Musings Of An Indie Writer| « | The Billboard |
»
|
|
Saturday, April 30, 2005
The Con Game
Before we proceed into the screedy part of this screed, allow your Curmudgeon to delineate what he perceives to be the conservative movement's aims for the American future. If in doing so, he happens to fillet your personal sacred cow, please bear with him. We can discuss it another time.
American conservatism -- in contrast to that of the older, less civilized nations of the world, such as all of Europe, Asia, Africa, Central America, South America, and Oceania, where "conservatism" means an unprincipled defense of the status quo by those who benefit from it, at the expense of those whom it mulcts and oppresses -- emphasizes the conservation of the desiderata of life laid down in the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. 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.
For any nation to found itself on a set of principles such as these requires that it erect and then conserve a culture that venerates them -- a culture which, in extremis, will take up arms, fight and die to defend them.
1. A Culture of Life
This phrase, one of the most stirring and most frequently repeated of President Bush's motifs, denotes a culture whose members respect human life, recognize its preciousness, and act in accordance with that recognition unless sheer survival dictates otherwise. It's been applied most often to conservative sentiments about abortion and euthanasia. Now and then, one will hear it in connection with other matters of family structure and family autonomy under the law. These are all fine usages, but one must not neglect the less frequently discussed subjects of war and national defense, which certainly impinge on questions of life and death.
If governments have any legitimate functions at all, the defense of the realm against external invaders is surely among them. Sometimes, defense has to be interpreted expansively, as for example when one can sense a threat of nuclear terrorism developing in a distant land. If the nation's defenders must sometimes strike first, then as long as we can be reasonably certain that our political authority's aims are in accord with our respect for life and the evidence upon which they've acted is sound, we need have no quarrel with it.
2. A Culture of Liberty
Liberty, or political freedom, is that condition which obtains when the individual's decisions and actions touching on that which is properly his -- his life, his property, and his peaceable interactions with other responsible, consenting adults -- are unconstrained by law or official intimidation. We may speak of a culture of liberty as one whose members expect that condition to obtain overwhelmingly more often than not, and who base their decisions and actions upon that premise.
Perfect liberty has never been achieved under any form of government. Nevertheless, it's the ideal toward which conservatives should strive. Both the Confucian ("Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you") and Christian ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") Rules, and every other wholesome, coherent moral system ever propounded, demand no less.
Liberty dictates that government, the principal threat to individuals' freedom throughout all of history, must perennially be viewed with suspicion -- especially, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, when its overt purposes are benign. Since it's far easier to keep watch over a limited government than an unlimited one, this dictates a principle of constitutionalism, with an armed citizenry standing guard over it. It also militates toward localism in preference to centralism, to foster political competition and to keep the exercise of authority as close as possible to those over whom it's exercised.
One of the bedevilments of our era is the use of "interpretation" by unanswerable courts and jurists to shatter the chains on governments and their action. Clearly, no limitation of the political sphere can survive a regime that can creatively reinterpret the Constitution and other chartering documents to award itself new powers at its discretion. Therefore, the maintenance of an absolutely strict-constructionist approach to all written law, most especially Constitutional law, is a necessity for the preservation of liberty, and an essential element in the conservative program.
3. A Culture of Happiness
The Declaration of Independence speaks of the right to the "Pursuit of Happiness," by which the Declaration's author, Thomas Jefferson, subsumed the entire spectrum of human actions not involved with violence or fraud. We may legitimately speak of a culture of happiness as one whose ideals and arrangements facilitate that pursuit, and whose members feel no inhibitions about acting in pursuit of their own happiness as and when they see fit. In this view, governments, whose defining characteristic is their privilege of using violence and defining the conditions under which it will be used, cannot be a source of positive benefits; they can only stand guard against predators, and act against them at need.
Under that condition, individuals, and voluntary groupings such as corporations, societies, and clubs, can pursue happiness in all the myriad ways Man has conceived. They can acquire property, engage in enterprise, practice religious creeds, indulge in various pleasures and diversions, and transmit their convictions about all these things both vertically through their families and horizontally through the communications channels of their times. Governments have no warrant to interfere with them.
It is a central tenet of the Anglo-American tradition that, while private individuals and their voluntary groups are free, governments and their agents, being hirelings with specific responsibilities, are not. Thus, government is enjoined from the exercise of many latitudes possessed by individuals. A good example is discrimination of any sort. Individuals must be free to choose their own associates as they please, whether for social, religious, commercial, or frivolous purposes, without being penalized for it. A government must observe scrupulous neutrality toward individual identities and characteristics. It may punish specific deeds, but it may not discriminate among men on any other basis. The short version of this principle is often called "blind justice," or "equality before the law."
