Columnists William Kristol and David Brooks promote something called “national-greatness conservatism.” They coauthored an opinion piece in which they exclaimed that it “does not despise government. How could it? How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government? But the way to restore faith in our government is to slash its flabbiness while making it more effective.”8
The Conservative does not despise government. He despises tyranny. This is precisely why the Conservative reveres the Constitution and insists on adherence to it. An “effective” government that operates outside its constitutional limitations is a dangerous government. By abandoning principle for efficiency, the neo-Statist, it seems, is no more bound to the Constitution than is the Statist. He marches more slowly than the Statist, but he marches with him nonetheless. The neo-Statist propounds no discernable standard or practical means to hem in the federal power he helps unleash, and which the Statist would exploit. In many ways, he is as objectionable as the Statist, for he seeks to devour conservatism by clothing himself in its nomenclature.
The Conservative is alarmed by the ascent of a soft tyranny and its cheery acceptance by the neo-Statist. He knows that liberty once lost is rarely recovered. He knows of the decline and eventual failure of past republics. And he knows that the best prescription for addressing society’s real and perceived ailments is not to further empower an already enormous federal government beyond its constitutional limits, but to return to the founding principles. A free people living in a civil society, working in self-interested cooperation, and a government operating within the limits of its authority promote more prosperity, opportunity, and happiness for more people than any alternative. Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny precisely because its principles are the founding principles.
2
ON PRUDENCE AND PROGRESS
EVEN WHEN DECLARING INDEPENDENCE
from England, the Founders recognized the dangers of imprudent change as it relates to governing. As the Declaration of Independence states, That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security….
The Founders were very careful to explain that revolution is a last resort compelled only by the imposition of an absolute despotism. No right-thinking Conservative today would encourage overthrowing the United States government, for he does not toil under the iron fist of absolute despotism, even though the Conservative is alarmed at the Statist’s growing success in substituting arbitrary state power for ordered liberty.
However, the Conservative does not reject change. Edmund Burke wrote that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”1 What kind of change, then, does the Conservative support?
Burke explained,
There is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding,—that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essential good as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be known beforehand. Reform is not change in the substance or in the primary modification of the object, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.2
For Burke, change as reform was intended to preserve and improve the basic institutions of the state. Change as innovation was destructive as a radical departure from the past and the substitution of existing institutions of the state with potentially dangerous experiments.3 Furthermore, the Statist often justifies change as conferring new, abstract rights, which is nothing more than a Statist deception intended to empower the state and deny man his real rights—those that are both unalienable and anchored in custom, tradition, and faith. Burke wrote, “By this un-principled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.”4
The Conservative believes, as Burke and the Founders did, that prudence must be exercised in assessing change. Prudence is the highest virtue for it is judgment drawn on wisdom. The proposed change should be informed by the experience, knowledge, and traditions of society, tailored for a specific purpose, and accomplished through a constitutional construct that ensures thoughtful deliberation by the community. Change unconstrained by prudence produces unpredictable consequences, threatening ordered liberty with chaos and ultimately despotism, and placing at risk the very principles the Conservative holds dear.
However, the Conservative seeks to preserve and improve the civil society, not engage in a mindless defense of the status quo inasmuch as the status quo may well be a condition created by the Statist and destructive of the civil society—such as 1960s cultural degradations, which are all too prevalent today. It is the Statist, then, who rejects even minor change if such change promotes the civil society, thereby challenging his authority.
The Conservative understands that Americans are living in a state of diminishing liberty—that statism is on the ascendancy and the societal balance is tipping away from ordered liberty. In these circumstances, the Conservative should not confuse prudence with timidity. If anything, certainly since the New Deal, the Conservative has too often lacked the confidence and persistence to defend the civil society.
Even the most dedicated Conservative acknowledges, however, the daunting challenge ahead. The Founders were right when they observed that man has a high tolerance for suffering.
The Conservative must accept that the Statist does not share his passion for liberty and all the good that flows from it. The Statist does not acknowledge the tremendous benefits to society from the individual pursuits of tens of millions of others. The Statist rejects the Founders’ idea of the dignity of the individual, who can flourish through ordered liberty, for one rooted in unpredictability, irrationality and, ultimately, tyranny.
