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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Auster
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/014471.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000582.html
"What is a Conservative ?
We’re all convinced there’s something called conservatism that opposes something called liberalism. Nonetheless, people who call themselves conservatives can disagree with each other in basic ways. What’s it all about ?
The answer, I think, is that conservatism—like liberalism—is less an opinion than a way of forming opinions. It’s not so much what you think as how you think that makes you conservative. That’s one reason conservatives can disagree among themselves, and it’s why there are two great opinion blocs, liberals and conservatives, that continue to confront each other in the same way regardless of how the issues change.
Basically, a conservative is someone who accepts the way ordinary people think about things in daily life, while a liberal today is someone who believes in experts. That doesn’t mean conservatives are dumb and liberals are smart, although miseducation can lead people to believe that. Instead, it means that liberals and conservatives have different ideas what it is to be reasonable. Intelligence is not the distinction. Most academics are liberal, but great literature is based far more on everyday thought and experience than on the findings of experts.
Since liberals believe it’s most reasonable to trust experts, they believe in social programs. Experts need a vehicle for exercising their expertise and giving it influence over society, and that’s what social programs are for. As believers in social programs liberals are tolerant of taxes, bureaucrats and centralized government, and they downplay things like family, religion and personal morality that can’t be planned or administered. They look upon society from the standpoint of a top bureaucrat whose job it is to run everything, and so view it as a collection of interchangeable individuals with no important ties to each other. What happens to people they explain by reference to an overall system that ought to be managed and made the same for everyone.
In contrast, conservatives take their cues from the things that define the ordinary daily life of ordinary people—family, business, church, neighborhood, kinship, personal integrity and so on. For conservatives the attitudes and loyalties that make those things work are what life’s all about. They look upon a man’s happiness or unhappiness not as a product of the grand system of society in general but as the result of far more specific things—his individual skill, integrity and effort, his connections to family, friends, neighbors and coworkers, and sometimes his luck. Those things can’t possibly be made equal for everyone, and an attempt to make them so would wreck far more than it helped.
These differences in basic outlook explain the differences in opinion. Conservatives favor religion and family values because those are the things that keep daily life together and give it its purpose and value. They emphasize reducing taxes and regulation because they believe people make their own decisions better than experts and bureaucrats. They are patriotic and law-abiding because they believe loyalty and integrity make the world go round, and because they feel an obligation to the country that lets their family and community exist in peace and safety. In comparison with liberals they downplay equality. It’s not that they favor inequality, but they think it’s stupid to force the issue. And they note that liberals themselves can’t solve the problem, since the bureaucrats who force everyone to be equal can’t themselves be equal to the people they control.
But what is ordinary life ? Someone might object that it is different in different times and places, in the Old South and in present-day San Francisco, so that conservatism might include anything from slavery to gay marriage depending on the situation. That kind of objection contributes to arguments about “true conservatism”. If someone is fiscally conservative but soft on social issues is he a true conservative who’s just adapting to changed circumstances, or is he on his way to liberalism ?
To my mind the answer is that conservatism can’t be simply a matter of how things happen to be at the moment. The “ordinary life” to which it appeals has to include a notion of the normal functioning of human nature under free institutions. Otherwise it could take any distorted form, and why use it as a standard? Slavery is therefore out, because it’s not a free institution. But so is the current tendency to redefine marriage—the enduring union of one man and one woman for mutual support and the rearing of children—so that it can mean anything or nothing.
The attack on marriage, on the rights and obligations it involves, and on the customs and attitudes that support it destroy the ability of ordinary people to carry on their lives and raise the next generation without government involvement in all the affairs of life. That can’t be acceptable on a view that takes as its standard the free functioning of the ordinary human arrangements of ordinary life. The “social issues” are therefore an essential part of any coherent conservatism.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000411.html
Liberals, conservatives and the good life
You can’t beat something with nothing, so what do traditionalist conservatives put up to oppose the liberals? The answer is clear enough. Politics is the art of living together, so the basic political question is what kind of life is best. Liberalism is based on the liberal notion of the good life—in theory doing your own thing, in practice careerism and recreational hedonism with a coloring of political correctness. Traditionalist conservatism can therefore respond to liberalism only by putting forward an alternative.
The traditionalist conservative view of the good life is based more on settled attachments and ultimate goods than on technology and present desire. Most concretely, it is based on God, family and country. The dispute between liberalism and traditionalist conservatism, therefore, is which understanding of life is better. Until that question becomes central to political discussion traditionalist conservatism will never make headway because it will never be possible for it to make its case.
