What’s Wrong with the World

Among the foundational Conservative values is simple appreciation. Gratitude for the good that he, somehow, through no merit of his own, is able to enjoy and recollect, will always be at the very heart of what animates the Conservative. It will not do for us to forget this, and accept the pretense that Conservatism is just another variety of political activism, always exercised by discontent and annoyance. This is the pretense of the professional political operatives, whose livelihood depends upon the continued agitation of segments of the population. Their business is not the happiness of man, but his unhappiness. Political operatives we will always have with us; yet the Conservative at least knows their place. And knowing the place of things is a fine formulation for wisdom.

Conservatism has given pride of place to gratitude. This is the ground of its politics.

ISI Books has brought out a rich new collection of Russell Kirk’s writings: The Essential Russell Kirk, edited by George A. Panichas. It will serve nicely as an introduction to one of the great but greatly neglected men of American Letters. A Conservative truly and a gentleman, Kirk influenced the postwar history of the Republic — though his usual position was in dissent — in inscrutable but profound ways. The breadth of his reflections, the careful elegance of his style, the depth of his erudition, the joy and gratitude in his heart, and his candor about the crisis that confronts modern man: each is robustly demonstrated in this volume.

Kirk will ever be associated with the name Edmund Burke: for that alone — for reviving interest in the greatest Conservative of the modern age — he would be justly memorialized. But he accomplished much more. He brought the word ideology under the obloquy it so richly deserved, turning hundreds of aspiring Conservatives away from this ruinous intoxicant. In his fiction as well as his essays, he subtly emphasized the mystery of life on this earth, the ineradicable duality of man, caught as he is between his animal nature and his longings for the supernatural. He revitalized interest in other worthy figures: the fascinating and enigmatic John Randolph of Roanoke, the House of Representative’s greatest orator; the intellectual peregrinator Orestes Brownson, once given the astonishing honor of the title “an American Newman”; the forgotten traditionalists of the interwar years, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More; and many more.

The most basic need of man, according to Russell Kirk, is order. Discovering, illuminating and defending the principles of American order was his vocation, which he carried out with grace, wit and intrepidity — as the reader of this volume will discover forthwith.

Reflective Conservatives are periodically haunted by the question, How do we resist Liberalism? They seek not a theoretical answer, however important that may be, but a practical answer. Liberalism at times seems a resistless force. It has subjugated to its unanswerable authority one of this country’s political parties; and it is on the verge of conquest of the other. It has very nearly made conservatism, at least in its mainstream guises, its vassal and sycophant. It has achieved enormous and ruinous advances into the territory of Christianity. Its opponents are numerous but fragmented, bewildered and largely ineffectual. What concrete steps of resistance should be taken?

The April issue of First Things features an adapted version of a lecture Fr. Neuhaus delivered at Beeson Divinity School, entitled Christ Without Culture. Neuhaus, suggestively modifying the famous Niebuhrian taxonomy of the ways in which the relationship of Christ and culture has been understood, adds to the list - Christ against culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture - the formulation Christ without culture. Noting that there is, in point of fact, a distinctive American culture, and more specifically, an American culture as it pertains to religious affirmations, Neuhaus elaborates:

Now, as a matter of historical and sociological fact, Christianity is never to be found apart from a cultural matrix; Christianity in all its forms is, as it is said, “enculturated.” In relation to a culture, the Church is both acting and being acted on, both shaping and being shaped. What then do I mean by suggesting this sixth type, Christ without culture? I mean that the Church—and here Church is broadly defined as the Christian movement through time—can at times adopt a way of being in the world that is deliberately indifferent to the culture of which it is part. In the “Christ without culture” model, that indifference results in the Church unconsciously adopting and thereby reinforcing, in the name of the gospel, patterns of culture that are incompatible with her gospel.

Much ink and many pixels have been spilled in disputations over the nature and significance of neoconservatism, particularly as this tendency appears to be the dominant political motif of the present administration. Much of the discussion has been, well, not so much a discussion as an exchange of incandescent invective, and, when it has not been so intemperate, it has tended towards the obfuscatory, as in the attempt to deny that there actually exists a definable tendency corresponding to the term "neoconservatism". Fortunately, prominent neoconservative Michael Novak has obliged those pining for a succinct exposition of neoconservatism. That interview, however, requires some interpretation; for, like a scriptural text, the story of neoconservatism is not a fit one for private interpretation, particularly the self-interpretations of those who authored it. Unlike a scriptural text, which is best interpreted from within the tradition out of which it arose, neoconservatism is best interpreted by outsiders. After all, is it not the case that we are often understood best by those who are, well, not us?

To this end, I propose to provide an interpretation of select passages from the linked Novak interview, refraining from emotionally-freighted language; imagine the deadpan delivery of Bob Dole, and you will have in mind the intended tone.

Neoconservatism is a topic that has received a fair amount of commentary during the course of the past six years, and seems likely to receive still more, as a lame-duck administration continues to wallow in lameness, the war continues to drag, and the host organism of the neoconservative movement, the Republican Party, hurtles toward the abyss of 2008. Neoconservatism is a topic warranting serious reflection, for while the media and the average American might well content themselves with the knowledge that some neoconservatives promoted a foreign policy that resulted in a Mesopotamian quagmire, the tendency is not one that will be slinking off to die on one of history's ash-heaps anytime soon.

In light of these considerations, it seemed preferable - instead of offering a quick response to a thoughtful comment - to elaborate upon the nature and origins of neoconservatism.

A commenter last week repeated a common charge against Russell Kirk, which is a common charge against half a dozen great Conservatives, beginning with Burke: that he was “more a poet than a philosopher,” that he was imaginative in his wording, that, in short, his verbal talent exceeded his philosophic. To answer this charge, I call on Mr. Kirk himself, proffering his summary of the Middle Age: “Two types of humanity were the wonder of mediaeval Europe: the great saint and the great knight. In later ages, their descendents would be the scholar and the gentlemen.” That magical and masterful literary summary appears in what I regard as his masterpiece: The Roots of American Order.

There, friends, is a gift for your recent graduate. For this book abounds in such philosophic poetry as that. A young man or woman who regards him- or herself as educated may graduate knowing little of the Middle Age (this is a condition common enough to be a mark against our institutions of learning): now he or she will knowing something at least, and a precious thing, the truth.

And of course there is a whole chapter on the Middle Ages to follow. So let us have done with this notion that men of letters cannot teach because they are more poet than philosopher.

Having been issued a sort of philosophical summons to render an account of my opposition to the political economy of the neoconservatives, and indeed, of the American consensus of the past several generations, I propose to provide an answer to the question, "Why such stridency against cooperation for mutual betterment, AS DETERMINED BY THE PARTICIPANTS"? Ultimately, this is a question that implicates what I take to be the fundamental questions of political thought, namely, what is justice? and how is justice to be sought and approximated in the ordering of our earthly affairs?

Sometimes, conservatives exasperated by such skepticism concerning freedom and markets will frame the question as one of hypocrisy: Why would an executive who has arrived at a decision to outsource his manufacturing in order to save x dollars per hour on wages and benefits be regarded as greedy, while the American employees who wish to retain those wages and benefits are not so regarded, and are often considered to be struggling to retain something to which they are entitled? And what has this to do with public policy? Any one of several different, though interrelated conservative answers to such a query could be articulated, though I only wish to focus on one for the present. For the purposes of political economy, the executive has a higher set of hurdles to clear.

Cardinal Newman wrote very astutely, if a bit acidly, that it is a misfortune to be self-educated. It may be a misfortune; often it is a joy and a calling. But even where joyous it must always be an exception, unless barbarism is ascendant. In that sense we might almost say of a society which, by lassitude, heresy or avarice, forces many men to become autodidacts: “there is a society oppressed by barbarism.” Upon reading a devastating essay by Larry P. Arnn in the Fall 2006 issue of The Claremont Review of Books, one is left with that distinct impression. Ours is a society oppressed by barbarism. Misfortune will be the lot of Americans for some time to come — at least for those Americans who believe that “education” contains a notion of diligent immersion in, and exploration and veneration of one’s own civilization.

