"Conservative" Doesn't Mean What You Think: A Guest Post By Jack Whelan

Many of our commenters on this post took issue with the spirited defense of New Deal-rooted American social democracy expressed by Jack Whelan at After the Future. In my opinion Jack is hands down one of the best thinkers and writers on the Web; I'm particularly blown away by his "post-secular" take on religious tradition and spirituality. While I don't agree with every point of his politics, I am grateful to him for making me question what I fear is fast becoming a knee-jerk or herd-instinct libertarianism (is that an oxymoron?!) in much of the blogosphere. I hope you will read, consider, engage, and discuss. ~ amba

Jack Whelan:

Thanks to Amba for inviting me to respond to those of you who take exception to my posts about Normal USA and Whom the Gods would Destroy. The negative reactions come from either misunderstanding my intent or from fundamental disagreements. I’d like to address the latter; I think Amba herself did a pretty good job of trying to address the former. My goal is not to convince anyone I’m right, but only to lay out my case in such a way to promote some serious discussion about bridging a gap between two fundamentally different world views. I challenge you; you challenge me. Deal?

So I think the best way to go about this is to lay out several propositions, any one of which could be developed into a full-length essay. Challenge me on any one of these, because if you disagree with my conclusion, it’s probably because you disagree with one of these propositions. This might help to give the discussion some focus. So here goes:

First. To live in society means to live in a state in which people restrain their liberty for their own and the common good. The best societies are democratic because people get to develop a consensus on the nature and extent of those restraints. To live in “the state of nature” is to live in a state where everyone is technically free until they run into someone who wants to enslave them. Hegel is the guy who worked out the whole master slave dynamic as it operates in pre-social situations. In the state of nature, might makes right. The powerful dominate the weak. In the state of nature, freedom is something only the powerful really possess. The powerful work hard to aggregate power to themselves, and they are free only until they meet someone more powerful who succeeds in dominating them. The New Hampshire license plate slogan, “Live free or die” is rooted in this basic dynamic. The aristocrat of freedom is the one who chooses to die fighting rather than to submit to enslavement to save his skin. The duel is a vestige of it as well. The whole idea of entering into society is to develop more civilized mechanisms for working things out so the powerful don’t go round doing as they please to the not-so-powerful. In its most developed form this alternative is called the rule of law.

Second. No one likes living with constraints, and we all chafe under them. It’s frustrating, and it’s a hassle. People seek wealth and power because the wealthy and the powerful live with fewer constraints. People who have power tend to abuse it. Why? Because they can, and that’s the whole point of getting it, to act with as few constraints as possible. And to be able to act without fear that anyone is going to stop them. One could argue that this desire is fundamentally a form of infantile narcissism, but I’ll leave that alone for now. The only point that needs to be made here is that it exists and it is a cause for all kinds of social pathology. Societies develop laws, mores, and norms which are designed to put constraints on pathological behavior, and the rich and powerful will always use their wealth and power to loosen things up when it comes to the constraints that they have to live with. They have the resources to make it happen if the rest of us let them.

Third. To be a conservative means to conserve. It’s not the same thing as being a man or woman of the right. To be a rightist means . . .

to lean toward the authoritarianism in which might makes right, i.e., to lean more toward the end of the social spectrum that is closer to the state of nature in which the exertion of power is the highest value. To be a rightist means, by extension, to celebrate the glories of the military and the control powers of the police which work to do the will of the powerful. To be a conservative, on the other hand, means that you lean toward the rule of law and the preservation of cultural mores and values. I consider myself to be a conservative in the Burkean tradition. Burke in his famous work on the French Revolution decried the Jacobin mentality that led inevitably to the social chaos known as the Terror. The Jacobins’ mistake was the mistake of all social engineers since, that they could systematically dismantle the old system and create from scratch a new one—mostly all that does is create more problems than it solves. I am against Jacobinism in all its forms. I am a subsidiarist, which means that I am against all top downism. I think that initiatives (except in national emergencies) should come from the bottom up, which is the way it should work in a democratic republic. So I would like to dismiss any idea that I am a socialist, if by socialism is meant the top-downism of command economies, Maoist cultural revolutions, legislated moral behavior, or nation building.

Fourth. Classical Liberalism in the economic sphere was an ideology which was developed to liberate a new class of capitalist investors from the constraints of mercantilism, the early modern top/down command economic system. Liberalism became associated with the whole cultural shift from medieval aristocrat-centered feudalism to modern bourgeoisie-centered democratic capitalism. Liberal had a progressive meaning in its early stages because it was about progressing beyond medievalism, and later it was associated with the policies that were about progressing beyond the social brutality of 19th Century unrestrained classical capitalism. Classical liberalism unleashed an unprecedented new social dynamic in the world which Schumpeter later called creative destruction. It created unprecedented wealth, technological innovation--and social dislocation and chaos, especially for those whose lives had been agriculture-centered. There is hardly anyone who will dispute that the transition from a traditional society to a modern capitalist society is brutal. Is there any one who would argue that it has had a tremendously destructive effect on traditional societies and the values that came with them? And is there anyone who will argue that the behavior of the early winners in this transition followed the logic described in item #1 and 2 above? Social Darwinism emerged as the ideology which justified this survival of the fittest mentality which was just the old law of the jungle rule, which is that the powerful dominate the weak. This system reached its high point in the period between 1870 and World War I. This early form of capitalism was pretty much as close to being back in the state of nature as modern societies ever got. Something had to give.