Liberals try to finesse the matter by claiming such disputes are divisive and should be kept out of politics. Each of us, they say, should pursue his own vision of the good life within a common system that facilitates that quest for each. Their proposed system for advancing the individual pursuit of whatever one likes turns out, of course, to be a system that favors careerism and recreational hedonism over all other possiblities. Liberals have thus discovered a way of resolving in advance all disputes in favor of their own version of the good life.
The two things traditionalist conservatives must do, therefore, are debunk liberal claims of neutrality and present their own understanding of the good life in as favorable a way as possible. The former involves a great deal of intellectual work and persuasion. In the world today the claim of neutrality is the typical justification for power, so the interests that support it are enormously powerful. Presentation of a better way of life involves intellectual work as well, but more fundamentally it is a matter of living well ourselves. Misconduct is not only misconduct but treason against the good in time of war. While living well may be difficult, however, it is not burdensome, because it is what makes us most fully human.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000548.html
"Conservatism as orthodoxy
What kind of conservatism is possible today ? Conservatism was originally defense of accustomed ways, mostly because of the goods they fostered but in part simply because they were accustomed. Since the goods tradition promotes can be difficult to articulate—if things were otherwise the goods wouldn’t have to be embodied in tradition but could be taken straight—and since the opponents of tradition refuse to admit the reality and value of traditional goods, the impression grew up that conservatism is simply defense of existing habit as such. That impression is a distortion, however. The conservative preference for stability has always been subordinate to more ultimate concerns. “Conservative Stalinist” is indeed an oxymoron.
The fact conservatism has been concerned with both means and ends has made it vulnerable to changed circumstances. As time has passed, public institutions and ideals have become more and more permeated with egalitarian hedonism. The same spirit has crept into the attitudes and habits of the people, and even into institutions such as church and university that once stood for something very different. As a result, a preference for established institutions and habits no longer promotes traditional goods as it once did. Conservatism as it was no longer makes sense, and has to change.
But how should it change? The possibilities have been:
Emphasis on what is accustomed. Conservatism keeps its form while losing its soul, and becomes a simple preference for what is settled at present, whatever that may be. This view became incoherent when “what is settled” came to include things like “the American tradition of progressive reform” or “the quest for equality.” An emphasis on what is accustomed can therefore only be rhetorical today. The claim that “true conservatism” is allegiance to what is settled, so that a true conservative like Edmund Burke would cherish the 1964 Civil Rights Act if he were alive today, is a specialty of academically-oriented liberals who think conservatives should just shut up, and to some extent of their faux conservative running dogs.
Emphasis on goods conservatism is concerned to foster. On this understanding conservatism keeps its soul but becomes a form of radicalism. In radical times that’s hard to avoid, since in the absence of reliable settled understandings the alternative to radicalism becomes doing what you’re told by whoever happens to hold social power for the time being. The issue that divides various forms of conservatism, however, is just what goods to foster:
Mainstream conservatism is concerned to foster goods that motivated American institutions until their post-60s radicalization, and that still retain their hold on the American people. These include personal discipline and ambition, equal opportunity, economic prosperity, and national greatness, with decency of conduct and residual religiosity in the background. Neoconservatism is a sort of intellectualized version of this mainstream conservatism.
Other forms of American conservatism—the constitutionalist/patriot movement, for example—are concerned to foster goods that characterized earlier stages of American life. These include populism, local, family and individual independence, and conservative decentralized evangelical religion.
It seems that the foregoing forms of conservatism want to reverse the development of liberalism in American society and stabilize it at some point in the past. One wonders whether the effort makes sense, or whether America was founded from the beginning on a conception of self-defining equal freedom that cannot be stabilized and has inevitably swept away all other goods. The European New Right would take the objection a large step further, and say that universal equality is a necessary implication of Christianity itself, so that to go forward we would have to go back to pre-Christian pagan Europe. Which of these objections if any is well-founded, and is there something that escapes them or is all simply flux?
What follows from these considerations, I think, is that the most important issue for conservative thought today is less tactics or even strategy than orthodoxy. What complex of practice, thought and symbol can endure through changes and remain a standard for social life and political action? What can we accept wholeheartedly as true? Without some sort of Archimedian point on which to stand, judge and propose goals for American society it seems conservatives are forever doomed to complaining and foot-dragging, with never a chance to offer effective principled resistance or even articulate a way of life for themselves independent of the corruptions of the world around them. Conservatism no longer makes sense except as a term for orthodoxy that emphasizes its ties to the past and embodiment in tradition. The present, it seems, is not a time for politics as ordinarily understood but for truth and how to live it."
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000531.html
"What is the place of freedom ?
