Conservatism as I Find it Compelling

Over at NiT, it was mentioned that the elements of “good conservatism” are not often discussed or celebrated. I assume that the gist of Tman’s complaint is that I defend liberalism as not what Will characterizes it, say that he describes an impoverished conservatism, and then leave the matter as to what better conservatism looks like totally unsaid. Fair enough. Here is a brief elaboration of the principles in conservatism I consider reasonable, challenging, and even compelling (Note: I have The Best of Burke on my bookshelf and leave my views subject to revision upon taking in a serious read of such a serious conservative mind):

• Conservatives take mores and traditions far more seriously than liberals and libertarians tend to. I think that this is a good thing. I think anyone who picks up Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Tocqueville cannot help but notice how important mores are for the maintenance of a public that serves the public good.
• I think that good conservatism recognizes both the importance of the functions that traditions serve and the ability to realize that traditional arrangements are not and cannot be permanent. An example I was taught comes from Tocqueville. Tocqueville argues that women in the domestic sphere are the “guardians of moral virtue” in the mid-nineteenth century America. It is the case that being the “keepers of moral virtue” is an important social job and it is the case that women staying universally and exclusively in the home is utterly dead. The question for conservatives in such a case is to either a: fight the inevitable or b: save the social good by housing it in modified or entirely new traditions. Obviously, option b is preferable.
• If liberalism is suspicious about the government’s role in the Homestead strike, Jim Crow, Corporate welfare, etc.; conservatism reacts most strongly against the two colossally failed revolutions in France and Russia, which both have similar patterns. Conservatives are skeptical of the panacea promises of the “mass social movement.” While many on the left have believed all to naively in “the cause,” they have often been entirely naive of Michel’s “Iron Law of Oligarchy,” which states, simply, that all movements end up with leaders and elites. Leftist thinkers like Sartre steadfastly refused to see Stalinism for what it actually was for an inexcusably long period of time.
• Conservatives are more willing to harness the important regime-building powers of the free market commercial economy. Whereas liberals are skeptical that money does anything good in the hands of the wealthy, the conservative recognizes the way that commerce concentrates ambitions and confrontations in non-violent ways. Good Conservatives, as I consider them, are not blind defenders of “free market” economics as a cover for corporate malfeasance, and believe that the state should be involved in correcting public choice dilemmas, but are still vigorous defenders of the commercial economy and have a well-thought out justification of fair exchange.
• Conservatism does not believe in expansive governmental powers because they believe that leaving as much as possible to civil society and the economy diversifies holdings of power and this diversity protects pluralist democratic society more than anything else. Conservatives are thus suspicious of military intervention and certainly are suspicious of military interventions for “causes” like “freedom” (which, really, could not be more French). This is why Neo-Cons are not “old cons.”
• All Conservatives trumpet individualism and freedom (as Will notes in his column), but individualism and freedom were not on the level of inviolable philosophical categories really until the writings of John Stuart Mill. I think that the wiser position is that individualism and freedom are made in contrast to what came before it, specifically theologic dictum and divine political authority figures. Both groups were very fond of saying that only they truly knew the public good and that everyone else were compelled to serve their interests at the cost of their own personal values and judgments. Conservatism does not necessarily believe that the individual cannot be subject to civic duty, but that the appeal for judgment must, at the very least, be the majority of opinions of his or her fellows who serve as equal citizens in the state. Even so, such duties should be both rare and necessary, so as to once more avoid the concentration of so much power and wealth in the state itself. This, by the way, is something that one cannot help but notice living temporarily in downtown Washington, DC. The foul stench of those who hover around the state and draw out government contracts like mosquitoes upon a great elephant so discolor the character of parts of my beloved District that it makes one very desirous as to embrace the first conservative who would have the courage to stand up and say they would have them banished.
• To dovetail the last point with the foreign intervention point, while today’s Republicans are militaristic and today’s left is characterized as pacifist, liberals are more into violent revolution as a general group and historically, major wars have been started or escalated by Democrats this century (Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Johnson), and it was a conservative Cold War President, Dwight Eisenhower, who warned us about the Military Industrial Complex and government funded research dominating higher education.

For my Proper Football Fans Out There

Samuel Eto’o and 25 million Euros for Thierry Henry?

If you are Arsenal, do you take it?

Merry Fitzmas To All, And To All a Good Night…

Dan Froomkin lays out the case that Scooter Libby the obstruction of justice that Libby is going to jail for is the obstruction of an investigation into the Vice President’s role in leaking Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity.  The most damning statement by Fitzgerald, in my mind was this:

And, as Fitzgerald notes: “The evidence at trial further established that when the investigation began, Mr. Libby kept the Vice President apprised of his shifting accounts of how he claimed to have learned about Ms. Wilson’s CIA employment.”