Fifth. In the social chaos that followed WWI, two great threats emerged—fascism and communism. Social democracies, first in Sweden, then the New Deal in the U.S., then the Popular Front in France and so on were developed as a third way. According to point three above, neither fascism nor communism is conservative—they were both centralized command systems that sought to reengineer their societies. All three were attempts to deal with the failures and chaos created by 19th century laisser faire capitalism. Social democracy, I would argue were relatively speaking, the conservative solution that naturally evolved—in the Burkean sense--in democratic societies in response to the brutality and social chaos created by 19th century classic capitalism. Fascism and Communism were the Jacobin alternatives.

Sixth. Americans are human beings and as such we behave no differently than anyone else. The presumption ought to be that Americans who have enormous wealth and power will behave like everyone else in history who have had it, which is that they will abuse it, and that they will do what they can to get more. If Social Darwinism was their mythos in the 19th Century. Ayn Rand Libertarianism is their mythos in this country at least since 1980. As point #2 states above, no one likes living with constraints, and Libertarianism is the ideology of no governmental constraint. But the problem lies in that taking the no constraint argument to its logical conclusion, you’re back in the state of nature. In the state of nature the strong dominate the weak.

These are some questions I put to you, dear Libertarian Ambivablogistas: Do you or do you not agree that the underlying agenda of the GOP since the Reagan revolution is to return this country back to the pre-New Deal era? If you say no, give me evidence, because the evidence for yes is pretty strong. Second, if we return to the pre-New Deal era—if we privatize everything, deregulate whenever an industry lobby demand it, reduce taxes to starve the beast so it has no muscle, what means will you have to protect you and your family when the world is dominated by corporations who can act without any counterbalance to restrain them? Do you really want to return to 19th century power arrangements? What makes you think we won’t if this reactionary agenda is successful? The problem is not big government, but who controls it. And we ordinary Americans have been pretty much sitting around and just let it be taken from us. And the result is legislation like the Medicaid Prescription bill. It now serves the interests pretty much of the already rich and powerful.

So where does the real threat come from? Every system can be abused, but the question for me is in which system do the abuses have the most potential for harm. In which system are abuses more likely to be redressed? Libertarians are afraid we’re going to become Soviet Russia, when it is far more likely we are moving toward becoming something like oligarchic Mexico or Brazil.

I’m for evolution—that’s what the word progressive means to me. I’m for slow steps forward, keeping what works, improving what doesn’t, but moving forward. The Reagan/Norquist/Libertarian program is based on a devolutionary state-of-nature agenda. It benefits the already rich and powerful and strips away the tools that ordinary people have to protect themselves from the predations of the rich and powerful. What part of this am I not getting right? To me nothing could be more obvious. So if it is I who is befuddled and delusional, make your case. Give me some evidence or a coherent argument. Because I haven’t heard it yet.

            ~ Jack Whelan

Cross-posted at Donklephant and After the Future

Comments

[realpc]

Jack,

I want to answer your first two propositions before I go on to read the others. These statements are very widely believed, but not really true.

" The powerful dominate the weak. In the state of nature, freedom is something only the powerful really possess."

I think we have to consider what the state of nature really is, rather than make the usual assumptions. Zoologists and ethologists have not really seen what you, and many other modern Westerners, describe. Social animal societies are orderly and often quite harmonious, and you do not see a lot of cruel domination. Yes, there is competition, and the strongest males (determined by ritual, non-lethal, fighting) may monopolize the females. But the male leaders are protectors, not dominators.

Love and cooperation are as important, in animal societies, as competition.

If we consdier primitive human societies, it is even more obvious that the conventional view is wrong. The simplest human societies are the least authoritarian, the most harmonious and cooperative.

So the situation is approximately the opposite of what the Western philosophers believed.

Progressive philosophy is rooted in the idea that nature is cruel and asocial, that in order to live in harmony we must rise above nature.

I am not a libertarian conservative, but I do sympathize with some conservative ideas, in moderation. I do not agree at all with the kind of libertarianism that glorifies the individual and scorns society and the common good. We are social animals. Living in society does NOT restrict our freedom, because it is our nature to live in society. Freud said that we must deny our natural selves in order to be civilized -- but the opposite is true. Living in isolation would be a denial of our natural selves.

Leftism is based in distrust of nature (and super-nature) and in trust in human intelligence. I think that anyone who looks carefully at the scientific evidence, would be more sympathetic towards some conservative views, and more skeptical about progressivism.