What is the proper place for freedom ? Certainly the liberal view that freedom is a self-contained final standard for politics is wrong, since freedom is always freedom to do or be something. As such it must be understood by reference to some further good. Freedom is primarily freedom to do or be what is good. Self-defining freedom, the equal freedom to do or be anything whatever, is a singularly useless conception that in practice requires everything to be suppressed because if A isn’t suppressed then just by existing it interferes with not-A and so denies it equal freedom. In the end, liberal neutrality can only lead to PC tyranny.
Freedom must therefore be defined by reference to an understanding of the good and defended as part of that good or at least conducive to it. We can’t make sense of it otherwise, and if we can’t make sense of it or say it’s good why bother with it ? Linking freedom and the good might seem difficult—if we know what the good is, why not ignore freedom and just go for it using whatever means seem effective ? Or if we don’t know what the good is, what conception of freedom other than the self-destructive liberal conception is available ?
The dilemma can be avoided if the ultimate good is transcendent—if we can’t fully know, articulate or possess it—and if it is a matter of what we do and how as well as what we experience, so that our participation in the good has an essential voluntary component.
If the good is transcendent then no system of discipline and control can adequately embody it, and our participation in it must evolve in ways that can’t be altogether predicted, planned or explained. The transcendence of the good therefore implies the need for a certain freedom and independence for communities and their traditions, and for limitations on government and especially on bureaucratic administration of social life. It also suggests some role for individual conscience, since no authoritative statement of the good can be altogether sufficient.
If the good includes what we do, why and how at least as much as what we experience, then freedom becomes a constituent of the good. If satisfaction of desire were the good then the most effective way to realize it might be to manipulate desires so they relate to things that can be reliably delivered to everybody. A combination of drugs and electrodes in the brain might be just the thing. In contrast, if the good cannot be fully realized unless we choose and pursue it voluntarily then manipulation and control are no longer neutral means but at best necessary evils.
An understanding of the good as publicly valid but transcendent, as objectively knowable but only in part, can be difficult to maintain. It not possible to demonstrate beyond objection what things public authority should insist on, what it should support or encourage, and what it should leave up to the conviction or choice of individuals and communities. These distinctions must nonetheless be made. Without them, the good loses either public validity or the quality of transcendence. In either case freedom, along with many other things, is doomed.
The only practical way to make the distinctions is by reference to the traditions and practices of a particular community. Freedom thus requires particularist loyalties and traditionalism. The rights that can do something for us are not universal human rights but the rights of Englishmen, of Americans, of any people whose way of life gives freedom a function with respect to a guiding understanding of the good. To give up that way of life or deprive it of authority in the interests of universality, multiculturalism or whatever is not to generalize the freedom that it secures to us but to destroy it. And that is what we see happening around us."
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000472.html#217
"What is to be done ?
So what does a traditionalist conservative do when he becomes convinced that public life is proceeding on fundamentally bad principles? The usual resources of the extremist are unavailable to him, because traditionalism is adverse to dogmatism, conspiracy theories and cure-alls. On the other hand, he can no longer participate in what passes for the mainstream. The following, extracted from a longer piece I wrote, outlines one possiblity:
So what is to be done? Basic matters like following traditional morality in daily life are clear enough. More and more the world enforces other demands as the price of integrity. The situation of traditionalists is becoming that of religious minorities in Europe before 19th century emancipation. Technocracy makes traditional beliefs on matters such as relations between the sexes and the place of the transcendent in social life hopelessly opposed to the understandings now demanded. Official insistence on commitment to antitraditional views has begun to make it difficult for a traditionalist to accept a responsible job in a mainstream institution, or permit his children to be educated by the public system. In the coming years such difficulties are likely to affect more and more of life.
A radical traditionalist movement has thus become necessary. The immediate function of such a movement would be to make life as a traditionalist easier for those so inclined; the ultimate function to restore tradition to public life. The first goal can be pursued piecemeal and as occasion offers; the second is mostly a matter of maintaining principle. Pragmatic success on any large scale is likely to be slow, because the traditionalist outlook is so deeply at odds with modern public understandings. Nonetheless, the views of even a tiny minority can be influential, especially if they express durable aspects of human life that established views ignore, because they change the setting in which men act.
That effect can be cumulative; if the public outlook has gone radically astray steady maintenance of an alternative can eventually transform what views seem plausible. The traditionalist outlook has great long-term advantages. To say values are human creations, as technocrats do, is to reduce morality to a statement of what others want and make it utterly ineffectual. Rational hedonism can motivate only what is self-serving, and formal liberal principles like utility or the categorical imperative are insufficient for the concrete demands of life. Effective common action requires faith in something that encompasses and transcends us, so lasting success goes to those who care about something more substantive than winning. Traditionalism connects morality to the nature and tendencies of things, and so grounds the trust in the world needed to motivate a comprehensive system of action.
