Posted on 04/27/2003 12:31:21 PM PDT by quidnunc
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The second major split within modern conservatism involves the Straussians in a rather different way. For over a decade, the clashes between Harry Jaffa and such partisans of the Confederate cause as Willmoore Kendall and M. E. Bradford have marked the forward lines of the North-South controversy. Jaffa has defended the hallowed ground of reason, equality (of natural rights), Abraham Lincoln, and the Union; Bradford has taken his stand on behalf of tradition, inequality, John C. Calhoun, and states' rights.
Recently, new armies have entered the field. The dispute between "paleo-conservatives" and "neo-conservatives" has generated not only smoke and noise but headlines, on account of Pastor Richard John Neuhaus's expulsion by the "paleo-con" Rockford Institute. Aside from that ungentlemanly action, the debate has centered around "global democracy," "secularism," immigration, and charges of envy and religious bigotry. These bitter disagreements occur in the context of two massive facts. One is that, in abstract terms, the paleo-cons and neo-cons agree on far more than they disagree on. Both sides agree that rationalism in politics leads quickly to Jacobinism; that universal truths of the sort expressed in the Declaration of Independence (or in twentieth-century liberalism: they tend to see the two as continuous) are ultimately destructive of authentic, historically rooted human communities; that history or experience is therefore a better guide than reason in political affairs.
Where paleo-cons and neo-cons disagree is over what is to be done. Strongly influenced by the Eastern Straussians (with whom they overlap), the neo-cons take a more or less Tocquevillian approach, reasoning that modern capitalist democracy is here to stay, that despite its anomie it has brought substantial benefits, that incremental improvement of our condition is possible and desirable. Their politics tends therefore to be utilitarian and meliorist but also strongly anti-utopian.
Both paleo- and neo-conservatives put a great deal of reliance on the idea of history (as their names, borrowed so to speak from the theory of evolution, attest). For the latter, it is liberal democracy's very success — the fact that, however uninspiring it may be, it has outlasted its foes — that proves its superiority; indeed, that makes it worthy and capable of propagation to the rest of the world. For the paleos, democracy's success, no matter how expansive, is hollow precisely because it cannot match the glories of traditional societies, especially that of the Old South. Thus the neo-con's cautious historicism shades over into a calculating utilitarianism, while the paleo-con's historicism rejects calculation in favor of a romantic appreciation of passion, the grandeur of the past, personal and national idiosyncrasy.
It is the peculiar nature of this dispute, the fact that the sides have so many premises in common, that helps to account for its second major characteristic: the allegations of nativism and anti-Semitism that color it. In the absence of a clear philosophical difference between the paleos and neos, the obvious ethnic and religious difference between them comes to the fore. That the neo-cons are mostly Jewish, and the paleo-cons emphatically not, is seized upon by both sides in weak moments as the secret explanation of the controversy. Of course, none of the policy questions that are being controverted here (immigration, "global democracy," etc.) can really be reduced to these terms. But the temptation to reduce them will be there so long as better arguments are not forthcoming.
This is particularly the case with the neo-conservatives, who have not responded as well as they should, I think, to the paleo-cons' criticisms. For the real issue is not whether there is room for Jews in a proper American conservatism, but whether, as the paleo-cons define it, there is room for America in conservatism. According to the traditional American understanding proclaimed in the Declaration, all men are created equal, and equally deserve to have their natural rights secured by a just government instituted and operating with the consent of the governed. The first purpose of conservatism would thus be to keep American government just, to make sure that it secures the common good and preserves the rights of its citizens. These rights, deriving from natural right, are based essentially on the citizens' humanity, and have no proper reference to their race, religion, ethnicity, class, or any other secondary or accidental characteristic.
This is not quite the America celebrated by the paleo-cons, who emphasize the regnant inequalities in American life as it has actually been lived. The older traditionalists like Willmoore Kendall were not at home with this America, either, but some of the new or second-generation traditionalists go even further in their rejection of all natural-right arguments. M. E. Bradford is perhaps the best known of these. Whereas most of the older traditionalists (e.g., Kendall, Russell Kirk) saw some harmony — however tenuous — between natural law and tradition or history, Bradford and his followers denounce any appeal to rational, transhistorical principles. To put the difference plainly: whereas Richard M. Weaver traced the decline of the West to William of Occam's attack on universals, Bradford blames our current degeneration on the prevalence of universals in politics and morals.
Other second-generation traditionalists take a different tack. Thomas Fleming, the editor of the Rockford Institute's Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, understands the natural law not as a law of right reason (as Aquinas did), but as a "law of nature" in the modern scientific nor deterministic sense: he uses sociobiology and anthropology to prove that gender and class differences are natural. Attempting to combine traditional natural law with some version of the philosophy of history, Claes Ryn and Paul Gottfried try in different ways to find a philosophical basis for the role of reason within the historical process.
The real issue here is not whether particular paleo-cons are nativist or anti-Semitic, much less whether particular neo-cons are hypersensitive. Everyone involved in this debate agrees that anti-Semitism is wrong. It is a doctrine without defenders. But this consensus cannot endure if its grounds are allowed to be undermined. Paleo-cons as well as neo-cons have an interest in keeping this consensus and the conservative movement itself intact. The problem is that such vices as anti-Semitism and nativism are a constant temptation whenever virtue goes unexplained and unchampioned. When reason, equality, and natural rights (including the right of religious freedom) are contemned in the name of a monolithic and unrestrained "tradition," the ground for evil has been prepared.
