Jacob Levy Hates People Who Are Intolerant!

He takes on Alan Wolfe:

Open University: [Wolfe's essay] is, as as I wrote at the time, "friend-enemy politics posing as an opposition to it. It is Wolfe who sees [the 2004] election as an apocalyptic contest between liberal democracy and its opponents rather than a competition between two legitimately opposed parties in an ongoing contestatory system."... The essay compares unlikes to unlikes in the service of equating liberalism to nice intellectual approaches and conservatism to thuggishness: "Schmitt had an explanation for why conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly fight for their ideas with much more aggressive self-certainty than, say, a hopeless liberal like Alan Wolfe." (I have an explanation, too: it rests on the distinction between talk-show hosts and thoughtful academics.)...

It's popular in the blogosphere to trot out the other side's most obnoxious and venomous and extreme spokespeople (Pat Robertson! Noam Chomsky! Ward Churchill! R.J. Rushdoony! Ann Coulter! Al Sharpton!) as a substitute for debate.... But a one-sided list of bad actors can't be used as evidence in an evaluation of which side has worse actors....

Here at OU Alan has been busy warning people against what he takes to be the censorious impulse involved in suggestions of anti-Semitism (regardless of underlying merit). [Karl] Schmitt was a Nazi. Throwing around claims like "conservatives have absorbed Schmitt's conception of politics much more thoroughly than liberals" seems to me at least as... uninviting of further discussion... as some of the claims that he's suggested illegitimately manifest a desire to censor....

I'm no conservative, but I found the claim that liberals do, and conservatives do not, care about process over outcomes, about precedent, about the boundedness of state power and the autonomy of society, and about engaging with their opponents as legitimate participants in debate very offputting. Linking that claim up with Schmitt made it all the worse.

My problem is that in America today I don't see many conservatives. I see plenty of Bush-apologists. But I don't see very many people who think that the traditions we have inherited deserve respect because they are our traditions. People who advance such arguments--that "women should be discriminated against" and "homosexuals should be beaten up" and "abortion should be banned" and "couples in movies should always have three feet on the floor" because that is the way things have been--always seem to stop short when the traditions that we have inherited are things like "workers should be unionized" or "taxes should be progressive" or "people should be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" or that those "quaint Geneva conventions" are the law of the land.

As Max Weber said, the materialist interpretation of history is not a streetcar that you can get on and off where you wish. Similarly, one would think that a conservative philosophical orientation is not something to be applied to support those past institutions and practices you like and to be ignored when past institutions and practices are things you don't like. But it is.

In fact, in practice, it always has. A conservative philosophical orientation has always been a streetcar to get you to where you already knew you wanted to go.

When Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France makes the argument that Britons should respect the organic political tradition of English liberty that has been inherited from the past, he whispers under his breath that the only reason we should respect the Wisdom of the Ancestors is that in this particular case Burke thinks that the Ancestors--not his personal ancestors, note--were wise.

Whenever Burke thought that the inherited political traditions were not wise, the fact that they were the inherited Wisdom of the Ancestors cut no ice with him at all. It was one of the traditions and institutions of Englishmen that they would conquer, torture, and rob wogs whenever and wherever they were strong enough to do so. That tradition cut no ice with Edmund Burke when he was trying to prosecute Warren Hastings. It was one of the traditions and institutions of Englishmen that all power flowed to Westminster. That tradition cut no ice with Burke when he was arguing for conciliation with and a devolution of power to the American colonists. It was one of the traditions and institutions of Englishmen that Ireland was to be plundered and looted for the benefit of upwardly-mobile English peers-to-be. That tradition, too, cut no ice with Burke.

Even in Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke doesn't argue that Frenchmen should build on their own political traditions--the traditions of Richelieu and Louis XIV, that is. He argues--well, let's let him talk:

Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France: We [in Britain] procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age; and on account of those from whom they are descended.... You [in France] might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution... suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. ... In your old [E]states [General] you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed; you had all that combination, and all that opposition of interests, you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe.... Through that diversity of members and interests, general liberty had as many securities as there were separate views.... [B]y pressing down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy, the separate parts would have been prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places.

You had all these advantages in your antient [E]states [General].... If the last generations of your country appeared without much lustre in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom.... Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the French as... a nation of low-born servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789.... [Y]ou would not have been content to be represented as a gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage....

Would it not... have been wiser to have you thought... a generous and gallant nation, long misled... by... fidelity, honour, and loyalty... that you were not enslaved through any illiberal or servile disposition... [but] by a principle of public spirit, and that it was your country you worshipped, in the person of your king? Had you made it to be understood... that you were resolved to resume your ancient [liberties,] privileges[, and immunities]... you would have given new examples of wisdom to the world. You would have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed despotism from the earth...

Burke's argument is not that France in 1789 should have followed its ancestral traditions. Burke's argument is, instead, that France in 1789 should have dug into its past until it found a moment when institutions were better than in 1788, and drawn upon that usable past in order to buttress the present revolutionary moment. This isn't an intellectual argument about how to decide what institutions are good. It is a practical-political argument about how to create good institutions and then buttress and secure them by making them facts on the ground.

What are good institutions? Burke sounds like Madison: checks-and-balances, separation of powers, rights of the subject, limitations on the state. Burke's views on what good institutions are are Enlightenment views--that branch of the Enlightenment that took people as they are and politics as a science, that is, rather than the branch that took people as Rousseau hoped they might someday be and politics as the striking of an oppositional pose. Because he finds that the English past is usable as a support for his Enlightenment-driven views, Burke makes conservative arguments in Reflections. But whenever conservative arguments lead where Burke doesn't want to go--to Richelieu or Louis XIV or the plunder of Ireland or the Star Chamber or Warren Hastings or imperial centralization--Burke doesn't make them. England's inheritance of institutions and practices is to be respected wherever it supports Burke's conception of properly-ordered liberty, and ignored wherever it does not.