In any event, grand public success is ultimately not the point. Honesty and maintenance of principle is itself victory. Traditionalism means that politics depends on things more important than itself, that our purpose in life is not pragmatic success but living in accordance with spiritual and moral order. We must give our lives a footing in what is real; from that all else follows. At a time when good and evil are proclaimed the offspring of desire, and all the means of publicity and tricks of rhetoric are used to foreclose discussion, it requires thought, effort and independence of mind to do so.
Independence does not mean denial of our surroundings and connections; the world would have ended long ago if good were not more pervasive and enduring than evil. The point of tradition is not to fabricate anything but to secure and foster the good everywhere implicit. The means are at hand, since we learn to live well in attempting to do so. Natural feelings lead us toward right patterns and understandings. Living memory and recent history tell us of a way of life, much of it still available to us, that is far more explicitly at odds with technocracy than the one that now prevails. Formal study also helps: the history of modernism shows how we got where we are, and the classics put us in touch with what preceded. Discussions with others, those sympathetic and those opposed, help clarify and broaden our thoughts and provoke thought in others.
The current situation demands something different from each of us. The traditionalist movement is an alliance of traditions, each with its own doctrines and authorities, working together against a pervasive common enemy that would destroy humanity as such. Such a movement has its strains and paradoxes, since traditions oppose each other, but its necessity is clear. As it evolves it will come to have its own standards, although each tradition will see what is needed somewhat differently.
On some points unified action is called for. We are social beings, and as such must confront the new order together and publicly. Its nature tells us what weapons to use against it. The power of technocracy comes from an unquestioned acceptance that is not well-founded and in some ways is difficult to maintain. Nonetheless, the language and habitual assumptions of public discussion make it hard for those sympathetic to traditionalism even to articulate a position different from the one dominant. Objections stutter and fall silent before the confidence and seeming coherence of the technocrats.
The political battle today is therefore in men’s minds rather than the legislative chamber, the polls, or the streets. Men naturally revert to tradition unless it is continually disrupted and suppressed. What is necessary is less to enforce particular traditions than to weaken antitraditionalism. Those who are not against us are for us; our job is not to overcome our fellow citizens but to bring them to realize where their fundamental sympathies lie.
The overwhelming public success of the technocratic outlook makes it an easy target. The ability to break its spell by forceful and repeated questioning and by providing an articulate alternative is an enormous power, one possessed by traditionalists right now if they would only use it. In spite of New Class dominance, Western polities allow anyone to participate in public discussion. There are ways of suppressing discussion , but also a thousand forums — dinner table conversations, local meetings, letters to editors and public officials, Internet discussions, little magazines, campaigns of minor political parties — that permit any of us to present almost any view he thinks right. A few intelligent and forthright voices in each forum arguing against the new order and for traditional ways would have a powerful effect on the balance of intellectual forces and eventually the social order itself.
The language of public discussion must therefore be contested. Technocratic rhetoric must be deflated, modernism deprived of the appearance of moderation and its brutal implications displayed. The possibility of social technology must be disputed, the failures of the new order driven home, and traditional understandings justified. Man must be shown to be a creature that lives by blood loyalties and transcendent goods, human life a compound not only of impulse and appetite but of essences — man and woman, Confucian and Christian, Turk and Jew.
Confronting technocracy, of course, is only preparatory. As men our main goal must be to put our own lives in order, and for that something more definite is necessary than clearing obstacles and indicating general directions. Truth exists for us in concrete forms, one of which each of us must accept as authoritative. To establish a life better than the one offered by individualistic liberal choice — in practice, by experts, advertisers and popular entertainers — it is necessary to accept and submit to a specific community and its traditions. That is not easy when social practice is too diffuse to make the authority of any tradition a given, but in times of dissolution each of us has no choice but to find his way to something to which he can give himself wholly.
At bottom, the answer to today’s confusions lies in faith, the realization that we do not make the world, that we recognize rather than create the Good, Beautiful, and True, and that to do so adequately we must draw on a wisdom greater than our own. Our acts can be fruitful only as part of an order for good founded in the nature of things. In spite of its apparent strength technocracy is based on fear of anything greater than ourselves and refusal to face obvious human limitations. It must fail because it has no way to deal with realities. Success is far more likely than appears. The world is ours: we need only throw off the chains of illusion."
