DemocracyThe God That Failed
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On Conservatism and Libertarianism
I
Let me begin by discussing two possible meanings of the term conservative. The first meaning is to refer to someone as conservative who generally supports the status quo; that is, a person who wants to conserve whatever laws, rules, regulations, moral and behavioral codes happen to exist at any given point in time.
Because different laws, rules, and political institutions are in place at different times and/or different locations, what a conservative supports depends on and changes with place and time. To be a conservative means nothing specific at all except to like the existing order, whatever that may be.
The first meaning can be discarded, then.1 The term conservative must have a different meaning. What it means, and possibly only can mean, is this: Conservative refers to someone who believes in the existence of a natural order, a natural state of affairs which corresponds to the nature of things: of nature and man. This natural order is and can be disturbed by accidents and anomalies: by earthquakes and hurricanes, diseases, pests, monsters and beasts, by two-headed horses or fourlegged humans, cripples and idiots, and by war, conquest and tyranny. But it is not difficult to distinguish the normal from the anomaly, the essential from the accidental. A little bit of abstraction removes all the clutter and enables nearly everyone to "see" what is and what is not natural and in accordance with the nature of things. Moreover, the natural is at the same time the most enduring state of affairs. The natural order is ancient and forever the same (only anomalies and accidents undergo change), hence, it can be recognized by us everywhere and at all times.
1To state this is not to claim that no one has ever adopted this meaning of conservatism. In fact, a prominent example of a conservative who comes very close to accepting the definition rejected here as useless is Michael Oakeshott, "On Being Conservative," in idem, Rationalism in Politics and other Essays (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1991). For Oakeshott, conservatism is
not a creed or a doctrine, but a disposition.... [It is] a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be.... [It is] to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss, (pp. 407-08)
Conservative refers to someone who recognizes the old and natural through the "noise" of anomalies and accidents and who defends, supports, and helps to preserve it against the temporary and anomalous. Within the realm of the humanities, including the social sciences, a conservative recognizes families (fathers, mothers, children, grandchildren) and households based on private property and in cooperation with a community of other households as the most fundamental, natural, essential, ancient, and indispensable social units. Moreover, the family household also represents the model of the social order at large. Just as a hierarchical order exists in a family, so is there a hierarchical order within a community of families—of apprentices, servants, and masters, vassals, knights, lords, overlords, and even kings—tied together by an elaborate and intricate system of kinship relations; and of children, parents, priests, bishops, cardinals, patriarchs or popes, and finally the transcendent God. Of the two layers of authority, the earthly physical power of parents, lords, and kings is naturally subordinate and subject to control by the ultimate spiritual-intellectual authority of fathers, priests, bishops, and ultimately God.
Conservatives (or more specifically, Western Greco-Christian conservatives), if they stand for anything, stand for and want to preserve the family and the social hierarchies and layers of material as well as spiritual-intellectual authority based on and growing out of family bonds and kinship relations.2
2See Robert Nisbet, "Conservatism," in A History of Sociological Analysis, Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, eds. (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). "Naturally," writes Nisbet, "the conservatives, in their appeal to tradition, were not endorsing each and every idea or thing handed down from the past. The philosophy of traditionalism is, like all such philosophies, selective. Asalutary tradition must come from the past but it must also be desirable in itself" (ibid., p. 26). "The two central concepts in conservative philosophy," Nisbet goes on to explain, are "property" and (voluntarily acknowledged) "authority," which in turn imply both "liberty" and "order" (pp. 34-35). "Property," in conservative philosophy, "is more than external appendage to man, mere inanimate servant of human need. It is, above anything else in civilization, the very condition of man's humanness, his superiority over the entire natural world" (p. 56).
II
Let me now come to an evaluation of contemporary conservatism, and then go on to explain why conservatives today must be antistatist libertarians and, equally important, why libertarians must be conservatives.
Modern conservatism, in the United States and Europe, is confused and distorted. This confusion is largely due to democracy. Under the influence of representative democracy and with the transformation of the U.S. and Europe into mass democracies from World War I, conservatism was transformed from an antiegalitarian, aristocratic, antistatist ideological force into a movement of culturally conservative statists: the right wing of the socialists and social democrats. Most self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives are concerned, as they should be, about the decay of families, divorce, illegitimacy, loss of authority, multiculturalism, alternative lifestyles, social disintegration, sex, and crime. All of these phenomena represent anomalies and scandalous deviations from the natural order. A conservative must indeed be opposed to all of these developments and try to restore normalcy. However, most contemporary conservatives (at least most of the spokesmen of the conservative establishment) either do not recognize that their goal of restoring normalcy requires the most drastic, even revolutionary, antistatist social changes, or (if they know about this) they are members of the "fifth column" engaged in destroying conservatism from inside (and hence, must be regarded as evil).