[amba]

My main concern with this is the assumption -- based, of course, on Lord Acton's maxim "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" -- that the wealthy are inevitably evilly disposed, while virtue resides in the little guy or gal by virtue of their powerlessness. This was Marx's assumption. Our founding fathers, particularly the Hamiltonians, didn't agree. They tended to mistrust the little guy, especially in numbers, when he became a "mob." Ill-informed, envious, passionate, nothing to lose -- the aristocrat-democrats who founded our country might well have said "Powerlessness corrupts," and they too would have had a point. They confined the vote to white male property owners, on the grounds , I guess, that property confers responsibility and a certain gravitas.

The wealthy are not automatically evil any more than the poor are. Both states have their temptations. Wealthy philanthropists have created public institutions that benefited everyone. I don't think it can automatically be assumed, either, that just because someone has made money they have done it by exploiting or abusing others (despite Balzac's maxim that "at the root of every great fortune lies a crime").

That said, I don't believe that huge entities like multinational corporations can be trusted to regulate themselves. Just as our government includes checks and balances to prevent any officeholder from arrogating too much power and abusing it, there need to be checks on the abuse of power by private entities. The danger is that they are in a position to evade or to buy off the law.

[Icepick]

Well, you've started by stacking the deck in your favor. You get to be a conservative AND a progressive, both in the most favorable light possible, and everyone else gets to be a Jacobin militarist looking to enslave everyone around them. That's a neat trick.

You allowed yourself the luxury of redefining the labels, while leaving everyone else stuck with the label they came in with.

I have a deep aversion to people exercising authority over me. I'm also aware that the biggest single threat to my autonomy is the government. It DOES NOT MATTER if it is the tyranny of an autocrat, or the tyranny of mob rule.

The whole idea of entering into society is to develop more civilized mechanisms for working things out so the powerful don’t go round doing as they please to the not-so-powerful. In its most developed form this alternative is called the rule of law.

That's all true enough, as far as it goes. But as the state becomes more powerful, so as to check powerful individuals and groups, the STATE becomes the biggest threat to liberty.

You speak of rule of law as though it were The Rule of Law, an independent entity capable of keeping everyone in check. However, laws are enforced by men, and ultimately the law means what those men say it means. Anyone who has grown up in a bad neighborhood knows this.

And the bigger the government gets, the more power it accrues to itself, the easier it is to run afoul of that government and its functionaries.

The presumption ought to be that Americans who have enormous wealth and power will behave like everyone else in history who have had it, which is that they will abuse it, and that they will do what they can to get more.

I'll accept that as true, and not just for arguement's sake. But why do you think this is true for generic Americans, but not for Americans in positions of governmental authority?

[realpc]

"Social Darwinism emerged as the ideology which justified this survival of the fittest mentality which was just the old law of the jungle rule, which is that the powerful dominate the weak."

As I said, this is a misconception. Yes there probably have been many ruthless capitalists who used Darwinism as their justification. But Darwinism, natural selection, does not have to imply ruthlessness. It describes an important, very obvious, aspect of nature -- some things are better than other things, the inferior things are less likely to catch on. So what?

Nature is competitive, and also cooperative. Competition is not something to be abhored, it just has to be restrained, as it is in nature.

When laissez-faire economics goes too far, when it's promoted by fanatics, it can be cruel. But in moderation it reflects the healthy competition of nature.

There have been many examples in history of the strong dominating and murdering the weak. But I believe that always resulted from our intelligence. Our inventiveness resulted in ever more deadly weapons, and in agriculture, which results in competition for land.

Darwinism is NOT about the strong dominating the weak. It is about the harmony that results from balancing cooperation and competition.

[amba]

real --

The simplest human societies are the least authoritarian, the most harmonious and cooperative.

At last we know what you romanticize -- the "primitive." Some hunter-gatherer societies are quite horrific. It really doesn't work to romanticize (or totally demonize) anything human.

Also, I disagree with you that leftists mistrust nature. I think Rousseauian roots of the left romanticize nature, especially its sexual aspects, and it is conservatism (at least social conservatism) that teaches we have to rise above it in spiritually inspired self-command.

[realpc]

I agree with you, more or less, that the best system is a third way, mixed, economy. I think this is almost universally agreed on now.

I do not agree that the Reagan revolution was about revoking the New Deal. That's a myth, like the idea that conservatives are in favor of racism. Conservatives have evolved along with everyone. We all take for granted now that old people, children and the disabled should not be left out on the streets to beg. It is not even up for debate. Neither is racism -- it's over, a dead theory that only lunatics still believe.

[realpc]

"Some hunter-gatherer societies are quite horrific."

By our standards. But what I meant was that, in general, primitives have been much less authoritarian, much less violent, than more advanced civilizations. The truth is the opposite of what most believe.

[realpc]

"The presumption ought to be that Americans who have enormous wealth and power will behave like everyone else in history who have had it, which is that they will abuse it, and that they will do what they can to get more."