You see, for all that Alan Wolfe is an intolerant wolf in tolerant sheep's clothing in his attack on conservatives for being intolerant, Alan Wolfe is right. Conservativism is at its base a form of intellectual thuggishness: a hitting-one's-adversary-on-the-head with the blackjack of tradition when doing so seems likely to gain one a momentary rhetorical advantage. That warped it at its origin, and warps it today.

Comments

[chris]

Exactly. 100% agreed.

[John Emerson]

"True conservatives" should have started disengaging themselves from the Movement Republicans, the Bush crime family, and the WWIV advocates a long time ago. Few have done so, and the ones who did now count as Democrats.

After the shit hits the fan, and when things have finally settled down, I don't see how these guys can possibly recover their reputations. If Bush loses, those who supposedly supported Bush "with reservations" are going to look disgusting. And if Bush wins, he won't need any fancy-pants intellectual Schmitt types.

They say that Schmitt was not happy with the way he was treated by the Nazis. He expected to be their main man, but they really didn't need him for anything -- and boy, was he miffed!

[Robert Waldmann]

You omit the oldest tradition trampled by Bush -- the great write of Habeus Corpus. What would Burke have written if he had heard Alberto Gonzales argue that the writ is not a right ? I can imagine and I regret imagined Burke's racist reference to the Attorney General's "maroonish" complexion.

However, it is quite clear that Burke would agree with Wolfe and DeLong and not with Levy. In fact, I am fairly sure that he would consider a resort to arms necessary to save English traditions in the New World in 2004 as he did not in 1776. That would make him a true conservative and easily more extreme than Ward Churchill. I disagree with imaginary Burke, thinking our traditions strong enough to endure even Bush with no need for desperate measures (just as I chide him for political incorrectness).

I am a bit disappointed that he was a man of the enlightenment enough to not only worship Newton but also take his formulas out of context and pretend that they remained valid when shorn of their meaning "you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe.." I stand in solidarity (Newtonian concept given a wholly new meaning by Rousseau) with romantic conservatives who denounce such nonsense.

However, while I consider Burke politically incorrect, over sympathetic to revolution and physics worshipping, I'm not sure I buy into your critique. You claim, in effect, that "Conservativism is at its base a form of intellectual thuggishness: a hitting-one's-adversary-on-the-head with the blackjack of tradition when doing so seems likely to gain one a momentary rhetorical advantage. That warped it at its origin, and warps it today" because "[i]t was one of the traditions and institutions of Englishmen that they would conquer, torture, and rob wogs whenever and wherever they were strong enough to do so" yet "[t]hat tradition cut no ice with Edmund Burke"

Odd definition of thuggishness demonstrating it's pressence from excessive respect for "wogs". It is true that the original Thugs were from the Indian subcontinent. However, they did not hit their victims with the Black Jack of tradition but rather choked off debate (and life) with traditional garrots forcing their victims to endure the agony of suffocation. Clearly this has nothing to do with those Americans who claim to be conservatives.

[Touche...]

[Robert Waldmann]

You omit the oldest tradition trampled by Bush -- the great write of Habeus Corpus. What would Burke have written if he had heard Alberto Gonzales argue that the writ is not a right ? I can imagine and I regret imagined Burke's racist reference to the Attorney General's "maroonish" complexion.

However, it is quite clear that Burke would agree with Wolfe and DeLong and not with Levy. In fact, I am fairly sure that he would consider a resort to arms necessary to save English traditions in the New World in 2004 as he did not in 1776. That would make him a true conservative and easily more extreme than Ward Churchill. I disagree with imaginary Burke, thinking our traditions strong enough to endure even Bush with no need for desperate measures (just as I chide him for political incorrectness).

I am a bit disappointed that he was a man of the enlightenment enough to not only worship Newton but also take his formulas out of context and pretend that they remained valid when shorn of their meaning "you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe.." I stand in solidarity (Newtonian concept given a wholly new meaning by Rousseau) with romantic conservatives who denounce such nonsense.

However, while I consider Burke politically incorrect, over sympathetic to revolution and physics worshipping, I'm not sure I buy into your critique. You claim, in effect, that "Conservativism is at its base a form of intellectual thuggishness: a hitting-one's-adversary-on-the-head with the blackjack of tradition when doing so seems likely to gain one a momentary rhetorical advantage. That warped it at its origin, and warps it today" because "[i]t was one of the traditions and institutions of Englishmen that they would conquer, torture, and rob wogs whenever and wherever they were strong enough to do so" yet "[t]hat tradition cut no ice with Edmund Burke"

Odd definition of thuggishness demonstrating it's pressence from excessive respect for "wogs". It is true that the original Thugs were from the Indian subcontinent. However, they did not hit their victims with the Black Jack of tradition but rather choked off debate (and life) with traditional garrots forcing their victims to endure the agony of suffocation. Clearly this has nothing to do with those Americans who claim to be conservatives.

[hari]

What you guys are missing is that in our 21st cent. globalization has given a totally different twist to monopoly of power - however you define it - which Britain enjoyed at Burke's time.

Westminister was the Power Centre of the establishment (ie. conservatives).

US Republicans have no concept of ideology, as in (UK) centuries back. They only understand the concept of power and how to use it.

Modern statecraft teaches us (eg. Sweden) that even conservatives can be "liberal" on social issues that matter for society-at-large.

Consequently, the type of cultural misfits you give rise to - due to the nature of US media and its profit motive - is not readily duplicated here, in EU.

