Kevin Moloney for The New York Times
Austin Bramwell, 26, of Denver,
one of five new trustees of
National Review, is a leader in a
group no longer characterized by
uniform views.
Posted on 07/17/2004 7:40:06 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Kevin Moloney for The New York Times
Austin Bramwell, 26, of Denver,
one of five new trustees of
National Review, is a leader in a
group no longer characterized by
uniform views.
In 1954, when he was 28, William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review to bear the standard of a fledgling conservative movement defined by three commitments: to fight Communism, to diminish the federal government and to uphold traditionalism in social affairs.
That formulation held the movement together for five decades, as Ronald Reagan brought conservatives to power, George H. W. Bush declared victory in the cold war and Bill Clinton pronounced the end of big government.
Now, many conservatives say, the current Bush administration is testing that definition of conservatism as it has never been tested before, from the expansion of federal health and education programs to the campaign to remake Iraq. And as Mr. Buckley prepares for retirement by handing over control of National Review, a new generation of young would-be Buckleys is debating just what conservatism means when their side has taken over Washington, and yet they still do not feel that they have won.
"Conservative is a word that is almost meaningless these days," said Caleb Stegall, 32, a lawyer in Topeka, Kan., and a founder of The New Pantagruel, newpantagruel.com, an irreverent Web site about religion and politics named for the jovial drunkard created by Rabelais. "It tells you almost nothing about where a person stands on a lot of questions," he said, like gay marriage, stem cell research, the environment and Iraq.
The debate among members of the young right is unfolding on Web sites like Mr. Stegall's and Oxblog, oxblog .blogspot.com, set up by three Rhodes Scholars. It is discussed at roundtables and cocktail parties organized by groups like America's Future Foundation in Washington. In journals for young conservatives, they tackle subjects as heterodox as the perils of Wal-Mart and urban sprawl, the dangers of unfettered capitalism to family life, and the feared takeover of their movement by hawkish neoconservatives.
In May the Philadelphia Society, a prestigious club for conservative intellectuals, tapped Sarah Bramwell, a 24-year-old Yale graduate and writer, to address the views of the young right at its 40th-anniversary conference. "Modern American conservatism began in an effort to do two things: defeat Communism and roll back creeping socialism," she began. "The first was obviated by our success, the latter by our failure. So what is left of conservatism?"
Rearing new conservatives has long been a subject of keen interest to their elders. To counter what they considered the liberal dominance of the major universities and news organizations, a handful of conservative foundations has helped build a network of organizations to train young members of the movement, most prominently the 51-year-old Intercollegiate Studies Institute. It publishes journals and books, sponsors fellowships and administers a network of 80 conservative college newspapers.
"I think one of the principal, even signal, features of the conservative movement is its overriding concern for nurturing young people," said Jeff Nelson, 39, the institute's vice president for publications.
Mr. Buckley recently chose Sarah Bramwell's husband, Austin Bramwell, 26, as one of five trustees of National Review. Mr. Bramwell, a clerk for the federal appeals court in Denver and an alumnus of the institute's programs, declined to comment because of his job at the court.
Mr. Nelson said young conservatives' greatest challenge might come from their predecessors' success. "Buckley started the conservative movement athwart history, yelling `stop,' " he said, "but there has been a subtle shift in the conservative movement's view of itself, from history's opponents to destiny's child."
"We have a lot of conservatives who reflect the values of the mainstream culture," he continued. "There are polls that show younger-generation conservatives trust the government much more deeply than their parents did."
The increase in federal domestic spending under President Bush would have been "unimaginable" to conservatives a few years ago, he said, and so would foreign policies like the invasion of Iraq.
Doubts about the justification for the war are a common theme among young conservatives. "Many conservatives, especially since Sept. 11, believe that a major, if not the major, calling of conservatives today is to articulate and defend a certain brand of international grand strategy," Ms. Bramwell argued in her address to the Philadelphia Society. "I believe this view to be not only mistaken, but quite possibly harmful to the conservative movement."
Still, Ms. Bramwell, who now works as deputy press secretary for Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado, said in an interview that she nonetheless supported the war in Iraq as a chance to advance United States interests in the Middle East.
Daniel McCarthy, 26, an assistant editor at The American Conservative, the magazine founded by Pat Buchanan, said that although many of his contemporaries questioned the war, few were willing to turn against the president, as he had.
"I say we have to go back to before the conservative movement became a movement," he said, "back to when it was just a few tormented intellectuals who didn't necessarily see themselves as a coherent group, and even to the so-called isolationist and noninterventionist right. America is a nation state. It is not meant to be a sort of world government in embryo, not meant to be a last provider of justice or security for the entire world."
But some young conservatives argue that the United States may need to become more active, not less. Eric Cohen, 26, is the director of the biotechnology and American democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington; the editor of its journal, New Atlantis; a consultant to the President's Council on Bioethics; and a contributor to The Weekly Standard.