4. The Left's Counterattack
The above is the compact and immensely inspiring philosophy of the Founding Fathers, who grasped all the principles of a free society without ever deluding themselves that they could foresee all that would come to pass. Though our Constitutional arrangements have required some adjustment now and then, as for example with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, the principles themselves have remained sound, proving themselves repeatedly in practice while other nations have experimented ruinously with one form of absolutism after another.
Absolutism in principle, independent of any rationale, is inscribed on the banner of the American Left, the sworn and implacable enemy of the conservative movement. The Left's principle is accepted everywhere in the world except in these United States. This has given rise to an incredible degree of pressure against our borders as the best, brightest, and most courageous of other lands swarm to our shores -- and a venomous hostility toward even the expression of Declaration principles, that often approaches frothing at the mouth.
But the opposition of the Left toward conservative ideals and their policy implications is easily understood and needs no commentary from a humble Curmudgeon. What does elicit his analysis is the Left's choice of tactics with which to oppose us in the court of public opinion. In recent years, a new tactic has reared its head, based on an attempt to draw artificial distinctions among conservatives where no real ones exist. It's this tactic your Curmudgeon has termed "the Con Game."
The Left would like us to believe that we are not all of a single mind. In truth, this is so at some levels of detail, which gives them a point of entry. However, in principle, we're distressingly (to the Left) united. Therefore, leftists strive to draw distinctions among us with a new and insulting lexicon, aimed both at fomenting division among conservatives and distrust of us by less politically engaged Americans.
Neocons are supposedly persons of expansionist, neoimperialist aims. They claim to be fighting for freedom abroad and American interests at home, but the Left would have you see them as the commanders of gunboats determined to impose themselves and their convictions willy-nilly upon the little brown brothers of less capable nations.
Theocons are supposedly persons -- Christians, really -- determined to impose their religious creeds upon others. According to the Left's dictionary, any mention by a theocon of religion or associated traditions is a gambit throw toward rewriting all the laws of the land to conform to Christian doctrines. Christian conservatives' words and deeds toward dispelling this notion, most particularly their frequent statements that they simply want to practice their own religion free of contradictory impositions from others, are always snorted aside.
Paleocons are supposedly persons anxious to "turn back the clock" to the early Nineteenth Century: when women couldn't vote or own real property; when landed gentry dominated the country's political institutions; and when the proper place of the Negro was in chains, working the fields during the day and singing spirituals at night. The Left's paleocon caricature is most often leveled at the "neo-Copperheads" who argue that the Civil War, despite the emancipation of the slaves and the restoration of the Union, was a terrible mistake that cost more than it ought -- an intellectually respectable argument that can neither be proved nor disproved in any final sense.
Leftists who employ the terms above seek to disturb in the public mind the assumption of innocence toward American conservatives. That is, the Left seeks to destroy the general assumption that American conservatives are honest and harmless persons who hold the views they do out of sincere conviction, and who are willing to admit to errors when they're discovered. Since the Left's policies have incurred widespread devastation wherever employed, and have done no small amount of damage even to the robust and well-appreciated political arrangements of the United States, it's quite plain why this should be important to them. One can only defend faulty methods that one is unwilling to renounce by misdirection -- usually, by attacking one's opponent's motives.
But another, possibly more sinister reason for the lexicon of the Con Game is to pit American conservatives against one another. This is sometimes distressingly easy. Since the Con Game's lexicon focuses on motives that contradict conservatives' emphases on individual liberty and national security, the promotion of those motives, justified or not, to prime importance in the popular discourse can becloud all significant matters of principle. It can suppress reasoned debate over objective matters in favor of substanceless accusation and counter-accusation. It's the most effective imaginable way to engender general distrust.
Unfortunately, a fair number of conservatives have played directly into the Left's hands by adopting Con Game labels for themselves. Equally unfortunately, too many conservatives see specific matters of policy on such contentious subjects as abortion and the War on Drugs as good reasons to separate themselves from those who feel differently about them, rather than as spurs to arrive at mutually acceptable positions through reason and study.
Combine the Con Game with the Left's "puff adder" tactics -- its various measures for making itself appear larger, stronger, and more popular than it is -- and the result is a powerful temptation for conservatives to despair, even now when our star is in the ascendant.
5. What, Then, Must We Do?
As previously mentioned, the entry point for Con Game tactics is the sheaf of specific differences among conservatives on various details of public policy. Some of these, being emotionally charged, are very troubling: abortion, drug abuse, border control and immigration, and the proper public attitude toward the irresponsible (i.e., madmen, children, and public charges). Often, conservatives' "there's a war on" rhetoric -- the assertion that something else currently afoot matters much more than our detail divisions, and therefore that debate on these lesser subjects should cease -- has been invoked by the Left in support of their Con Game contentions. It's we who provide them with such opportunities, and we have to stop.