What Arnn — President of Hillsdale College — lays out in some detail is an arraignment of education in America so shattering as to induce the reader to a kind of despondency, followed by, it is to be hoped, a very solid kind of defiance. As Arnn tells it, with subtlety and incision, the agents of barbarism are in the driver’s seat; and the would-be defenders of civilization are reduced by bafflement, misconception, and disarray. Deriving from work by a committee of the President’s Advisory Council, the verdict is grim: “our kindergarten students rank with the best in the world in their knowledge of science and math. For each year that they are subjected to the capable attentions of our public education system, they fall a step behind. By the time they graduate from high school, they rank at the 10th percentile in math internationally, struggling to keep ahead of the unschooled goatherds of the Third World.” It might be added, of course, that a goatherd at age eighteen is probably the master of quite a variety of useful skills, such that his education is, in its own way, quite adequate.

For this Sunday, we continue with Bertrand Bronson, circa 1952:

*   *   *   The assumption that men are basically alike in all times and places, and that the sum total of scientific information already available or yet to be discovered is unlikely to make any radical alteration in human nature, obviously puts a premium on the way in which the old truths are restated. This is not...to reduce the importance of the old truths, which are old because they are fundamental and therefore discovered early, and which, only because they are familiar, are likely to be rejected unless continually re-presented in fresh and agreeable forms.

Our last Sunday with Samuel Johnson, for the time being, though the first to offer an actual excerpt of his own writing, wherein he declares upon the "works of fiction" gaining fashion in his day, the difficulties (and virtues) of which are equally, if not more keenly, felt in our own time, now that the feeding of fantasy to the populace has become an industry. Most important for our puposes, though, is the fact that, however varied his subjects may be, the same force and foundation of character impresses itself upon them all:

...But the fear of not being approved as just copyers of human manners, is not the most important concern that an author of this sort ought to have before him. These books are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle, to whom they serve as lectures of conduct, and introduction to life. They are the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions; not fixed by priniciples, and therefore easily following the current of fancy; not informed by experience, and consequently open to every false suggestion and partial account.

Here at What’s Wrong with the World, we have recently endured the spectacle, not without its amusements, of conventional freethinking arguments. We have not neglected to laugh at the absurdities into which these poor men have cast their minds. But we have sometimes neglected, perhaps, to pray that they would be freed from this bondage. And we should not make light of the oppression of this bondage, yoked upon both the minds of individual men, and through them upon the public life of the Republic. As our won Daniel Larison sharply puts it, Freethinking ruins all things.

Old Russell Kirk was a man who bent is supple and penetrating mind over this oppression, especially in the latter part of his career, after he returned to the Church of Rome.

*    *    *    *

So it has come to pass, here in the closing years of the twentieth century. With the weakening of the moral order, “Things fall apart; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. . . .” The Hellenic and the Roman cultures went down to dusty death after this fashion. What may be done to achieve reinvigoration?

As I suspect most readers of these pages will be aware, the son of Boston University professor of history and international relations Andrew Bacevich was killed while serving in Iraq. I'll not linger on the loss, which, like all such losses, is unutterably tragic, tinged in this case by the irony of the fallen hero's father's reputation as a critic of Bush's Mesopotamian misadventure. Our prayers must be with the Bacevich family as they mourn their loss.

The loss of a young officer, however, while an occasion for private grieving, is veritably pregnant with portents for the future of this nation, well beyond the polarization of our political discourse that would have the vilest of war enthusiasts penning letters to Prof. Bacevich to lay the blame for the loss of his son at the elder man's writings. For here it is not merely the nature of the loss - though even this alters its aspect when contemplated in light of the political setting - that arrests the mind, but the also nature of the political establishment itself. Though the sort of people who were rankled by the celebrated First Things End of Democracy symposium will likely bridle at the suggestion, it is all but incontrovertible that the response of the establishment to public opinion on the war (and on other matters, as we will see) indicates that the integrity of our ostensible republic of self-governing citizens has been compromised, perhaps mortally.

Red State editor and blogger Pejman Yousefzadeh is currently on board at Right Reason as a guest-blogger, contributing a series of pieces sketching the lineaments of a rapproachment between conservatism and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche's philosophy, long tarred by association with the horrors of German National Socialism, and rejected by most conservatives on account of its advocacy of militant irreligion and its status as a resource for postmodernists and nihilists, such as this fool, may, he argues, contain rich potentialities for conservative thought.

In an earlier thread, in which I sought to challenge some of the presumptions and delusions of the economistic modes of analysis that too often shape public policy, a reader commented that mass immigration is the greatest issue confronting the Western world today. It is incontrovertible that immigration is one of the most salient of all the momentous questions that confront us; whether we are considering the disruption of the social fabric, the alteration of the economic patterns and relationships that prevail in our country, the devolution of our political culture, or the immigration-driven presence among us of devotees of the jihad, immigration is implicated in all of these developments. But it seems to me somewhat precipitous to pronounce that immigration is foremost among these issues, in the sense that doing so might be placing proverbial carts before proverbial horses. Rather, or so it seems to me upon reflection, immigration is an element - a critical and integral element, nonetheless - of a broader historical tendency, a tendency often presented to us under the aspects of inevitability and progress. We might even look through the historicism with which we are often confronted, seeing in it merely the masquerade of a doctrine of fate, of the totality to which all of the particulars of our societies are to be sacrificed.

What should Conservatism look like after Bush? I try my hand at this question over at Redstate. Have a look.

In the debate over a proposed Jihad-sedition law — a law at once designating the threat of sedition on principles of Jihad a threat of highest gravity, and giving legal teeth to that designation — one response commonly heard, though more whispered than shouted, is that, “it will never pass.” I have written about this proposal several times over a period of over a year, but the impermanence of the Web medium makes it as though each proposal is quite novel and shocking — so I have some sense for how this thing strikes readers. A sizeable group, even at a place like Redstate, are inclined react with predictable antagonism to the proposal; some are even thrown into unreason by their shock; but others merely react with what we might call a conjecture of impotence, a preemptive prediction of failure.

In an otherwise excellent review of the latest installment of the Bourne franchise, Peter Suderman, amidst discussions of character development and depth, and the mirroring of content in cinematic form, throws out this baffler concerning the politics of the flick:

Greengrass tries to supplant Bourne’s emotional blankness with some fairly obvious and simplistic liberal politics at the end. Most of these bits, though, seem thin, even desperate, groping for something the series hasn’t earned rather than letting its cool, detached brutality speak for itself. And really, is there any need to spell it all out? It’s always been plain to see that Bourne was what Nathan Lee smartly calls “action hero as blowback.”

When I encountered post-modernism, critical theory, and all the rest of the nonsense back in graduate school, it soon emerged that anybody who resisted these trends was dubbed "conservative," and that, with the clear implication that this was an insult.

Being politically conservative myself on many issues, I found this strange. I knew for a fact that Professors X and Y were not politically conservative. They were politically liberal, though you found that out only in passing. They were professionals who were interested in their subject matter, taught it well, and did not bring political issues into the academic discussion gratuitously.

Daniel Larison on Sullivan's ridiculous Christianist conspiracy theory:

If they existed, Christianists would be interesting people. They would have to believe at one and the same time that they must make God’s will into the law of the land and enforce Christian doctrine throughout society and be convinced that the best instrument for this goal was the utterly secular, Mammon-serving Republican Party. They would have to be completely fanatical and at the same time completely indifferent that their chosen vehicle of political power was basically hostile to everything they sought to achieve (which is one of the reasons why, despite decades of trying, they have achieved next to nothing). They would have to be able to turn their fanaticism on and off with a readily available switch, which makes them rather less worrisome as the founders of the future theocratic nightmare to come.