Much of the conservative veneration for the family lies in its historic affinity between family and property. It is usually the rule for any family to seek as much advantage for its children and other members as is possible There is no issue over which conservative has fought liberal and socialist as strenuously as on threats through law to loosen property from family grasp, by taxation or by any other form of redistribution, (p. 52)
Almost everything about the medieval law of family and marriage, including the stringent emphasis upon chastity of the female, the terrible penalty that could be exerted against adultery by the wife, springs from a nearly absolute reverence for property, for legitimate heritability of property, (p. 57)
Similarly, the conservative emphasis on authority and social rank orders, and the affinity to medieval—pre-Reformation—Europe as a model of social organization, is rooted in the primacy of family and property. "There is," explains Nisbet,
no principle more basic to the conservative philosophy than that of the inherent and absolute incompatibility between liberty and equality. Such incompatibility springs from the contrary objectives of the two values. The abiding purpose of liberty is its protection of individual and family property— a word used in its widest sense to include the immaterial as well as the material in life. The inherent objective of equality, on the other hand, is that of some kind of redistribution or leveling of the unequally shared material and immaterial values of a community. Moreover, individual strengths of mind and body being different from birth, all efforts to compensate through law and government for this diversity of strengths can only cripple the liberties of those involved; especially the liberties of the strongest and the most brilliant, (p. 47)
For the conservative, then, the preservation of property and liberty requires the existence of a natural elite or aris
tocracy, and he is accordingly strictly opposed to democracy. Indeed, notes Nisbet, "for most conservatives socialism appeared as an almost necessary emergent of democracy and totalitarianism an almost equally necessary product of social democracy" (p. 92). On the incompatibility of liberty and equality (and democracy) see also Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Liberty or Equality? (Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 1993); on the conservative emphasis on a nobilitas naturalis as a sociological prerequisite of liberty see also Wilhelm Ropke, Jenseits von Angebot und Nachfrage (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1979), chap. 3.3.
That this is largely true for the so-called neoconservatives does not require further explanation here. Indeed, as far as their leaders are concerned, one suspects that most of them are of the latter (evil) kind. They are not truly concerned about cultural matters but recognize that they must play the cultural-conservatism card so as not to lose power and promote their entirely different goal of global social democracy.3 However, it is also true of many conservatives who are genuinely concerned about family disintegration or dysfunction and cultural rot. I am thinking here in particular of the conservatism represented by Patrick Buchanan and his movement.4 Buchanan's conservatism is by no means as different from that of the conservative Republican party establishment as he and his followers fancy themselves. In one decisive respect their brand of conservatism is in full agreement with that of the conservative establishment: both are statists. They differ over what exactly needs to be done to restore normalcy to the U.S., but they agree that it must be done by the state. There is not a trace of principled antistatism in either.
3On contemporary American conservatism see in particular Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement, rev. ed. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993); George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Justin Raimondo, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Burlingame, Calif.: Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993); see further also chap. 11. The fundamentally statist character of American neoconservatism is best summarized by a statement of one of its leading intellectual champions, the former Trotskyite Irving Kristol: "[T]he basic principle behind a conservative welfare state ought to be a simple one: wherever possible, people should be allowed to keep their own money—rather than having it transferred (via taxes to the state)—on the condition that they put it to certain defined uses." Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 119 (emphasis added). This view is essentially identical to that held by modern—post-Marxist—European Social-Democrats. Thus, Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD), for instance, in its Godesberg Program of 1959, adopted as its core motto the slogan "as much market as possible, as much state as necessary."