May be, US culture is still young and developing compared to the European landscape today. But the contradictions in US culture which annoys the spirit of mutual respect, here, is manifest.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/opinion/11sun1.html?ex=1331269200&en=7fadb29db1375a1e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

March 11, 2007

The Failed Attorney General

During the hearing on his nomination as attorney general, Alberto Gonzales said he understood the difference between the job he held — President Bush's in-house lawyer — and the job he wanted, which was to represent all Americans as their chief law enforcement officer and a key defender of the Constitution. Two years later, it is obvious Mr. Gonzales does not have a clue about the difference.

He has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush's imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush's rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.

First, there was Mr. Gonzales's lame op-ed article in USA Today trying to defend the obviously politically motivated firing of eight United States attorneys, which he dismissed as an "overblown personnel matter." Then his inspector general exposed the way the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been abusing yet another unnecessary new power that Mr. Gonzales helped wring out of the Republican-dominated Congress in the name of fighting terrorism.

The F.B.I. has been using powers it obtained under the Patriot Act to get financial, business and telephone records of Americans by issuing tens of thousands of "national security letters," a euphemism for warrants that are issued without any judicial review or avenue of appeal. The administration said that, as with many powers it has arrogated since the 9/11 attacks, this radical change was essential to fast and nimble antiterrorism efforts, and it promised to police the use of the letters carefully.

But like so many of the administration's promises, this one evaporated before the ink on those letters could dry. The F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, admitted Friday that his agency had used the new powers improperly.

Mr. Gonzales does not directly run the F.B.I., but it is part of his department and has clearly gotten the message that promises (and civil rights) are meant to be broken.

It was Mr. Gonzales, after all, who repeatedly defended Mr. Bush's decision to authorize warrantless eavesdropping on Americans' international calls and e-mail. He was an eager public champion of the absurd notion that as commander in chief during a time of war, Mr. Bush can ignore laws that he thinks get in his way. Mr. Gonzales was disdainful of any attempt by Congress to examine the spying program, let alone control it.

The attorney general helped formulate and later defended the policies that repudiated the Geneva Conventions in the war against terror, and that sanctioned the use of kidnapping, secret detentions, abuse and torture....

[anne]

Hari:

"US Republicans have no concept of ideology, as in (UK) centuries back. They only understand the concept of power and how to use it."

Interesting comment.

[Robert Waldmann]

Hey hari have you ever heard of Silvio Berlusconi ?

I admit he is not as violent as Bush but the media scene was much worse here where he controlled all national networks than there where Murdoch has one and was never prime minister. One saving grace, Berlusconi couldn't appoint or fire procuratori capi, that is, those who correspond to US attorneys.

p.s. sorry about double posting.

[gordon]

However selective Burke might appear to be, he certainly was consistent when it came to criticising the behaviour of foreigners. It was (and is) one of "the traditions and institutions of Englishmen" to insist that other people should be more like Englishmen. And that is a tradition that Burke didn't even think of violating.

[Bruce Wilder]

I'm confused by this post. Are you giving Burke as an example of conservative? He was not a conservative, you know?. Burke was a Whig, a proto-liberal, if you will, (as were the American Founding Fathers).

Burke favors a concept of ordered liberty arrived at by a process of reason, but it is reason well aware of the limitations of reason, and respectful of experience. Liberalism inherited that spirit, and it is a spirit, not of opportunistic rhetoric, but, rather, a spirit never too sure that it is entirely right. It is that combination of idealism and clear-eyed practical skepticism, which made liberalism the one, most successful ideology in modern human history.

Conservatism is not an ideology, at all, but simply service to vested interests and established power. The conservatives of Burke's day were the Tories, loyal to the King, as the fount of all honor (and not a few bribes).

[Slocum]

I'm not a conservative, but I will say that I'd be more worked up over Bush's war-on-terror related infringements on liberties if I thought they were likely to be durable rather than ephemeral, but my feeling is that they'll disappear with the end of the Bush presidency.

I'm much more disturbed by the excesses of the war on drugs and the militarization of the police with the increased use of SWAT teams and no-knock raids. But these excesses did not begin with Bush and don't even seem to have all that much to do with the Federal government. When a majority of U.S. citizens think it's OK to make high-school kids pee in a cup to play in the band or for shock troops in fatigues and night-vision goggles to burst through doors in the middle of the night to catch pot dealers--well, that kind of crap bothers me a lot more because I don't see any real sign it's on the way out. Clinton was just as bad as Bush has been, and I don't see any candidates running on either side that promise to be any better -- just who do you support if you want to see and end to the war-on-drugs and all the related civil liberty violations?

[Kaleberg]

Conservatism has had this problem for a while. Consider George Orwell who noted that "those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists." This is from his essay on Kipling.

Orwell's note on "the lesser breeds without the law" is still apropos.

[Joe S.]

I think that Brad was unfair to Burke. Brad defines a conservative as a reactionary, and blames Burke for not being a consistent reactionary. But Burke was an Enlightenment conservative: not at all reactionary.

Burke's conservatism was of a presumptive variety: the old ways are likely to be the best ways, and we should be slow to abandon them. "Many of our [English] men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them." But that doesn't mean that all general prejudices are wise. As Brad points out, Burke was quite happy to challenge them when they clearly led to horrible results.

[piotr]

French monarchy had many admirable traits, but it was not amenable to gradual improvement that Burke would advocate. It was justified by the divine right of the Kings to rule (never Queens! perish the thought) which was easy to prove by observing that the King can heal with His touch.

Highly educated populace could not help but notice that the subject of Divine Grace is an idiot (not a nasty piece of work, o no, but surely an idiot) without a trace of the healing ability. Nonsense can be tolerated in the name of tradition, but you can pile it only so high before the edifice crumbles.

