Up From Conservatism

0:00By the way, if you notice that my shirt's a little bit wrinkled this morning, it's because I basically trust Jeff Tucker on everything that involves fashion. And last night, in order to justify the fact that he had a very wrinkled shirt, he explained that these were status wrinkles. And so I imagined myself last night ironing wrinkles into my shirt, but it turned out not to be necessary. Well, unfortunately, I don't have much time for jokes here, and plus, apparently, we have a potentially global audience, thanks to this incredible technology. And it made me think that this is obviously a very, very important event with the live broadcasts and everything, so I decided that this one's no drinking before the lecture.

0:45I have two tiny, tiny 30-second each plugs to make for myself, if I may, because this event, unfortunately from my point of view, is scheduled really three months too early, because I have two books coming out in the next three months, it's just a fluke that they're coming out at the same time, but at the end of the next month, they have a book coming out called, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and it's under the constraints of a very severe word count limit, I pretty much overturned as much as I possibly could. and at the end I have a bibliography directing people to reliable sources and so on and so forth. It's available to be pre-ordered on Amazon. The cover is going to be different, the book description is sort of screw-napped, but there is a page there so you can pre-order it.

1:30I've heard a story about a guy who pre-ordered five copies and wanted to give some to his friends. Then the next day he woke up in bed surrounded by precious gems. These results are not typical, but nevertheless, the second brief plug is for a book I have coming out that stirred up some controversy months ago before it was even ready, called The Church and the Market, A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, which there's a flyer about it back there on that table, and I mention that because that book developed out of a paper I gave at the Austrian Scholars Conference two years ago, When Ronald Reagan died in June, Republican tributes to his memory were an awkward thing to watch.

2:32Republican politicians who had long since come to boast of their expansion of federal The Federal spending heaped praise upon Reagan, the man who, at least in his rhetoric, had poured such withering scorn upon the moral and material pretensions of government. These were men who had voted for a deeply immoral expansion of Medicare, the Wild Left Behind Act, which they would have been howling about if the current president's predecessor had dared to propose it, and so on and so forth. The 18.6% increase in non-defense discretionary spending that occurred during the 107th Congress of 2002-03. was by far the greatest such increase in decades. The Bush administration said the Wall Street Journal has been the most profligate since the 1960s. Bill Clinton was the very model of fiscal restraint by comparison.

3:19Meanwhile, Republicans cheer and embrace federal programs they used to condemn. And of course, we're reminded of the notorious and famous phrase and sentence of Stan Evans who once said that conservatives who come to Washington know it is a sewer, The trouble is most of them wind up treating it like a hot tub. For the most part, the present slate of self-described conservatives possess none of the older conservative appreciation for the limits of politics. They write books with titles like An End to Evil. They give speeches like this one, delivered by Republican Senator Sam Brownback at this year's Republican convention. From the HIV AIDS patient in Uganda to the 14-year-old girl From the down syndrome child seeking an education, to the prisoner working to turn away from a life of crime, this nation and this president will fight for you.

4:10From the man held in a foreign prison for practicing his faith, to the Sudanese refugee attacked for the color of her skin, this nation and this president will fight for you. Well, while Sam Brownback is promising that the American people will fight for you, Well, while Sam Brownback is promising that the American Messiah will right every wrong in the world, Federal promises to the American people are in deep trouble. To take just one example, as of last year, Medicare was underfunded to the tune of $27 trillion, nearly four times the entire national debt, in terms of future promises versus projected tax receipts. Shoots. A report issued last year found that the average male reaching age 65 could expect to receive $71,000 more in benefits, mainly Social Security and Medicare, from the federal government than he had paid in. The average 25-year-old male, on the other hand, could expect to pay $322,000 more in taxes than he would ever get back from federal transfer programs. The conservative response to this situation, apparently, is to add an extra

5:19Alvaro Vargas Llosa, who has a stronger stomach than I do, tried to make sense of the state of conservatism by attending this year's Republican Convention and speaking to some of the delegates. What was there for conservatives to cheer about a budget-busting administration like this one he wanted to know? Well, the delegates appear to believe that increases in spending were due to homeland security measures and the war. But spending is in fact way up across the board, 70% in education alone. Even John Kerry was able to criticize the president in the last debate for not having vetoed a single spending bill. You're in trouble in that situation. Well, that doesn't really matter to these conservatives, since according to many of the people Yosa spoke to, more important than working towards smaller government is using the federal government to promote moral virtue.