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/014471.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000582.html
"What is a Conservative ?
We’re all convinced there’s something called conservatism that opposes something called liberalism. Nonetheless, people who call themselves conservatives can disagree with each other in basic ways. What’s it all about ?
The answer, I think, is that conservatism—like liberalism—is less an opinion than a way of forming opinions. It’s not so much what you think as how you think that makes you conservative. That’s one reason conservatives can disagree among themselves, and it’s why there are two great opinion blocs, liberals and conservatives, that continue to confront each other in the same way regardless of how the issues change.
Basically, a conservative is someone who accepts the way ordinary people think about things in daily life, while a liberal today is someone who believes in experts. That doesn’t mean conservatives are dumb and liberals are smart, although miseducation can lead people to believe that. Instead, it means that liberals and conservatives have different ideas what it is to be reasonable. Intelligence is not the distinction. Most academics are liberal, but great literature is based far more on everyday thought and experience than on the findings of experts.
Since liberals believe it’s most reasonable to trust experts, they believe in social programs. Experts need a vehicle for exercising their expertise and giving it influence over society, and that’s what social programs are for. As believers in social programs liberals are tolerant of taxes, bureaucrats and centralized government, and they downplay things like family, religion and personal morality that can’t be planned or administered. They look upon society from the standpoint of a top bureaucrat whose job it is to run everything, and so view it as a collection of interchangeable individuals with no important ties to each other. What happens to people they explain by reference to an overall system that ought to be managed and made the same for everyone.
In contrast, conservatives take their cues from the things that define the ordinary daily life of ordinary people—family, business, church, neighborhood, kinship, personal integrity and so on. For conservatives the attitudes and loyalties that make those things work are what life’s all about. They look upon a man’s happiness or unhappiness not as a product of the grand system of society in general but as the result of far more specific things—his individual skill, integrity and effort, his connections to family, friends, neighbors and coworkers, and sometimes his luck. Those things can’t possibly be made equal for everyone, and an attempt to make them so would wreck far more than it helped.
These differences in basic outlook explain the differences in opinion. Conservatives favor religion and family values because those are the things that keep daily life together and give it its purpose and value. They emphasize reducing taxes and regulation because they believe people make their own decisions better than experts and bureaucrats. They are patriotic and law-abiding because they believe loyalty and integrity make the world go round, and because they feel an obligation to the country that lets their family and community exist in peace and safety. In comparison with liberals they downplay equality. It’s not that they favor inequality, but they think it’s stupid to force the issue. And they note that liberals themselves can’t solve the problem, since the bureaucrats who force everyone to be equal can’t themselves be equal to the people they control.
But what is ordinary life ? Someone might object that it is different in different times and places, in the Old South and in present-day San Francisco, so that conservatism might include anything from slavery to gay marriage depending on the situation. That kind of objection contributes to arguments about “true conservatism”. If someone is fiscally conservative but soft on social issues is he a true conservative who’s just adapting to changed circumstances, or is he on his way to liberalism ?
To my mind the answer is that conservatism can’t be simply a matter of how things happen to be at the moment. The “ordinary life” to which it appeals has to include a notion of the normal functioning of human nature under free institutions. Otherwise it could take any distorted form, and why use it as a standard? Slavery is therefore out, because it’s not a free institution. But so is the current tendency to redefine marriage—the enduring union of one man and one woman for mutual support and the rearing of children—so that it can mean anything or nothing.
The attack on marriage, on the rights and obligations it involves, and on the customs and attitudes that support it destroy the ability of ordinary people to carry on their lives and raise the next generation without government involvement in all the affairs of life. That can’t be acceptable on a view that takes as its standard the free functioning of the ordinary human arrangements of ordinary life. The “social issues” are therefore an essential part of any coherent conservatism.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000411.html
Liberals, conservatives and the good life
You can’t beat something with nothing, so what do traditionalist conservatives put up to oppose the liberals? The answer is clear enough. Politics is the art of living together, so the basic political question is what kind of life is best. Liberalism is based on the liberal notion of the good life—in theory doing your own thing, in practice careerism and recreational hedonism with a coloring of political correctness. Traditionalist conservatism can therefore respond to liberalism only by putting forward an alternative.
The traditionalist conservative view of the good life is based more on settled attachments and ultimate goods than on technology and present desire. Most concretely, it is based on God, family and country. The dispute between liberalism and traditionalist conservatism, therefore, is which understanding of life is better. Until that question becomes central to political discussion traditionalist conservatism will never make headway because it will never be possible for it to make its case.
