Posted on 04/09/2022 2:06:32 PM PDT by TBP
Anti-capitalism — one prominent expression of a more general anti-liberalism — is where the radical Right and the radical Left meet.
One of the political difficulties of conservatism — and here I mean American conservatism, not the imported kind — is that by its nature it does not offer much in the way of novelty, excitement, or even enthusiasm. It is a philosophy of least-bad options, necessary inconsistency, and moderate expectations. American conservatism is rooted in the values of the American Revolution and the American founding, which are largely liberal values in the classical sense, a source of some confusion to modern conservatives. American conservatism, informed by the liberal Anglo-Protestant commercial culture of our British antecedents, does not offer the romance and pageantry of Europe’s throne-and-altar rightism. It does offer an open society in which those and many other bad ideas can find adherents and be discussed freely.
The old “fusionist” approach to conservatism was based on the various right-wing factions’ having policy preferences and priorities that were in the best-case scenario complementary but in any case at least not mutually exclusive: Smith, who desired a more assertive U.S. foreign policy, found a reliable partner in Jones, whose main interest was minimizing economic regulation. Those who prized economic liberty could work with Irving Kristol’s “two cheers for capitalism,” but “Smash Capitalism!” is a very different kind of proposition.
You can have the excitement, the radicalism, and the strange new respect for socialism — I’ll take boring old liberty and property rights, and the necessary means to defend them.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
He dies have a point about modern American conservatism, however, and at times Williamson comes off sounding like Russell Kirk in this article.
Marking.
Preserving the pretend center which allows fattened government to continue the game.
Goebbel's specifically stated that the National Socialists were anti-captialists. Does this mean they were radical Right? The Left wishes this meme to continue to live on, behind which to hide.
National Socialism,/B> has been spoon-fed to the West as if equivalent to "right wing." International socialism has been posed as it on the "left wing."
Here's a simple notion. The Right-Left model with its "meet at the edges" narrative is false.
Small and less powerful, less expensive, non-invasive government versus big and more powerful, more expensive and very invasive government is the REAL model to hold in mind.
In this simple model, there is not "meeting" at the far edges. Williamson dabbles in the right-left model, when a true conservative would align with small, non-invasuve government that should NEVER be big, expensive nor invasive.
Yes, Williamson does make several valid points here, such as “How strange that the skeptical Protestant colonists who believed that permitting Catholics to flourish in the United States would be an invitation to religiously informed illiberalism and the creeping sway of strange Continental ideas have turned out, after so many years, to have been kinda-sorta right.”
“Kinda-sorta” in the sense that the neo-Catholic integralism proposed by Ahmari and a handful of weirdo academics (e.g., Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law) is indeed exactly the sort of thing that the old-timey protestants did fear. Fortunately, the adherents uf that school of thought are very few in number. The irony of the whole thing is that these guys are pushing something that most of the Catholic hierarchy itself has zero interest in. I mean, how crazy is the idea of enforcing Catholic morals on secular society when someone like Bergoglio has essentially zero interest in enforcing Catholic morals even within Catholicism.
When I first learned what Catholic Integralism means I thought these guys must be joking. I am still not sure. Maybe it is all an elaborate prank?
Though it’s a minor movement with a tiny following and no real influence, to integralists like Ahmari is definitely not a joke. And the integralism of the likes of Ahmari is the source of his feud with National Review going back to the days when David French was still there. Ahmari made the argument of “Hey, if Catholic morality held sway in this country, that’d be the nail in the coffin of things like ‘drag queen story hour’ at the public library.” French, on the other hand, took the view that ‘drag queen story hour’ is the sort of the price we pay for living in a ‘free’ country.
Personally, I think that the rise of neo-integralism at least as an academic movement in the U.S. is the result of a recognition that a post-Christian ethos has prevailed in this country. It goes back to John Adams’ famous assertion that the Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” It’s pretty obvious that we’re past the point of having “a moral and religious people,” so the question is, “Now what?”
Funny that NRO will play nice with pervs but witch hunt those who just want to put a few brakes on naive free market fervor. What's so wrong about shutting the border, limiting legal immigration, eliminating h1b, having a few tariffs, and supporting essential US industries? That's what Japan does and we don't call them socialist.
Look for The Distributist, Auron McIntyre, and Charlemagne on YouTube if you're at all interested.
Ahmari and the other Integralists want to do a lot more. They want to do away with voting, freedom and rights and have the Catholic Church decide everything.
If Conquest"s edict is correct that all organizations that aren't explicitly rightwing will end up moving to the left, then that exactly describes the conservative movement in the US.
I think you’re interchanging two different meanings of “liberal”.
Williamson meant classical liberalism. That’s America. American conservatism is “liberal conservatism” under that definition.
Conquest was talking about commies. By that classical definition commies are illiberal.
