COMMON SENSE IS CONSERVATIVE:

A Common Sense Democrat manifesto: Where do we go from here? (Matthew Yglesias, Nov 12, 2024, Slow Boring)

Nine principles for Common Sense Democrats

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share posts elaborating on each one individually, but in the meantime, these are the principles I’d like to see the Democratic party embrace:

Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.

The government should prioritize maintaining functional public systems and spaces over tolerating anti-social behavior.

Climate change — and pollution more broadly — is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey.

We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin, rejecting discrimination and racial profiling without embracing views that elevate anyone’s identity groups over their individuality.

Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people’s basic freedom to live as they choose.

Academic and nonprofit work does not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private business or any other jobs.

Politeness is a virtue, but obsessive language policing alienates most people and degrades the quality of thinking.

Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, not their workforce or abstract ideological projects.

All people have equal moral worth, but democratic self-government requires the American government to prioritize the interests of American citizens.

DON’T SQUANDER OUR INHERITANCE:

Order for a Disordered Time: a review of The Roots of American Order by Russell Kirk (Daniel Pitt, University Bookman)

When one thinks of order one might think of the phrase law and order. Kirk explains, however, that order is wider and larger than law. Law is, of course, an important element of sustaining order but they are not indistinguishable. My own way of thinking about the difference between law and order is that law is a puzzle piece in the overall puzzle of order. The other puzzle pieces are traditions, norms, customs, and beliefs. Together they form the whole picture of order. Dr. Kirk provides us with two types of order: (1) order in one’s soul; and (2) order within the civil society at large. Kirk ensures that the reader is not led to believe that this categorization of order means that they are discrete and distinct, but quite the contrary is true, these roots of order are deeply “intertwined.” […]

What do we derive from these cities? From Jerusalem, the concept of “a purposeful moral existence under God,” who cares about His nations and human persons and who is the source of all morality. From Athens, we learn that human beings are social beings, and they need to live in a community and that order in the soul and order in civil society are linked together. From Rome, we learn the importance of venerating our ancestors. Of course, these roots were intertwined “with the Christian understanding of human duties and human hopes.” From London, we get Magna Carta, equality before the law, common law, representative government, the English language, America’s social patterns and the foundations of its economy. On personal freedom in America, Kirk states that “in its origins, American personal liberty perhaps owes more to the common law than any other single source.” Indeed, according to Kirk, “the law, which is no respecter of persons, stands supreme: that is the essence of British legal theory and legal practice, and it passed into America from the first colonial settlements onwards.” From Philadelphia, the roots are America’s founding documents. In other words, the importance of art, law, ordered-liberty, community and tradition derive from these five cities, and they are essential to human prosperity, flourishing, and order.

ALL ABOUT THE SPECTACLE:

Adam Smith: He shows how to reconcile natural liberty with ordered justice (Ian Crowe, September 10, 2024, Modern Age)

The Theory of Moral Sentiments places Smith firmly among the thinkers, such as Hutcheson and Hume, who emphasize the role of aesthetics and the natural human passions in the shaping of principles of moral philosophy. In the way he links sympathy, imagination, and ambition, however, he moves beyond his contemporaries in two main respects. First, in developing the “sympathetic” link between the impartial spectator and the individual conscience, he injects an objective quality of imagination into the impulse of sympathy (in which sense Smith might be seen as a “philosopher of the normal,” a term used by Dr. William Campbell to describe the political economy of Wilhelm Röpke). Secondly, his treatment of the motive of “self-love” reveals a subtle combination of utility and benevolence that passes between Hutcheson’s reliance on a separate moral sense and Bentham’s utilitarianism. Both of these concepts, conscience and self-interest, reveal the powerful influence of Stoicism on Smith’s thought, and are vital in appreciating how Smith linked the natural and the moral—motive and judgment—within his system.

