culture as a whole–that bothers me the most. Scallon also added this anecdote referring to the McGovern campaign:

“You know,” said Talmadge, “what was wrong with George in that campaign was that he gave the impression that he was mad at the country. He was condeming her policy in Vietnam and just seemed like everything he said indicated that he was as mad as hell about this country. People aren’t going to support a candidate like that. This is a great country. It makes mistakes, but by God if you get up there and preach day and night against America, you’re not going to be elected.”

Talmadge was probably right then, and his observation would hold true today as a matter of electoral politics. If Americans have had a habit of self-congratulation, we also prefer it when our politicians flatter us. Perhaps that is an inescapable part of democratic or quasi-democratic politics. No one likes to hear that he is contributing to grave national problems, much less that he must change something about himself rather than demand action from the government on his behalf. Private irresponsibility hardly fuels demands for public probity and prudence, but instead seems to give license to reckless policies. The old stump speech boilerplate about making the government’s budget more balanced and like a household budget will still win applause, but when private indebtedness is so great it means nothing.

One of the most tired accusations is that so-and-so “blames America first,” which in a more sane world would be understood as taking responsibility for one’s own flaws. One would think that a more damning charge would be to say that someone never blames America, and so refuses to take responsibility for anything done in her, our, name, but even this use of the word blame is misguided. In fact, most of the people who “blame America first” go to great lengths to identify the flaws of America only with the parts of the country unlike theirs and only with the people on the other side of cultural and political divides. The more comprehensive the critique, the fewer people there are who want to hear it. When making a cultural critique of private habits, the resistance becomes even more fierce. The more prophetic and less convenient the warning, the less political traction it has because it unites more enemies against it. To call for self-restraint, rather than self-congratulation and self-rewarding, from everyone is necessarily to be a voice in the wilderness.

Obviously, there are different degrees of responsibility. Not everyone is equally responsible for our predicament, but neither is anyone entirely free of responsibility. One of the worst traits of populist rhetoric is its capacity to find scapegoats and evade the responsibility that the people themselves have for their predicament, so it follows that a populist agenda that is expressed in terms of self-criticism will make many enemies and win few friends. I think this may help explain why “Come Home, America” grates on so many ears, instead of sounding like a clarion call. To call for America to come home suggests that she has gone astray, and so it means that we as a nation have gone astray, which is to do the worst thing possible in a political campaign: tell your audience the truth about them.

What does any of this have to do with the original discussion? To the extent that people conventionally define patriotism as collectively denying national responsibility and exulting in national pride, it is not surprising that it should wax and wane with electoral fortunes of different factions. It is telling that this discussion was prompted by the argument currrently circulating that there can now be an unabashed left-patriotism on account of Obama’s election, as if patriotism or the expression of it can or should be contingent on the faction currently running the state. Now that Obama is in office, the argument seems to go, the left can indulge in the pretense that we can do no wrong and other nations hate us for our freedom (or whatever virtue they would like to trumpet at the time). If patriotism were actually contingent on such things, I would submit that it wasn’t really patriotism at all. Indeed, evading responsibility, shifting blame and invoking our exceptional status are all reliable ways of escaping patriotic duties and the hard choices that go with them. Critics of such “patriotism,” which is not really patriotism at all, are necessarily going against the optimistic grain, as optimism permits the perpetual deferral of hard choices.

I’m probably the last one who should comment on not being familiar with the latest trends, but do people still actually use the phrase “off the hook” anymore? Well, Michael Steele does:

Newly elected Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele plans an “off the hook” public relations offensive to attract younger voters, especially blacks and Hispanics, by applying the party’s principles to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”

What was I saying about falling into the trap of insulting stereotypes? Changing public perception and adopting different symbolism are important successes that Cameron has had in Britain, and Freddy discusses how Cameron has managed to rebuild the Tories through consistently making vague gestures in different “reform” directions: sometimes as a modernizer, sometimes as a Red Tory sympathizer, and sometimes as a Blairite knock-off. However, these successes would not have been sufficient to win back voters lost to the Tories for decades had Labour not so thoroughly abandoned its working-class constituencies. It seems to me that Steele’s remarks are an example of the sort of “hug a hoodie” Cameronism that Republicans should definitely avoid. There is nothing so head-smackingly condescending as a Republican politician trying to show that he is trendy and familiar with the latest pop culture. More often than not, the pol simply is not familiar with the latest pop culture, and the attempt to appear so becomes an occasion for eye-rolling embarrassment for all involved. It also sends the message loud and clear that the pol not only doesn’t know how to speak to the voters he wants to reach, but that he doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know.

All that said, let’s give Steele a break for a moment. This is not necessarily that different from Howard Dean’s famous “guys with Confederate flags in their trucks” line, which was tone-deaf in its own way but at least demonstrated some awareness that his party consistently failed to win the votes of most white men in national elections. However, the idea that Dean was trying to articulate was that the Democrats had to try to compete in all fifty states and pursue voters whom they had largely neglected and ignored, especially in regions where the party had been competitive in the past. Five years after he said that, the Democrats are the majority in Congress, control the White House and are well-represented among the governors and state legislatures around the country. It is safe to say that Dean was as far removed culturally from Confederate flag-owning white men as Steele is removed from the voters he is referring to here, as the clumsiness of the remarks makes clear, but Dean did have some idea how to translate his clumsy pander into something like an effective method of recruiting local candidates who could compete in traditionally hostile territory. Jim Webb, Heath Shuler and Travis Childers are just a few examples of the success of that approach.