6:09would have been unthinkable to, in effect, educated normal conservatives who would have thought that this is the sort of thing that churches do, localities do, not the federal government. But even here, the delegates aren't exactly consistent. According to Yosa, many of these same activists saved their loudest cheers for two moderate politicians not known for pursuing a traditional social agenda, Rudolf Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger. War trumps all. This belief in the promotion of moral virtue as a function of the federal government may help to explain the enthusiasm among some conservatives for the president's proposal to spend one and a half billion dollars to promote healthy marriages in America. Now, I don't know about you, ladies and gentlemen, but when I think healthy marriages, I think Washington, D.C.

7:02Now, one presidential advisor said, quote, This is a way for the president to address the concerns of conservatives and to solidify his conservative base. Well, there you have it. So ignorant are they of their own principles and tradition that the people who comprise the president's conservative base think it's a great victory for their cause when the federal government hires secular therapists to teach interpersonal skills to young couples. The conservatism of yesteryear, whatever its faults, The Social Leftism and Foreign Policy Adventurism of so-called conservatism today, on the other hand, sound more like the bellowings of a fraction of the world's most powerful. It is impossible to imagine such luminaries of yesteryear as Russell Kirk, Eric von Knoll-Ledeen and Richard Weaver supporting the juvenile jingoism of the kiddies who dominate the movement now. Still less would they have accepted the suggestion that objecting to leftist utopianism made them unpatriotic.

7:51The social leftism and foreign policy adventurism of so-called conservatism today, on the other hand, sound more like the bellowings of a frat party than a serious community of scholars and statesmen. In an article I wrote for lewrockwell.com, I quoted neoconservative writer Jonah Goldberg and asked people if they could imagine Russell Kirk saying this. Jonah Goldberg said, Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall just to show we mean business. There's the great intellectual movement you have there. Wonderful. Right, that sounds very much like it. Actually, no, this is a Goldberg quotation, but in a way they sort of morph into each other, don't they?

8:37Older conservatives wrote books that we still read and profit from today. Few of us who have read something by Connolly Dean or Richard Weaver have not benefited from those books. The present generation, on the other hand, produces forgettable collections of platitudes whose brief, if flashy, shelf life is followed by their rapid and merciful consignment to oblivion. Now my talk is called Up From Conservatism. Now, the sort of secret of these talks is that, at least in my case, the title was given to me, which is fine. It's wonderful. That way I don't have to think anything up. I can take the topic they've given me and then develop it. But I think Jeff Tucker probably was trying to get me to say, you know, go further than I had gone before in my condemnation of conservatism, and I think I'll take him up on that invitation.

9:28I trust that the title of the talk is based on Bill Buckley's book, Up From Liberalism, in the 50s, and so now we're going up from conservatism. It's a fitting title for a talk, because as somebody who in the past, at least, has described himself as a conservative, I feel that every time somebody asks me for my political affiliation, if I say conservative, then I immediately have to follow it up with, You follow it up with, but wait a minute, I'm not a lunatic. It's very difficult. It's very difficult. Now libertarians have a similar problem, not quite as bad. You say you're a libertarian, people immediately make certain assumptions about you too, and you have to say, no, wait a minute, I have a job, I'm successful. So I don't know what word, I wish I had a new word for us, Rockwellian maybe is a possible word, I don't know.

10:18But nevertheless, what is the way up from conservatism? Well, for one thing, I think there is a lot that can be learned from the Austrian School of Economics and from the tradition of thought that Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute represent. Now, I still think of myself, at least culturally, as a conservative. And it seems to me that in the course of the 20th century, In this century, the state really revealed itself as the most powerful threat yet seen to traditional societies. Whether it's wrecking neighborhoods with forced busing and urban renewal, undermining marriage and the family through its crushing tax burden, or through welfare state programs that encourage dependency on the state instead of dependency on family and community, or seeking to marginalize or supplant all other social institutions, Burke's little platoons of society, The statist assault is there for all to see.

11:13Then there are the increasingly visible, even macabre, spiritual pretensions of the modern state. How else can we describe what we are presented with at the Democratic and Republican conventions, other than the cultivation of a messiah figure? The other day, John Edwards said that if he and John Kerry were elected, people like Christopher Reeve would walk again. Why don't these guys just try to multiply some loaves and fishes while they're at it? In my book, The Church Confronts Modernity on American Catholicism and the Progressive Era, I point out an overlooked aspect of progressive ideology, namely the desire to substitute what the progressives expressly called a religion of the American way of life in place of traditional religion. American intellectuals during the Progressive Era were trying to construct a new American ethic in which the citizen's primary loyalty was to the national community, by which they essentially meant the federal government, rather than to states and localities, and to a new non-dogmatic, non-denominational ethic, instead of to any revealed religion.