Growing up, the harder sort of Protestant fundamentalists were wont to argue that the alliance of the Religious Right with the GOP would end in failure, futility having been its lot. Setting aside the question of what, precisely, Christians should have done when the nation slipped into the cultural centrifuge in the Sixties and Seventies, it is remarkable that what began with a mixture of noble aims and low, political farce should now end in tragedy, as the Christian right fragments, and finds itself increasingly marginalized (or perhaps this marginality is being revealed). The only play left is that of refusal - of the role of GOP 'automatics'. This, at least, would be a beginning.

Via Rod Dreher, quoting Caleb Stegall's review of Bill McKibben's book, Deep Economy:

In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Röpke’s home of Geneva, Switzerland. During the war, the Genevan fathers coped with shortages by providing citizens with small garden allotments outside the city for growing vegtables. These citizen gardens became so popular with the people of Geneva that the practice was continued even after the war and the return to abundance. Röpke was particularly proud of these citizen farmers, and so he took Mises on a tour of the gardens. “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!” Mises noted disapprovingly. “Perhaps so, but a very efficient way of producing human happiness” was Röpke’s rejoinder.

For the present, I'll restrict myself to observing that the efficient, centralized agricultural production so admired by Mises will be rendered obsolete by the gradual increase of the costs of the petroleum required for fertilization, pesticides, and transportation, and that smaller farms tend to produce greater yields per acre, while larger farms tend to produce greater yields per dollar. Oh, yes, one more thing - I've never yet known a child who thrills to the sight of heavy industry and suburban sprawl; virtually all of them, to the contrary, thrill to the sight of such ordinary features of the natural world as hills, fields, forests, ponds, cows, turtles, and so on. From the mouths of children, thou hast ordained wisdom, O God - or so I am inclined to say.

Perhaps some readers will be conversant with a controversy, simmering beneath the surface of our mundane political discourse, concerning a hypothetical/proposed/aborning/fantastical North American Union, modeled after the European Economic Community and entailing similar economic, regulatory, administrative, and legal "harmonizations". The ostensible centerpiece of this union, a 'NAFTA superhighway' bisecting the continent, running from Mexican ports on the Pacific Ocean right through the American heartland to Canada, is said to exist in embryonic form in the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, a colossal white-elephant boondoggle of the age of globalism. Left-wing and progressive political movements in Canada and Mexico perceive the high-level, international conferences, in which representatives of both government and business participate, as a nascent continental corporatocracy; right-wing populists in America, stinging from the obsession of the American establishment with mass immigration and a New Economy which benefits Wall Street, but not Main Street, perceive in these consultations a plutocratic subversion of national sovereignty. Of course, the principals of these proceedings, who often seem to adopt a "whatever it is, which we're not quite going to say, it isn't what you think it is" posture towards their critics, must exist under the clouds of left and right-populist suspicion arising from growing awareness of the profoundly unrepresentative character of the European Union.

Regardless of one's position on this discrete controversy, it would seem logical - yes? - given the manifest logic of globalization, to contemplate the prospects for deepening integration among the three North American nations. If globalization is what its proponents claim for it, then something akin to what the critics allege either is occurring, or will occur, or is likely to occur, with or without those international junkets for bureaucrats, executive branch appointees, and CEOs from richistan.

One can hardly go wrong with a Chesterton quote, so here is one that gets to the point concerning the phenomenon discussed in my previous post:

It is a negation of property that the Duke of Sutherland should have all the farms in one estate; just as it would be a negation of marriage if he had all our wives in one harem.

The autumn of 1994 I spent at Messiah College, in Grantham, PA. My family were moving at the time, both the business and the residence, and it seemed better for me to be near to home at such a time. One of my three roommates that semester was a Korean who had been adopted by a Texas family, spoke with a bit of an accent, wore cowboy boots, and chewed tobacco. He was also greatly enamored of the foreign policy writings of George Kennan, considered one of the architects of the policy of containment. This fondness provided fodder for the occasional conversation, and my expression of reservations concerning the judgment of a man who came to perceive in the specific character of American opposition to communism and the Soviet Union a greater threat to the commonweal than the often dissembling anti-anticommunism. Kennan feared the release of the simplifying, reductive passions of a nationalism that would, far from grasping the profounder, historical, geopolitical, and yes, spiritual dimensions of the standoff, construe it as a confrontation of rival ideologies. The Cold War was not merely a matter of geopolitical wrangling and foreign policy; it was a test of national character.

This, in my youth - I was but twenty years old at the time - I did not perceive. I had not yet learned to discriminate between the various tendencies and strands of the American character, to winnow the noble from the base, the prescient from the purblind, the prudent from the foolhardy. And so I thought that anticommunism was anticommunism, and that the imperative thing was that one have opposed communism, that specter of a godless, totalitarian collectivism, stamping on a human face in the name of the future.

The opposition of yours truly to a phenomenon variously described as 'economic centralization', 'globalization', 'managerial capitalism', and 'concentration' is perhaps a curiousity, a seemingly bizarre and incongruous outlier relative to the mainstream of conservative thought. At a minimum, this is the impression I often receive.

However, suppose I were to reformulate the questions posed by our own Steve Burton in a comment in an earlier thread.

I have long believed that the goal of bringing democracy to Iraq — a goal that is often confused with bringing freedom to Iraq — may in fact be inimical to the immeasurably more important goal of vanquishing the Jihad. This for the pulverizingly simple reason that the Jihad is popular in the Islamic world, including Iraq. I doubt that it commands majority support — but it certainly commands majority acquiescence, and enormous factional sympathy. That is to say, waging war to subjugate the infidel (however defined), being an ancient and enduring feature of the Islamic religion, perforce is an enduring feature of Islamic society. Emancipate that society from autocracy and suppression — free popular passions from the yoke of Leviathan — and you may well find that the Jihad is not weakened but considerably strengthened.

Referencing a contribution by Ezra Klein to an ongoing conversation about Wal-Mart, its business model and the social, political, and economic consequences of that model, Reihan Salam states, or, perhaps, sketches, the case for wage subsidies:

Hence the case for wage subsidies. Wal-Mart shouldn't be held responsible for solving all our social ills. On the center-left, there really are (at least) two distinct approaches to Wal-Mart: in cities like Chicago, politicians target big-box stores per se, as though Wal-Mart were a black-hatted corporate villain that exists in a vacuum. (McDonald's also plays this role.) Then there are those who very sensibly advocate comprehensive national policies that would impact all of us. My bias is clear. The right policies are those that use revenues raised by broad-based taxes to fund a basic minimum: a decent wage and health care.

In a discussion sparked by this fine essay by James Pinkerton, a correspondent asks me to expound upon my notion of “Christendom,” which concept he is deeply skeptical of. I explained myself this way:

In a forthcoming magazine I have a long essay that ends in an emphatic call for Christian unity against the Jihad. It says nothing about the activity of the American state; but it says that we who profess Christ should strain toward unity against this menace. I believe that Christ opposes wickedness; I believe that the Jihad is wicked. Therefore I feel that it should be opposed. In my essay I make this call specifically in the context of all the Christian brothers oppressed by the Jihad. We should unite against this oppression.

Here is a Sunday question: what is the status of the idea of PROGRESS in Conservative thought?

It was inevitable that, with the vaulting of Mike Huckabee into the top tier of GOP presidential contenders, the rhetorical knives would be drawn. Huckabee was never one of the anointed candidates of the GOP establishment, and espouses a version of the now-discredited "Compassionate Conservatism" that has proven so disastrous under Bush; beyond that, there are the facts that several of his announced policy positions alienate key factions within the GOP establishment, that he was rather liberal and imprudent in granting clemency to ne'er-do-wells, and that he demonized - prior to his recent 'conversion' to the cause of immigration reform - advocates of immigration enforcement as hard-hearted bigots acting contrary to the highest ethical dogmas of Christianity.

There is more to the matter, though, than this. There is also the GOP's very own dialect of class warfare.

