By Jim Sleeper<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beneath and beyond the January 6 insurrection and the right-wing populist surge expected in Tuesday’s midterm elections, American conservative thinking is taking some confused and confusing turns. One of them involves backing away from familiar \u201csupply-side\u201d dogmas and moving instead toward seizing the power of the administrative state to restore order and public virtue to Silicon Valley technocrats and to unruly masses, all under the tutelage of a \u201ctruly\u201d conservative ruling elite. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
These thinkers aren\u2019t flirting with Bernie Sanders\u2019 democratic socialism or Joe Biden\u2019s new New Deal. They\u2019re edging closer to the vaguely Roman Catholic \u201ccommon good Constitutionalism\u201d of Harvard Law Prof. Adrian Vermeule and of several Supreme Court justices, or to the old Ivy-Protestant, \u201cGood Shepherd\u201d guardianship of the republic, or even to the Nineteenth-century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck\u2019s authoritarian, ethno-nationalist welfare statism, which presaged the \u201cnational socialism\u201d of a German political party that incorporated that phrase into its name and its public promises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s a complex development, but let me try to make it as comprehensible as it is reprehensible, because it may be hard upon us after this Tuesday’s elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe Need to Stop Calling Ourselves Conservatives,\u201d <\/a>writes John Daniel Davidson, a senior editor of The Federalist. <\/em>a conservative publication (unaffiliated with the judiciary-focused, right-wing Federalist Society). Davidson praises and echoes an argument by Jon Askonas, a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America, who writes in Compact<\/em><\/a>, another conservative site, that \u201cthe conservative project failed\u201d because it \u201cdidn\u2019t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos [or over-determined trajectory] of sheer profit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Both writers want a counter-revolution against a corporate technocracy whose fixation on maximizing profit has trapped Americans like flies in a spiderweb of come-ons that grope, goose, track, and indebt us, bypassing our minds and hearts on the way to our lower viscera and wallets. But are conservatives who lament such developments truly urging a revolution within \u201cfree market\u201d conservatism itself? Or are they making only a tactical shift in a strategy to support the scramble for sheer profit and accumulated wealth, glossed by religiously inflected public discipline?<\/p>\n\n\n\n American conservatives have long ridden every national gold rush, blaming liberals and progressives for trying to stop such stampedes by desperate mobs and greedy plutocrats. Most of Davidson\u2019s articles have pounced, in synch with conservative media, on any opportunity to lambaste liberals for disrupting plutocracy\u2019s accumulation of wealth. (See \u201cThe Biden Administration is Trying to Criminalize the Opposition\u201d<\/a>;<\/strong> \u201cThe Next GOP Congress Should Impeach Merrick Garland\u201d<\/a> and \u201cIt\u2019s Not Crazy to Think Biden Sabotaged Nord Stream\u201d<\/a>) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet now Davidson is warning that conservatives themselves have undermined their small-r republican virtues and freedoms by surrendering more than they\u2019re conserving. He\u2019s accusing them of accommodating themselves to \u201cwoke\u201d liberals\u2019 efforts to redress income inequality, sexual and racial grievances, and markets\u2019 amoral reshaping of society. So doing, he warns, conservatives, too, have disfigured civic and institutional order. Once upon a time, he explains, \u201cConservatism was about maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing. Well, too late. Western civilization is dying. The traditions and practices that conservatives champion\u2026 do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation\u2019s history.\u201d So, conservatives must seize power instead of sharing it. They must restore moral and social order, even if doing so requires using big government to break up a few monopolies and redistribute income a little to Americans whom conservatives have claimed to champion even while protecting the powers and processes that have left them behind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Davidson and Askonas reproach fellow-conservatives for buying into \u201cwoke\u201d corporate capital\u2019s intrusive, subversive technologies, which treat citizens as impulse-buyers whose \u201cconsumer sovereignty\u201d suffocates deliberative, political sovereignty. One irony in conservatives\u2019 making this critique is that profit-crazed media such as Rupert Murdoch\u2019s assemble and dis-assemble audiences on any pretext — sensationalistic, erotic, bigoted, nihilistic\u2014that might keep them watching the ads and buying whatever they\u2019re pitching. Another irony is that conservative jurisprudence that protects consumer marketing\u2019s algorithmically driven pitching — by pretending that the business corporations engaging in it are persons deserving of the First Amendment-protected speech of self-governing citizens — only hands bigger megaphones to managers of swirling whorls of anonymous corporate shareholders, leaving truly deliberative citizens with laryngitis from straining to he heard in the cacophonous free-for-all that becomes a free-for-none as it’s driven by the telos of sheer