Yeah, as Icepick said, a big rich powerful government is just as likely to abuse its power as a big rich powerful corporation or individual.

There is no easy cure for our problems. It makes no sense to despise and distrust big business while loving big government.

[Icepick]

I’m for evolution—that’s what the word progressive means to me. I’m for slow steps forward, keeping what works, improving what doesn’t, but moving forward.

Okay, so you were for keeping things mostly as they were in the late 1970s, yes? Arguing the merits of stagflation isn't likely to win you many allies.

To be a conservative means to conserve.

-and-

To be a conservative ... means that you lean toward the rule of law and the preservation of cultural mores and values.

Uh, these definitions conflict. A Saudi prince may wish to conserve Saudi society as presently construed, complete with an absolute monarch.

[Jack Whelan]

My goodness, realpc, you are a romantic! A couple of points in response:

1. The phrase 'state of nature' is a contrivance of political philosophers to describe the abstract state of the individual stripped of any kind of society. I don't think anybody seriously thinks of it as the way things ever were, but it does describe pretty accurately the anomic condition experienced when traditional societies break down. Look what's happening in the horn of Africa right now. I think of the state of nature as the extreme of social or cultural breakdown.

2. Your characterization of leftism and rightism is the opposite of their conventional designations. Liberals believe in the natural goodness and perfectibility of man, thinking the only thing that holds them back is poor socialization. Conservatives have always had a healthy respect for the evil that is in the human heart and have been skeptical about progress for that reason. Your ideas are aligned much more with traditional liberalism than with conservatism.

3. Lastly, the implication of what you are saying is that if only Saddam, Hitler, Genghis Kahn, the recently convicted Enron execs, upper management at Wal-Mart had a little more scientific training, they'd be more cooperative and nicer to the people who were there for them to exploit. Even if 95% of human beings were cooperative and nice, all it takes is the 5% to make a mess of things if they have the power to do so. Most Muslims, I'm sure want peace and stability, but they don't have the power to effect them. A minority of fanatics has the power to set the agenda because they have the power and no one can stop them.

The implied point in my post is at least rasie the question that something similiar is happening in our country with regard to the concentration of wealthy and power with a relative minority, and they are doing it under the banner of conservative or traditional values. That's where the con lies. There is nothing conservative about their agenda at all. It's a smokescreen created for reasons having purely to do with political expediency.

I don't expect to convince you about that, but try, as a thought experiment, to look at unfolding events through that lens, and see if things don't come into clearer focus.

[Kevin]

This is pretty heady stuff so I'll limit my comments to those of you who are romanticizing Darwinism, nature and the survival of the fittest. You are misguided. Nature is about brutality and the vicious fight for survival. This results in a balance because if it doesn’t then the system crashes and nature starts over, until a new balance emerges.

This happens a lot (crashing) when new species are introduced to an environment. I could give examples but instead I’ll encourage you to get a subscription to National Geographic. As for hunter gatherer societies, it wasn’t the lack of desire or the “oneness” with nature that limited their violence. It was their lack of power. Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond describes this dynamic at length.

As for the rest, I’m still making up my mind. I don’t like where Bush has taken this country but what I like less is how few people are even questioning it. Thanks Amba for the post and the link to Jack Whelan’s site, very thought provoking.

[Icepick]

Do you or do you not agree that the underlying agenda of the GOP since the Reagan revolution is to return this country back to the pre-New Deal era?

Why the false dichotomy? Why does it have to be New Deal or pre-New Deal? Have we really run out of ideas? Can there be nothing else? What a stultifying viewpoint!

Classical liberalism unleashed an unprecedented new social dynamic in the world which Schumpeter later called creative destruction. It created unprecedented wealth, technological innovation--and social dislocation and chaos, especially for those whose lives had been agriculture-centered. There is hardly anyone who will dispute that the transition from a traditional society to a modern capitalist society is brutal.

Yes, major transformative events create social upheaval. There will be winners and losers. And unless you plan on freezing human society in place, these major transformations will continue to happen, with all that that implies.

Dramatic upheavals happen, and with increasing frequency they happen when no one is looking. You speak of the post-WWI chaos effecting societies at the time. But for all its carnage, for all the polities and societies that were destroyed and created by WWI, the most important event of the 1910s took place on May 29, 1919, far from Flanders Field. I'll be impressed by anyone that knows what I'm talking about without looking it up. (I also doubt that anyone here would agree with my contention that it was the most important event of the decade.)

Your desire for "slow steps forward, keeping what works, improving what doesn’t, but moving forward" is fine ... just so long as a great big rock doesn't fall out of the sky.

[Icepick]

There is nothing conservative about their agenda at all. It's a smokescreen created for reasons having purely to do with political expediency.

I don't expect to convince you about that, but try, as a thought experiment, to look at unfolding events through that lens, and see if things don't come into clearer focus.

And this is what really pisses me off about you, Whelan. Once more you are ascribing nothing but pure malice to your political enemies, and telling anyone who doesn't agree with you that they must be an idiot.

