“I’d say that most all libertarians are conservative (in the real sense of the word, at least)!”

No they’re not. Conservatism as an explicit tradition of political thought began in Britain in direct opposition to classical liberalism. Its purpose was to defend the authority of the Crown in the wake of the French Revolution, its content was a rejection of “abstract” demands for universal liberty, and its means were brute force.

The conservative tradition is not something worth your labors. Toss the rotten thing out.

Thanks, arcane, for good comments. The stuff on education (i.e., actually on topic) will have to wait for a moment, because it is very late and I have virtual miles to go before I sleep. But I would like to remark quickly on this:

“There isn’t a doubt in anybody’s mind that Bismarck was right-wing, …”

Indeed. There’s no doubt in my mind, either. That’s why I said: “These are ideas that come from a recognizable Right-wing source—they are straight out of the educational playbook of the Kaiser’s Prussia. But that just goes to show that not all Right-wing ideas are conservative ideas.”

The fact that Bismarck was clearly a man of the Right is immaterial unless conservatism, as a historical tradition of thought and practice, is identical with the Right. Which it’s not—although the two often overlap. Conservatism and Rightism are distinct (though linked) in their historical origins, in their theoretical preoccupations, and in their

Case in point: it would be hard for anyone to seriously defend the claim that Nazism was not a movement of the Right. (You can point out that it claimed to be a form of socialism; true, but that only shows that there is Right-wing socialism.) But it would also be hard for anoyone to seriously defend the claim that Nazism was a conservative movement; it was a movement devoted to radical reconstruction of the whole society, and indeed the whole world, from the standpoint of a apocalyptic conception of racial struggle and a messianic notion of racial purity. Now, the Second Reich was very far from being that; but it was also very far from being “conservative” in any meaningful sense; it was a Right-wing regime which pioneered nearly every piece of “progressive” government policy and waged an ongoing war against traditional institutions in the name of creating a new Kultur in the image of the new Prussian State.

I’ll have something to say on actual educational issues soon. Cheers.

As for sources, there’s always PEN (Public Education Network), which puts out a hefty “Weekly Newsblast” … see: http://www.publiceducation.org/newsblast-current.asp and http://www.publiceducation.org/cgi-bin/newsblastsubscribe/subscribe.asp

Too bad the weblog name has already been taken: if only I’d been there earlier with the obvious choice! But, alas, I guess that “Re-neducation” was just not meant to be…

“Yes, and I still support abolishing it. Either though you ignored the context that I wrote that in, are vouchers and testing not conservative proposals?”

Depends on what you take the content of conservatism to be, I suppose. If your aim is strictly limited government and a federal republic rather than a national bureaucracy, then no, these aren’t conservative proposals.

Vouchers aren’t the main focus of my concern here—although I will say that they amount to extending government money—and thus, government control—over private schools as well as state schools. There are good arguments to be made on both sides for whether the benefits to school competition still outweigh the costs in increased bureaucratic control and homogenization, but it certainly seems to me that the further away from local communities you place the locus of control (like, say, in the federal Department of Education) the worse it looks.

The “Good God, man,” though, is directed towards the notion that the federal power-grab through mandated “testing” is somehow a conservative notion. What “testing” means is a massive and unprecedented takeover of education by the federal government through Department of Education testing mandates. That is what Bush promised and that is what he delivered. Today the federal education bureaucracy is more powerful, exercises more centralized control over local school districts, and has a budget heading for the roof. You may say John Kerry would be just as bad or worse; fine, but no-one is claiming John Kerry is a conservative.

These are ideas that come from a recognizable Right-wing source—they are straight out of the educational playbook of the Kaiser’s Prussia. But that just goes to show that not all Right-wing ideas are conservative ideas. If you still think that these proposals are a good idea, fine; there are arguments to be made for them. But there are no arguments to be made for describing them as conservative proposals.

arcane said: “In it are great conservative proposals, such as conducting mandatory testing programs to increase school accountability and voucher programs so that lower income families can get their children out of failing public schools.”

Good God, man, since when is a massive federal takeover of the educational system through Department of Ed testing mandates a conservative proposal? Wasn’t it conservatives who were pushing for the Department of Education to be abolished not ten years ago?