profit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s no small thing for conservatives such as Davidson and Askonas to acknowledge that they can\u2019t reconcile their claim to cherish traditional communal and family values with their knee-jerk obeisance to every whim and riptide of conglomeration or financialization. Ivy League graduates often try to finesse the contradiction gracefully and persuasively to most Americans, as John F. Kennedy and the two George Bushes did, but they \u201cknew better\u201d than to persuade themselves: \u201cWe are poor little lambs who have lost our way, \u2026 damned from here to eternity,\u201d Yale\u2019s Whiffenpoof songsters croon, clinging to lost civic virtue in formal white ties and tails but acknowledging, humorously and ruefully, the soulless life awaiting them in Dad\u2019s firm or at J.P. Morgan or in poring over spreadsheets as corporate lawyers and business consultants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although Davidson and Askonas are more candid than the Whiffenpoofs about the costs of facing both ways, they stop short of crediting Whittaker Chambers<\/a>, the ex-Communist who drew on his Marx to warn William F. Buckley Jr. that “You can’t build a clear conservatism out of capitalism, because capitalism disrupts culture,” as Sam Tanenhaus, a biographer of Chambers, paraphrased him in a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in 2007. Liberal Democrats, too, have stopped short of challenging neoliberal capitalism\u2019s relentless dissolution of civic-republican virtue, voting instead for \u201cthe pro-corporate and anti-worker policies that made Trump,\u201d as Robert Kuttner reminds readers of an American Prospect <\/em>column<\/a> in which he filleted the centrist liberal writer Anand Giridharadas\u2019s effort<\/a> to rescue liberalism without indicting or significantly reconfiguring corporate capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Democrats celebrate their breaking of corporations’ glass ceilings to install \u201cthe first\u201d Black and\/or female or gay CEO, but they do little to reconfigure those structures\u2019 foundations and walls. While they\u2019ve been breaking glass ceilings, they\u2019ve also been breaking laws and regulations like the Glass-Steagall law, which restrained the investment banking, private-equity, and hedge-fund rampages that bamboozle and dispossess millions of Americans. They\u2019ve even accepted the Supreme Court\u2019s orchestration of George W. Bush\u2019s ascent to the presidency and its decimation via the Citizens United <\/em>ruling,<\/a> of campaign-finance laws that curbed corporate capital\u2019s sway over elections of officials who are supposed to regulate corporate capital itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Kuttner’s view (and mine; see Liberal Racism<\/a><\/em>), liberal Democrats who wave banners of ethno-racial and sexual identity to cover for their complicity in all this have given conservatives excuses to divert a resentful public’s attention from the right\u2019s even-more deceitful complicity in fomenting our republican crisis. Instead of offering alternatives to inequality and decay, conservatives have dined out so compulsively on liberals\u2019 follies that they\u2019ve forgotten how to cook for themselves and the rest of us and have abandoned the kitchen to Donald Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n * * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n After peddling demagoguery and coming up empty, some conservatives have turned to religion for cover and succor, if not salvation. But religion should scourge them, as Moses scourged the fabricators of the Golden Calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai; as Jesus did the moneychangers whom he drove from the Temple; and even as the conservative theologian Richard John Neuhaus did Senator Bob Dole, who\u2019d condemned cultural decadence in Hollywood and had challenged Bill Clinton in the 1996 election but later made TV commercials for Pfizer, testifying that Viagra helped him cope with his erectile dysfunction. \u201cThe poor fellow looks like he\u2019s restraining the impulse to unzip and show us the happy change,\u201d Neuhaus sneered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I noted Dole\u2019s folly in “Behind the Deluge of Porn, a Conservative Sea Change,” an essay<\/a> for the journal Salmagundi, <\/em>the conservative Christian editor Rod Dreher, then at The Dallas Morning News,<\/em> republished my essay in that newspaper, explaining to the conservative Catholic magazine<\/a> GodSpy<\/em><\/a> <\/u><\/em>that although I had made \u201can impassioned case\u201d that \u201c\u2019the pornification of the public square\u2019 is destroying any kind of civic-republican ethos,\u201d I would never see my dreams realized through liberalism because \u201conly religious faith has the power to resist our very powerful commercial culture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Religious conservatives such as Dreher and New York Times <\/em>columnist Ross Douthat<\/a> have indeed sought in faith an escape hatch of sorts from conservatism\u2019s imprisonment in the telos of sheer profit in our fallen world. Religion served that purpose, too, for William F. Buckley, Jr., who was a wealthy heir to part of the fortune his father had accumulated as an oil prospector and industry developer who meddled in Mexican politics during the military dictatorship of Victoriano Huerto. In 1951 Bill, Jr.