[amba]

May 29, 1919? Without looking it up -- does it have anything to do with Henry Ford? The assembly line, or else something to do with medicine or hygiene, would have affected people's lives the most.

[Kevin]

I don’t think this is about choosing between Big Government and Big Business, it’s fighting against the union of the two. That was the pre WW1 reality that I believe Jack was referring too and it took William McKinley getting shot to start breaking that marriage in the US. That is my concern now. I doubt we could ever starve the US government down to size but it has in the past and could in the future be completely co-opted. It’s not enough that the government be strong, it must be independent.

[Kevin]

I cheated and looked it up, Eddington proves E=MC^2 right. You might be right too.

[Icepick]

Lastly, the implication of what you are saying is that if only Saddam, Hitler, Genghis Kahn, the recently convicted Enron execs, upper management at Wal-Mart had a little more scientific training, they'd be more cooperative and nicer to the people who were there for them to exploit.

Yeah, that wasn't a cheap shot. Hell, sticking Lay and Skilling in with the other three is pretty egregious. Or do you really believe that (Murder on a grand scale) = (Accounting fraud)?

[Icepick]

Kevin's close. Eddington provided the first experimental evidence that Einstein's General Theory was correct. A great triumph for the scientific method.

[Jack Whelan]

Icepick--

I'm not going to respond to most of the ways you misread my post. I'll just leave you with a question: If there is no government to counterbalance the enormous power that is aggregating to these huge multinational corporations, who will hold them in check? It comes down to who you want to be abused by--an agency which is at least potentially held accountable by the politcal process if citizens exercise vigilance and skepticism about the behavior and motive of their elected officials--or by unaccountable mega private entities? It really is a no-brainer.

I'd love to live in an anarchic society with no government. It would work if the world in fact behaved the way realpc thinks it does. But it doesn't. There are bad guys and the more power and wealth they acquire in the private sector, and the weaker the government becomes as an effective check on their power, the more vulneralbe the rest of us become.

The whole point of what I'm writing is that there have to be countervailing powers. And people like you, in your demonizing the goverment are blinded to the more pressing threat. And you are giving the interests which pose that threat exactly what they want by supporting the disempowering the one thing that can hold them in check.

The problem is not the government, but the lack of vigilance exercised by its citizens. And the gullibility of citizens who believe only what they want to hear.

[Jack Whelan]

Amba--

I don't assume that wealth makes someone evil. But if someone has evil intent, the greater his access to wealth the more enabled he will be to achieve his objectives, and the more powerful he becomes the more important that there be a countervailing power to keep him in check.

People who have evil intent realize that they can't achieve what they want without wealth and power, and so naturally seek to obtain as much of it as they can. So we must always be on guard not against the wealthy, but to the aggregations of high concentrations of power and wealth, which can be used for abusive purposes.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I would have no problem with a system that let people become as rich as they wanted so long as that system insured that wealth didn't translate into political influence or power. It's not that I think wealth and power must necessarily be used abusively, but if it were to be, how could it be stopped? Better not to let things get too far and just trust the rich will be as realpc thinks they will. It's just prudential common sense.

[Jack Whelan]

Amba--

Another point. You have to decide whether you're really a democrat. The thrust of some of your comments is really very close to the traditional argument that favored aristocracy over democracy. It was, for instance, Plato's argument. The ancients believed that democracy was the last phase before dictatorship because the mob was easily swayed by demagogues. Better to have a system in place where an oligarchic elite, for Plato one that was philsophically trained, calls the shots.

[amba]

Jack --

I am a democrat. I was playing devil's advocate, just to show that some demonize the rich, and some demonize the poor.

[forestwalker]

"My main concern with this is the assumption -- based, of course, on Lord Acton's maxim "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" -- that the wealthy are inevitably evilly disposed, while virtue resides in the little guy or gal by virtue of their powerlessness."

amba,

I suspect Jack holds Acton's maxim as a truism. But the conclusion you're drawing isn't supported by what he's laid out here. I don't read him saying that the wealthy are more evil and the poor more virtuous: we all share the same psychology/fallen nature, after all. I think what Jack is saying is that the wealthy (i.e. the powerful) are less constrained by the limitations that reality imposes on the majority and their power gives them the opportunity, should they choose to exercise it, to define their own reality (and that of others) according to their own desires (Jack's not building on Acton; they're both describing the same dynamic of our individual and social natures).

[amba]

I think you're right that that's the content of what Jack says (and it's correct, too). But his tone is that of class warfare. I think that's what I'm picking up and responding to. (Granted it's in the Christian tradition of "a camel could sooner pass through the eye of a needle . . . ")

There are three ways to constrain the conduct of the wealthy people who run corporations. When you start by assuming the worst you antagonize.

a) Peer pressure. Ethical and socially responsible behavior, rather than rapacious anything-goes, can actually become the admired norm. Social shaming rather than admiration can be bestowed on scoundrels by their peers.

b) Incentives. The carrot rather than the stick.

c) Regulation. Necessary but not sufficient. You want the "good rich" working with you, not against you. And I don't mean the guilt-ridden self-hating rich. To get them working with you, you can't make them feel guilty until proven innocent, that they are somehow reprehensible just by dint of having money.