Accidentally, it seems that our "faith based community" is waning. Did people start to notice that George the Younger has not trace of healing ability?

[Colin Danby]

As an epistemological conservative Burke seems consistent and smart; Skidelsky's Keynes bio makes an interesting link to Keynesian uncertainty via a schoolboy Keynes paper on Burke.

There's also an implicit sociology in Burke, a theory of how institutions and ranks and roles help people know how to behave toward each other. Smith makes similar points. Burke sees the cultural thickness, the embeddedness, of institutions, and asks good questions about how you're going to replace that. (Hence plunder does not work as a Burkean institution.) I don't have the texts at hand, but I don't think his argumentation is quite as opportunistic as Brad's 5th paragraph claims, and you could draw some principles to supplement the points in Brad's penultimate paragraph.

But I know very little, speaking of epistemological conservatism. There must be some Burke scholars out there.

[Bruce Wilder]

When I read the first couple of sentences of Brad's commentary, I thought for a moment he was going to make quite a different point, perhaps the point that conservatives -- real reactionary conservatives -- cannot generally make their views clear, because such a course would preclude them from power. Consequently, conservative political rhetoric tends to have a high component of spin, misdirection or deception built-in.

It may be, in deference to Jacob Levy's sensibilities, which require symmetry of opprobrium, that we should admit that liberals are sometimes given to overoptimistic idealism, or some such, but liberals, generally, do not have to disguise their desiderata.

Liberals do have to build up some concept of their desiderata, however, and this requires intellectual effort, refined judgement, etc.

Conservatives have quite a different burden. The conservative desiderata are generally dictated by the existing pattern of vested interest, and opportunities for kleptocratic governance. All the intellectual effort goes into fashioning attractive and fashionable clothes for what is, always, at base a naked grab for additional power and wealth for the already wealthy and powerful, or a desperate defense of power and wealth previouly secured.

Viewing conservatism in this light, no one would mistake Burke for a conservative.

[Count Cant]

Max Weber's street-car line:

I think he may have lifted that from a line of Schopenhauer's on the ontological argument in its causal variant.

(I.e.,roughly: "every effect must have a cause distinct from itself; this rock moves because my hand moved it, and that in turn because my soul moved it, and that in turn because animated by progenitors. But since this cannot go ad infinitum, there must be some causa sui, and this we all know as God.")

Schopenhauer's quip was something to the effect that the causal principle was like a cab for hire that the theologian rides to his desired destination and then dismisses.

And speaking of thuggish invocations of traditions that are forgot whenever convenient: anyone here remember "Bush v. Gore"?

[John Emerson]

I've recently been asking people to imagine two Movement Republicans arguing about Burke vs. Hayek (for example). It may be that some of them have a memorized schtick (Bill Bennett, a few others) but a high proportion of them are con men, boodlers, thugs, or religious fanatics.

You can even watch the decline in conservativism within families, for example the Kristols or the Bellows, and maybe even the Podhoretzes (if you posit a talented father for Norman).

[begriffdesbegriffschen]

These points about Burke's essential mendacity are all quite good and well taken. (Although I would quibble with you a bit -- he did *change his views* after Revolutionary France began to head south, as is well attested, so I don't think it is fair to charge him with all of the Whiggery that you do.) May I ask why you always change the the "C" in "Carl Schmitt" to a "K"? While I deeply admire your orthographic purism for, e.g., Greek names, Schmitt's given name is actually spelled with a "C" in his native German. (I would include the link to amazon.de, but the spam filter would probably ax it.)

[Gene O'Grady]

I can't speak for anyone else, but the reason I typically change the C to K in German names is that there was a change in orthographic conventions somewhere in the nineteenth century and I assume that adjustment to what I believe is the modern standard is usually appropriate. Since my German is not all that good, although I did once catalogue many 19th century German language minutiae, I may make mistakes.

Interestingly, in Greek a language I know well, my ortographic purism is basically inoperative.

[Count Cant]

and thus reno is revealed as someone who just, fundamentally, does not understand the idea of principles.

I'm glad you told me this before I had you over to dinner; now I can be sure to count my spoons.

(and theft from Dr. Johnson does not count as theft; it is merely the use of a natural resource, and one can always be confident of leaving enough and as good for others.)

[Jacob T. Levy]

Oh, dear. I thought you were going in a different direction, too-- to the critique that Bush-apologists actually do all the things that Wolfe says conservatives as such do.

Instead I think you went someplace strange. You just equated conservatism with traditionalism, and noticed that there haven't ever been many substance-free traditionalists. True enough; and there've been almost as few substance-free 'progressives' who counted just any alteration in the status quo as moral progress, even though there have been both conservatives and progressives who have seemed to claim that they did those things.

But "Conservativism is at its base a form of intellectual thuggishness: a hitting-one's-adversary-on-the-head with the blackjack of tradition when doing so seems likely to gain one a momentary rhetorical advantage. That warped it at its origin, and warps it today." doesn't follow. All that follows is that conservatism isn't simplistic proceduralist-traditionalism, which is true but not, I think, very interesting. Is there any healthy political tradition or mindset that you can identify that you think does serve just one master principle in a thoroughly consistent way? If not, are all of them mere thuggishness?

Burke was a traditionalist in some large part *because* he was a substantive liberal. He thought that opinion and custom provided some of the strongest constraints on power, and that power loosed from those constraints might be loosed from all of them. That, at the extreme, was the Hastings regime-- pure power, unconstrained by either the domestic norms of England or the domestic norms of India. That, too, was the imperial government in Massachusetts by 1775. And, he thought, it was the affirmative principled commitment of the French Revolutionaries, delcaring freedom from custom and freedom from constraint in the same breath.