12:14According to one scholar, progressives held that all social knowledge deserving a hearing must be cosmopolitan in origin and national in import. They invented a conception of citizenship, moreover, that stipulated that the possession The question of social knowledge entailed reflecting on and articulating ideas of national public good unmediated by party, interest, region or sectarian religion. All these things were to be shunted aside. Yet to hear these arguments today, do we turn to modern conservatism? The question answers itself. We look instead to intelligent libertarians like Hans Hoppe, who shows in his indispensable book, Democracy, the God that Failed, that the state is always at war with so-called intermediary institutions. This is a point, by the way, that a traditional conservative like Robert Nisbet repeatedly made but, of course, the typical Fox News viewer has never heard of Robert Nisbet.

13:06Unfortunately, he has never heard of Hans Hoppe either. That's a real shame, though. That's a real shame. Oh, that's good. Well, that's true. Tom de Lorenzo watches Fox News just to make fun of them and criticize them on the blog. I'm talking about the cheering people. Likewise, Professor Hoppe argues that purely private communities can supply everything that cultural conservatives seek. Likewise, the Austrian School, particularly in the work of Rothbard, Hoppe, Walter Block, shows that the usual distinction made in mainstream economics between public goods, that by their nature must be supplied by government on the one hand, and private goods, capable of being produced on the free market on the other, is without foundation. In other words, they show us how much of life can be arranged through the normal channels of civil society, The more familiar we are with Austrian literature, the more impatient we become with the state and its ceaseless path of destruction.

13:55And the fact of repeated government failure is only half the story thrives on failure. We well know how this works when it comes to the welfare state and fostering dependency. The bureaucracy measures success by how fast it increases the number of people on the rolls. An attitude no charitable institution relying on voluntary contributions could possibly afford to hold. One scholar of welfare cites a candid description of the system by a social security official in a Midwest field office. In the field, I was a supervisor out there for years and years. Your staffing, your budget for supplies and your awards money for the employees was based on work units. Now work units were assigned based on the number of claims you took. So we would sit around and figure out how we could get more people on the SSI roles because it would benefit us. The more applications we took, the more work units, the bigger the staff we could build up an empire.

14:43Well, rarely do you get so frank in admission. But Murray Rothbard said in a wonderful transcribed quotation that somebody very kindly reproduced on the Mises blog recently, he said this, he said, In general, I urge everybody to look at a government measure, not in terms of a tragic failure to achieve the common good, public interest or general welfare, but rather as a conscious agency for doing all sorts of monopolizing, cartelizing and other restrictive things. In other words, the government is not that dumb, says Rothbard. That's exactly right. They want this. This is the outcome they desire. Likewise, he said, there's a rational conspiracy view of history and an irrational, sort of sloppy conspiracy theory of history. The sloppy view only says qui bono and then says, aha, these guys are responsible. They're evil and so forth.

15:31The rational conspiracy theorist looks more deeply and asks, who caused these men for them? Who continues to lobby for them? This makes him a scholar instead of a hopped-up paranoid. And then my favorite line, so scholarship is essentially confirming your early paranoia through a deeper factual analysis. So this institution, the state that wrecks communities and rips us off while it's at it, needs to be dramatically demystified and delegitimized. Norman Cantor, a scholar of the Middle Ages, reminds us that in fact, a person in the Middle Ages, which many conservatives have great place in their hearts for the Middle Ages, Here's what Norman Cantor says about the state then. He speaks about the relative unimportance of the state. He talks about the family, the arts, learning and science, business enterprise and technological progress.

16:21These are the work of individuals and groups and the involvement of the state is remote and disengaged. It is the rule of law that screens out the state's insatiable aggressiveness and corruption and gives freedom to civil society below the level of the state. It so happens that the medieval world was one in which men and women worked out their destinies So it seems to me conservatives ought to forget looking to this institution for anything. Getting the state out of the way, conservatives could promote the values they cherish through the channels of civil society, as Cantor says they did during the Middle Ages. Finally, last year I got a call from a semi-prominent traditional Catholic asking what I thought of the idea of fielding a good traditional Catholic for president. I'm involved in a lot of Catholic circles. And I said all we'd have to show for it would be millions of dollars wasted. I said, what if we took that money and used it to endow a good, non-leftist, non-social justice oriented Catholic university?

17:11That would do more good than all the quixotic presidential candidacies in the world. The channels of civil society are open to us, let's use them. And when I put it that way, he agreed. So ultimately then, it seems to me that the way up from conservatism is an attitude that admires and appreciates the public sector and that seeks a cultural, at the very least, a cultural and moral secession from the state.