The problem is, our culture just admires people for being rich, never mind how they got it. There are no particular, strong rewards even in public esteem for being ethical. Only for being powerful. How can we change that?

[forestwalker]

And let me push a bit against your rejection of this idea (whether Jack was really articulating it or not):

"My main concern with this is the assumption...that the wealthy are inevitably evilly disposed, while virtue resides in the little guy or gal by virtue of their powerlessness."

Consider that sentence in light of Jesus' "money is the root of all kinds of evil."

What? The teaching is, "the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil," you say?

:) Exactly.

Wealth, in and of itself, is not evil. Lusting after it, using it to separate oneself from community (or reality), using it as a means of control, putting it in service to ego...these are not so good. (And just for fun, replace 'wealth' with 'sex' in that sentence and it's clear that the legalism and moral sensitivity of Left and Right are not all that different).

"the aristocrat-democrats who founded our country might well have said "Powerlessness corrupts," and they too would have had a point."

That's true enough, too. Going back to an older teaching: "give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, 'Who is the LORD?' Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God."

[realpc]

"I'd love to live in an anarchic society with no government. It would work if the world in fact behaved the way realpc thinks it does. "

Oh for heaven's sake, you sure did misinterpret my argument.
Social animals in nature, and primitive humans, follows rules and rituals that evolved over millions of years. They are easily disrupted by changes in the environment. Primitive human societies all disintegrated after western contact.

I think you misunderstood me because there is a kind of leftist who romanticizes the primitives and thinks we don't need governmenst. Ridiculous!

You are too quick to apply labels!

My point was that your "state of nature" argument is false.

Yes we see many examples of chaotic societies now, in Africa, Russia, etc. Drastic change results in chaos. But that is not the state of nature. Nature is chaotic in times of crisis, but it can be harmonious and (precariously) balanced in times of stability.

[amba]

How completely awesome that you found that quote.

Our whole culture has the "love of money" problem -- we could do with more "love of virtue," in the old-French sense that meant "power" not "priggishness." Money seems like our real god, often. And/or fame. People don't feel real until they've been on television.

Robert Beck explains how the problem is "hedonic terminal desires", that is, pursuing pleasure directly as an end in itself rather than a byproduct of doing good things.

[amba]

real,

Looking at the (God-given) restless nature of human beings, you've got to wonder how many "times of stability" we've ever had. Trade, exploration, warfare, innovation . . . I guess it all happened very slowly, and we can't imagine that because the curve has shot up so dramatically in the last few centuries and even more in the last few generations, like one of those graphs where the very slowly climbing line suddenly spikes up toward infinity . . . I don't know what they're called.

[realpc]

Yes amba, it has been mostly chaos since 10,000 or so years ago. In my opinion (and in the opinion of others), the trouble started with agriculture.

Metal technology also contributed to the chaos, as it started the arms race.

As I often say, our greatest strengths (intelligence and creativity) are our greatest weaknesses.

I think Jack's argument, which resembles the general progressive argument, is basically wrong. It fails to question certain 19th century ideas that were established before modern anthropology and zoology. (Anthropologists had only a brief chance to study primitives, since the hunter/gatherer traditional lifestyle was mostly destroyed not long after the advent of the science of cultural anthropology).

Konrad Lorenz helped dispell the 19th century myth of nature as cruel and chaotic. For example, he studied wolves and found that they are highly social, loving, law-abiding creatures. Sure they are fierce predators, but killing for food has nothing to do with cruelty or chaos.

Jack may have some valid points, but so much of his argument depends on the 19th century myth of nature as chaotic and malicious. This is a serious defect in so much progressive reasoning.

And yes, primitive tribes have been used to support the "humans are basically good and don't need government" argument of some leftist radicals. But, as I said before, that argument is also unscientific.

[ckreiz]

I disagree with Whelan #6's assumption that the Bushies are trying to turn the clock back to the early 1900s. It just isn't so. What the Right hates to admit is that FDR won and Barry Goldwater lost- liberalism carried the 20th century. On that point, Whelan #5 is spot on. We expect a certain level of government intervention in our lives to cushion against the impact of capitalism's inherent Social Darwinism. But Reagan and his ideological descendants haven't laid a hand on huge social programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Goldwater failed in his attempt to dismantle Social Security. There hasn't been a serious effort to do so since.

Modern conservatives have reluctantly accepted Whelan #5- that a monster federal government is part of the political landscape. The liberal-conservative debate picks at the edges of the monolith. There's no serious debate to dismantle it, not because there's not a desire to, but because it's political suicide to do otherwise. Right-wing rhetoric positing otherwise is mere window-dressing.