THEY’RE STUCK ON REASON:

The Trust Trap: Greater public faith in elite institutions requires evidence of restraint, not just of competence (Yuval Levin, August 11, 2024, Sapir)

In 1970, in what may well have been the best of his many landmark essays, Irving Kristol took up this peculiar challenge of legitimacy. “The results of the political process and of the exercise of individual freedom — the distribution of power, privilege, and property — must also be seen as in some profound sense expressive of the values that govern the lives of individuals,” Kristol wrote. If elites hold power or privilege for reasons that most of their fellow citizens don’t consider adequate, the entire society will lose respect for the rules by which it says it lives.

Not many would enjoy living in such a society. It would feel not only unequal but also unfree. “People feel free when they subscribe to a prevailing social philosophy; they feel unfree when the prevailing social philosophy is unpersuasive; and the existence of constitutions or laws or judiciaries have precious little to do with these basic feelings,” Kristol concluded. The principles according to which our elites exercise power must somehow be, as he put it, persuasive.

So how do our own elites now justify their status and that of the institutions they lead? Implicitly, without ever quite articulating it, they tend to fall upon a mix of technocratic credentials and progressive high-mindedness. This broadly describes the self-image of the unusually cohesive elite class that now runs most of our major institutions. Its members (at least most of them) earned their places by demonstrating a peculiar sort of merit — through admission to a selective university, followed by various honors, certifications, rites of passage, jobs, and stamps of approval that signify competence.

This is a cold and almost clinical standard of worth, but the nagging guilty feeling that it may not be a sufficient rationale for status and authority is then allayed by a kind of secondhand atonement — a ritual acknowledgement of the sins of others that played a part in creating today’s conditions of inequality. This might entail, for instance, naming the privilege that results from the inegalitarianism of prior generations or naming the Native American tribes that once occupied the lands we now possess.

The bizarre intensity with which such rituals are enforced sometimes feels like the working out of an authoritarian instinct, but it is at least as much a function of the depth of the guilt they are meant to placate. And if, after all that proof of formal qualifications and moral purity, the public is still skeptical of elites, then their skepticism is presumed to result from the failure of ordinary people to value rational competence, or from their bigotry or small mindedness. What else could explain it?

Their failure to ever reckon with the dubious foundation of their belief system leaves them overconfident in an ideology most in the Anglosphere have long rejected.

DEMOCRACY OF THE UNBORN:

Book Review: “The Conservative Futurist” by James Pethokoukis: A Visionary Journey toward Tomorrow (Brent Orrell, June 17, 2024, AEI)

To some, “conservative futurism” will ring oxymoronic; but the future Pethokoukis is eager—“faster, please” —to usher in is conservative in the sense that it seeks to respect individual liberty and the free market and, following Burke’s vision of society as a “multigenerational partnership,” extend our moral and social concern concern to our children and grandchildren.

Resisting the stereotype that conservatism is inherently backward-looking or resistant to change, Pethokoukis’ conservatism centers individual liberty in the quest for progress. His project has much in common with Hayek’s, especially in the latter’s memorable essays “The Use of Knowledge in Society” and, ironically, “Why I Am Not a Conservative” (the meaning of the term has evolved: what Pethokoukis seeks to conserve is not natural hierarchies and the status quo, but classical liberalism, which increasingly finds itself under threat).

WE ARE THE dEEP sTATE:

Shogun and the Universal Truths of Fusionism (Matthew Malec, May 2024, Fusion)

One of conservatism’s great virtues is that it understands that human nature is flawed and no one is infallible. Plans that come from the top down should be debated and even viewed skeptically. At its best, conservatism starts with the family, then builds out to civil society, and only then to a limited government that gives these smaller units the space they need to thrive. There is no (earthly) savior lying in wait. Whether coming from populists or post-liberals, we should be wary of any calls for regime change or working outside of the constitutional system that has served us well for nearly 250 years. When conservatism loses its skepticism and begins to look toward utopia, it has already lost.