Liberals try to finesse the matter by claiming such disputes are divisive and should be kept out of politics. Each of us, they say, should pursue his own vision of the good life within a common system that facilitates that quest for each. Their proposed system for advancing the individual pursuit of whatever one likes turns out, of course, to be a system that favors careerism and recreational hedonism over all other possiblities. Liberals have thus discovered a way of resolving in advance all disputes in favor of their own version of the good life.
The two things traditionalist conservatives must do, therefore, are debunk liberal claims of neutrality and present their own understanding of the good life in as favorable a way as possible. The former involves a great deal of intellectual work and persuasion. In the world today the claim of neutrality is the typical justification for power, so the interests that support it are enormously powerful. Presentation of a better way of life involves intellectual work as well, but more fundamentally it is a matter of living well ourselves. Misconduct is not only misconduct but treason against the good in time of war. While living well may be difficult, however, it is not burdensome, because it is what makes us most fully human.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000548.html
"Conservatism as orthodoxy
What kind of conservatism is possible today ? Conservatism was originally defense of accustomed ways, mostly because of the goods they fostered but in part simply because they were accustomed. Since the goods tradition promotes can be difficult to articulate—if things were otherwise the goods wouldn’t have to be embodied in tradition but could be taken straight—and since the opponents of tradition refuse to admit the reality and value of traditional goods, the impression grew up that conservatism is simply defense of existing habit as such. That impression is a distortion, however. The conservative preference for stability has always been subordinate to more ultimate concerns. “Conservative Stalinist” is indeed an oxymoron.
The fact conservatism has been concerned with both means and ends has made it vulnerable to changed circumstances. As time has passed, public institutions and ideals have become more and more permeated with egalitarian hedonism. The same spirit has crept into the attitudes and habits of the people, and even into institutions such as church and university that once stood for something very different. As a result, a preference for established institutions and habits no longer promotes traditional goods as it once did. Conservatism as it was no longer makes sense, and has to change.
But how should it change? The possibilities have been:
Emphasis on what is accustomed. Conservatism keeps its form while losing its soul, and becomes a simple preference for what is settled at present, whatever that may be. This view became incoherent when “what is settled” came to include things like “the American tradition of progressive reform” or “the quest for equality.” An emphasis on what is accustomed can therefore only be rhetorical today. The claim that “true conservatism” is allegiance to what is settled, so that a true conservative like Edmund Burke would cherish the 1964 Civil Rights Act if he were alive today, is a specialty of academically-oriented liberals who think conservatives should just shut up, and to some extent of their faux conservative running dogs.
Emphasis on goods conservatism is concerned to foster. On this understanding conservatism keeps its soul but becomes a form of radicalism. In radical times that’s hard to avoid, since in the absence of reliable settled understandings the alternative to radicalism becomes doing what you’re told by whoever happens to hold social power for the time being. The issue that divides various forms of conservatism, however, is just what goods to foster:
Mainstream conservatism is concerned to foster goods that motivated American institutions until their post-60s radicalization, and that still retain their hold on the American people. These include personal discipline and ambition, equal opportunity, economic prosperity, and national greatness, with decency of conduct and residual religiosity in the background. Neoconservatism is a sort of intellectualized version of this mainstream conservatism.
Other forms of American conservatism—the constitutionalist/patriot movement, for example—are concerned to foster goods that characterized earlier stages of American life. These include populism, local, family and individual independence, and conservative decentralized evangelical religion.
It seems that the foregoing forms of conservatism want to reverse the development of liberalism in American society and stabilize it at some point in the past. One wonders whether the effort makes sense, or whether America was founded from the beginning on a conception of self-defining equal freedom that cannot be stabilized and has inevitably swept away all other goods. The European New Right would take the objection a large step further, and say that universal equality is a necessary implication of Christianity itself, so that to go forward we would have to go back to pre-Christian pagan Europe. Which of these objections if any is well-founded, and is there something that escapes them or is all simply flux?
What follows from these considerations, I think, is that the most important issue for conservative thought today is less tactics or even strategy than orthodoxy. What complex of practice, thought and symbol can endure through changes and remain a standard for social life and political action? What can we accept wholeheartedly as true? Without some sort of Archimedian point on which to stand, judge and propose goals for American society it seems conservatives are forever doomed to complaining and foot-dragging, with never a chance to offer effective principled resistance or even articulate a way of life for themselves independent of the corruptions of the world around them. Conservatism no longer makes sense except as a term for orthodoxy that emphasizes its ties to the past and embodiment in tradition. The present, it seems, is not a time for politics as ordinarily understood but for truth and how to live it."
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000531.html
"What is the place of freedom ?