At this point, let us note that this story is a dead issue in terms of “getting” anyone.  But, I am glad that I will be around when the histories are written about what happened here.  My hypothesis is that Libby has essentially gone to prison because he has made it impossible to prosecute anyone else in the White House, be it Rove, Cheney, Armitage, whoever.  But we will most likely have to wait for the answers in any definitive sense.  The only thing left to guess about is, if Libby gets 2 and 1/2 years, will President Bush pardon him on his last day in office or let Libby sit out the remaining year on his sentence?

Dana Milbank on Darfur

I wanted to point to a WaPo Online piece by Dana Milbank on the Press Conference by the Sudanese Ambassador to the United States.  Milbank treats this meeting with the appropriate amount of incredulity that it deserves.  Here’s a question, how many Northern Sudanese do you suppose believes this?   The short answer, I suppose, is that it does not matter.  The  lack of real democracy in  Sudan  shows itself, at least partially, in the fact that the rhetoric of Sudan’s  politicians is so bad  because their truth claims go officially unchallenged inside of the Sudan.  the ambassador got animated, confused, and threatened the United States when he had trouble answering questions.  This seems to further vindicate Orwell’s belief the political freedom is at least in part tied into the idea that, when one says something stupid, it is obvious to everyone, including the speaker himself.  That can only happen in a society that takes truth-tracking seriously, and taking truth tracking seriously requires reasonableness and contestation.  The government in Khartoum lacks both, and so long as it does, it is entitled to nothing but steadfast opposition by those strong enough to force their objections to be recognized.

An Uninspired Case

George Will writes “A Case for Conservatism” in today’s Washington Post.  I have to say that I found Will’s case to be largely unmoving.  First, Will states plainly:

The argument, like Western political philosophy generally, is about the meaning of, and the proper adjustment of the tension between, two important political goals — freedom and equality.

Which is a troubled statement for its vagueness.  I attended a course at Maryland as a graduate student called “What’s Freedom?” which devolved big time as consensus frustratingly broke down on the meaning of the word class after class.  Second, if one takes a look at the “Freedom/Liberty” dynamic as set up by Isiah Berlin (Most likely Will’s inspiration), it is inherently is paradoxical.  Freedom without capability is problematic, capability without instruction is diminished, instruction requires learning to self-limit by first recognizing proper limits that are at first imposed by others, or unfreedom.  In short, this entire dynamic strikes me as unhelpful when we contrast Berlinian freedom and equality.

Next, Will writes,

Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome. Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism’s goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market’s role in allocating wealth and opportunity. Liberalism increasingly seeks to deliver equality in the form of equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government.

 Problems abound in this passage.  First off, to claim that all liberals are strict egalitarians is patently false.  Second, those who are egalitarians would object, and rightly so, that to claim that there efforts directed towards equality of opportunity come directly from inferring them from unequal outcomes is simply not the case.  Many egalitarians are interested in equality of opportunity for the purpose of equality of citizenship.  Going back as far as Aristotle, political thinkers have believed that citizens cannot be consumed by basic needs and still be full and equal citizens because they cannot focus on the public good when they have to devote so much time to survival.  Whether one agrees or disagrees with this position (and to disagree with it is to disagree with a LOT of political theory), to pretend that this is not a consideration that egalitarians have and that it is a WORTHY consideration, amongst other worthy considerations egalitarians have, is utterly unfair to their position.

Further, to state matter-of-factly that the liberal position is to advocate “dependence” on the Federal Government is to pre-define liberals out of the argument without taking their position seriously with any degree of reasonableness.

Finally, Will writes:

Conservatism argues, as did the Founders, that self-interestedness is universal among individuals, but the dignity of individuals is bound up with the exercise of self-reliance and personal responsibility in pursuing one’s interests. Liberalism argues that equal dependence on government minimizes social conflicts. Conservatism’s rejoinder is that the entitlement culture subverts social peace by the proliferation of rival dependencies.

Liberalism also cares about self-reliance and dignity.  But liberals also recognize that capable, self reliant people, when they have to fight for the things that matter to them, will always choose to arm themselves as best as possible to advantage their chances of winning what they believe is theirs.  Liberalism believes that it is only self-limitation that makes free, commercial, democratic government possible.  In ding so, the control over the restraining mechanisms themselves allow those who control them to have enormous influence over who wins and who loses many battles between those who fight for scarce resources in a community of equals.  Liberals are skeptical that government institutions create “dependence” for those who are resource-famished while institutions that oversee commerce and defend the property rights of citizens are somehow “non-dependency” institutions to conservatives, even though both sets of institutions dole out public goods.  Liberals are fearful that “small government” is really another word for “aristocracy,” something that liberals find to be very thinly masked when they talk to many conservatives obsessed with “glory,” “manliness,” and the “exceptional people” in society.  Liberals would point out that it is the smaller, Federalised American regime that allowed slavery for 100 years, and allowed Jim Crow for 100 more.  That it was the “laissaez-faire” American government that sent troops to shoot picketers in Homestead, Pennsylvania.  That it was the laissez-faire American government that opened fire on hungry World War I veterans.  The liberal suspects there is much evidence to lead to the conclusion that our experiments with “hands-off” government always lead to corruption and malfeasance that is good for neither the public good nor for even the wealthiest classes in America in the long run.