Max asks: “And as much as it makes me hurt to think about it, I have a feeling it won’t be smooth or over by the 3rd. When did voting get so complicated? Why haven’t we spent the last 4 years trying to work and make sure we don’t have a repeat of 2000?”

Well. Ask yourself two questions: (1) who most directly benefited from the electoral mess in 2000? and (2) who is in power to put forward or obstruct serious electoral reform now? And there’s the answer to your questions as well.

Cynical? Sure, I’ll cop to that—but cynicism pays when folks like these are running the show.

“I was skeptical simply because it seemed to me that the characteristics of the Russian “personality” were crystallized as early as the reign of Ivan the Terrible (or perhaps Peter the Great), that is, the appeal of autocracy and the strong man.”

People say this about Russia and its history all the time, but I don’t get it at all. Didn’t ordinary Russians rebel against the Czar repeatedly? Didn’t they even sort of contemplate a revolution at some point?

Weren’t most of the repressive measures of Soviet Communism directed against internal opposition to the centralization of the Party during the Civil War and post-Civil War period? Wasn’t there an extensive dissident movement? Didn’t the regime finally collapse internally in the face of such opposition?

Russian history is a terribly sad story, but it seems to me that there are much better explanations for that than blaming the victims or their “national character”…

I’m a bit puzzled by the tack taken by several defenders of philosophy in this thread. For example:

Rikurzhen: “At its best, analytical philosophy relies on falsification, permits empirical solutions, and enjoys a marketplace of ideas.”

Steve: “Philosophy does have a role to play in science.”

Frank: “Philosophy such as his does more, by way of lucid logical processes informed by the current state of scientific knowledge, to discredit theism, or creationism than mere data-crunching. A truly philosophy-averse “scientist” is little more than a technician.”

Steve: “I agree with you to an extent and had outlined some ways I think philosophy is useful.”

It’s not that I necessarily disagree with claims such as these; but I wonder whether they really get at the underlying issue. There may very well be good reasons to think that philosophy is, in some ways, useful to empirical science. But does an intellectual discipline need to be useful to empirical science to be worth pursuing? If so, Jesus, why?

gc: “how can you teach mathematics if you believe that 1 = 1 has the same truth value as 1 = 2?”

I don’t know, but Derrida didn’t believe this or argue for it. Nowhere in Derrida’s writing does he challenge the notion of truth as applied within discursive domains—among them mathematics. What he takes himself to be challenging is an uncritical metaphysical account of what our traffic in truth, plain meanings of words, etc. amounts to. As Derrida himself puts it in Limited Inc.:

“[T]he value of truth … is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. … [W]ithin interpretive contexts … that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competance, criteria of discussion and of consensus. … I take into account and believe that it is necessary to account for this stability [of interpretive contexts], as well as for all the norms, rules, contractual possibilities, that depend upon it. But … to account for a certain stability … is precisely not to speak of eternity or of absolute solidity; it is to take into account a historicity, a nonnaturalness, of ethics, of politics, of institutionality, etc. … I say that there is no stability that is absolute, eternal, intangible, natural, etc. But that is implied in the very concept of stability. A stability is not an immutability; it is by definition always destabilizable.”

Derrida is not a truth-nihilist. There are deep, fundamental problems with his philosophy and his method, but this is not among them. If lit crit popularizers, or unsympathetic critics, have tried to make Derrida into one, that is their problem, not his. For an excellent overview of what Derrida is (and isn’t) doing, and some of the interpretive and philosophical problems involved with reference to contemporary Analytic philosophy, I recommend Martin Stone’s “Wittgenstein on Deconstruction,” anthologized in THE NEW WITTGENSTEIN (eds. Alice Crary and Rupert Read).

Lopez: “I’ll just note here that I have no problem whatsoever with peaceful white seperatism. If someone wants to buy some land, fence it in, and hate homos and Meskins and Negroes, that’s perfectly fine by me. … But that isn’t the Hoppean position either.”

Well. It’s clear enough that peaceful white separatism (by definition, since it it’s stipulated to be peaceful) doesn’t tread on anyone’s rights. So there’s no problem with it whatsoever as far as a libertarian theory of justice is concerned. But although no-one has any right to force people not to form such communities, don’t you think that they are still idiots?

Justice is the only virtue that’s enforceable, but it’s not the only virtue.