What is the proper place for freedom ? Certainly the liberal view that freedom is a self-contained final standard for politics is wrong, since freedom is always freedom to do or be something. As such it must be understood by reference to some further good. Freedom is primarily freedom to do or be what is good. Self-defining freedom, the equal freedom to do or be anything whatever, is a singularly useless conception that in practice requires everything to be suppressed because if A isn’t suppressed then just by existing it interferes with not-A and so denies it equal freedom. In the end, liberal neutrality can only lead to PC tyranny.
Freedom must therefore be defined by reference to an understanding of the good and defended as part of that good or at least conducive to it. We can’t make sense of it otherwise, and if we can’t make sense of it or say it’s good why bother with it ? Linking freedom and the good might seem difficult—if we know what the good is, why not ignore freedom and just go for it using whatever means seem effective ? Or if we don’t know what the good is, what conception of freedom other than the self-destructive liberal conception is available ?
The dilemma can be avoided if the ultimate good is transcendent—if we can’t fully know, articulate or possess it—and if it is a matter of what we do and how as well as what we experience, so that our participation in the good has an essential voluntary component.
If the good is transcendent then no system of discipline and control can adequately embody it, and our participation in it must evolve in ways that can’t be altogether predicted, planned or explained. The transcendence of the good therefore implies the need for a certain freedom and independence for communities and their traditions, and for limitations on government and especially on bureaucratic administration of social life. It also suggests some role for individual conscience, since no authoritative statement of the good can be altogether sufficient.
If the good includes what we do, why and how at least as much as what we experience, then freedom becomes a constituent of the good. If satisfaction of desire were the good then the most effective way to realize it might be to manipulate desires so they relate to things that can be reliably delivered to everybody. A combination of drugs and electrodes in the brain might be just the thing. In contrast, if the good cannot be fully realized unless we choose and pursue it voluntarily then manipulation and control are no longer neutral means but at best necessary evils.
An understanding of the good as publicly valid but transcendent, as objectively knowable but only in part, can be difficult to maintain. It not possible to demonstrate beyond objection what things public authority should insist on, what it should support or encourage, and what it should leave up to the conviction or choice of individuals and communities. These distinctions must nonetheless be made. Without them, the good loses either public validity or the quality of transcendence. In either case freedom, along with many other things, is doomed.
The only practical way to make the distinctions is by reference to the traditions and practices of a particular community. Freedom thus requires particularist loyalties and traditionalism. The rights that can do something for us are not universal human rights but the rights of Englishmen, of Americans, of any people whose way of life gives freedom a function with respect to a guiding understanding of the good. To give up that way of life or deprive it of authority in the interests of universality, multiculturalism or whatever is not to generalize the freedom that it secures to us but to destroy it. And that is what we see happening around us."
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/000472.html#217
"What is to be done ?
So what does a traditionalist conservative do when he becomes convinced that public life is proceeding on fundamentally bad principles? The usual resources of the extremist are unavailable to him, because traditionalism is adverse to dogmatism, conspiracy theories and cure-alls. On the other hand, he can no longer participate in what passes for the mainstream. The following, extracted from a longer piece I wrote, outlines one possiblity:
So what is to be done? Basic matters like following traditional morality in daily life are clear enough. More and more the world enforces other demands as the price of integrity. The situation of traditionalists is becoming that of religious minorities in Europe before 19th century emancipation. Technocracy makes traditional beliefs on matters such as relations between the sexes and the place of the transcendent in social life hopelessly opposed to the understandings now demanded. Official insistence on commitment to antitraditional views has begun to make it difficult for a traditionalist to accept a responsible job in a mainstream institution, or permit his children to be educated by the public system. In the coming years such difficulties are likely to affect more and more of life.
A radical traditionalist movement has thus become necessary. The immediate function of such a movement would be to make life as a traditionalist easier for those so inclined; the ultimate function to restore tradition to public life. The first goal can be pursued piecemeal and as occasion offers; the second is mostly a matter of maintaining principle. Pragmatic success on any large scale is likely to be slow, because the traditionalist outlook is so deeply at odds with modern public understandings. Nonetheless, the views of even a tiny minority can be influential, especially if they express durable aspects of human life that established views ignore, because they change the setting in which men act.
That effect can be cumulative; if the public outlook has gone radically astray steady maintenance of an alternative can eventually transform what views seem plausible. The traditionalist outlook has great long-term advantages. To say values are human creations, as technocrats do, is to reduce morality to a statement of what others want and make it utterly ineffectual. Rational hedonism can motivate only what is self-serving, and formal liberal principles like utility or the categorical imperative are insufficient for the concrete demands of life. Effective common action requires faith in something that encompasses and transcends us, so lasting success goes to those who care about something more substantive than winning. Traditionalism connects morality to the nature and tendencies of things, and so grounds the trust in the world needed to motivate a comprehensive system of action.
