02.14.06
The Death of Conservatism
Joe from the Evangelical Outpost is running a theme in the same vein as my prior post. Joe states that “Conservatism is dead and Ann Coulter is its corpse.” I’d have to agree that if vitriolic name-calling and childish polemic are the best the so-called “Conservative” movement has to offer these days, then it has truly lost its way.
Read More:the evangelical outpost: Civility and the Coulterization of Conservatism
Curt Doolittle said,
March 16, 2006 at 9:45 am
Regarding: “name calling and childish polemic”
This vitrolic combativeness was a reaction by conservative intellectual leaders, started in the early nineties, (along with the careful recruitment of women) as a reaction to the tactic of Democratic pundits to utilize the news media as a podium and by using each media appearance to “stay on message” and not engage in direct debate. If you recall cable news during the nineties, it was very common for some twenty-something to get on a news program and instead of answering the interviewer’s questions, just repeat the same phrase over and over again as if the American public could be compelled to believe in an alternate reality by virtue of chanting — as if we were some middle eastern tribal society. Unfortunately, it tends to work with the average person less knowledgeable in logic, rhetoric and history. This is the manufacture of common knowledge in the time honored tradition going back nearly to Zoroaster. Early Jewish scholars used the tactic when combined with humor, and it is still the most common means of non-rational debate in that culture. Today prominent leftist scholars (most noteably at Berkely) actively encourage the use of this tactic.
The conserviative response was to use a visible attack along the lines of those used by the Democratic Party spokespeople. While not exactly intellectual debate, this would nullify the “reality by chanting” tactic, as well as encourage the conservative party faithful, who, as people already possessed of conviction, were frustrated by the inability of their advocates to conduct a substantive debate in seven minute news segments flooded with sound bite repetitions. Even now, after a decade and a half of this, there are only a few dozen people on the conservative side who can speak in the common language to common people about conservative values. On the opposite side, there are legions of leftist pundits all vying for popular attention in every medium.
To say this tactic was ineffective is inaccurate. To say the tactic no longer is necessary, is a temporary truth, soon to be relived if forgotten. To say that it is a referendum on the underlying conservative message, is an error. It is simply time to move on to other tactics.
In the broader sense, the Straussian neo-conservative movement is hardly dead. (the use of government to further productive capitalism by economic coercion regardless of public consent.) The traditional conservative approach to liberty and property rights ( to encourage intentional consent for productive capitalism through rational dialog) is probably less likely to continue in it’s form, because it is more succeptible to the slow erosion of property rights, and the practicality of the ineffective educational system, combined with the breakdown of traditional family order, as well as the increases in population from immigration.
Such debates take years to win for each person that is added to the population, and the existing base of people who possess these libertarian values is now less than one third of the population. And despite what the left pontificates, the economic disparity between people “as represented by their ability to enforce conformity through economic coercion” is so limited, that the conservatives cannot propagate their philosophy except by example.
Along with this demographic problem, the monetary system we now employ, which favors long term debt and the constant devaluation of the currency, is no longer a formative process of indirect coersion that educates people to save. So there are both demographic and economic processes that erode the conservative message of production, and capital accumulation fed by the delay of gratification. And instead, we are being encouraged by our monetary system to increase consumption, accelerate gratification, refrain from saving, and produce less. While at the same time the part of the population that uses social ostricization to compell people to conserve no longer possesses the ability to use capital or charity to encourage others to adopt those practices. The education system never did contain ethical economic philosophy directly, it was only embeded in the literature programs. History is now not taught, because it forces value judgements, and when it was taught was taught as the history of conflict, not the history of property rights and economic coordination. The religious structure which held the comon vlaues of protestant cooperation that compelled both production, saving and the delay of gratification, has eroded as well.
In light of this greater movement, debates about intra-decade media tactics are inconsequential to the underlying problem: retention of liberty. Which is no more than property rights. And more importantly, the social means of cooercing people to adopt the quite unnatural behavior of delaying gratification, saving and producing more than they can consume. If this were not true, the economic strategy would have been developed more than by one small culture in all of human history. Despite the fact that that small culture propagated the philosophy to the greatest increase in human prosperity across the greatest number of people, ever accomplished by man.
We have bigger fish to fry.
-Cheers