\u2019s book God and Man at Yale <\/em>summoned that college\u2019s presumptively Christian gentlemen alumni to rout the godless socialism of its professors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Buckley\u2019s conservative movement has been at it <\/a>, albeit in secular terms, ever since his passing in 2008. The lavishly funded William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale characterizes itself<\/a> as a champion of \u201cviewpoint diversity\u201d instead of color-coded diversity, and it claims to oppose \u201cintellectual and moral conformity\u201d on campus. Its website features Buckley\u2019s observation that \u201cLiberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.\u201d Actually, the program isn\u2019t above trying to shock left-of-center students into making censorious protests which conservative media then spotlight and lampoon, as I recounted in Salon<\/em>.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Whittaker Chambers would have responded to conservatives\u2019 zeal with a shrug and \u201cthe sly half-smile of a melancholy man who knows better,\u201d as Tanenhaus put it. The fuller truth is that \u201cviewpoint diversity\u201d doesn\u2019t make much headway against the Buckley Program\u2019s own carefully managed internal conformity, as I discovered in September 2021, when its president, having read a column of mine<\/a> about Yale\u2019s star-crossed venture to establish a liberal-arts college with the tightly run city-state of Singapore, invited me to speak with Buckley student fellow. \u201cWe are looking to host in-person events with Yale affiliates,” he told me. “Please let me know if you are and I would be happy to follow up.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI’d be delighted to talk with and listen to Buckley Program participants,\u201d I responded. \u201cMy criticisms of Yale College (which I’ve defended at times against certain outside conservative critics) are themselves somewhat “conservative,” in that I try to protect old civic-republican virtues that I think Yale should continue to nurture. I agree with conservatives that Yale doesn’t do enough of that. But\u2026 I believe that\u2026 finance capital\u2026 undermines what’s best and necessary in a traditional liberal education\u2026. I could also discuss broader dilemmas that Yale faces in its role as a crucible or training center for civic-republican leadership. Again, I’ve been severely critical of some conservative critics of Yale (try this, for example!<\/a> –how’s that for “viewpoint diversity”?!). But the older and wiser I become, the more convinced I am that each side of the political spectrum needs the best of the other side in certain ways, and, in this time of increasing polarization, that can’t be stated often or clearly enough. I’d be glad to explain what I mean by this, and I’d be more than willing to listen for a long time to the Buckley student fellows’ own thoughts about this.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n I never heard back from the Buckley president or anyone else in the program. Ironically, my disinvitation may have had been prompted by my depiction<\/a> of some conservatives\u2019 stagey condemnations of liberals\u2019 \u201cdisinvitations\u201d of conservative speakers. I described Buckley board chairman Roger Kimball\u2019s introduction of the columnist George Will to Buckley student fellows at a \u201cDisinvitation Dinner\u201d staged by the program to dramatize Scripps\u2019 college\u2019s cancellation of its speaking invitation<\/a> to Will after Will had made disparaging remarks about a \u201crape culture\u201d of supposedly inflated accusations and cries of victimization. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOur colleges and universities, though lavishly funded and granted every perquisite which a dynamic capitalist economy can offer, have become factories for the manufacture of intellectual and moral conformity,\u201d Kimball thundered, oblivious of the conformity he was enforcing on the 20 year-olds seated before him in formal wear at Will\u2019s \u201cDisinvitation Dinner\u201d in an elegant hotel. <\/p>\n\n\n\n More telling than this reeking strain of hypocrisy has been the conduct of the Yale Law School\u2019s chapter of The Federalist Society, some of whose alumni guided Trump in deciding his appointments to the Supreme Court and other federal judicial benches. Here I commend a brilliant expose of the Federalist Society\u2019s \u201cfree speech\u201d hypocrisy <\/a>by Jack McCordick, a Yale undergraduate at the time who’s now a researcher-reporter for The New Republic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Firebrands in the Buckley undergraduate program and the Federalist Society\u2019s law school chapter succeed at times in baiting left-leaning students (and, sometimes, university administrators) into committing or suborning excesses that the national conservative media eagerly denounce. But when the Law School\u2019s Federalist Society chapter did manage to sponsor a straightforward debate — \u201cIncome Inequality: Is it Fair or Unfair?\u201d — between the progressive Yale Law Professor Daniel Markovits and libertarian writer Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute — Markovits wiped the floor with Brook: See for yourself <\/a>how an outbreak of \u201cviewpoint diversity\u201d at the behest of the Federalist Society flummoxed its organizers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A similar embarrassment became public when editors and board members of conservative Manhattan Institute\u2019s City Journal <\/em>denied its writer Sol Stern freedom of speech to criticize Donald Trump at all. Stern, who\u2019d been writing for that magazine and institute for years, outed them in an article — “Think Tank in the Tank”<\/a> — for the left-liberal DEMOCRACY Journal that\u2019s as telling as McCordick\u2019s expose of the Federalist Society. <\/p>\n\n\n\n * * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s almost enough to make one sympathize with some conservatives\u2019 religious escapes –Rod Dreher\u2019s embrace of what he calls the \u201cBenedict Option,\u201d comes to mind. But it\u2019s not enough to make me sympathize with the secular cries de Coeur<\/em> of Davidson. <\/em>\u201cPut bluntly,\u201d he writes, \u201cif conservatives want to save the country, they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it<\/a>. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201dOne need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell <\/em>decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips<\/a>,\u201d the baker who has indeed been hard-pressed to defend himself legally several times for refusing to decorate a cake with words congratulating a gay couple on a wedding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe left will only stop when conservatives stop them,\u201d Davidson continues, warning that \u201cconservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about \u2018small government\u2019\u2026. To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point,\u201d he concludes. \u201cIf conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after <\/em>we have won the war.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n But when have conservatives ever shied from wielding power, except when they\u2019ve been embarrassed or forced into relinquishing it by the brave civil disobedience of a Rosa Parks and the civil-rights movement or by the disciplined, decisive strikes and protests and electoral organizing of labor unions and social movements? If conservatives really want to \u201cattend with care\u201d to the examples set by Cincinnatus and George Washington, who relinquished power so that the public interest would continue to be served more lastingly and effectively by others, they\u2019ll have to enable American working people to resist the \u201ctelos of sheer profit\u201d that\u2019s stressing and dispossessing them and that\u2019s displacing their anger and humiliation onto scapegoats under the ministrations of Fox News and right-wing demagogues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n How about taking seriously Davidson\u2019s proposal that government offer \u201cgenerous subsidies to families of young children\u201d — a heresy to Grover Norquist, the anti-tax zealot who said he wants to shrink government to a size where he could drag it into a bathtub and drown it? How about banishing demagoguery from their midst, as they often claim that Buckley banished John Birchite anti-Semitism? How about disassociating themselves, as I think Buckley would have done, from The Claremont Institute,<\/a> the hard-right think tank that\u2019s been so deeply \u201cin the tank\u201d for President Trump that he gave it a National Humanities Medal and followed the advice of its senior fellow John Eastman in attempting to overturn the 2020 election? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Not only does Davidson propose that \u201cto stop Big Tech\u2026 will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms;\u201d he also proposes that \u201cto stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds.\u201d He writes that conservatives \u201cneed not shy away from [big-government policies] because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.\u201d But American conservatives who expect to wield big-government power may be moving toward a strain of European conservatism that has long mixed capitalism and welfare-state spending to advance nationalist, imperialist, and even racialist agendas. That dark, dangerous tradition began with Bismarck and metastasized into Nazi \u201cnational socialism\u201d half a century later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n If so, American conservatives\u00a0should look carefully into the Pandora\u2019s Box that they\u2019re opening. \u00a0And those who crave a godly relation to power would do well to ponder an observation by John Winthrop, the founder and first governor of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, in\u00a0his essay-sermon, \u201cA Modell of Christian Charity,\u201d<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cIt is a true rule, that particular estates cannot subsist in the ruin of the public.\u201d In other words, not even wealthy estates can survive for long in a society that\u2019s being disintegrated by capitalism. It’s hard to imagine America\u2019s conservative \u201cfundamentalists,\u201d be they religious or secular, finding it in themselves to escape\u00a0the English poet\u00a0Oliver Goldsmith\u2019s foreboding<\/a>\u00a0of doom in 1777: \u201cIll fares the land, to hastening ills a\u2019prey, when wealth accumulates, and men decay.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (This was posted originally by the History News Network https:\/\/historynewsnetwork.org\/article\/184360 on November 4, 2022 and was picked up by Rawstory. ) By Jim Sleeper Beneath and beyond the January 6 insurrection and the right-wing populist surge expected in Tuesday’s midterm elections, American conservative thinking is taking some confused and confusing turns. One of them involves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3932"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3975,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3932\/revisions\/3975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jimsleeper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jimsleeper.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/image.jpeg\")
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