In an interview, he argued that conservatives needed to accept an active role for government in dealing with advancing technology, whether in the form of terrorists' weapons abroad or attempts to change the nature of life at home. "The conservative project is making the case for progress abroad while confronting the dilemmas of progress at home," he said.
Mr. Cohen defended the Bush administration's preventive intervention in the Middle East as well as its limitations on federal financing for stem cell research.
"Medical progress is going to keep people alive longer than they would have been," he said. "I think prudent conservatives are going to have to find some responsible way to have sensible government to deal with the needs of aging generations. We have seen a version of this in the prescription drug bill, and there are going to be other obligations."
Mr. Stegall, an evangelical Presbyterian and the son of a minister, said he shared Mr. Cohen's support for government social programs, but for religious reasons. He said he and other theological conservatives had founded The New Pantagruel as an alternative to the politics of the older generation of Christian conservatives.
"If I could sum up what we stand for in one word, it would be sustainability," he said. By that, he explained, he meant theologically conservative views on sustaining family life, as well as typically liberal views on sustaining the environment and local communities and helping the poor. "For us, those two halves are inextricably linked," he said.
But several conservatives, young and old, said the greatest division in the movement pitted young traditionalists against their more libertarian peers. David Weigel, 22, the former editor of a conservative magazine at Northwestern University, a contributor to the libertarian magazine Reason and an intern at the editorial page of USA Today, said that last spring his college paper had trouble finding any conservatives on campus who supported amending the constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
He contended that even young conservatives who maintained a strict moral code for themselves were increasingly reluctant to regulate the behavior of others. "I am personally abstinent," he said, "and I plan to stay that way, but I have no problem with international aid programs that use or distribute condoms."
Ramesh Ponnuru, 29, a prolific writer for National Review, complained that the Republican party had been focusing on social issues because limited government did not have as big "a political payoff."
"There is a serious possibility that the libertarian wing of the conservative movement goes off in its own direction, either breaking off or allying with the Democrats," he said.
Mr. Buckley, however, said he was unperturbed. "The sweep of the Soviet challenge was what I call a harnessing bias, and now that harness has come apart," he said. "But I don't think the threads are by any means abandoned." He added: "There has never been a movement that doesn't go through this perplexion and development."
Absolutely. See # 27.
Indeed, what is the gay marriage movement other than an attempt by a liberal elite to impose on everyone else the notion that sodomy is something which should be accepted. That is, they claim the morally superior and just position is that we must accept their imposition of values. All axiological questions of justice, tolerance, equality, etc., involve a scale of moral values, of "goods" - of transcendental qualities of preferred rights and wrongs.
tpaine:Your claim that there are no '-- conservative policies that regulate the behavior of others --' is a howler.
Unfortunately for you, there was no such claim. The "howler" was yours alone.
Siamese Princess wrote:
Radical individualism and radical equalitarianism are destroying our country and civilization. An excellent book to read about this is Judge Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah.
______________________________________
Another view, published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute:
January 1997
Slouching Towards Statism
Which is a greater cause of cultural and moral decline: the private sector or the government? Asked another way, which is doing more to promote a return to civilized social norms: the market or the central state?
The answer highlights a dividing line between left ad right.
Robert Bork's book Slouching Towards Gomorrah provokes this query. He chronicles a dizzy array of depressing cultural data that even left-liberals can't ignore. His thesis is that civilization is slipping through our fingers, and he's probably right.
However, his suggestions for change require new forms of government intervention, a grave error that dooms his analysis.
Bork has confused the cause with the cure.
It's government policy, not the private sector, that has caused social collapse by politicizing culture in the first place.
Whether it's fostering welfarism, backing ugly art and music, punishing society's natural elites with income and inheritance taxes, or shortening time horizons through persistent inflation, the government has debased tastes, subsidized moral squalor, and dumbed down social norms.
Great 'authoritarian' style non-reply. Feel better?
Authoritarian? Oh, dear... So the principles of Aristotelian logic are now "authoritarian"?
Unfortunately for you, there was no such claim. The "howler" was yours alone.
Well, I guess I can't 'prove' that, so I'll have to fall back on the words of one of FR's great self-touted philosophers:
"It would be impossible to discuss (or understand) the concept of the "scientifically provable" entirely within the narrow limits of empirical science, understood in the sense of scientific materialism, derived from 17th-century Baconian or Cartesian ideology or from 19th-century positivism. To postulate, in a formal theoretical proposition, a definition of the scientifically provable, you have to engage in essentialist ratiocination along the lines of Aristotelian philosophy or scholasticism, precisely the kind ridiculed by such ideologues. So, for someone to argue that only empirical truth claims, in the sense of laboratory or physical science, have "scientific" epistemological status, he or she engages in a form of contradiction because the definition of the terms cannot be established by that cognitive method. i.e., "science is of such a nature that only empirical physical science establishes truth." The Philosopher would want to know where the empirical observation occurred which validated that claim. You can't "prove" that only the claims of the physical sciences of the post-17th-century empiricists are true empirically, so to speak. The "nature" of truth cannot be demonstrated in that epistemological methodology.