The only answer to the challenges conservatism faces is a revitalized fusionism that focuses on limiting government and objective morality while working within our constitutional framework. Fusionists must cling tight to first principles, including distrust of human nature, and maintaining the ever-precarious balance between respecting individual rights and ensuring people have the communities they need for true fulfillment. If we do not step up, something else will fill the void, and it may well be a Toranaga-esque figure with little respect for rights and a thirst for power.

MEANWHILE, WHEN JOE AND DONALD AGREE…:

Bootlegger in a Baptist’s Mask (G. Patrick Lynch, May 21, 2024, AIER)

For many years most economists have clearly understood that free trade is hugely beneficial to both individual consumers and the economies of communities of all sizes. If Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman agree on something, it’s safe to say that it’s likely true.

THE ANGLOSPHERIC DIFFERENCE:

Review: Russell Kirk’s The Politics of Prudence (Paul Krause, May 17, 2024, Voegelin View)

This basic framework for understanding conservatism is then revealed through the chapters of this book, beginning with the “Errors of Ideology.” Ideology, as Kirk defines it, is a dogmatic approach to “transforming society and even transforming human nature.” The ideologue generally takes as their starting point a hatred of the current political order, a hatred of human nature, and a belief in progressive utopia from some thinker or book who revealed to humanity what could be. Ideology, as practiced by the ideologue, becomes “merciless” in that “march toward Utopia.” Drawing upon other thinkers like Eric Voegelin and Gerhart Niemeyer, Kirk sharply explains the essence of ideology as “promis[ing] mankind an earthly paradise.”

Conservatism, standing in opposition to ideology, isn’t about rejecting change or reform. Kirk, quoting Burke (one of his heroes), knows and affirms that change and reform are necessary (change is a natural part of existence). Change and reform can be good things too. However, the change and reform that conservatism promotes is within the limits of worldly and human nature—to make it better, not perfect. In the merciless march to Utopia promoted by ideology and conservatism’s opposition to ideological madness, Kirk implies that conservatism acts within the boundaries of nature (both earthly and humanly) while ideology seeks to eradicate nature to escape the limits of nature.

TEAM BURKE:

Peter Viereck’s Unadjusted Conservatism: One of the most insightful figures in postwar conservatism has been forgotten in our age of political chaos. (John D. Wilsey, 5/02/24, Law & Liberty)

His study of, and tragic experience with fascism moved Viereck to Burkean conservatism. He defined conservatism like this:

The conservative principles par excellence are proportion and measure; self-expression through self-restraint; preservation through reform; humanism and classical balance; a fruitful nostalgia for the permanent beneath the flux; and a fruitful obsession for unbroken historical continuity. These principles together create freedom, a freedom built not on the quicksand of adolescent defiance but on the bedrock of ethics and law.

Viereck’s is a beautiful articulation of the conservative disposition.

Viereck identified specific features of measured and extreme conservatism. He classified measured conservatism as evolutionary Burkean and extreme conservatism as reactionary Ottantottist. What did he mean?

Viereck argued that Burke’s Reflections birthed modern conservatism in a similar way that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels birthed international Marxism through their Communist Manifesto. For Viereck, what stood out most clearly from Burke’s conservatism was an orientation around tradition, especially the tradition of ordered liberty. Viereck also saw that the Burkean tradition was evolutionary, contrasted with the ossified, counter-revolutionary rightism expressed through French thinker Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821). For Viereck, both the Burkean and the Maistrian strands of conservatism hold up tradition in the face of revolutionary change, but Burkeans stand for traditional liberties whereas Maistrians champion traditional authority. Viereck called the Maistrian tradition “ottantott,” from the Italian word, ottantotto, meaning “eighty-eight.” Viereck wrote, “A reactionary king of Piedmont-Sardinia became almost a figure of fun by wandering about mumbling pathetically the word ‘ottantott.’ … Thereby he meant to say: all problems would vanish if only the world turned its clock back to 1788, the year before the Revolution.”

