Until just about a year ago, it was, in a certain sense, easy to sit down and write posts for this blog. To be sure, there was a way in which it most definitely wasn't easy, because Western civilization had already spun so far out of control as to make me feel embarrassment for my species pretty much constantly.
The point of posts here was to appeal to what was left of post-American society's sense of dignity, common sense, fealty to clarity, love of freedom and desire to please God as we, writer and readers alike, encountered each new outrage, absurdity and victory for darkness. The mirror this blog holds up to this countervailing force is a worldview called conservatism.
And then, as I say, just about a year ago, the lines of demarcation, and the kinds of players recognized to be on the stage, underwent unprecedented transformation. A new element, and, in its wake, a new host of perspectives, upended the duality we had always understood to be the defining characteristic of our civilizational struggle.
No matter how absurd the developments we looked at became - transgender bathrooms, Ferguson riots based on a lie about a law-enforcement incident, laws dictating maximum sizes for soda-pop servings, subsidized solar-panel "companies" - they all fell under the rubric of leftism. And while there were various shadings of conservatism with different points of emphasis, sometimes to the ignoring of certain essential components of any stance that could be called conservatism, the most viable category within that label was the one that embraced the three pillars we feel so compelled to stress here. Yes, it's true that Pat Buchanan has written for Lew Rockwell's Antiwar.com site and, conversely, David Brooks is on record as being in thrall to the crease of the Most Equal Comrade's pants. But there was a peak to the bell curve called conservatism, and its nature was still what it had been in the heyday of Russell Kirk, Whitaker Chambers and Barry Goldwater.
Now, in late spring 2016, with Donald Trump pulling within three points of Hillary Clinton, the question "Who gets to define conservatism?" is being asked very loudly.
There's a certain breed of person asking it who is being nakedly disingenuous. Laura Ingraham, for instance, has spent - well, just about the time span I'm talking about: this past year - setting up a false dichotomy between an "establishment" consisting of the Bush family and big-money donors and "the people," the proverbial American family huddled at the kitchen table with a stack of bills and a calculator. How disingenuous is this setup? Disingenuous enough to lump Ted Cruz and Trump together as "outsiders" as long as Cruz was a viable candidate and thereby served their purpose.
Then there is the the "this-insistence-on-a-change-of-an-unprecedented-degree-and-kind-is-exhilarating-to-see" camp, as represented by folks like Roger L. Simon at PJ Media. They're thrilled at the emergence of a "man of action from the business world" to serve as a foil to the "wonky theorists" - you know, the ones who have strived to maintain clarity about the three pillars of the worldview we ostensibly share.
The burden ought to be on these types, but such are the times that they can skate right past any reckoning they ought to have to face.
Never are they held to account for any of Trump's nearly infinite utterances of an alarming nature - not the ones that make clear his shallowness, not the ones that reveal his inconsistency, not the ones that are incoherent to the point of being incomprehensible, not the ones that are plainly mean.
I won't take space hear to once again catalogue them. They're well known, and this blog has a "Donald Trump" category full of posts documenting them.
The most recent one, though, is telling. Asked how he envisions the essence of the Republican party fifteen years from now, Trump says he sees it as a "workers' party," and goes on to flesh out what he means by resorting to his populist message about wage stagnation. I must note that the link I provide is to a Hot Air post by Allahpundit, who seems to have a throatful of Kool-Aid. After quoting Trump, he expends considerable verbiage on why he sees this as a good thing.
I want to conclude this post by bringing it to a fairly simple point: Trumpism, to the extent that it is a coherent approach to policy, culture and life, is leftist. There is nothing - nothing - conservative about any of it. As I said the other day in my post on how any politician who harps on "jobs for the middle class" is blowing smoke, enthusiasm over vague promises to restore economic good times is always predicated on a view that government properly has some role in economic life.
It doesn't. Conservatives understand this. Like everyone else, our situations are more precarious than they were in more stable times, but we refuse to become so desperate as to buy the bottle of snake oil.
This is why I have no patience for observations of the current juncture that get in the demographic weeds, looking at what southern whites, or third-generation Polish Rust-Belt skilled tradesmen, or single urban women, or poor blacks, or transgendered college students, or evangelical Christians perceive as their pet grievances and yearnings. Any remedy for any or all of them that merely offers an improvement of their material situations is the stuff of even more civilizational confusion.
I don't care if I'm not crafting my message of three-pillared conservatism effectively enough to reach millennials or women or Asians or anybody else. This blog is merely about stating and defending the basic approach to our national life that would pull us up from our morass with the actual rapidity that charlatans routinely promise. I don't yet know how to doll it up to make it palatable to particular demographics.
You're expected to be smart enough to get it whoever you are.
And that's not dismissiveness; it's part of the principle being defended. Human beings ought to strive to be sharp. When they don't . . . well, you get what we have in the spring of 2016 in post-America.
The fact is, as Kevin Dowd and Martin Hutchison end their book, Alchemists of Loss, “The basic weakness of the capitalist system, the problem of how to prevent management and powerful interest groups more generally from enriching themselves at everyone else’s expense, has escalated to the point where the capitalist system itself is now in a major legitimation crisis . . . These interest groups have also taken over the state itself to a very significant extent, in the process turning modern capitalism into an ugly and corrupt system of crony capitalism that cannot be defended and is rightly reviled by an increasingly restive man in the street, who is called upon to pay for it” (italics mine).