Case closed?
I thought the boy's whining about condom distribution was a silly public demonstration for conservative thought. Conservatism is not about condoms. The pseudo-libertarianism on social issues is juvenile. No one's copulations are endagered by conservatives or by some guys in the backwoods of Virginia reading the King James version of the Bible. The liberal positions on these matters are tiresome and sophomoric.
"I'm not debating additional issues." -Howling Absurdity-
Thank you.
"I'm not debating additional issues."
-Howling Absurdity-
Thank you.
Ronald Reagan defines the conservative movement best.
But basically, the ontological categories and principles of authentic conservatism do not support a totalitarian secular humanist interpretation of Western culture or the Constitution.
Now, I will admit the rhetorical question at issue was a trick question. Great technique in debating, by the way. Since HMBA does not consider the current regime or players to be authentically "conservative," there are not really any "conservative" policies to cite on the matter. Hee, hee.
I just thought it silly for anyone posing as a conservative to be whining about condoms, particularly global UN condom distribution, as if that were some issue which should preoccupy our time in the archives of hallowed conservative thought.
I apologize for any confusions. We can debate the Aristotelian logical square of opposition and the proper form of logical propositions on policy matters at a later time. I suspect the Kerry-Edwards machine and the Church of Kerryosophy should supply a lot of lessons on how not to manipulate logical propositions. Or ontological propositions.
I agree with the quote cited in #66. If you want to debate that later, I don't mind.
The key phrase in your latest non reply retort:
"I'm not debating additional issues."
-Howling Absurdity-
Thank you.
69 tpaine
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But basically, the ontological categories and principles of authentic conservatism do not support a totalitarian secular humanist interpretation of Western culture or the Constitution.
-another Howlingly Absurd retort-
______________________________________
Whatever.
Well, that's a rather integral feature of the larger debates in question. If reality is just whatever anyone wants it to be or feels like it should be, we tend to run into problems. Kerryosophy among others.
HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity wrote:
I agree with the quote cited in #66.
If you want to debate that later, I don't mind.
______________________________________
Another weird comment.
You ~wrote~ the comment quoted, according to your home page.
Just genuinely curious. Philosophically, that is.
HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity wrote:
I agree with the quote cited in #66.
If you want to debate that later, I don't mind.
______________________________________
Another weird comment.
You ~wrote~ the comment quoted, according to your home page.
--- Thus, it stands to reason you would agree with it.
76 tpaine
______________________________________
What would be "weird" about debating the nature of truth claims Particularly if they are relevant to ongoing civic debates on public policy.
Just genuinely curious.
Philosophically, that is.
77 -howlingly absurd-
______________________________________
You are curious about why I find you agreeing with yourself sorta weird?
--- OK... -- I'm about to dine now myself. Even though I don't think I agree that I should. Perhaps later we could debate that proposition. Whatdaya think?
Many 'conservatives'... are actually free-market libertarians - as are the scholars at the CATO Institute.
'Conservatives' tend to think of libertarians as simply the "Party of Pot & Ferrets." We, on the other hand, tend to think of Republicans as "The other white meat" (Party of Pork barrel spending, never saw a subsidy they didn't like), & gay-bashing religiosity.
So, I guess we're even. :)
Seriously, there is much common ground amongst libertarians & conservative -- e.g., pro-second amendment, pro-vouchers, anti-Federal land-grabs, etc -- and many libertarians are pro-life as well (though some are pro-choice such as myself).
Wm. Buckley was in fact IN FAVOR of decriminalizing drugs, though many "Trads" seem to forget this aspect of Buckley's work.
I think the main bone of contention may be Gay rights & other social issues. Many libertarians are also atheists & take a much more laissez-faire approach to life style & social issues; this tends to be the point at which they depart from Trad/Religious-Right thinking.
When introduced to Libertarian policy positions in class, many students, esp. the "conservative" ones, tend to say they in fact tend to side more with libertarianism than religious conservatism (now that they understand it a little more fully) -- though they had originally come from a more Trad perspective at the start of the semester. Most of them have never HEARD of third party philosophies and had only heard of the Dems & the Repubs! Third parties? In America?? Gee... what are the odds? :)
Great article -- thanks for posting it.
It's OK with me. Perhaps I was not sure why you cited my rant on the epistemology and ontological presuppositions of modern scientism. They have some not entirely incidental relation to liberal ideology.
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