Atop that, the time has come to compel conservative officeholders -- that is, politicians who were elevated to their positions because they espoused conservative convictions -- to behave like conservatives in office. This is particularly important in fiscal and economic matters. No conservative ought to accede to deficit spending. No conservative ought to sanction deliberate currency inflation. No conservative ought to approve the disbursement of taxpayer monies to foreign governments or "international institutions"...yet all too many do, which greatly weakens the most potent argument -- pocketbook politics -- for keeping them in power.
Third, conservatives must be aggressive about public cleanliness -- that is, about cleansing all kinds of public institutions of any and all corruption, secret dealing, or chiseling around the edges of the law. If the Constitution of the United States truly means what it says, how can a conservative approve of the filibuster of judicial nominees, of unelected regulators whose decrees have the force of law, of federal departments not authorized by any Constitutional provision, or of even the slightest violation of any of the most explicit guarantees of the Bill of Rights?
Leftists have become facile at associating conservative departures from conservative principles as expressions of their Con Game premises: legislator X was acting on his religious beliefs, and damned be his oath to uphold the Constitution; executive Y was advancing his vision of a modern American empire; justice Z never gave up on the idea that some races should have more legal standing than others. The damage they can cause with even the hint of a foundation for such accusations is incalculable.
We have been remiss. Our defaults and shortcomings have created the very tools with which our enemies seek to lay us low.
6. Prospects.
The Con Game is "the new Vietnam." The Right is winning the elections, but the Left is displaying more creativity in tactics, and is advancing unconscionably in the battle for public opinion. Certain measures will be necessary, though not sufficient, to reverse their gains:
- Conservatives must learn not to treat principles as poison, and to admit that many a contested issue might yet be resolved through recourse to principles and the lessons of history. When challenged for a departure from the positions held by other conservatives, the most appropriate rejoinder is to:
- Admit that it's unsettled;
- Allow that we're fallible;
- Maintain that we're working on it.
- The incentives of power and perquisites, which invariably turn a man's head away from principle and toward self-aggrandizement, make it mandatory that some form of term limits be applied to all elected officials, at all levels of government.
- One critical fulcrum that must be recaptured for the future of the nation is its educational system. Constitutional principles and American traditions of liberty are still shut out of the schools, all the way to the highest of the high. It will require vouchers or tuition tax credits, and a permanent removal of federal funding from both lower and higher education, to break open those bastions.
- Another critical fulcrum is the communications media. Conservatives are making headway there, but more could be accomplished with a thorough program of deregulation. Regulation of the broadcast media has awarded monopolies to the existing networks, which have been the creatures of the Left for decades. Regulation of labor relations -- the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act and the Norris-LaGuardia Act, in particular -- has allowed unions to impede the emergence of new print media, particularly in the large cities where union bosses and municipal officials are often found under the same sheets.
In tandem with the above, we must resolutely resist the Left's imposition of Con Game terminology upon us. Certainly, we must never apply it to ourselves:
- Don't be a "neocon."
- Don't be a "theocon."
- Don't be a "paleocon."
Be an American conservative: a defender of individual liberty, private property, and a sharply limited government sphere. Be ready to argue for your convictions, including with other conservatives, but never succumb to the Left's imputations that a difference in positions on specific issues necessarily implies that those who differ with you have evil intentions. That's their game; don't play it.
In other words: Be an American.
Comments
Alexis DeTocqueville meet Francis W. Porretto:
“Never succumb to the Left’s imputations that a difference in positions on specific issues necessarily implies that those who differ with you have evil intentions.”—The Con Game, 2005.
For
“The despot cares less that you love him than that you distrust your fellows”—paraphrase of an analysis in Democracy in America, 1835.
The Left has lost the game of winning elections. They see no longer a voting majority that “loves” them.
So, what they need is for America to balkanize into as many different warring camps as possible, and they have agents who pay to encourage it (and to harry everybody else). See The Billboard for latest evidence.
Thank you Curmudgeon Emeritus.
Posted by Pascal Fervor on 04/30/2005 at 12:00 PM“If the Constitution of the United States truly means what it says, how can a conservative approve of [...] unelected regulators whose decrees have the force of law, of federal departments not authorized by any Constitutional provision, or of even the slightest violation of any of the most explicit guarantees of the Bill of Rights?”
They can because their (supposedly “conservative”) constituents _demand_ it, and promise to punish them if they ever stop. The divisions may not be as severe as the Left wants to believe, but they’re not entirely illusory either…and certainly not fraudulent.
Posted by Matt on 05/05/2005 at 01:28 AM
Comment Form
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