In any event, grand public success is ultimately not the point. Honesty and maintenance of principle is itself victory. Traditionalism means that politics depends on things more important than itself, that our purpose in life is not pragmatic success but living in accordance with spiritual and moral order. We must give our lives a footing in what is real; from that all else follows. At a time when good and evil are proclaimed the offspring of desire, and all the means of publicity and tricks of rhetoric are used to foreclose discussion, it requires thought, effort and independence of mind to do so.
Independence does not mean denial of our surroundings and connections; the world would have ended long ago if good were not more pervasive and enduring than evil. The point of tradition is not to fabricate anything but to secure and foster the good everywhere implicit. The means are at hand, since we learn to live well in attempting to do so. Natural feelings lead us toward right patterns and understandings. Living memory and recent history tell us of a way of life, much of it still available to us, that is far more explicitly at odds with technocracy than the one that now prevails. Formal study also helps: the history of modernism shows how we got where we are, and the classics put us in touch with what preceded. Discussions with others, those sympathetic and those opposed, help clarify and broaden our thoughts and provoke thought in others.
The current situation demands something different from each of us. The traditionalist movement is an alliance of traditions, each with its own doctrines and authorities, working together against a pervasive common enemy that would destroy humanity as such. Such a movement has its strains and paradoxes, since traditions oppose each other, but its necessity is clear. As it evolves it will come to have its own standards, although each tradition will see what is needed somewhat differently.
On some points unified action is called for. We are social beings, and as such must confront the new order together and publicly. Its nature tells us what weapons to use against it. The power of technocracy comes from an unquestioned acceptance that is not well-founded and in some ways is difficult to maintain. Nonetheless, the language and habitual assumptions of public discussion make it hard for those sympathetic to traditionalism even to articulate a position different from the one dominant. Objections stutter and fall silent before the confidence and seeming coherence of the technocrats.
The political battle today is therefore in men’s minds rather than the legislative chamber, the polls, or the streets. Men naturally revert to tradition unless it is continually disrupted and suppressed. What is necessary is less to enforce particular traditions than to weaken antitraditionalism. Those who are not against us are for us; our job is not to overcome our fellow citizens but to bring them to realize where their fundamental sympathies lie.
The overwhelming public success of the technocratic outlook makes it an easy target. The ability to break its spell by forceful and repeated questioning and by providing an articulate alternative is an enormous power, one possessed by traditionalists right now if they would only use it. In spite of New Class dominance, Western polities allow anyone to participate in public discussion. There are ways of suppressing discussion , but also a thousand forums — dinner table conversations, local meetings, letters to editors and public officials, Internet discussions, little magazines, campaigns of minor political parties — that permit any of us to present almost any view he thinks right. A few intelligent and forthright voices in each forum arguing against the new order and for traditional ways would have a powerful effect on the balance of intellectual forces and eventually the social order itself.
The language of public discussion must therefore be contested. Technocratic rhetoric must be deflated, modernism deprived of the appearance of moderation and its brutal implications displayed. The possibility of social technology must be disputed, the failures of the new order driven home, and traditional understandings justified. Man must be shown to be a creature that lives by blood loyalties and transcendent goods, human life a compound not only of impulse and appetite but of essences — man and woman, Confucian and Christian, Turk and Jew.
Confronting technocracy, of course, is only preparatory. As men our main goal must be to put our own lives in order, and for that something more definite is necessary than clearing obstacles and indicating general directions. Truth exists for us in concrete forms, one of which each of us must accept as authoritative. To establish a life better than the one offered by individualistic liberal choice — in practice, by experts, advertisers and popular entertainers — it is necessary to accept and submit to a specific community and its traditions. That is not easy when social practice is too diffuse to make the authority of any tradition a given, but in times of dissolution each of us has no choice but to find his way to something to which he can give himself wholly.
At bottom, the answer to today’s confusions lies in faith, the realization that we do not make the world, that we recognize rather than create the Good, Beautiful, and True, and that to do so adequately we must draw on a wisdom greater than our own. Our acts can be fruitful only as part of an order for good founded in the nature of things. In spite of its apparent strength technocracy is based on fear of anything greater than ourselves and refusal to face obvious human limitations. It must fail because it has no way to deal with realities. Success is far more likely than appears. The world is ours: we need only throw off the chains of illusion."
