Comments Elsewhere

Warren G. Harding also drove tariffs sky-high, approved the first ethnic immigration quotas in American history, and was initiated into the bloody Ku Klux Klan in the White House.

Bush and Kerry may be assholes, but thank God that men like Harding no longer make it onto the ballot.

“If you don’t vote for what you truly want,(limited govt.), you’ll never get it.”

But I don’t want limited government. I want no government. So building the Libertarian Party is for me (as it is for many others) just as much a strategic move as voting for some worse statist. (Indeed, this is the case even if you are (just like Badnarik) a committed minarchist Constitutionalist. “Limited government” isn’t on the ballot; Michael Badnarik is, and the argument for voting for him is, at the strongest, that he would do the most to advance the cause of limited government if elected.)

Given that, there are some good reasons to think that if you are in the particular circumstance of, for example, living in a swing state where a handful of votes may determine the outcome, there may be good reasons to think that a vote for Kerry is the wisest course of action available. (As Roderick argues, the case is much less strong insofar as these considerations aren’t in play—if I were still living in Alabama rather than Michigan, I wouldn’t hesitate to put in a ballot for Badnarik.)

‘I don’t understand what you are talking about. British politics have nothing to do with American politics.’

This would come as a surprise to Russell Kirk, who explicitly drew from the work of British conservatives such as Edmund Burke. American conservative thought and practice has always been directly linked with English conservatism. It would be downright foolish not to understand the connections between Tory thought in the wake of the French Revolution—including, in particular, their critique of univeralist ideology and reconstructive politics (in both cases, their main target was the classical liberals, who they blamed for the Revolution). American conservatives have certainly made no bones about these connections.

‘Neo-conservatives aren’t part of the American “Conservative Tradition;”’

Is there any particular reason for saying this other than the fact that you don’t like them? Anarchists typically loathe the fact that Marxist-Leninist butchers are also part of the socialist tradition, even though they were, comparatively, Johnny-come-latelies who mangled a huge amount of the tradition to serve their own bloody-minded ends. But few would deny that the Marxist-Leninists were, in fact, part of the socialist tradition.

“Look up Bill Buckley on lewrockwell.com, and you’ll find out exactly what it meant to be a conservative before the neo-cons showed up. Not because Buckley is one, but because he, more than any other person, fucked it all up. Also, conservatives (circa 1930’s-1940’s) were traditionally not widely associated with any social regulation, merely economic issues.”

I’m well aware of Rothbard’s broadsides against Buckley. You may notice that the Commonweal quote from Buckley that I linked is one commonly cited by Rothbard. And pretty much everything that can be said against Buckley is well-deserved.

But I can’t agree with the notion that there was anything of value in the conservative tradition to be fucked up when Buckley reached the scene. This, for example, is simply not true: “conservatives (circa 1930’s-1940’s) were traditionally not widely associated with any social regulation, merely economic issues.” In fact, American conservatives during the 1930s and 1940s routinely embraced militant white supremacy—especially in the South. The Old Right that LewRockwell.com fawns over included many very honorable people with good reasons for opposing interventionist warfare—but also an unfortunate number of anti-Semites and admirers of fascism. (Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin are not to be praised for their anti-interventionism: they only opposed intervention because they were fond of the Nazi terror-empire.)

Neo-conservatism is Prussian authoritarianism combined with rampaging Trotskyist globalism. That sucks; but paleoconservatism, with its legacy of social authoritarianism, (sometimes) economic protectionism and welfare populism, and (always) xenophobia and militant racism is not an improvement. Both of them are ugly movements that trace important parts of their influence to ugly forebearers in British conservatism, the French Right, and the Kaiser’s Prussia. The conservative tradition is not worth saving. If you want to find a tradition to reclaim from statism, it is anti-state liberalism that you should look into. (Generally speaking: the dude who wears the Crown is a less reliable libertarian than the dudes who are chopping that crowned head off.)

“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”…