Unstoppable (6 page)

It is true that contemporary conservatives often ask for this caricature, so maddening is their clinging to rigid abstractions and distancing themselves from facts and realities. For example, their arguments against basic health and safety regulation and its benefits have been delivered with general bombast about the value of free markets and the dangers of socialism. Recently, that approach was taken to the limit by think tanks, which in their discussions fortified an empirically starved plausibility with baseless declarations, rigged costs, and ignored benefits—sometimes to such a heightened degree that it embarrassed their corporate chieftains, who, after all, have accepted and profited from safety devices, such as seat belts, air bags, workplace detection of hazards, and emergency equipment. To paraphrase George Carlin, these think tankers have turned Adam Smith's “invisible hand” into a middle finger.
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Consider, by contrast, some of the views of the conservative icons often cited as unbeatable authorities for laissez-faire economies. Friedrich Hayek, a leader of the Austrian School of Economics, argued that the government may need to provide “a comprehensive system of social insurance” to protect the people from “the common hazards of life,” including illness.
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He also
conceded that, in a situation of chronic unemployment, the government could have a planning role. In short, he was not an absolutist. Though most known for his deep distaste for state economic planning—whether socialist or communist—and for his belief in its inevitable failure, he was rigorously critical of cartels, monopolies, and anything that smelled of impositional planning or coercion by concentrated corporate power over free markets. One would never sense the existence of these nuanced views listening to modern, clenched-teethed libertarians, who shower Hayek with their accolades as the categorical authority for their strict positions.

“Coercion” of any kind animated libertarian Frank Meyer's writings as well. He wrote that “the only equality premised from the freedom of the person is the equal right of all men to be free from coercion exercised against their life, liberty and prosperity.”
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Russell Kirk was more sensitive to private coercion when he wrote that the true freedom of the person “subsists in community.” Kirk, who was a major figure in reviving postwar conservative thought with his seminal book
The Conservative Mind
, pointed to the destructive effect of the imperious auto/highway lobby on communities and mores. He believed that free, self-reliant communities shielded and advanced individual freedom from both statist and private authoritarians. Meyer and Kirk fought over and never reconciled their differences concerning the dangers of coercion, but their followers blithely ignore these qualified thoughts in their polemics against liberals.
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When Peter Viereck published his
Conservatism Revisited
in 1950, the liberal Left was preeminent, and “conservatism” signaled militant anticommunism, a strong military, less government, free market economics, and according the benefit of most doubts to the business classes. Viereck did not harp on these themes but felt the key tenet of conservatism was to “root the masses in the universals of civilization.”
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In his view, values precede politics, here recalling Edmund Burke, who was anything but a “rootless doctrinaire.” Burke wrote in 1790 that “a state without the means of
some change is without the means of its conservation.”
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Viereck made himself unpopular among old-guard Republicans by supporting the rights of workers to form trade unions (and thereby, he added, form nurturing communities) and by backing some New Deal reforms. He excoriated liberals on many scores, however, for their governmental overreach and for other sins that undermine individual initiatives. That did not matter to his harsh conservative critics, who derided this avowed Edmund Burke/John Adams conservative as really a liberal at heart. After all, anticommunist Viereck opposed Joe McCarthy's tactics.

And so it goes with conservatives fighting among themselves. There are plenty of philosophical disagreements, and sometimes turf wars and petty conflicts, between self-described conservatives or libertarians, who classify, slice, and dice their differences in raging polemics in their books, magazines, and pamphlets and now on their websites and blogs.

The Many Messages of Contemporary Conservatives

Here are some samples of their contesting nomenclatures: conservative, paleoconservative, traditional conservative, market conservative, libertarian conservative, libertarian populist, populist conservative, Burkean conservative, Buckley conservative, Kirk conservative, Eisenhower conservative, Goldwater and Reagan conservative, neoconservative, even classical liberal as being today's conservative. Had enough? Try these contemporary micro-distinctions made by today's conservative columnists: David Brooks of the
New York Times
talks about communitarian conservatives as compared with market conservatives; Michael Gerson of the
Washington Post
slices conservatism between “reform conservatism” and “rejectionist conservatism.”
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To further blur public impressions of conservatives, right-wing pollster and wordsmith Frank Luntz unloaded in the April 2012
Washington Post
on what he called “Myths
About Conservative Voters.” The
myths
, he writes, are that they care most about the size of government, want to deport “illegal” immigrants, worship Wall Street, want to slash Social Security and Medicare, and don't care about inequality.
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Even top conservative opinion makers sometimes shake the standard mythology. Arch-corporatist right-winger and Mellon heir, billionaire Richard Scaife has been a major factor in building right-wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, and bankrolling right-wing corporatist candidates. That did not stop him from placing a costly, full-page ad in the
Wall Street Journal
in 2011 defending Planned Parenthood and praising founder Margaret Sanger with these words: “I respected her dedication to making health care and birth-control services available to all Americans, especially those with low incomes, no insurance and no other recourse to medical services.”
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In a vigorous rebuttal of a column by the right-wing George Will, former leading Republican senator Alan Simpson stated he favors campaign finance reform. He even assailed the Republican justices' 5–4 Supreme Court decision in
Citizens United
that said corporations were “persons” for the purpose of letting them make unlimited independent donations for or against any candidates for public office. He took the justices to task for “asserting a remarkable right of corporate personhood that I have yet to find in the Constitution.” This is the same Alan Simpson who has ridiculed elderly people, the AARP, and the “entitlements” senior citizens receive.
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Flying in the face of conservatives' belief in fiscal responsibility, Republican leaders John Boehner in the House and Mitch McConnell in the Senate routinely oppose any cuts in the giant military budget, no matter how wasteful, redundant, or even unauditable is the spending, and they will sometimes try to give the Pentagon more than it requests. All this for a “U.S. Defense establishment” that author Fareed Zakaria calls “the world's largest socialist economy.”
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Here are two other examples. Conservative Stanford professor Ronald McKinnon wrote an article for the
Wall Street Journal
called “The Conservative Case for a Wealth Tax.”
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Federal judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, seen as a paragon of judicial conservatism, wrote a book,
Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance
(2012), in which he took on both Left and Right constitutional theories. Jeffrey Rosen's review of Wilkinson's book notes “For law students and citizens who are frustrated with the way that all the constitutional methodologies fail, in practice, to deliver on their promise of helping judges separate their political views and judicial decisions, Wilkinson's primer offers a diagnosis of the problem and a self-effacing solution.”
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Take that, Justice Scalia.

