Posted on 08/21/2007 11:41:49 AM PDT by DesScorp
I just recently caught up with the exchange on conservatism and the culture wars between Brink Lindsey and Ramesh Ponnuru, in which Lindsey exhorts conservatives to give up any further efforts in the culture war, which he deems finished. And I also heard some of a Cato Institute talk that featured Lindsey and David Brooks, who agrees with Lindsey on this point. I agree with Peter Wood who commented on PBC that if the culture war is over, efforts to reform the university are pointless, and we obviously don't think such efforts are pointless or we wouldn't be here at PBC. Neither would the Manhattan Institute have initiated its Minding the Campus feature. Neither would Regnery be issuing its politically incorrect guides to various subjects. And so forth.
I also think that Lindsey's view of modern life as the “exuberantly pluralistic pursuit of personal fulfillment through an ever-expanding division of labor” is utterly soulless.
Also, Lindsey made some remarks in his part of the exchange, that the Right should be embarrassed about previous racism, sexism, and prudery. I don't have the exchange in front of me now, but I think that's close to what he said. In the National Review I read as a teenager, edited by William Buckley, I don't recall any of that. I recall its being sound, elegant, rational, cultured, with high intellectual standards. Lindsey should be prevailed upon to give specific examples of what he means by the sins of the Right in these areas.
(Excerpt) Read more at phibetacons.nationalreview.com ...
Currently, the left is using the government to ENFORCE IMMORALITY.
Simply put, whether by design or by unintended consequence,
the subsidizing of poor choices just leads to more of those choices.
The Law of Unintended Consequences is well established and all but proven in my mind. We see it over and over again. Speed restrictions on highways that increase accident rates, CAFE legislation that decreases fleet milage, public schools that prevent kids from learning, tax policy that stifles commercial activity and decreases revenues... and the list goes on and on. It has become a truism that whatever the government tries to do, they wind up doing the exact opposite by accident.
And yet "social consevatives" want to harness this power in order to enforce morality, and expect to get the results they desire. Instead, they wind up supplanting morals-friendly social networks and acheive the exact opposite of what they intended.
This should come as no surprise.
I'll bet you believe the New Deal interpretation of the Commerce Clause that says Congress can regulate virtually anything as "interstate commerce".
Who gave us the election in ‘04? The Lindseys of the world apparently have very short memories.
Post of the decade.
The “restraint” should be the natural (bad) consequences for (bad) behaviors and choices. (Do something stupid and get hurt - spend the rest of your life having to live with the injury - without “disability”. Let your daughter run around unsupervised, you may have to take care of an unexpected grandchild for the next 18 years.)
When our society subsidizes and alleviates those bad consequences, that’s when you get the huge moral decline that you see.
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Absolutely right, Mr. B!
What we have today are iatrogenic social disorders, caused by the very government progams supposedly designed to alleviate them.
“War is the health of the State” - the modern progressive state has nothing to war on but its own population.
Get the government out of the business of subsidizing those who won’t exercise self control and we will see some improvement. For instance, end all government welfare, and thereby quit subsidizing illegitimacy and we’ll see a huge reduction in it. Stop requiring that hospitals take all comers, regardless of ability to pay, etc. We don’t need more laws, in fact we need many fewer laws.
You see it over and over again. They go running to Washington thinking they're going to get federal laws imposed on everyone that reflect their "local values". Instead they end upu having local laws dictated to them that reflect the values of the beltway.
I reviewed this book for a Catholic News Service (forget the specific name of the group), and you are exactly right. Lindsey is quite hostile to religious people in this book, claiming they “set back” intellectual life in the 20th century. In several places, his theory is just off. He does seem to realize, however, that the very forms of social control needed to succeed in an entrepreneurial society-—self-discipline, faith, optimism, structure-—are those generally weakened by Libertarian practices, and he really doesn’t have an answer for that.
The difference is that social conservatives don’t like to think about it or celebrate it publicly (just with their frat or sorority cronies?). For them, the conservative values are what pulled them away from their youthful libertinism, and they fear the absence of the social conventions will lead to a breakdown of society.