As I say, the neo-conservatives in particular have not been very successful at articulating the larger questions at stake, partly because they have been unwilling to undertake the positive defense of American principles that is required. They need to say in broad daylight why nativism and anti-Semitism — errors with which they charge the paleo-conservative movement — are un-American, hence also unconservative. Such a declaration would invite a reconsideration of some of the principles they have shared half-heartedly with the paleo-cons. After all, the neo-cons have always stopped short of the paleo-cons' and the Old Right's open break with Lincoln and his interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. Yet only Jaffa and the Western Straussians have vigorously contested this attack on Lincoln and the role of equality in the American political tradition. The neo-cons, like the Eastern Straussians with whom they have so much in common, have been content to keep their discontents private, and to hope for the best. But the logic of the debate carries it more and more clearly in the direction of the classic North-South struggle within conservatism. And the border states must eventually choose sides.
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(Excerpt) Read more at claremont.org ...
It's impossible to know whether they're talking sense or engaging in subversive mischief until a century or so after they die.
As much as Kesler may desire to think that his school is rooted in "the hallowed ground of reason," reality paints a much different story. Jaffa is about as much to "Lincoln and the Union" as Khomeini was to Mahomet and the Shari'a.
Both rejected the tools of reason long ago and, in its place, adopted a quasi-religious blind adoration for their respective idols and dogmas. To attempt to pass either off as exercises in reason is no more valid than calling war "peace," day "night," and up "down." As is so with each of these items, blind idolatrous adoration and reason are mutually exclusive of each other - the presence of one precludes the presence of the other.
That statement too is a falsehood. Beard et al aside, the pro-Lincoln responses to him are hardly a rejection of "Marxist and progressive history" that the Jaffaites claim. No more explicit and direct form of Marxist history exists than that written by Marx himself, and far from rejecting Marx's own arguments about Lincoln, the Jaffaites have embraced many of them. Marx personally adored Lincoln and wrote so at length many times. Much, if not most, pro-Lincoln scholarship ever since has echoed with Marxian concepts.
In all seriousness - to tout Abraham Lincoln's life and writings as an exercise in and defense of the doctrine of "equality" openly defies readily known and accessable reality. Lincoln had no doctrine of "equality" beyond a political soundbyte that he would turn around and directly contradict on the drop of a dime. To pretend otherwise is to exert blind faith in that which never existed.
Just wait until the Claremonsters show up to argue that Lincoln didn't really say what he said, and that some nonsensical esotericism, to which they only have access, underlies Lincoln's sayings. That has become, of late, their way out of Lincoln's irrefutably existant and frequent self-contradiction on all matters of race, slavery, and equality.
Be warned though. We cannot expect reason to convince them of anything otherwise. The Abratollah has already proclaimed himself Imam and lingers to preach the esoteric Lincoln that only he "knows" in fullness, all to guide the world until his Mahdi returns to cleanse it of the southern "infidels." When the rational demonstrate falsehoods in the Abratollah's teachings, he claims ownership of the form of truth. When that claim is objected to as an exercise in irrationality, he extends his claim to encompass the very same tools of reason that his actions defy and violate. It is all an exercise in the very same circular logic of the Wlat brigade:
The Lincoln is god, therefore the Lincoln is perfect.
The Lincoln is perfect, therefore the Lincoln can do no wrong.
The Lincoln can do no wrong, therefore all who claim he did wrong are in error.
Since all who claim that the Lincoln did wrong are in error, he must have done no wrong.
Since the Lincoln did no wrong, he must be perfect.
Since the Lincoln is perfect, he must be god, and thus his divinity is demonstrated.
The rational observer recognizes the circular idiocy in this manner of thinking, but the Lincolnites, who dwell in irrationality, respond in expected fashion - they erroniously label any such characterization of their logic a scarecrow, only to turn around and indulge in that very same creature of straw that they just claimed was not their own. But point this out to them, make note of the fact that their prophet is a fraud, question the validity of their esoteric claim to the "truth" of that same fraud, draw attention to the reality that their mahdi is as non-existant as the hill he dwells under and they respond not by acknowledging those facts but instead issuing that great racial fatwah of condemnation to tarnish and label you on their own self-proclaimed authority.
There is no claim of reason to the Lincoln cult, no claim to rationality, for their Lincoln is, by definition, an extrarational being that they have determined, by their own arbitrarily exercised extrarational means, to exist beyond the reach of reason itself. That is why this crowd is so dangerous, why their Lincolnian idolatry is so pervasive, and also why they will never admit that they are wrong. But reality dictates that they cannot escape rationality and must ultimately bear its consequences. One cannot worship both God and mammon. A mutual exclusion precludes it.
Criticise the "precious". How could we? </sarcasm>
Doesn't help your case to let your emotions overrule your good sense - one of the many things that distinguishes us all from the left is the fact that we don't need to rely on personal smears to lay out our arguments ;)
I suppose this will come back around again to our old dispute of whether morality and ethics comes from within or without - if it comes from...elsewhere, then listening to that innate sense is entirely appropriate. If not, then that innate sense is nothing more that reason and experience again, I think
It may or may not be nothing more than reason and experience, but even if it is limited to that, the innate sense can still be valid even if the person sensing it isn't able to give all the reasons for why it's so. Yeah, that involves a risk that it could be coming from some evil demon instead, but that's where that ol' leap of faith comes in.
We'll get you a beer while we're at it ;)
Shhh! I think he knows we are aware of his precious' evil and the need to destroy it. We've got to watch out - Waltrot cannot be trusted!
Thanks Edith....you're almost trained.
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