Burkeans and ottantotts differ in the way they understand the nature of change and how to respond to it. Burkeans see change as natural and inevitable, thus it must be managed by honest deliberation based on constitutional procedure, tradition, and prudence. Ottantotts are resistant to change, deploying nostalgia not for imaginative purposes, but as a test for truth. Ottantotts, since they are counter-revolutionary, seek disruption no less than leftist revolutionaries. They are utopian in a similar way to leftist revolutionaries: their political vision is predicated on obscurantist nostalgia, which is just as abstract as the leftist revolutionaries’ dreams of a perfected society. Both leftist revolutionaries and ottantott counter-revolutionaries seek to build temples in the sky, and have no use for the concrete experience of the past. Viereck saw the Burkean tradition as the predominant conservative tradition in American history. He thought the ottantottist tradition, emerging from the thought of Maistre, as the predominant conservative tradition on the continent of Europe. Considering the development of American conservatism since 1990, there seems to be a clear turn toward ottantottism, especially in its rising populist appeal due to the frustration among many Americans for Republican aimlessness in the opening decades of the twenty-first century.

iDENTITARIANISM IS JUST ANOTHER ISM:

The Origins of Conservatism’s ‘Gnostic’ Meme (Joshua Tait, 4/12/24, The Bulwark)

His moment came in 1951, when Voegelin was invited to the University of Chicago to give a set of lectures under the auspices of a conservative program that had produced influential books by Leo Strauss, George F. Kennan, Daniel J. Boorstin and others. Voegelin’s lectures were gathered into a book, The New Science of Politics. It was through this book that American conservatives were introduced to the concept of Gnosticism in its political and ideological application.

VOEGELIN’S GRAND HISTORY begins with the priestly kings of antiquity who united the secular and spiritual order under their rule. Over time, the unity of their authority developed cracks, many of which resulted from the growth of Christian belief in an omnipotent God who is ontologically separate from His Creation. Society became more secular as the created world was de-divinized, but the spiritual energies were not scoured from the Western imagination—they were merely sublimated. This is where Gnosticism comes into play: For Voegelin, it names the true motivation of anyone who advocates any substantive change to the political order. It is the attempt to bring “our knowledge of transcendence”—our inchoate sense of the Kingdom of Heaven, the eschaton, the endpoint of history—into secular reality through politics.

Voegelin experienced the rise of both Nazism and Bolshevism, and he came to see Gnosticism at the motive core of both movements. “The totalitarianism of our time,” he wrote, “must be understood as journey’s end of the Gnostic search for a civil theology.” But Voegelin was interested in more than endpoints. He saw Gnosticism in a variety of dynamic and emerging ideologies including liberalism, progressivism, positivism, scientism, and still other outlooks and systems. Few could escape his novel, encompassing metaphysical critique.

If Gnosticism involves self-deception—no advocates of the ideological systems Voegelin targeted would accept it as a characterization of their true political motives—it also runs afoul of a self-defeating contradiction, Voegelin argued: Its gnosis, the special knowledge upon which these movements are based, is ultimately false. In his view, Gnostics see their program as an end state that they insist upon in defiance of reality. When Gnostics triumph politically, they only manage to build a dreamworld— fundamentally flawed social arrangements that create a “very complex pneumopathological state of mind”—which he elsewhere defines as the “condition of a thinker who, in his revolt against the world as it has been created by God, arbitrarily omits an element of reality in order to create the fantasy of a new world—among anyone unfortunate enough to live under them, including the Gnostics themselves.

The Summers of Theory (Peter E. Gordon, 4/09/24, Boston Review)

On the one hand, “theory” carried a hint of privilege, the cultivation of exquisite skills in reading and interpretation that were accessible only to an elite. On the other hand, it implied the hopeful idea of an emancipatory practice, since presumably anyone who wished to “do theory” did so because it promised, someday and somehow, to link up with the moral and political business of transforming the world.