But the posited relationship between custom and power was an empirical generalization, a theory but not a dogma. And when custom itself served power, that theory can't by itself tell you where to go. As you note, he often rejected custom and power when they went together (though by no means always). But that doesn't at all mean that custom was playing only an opportunistic part in the theory. It was part of a joint function that told him what was first-best (restrained power, with the restraints trustworthy because grounded in custom) and what was worst (unconstrained power, unconstrainable by custom, either because custom was shattered or because it was imperial power which got to operate in something of a moral vaccuum). It wasn't by itself a theory of the other two boxes in the matrix; there, as he said, we must fall back on judgment and circumstance. But it was an honest theory about the range it described, and it illuminated things about power that weren't otherwise well-understood.

In short: Burke's conservatism, which was not a proceduralist-traditionalism, was what *allowed* him to perceive and understand the abuses in India, America, and Ireland. Those aren't counterexamples to his conservatism but instantiations of it.

You're seeming to rule out the possibility of an honest conservatism. Even Mill didn't go so far, and he was faced with a pretty dreadful generation of conservatives. Emerson knew better. Indeed, I know that you know better.

Finally: no, I wasn't indulging in Lehrerism-cum-Broderism, or demanding equaliy of opprobrium. I was calling for likes to be compared with likes and for comparative questions to be answered with real comparisons. The question thus posed may well reveal an answer about one side being more incivil, more intolerant, or even more political in the Wolfe-Schmitt sense. Indeed I think that the Bush-era mainstream Republicans certainly are worse offenders than the Bush-era mainstream Democrats (judging respective extremes is harder). But Wolfe's essay gave us no new fair reason to reach that conclusion.

[joachim voth]

To dismiss Schmitt as a Nazi is plain silly. Shall we dismiss Bodin because he wrote a guide to hunting witches?

[anne]

"Shall we dismiss Bodin because he wrote a guide to hunting witches?"

Of course we should dismiss Jean Bodin, postively, absolutely, can there be even the slightest doubt?

[anne]

Carl Schmitt was a Nazis early on, till the end, and if there was a regret we know nothing of the regret. Of course, we dismiss such a "thinker."

[anne]

Herein we find modern American conservatism:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/03/paul_krugman_ov.html#comments

March 12, 2007

Paul Krugman: Overblown Personnel Matters
Edited by Mark Thoma

In his last column, Paul Krugman highlighted research showing that Democrats have been investigated by federal prosecutors far more often than Republicans since the Bush administration came to power, an indication that political pressure may have been applied inappropriately. This column looks at the "overblown personnel matter" involving the recent firing of federal prosecutors, an action that again raises questions about the role politics played in the process, and whether the political pressure that was applied and exercised was proper:

NY Times: Nobody is surprised to learn that the Justice Department was lying when it claimed that recently fired federal prosecutors were dismissed for poor performance. Nor is anyone surprised to learn that White House political operatives were pulling the strings.

What is surprising is how fast the truth is emerging about what Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, dismissed just five days ago as an "overblown personnel matter."

Sources told Newsweek that the list of prosecutors to be fired was drawn up by Mr. Gonzales's chief of staff, "with input from the White House." And Allen Weh, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party, told McClatchy News that he twice sought Karl Rove's help ... in getting David Iglesias, the state's U.S. attorney, fired for failing to indict Democrats. "He's gone," he claims Mr. Rove said.

After that story hit the wires, Mr. Weh claimed that his conversation ... took place after the decision to fire Mr. Iglesias had already been taken. Even if that's true, Mr. Rove should have told Mr. Weh that political interference in matters of justice is out of bounds...

And the thuggishness seems to have gone beyond firing prosecutors who didn't deliver the goods for the G.O.P. One of the fired prosecutors was — as he saw it — threatened with retaliation by a senior Justice Department official if he discussed his dismissal in public. Another was rejected for a federal judgeship after administration officials, including then-White House counsel Harriet Miers, informed him that he had "mishandled" the 2004 governor's race in Washington, won by a Democrat, by failing to pursue vote-fraud charges.

As I said, none of this is surprising. The Bush administration has been purging, politicizing and de-professionalizing federal agencies since the day it came to power. But in the past it was able to do its business with impunity; this time Democrats have subpoena power, and the old slime-and-defend strategy isn't working. ...

Still, a lot of loose ends have yet to be pulled. We now know exactly why Mr. Iglesias was fired, but still have to speculate about some of the other cases — in particular, that of Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for Southern California.

Ms. Lam had already successfully prosecuted Representative Randy Cunningham, a Republican. Just two days before leaving office she got a grand jury to indict Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor, and Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the former third-ranking official at the C.I.A. ... And she was investigating Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, the former head of the House Appropriations Committee.

Was Ms. Lam dumped to protect corrupt Republicans? The administration says no, a denial that, in light of past experience, is worth precisely nothing. ...

What we really need — and it will take a lot of legwork — is a portrait of the actual behavior of prosecutors across the country. Did they launch spurious investigations of Democrats, as I suggested last week may have happened in New Jersey? Did they slow-walk investigations of Republican scandals, like the phone-jamming case in New Hampshire?

In other words, the truth about that "overblown personnel matter" has only begun to be told. The good news is that for the first time in six years, it's possible to hope that all the facts about a Bush administration scandal will come out in Congressional hearings — or, if necessary, in the impeachment trial of Alberto Gonzales.

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/opinion/09krugman.html

March 9, 2007

Department of Injustice
By PAUL KRUGMAN

For those of us living in the Garden State, the growing scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors immediately brought to mind the subpoenas that Chris Christie, the former Bush "Pioneer" who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, issued two months before the 2006 election — and the way news of the subpoenas was quickly leaked to local news media.