What remains to be seen is whether Steele has the imagination to apply the lessons of Democratic success to the GOP. It is also not certain that the rest of the GOP leadership will go along with a similar recruiting effort in the Midwest, New England and the Pacific West if it means backing candidates who are insufficiently party-line on this or that issue. The profile of the right candidates would have to differ depending on district, but before you could discover the right candidates for these districts you would need to be willing to try. Nothing I have heard from Steele since his election suggests that he will be, but perhaps he will surprise us.

“Growth” is not necessarily, or even likely, a source of human happiness. Why is it the overarching and one univocally agreed-upon goal of our modern politics? ~Prof. Patrick Deneen

John Schwenkler was remarking not long ago on the unnatural and bizarre quality of referring to the “growth” of abstract entities, and cited objections to describing the “growth” of the economy. This language and the policies this language is used to defend have something important in common, which is the obscuring of costs and losses. As Prof. Deneen says elsewhere in the same post:

The basic circularity implicit in our current moment reveals a deeply troubling truth about our current economic condition: growth is fundamentally generated by deepening and extending bad behaviors (such as indebtedness), the costs of which are to be obscured by economic growth. However, because those costs keep rising – in every sense, not only monetary, but socially, environmentally, generationally – the need for higher economic and social costs to spur greater growth, and greater growth to service and obfuscate the costs, increases exponentially. In recent years the frenetic logic of this basic truth has led us to a condition like a runner on an out-of-control treadmill, running madly to get ahead, at best standing still, at worst about to be thrown off the machine.

The immediate goal seems to be to mask the costs of private indebtedness, which are expressed in the collapse in (artificially-inflated!) consumer demand, with massive public borrowing from the next generation. On the plus side, private indebtedness has risen to such levels that we cannot now follow the ruinous South Korean model of “recovery” through still more debt-financed private spending (not that we should want to follow that model), but the South Korean example should serve as a warning about the basic unsustainability of this obsession with “growth” that is financed with easy money and cheap credit. Eventually, there comes a time when everything that has already been bought and consumed has to be paid for, and the reckoning cannot be perpetually deferred into the future. If today’s “growth” has been purchased at the expense of future prosperity, there has not been any real growth, but merely indulgence facilitated by theft committed against those not yet born. Other costs that “growth” and faith in the power of technology to facilitate ever-more “growth” obscure are the costs to the natural world and, of course, to the social and political order.

As Prof. Deneen discusses later in the post, there is a proper fulfillment to natural growth beyond which growing is supposed to cease. Indeed, growth beyond that point is typically unhealthy and takes the form of cancers. This is the basic distinction that I believe John Lukacs also made long ago between “growth” and prosperity. On the other hand, perhaps a way of life geared towards perpetual and ceaseless growth is better understood as one that is continually regressing towards childhood and ultimately infancy, which might explain the prevalence of the optimistic, child-like belief that we can have whatever we want and there will always be someone or something to solve our problems. Maturity implies being fully grown and being ready to take on responsibilities, which suggests that the more we cultivate the idea of constant and endless “growth” as the proper goal the more irresponsible and dependent we will become.

What would we do without the so-called conservative “dogmatic aversion to statism”? For starters, we might actually start restraining the power of the central state and breaking up its collusion with concentrated wealth. In other words, we might start combating etatisme. Of course, that’s the point–in practice, most people who call themselves conservatives do not have a “dogmatic aversion to statism,” and when it comes to war and finance they are often defenders of an activist, centralized state. This actually makes a certain amount of sense, as most people who call themselves conservatives are, when you press them, essentially classical liberals, and classical liberals did not have a “dogmatic aversion to statism,” either. By comparison with their traditional conservative and monarchist foes in the 19th century, they were advocates for centralism and the expansion of the role of the state in the name of reason and liberty. Standardization, rationalization and uniformity in law and regulation were what most classical liberals prized, which is one reason why they tended to be strong nationalists hostile to the customs and privileges of regions and local parlements. The separation of modern strands of classical liberalism from nationalism (i.e., some forms of libertarianism) is a curious by-product of 20th century American politics, and I am guessing that this owes a great deal to influence of exiled liberals from central Europe on the evolution of these strands of American classical liberalism. These were exiles who were repelled by the nationalist politics of their home countries. In many European countries, it remains the case that nationalist parties are the direct descendants of classical liberal nationalists and the most classical liberal parties (outside Germany) tend to be inclined towards nationalism. As John says, “statist” is a somewhat useless designation, since at some point almost everyone accepts that there must be a government, and opposition to a centralized state as a matter of principle or “dogma” is a position held by relatively few people and many of them would not call themselves conservatives. Suffice it to say that when Will Wilkinson accepts the moniker “statist,” its value as a pejorative insult has been exhausted.