This is not the portrait of liberalism that George Will paints, and in painting such a poor vision of liberals and their concerns, he trumpets a diminished vision of conservatism… like a cheap promoter claiming he has the next great heavyweight who is undefeated after beating a string of bums.  Both ideologies deserve better, and indeed are better than George Will describes them… at least at their best.

The Worth of a State

“The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interest of their mental expansion and elevation to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes — will find that with small men no great things can be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail to nothing.”

— John Stuart Mill

Is this the year that health insurance will matter?

Barack Obama has unveiled a typically vague plan for Universal Health Care.  Not to say that this is necessarily a bad thing.  No President will ever get to fill in most of the details without prolonged negotiations with Congress and variety of interest groups and NGO’s.  On the other hand, is there any way to craft a health care policy that is both attractive to the American public and all of the interest groups that could easily move to kill any initiative through advertising, lobbying, and employing many other varieties of political leverage that they have at their disposal?  It would be a start to see universal health coverage be an issue that actually attracts votes.  Is this the year where this happens?  Something to keep an eye on.

Glavin… I mean Gluten-Free

I’m back in Harrisburg for the day.  I have been having problems with my digestive tract for about a week and a half, and I have to take this time to mention that I have not had any gluten in four days, and I feel terrific.  My stomach ailment still ails me a bit, but I feel alert, lean, fit, and I’m in a pretty good state of mind.  Plus, I have discovered rice-based pasta, which smells somewhere between rice and baby formula when prepared, but tastes pretty decent.  It turns out that I don’t likely have a very strong wheat allergy, but given how much healthier I feel, I’m not sure I’m going back anyway.  Maybe the occasional pizza, and I’ll use soy and barbecue sauce, but otherwise I think I’m going to try to stay pretty much gluten-free.

Monica Goodling

Not much came from granting Monica Goodling immunity in exchange for her testimony. We know now, that she in fact used strong political litmus tests in her screening of applicants, and she admits that she possibly even broke the law in doing so. However, as Dan Froomkin points out, we didn’t find out anything about the “why’s” of these prosecutors getting dismissed.

CL Final 2nd Half Liveblogging

2nd Half:

• Kickoff…well, when Liverpool decides to actually join the match.
• Finnan with a nice look for Kuyt in the box, but Milan cut it out.
• Liverpool have come out with urgency in the first half.
• Gerrard goes down in the box… but a nice side by side tacke by Milan. Corner to Liverpool.
• Crouch and Kewell warming up… I’d prefer to see Bellamy myself.
• 53rd minut… Pepe Reina dribbles into the corner and plays a dodgy clearance. yikes!
• 56th minute: I’m not clear why that was offisides. The passive offside rule continues to bother me.
• Mascherano gets a yellow in the 58th minute.
• Kewell for Zenden. For me, the sub is late.
• Kaka is in behind and Carragher pulls him down… a deserved yellow card and another free kick from 20 yards… Pirlo puts it over.
• Gerard a chance to be the hero… weak shot right at Dida. Gerrard is not having a good match.
• This just in…Keyshawn Johnson has retired and joined ESPN as an analyst… hopefully his analysis will be more on point than his book, where he erroneously said that Wayne Chrebet was all hype and Keyshawn Johnson was a dependable third down receiver.
• Riise puts it wide… it’s not a good sign when Riise’s 40 yard monster shots are your best hope.
• 72nd minute… ugh… nothing happening.
• Gerrard almost pulled a Landon Donovan and score off a deflection off the match official.. but Gerrard puts it wide.
• 76th minute, Kewell a harmless header in the box, weakly to Dida.
• Crouch warming up.
• Crouch on for the Scousers. Jankolovski off for Kaladze.
• Inzaghi imitates me in eighth grade by letting a beautiful cross go right between his legs without a touch.
• 82nd minute:  AC Milan are impersonating AC Milan… but we know from the first 82 minutes that they aren’t really AC  Milan
• Goal AC Milan.  Pippo Inzaghi again.  Nice short through ball and a slow, cheeky finish.
• Here’s a thought Liverppol defense, rather than stand with oyur hands up, why not actually chase the play, then maybe you could clear the interminably slow ball off the line?
• 86th minute:  Crouch creates the best shot of the match for Liverpool all by himself.
• 89th minute:  Kuyt scores off a corner!  Some interest in the end here!
• 90th minute:  as well as Pennant has played… he’s missed many wide open runners going down the field.  This time he misses a wide open Kewell and forces a bad ball into Gerrard.
• 3 minutes of extra time.
• Favalli on for Seedorf… a slow goodbye for Seedorf.
• 90 seconds or so left.
• 30 seconds.
• Full Time.  AC Milan win despite being allowed into the Champions League under questionable circumstances.