The subpoenas were issued in connection with allegations of corruption on the part of Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat who seemed to be facing a close race at the time. Those allegations appeared, on their face, to be convoluted and unconvincing, and Mr. Menendez claimed that both the investigation and the leaks were politically motivated.

Mr. Christie's actions might have been all aboveboard. But given what we've learned about the pressure placed on federal prosecutors to pursue dubious investigations of Democrats, Mr. Menendez's claims of persecution now seem quite plausible.

In fact, it's becoming clear that the politicization of the Justice Department was a key component of the Bush administration's attempt to create a permanent Republican lock on power. Bear in mind that if Mr. Menendez had lost, the G.O.P. would still control the Senate....

[anne]

Therein, and moreso in the lunatic tragedy of Iraq, is modern American conservatism.

[Jacob T. Levy]

"To dismiss Schmitt as a Nazi is plain silly. Shall we dismiss Bodin because he wrote a guide to hunting witches?"

To the latter: no; his political theory seems to have been mostly independent of his religious weirdness.

To the former: we shouldn't *dismiss* Schmitt, and he was an important and profound thinker. But in evaluating his theory and deciding what to make of it, I do think that the fact that the theorist of unlimited and unlimitable executive power who was a bitter critic of the weakness of rule of law-bound parliamentary democracies, and who theorized politics as being at its core concerned with the willingness to use lethal force against those against whom we define ourselves was also sometimes a Nazi has a legitimate effect on how we view the upshot of that theory...

[anne]

Now, so that we are perfectly clear, a Nazis from beginning to end, a Nazis showing not the least sense of what it meant to be a Nazis, not the least sense ever, there can be no "important and profound thought" there, only perversity passing as thought.

Wish an important and profound thinker, the look to Fritz Stern. There is a thinker to honor.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/06/nyregion/06profile.html

January 6, 2005

Warning From a Student of Democracy's Collapse
By CHRIS HEDGES

FRITZ STERN, a refugee from Hitler's Germany and a leading scholar of European history, startled several of his listeners when he warned in a speech about the danger posed in this country by the rise of the Christian right. In his address in November, just after he received a prize presented by the German foreign minister, he told his audience that Hitler saw himself as "the instrument of providence" and fused his "racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity."

"Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics," he said of prewar Germany, "but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas."

Dr. Stern's speech, given during a ceremony at which he got the prize from the Leo Baeck Institute, a center focused on German Jewish history, was certainly provocative. The fascism of Nazi Germany belongs to a world so horrendous it often seems to defy the possibility of repetition or analogy. But Dr. Stern, 78, the author of books like "The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology" and university professor emeritus at Columbia University, has devoted a lifetime to analyzing how the Nazi barbarity became possible. He stops short of calling the Christian right fascist but his decision to draw parallels, especially in the uses of propaganda, was controversial.

"When I saw the speech my eyes lit up," said John R. MacArthur, whose book "Second Front" examines wartime propaganda. "The comparison between the propagandistic manipulation and uses of Christianity, then and now, is hidden in plain sight. No one will talk about it. No one wants to look at it."

Dr. Stern was a schoolboy in 1933 when Hitler was appointed the German chancellor. He ran home from school that January afternoon clutching a special edition of the newspaper to deliver to his father, a prominent physician.

"I was young," he said, "but I knew it was very bad news."

The street fighting in his native Breslau (now Wroclaw in Poland) between Communists and Nazis, the collapse of German democracy and the ruthless suppression of all opposition marked his childhood, and were images and experiences that would propel him forward as a scholar.

"I saw one of the last public demonstrations against Hitler," he said. "Men, women and children walked through the street and chanted 'Hunger! Hunger! Hunger!' "

His paternal grandparents had converted to Christianity. His parents were baptized at birth, as were Mr. Stern and his older sister. But this did not save the Sterns from persecution. Nazi racial laws still classified them as Jews.

"It was only Nazi anti-Semitism that made me conscious of my Jewish heritage," he said. "I had been brought up in a secular Christian fashion, celebrating Christmas and Easter. My father had to explain it to me." ...

[anne]

Enough of apologizing for falsity anf inhumanity, for there is trueness and compassion enough to look to and there is our guide. Look to compassion and possibly in future we will not find ourselves in such a lunatic's tragedy.

[anne]

Jacob Levy:

"I do think that the fact that the theorist of unlimited and unlimitable executive power who was a bitter critic of the weakness of rule of law-bound parliamentary democracies, and who theorized politics as being at its core concerned with the willingness to use lethal force against those against whom we define ourselves was also sometimes [sic] a Nazi has a legitimate effect on how we view the upshot of that theory..."

This, of course, is the essence of what is is to be a Nazis "thinker."

[anne]

Ah; there is a scene in a limousine when Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza are being mistaken driven to a Nazi rally near Madison Square Garden and George is explaining how was being ooogled by a long-legged blond. "She's a Nazis, George, a Nazis," Jerry says. "But she's a cute Nazis," George answers.

[andres]

Brad's too long-winded here, and a little unfair to _real_ conservatism as opposed to its actual exponents. Honest conservatism is nothing more than a psychological preference, born from caution and skepticism, for the political status quo. This preference is often irrational but should nevertheless be consistent, and so it is actually held by relatively few people.

Too many Republicans who call themselves conservatives are in fact reactionaries who wish to undo many of the reforms that they have inherited from the past--eg Social Security. And many others are not conservatives but militarists at best/fascists at worst of the sort who led Germany into World War I. And from that I will not budge.

