A SECURE CITIZENRY:

Private enterprise: Conservatism thrives in America, says Mark Steyn, because citizens — not subjects — are suspicious of government and want to be left to their own devices (Mark Steyn, 10/02/04, The Spectator)

The American Right, on the other hand, is supposed to be split from top to toe between ‘neocons’ and ‘paleocons’, the latter being the isolationist Right and the former being sinister Jewish intellectuals who’ve turned the Bush administration into an arm of Israeli foreign policy. One problem for those who see conservatism in terms of this epic struggle is that one side doesn’t exist. The ‘paleocons’ boil down to a handful of anti-war conservatives, the most prominent being Pat Buchanan, who in the 2000 presidential election got 0.42 per cent of the vote. He’s no BNP, never mind Ukip. The real divide is between the neocons (for want of a better term) and the ‘assertive nationalists’ — that’s to say, those who think we ought to bomb rogue states, smash their regimes and rebuild them as democratic societies, and those who think we ought to bomb rogue states, smash their regimes, and then leave them to stew in their own juices, with a reminder that if the next thug is foolish enough to catch Washington’s eye, then (as Arnie says) ‘Ah’ll be back!’ This difference can seem like a big deal — those who think we need to win their hearts and minds vs those who think they’re mostly heartless and mindless, so who cares? But in truth it’s only a difference of degree.

To British conservatives, for whom there are no constituencies equivalent to the evangelical Christians and the Second Amendment types, the American Right can look a little freaky. But one of the consequences of September 11 is that it revealed the conservative coalition to be much more cohesive than superficial appearances might suggest. For starters, take small government. Every true conservative ought to be sceptical about government, because there’s hardly anything the government does that wouldn’t be better done by somebody else. Imagine if the GPO still ran Britain’s telephone network. Imagine the kind of Internet service you’d have. Because of a compromise deal to avoid redundancies with the Amalgamated Union of Fax Machine Installers, you’d be paying different rates according to which domain you sent an email to: .uk? That’d be 30p. .fr? That’d be one pound. .nz? That’d be 15 quid. And it would take a week. And you’d have to apply a month in advance for an online session. And take a postal order round to the nearest application-processing office.

Conservatives embrace big government at their peril. The silliest thing Dick Cheney has ever said was a couple of weeks after 9/11: ‘One of the things that’s changed so much since September 11 is the extent to which people do trust the government — big shift — and value it, and have high expectations for what we can do.’

Really? I’d say 9/11 vindicated perfectly a decentralised, federalist, conservative view of the state: what worked that day was municipal government, small government, core government — the firemen, the NYPD cops, rescue workers. What flopped — big-time, as the Vice-President would say — was federal government, the FBI, CIA, INS, FAA and all the other hotshot, money-no-object, fancypants acronyms. Under the system operating on that day, if one of the many Algerian terrorists living on welfare in Montreal attempted to cross the US border at Derby Line, Vermont, and got refused entry by an alert official, he would be able to drive a few miles east, attempt to cross at Beecher Falls, Vermont, and they had no way of knowing that he’d been refused entry just half an hour earlier. No compatible computers.

On the other hand, if that same Algerian terrorist went to order a book online, amazon.com would know that he’d bought The Dummy’s Guide to Martyrdom Operations two years ago and their ‘We have some suggestions for you!’ box would be proffering a 30 per cent discount on The A-Z of Infidel Slaying and 72 Hot Love Tips That Will Have Your Virgins Panting For More. Amazon is a more efficient miner of information than US Immigration. [...]

So one of the lessons of 9/11 is that in the end citizen initiative is more reliable than nanny-state regulation. That’s one reason no Democrat in a competitive district wants to run on an anti-gun platform. In the weeks after 9/11, gun sales in some states were up over 20 per cent, especially sales to women. ‘Let’s roll!’ beats gun control any day. The supposedly opposite ends on the conservative continuum — the foreign-policy think-tanks fussing over geopolitical trends in post-Soviet Central Asia and the stump- toothed guys in plaid with full gun-racks in their pick-ups — turn out to have an identical world view: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Three years ago, I got a flurry of emails from Yorkshire, Oslo, Marseilles and elsewhere recounting incidents of gangs of Muslim youths enthusiastically celebrating the glorious victory of 9/11 by swarming around cars, banging on the windows, intimidating the drivers, yelling Osama’s name. If you tried that in Texas, the guy would reach in his glove box and blow your head off. Second Amendment conservatism is more secure and better integrated with the bespoke mainstream than it’s been in years. The government can’t tell you you’ve got to be on full alert and at the same time announce new restrictions on the right to defend yourself and your home.

Social conservatism is also more secure. Fainthearted Canadian Tories may have signed on to ‘a woman’s right to choose’, but the refusal of American conservatives to accept, as the rest of the West has, that the abortion issue is settled looks sounder every day. Whether or not individual women should have the right to choose, the state has no interest in encouraging them to do so. What Western societies need is more babies. Without them, the Dar al-Islam will win by default, slowly annexing shrivelled, barren, secular Europe. Unlovely though they may be to worldly British Tories, America’s religious Right has in fact a more rational view of the world than European hyper-rationalists.

The genius of the Ownership Society though will be to meld that capacity for citizen initiative with what will still be a big government to some greater or lesser degree. Government won't so much get out of the education business and retirement and unemployment and the like as it will act as the stern facilitator, requiring you to provide for those things, or in extreme cases providing them for you, but allowing you some freedom to structure choices that suit your own desires. That the entire system will be mandated by the state will be intolerable to the most libertarian, while the individual liberty it provides will be intolerable to the statists. In that middle ground lies tremendous opportunity.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 2, 2004 10:48 PM