Recent developments in the Republican presidential campaign have afforded the establishment right the opportunity to articulate its vision of order within the conservative movement, occasioning the curious spectacle of a movement which has played the people-against-the-elites card for generations suddenly lauding expertise, credentials, and the cultivated minority. There is, of course, a place for such things in any conservatism worthy of the name; the crucial things are that the elites and their substantive traditions be identified correctly, and that corrupt, false, and degraded pretenders to authority be exposed. One does not read Babbit, Weaver, or Kirk and develop a leveling sensibility; neither, though, does one acquire a sense that the characteristic modern forms of authority, being invested in value-neutral technique, are legitimate.

National Review, however, has recently telegraphed that, perhaps, that most venerable of traditional authorities is no longer quite so welcome as it once was.

Jonah Goldberg's recently-published tome, Liberal Fascism, has, as one might imagine given the incendiary title, generated much controversy, much of which can be digested, albeit from its author's perspective, over at the liberal fascism blog at National Review Online. Intrigued by the authorial intention of disclosing the affinities of certain strands of progressivism with darker ideological shades, not to mention the essential leftism of fascist ideology, a theme dear to the heart of every conservative who has ever assimilated Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Leftism Revisited, I purchased a copy with every intention of settling in for a painstaking reading, provided only that initial impressions did not confirm my suspicions.

Alas, reading the dust jacket and perusing the contents and index, followed by a spell or two of unsystematic browsing, only confirmed my initial suspicions: Goldberg employs, not merely a generic typology of fascism, but a typology so diffuse, indistinct, and indiscriminate that the apparent operational logic associates things with fascism merely because real, historical fascists may have said/done/advocated/liked similar things. No end of analytical mischief results from such imprecision; illustrative of the dynamic might be the association of organic foods and vegetarianism with fascism, merely on the grounds that actual fascists occasionally manifested an interest in such things. That things possess a distinct essence or nature, and that these things can be situated in radically different social and theoretical contexts, depending upon the narrative framework within which they acquire collective meaning, are considerations altogether too nuanced for Goldberg's labours. Those labours indeed seem to involve piling together a veritable mountain of things of which the author disapproves, on the basis of a few superficial resemblances - not even family resemblances, necessarily - which suggests the conclusion that they are substantively similar - except that Goldberg often shrinks from this conclusion. He'll intimate that something is hinky, aver that he's not really saying that anything is hinky, and leave the reader with the nonrational sense that that something is just off. A shrewd rhetorical performance, to be certain, though not a style commensurate with the gravity of the subject matter.

Apropos of this methodological inadequacy, James Poulos, following upon Austin Bramwell's decimating review of Liberal Fascism, suggests that Goldberg is engaged in a thoroughly postmodern performance, one that threatens to evacuate authority from the conversation:

This picture was taken in April 1996 at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where I was a full-time faculty member from 1989 to 1996. The woman in the middle is my wife, Frankie. Right before the photo was taken, I was standing next to Bill Buckley and my wife was to his left. He then gently grasped her shoulders from behind, escorted her between us, turned to me and said, "A rose between two thorns."

Mr. Buckley was at UNLV for a debate with John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist with which he debated numerous times. Frankie and I snuck into the room where Mr. Buckley was convalescing before the debate. We were amazed to find him all by himself. We introduced ourselves to him. He immediately began asking me questions about my academic work. I told him that I had published a book (Politically Correct Death) that had been one of the two featured volumes by the Conservative Book Club during a month in 1994. I proudly told him that the other book was his, Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist. He then said, in his distinct style, "That's similar to when my son Chris and I both had books on the New York Times bestsellers list at the same time." I thought to myself, "No, it isn't." He, of course, was just trying to be kind. And I very much appreciated that. He then turned his attention to my wife and asked her a variety of questions about living in Las Vegas with a philosopher. He was so charming and gracious, and seemed sincerely interested in us and what our lives were like.

A university official arrived to take Mr. Buckley to the theatre at which the debate was to take place. So, I didn't get a chance to tell him that his work--especially the book Up From Liberalism--strongly influenced my developing political views while I was in college and graduate school. While reading the book as an undergraduate I found myself agreeing with its arguments before I knew that the author was a "conservative." In fact, when I told one of my professors that I was reading Up From Liberalism and thought it was a terrific read whose author presented compelling arguments for his political views, my professor said, "But Buckley is a conservative. You can't possible agree with him." I then said, "I guess I am a conservative."

Thank you, Bill Buckley. Well done, good and faithful servant.

I should place my cards, face-up, on the table: I believe that the South had the better constitutional arguments in the antebellum period, not to mention a sounder architecture for political philosophy generally (which is to say that those with a better inheritance defended the worst, always a recipe for disaster); I question certain of Lincoln's wartime policies, both constitutionally and otherwise; I question the conduct of certain phases of the war; I abominate the centralized national state that emerged in the wake of the War and Reconstruction; I regard the conflict of industrial and agrarian conceptions of order as equally, perhaps more, decisive than slavery in the run-up to the War; and I've no love or reverence for the economic centralizers who desired that state, and availed themselves of it when they received it. I admit without hesitation that the South was often belligerent and injudicious in pressing its claims (so also was the North; it was a national tragedy), that a defense of slavery was an aspect of the Southern cause (though assuredly not the whole of it, and assuredly not to the average fighting man), and that those who dissented from the Southern understanding could not but respond as they did (it was a tragedy, after all). What else could Lincoln have done, given his convictions, after the unpleasantness at Fort Sumter?

Nevertheless, despite all of that, there is a case to be made that, just as Harry Jaffa and certain neoconservatives are mistaken in regarding America as an ideological and messianic nation, destined to spread freedom abroad, so also are they wrong in regarding Lincoln as a prophet of that nation. Lincoln, logically speaking, could have been entirely wrong in his interpretation of America, yet not by virtue of that error a prophet of democratic interventionism; likewise, he could have been correct in his interpretation of American institutions, yet not also such a prophet. The two are not necessarily associated.* Grant Havers makes that case over at Taki's. It is well worth reading.

*This is not to deny a resonance between the unitary national state and adventures abroad; the connection between the two is evidenced quite abundantly in modern history. Nor is it to deny that the tensions and contradictions of such a state often express themselves in foreign policy. It is to say only that this should be understood historically as well as conceptually, and not as a logical entailment. History is inconsistent because men are inconsistent; that Lincoln prosecuted the Civil War does not necessarily make him a herald of neoconservative empire. We can criticise or laud with respect to his own time and aims, and leave anachronisms to the neoconservatives. That is the argument.

Wilson is a better precedent for the errors of our age, anyway, at least on the plane of public rhetoric.

Via Jeff Culbreath I found this marvelous essay on the hope, the joy, the true liberty in gardening with your own hands. It contains numerous little gems like this: “The planting of seeds in my garden, by hand, on my knees, is a simple action of rebellion against the modern order. It is an act of wisdom and significance in the midst of a foolish and vacuous world. It is voluntary submission to an older, higher calling.”

I do not yet have a garden to speak of. The house we bought last year sits on a considerable acreage, but it is massively overgrown. Right now, however, I am enjoying the fruits of the hard work I put in over the past year, clearing out a section of that overgrowth. In late March, to my surprised delight, a mass of rye grass (presumably with good shade tolerance) sprouted up in the section I had cleared. I did not plant the stuff. As a more knowledgeable friend remarked, you never know what will turn up when you clear out the weeds.

The appearance of the rye grass accelerated my timetable. I had planned on another year of clearing and tilling, followed by seeding early next spring. But with the rye coming up on its own, I decided to seed some fescue out there with it. That was six weeks ago. On Sunday I mowed the section for the first time. Thankfully, the drought in north Georgia has abated this spring, so it looks like I’ll have a good solid section of lawn by mid-summer. And I am already at work, clearing a different section in preparation for the garden.

So indeed I know something of the joy of this small “rebellion against the modern order.”