In other countries, what self-described conservatives stand for is even more ambiguous and often grounded in pragmatism. In Western Europe, conservative parties generally continued broad-gauged social welfare policies when they defeated and replaced the governing social democratic parties, at least until the recent turbulent recession. The
Times'
David Brooks visited the conservative government in the United Kingdom in May 2011 and pronounced that Prime Minister David Cameron's “Big Society” program “seeks to nurture community bonds, civic activism and social capital, reacting to the concentrated corporate power that weakens the network of entrepreneurs and tradesmen.”
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Maybe these were just words, but lip service is the first step toward acceptance.

David Brooks categorizes the different Washington Republicans as the “beltway bandits,” “the show horses,” “the big government blowhards,” and the “permanent campaigners.” “All these groups,” he writes, “share the same mentality. They do not see politics as the art of the possible.” He called for a fifth category of “practical conservatives.”
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(He failed to pinpoint another category in the conservative camp, those—regularly politicians—who mouth the slogans of conservatism but violate them in practice. This is where legislators say no to government handouts and yet take the dough. This is where we might place Representative Michele Bachmann, who was presenting
herself as a no-holds-barred opponent of government spending and taxation at the same time as her family's farm received $260,000 in subsidies from the Department of Agriculture between 1995 and 2009.
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)

President Reagan's budget chief, conservative David Stockman, recently wrote a book about the “corruption of capitalism in America,” denouncing rampant Wall Street speculation, greed, and what one reviewer described as “sweetheart deals between government and industry”—often with the energy sector—driven by corporate lobbyists.
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Another George Will column found fault with conservative politicians. Will tore into Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham in relation to the US attack, with other NATO countries, on Libya. For good measure, he added another column on “Obama's Lawless War,” noting that many Republican senators supported it without demanding the congressional votes required by the Constitution to declare war and specifically to authorize and appropriate the monies spent on those attacks.
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Indeed, because liberal thinkers tend to be more empirical in their worldly assertions and so don't have the abstract quality of much older conservative thought—or at least so it has been over the past century—they are not comparably revered and recalled authority figures, and are not cited as much in serious public dialogue or conversations. This contrast may be changing, as conservatives shift the grounds of their arguments.

When the foggy militaristic writings of the neoconservatives before and after their Bush-Cheney criminal invasion of Iraq are compared with more recent articles in the
American Conservative
magazine, one can see the changeover to descriptions and empirical arguments that attempt to ground themselves in facts and data.
The American Conservative
and one of its founders, Patrick J. Buchanan, have issued the most devastating critiques of the neocons' lust for unlawful wars. It is a compliment to this magazine that its definition of conservatism, without the need for a qualifying
adjective, demonstrates the possibility of Left-Right fusion. Until the recent change in publishers at the
American Conservative
, the
Nation
magazine could easily carry many of its articles without skipping a paragraph.

The divide between the still influential neocons—allied with the preferred politics of the military-industrial complex and the domestic pro-Israeli government lobby—and the traditional conservatives is far wider and harsher than any differences they have with influential corporate liberals or neoliberals. The two conservative camps differ over foreign and military policy, empire, trade agreements, presidential power and constitutional compliance, congressional checks and balances, immigration, the PATRIOT Act, corporate crime and corporate welfare, and the immense powers of Wall Street and its corporate state in Washington, DC.

Writing as a traditional conservative, Buchanan, in his 2004 book
Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency
, hurls thickets of historical fact against the neocons' myths, lies, and hypocrisies, which they garnish with a belief in militaristic, patriotic exceptionalism, touting America's leaders' inherent humanism, a faith belied by the deliberate slaughter of civilians in the United States during the Civil War and the mass incinerations over Dresden and Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, whose purpose was to “terrorize the population,” to use the language of our leaders at the time.
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It is too bad C-SPAN could not sponsor debates between the likes of Buchanan and the armchair, draft-exempted belligerents Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Elliott Abrams. Such an exchange would have destroyed the liberal's monocultural stereotype of conservatives for a long time.

Another case of confusing conservatives of different stripes appeared when Representative Dennis Kucinich, the active progressive, insisted to the
Washington Post
that his proposed Department of Peace “is actually a conservative position. Peace is becoming the
conservative position. By not getting into military conflicts, we conserve lives, we conserve America's resources, we conserve America's money.”
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The former Ohio lawmaker, if he stopped relying on his dictionary definition of traditional conservation, would not find many militaristic Republican “conservatives” in Congress concurring with him.