[amba]

real,

Humans differ from most or all of the rest of "nature" in that the restraints on sexuality and aggression that are instinctual with most social animals (like wolves) are variable with us. Taken over by culture. You could say we have an instinctual need for culture, but the wide variability of cultural norms is what makes us so adaptable. It has also led to plenty of experiments that failed. Conservatives like to quote Richard M. Weaver whose book was titled Ideas Have Consequences. Rousseauian ideas about the basically cooperative and harmonious nature of human beings have paradoxically allowed unrestrained greed and lust to thrive. (By the way, there should be a rule about social thinkers that goes something like, "By their immediate/intimate fruits ye shall know them." Both Rousseau and Marx abandoned or neglected their own children.)

By the way, I was astonished to learn that the "social Darwinism" of the Industrial Revolution came before biological Darwinism, and gave rise to it -- in Darwin's mind:

Darwin, for instance, “derived natural selection more by wondering how he might transfer the laissez-faire principle of Adam Smith’s economics into nature than by observing tortoises on the Galapagos Islands.”

[Icepick]

I'm not going to respond to most of the ways you misread my post. I'll just leave you with a question: If there is no government to counterbalance the enormous power that is aggregating to these huge multinational corporations, who will hold them in check?

Uh, did I say there should be no government? Thinking the governemtn is too large and intrusive is different than saying there whould be no government.

[Icepick]

Thank you, Kreiz. Your comment is spot on.

[ckreiz]

realpc @ 932 am secures the point. Exactly, pc.

[ckreiz]

The last major piece of the progressive pie is national health insurance. The Right succeeded in dismantling Clinton's push for it in '93-94. But Kennedy-Kassebaum was an incremental move back in the other direction, imposing unfunded mandates on insurers. Ironically, large corporations are reconsidering the concept and trending toward it, recognizing that health insurance is an extraordinary private burden (GM, e.g). Again, this cuts again Whelan #6.

[amba]

Yes -- a lot of Wal-Mart workers, who don't have benefits, are on Medicaid.

[amba]

Isn't it ironic.

[Jack Whelan]

ckreiz & Amba--

My argument is not based on what has been accomplished but with what the Libertarian Conservative movement hopes to accomplish in the long run. Most conservatives were very disappointed that Reagan didn't accomplish more. So then the question remains what is the 'more' that they wanted to accomplish, and I guess it's a question of whether you think people like Grover Norquist, Kark Rove, and David Frum are marginal or central to that agenda.

And so it's in that light that I would argue that the whole brouhaha about Social Security last year was a tactical first step in the longer range strategy of dismantling Social Security.

But my larger concern is not with the ideology of shrink-the-government conservative ideologues, but with the question of power distribution and how the libertarian agenda plays into the hands of a strengthening trend toward crony capitalism. Mega corporations are fine with big government so long as it does its bidding. The Pharmaceutical Industry, for instance, was delighted with the Medicaid Prescription bill. I see Libertarians as unwitting accomplices in the corporate agenda which cares not about conservative ideology but about its narrowly defined ends to meet stockholders expectations. They are willing to make alliances with Libertarians so long as it meets their ends of creating conditions in which the government complies to their will rather than the corporations complying with the government's.

The problem with the thrust of Libertarianism is that in its obsession to privatize and deregulate, it is removing the tools the "people" have to restrain these enormously powerful and wealthy actors. As you shrink the government, you make yourself that much more vulnerable to abuses from those interests. And it's in that sense that we are indeed returning to the time before the two Roosevelts to the Robber Baron era of bare-fisted capitalism. I read somewhere that Karl Rove thought of Mark Hanna as his role model, and it makes perfect sense.

Regarding Amba's class warfare comment. If the poor we shall have always with us, so will we have also the rich. I don't have a problem with individual people being rich, if that's what they want to be. My problem is with the power that comes with wealth and of the potential to abuse it. Call it Julius Caesar Syndrome. JC was not someone with whom you could work cooperatively, unless he saw working with you as useful toward achieving his ends. He knew what he wanted and he was going to do what it took to get it. Maybe most people aren't like that, but enough people are--the corporate world is full of them--and so I see my attitude as that of Brutus, reluctantly adopted with the goal to protect and conserve the larger common good. I want to prevent creating the conditions for the possibility of a Julius Caesar in our national life, and quite frankly I see us in the last six years laying the foundation for doing just that. I know that this is the opposite of what Libertarians want, but it will be its unintended consequence if they otherwise get what they think they want.

[realpc]

"Rousseauian ideas about the basically cooperative and harmonious nature of human beings have paradoxically allowed unrestrained greed and lust to thrive."

amba, I am with you on that. There have been two big misunderstandings that underly progressive ideology -- humans are basically "good" and do not need laws; nature is chaotic and needs to be controlled.

I think most progressives have been influenced by these fallacies to some degree.

You mistook me for a Rousseauian when I said that social animals and primitive humans live orderly lives. My point was to argue against the 19th c. myth that humans must rise above nature and control it, or chaos and cruelty will reign.