Now this post could hardly be complete without a quotation from our patron saint:

The man who makes an orchard where there has been a field, who owns the orchard and decides to whom it shall descend, does also enjoy the taste of apples; and let us hope, also, the taste of cider. But he is doing something very much grander, and ultimately more gratifying, than merely eating an apple. He is imposing his will upon the world in the manner of the charter given him by the will of God; he is asserting that his soul is his own, and does not belong to the Orchard Survey Department, or the chief Trust in the Apple Trade. But he is also doing something which was implicit in all the most ancient religions of the earth; in those great panoramas of pageantry and ritual that followed the order of the seasons in China or Babylonia; he is worshipping the fruitfulness of the world.

On the top of the third hour, that's 8-9 pm (EDT) and 5-6 pm (PDT).

Some interesting things are afoot in the conservative movement, including something about which I was made aware just last week, The Culture Project. Here's its press release:
(cross-posted)

ISI has released another gem of a book. Its flagship publication The Intercollegiate Review has been appearing for 40 years and more, and now finally has a compilation of its rich content equal its stature. Hardly a Conservative luminary has failed to appear in this journal, and in this volume the editor gives us an excellent sample, evidencing the breadth and depth of subjects assayed. Highly recommended.

From the promotional material:

"With a circulation in the tens of thousands, and featuring foundational essays ranging across the disciplines — from political theory, philosophy, and economics to strategic studies, cultural criticism, and belles lettres — the Intercollegiate Review has been since 1965 one of the central organs of American conservative intellectual life. Many of the most serious thinkers on the right have appeared in the IR, and some of the most important theoretical debates in American conservatism have played out in its pages. At once sophisticated, penetrating, profound, and humane, the IR has consistently reflected the American conservative mind at its most thoughtful. From the Cold War and the Woodstock generation to the war on terror and the revolution in biotechnology, this collection of the IR's best essays from its first four decades constitutes a chronicle of contemporary American history as seen from the right. Arguing Conservatism includes essays by dozens of eminent thinkers, including Robert Bork, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Conquest, Ludwig von Mises, Robert Nisbet, Roger Scruton, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Robert Penn Warren."

You can listen here.

My take: McDonald--with "a self-ordained professor's tongue too serious to fool" (to borrow from B. Dylan)--reveals a deep loathing for those who do not share her cultural proclivity for academic pedigree, pontifical articulation, and self-congratulatory verbosity. She is, sadly, not alone among the hob nob right snobs. She is joined by the linguistically adept David Brooks, David Frum, Chris Buckley, and Kathleen Parker. They, of course, like George Barnard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, and Margaret Sanger, write well, think big thoughts, and attend all the right parties.

To clip and paste from a famous line offered by Chris Buckley's late father, Bill: I would rather be governed by the first 500 names in the Wasilla, Alaska phone book than the guest list for a party at Sally Quinn's house.

Apparently, sometimes the apple does fall far from the tree.

(cross-posted)

We are pleased today to welcome to What's Wrong with the World a new Contributor, the esteemed philosopher and theologian Ed Feser of Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. We have Lydia to thank for cajoling him into joining us. They were colleagues at the late great Right Reason. Prof. Feser's writings have circulated widely. His bio is here. He is the author of four books, including, most recently, a polemic against that obnoxious faction known as the New Atheists, whose project is to assail religion wherever its principles are advanced most ineptly and studiously ignore it where its principles are advanced most competently. Accordingly, we can expect these dutiful scholars to pay Prof. Feser no attention at all.

In any case, we shall pay the professor and his incisive defenses of right reason plenty of attention. We might even ask his opinion of Bob Dylan.

By now you may have heard that Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F. Buckley, Jr., and until yesterday a columnist for his father’s magazine National Review, has declared himself an Obama supporter and resigned his position at the magazine. His reasons? McCain has “changed,” Buckley tells us, having become “irascible and snarly” in the course of a failing campaign; “his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises,” and his attack ads are “mean-spirited and pointless.” Buckley also dislikes McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate.

Today Jonah Goldberg took Kathleen Parker and others to task here for some of the silly and ill-informed things they have been saying in defense of “secular conservatism.” Goldberg then posted some remarks of mine on this debate here, and a none-too-amused Heather MacDonald replied to me in turn here. Scroll through the comments on MacDonald’s post for my reply to her reply.

So, Heather MacDonald has replied to my reply to her. Take a look and then come back.

Welcome back.

Now, a little thought experiment. Suppose you were a professional physicist. Suppose further that that you came across the writings of someone whose knowledge of quantum mechanics derived entirely from discussions with high school science students. She had picked up from them some of the jargon – “collapse of the wave function,” “Schrödinger’s cat,” “wave-particle duality,” and so forth – but because their explanations were amateurish at best – always oversimplified, usually at least partially mistaken, and sometimes even grotesquely off-base – they failed to convey to her anything close to an accurate picture of the subject. Bizarrely, though, she used the bad information she’d picked up from them as the basis for an attack on the intellectual respectability of quantum mechanics, presenting it as clear evidence of the irrationality of contemporary physicists. “These physics oddballs claim they have a cat in a lab somewhere that is both alive and dead at the same time! And they also believe in little magic particles floating on foamy cosmic waves, or some such thing. Oogedy-boogedy, as my friend Kathleen would say. Maybe we conservatives ought to stay away from them. Maybe start a blog too. ‘Cause otherwise, you know, we might look as foolish and clueless as they do!”

Over at Secular Right, Heather MacDonald has added a reply of her own to John Derbyshire’s reply to my previous reply to her. Dizzy yet?

Anyway, here’s a response that I hope will bring this exchange, if not to a close, then at least into greater focus:

Hello again Ms. MacDonald,

If you’ll forgive me for saying so, it seems to me that you keep missing my point. On top of that, you are now trying to change the subject. If you will indulge me for a few minutes – and it seems that a more in-depth reply is, after all, what you are requesting of me – let me try to explain how.

The label “empire” is often applied to the United States as an epithet, not only by left-wingers but also by paleoconservatives. But imperialism is neither inherently immoral nor inherently unconservative, and it is false to assume that the fact that some American policy might plausibly be described as “imperialist” is ipso facto a reason for a conservative to disapprove of it. (Of course, there might be other reasons to disapprove of it. That something is “imperialist” doesn’t make it necessarily good either. The point is that imperialism per se is morally neutral.)

A left-of-center friend of mine recently complained to me that conservatives are “guilty of appealing to tradition when it suits [them], and not when it doesn't.” This is a common charge, but not a fair one. There is not, or need not be, anything arbitrary in the fact that conservatives uphold some traditions but not others. For no serious conservative, nor indeed any unserious conservative that I can think of, has ever said that traditional practices and beliefs are always good, or ought always to be preserved. The conservative attitude to tradition is far more nuanced than that.

Several years ago, when I was a contributor to the now defunct blog Right Reason, one of my blog-brothers, Robert C. Koons, published a brief narrative of why he is a conservative. In this entry on WWWtW, I would like to offer my own brief story.

In my new book, Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic (Brazos Press, 2009), I write about my spiritual pilgrimage, including how I became a conservative while growing up in a family with liberal Democratic roots. What follows is that brief portion of the book.

What Erik Kain said. I have no grand, architectonic theory as to why conservatism, the New Criterion aside, has largely abdicated its natural role as the custodian of high culture, in all its expressions - by which I do not mean George Will's hurrumphing about denim - preferring to wallow instead in altogether too many uncouth, uncultivated, unlearned expressions of cultural contempt, invidious presentations of political and legal issues (oppose torture? - you must hate America, or want Americans to die), and generalized anti-intellectualism (such as the rote incantation of antediluvian talking points and the corresponding simplification of the complex, prudential business of analysis and policy formulation). My only suggestion would be that, at some moment - in the sense of a phase of time - in our history, the conservative opposition to a particular entrenched elite morphed into an inchoate distrust, even resentment, of elites, expertise, and competence in general; probably this transition was precipitated by the alliance of the new left and the managerial, technocratic establishment in the 70s, the cultural resentments and hostilities towards the former becoming a synecdoche for the whole, slowly bleeding over into a distrust of high culture and intellection. Bill Buckley's famous quip about the Boston phone directory doesn't have the same resonance when translated into the idiom of angry ranters contemptuous of sustained thought about our common things. Whatever one might say about the substance of left politics, it is the tendency of the left to give intellectual form to the raw matter of leftist grievances and aspirations; a structuring effect is produced. On the right, much is without form and void, as those who ought to be structuring and refining rightist aspirations instead pander to them as though the mere intensity of their expression were sufficient to constitute a politics. Whoever said that grievance politics and the entitlement mentality were exclusively left-wing? Manifestly, they are not.