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If every sinner felt compelled to defend sin no one could speak out against it since we are all sinners. That is the trap within the idea (a Biblical one) that hypocrites are to be condemned. The reality is to repent of sin and then have the courage to speak out against it openly and without hypocrisy. In other words, it is not hypocritical at all to condemn a sin you have repented of. I think it is completely logical to believe that sin should not be outlawed, but should be condemned, and that this is consistent with libertarian thinking. Where I part ways is within the thinking that all sin should be legal no matter how destructive.
The other group of Libertarians (or I should say Liberaltarians) that I see are upper class or middle-upper class men who are liberal Democrats who can't bring themselves to call themselves liberal Democrats.
They call themselves Libertarians, but they vote Democrat, support Democrats, and bash Republicans and conservatives. (Real Libertarians just bash Republicans and conservatives - they are silent about Democrats...)
Their patron saint is Bill Mahr (who also calls himself Libertarian, but is really nothing more than a socialist liberal Democrat.)
With the Liberaltarians, there's not a dime's bit of difference between them and the Democrats (to use a variation of a phrase the Libertarians are very fond of).
To me, a true test as to whether one is a Libertarian or a Liberaltarian is to ask them if they are for "universal" government run health care. If they say yes, they are Liberaltarians (and you would be suprised at how many people who call themselves Libertarians will say yes).
The Founders, at least many of them, were personally conservative in behavior, but of (classical) liberal opinion about the role of the state. A sound position, IMHO. Remember, the Founder were almost all deeply versed in both English history (including Magna Carta, Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, Gloriana, the the debacle of the Stuarts and the Commonwealth, and the Glorious Revolution. The understood that liberty involved responsibility. Moreover, almost all of them were classically educated and deeply imbued with what were seen as the virtues of the classical Greeks and (especially) Romans. Many of them were deeply committed to the notions of 'civic virtue' - a willingness to voluntarily subsume one's own interests to those of the state for the greater good. Think of Horatio at the Bridge (in Macaulay's telling) or Cincinnatus at his plow (in Livy).
This became patently obvious to me after reading Dr. Sowell’s Basic Econ book.
Economics is nothing but analyzing the results of incentives and disincentives.
And the disincentive to immoral behavior is its very high likelihood of resulting in bad consequences.
God’s way or the hard way, in essence.
The Religious Right tends toward governmental intervention in the lives of individuals which kind of makes them big government, morally conservatives.
It should surprise no one that these two groups are always butting heads.
The libertarians also seem to be butting heads with a larger and larger percentage of conservatives.
Some of that seems to be because the libertarians are becoming increasingly liberal on moral issues, but some also seems to be due to a larger percentage of conservatives being more accepting of government interference in people's lives.
Or maybe it just seems that way. After all I seem to always remember things being better in the past than they probably really were.
I wrote something intelligent but then had second thoughts about adding to a discussion on self-flagellation. I’ll just get some popcorn!
“Social conservatives aren’t doing themselves any favors when they drive away voters who agree with them for the most part. It comes down to they just cannot mind their own business.”
A party that wants to legalize heroin isn’t just “minding their own business”...they’re seeding crime, death, and destruction.
It would be foolish to think that Libertarians, of all people, would be homogeneous in their beliefs...and most of us small-L libertarians never quit being plain constitutionalist conservatives in the first place.
I think the tide began to turn with the Republican majority, and the perception that the "conservatives" now wielded the power. This attracted the political opportunists that believe the end always justifes the means.
Today's Libertarians are in bed with the left. Most of the small "l" ones remaining in the Republican party are in bed with the Republicans for Choice and the Log Cabin Republicans, working diligently to take down the party of Reagan and elect Democrats so they can have "their" tiny, little permanent minority party returned to their control. Read some of the stuff written by Eisenhower's progeny. The real political enemy is not the Democrats, but the conservatives like Reagan who stole "their" party.
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