A second, somewhat older but nowadays almost indistinguishable branch of contemporary American conservatism is represented by the new (post World War II) conservatism launched and promoted, with the assistance of the CIA, by William Buckley and his National Review. Whereas the old (pre-World War II) American conservatism had been characterized by decidedly anti-interventionist (isolationist) foreign policy views, the trademark of Buckley's new conservatism has been its rabid militarism and interventionist foreign policy. In an article, "A Young Republican's View," published three years before the launching of his National Review in Commonweal, on January 25, 1952, Buckley thus summarized what would become the new conservative credo: In light of the threat posed by the Soviet Union, "we [new conservatives] have to accept Big Government for the duration —for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged . . . except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores." Conservatives, Buckley wrote, were duty-bound to promote "the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy," as well as the "large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington." Not surprisingly, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, essentially nothing in this philosophy has changed. Today, the continuation and preservation of the American welfare-warfare state is simply excused and promoted by new and neo-conservatives alike with reference to other foreign enemies and dangers: China, Islamic fundamentalism, Saddam Hussein, "rogue states," and /or the threat of "global terrorism." Regarding this new Buckleyite conservatism, Robert Nisbet has noted that of
all the misascription of the word "conservative"... the most amusing, in an historical light, is surely the application of 'conservative' to the last named [i.e., the budget-expanding enthusiasts for great increases in military expenditures]. For in America throughout the twentieth century, and including four substantial wars abroad, conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets, and an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism. In the two World Wars, in Korea, and in Viet Nam, the leaders of American entry into the war were such renowned liberal-progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. In all four episodes conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank and file, were largely hostile to intervention; were isolationists indeed. (Conservatism, p. 103) And on Ronald Reagan in particular, during whose administration the new and neoconservative movement were fused and amalgamated, Nisbet has noted that Reagan's "passion for crusades, moral and military, is scarcely American-conservative," (ibid, p. 104).
4See Patrick J. Buchanan, Right from the Beginning (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1990); idem, The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice are Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy (New York: Little, Brown, 1998).
Let me illustrate by quoting Samuel Francis, one of the leading theoreticians and strategists of the Buchananite movement. After deploring "anti-white" and "anti-Western" propaganda, "militant secularism, acquisitive egoism, economic and political globalism, demographic inundation, and unchecked state centralism," he expounds on a new spirit of "America First," which "implies not only putting national interests over those of other nations and abstractions like 'world leadership,' 'global harmony,' and the 'New World Order,' but also giving priority to the nation over the gratification of individual and subnational interests." So far so good. But how does he propose to fix the problem of moral degeneration and cultural rot? Those parts of the federal Leviathan responsible for the proliferation of moral and cultural pollution such as the Department of Education, the National Endowment of the Arts, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the federal judiciary should be closed or cut down to size. But there is no opposition against the state's involvement in educational matters. There is no recognition that the natural order in education means that the state has nothing to do with it. Education is entirely a family matter.5
Moreover, there is no recognition that moral degeneracy and cultural rot have deeper causes and cannot simply be cured by state-imposed curriculum changes or exhortations and declamations. To the contrary, Francis proposes that the cultural turn-around—the restoration of normalcy—can be achieved without a fundamental change in the structure of the modern welfare state. Indeed, Buchanan and his ideologues explicitly defend the three core institutions of the welfare state: social security, medicare, and unemployment subsidies. They even want to expand the "social" responsibilities of the state by assigning to it the task of "protecting," by means of national import and export restrictions, American jobs, especially in industries of national concern, and "insulate the wages of U.S. workers from foreign laborers who must work for $ 1 an hour or less."
5Buchanan and his intellectual allies want to abolish the federal government's control over educational matters and return such control to the level of states or, better still, local government. However, neoconservatives and most of the leaders of the so-called Christian Right and the "moral majority" simply desire (far worse from a genuinely conservative point of view) the replacement of the current, left-liberal elite in charge of national education by another one, i.e., themselves. "From
Burke on," Robert Nisbet has criticized this posture, "it has been a conservative precept and a sociological principle since Auguste Comte that the surest way of weakening the family, or any vital social group, is for the government to assume, and then monopolize, the family's historic functions." In contrast, much of the contemporary American Right "is less interested in Burkean immunities from government power than it is in putting a maximum of governmental power in the hands of those who can be trusted. It is control of power, not diminution of power, that ranks high."
From the traditional conservative's point of view it is fatuous to use the family—as evangelical crusaders regularly do—as the justification for their tireless crusades to ban abortion categorically, to bring the Department of Justice in on every Baby Doe, to mandate by constitution the imposition of "voluntary" prayers in the public schools, and so on. (Nisbet, Conservatism, pp, 104-05)
In fact, Buchananites freely admit that they are statists. They detest and ridicule capitalism, laissez-faire, free markets and trade, wealth, elites, and nobility; and they advocate a new populist—indeed proletarian—conservatism which amalgamates social and cultural conservatism and social or socialist economics. Thus, continues Francis,
while the left could win Middle Americans through its economic measures, it lost them through its social and cultural radicalism, and while the right could attract Middle Americans through appeals to law and order and defense of sexual normality, conventional morals and religion, traditional social institutions and invocations of nationalism and patriotism, it lost Middle Americans when it rehearsed its old bourgeois economic formulas.6