The claim in November 2007:

U.S. and Pakistani authorities captured KSM on March 1, 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. KSM stayed mum for months, often answering questions with Koranic chants. Interrogators eventually waterboarded him — for just 90 seconds.

KSM “didn’t resist,” one CIA veteran said in the August 13 issue of The New Yorker. “He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” Another CIA official told ABC News: “KSM lasted the longest under water-boarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again.”

Today, Library Tower looms 73 stories above Los Angeles. But the Pacific Coast’s highest skyscraper might have become a smoldering pile of steel beams had CIA interrogators not waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) 183 times in March 2003, as recently released memoranda reveal.

(Cross-posted)

Paul Cella's post Biblical Solutions is especially timely not just in light of the current recession, but also because of the publication of Pope Benedict XVI's new encyclical Caritas in Veritate. I'll have more to say about CV once I've read the whole thing. In the meantime, it would be useful to issue a little primer about how Catholic social teaching applies in today's dire circumstances.

What I've seen of CV so far is quite in line with how Catholic social teaching (see here for its official "compendium") has been developing since Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891). By endorsing private property and the pursuit of profit, it is compatible with some forms of capitalism and thus needs no defense around here. But it also insists on conditioning those goods by such principles as "the universal destination of goods," "solidarity," "subsidiarity," and "the preferential option for the poor." As moral injunctions for the faithful, those principles are not terribly controversial either, at least among Christians. Most of the debate about applying Church social teaching concerns the extent to which such conditioning principles call for civil legislation and regulation, especially concerning the economy. On that question, the political (and theological) Left is generally maximalist; the political (and theological) Right is generally minimalist.

As a conservative in the American sense of the term, I come down mostly with the minimalists. Thus I believe that the principle of "subsidiarity" calls for private over public solutions when the former are feasible. From a theological standpoint, though, the question whether to be a political minimalist or a political maximalist is a matter of prudential judgment, rather than doctrine, about what's "feasible." The question is essentially empirical, and boils down to how to balance, in practice, the principle of subsidiarity with the other principles "conditioning" the goods of private property and profit. Subsidiarity is generally more popular with the Right than with the Left. But for Catholics, and a fortiori everybody else, Rome generally treats the balancing act as a matter of opinion. For the social teaching of the Church is logically compatible with a rather broad range of prudential judgments about how to implement it in the concrete.

In fact, what conservative critics of the Church's social teaching often fail to realize is that, seen as a whole, it is less palatable to the Left than to the Right. Liberal Catholics generally embrace Church teachings on, e.g., the death penalty, health care, and the treatment of immigrants, and want them enshrined in secular legislation; but on abortion, euthanasia, same-sex "marriage," and other issues called "social" in American political parlance, the song changes dramatically. True, the precise converse holds among many Catholics who are politically conservative, especially in the U.S.; but in my view, the conservatives hold the theologically stronger position. As Fr. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute notes:

It is quite a spectacle to see Catholic progressives — who in other circumstances contort themselves into exegetical pretzels when they want to undermine clear, emphatic, authoritative, and repeated magisterial prohibitions on same-sex relations, female “priests,” and contraceptive acts — morph into virtual Ultramontanists on prudential matters such as the precise level of a minimum wage.

And the same could be said, mutatis mutandis, about many other political issues, such as whether the advantages of government-run health care would outweigh the disadvantages. As I argued in this post, the trouble with the Catholic Left is that it often presents as morally binding certain political proposals which, from Rome's standpoint, are really matters of opinion, and presents as matters of opinion certain political proposals which, again from Rome's standpoint, are morally binding. So not only is the Catholic Right's general sense about Church social teaching theologically sounder than the Left's; said teaching is more easily reconciled with American "conservatism," or at least with some strains thereof, then with American "liberalism."

But in some cases, applying the Left/Right dichotomy is simply unilluminating. The "usury crisis" Paul has described is a good example. Although people can debate from now till doomsday how much state regulation of debt instruments is wise, and probably will, it cannot be denied either (a) that some degree of regulation is necessary, and (b) that the explosion of public and private debt, all slated to be repaid with interest, has been bad for everybody. Ignoring the traditional moral strictures of the Church about debt and interest fosters a systemic greed which is eventually self-defeating. We are now in a situation where bankrupt governments are shoring up bankrupt sectors of the economy with funny money that will burden the next generation and beyond with unsustainable debt service. That wouldn't have been necessary if both the private and public sectors hadn't reduced themselves to pigs feeding at the trough. Because both private and public greed have driven this crisis, it's really not a Left/Right issue. It's a rather elementary moral issue.

For Nietzsche, European civilization has been in decline since Plato. For Heidegger, the rot set in even earlier, with the Pre-Socratics. It is widely held among secularists that the history of Western civilization between the rise of Christianity and the Enlightenment was a centuries-long dark age that stalled the scientific progress that had been initiated by the Greeks and only restarted with Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Co. Marxists tell us that the entire history of the human race is a history of one form of oppression supplanted by another. Feminists tell us that it is, above all, a history of men oppressing women. Multiculturalists tell us it is a history of the West oppressing the rest.

Other examples could be given. The idea that vast stretches of human history – centuries, even millennia – have been shrouded in moral and intellectual darkness is taken very seriously.

Except when that idea is given a conservative twist. When a conservative says that things have been getting worse since the 1960s, or since FDR, or since the Enlightenment, or (as Richard Weaver says in Ideas Have Consequences and as I argue in The Last Superstition) since William of Ockham, the very idea of a decades- or centuries-long decline is dismissed as inherently crackpot, the ravings of a misanthropic crank or misfit.

Why the double standard? Just asking, as they say.

(The obvious answer might seem to be that the developments bemoaned by conservatives are “progressive” ones, and thus couldn’t possibly mark a decline. Out of charity, though, I won’t put this answer into the mouth of the left-winger, since it is blatantly question-begging. Surely the lefty has a better answer. So what is it?)

(cross-posted)

Most of us are cognizant of what left-wing political dementia looks like, of how it presents in its subjects, a prime manifestation being the assignment to Obama of quasi-messianic status. Political dementia knows no partisan limitations, and the following, then, is an oddly disquieting presentation of right-wing political nutbaggery.

Blogospheric commentary on this spectacle has been, as one would expect, voluminous and predictable, with the left hauling out the tropes of populist conservative racism, and referencing the dreaded Southern Strategy of the GOP realignment. It cannot be denied that there is a kernel of truth to that analysis, given the occasional presence of stuffed-monkey toting nutbars at McCain rallies last autumn, but racism cannot suffice to explain the above manifestation of political dementia. Race, after all, is often itself a trope, a convenient adumbration of a broad array of political, cultural, and economic concerns, and in this instance, is not even the object of the ire of the crazies at the Delaware town hall meeting. Rather, what transpires in this video is altogether more interesting, more subtle, and, for that very reason, more profound: those who have latched onto a certain cause have essentially reified, distilling, as it were, into a physical symbol, a profound sense of political and cultural alienation - dis-identification - from a politician, the present configuration of the political establishment, and the direction of the country. An inability to identify with a president and his political programme became a judgment that he was deficient in his Americanism, according to a variety of partisan metrics; and that judgment, in turn, was crystallized, literalized, in the claim that the president was not even an American citizen.