This probably cannot be said often enough, loud enough. The obvious follow up question is "when did progressives change their name and take over the word liberalism?"
FDR did that, BTW, in the 1932 presidential election. Classical liberalism is the only liberalism, there realistically is no other.
They, are progressives. And that's all they are. They don't deserve the word liberal.
Just one simple word definition change has created such an untold amount of damage and mayhem in its wake. And to this day, far too few even consider the concept of fighting to restore that word to its rightful place. Progressives do that even to this day, replacing the definitions of words and corrupting their meanings.
Liberalism stems from the Enlightenment. It seems from the progressives' perspective that conservatives are okay with all of the scientific and technological progress that was spawned from those first sparks in the 16th century. However, it also seems that conservative thought with regard to political philosophy and economics stopped with Locke, Burke, and Adam Smith.
Why would it be the case that human thought with regard to science and technology continues apace while most everything that could be said about our political economy was determined by the middle of the 18th Century?
The progressives would claim that Kant, Hegel, Marx, Rousseau, Derrida, Foucault, Rorty, Rawls, etc. have advanced political and economic thought as much as Bohr and Einstein advanced scientific thought.
They would argue that conservatives are either stupid in adhering to the old doctrines just like those who still believe the Earth to be only a few thousand years old. Either that, or conservatives know better but prefer that set of rules that is optimized for the white patriarchal class to exploit the unwashed masses, i.e. the rules laid down when white men ruled Western Civilization.
It's an argument which has some merit and needs to be met head on by conservatives if they wish to be a meaningful part of the plurastic discussion.
Rightwingers, on the other hand, can say The Enlightenment either was a big mistake or else it wasn't such a big deal and we need to build our theories on older and more stable foundations.
Yes, it does, to the extent that we would use the phrase "classic liberalism".(some would prefer Lockean liberalism)
The damage that progressives do by doing their name change, and calling themselves Liberal, is that they get to claim a falsehood. It's kind of like a reverse adoption.
Progressivism are anti-liberal and thus, are not the offspring of the enlightenment. Progressivism is the rejection of the enlightenment. This is crucially important. Progressives disdain liberty. and that makes progressives deeply unenlightened people, favoring a despotism cloaked in new technologies that's ultimately a very old, and very decrepit form of human thought.
Administrative despotism is still depotism. It's the oldest known human form of governance. The absolute oldest. Just because they put their new little spin on despotism and said "oh we can have administrative agencies do this instead of one man" that does not actually make it new. It's just a new spin, a new variation of the virus.
People forget that (and progressives have fostered forgetting) that the enlightenment also blossomed in the US and among the branches of the enlightenment(such as French enlightenment, English enlightenment), there was an American enlightenment also. Madison, Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin are all a part of the American enlightenment.
Because of their rejection of individual liberty, Progressives must, MUST reject the American founding. So they have to reject the enlightenment as well by default. That's why they call the founders racists and so forth. Progressives hate nothing else as much as they hate the American founding.
You can see how much hatred progressives have in their calling Adam Smith a racist. Here's a guy who wrote in his works, that slavery is deeply immoral and wrong. So Smith(An enlightenment-era thinker) is basically an abolitionist. And yet they still call him racist. We have his works, we can go read it. It's real.
Why? How can they get this so wrong in the face of irrefutable evidence? It's because they don't care. They have their own facts, and their own reality. Progressives will lie, cheat, steal, and then lie some more about it in order to achieve their purpose. And what progressive historians have done in order to manipulate the past is some of the worst of it all.
Progressives only want despotism, the oldest form.
"And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man." - Ronald Reagan
If libraries want to have drag queen story hour, nobody should attend and the library should have to fund it on its own. Not one penny of public money should go to such a demented idea.
It’s the same kind of grooming that the corporatists (such as Disney) are doing. If they have a right to do it, we have a right not to support it.
Japan is at least quasi-socialist. Most Western countries are.
I’m all for controlling our borders an immigration. There should be no illegal immigration. Once we’ve controlled it, we can talk about the process for coming legally.
Tariffs are bad economic policy, but can in some circumstances be good foreign policy. We should hit China hard, for example.
Are you proposing giving subsidies to American businesses? If so, that is a Big Government, progressive idea, and remember, government money brings government control.
They sound like they would resonate well with Aleksandr Dugin and the Fourth Political System.
To a large extent, yes. It's what's known as "classical liberalism," as opposed to modern liberalism. But there is still a large, if muted, traditionalist element, the Kirkean Tories who reject fusionism. Yet political necessity forces the two into political coalition. If Adams and Jefferson were around today, they wouldn't lead different parties, but two wings of the same party in uneasy coalition against woke progressivism.
And even that has shades. There is "conservatism" as we know it in America today, which is classical liberalism tempered with traditionalism and a respect for the permanent things, and libertarianism, which lacks that tempering influence. William F. Buckley once said that conservatives are libertarians and something else.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.