[Bruce Wilder]

andres: "Honest conservatism is nothing more than a psychological preference, born from caution and skepticism, for the political status quo."

Of course, that's the definition of a political temperment, which might be usefully opposed to a "progressivist" temperment. It isn't a political philosophy, program or party. I would be interested in whether "reactionary" is not also a political temperment.

If we were intending define conservatism in terms of something more like a philosophy or program, then I would think we would associate it with authoritarianism and an affection for aristocracy, and hierarchy.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/opinion/l03iraq.html

Is It Time to Leave Iraq?

To the Editor:

"Empty Words on Iraq":

My son, a 19-year-old American marine, is scheduled to be sent on the "deadly fool's errand" to Iraq in September. I live with constant fear that he, too, will be pointlessly injured, maimed or killed in this "obvious quagmire."

Unspeakable horrors, as in the town of Haditha, are creating victims of both innocent Iraqis and young Americans being exploited for their patriotic ideals by leaders who support the war but don't, in fact, support the troops.

I have opposed the war since its beginning. Now, three years on, with my own son's participation in it looming, I'm living the ultimate nightmare where I'm screaming and no one — but no one — is listening.

Donna J. Anton
Hayle, England, June 2, 2006

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/18/opinion/l18iraq.html

The Relentless Tragedy Called Iraq

To the Editor:

"Insurgent Bombs Directed at G.I.'s Increase in Iraq":

I can't help but compare your headline with President Bush's bizarre remarks on Wednesday: "There's some good people in our country who believe we should cut and run. They're not bad people when they say that, they're decent people":

"President Joins in G.O.P. Attacks on Democrats About Terrorism".

You better believe I'm a decent person — and a decent mother whose 19-year-old United States Marine son is being deployed to Iraq next month to face a deadly, targeted anti-American insurgency that has nothing to do with the "war on terror."

Why should my son, or any other mother's son, be sacrificed in a mounting civil war because it's not politically advantageous for the Bush administration to admit that its Iraq policy has failed?

My decency is suffused with bitterness.

Donna J. Anton
Hayle, England, Aug. 17, 2006

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/10/opinion/l10iraq.html

This Time, a True Strategy for Iraq?

To the Editor:

"Quagmire of the Vanities":

Paul Krugman is right: gambling on the Iraq war is much easier "when the lives at stake are those of other people's children." Except that it is my son, a 20-year-old United States marine stationed in Falluja, whose life is being gambled with.

It is my son whose blood may yet protect the egos of men who won't admit that they were wrong. And it is my son whose 3,000-plus comrades-in-service have already paid the ultimate price for fighting another nation's civil war.

After four years of pointless, fruitless, uninstigated combat, if President Bush indeed escalates the "sacrifice" of other parents' beloved children — against all reason, against the will of the electorate and without any personal sacrifice to call his own — it would not be vanity. It is called tyranny.

Donna J. Anton
Hayle, England, Jan. 8, 2007

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/opinion/l12herbert.html

Is This 'Supporting the Troops'?

To the Editor:

My 20-year-old son is nearing the end of his first deployment to Iraq with the United States Marines. Only a few days ago, we learned that he received a commendation for initiative and bravery for pulling wounded and dead Iraqi soldiers out of a bus hit by a roadside bomb during a recent midnight convoy.

Specifically, he was recognized for "tirelessly moving multiple wounded Iraqis to the casualty collection point and loading them on the medivac helicopters ... and also volunteering to help collect the dead and ensuring that they were evaluated."

It's bad enough that my son is risking his life fighting a war that was waged on lies and deception. How infinitely more galling it is to realize that his value to the Bush administration wouldn't even merit decent care at Walter Reed if he were wounded or disabled.

Bob Herbert is right about the troops being shortchanged: it's something I never thought that America would do either.

My son has been commended for extending a degree of professionalism, respect and devotion to duty in aiding wounded Iraqi soldiers that the United States government doesn't extend to its own troops.

The horror, the horror.

Donna J. Anton
Hayle, England, March 8, 2007

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/world/middleeast/12cnd-cheney.html?hp

March 12, 2007

Cheney Assails Those Favoring Iraq Drawdown
By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON — Vice President Dick Cheney offered an aggressive defense of the Bush administration's Iraq strategy today, asserting that those in Congress who pursue a gradual drawdown of American forces are "undermining" the troops and that a withdrawal would represent "a full validation of the Al Qaeda strategy." ...

[anon]

Aristophanes was the last respectable conservative. Burke was almost in his class, but not as fun to read.

[andres]

Bruce Wilder: "If we were intending define conservatism in terms of something more like a philosophy or program, then I would think we would associate it with authoritarianism and an affection for aristocracy, and hierarchy."

I agree completely, but then we would have to accept that Edmund Burke, who is supposedly the intellectual founding father of conservatism, was no conservative at all, given the points Brad mentioned. Conservatism would then cease to be an intellectual position on politics and would be nothing more than a naked assertion of might-makes-right (as expounded by Thrasymakos in The Republic, Brad's favorite dialogue perspective), given that all authoritarianism, aristocracy and hierarchy were born from the swords of barbarian conquerors.

[Dave]

What I find ironic is that many traditional views of how to order human society are based in the idea that what works for the animals in the barnyard should also scale to people in the city -- yet if one takes this approach too literally and uses modern statistically based agricultural practices, they tend to lead more to the New Deal than the Ancien Regime.

For instance, a fondness for hierarchy and precedence is reminiscent of a pecking order (some animals are more equal than others). Yet where the modern conservative seems to believe that, for N animals, one ought to set out N-1 piles of food (to spur competition), a better yield (with less wastage due to conflict) occurs when one sets out N+1 piles instead.