At this point, one might as well apply the strictures against conspiracy theorizing previously and fruitfully discussed on this site to the bizarre movement now setting down roots on the right, as exemplified by the embedded video clip.

All apologies for the title of this post, redolent as it is of the baroque headings often found on nineteenth-century treatises of one kind or another, but that's simply the title that emerged from my reflections on the Wal-Mart development controversy raging downthread. It is a cardinal error, in my estimation, to consider the question of the siting of a Wal-Mart near an historic battlefield in (artifically) pristine isolation from the broader question of the character of most contemporary development in America, which is to say, in abstraction from the political economy of such development, as well as the objects it serves.

In the first instance, as one may infer from the statistics discussed in this post at Calculated Risk, commercial real-estate in America is substantially overbuilt. There is an excess of capacity visible not only in the statistics detailing increasing vacancies and plummeting values - and in the discussions among many economists of a foreclosure crisis in CRE, not to mention the prospect of bailouts - but in the truly astonishing per-capita retail square-footage figures for the United States, figures that substantially exceed even European countries with broadly comparable standards of living. (I hope I may be pardoned for failing to provide these figures, as the link I intended for this purpose has vanished from my computer, and I've not been able to re-locate it.) This excess of CRE stocks is due in large measure to the superabundance of credit made available over the course of the preceding decade, and subsequently utilized to expand retail operations on the presupposition of the sustainability of both then-current trends in consumption, and an economy a mere 25% of which is actually productive. The recession-disclosed unsustainability of these trends, themselves a reflection of the social contract of the post-industrial, globalizing economy of America - according to which the average American would be compensated for nominally static wage growth which an increase in the availability of credit and a profusion of ever-cheaper foreign-made goods - led to a bursting of the bubble in commercial real-estate, much as the intersection of these trends with the oil price shock of 2008 precipitated the foreclosure crisis in residential real estate, and the recession more broadly. In fine, the bubble in commercial real-estate, and the massive misallocation of resources it reflects, were products of a period of vast irresponsibility, both collective and personal, where any restoration of pre-recession trends will represent a return to that very irresponsibility. We spent too much money that we didn't really have on too many things we didn't really need, purchased from too many stores that didn't need to exist - because we had evolved a variety of mechanisms to compensate for the structural adjustments of a post-industrial, globalizing economy. Wall Street found that investment in finance, from the routine to the hermetic, was more profitable than investing in productive enterprise; and Main Street, availing itself of Wall Street's grasping hand, found, for a time, that debt was easier to bear than downward mobility, or economic stasis. We had a collective economic orgy around an illusory golden calf, and the sheer quantity of CRE is a function of that revelry.

The comment thread under my original post has broached a variety of subjects, and touched upon many implications, actual, potential, or imagined, following from the arguments sketched therein. Rather than attempt to respond to each one these in the original thread, leaving the matter of the responses' connections to the original queries ambiguous - who raised this issue?, to what is this a response? - and thus cluttering up the thread, I thought it preferable to group them together in a new thread, where they might better be clarified.

The question of nature of the currency, and of its backing, has arisen. It is beyond all caviling that the monetary policies of the Greenspan Fed provided a crucial material cause for the development of the financial bubble, and thus, the subsequent collapse. The broad recognition of this reality has precipitated a renewed interest, if only on the right, in the gold standard particularly, and perhaps also in more complicated currency systems backed by a combination of precious metals. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the interest, but though I am unreservedly critical of the role of monetary policy in the generation of the crisis - and of the attendant manipulations of fundamental economic data concerning inflation and unemployment - it does not appear to me that the gold standard, or any other hypothetical metallic-based currency system, suffices either to preclude the ruinous cycles of boom and bust characteristic of modern capitalistic economies, or to preclude the possibility of deleterious consequences proceeding directly from the monetary system itself. The historical record of the gold standard in the nineteenth century was rather dismal, if one is concerned to have some sort of monetary prophylaxis against cycles of bubble and bust. Moreover, the relative fixity of the quantity of currency under a metallic standard renders rather difficult the entrepreneurial function, inasmuch as, if one posits a relatively static money supply and and expanding cycle of trade - which the entrepreneur must - then it follows that prices must decline as the economy expands. This is, to say the least, a confusing sort of economic signaling; few entrepreneurs will be willing to invest in the expectation of.... falling revenues, profits, and income. Now, of course, businesses were routinely started under the gold standard, but that merely leads into the second difficulty engendered by the relative fixity of the monetary base under a metallic standard. If the supply of money is static, or relatively fixed, in the sense that it expands slowly and fitfully, with new discoveries of specie, or new acquisitions by a central bank, and the economy is assumed to expand for a time, then it follows of necessity that the relative value of existing debts increases, and that this increase is highly correlated with falling prices. Apologetics for the gold standard often emphasize this latter aspect of the system, and, in my estimation, practice a bit of evasion with regard to the former, for it is the former aspect that proved to be the achilles' heel of the system in operation, as the periods of expansion would result in the appreciation of existing debts, a process which sooner or later become utterly unsustainable. This intrinsic feature of the gold standard served as a contributing material cause of the political ferment of the late nineteenth century, particularly among farmers, who found the real value of their debts appreciating more or less simultaneously with the collapse of agricultural commodity prices. Bankrupted by debts impossible to discharge, their properties would be foreclosed upon - and this raises the final, insuperable problem with the gold standard: it is regressively redistributive, effectively, over the cycle of expansion and contraction, redistributing wealth - often real and tangible, as opposed to merely notional - from its possessors, often smallholders and small businessmen, to those who had the good fortune to possess capital to lend at t1. Given that one of the preconditions of our present financial crisis was, shall we say, an insufficiency of resources among the broad middle of the economic spectrum, owing to politico-economic trends of the past two generations, and given, moreover, that any durable solution to our economic predicament must result - at least in the medium term and beyond - in both a rising median income and greater income stability among the middle classes, a monetary system which features regressive redistribution is a non-starter.

Ordinarily, I could carry no brief for David Frum, a savvy actor in movement politics who made himself the Grand Inquisitor against the paleoconservatives and other dissenters opposed to the Iraq War - and all of the victims of his purge have been vindicated by the tides of history - and lately an advocate of a reformed, moderate conservatism. I can espouse neither his foreign policy prescriptions, demonstrably disastrous as they have been, and cannot but be, nor his prescriptions for domestic reform, to the extent that they are contingent upon throwing the social conservatives to the wayside. However, in the matter of in re: Sunstein, I am compelled to side with Frum, and Millman, not so much because I embrace Sunstein's controversial policy proposal without reservations, but because I find the critiques of it at once muddled and overwrought, and the rhetoric deployed in defense of those attacking Sunstein histrionic and philosophically dishonest.

Hewing solely to those excerpts quoted by Lydia below, I am compelled to make inquiry:

- How is it that Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck have become "the most powerful and feared and charismatic conservatives"? Would this be the Sarah Palin who at once argues that a lack of regulation was, and was not, the cause of the financial crisis, and who retails the bizarre idea that, if Federal Reserve policy was at the root of the bubble, the banksters are somehow exculpated by this fact (The Fed, and Congress, are uniquely responsible for creating the conditions in which bankers behaved badly, which is to say that they simply couldn't help themselves)? Would this be the Rush Limbaugh who stated that a school-bus beatdown meted out in suburban St. Louis transpired because, in Obama's America, blacks feel empowered to act on the belief that whites are born racists, when the incident related to the strange status hierarchies reflected in seating arrangements? Would this be the Glenn Beck who argues, in perfect innocence, that American government has been captured by a government-corporate oligarchy, but that it would be doubleplusungood progressivism to do anything effective to counter it?

Is it now forbidden to critique the failures and missteps of movement luminaries, merely because The Cause now seems so exigent, even when one has legitimate concerns that the flaws of the movement and its leading figures will prove deleterious to the movement in the medium-term and beyond, or have already proven so?