It is observed that the Statist is dissatisfied with the condition of his own existence. He condemns his fellow man, surroundings, and society itself for denying him the fulfillment, success, and adulation he believes he deserves. He is angry, resentful, petulant, and jealous. He is incapable of honest self-assessment and rejects the honest assessment by others of himself, thereby evading responsibility for his own miserable condition. The Statist searches for significance and even glory in a utopian fiction of his mind’s making, the earthly attainment of which, he believes, is frustrated by those who do not share it. Therefore, he must destroy the civil society, piece by piece.
For the Statist, liberty is not a blessing but the enemy. It is not possible to achieve Utopia if individuals are free to go their own way. The individual must be dehumanized and his nature delegitimized. Through persuasion, deception, and coercion, the indi
vidual must be subordinated to the state. He must abandon his own ambitions for the ambitions of the state. He must become reliant on and fearful of the state. His first duty must be to the state—not family, community, and faith, all of which have the potential of threatening the state. Once dispirited, the individual can be molded by the state.
The Statist’s Utopia can take many forms, and has throughout human history, including monarchism, feudalism, militarism, fascism, communism, national socialism, and economic socialism. They are all of the same species—tyranny. The primary principle around which the Statist organizes can be summed up in a single word—equality.
Equality, as understood by the Founders, is the natural right of every individual to live freely under self-government, to acquire and retain the property he creates through his own labor, and to be treated impartially before a just law. Moreover, equality should not be confused with perfection, for man is also imperfect, making his application of equality, even in the most just society, imperfect. Otherwise, inequality is the natural state of man in the sense that each individual is born unique in all his human characteristics. Therefore, equality and inequality, properly comprehended, are both engines of liberty.
The Statist, however, misuses equality to pursue uniform economic and social outcomes. He must continuously enhance his power at the expense of self-government and violate the individual’s property rights at the expense of individual liberty, for he believes that through persuasion, deception, and coercion he can tame man’s natural state and man’s perfection can, therefore, be achieved in Utopia. The Statist must claim the power to make that which is unequal equal and that which is imperfect perfect. This is the hope the Statist offers, if only the individual surrenders himself to the all-powerful state. Only then can the impossible be made possible.
President Barack Obama made this point when lecturing the Wesleyan University graduating class of 2008 during his campaign: “[O]ur individual salvation depends on collective salvation.”5 But salvation is not government’s to give. Indeed, it is not a grant to mankind from mankind. Under the wrong conditions and in the wrong hands, this deviant view is a powerful tool against humanity. The difficulty if not impossibility is in containing the soft tyranny so it does not metastasize into a more absolute tyranny, since the diminished and then vanquished civil society is the sole anecdote.
American history and traditions make the transformation from civil society to tyranny more complicated for the Statist than in Europe and other places, which helps explain its slower pace. As French philosopher Raymond Aron wrote in 1955, “[In America] there is no sign of either the traditions or the classes which give European ideas their meaning. Aristocracy, and the aristocratic way of life, were ruthlessly eliminated by the War of Independence.”6 Still, tyranny is a threat that looms over all societies, preventable only by the active vigilance of the people. The Statist in America is no less resolute than his European counterpart but, by necessity, he is more cunning—where the European lurches and leaps, the American’s steps are measured but steady. In America, the Statist understands that his counterrevolution must at least appear gradual and not revolutionary—sometimes even clothed in the flag and patriotism—lest his intentions become too obvious and thus alarming to his skeptics.
For the Statist, the international community and international organizations serve as useful sources for importing disaffection with the civil society. The Statist urges Americans to view themselves through the lenses of those who resent and even hate them. He needs Americans to become less confident, to doubt their institutions, and to accept the status assigned to them by outsiders—as isolationists, invaders, occupiers, oppressors, and exploiters. The Statist wants Americans to see themselves as backward, foolishly holding to their quaint notions of individual liberty, private property, family, and faith, long diminished or jettisoned in other countries. They need to listen to the voices of condemnation from world capitals and self-appointed global watchdogs hostile to America’s superior standard of living. America is said to be out of step and regressive, justifying the surrendering of its sovereignty through treaties and other arrangements that benefit the greater “humanity.” And it would not hurt if America admitted its past transgressions, made reparations, and accepted its fate as just another aging nation—one among many.