Similarly, when cattle finishers attempted to save on feed by restricting intake (so the cattle would "leave nothing on the table" and so make efficient use of this relatively cheap input), it was discovered that their front-end savings were eaten up on the back end when the stressed cattle weren't very well marbled and hence graded out poorly.

:: :: ::

The right of the people to be secure ... against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated -- unless data mining for vital national security interests.

No animal shall sleep in a bed -- with sheets.

[Paul G. Brown]

It's all very well to say, as Burke and others do, that traditional structures (ie. the status quo) deserves more than neutral weight in deciding how best to organize ourselves. But the problem is that, well, things change, and nothing in Burke's doctrine provides any guidance about how to judge between possible changes.

In any sufficiently long history one can find evidence for any number of 'traditions' and 'institutional systems'. It's picking from among them, that's hard.

[Bruce Moomaw]

I think nothing Levy says in his new comment changes the fact that the valuable part of Burke's thought has nothing to do with the supposed value of "tradition" or "custom" in themselves -- it's simply his common-sense revulsion against tyrannies motivated by Utopian theories, and against the idea so many pseudo-intellectuals have had that it is somehow possible to create a benevolent dictatorship, which it is most definitely not.

[Timothy Burke]

One objection I have here is that I read another point in Burke in the Reflections, rather similar to what Bruce Moomaw describes above. There's a selectivity about what Burke regards as an admirable tradition, certainly. But there's also a theory of directed change over time in Burke which suggests that the more ambitious and wide-reaching a desired progressive or emancipatory change might be, and the more sudden the time scale of proposed change is, the less likely it is to achieve its aims. Burke, as I understand him, is suggesting in part that progressive or emancipatory politics has to derive from the organic substrate of a given society, and not deviate in some startling or disjunctive manner from those organice precedents.

This is the aspect of Burke's thought that I think could properly be called "conservative liberalism" rather than reactionary conservatism per se. It would be correct to point out that most contemporary American conservatives are anything but Burkean in this respect, certainly.

[IM]

A few words about Carl Schmitt: He wasn`t strictly speaking a Nazi. He did lack the race-based thinking of the racist and anti-semitic wing of the german right. He defected to the nazis only in 1933 because of opportunismen and didn`t really prosper -he coverted to late. He had much influence on the mainstream right in Germay after 1945, especially on legal theorists.
You have to remember on the other hand that Schmitt was not a conservative in the tradional pre 1914 sense. Like most younger members of the 1920s german right, he was a revolutionary conservative. No longer believing in authority, Monarchy, church and landed interests like the old right they were hyper-nationalists, believed in war for wars sake and had a fascination with totalitarian states.
So to compare the thinking of the young right in the weimar republic with todays movement conservatives in the U.S. does make sense.

[IM]

Another thing: Contrary to Mr. Levys opinion, Schmitt wasn`t a profound thinker. He could write well and did contribute some insights to the interpretation of the weimar constitution. But if you look at his system of legal and political philosophy you will find that there is no there where. Condenses down he says this:
a) Core and fount of law, especially constitutional law is emergency law (Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand bestimmt)
b) The power to rule in a emergency has to focus in one person -the president,later the führer.
c) Important is that this person can decide unhindered; that there is adecision, any decision is paramount; what he decides is law. (Dezisionismus)

It comes down to primitive power-worship. Schmitt doesn`t solves the traditional legal and political questions, he just skips them by worshipping the decision whatever its substance.
And aren`t some of the wilder claims about the national security powers of the american presidency by Yoo and his ilk quite similiar to Schmitt and his warden of the constitution theory? Or is Yoo fringe and doesn`t really count too in Levys view?

[Jacob T. Levy]

As far as I can tell, the structure of where we are is:

Brad says that Alan Wolfe was right to characterize conservatism as systematically more Schmittian in its approach to politics than is liberalism.

Brad's reason for thinking this is that

a) conservatism involves appeals to tradition, but

b) no interesting or important conservative, and certainly not Burke, just commits him or herself to the uncritical acceptance of all traditions, therefore

c) conservatives must make purely opportunistic and thuggish use of tradition, dishonestly using it as a blackjack, therefore

d) conservatives are dishonest and approach politics as a matter of warfare, just like Wolfe says Schmitt says.

But that "therefore" between (b) and (c) is hiding an awful lot of work. What I'm suggesting is that conservatism, like most political theories, has more than one operating principle, and that proceduralist-traditionalism is not the only strand in it. Any political theory with more than one principle is sometimes going to emphasize one over another.

"John Rawls says he cares about equality. But when equality conflicts with the absolute needs of the worst off, or with liberty, equality cuts no ice with him. Therefore, Rawls doesn't really care about equality, but only cares about having it in hand as a rhetorical blackjack with which to beat uo his opponents. Therefore liberals are opportunistic Schmittians who approach politics as warfare."

Doesn't compute.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Burke had as clear a set of rules as Rawls for deciding what to do when his principles conflicted. But I've offered a reconstruction of Burke (hardly an original one) that I think does a pretty good job of accounting for most of his positions without recourse to the blackjack explanation-- *at least,* that means that the "therefore" between (b) and (c) is a "maybe therefore."

Caring about multiple substantive principles and ends =/= sincerely caring about none of them and just wanting to win at all costs.

Brad recognized that "Burke's conception of properly-ordered liberty" ends up doing a lot of work in Burke's theory. That *by itself* means he's wrong to think that he's siding with Wolfe-- because Wolfe's conservatives lack such substantive commitments. All they want is to win power and to destroy their enemies. Brad's characterizing actors who opportunistically seek rhetorical advantage in the pursuit of some substantive aim. Wolfe's not.