- Neo-Stalinism? Neo-Stalinism? I must have missed the terror famines, show trials, purges, mass executions, gulags, the climate of suspicion and surveillance in which children turned their parents over to torturers for petty party perks, the bloody repression of religion, and the command economy operated by intellectual incompetents after the liquidation of the Tsarist intelligentsia. My wife grew up in the Soviet Union, in the days of Perestroika and Glasnost, which nonetheless remained orders of magnitude more oppressive than anything contemplated in current policy, and yet failed to descend to the sheer depths of Stalinism in repression and barbarity. Perhaps the prefix 'neo' is intended to differentiate this contemporary Stalinism from the genuine, historical article, in which case it appears to mean nothing more precise, or menacing, than 'any policy proposed by someone to my left with which I happen to disagree' - which would render it the rightist analogue of the tiresome leftist accusation of 'fascism', which, alas, some segments of the right have lately attempted to resuscitate for their own purposes.

If conservatives were forbidden to employ private definitions of key terms in political thought, such as 'socialism', or 'Stalinism', and were thus compelled to deliberate over the merits and demerits of specific policies, articulating specific reasons pro and contra, we would be entertaining, in effect, a debate over the extent to which the United States, in a few areas such as banking regulation and health care, should become more like Germany or Switzerland, respectively. That is, we would be debating specific instances of the generic question of American Exceptionalism, endeavouring to determine whether, and to what extent, the unique characteristics of America exempt it from the general structural tendencies of Western modernity, in politics, economics, and so forth. That might be a disputation worth entertaining, and for a protracted engagement; but we will prove ourselves incapable of entertaining it openly and honestly so long as we veil this fundamental question beneath layers of mystifying incantations.

But the issue with Sunstein concerns the implications of his legal proposal for the enforcement of the interests of animals, you say? Very well, let us turn to that matter.

Far be it from me to inveigh against The American Conservative for any light and transient cause, especially after defending the redoubtable Daniel Larison in these pages (though he is more than capable of defending himself), but a couple of TAC's contributors have managed to lash themselves into a tizzy over Nick Griffin, and his recent appearance on the BBC, as well as Geert Wilders, who was finally permitted to enter the UK.

First, David Lindsay expressed his support for the initial ban, and then proceeded to opine that the ban should be extended to other ideological undesirables likely to disturb the public tranquility:

I fully supported the ban on Geert Wilders from visiting Britain, as he was finally permitted to do this week. He is in the Pim Fortuyn tradition of opposing Islam so that the Netherlands can remain a drug-addled, whore-mongering country where the age of consent is 12, contrary to the wishes of its general public either in the staunchly Protestant north or in the devoutly Catholic south. That is not any West which I for one wish to defend. But then, it is not in fact the West at all. It is only the most extreme, and in that sense logically consistent, manifestation of the pseudo-West proclaimed by the neoconservative movement, or what’s left of it these days.

Dear reader, there is yet more.

It appears The American Conservative is making some of their archived content freely available online. For those who might be interested, here is a review I wrote for them some years back of An Imaginative Whig: Reassessing the Life and Thought of Edmund Burke, edited by Ian Crowe. As the review indicates, Burke’s sometimes ambiguously conservative thought raises questions about precisely what conservatism is and exactly how it relates to tradition – questions that are especially pressing today, when some conservatives are advising their fellows to abandon the cause of upholding certain aspects of traditional morality in the interests of preserving electoral viability. These are questions I have addressed elsewhere – for example, in this post about conservatism and tradition and this article about the metaphysical foundations of conservatism.

Approximately one month ago, Fr. Jonathan Tobias, who maintains a blog entitled Second Terrace, authored three meditations on the subject of locality, memory, nostalgia, modernity, and the Church. Those posts may be read here, here, and here, and together constitute a gentle interrogation of certain intellectual and spiritual tendencies on what might be referred to as the 'alternative right'. Critical to this interrogation is the distinction between nostalgia and memory, between sentimentality and a rooted, lived tradition - preferably Tradition. In the comments following the third post, I wrote what follows, not in order to engage in a fruitless disputation, but in an attempt to clarify, to excavate, the genesis of nostalgia as a cultural and psychological phenomenon; for nostalgia, that sentimental gaze fixed upon an idealized past, at once warm and wistful, is not a primary phenomenon, but a secondary, symptomatic one - symptomatic of the unhomelikeness experienced in times of relentless, remorseless change.

Brief Notes on Nostalgia

While agreeing with virtually all of the analyses given in the post, I cannot be so quick to dismiss the phenomenon of nostalgia, inasmuch as it is a symptom, and fairly begs to be diagnosed as such. Christopher Lasch, in his The True and Only Heaven - a near-magisterial treatment of these themes, in my estimation - is at pains to distinguish nostalgia and memory, as well as optimism and hope. Obviously, the former terms in these binaries are disordered, but what is important is that the phenomenon of nostalgia is the mirror image of progress, the relentless, churning, ceaselessly-revolutionizing, creatively-destroying Gadarene plunge into a fervently-desired future of BiggerBetterFasterMore, which, so far from increasing human satisfaction, seems to increase discontent with every achievement. Progress is typically portrayed, especially among certain 'conservative' temporizers, who wish to combine the incongruous elements of modernity in economics and material culture with traditionalism in morality, as a merely neutral relieving of man's estate that leaves us 'stuck with virtue' - although they also want to have it the other way, with the wellsprings of modernity, on their constructions, arising from the deepest aquifers of Christianity - but it is obvious that progress is merely a transposition, to the societal level, of the dialectic of the passions. It is driven, not by an impulse or judgment that human desires and aspirations should be conformed to natural limits, either those of our common nature or those of the nature that remains a common inheritance, however much we feign otherwise, but by the impulse to fulfill an ever-increasing wish-list of desires, typically, as is modernity's wont, by means of greater quantities of desire's objects. Progress is the attempt to satiate the infinite appetite of desire, to fill its fathomless abyss, with sheer quantity; as such, it is both born of a certain spiritual restlessness and productive of that restlessness, as each evanescent satisfaction generates a greater longing.

Writing in the latest number of National Affairs, Eric Cohen ably memorializes the “moral realism” of the late Irving Kristol, greatest of the neoconservatives. Cohen’s focus for most of the essay is Kristol’s searching examination of capitalism, which featured prominently through his entire career as a writer and editor. Never let it be said that Kristol was an uncritical promoter of the capitalist form of political economy. Cohen quotes at length from a speech in 1991, when capitalism was at its very zenith of prestige:

In a sense, it is all Adam Smith’s fault. That amiable, decent genius simply could not imagine a world in which traditional moral certainties could be effectively challenged and repudiated. Bourgeois society is his legacy, for good and ill. For good, in that it has produced through the market economy a world prosperous beyond all previous imaginings — even socialist imaginings. For ill, in that this world, with every passing decade, has become ever more spiritually impoverished. That war on poverty is the great unfinished task before us. The collapse of socialism, along with the vindication of a market economy, offers us a wonderful opportunity to think seriously about such an enterprise. Only such an enterprise can ensure a capitalist future.

Cohen recapitulates this point repeatedly, and with increasing insistence: “in the end, as Kristol argued, our destiny will depend far more on our cultural and spiritual lives than on our regulatory and tax policies.” “Building a family requires precisely the virtues and spiritual purpose that the capitalist order fails to nourish, while the future of the capitalist order — and, more significantly, the future of a morally decent, democratic, and prosperous modern civilization — requires flourishing families.” “Perhaps the most important work before us — which Kristol, a Jew in largely Christian America, could not do — is to reform and re-invigorate Christian political theology, for it is on this that the spiritual vitality and moral-political sanity of American civilization likely now depends, both for better and for worse.”

Well worth a read.

UPDATE: By the strange twists of memory, the mystic chords even, I am reminded of this fine essay by Cohen, which had a dramatic effect on me almost ten years ago.