The Statist must also rely on legions of academics to serve as his missionaries. After a short period of training and observation, academics receive a sinecure—a personal stake in the state via lifetime employment through a system of tenure. The classroom is turned into a propaganda mill, rather than a place for education, to shape the beliefs and attitudes of successive generations of malcontents and incubate the quiet revolution against the civil society. Academics help identify the enemies of the state, whom their students learn to distrust or even detest through distortion and repetition—corporations as polluters, the Founding Fathers as slave owners, the military as imperialist, etc.
Academics claim to challenge authority but, in truth, preach authoritarianism through various justifications for and approaches to deconstructing the civil society. They talk of individual rights but promote collectivism. They talk of enfranchisement and suffrage but promote judicial and administrative usurpation of republicanism. They talk of workers’ rights but promote the heavy taxation and regulation of labor. Indeed, academics portray Utopia as a kind of heaven on earth but have a high tolerance for the hell of widespread misery. The academic knows from history, and better than most, the destructive power of the Statist’s way. But he believes it is the price humanity must pay to pave the way for Utopia—or, conversely, he dismisses Statist-caused misery as a misapplication of utopian ideals resulting from the poor performance of a particular Statist or the nefarious doings of the enemies of the state.
The academy’s first cousin is Hollywood, which uses entertainment to besmirch the civil society. Why would actors who are celebrated for freely practicing their profession do the Statist’s bidding?
Writing not just of actors but all those who “pretend to themselves that they are still pushing envelopes and slashing away at bourgeois complacency,” University of Tennessee professor Wilfred M. McClay observes, “There is profound self-deception at work in people who luxuriate in the fruits of worldly success while disdaining the personal habits and cultural conditions that make such success possible. There is also a strangely hidden compulsion behind the need for such condemnation. Yet somehow even the most incongruous social conventions can take hold for a time, and in our era, the conjunction of a dutiful other-directedness with a dutiful rebelliousness seems by now so entrenched and commonplace as to be almost natural. Its existence would make it very challenging to be truly countercultural if one is of a mind to be.”7
The late Eric Hoffer, the blue-collar philosopher, provides a compelling answer: “Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.”8
The actor thirsts for attention. But he lives in the world of make-believe. Once he achieves fame, he wishes for his fame to be used to achieve relevance. Attention and fame would appear to be at odds with anonymity, but the actor finds anonymity in the larger fraternity that is Hollywood and relevance in its causes—Marxism in the 1940s to global warming today. It is the rare actor who challenges the fraternity.
The Statist is also assisted by the media, for the media are parasites of the Statist—not the government per se but the Statist. They gather information produced by the Statist and regurgitate it to the masses. The relationship between the Statist and media is symbiotic. The Statist protects the media and enhances the media’s clout by censoring the speech of others, usually at the insistence of
the media. Today, campaign finance laws restrict the amount of resources individuals can use to speak about candidates to their fellow citizens during political contests. And even if the necessary resources are raised, the Statist prohibits their use for broadcast communications in the crucial days running up to the election. Hence, the individual must rely inordinately on the media for disseminating information.
To the extent there are pockets of independence that challenge the Statist, they are treated like tumors that need to be isolated and excised to achieve the purity of the body politic. There are current efforts to resuscitate the so-called Fairness Doctrine and similar connivances—which would circumscribe the content of speech on talk radio—simply because the forum is generally hostile to the Statist.9 The media decry alternative information outlets on the Internet, which do not vet their content through the media’s editors. There are now rumblings about regulating the Internet, which occurs in places like China. Of course, these neutering strategies are said by the Statist to actually promote speech, or responsible speech, thereby disguising his real motives.10
The media sing like a nay-saying Greek chorus, amplifying the mantra for greater statist authority. No matter how robust the economy, they claim the imminent threat of a recession or depression. And when economic hardship exists, often at the hand of the Statist, they join the Statist in condemning the free market and advocating for more government. No matter the progress in race relations, they insist racism is rampant. In the weeks leading up to the election of President Barack Obama, the media reported repeatedly of the racist citizens who would deny Obama his victory should he lose. No matter the advances of the health-care system, the media paint it as inferior to all others, with anecdotal stories of incompetence and services denied to help promote statist health-care proposals. Rarely do the media report of the nightmarish, systemic failures of the British or Canadian national health-care experiments. For the most part the Statist’s enemies are the media’s enemies, as reflected in their hostility to individuality and private property, and the Statist and the media have kindred spirits in academia and Hollywood. Their effect is to soften up the population to become receptive to the counterrevolution—or at least lessen resistance to it.