ReplyDeletehttp://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/capitalism-vs-the-free-market/
Tumultuous events over the last twenty-five years—the stock market crash of 1987, S&L crises of the late 1980s, the dot-com crash, LTCM default, the flash crash in May 2010, the LIBOR scandal, the MF Global and Knight Capital scandals, the Great Recession here in America, the bankruptcy of Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland, and Portugal in Europe—have all been, directly or indirectly, products of the same governments, which have been hopelessly trying to “manage the economy,” stimulating production at times, stimulating consumption at other times, redistributing from the rich to the poor at times, and then redistributing from the poor to the rich at other times. Not so surprisingly, most people have by now lost any confidence in a “free” market economy. Once the distinction is blurred between capitalism, socialism, fascism on one side, and free market on the other, the case for the free market is lost. When the catastrophe finally occurs, most people will want a knight on a white horse to save them, not a free market. History is perfectly clear here.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/capitalism-vs-the-free-market/
That's why LITD has always been mindful of using the term "free market" rather than capitalism. Good old economic liberty, as described by Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, Ludwig Von Mises, Frederich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt and Milton Friedman, is the only economic "system" consistent with the conditions necessary for human well-being.
ReplyDeleteSo give me an example of when the free market best flourished in this, the Greatest Land? Or any other land for that matter. And do not just contrast it with its opposites, the bondage markets of socialism or communism
ReplyDeleteThe 1920s, the 1960s, the 1980s and the 1990s, for recent examples. Mind you, these represent relative flourishing a, as certain sectors and demographics experienced tough times even in those periods. Those can generally be traced to the effects of various forms of governmental interference, however. A pure free market has never been tried, but we can see a pattern that the freer the market, the more society experiences general prosperity
ReplyDeleteThat's what I thought. Theory only. A pig in a poke, so to speak. Some pie in the sky statement that our current "problems" would dissolve in short order by making us all 1099s and with government spending on defense only, I presume.
ReplyDeleteNo, it works whenever it's tried. We've just never had the chance to watch it work completely freed of government interference in the market.
ReplyDeleteAs to whether we should all be 1099-ers, I doubt if that would work. Some organizations need employees.
Now, government spending on defense only? I can see that.
Oh, I get it, some employees need holiday and vacation pay, health and dental insurance, pay increases, employer contributions to OASI and 401Ks, workers' and unemployment compensation,pensions and the like I guess, too. All the rest must either own their lonely hearts or give their free will a chance.
ReplyDeleteSooo, a pure free market has never been tried. Why do you think that is? No cattle analogies please.
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ReplyDeleteWe would not have unemployment compensation if the free market allowed for a safety net. We certainly would not have worker's compensation if there weren't a mass of hapless workers injured in dangerous jobs who had to previously prove negligence without any degree of contributory negligence on the employee, would not have OASI if the markets had not crashed in the late 20s, leading to a dismal decade of soup lines and extreme poverty for the masses, would not have Obamacare (and worse, single-payer which the Dems still promise) were it not for exponentially increasing health care costs and the continued sloughing-off of the employer plans which is deemed too costly now for the management hot shots and the even hotter-shot stakeholders who neither lift, nor risk losing, a finger to reap their daily bonanza. You will come back with more about clueless cattle and remind of us the great risk the moneyed take with their hard won cash.
ReplyDeleteNo, I wasn't talking about what the employees "need." It starts with what arrangements those organizations that have particular functions they need performed find most suitable.
ReplyDeleteHealth care costs would find their natural level without interference in the relationship between buyer and seller.
ReplyDelete"Management hot shots" is an infantile generalization of the individuals in executive positions at profit-making organizations
ReplyDeletehttp://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell100903.asp
ReplyDeleteIt is painfully obvious that President Roosevelt himself had no serious understanding of economics, any more than his Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover, had. The difference was that Roosevelt had boundless self-confidence and essentially pushed some of the misconceptions of President Hoover to their logical extreme.
The grand myth for decades was that Hoover was unwilling to use the powers of government to come to the aid of the people during the Great Depression but that Roosevelt was more caring and did. In reality, both presidents represented a major break with the past by casting the federal government in the role of rescuer of the economy in its distress.
Scholarly studies of the history of these two administrations have in recent years come to see FDR's New Deal as Herbert Hoover's policies writ large and in bolder strokes.
Those who judge by intentions may say that this was a good thing. But those who judge by results point out that none of the previous depressions — during which the federal government essentially did nothing — lasted anywhere near as long as the depression in which the federal government decided that it had to "do something."
In "FDR's Folly," author Jim Powell spells out just what the Roosevelt administration did and what consequences followed. It tried to raise farm prices by destroying vast amounts of produce — at a time when hunger was a serious problem in the United States. It imposed minimum wage rates that priced unskilled labor out of jobs, at a time of massive unemployment.
Behind both policies was the belief that what was needed was more purchasing power and that this could be achieved by government policies to raise the prices received by farmers and workers. But prices do not automatically translate into greater purchasing power, unless people buy as much at higher prices as they would at lower prices — which they seldom do.
Then there were the monetary authorities contracting the money supply in the midst of the biggest depression in history — when the economy was showing some signs of revival, until their monetary contraction touched off another big downturn.
With policy after policy and program after program, "FDR's Folly" traces the high hopes and disastrous consequences. It would be funny, like the Keystone cops running into one another and falling down, except that millions of people were in economic desperation while this farce was being played out in Washington.
Perhaps worse than any specific policy under FDR was the atmosphere of uncertainty generated by incessant new experiments. Billions of dollars of investment were needed to create millions of jobs for the unemployed. But investors were reluctant to risk their money while the rules of the game were constantly being changed in Washington, amid strident anti-business rhetoric.
Some of the people who most admired and almost worshipped FDR — poor people and blacks, for example — were hurt the most by amateurish tinkering with the economy by Roosevelt's New Deal administration. This book is an education in itself, both in history and in economics. It is also a warning of what can happen when leaders are chosen for their charm, charisma and rhetoric.
The reason a pure free market has never been tried is that human beings, fallen creatures that they are, have always loved power, and government provides the perfect opportunity to acquire and use it.
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