Conservatism

Would someone please explain what is “conservative” about the Bush Administration? They claim that banner, yes; and critics obediently oblige.

But look at what they do. Run up the deficit, erode local control of the schools, launch a grandiose nation-building fiasco in Iraq, regard truth-telling as optional behavior, give the federal government authority to pry into our lives. It sounds like the litany of things conservatives scold liberals for, or used to.

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For people whose work is the written word, reporters can be stunningly indifferent to what words actually mean. The word “conservative” is a prime example. We have today a President who thinks the federal government is going to bring democracy to the Arab world. He has intruded that government into the affairs of ordinary Americans to a degree not seen before, and he has run up staggering deficits to boot. Yet this is a “conservative” President, for no apparent reason other than that he says he is.

Usually, when reporters use the word “conservative,” they actually are referring to a cynical Right wing politics that is closer to corporate Jacobinism. It is the belief in the use of the corporate market to bring about radical upheavals in American values and mores, all the while preaching the sanctity of those values and mores, and blaming people they call “liberals” for the upheavals. Few things would so clarify American political debate, as to begin to get a grip on the term “conservative”. It also would help to understand why the commons will be central to the next big turn of the ideological wheel.

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Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy by Edward Luttwak
Book Review

The notion of a conservative critique of the market can jar the contemporary mind, a little like a left-wing critique of the state. But that suggests the tenacity of Cold War stereo-types and a media that is conceptually inert. Suspicion of the market is conservative in the most fundamental sense. It can arise from a desire for true economy, as opposed to the wastrel and debt-driven tendencies of the consumer culture. It can express a desire to protect that which is of great value, whether in the social structure or the natural environment, against the machinations of pecuniary gain.

As it sprang from Adam Smith’s mind, the concept of the market was deliberately disruptive–a radical force. It served to rout the residues of feudalism–the traditional bonds of locality and community–and clear the way for the industrial age, with its mathematical logic of production and gain. This was not a conservative undertaking. But soon enough it acquired the respectability of money; and this forced true conservatives into the role of radicals, for opposing the radicalism of money which was now the status quo.

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Much of the Christian Coalition’s political agenda conflicts with the true meaning of Christianity: self-sacrifice, helping those in need, and universal love. The group favors a $500 tax credit per child, regardless of income, yet it does not favor the Earned Income Tax Credit.

There is something very strange about the Christian Coalition’s “Contract With the American Family,” released with much fanfare in May. The document says a lot about the usual conservative agenda–tax credits as rewards for doing right, abolishing the Department of Education, policing the Internet, and so on. But there’s little of the thing you’d most expect to find. There’s not one word that Jesus himself actually said.

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