I believe we belong to nature, like it or not, and to survive we must learn and respect nature's laws.

[realpc]

Jack,

I think everyone -- including all but extreme irrational libertarians and anarchists -- agrees that we need laws and regulations. People do what they can get away with, often without even realizing they are hurting others.

In the early days of capitalism, no one knew what kinds of laws and regulations would be needed. We have learned a lot since then, and will continue to learn.

No one is trying to drag us back into the early lawless days of capitalism. That is partisan hysteria.

[Tom Strong]

realpc,

I don't understand why you trace negative views of nature back to the 19th century. If anything, what I learned was that enlightenment thinkers from Newton to Emerson, and including the Founders, all thought nature was good and that human societies were of a piece with it. Emerson in particular thought of nature as nearly divine. Of course, there were also thinkers such as Hobbes who had much more negative views of nature, but they hardly had a monopoly on the conversation.

I'm going to reserve the rest of my comments for Jack's blog.

[amba]

Best said so far, Jack, and a tough one for the libertarians to answer -- I look forward to hearing what they say.

When you talk about power, I'm thinking about the complicated relationship between money and the vote. The vote is the power of the people and it can counter the power of capital, but so often the power of capital buys the vote -- or buys it off. I have heard a former political consultant -- Tony Blankley, now managing editor of the Washington Times -- say out loud that low voter turnout is a deliberate goal of negative political advertising because it favors base candidates. The advertising itself is bought and paid for. And then there's the susceptibility of so many to be entertained and distracted rather than informed. So you have a lazy or uninspired electorate, and a manipulative, well-funded political elite, who serve the corporate agenda, and have no reason to inspire the electorate.

It all comes down to the vote.

[Jack Whelan]

Amba--

Yes, it does come down to the vote, and it's not just the role of money that's a concern--feeling confident that we're getting fair vote counts is quckly becoming one, too. I have been convinced by the evidence that the vote count was manipulated in Florida, and I'm reserving judgment on Ohio, but nothing at this point would surprise me.

By the way, I keep saying Medicaid instead of Medicare in relation to the infamous $1.2 trillion corporate giveaway.

[realpc]

"I don't understand why you trace negative views of nature back to the 19th century."

Tom,

Not everyone in the 19th century had the same view of nature!

But Freud, and there are many others, believed that individuals are naturally asocial.

I learned as a child (and I can't be the only one!) that primitive people are murdering savages, and that wild animals are lawless.

We have expressions like "it's a jungle out there," and "law of the jungle."

Come on, you are just looking for minor points to disagree on. You know that our very concept of "wild" means untamed, unpredicatble. So it turns out to be a human-centric myth, completely wrong. We should not base our philosophies on myths, especially when scientific observations show them to be false.

[Tom Strong]

real,

I'm not trying to knock what you wrote - I'm genuinely curious about how you came to your beliefs.

Nor do I think it's a minor point. If you think "nature must be controlled" is an essential progressive viewpoint, and I think "humans need to live more in harmony with nature" is an essential progressive viewpoint, then you and I are not speaking the same language. In an already polarized discourse, that's a big problem.

I learned as a child, in an admittedly "progressive" environment, that primitive people were good (though not perfect) and lived in harmony with nature, much more so than moderns. With the corollary view that modern people should learn to respect nature just as primitives did. This was ingrained in me so deeply that I only learned to examine and criticize this perspective in the last decade of my life.

[amba]

You mean the most recent decade of your life.

[Tom Strong]

Like when you say this:

There have been two big misunderstandings that underly progressive ideology -- humans are basically "good" and do not need laws; nature is chaotic and needs to be controlled.

I don't see this as underpinning progressive ideology at all. Look at the environmentalist movement. Environmentalists propose all kinds of laws to restrict human behavior; and they frequently romanticize nature. For many years, someone like Michael Pollan wouldn't have been considered an environmentalist by the true believers, because he's in favor of gardening and small-scale agriculture.

[Tom Strong]

amba,

I suppose I do!

[Icepick]

Tom,

We hope so for your sake!

[realpc]

Tom,

Progressive ideology includes contradictions (as does conservative ideology).

Jack Whelan's post said the state of nature is chaotic, that individuals do not naturally consider the rights of others. But what is chaotic, in reality, is humanity's discord with nature, since the invention of agriculture, at least.

I brought up the evidence on social animals and primitive humans in order to show that his first two propositions are wrong. He does not speak for all progressives, but his perspective is common among secular humanists.

Being a leftist means opposing the conventional culture, being outside it in one way or another. Our conventional culture stands for organized religion, business, the traditional family, and a strong military, for example. The left includes all groups who, for whatever reason, strongly oppose any or all of these values.

Some leftists are secular humanists or scientific atheists. Others are anti-science environmentalists. There is definitely more than one way to be a leftist. There is more than one way to be a rightist, but it's more restricted. The left includes anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-religion, anti-science -- whatever opposes the status quo.