Posted on 10/13/2002 1:12:36 PM PDT by aconservaguy
After September 11, reflection on what President Bush means when he calls himself a compassionate conservative has about disappeared. He is now mostly a war leader, and surely compassion is not a virtue of a commander-in-chief. The president does know how to put a compassionate face on what we must do in Afghanistan. We are dropping bombs on our enemies the Taliban, but food on our friends, the hungry and oppressed people of that pathetic nation.
And we, the president adds, are not at war with Islam; genuine Islamic believers are also compassionate or kind and gentle conservatives. We are at war only with terrorists who distort that religion for their evil purposes. But let's face it: We know those seemingly compassionate distinctions are mainly rhetorical devices the president is employing to vanquish our enemies and secure our "homeland." At this point, we must hope and we have reason to believe that we do not have a compassionate foreign policy.
But the president's resolute response to the terrorist attack can be, I think, integrated into compassionate conservatism properly understood. The phrase means that genuinely conservative policy is not libertarian, or at least not completely libertarian. It is based on some concern for the souls of Americans.
I remember reading on the day of President Bush's inauguration an article by anti-tax activist Grover Norquist that sought to remind us that the Democratic party is not primarily stupid but "evil." The Democrats, Norquist alleges, remain the party of "coercive utopianism." That phrase, of course, was used to describe the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. But say what you will about Bill Clinton, he was no coercive utopian. As president, he put his faith far more in the market than in government planning, and in his mind communism's failure completely discredits its theory. Not only that, President Clinton was pretty much for freedom across the board: On the social or cultural issues, such as abortion and gay rights, he is pro-choice or libertarian. He was, all in all, the most consistently libertarian president we've ever had. (Someone here might object with environmentalism or affirmative action, but I didn't say perfectly consistent!)
Dare I say that President Bush sees that the greatest danger to human liberty now is far more "anticoercive" than "coercive" libertarianism? Both anticoercive (meaning libertarian) and coercive (meaning Marxist) utopians share the vision of the withering away of the state. We now know that certainly will not happen through the revolution Marx described. Old-fashioned libertarians did not really believe that it would happen at all. They tended to look not forward but backward. They favored the restoration of some freer—if not perfectly free—moment in America's past and whined that history was not on their side. They also served liberty, of course, with their anticommunism. But today libertarians believe that the progress of history or technology will make their dream a reality. They call their opponents, as Marxists used to do, enemies of the future. They believe that we will have a designer future. Biotechnology will extend life indefinitely, and so we will even be relatively unconstrained by biological necessity. And genetic manipulation in the womb will even make it possible for parents to design or perfect their children. Economic freedom, meanwhile, will triumph over political restrictions; the technological imperatives that produce globalization cannot be stopped.
President Bush sees that conservatives are now defined, or ought to be defined, by opposition to extreme libertarianism and unfettered technological progress. They must insist that technology must be subordinated to properly human purposes, and they realize the moral and political limitation of technology will require political will and coercion. That is, in fact, what the president said in his most thoughtful speech defending the limits he imposed on stem cell research, and it is what he implied by making Leon Kass—our most eloquent opponent of biotechnological assaults on human nature—his chief advisor on biotechnology. When it comes to issues like abortion, euthanasia, cloning, cyberporn, and so forth, conservatives such as the president are to some extent statists. They see libertarianism as culminating in a misanthropic form of compassion: The libertarian hope is that technology can liberate us altogether from human suffering by overcoming what had been regarded as natural limits to human choice. As the president explained in his inaugural address, conservatives are now distinguished by their defense of the virtue of beings who can not only be compassionate but courageous, and who can acknowledge their necessary and beneficial dependence on God.
The unprecedented attack against America on September 11 only reinforces the anti-libertarian or political impulse of compassionate conservatism properly understood. The president just said, quite rightly, that Americans now are all soldiers. They must now remember, in other words, the basic duty of citizenship; they cannot escape the fact that human beings are necessarily citizens. True compassion means acting effectively to protect those who are truly vulnerable, a category which now includes our fellow Americans even here at home. We have been reminded forcefully of another dark side of globalization and high technology; we are more vulnerable than ever to the forces of evil in the world. The world is a much more dangerous place because so many governments have become so weak. We have also been reminded that human beings remain divided religiously, and that our view of liberty cannot be separated from very definite views concerning the dignity of the human being and his or her relationship to God. Tolerance cannot mean indifference to the truth about what we really believe. Our enemies believe they can succeed only because they mistakenly believe that Americans have become so mindlessly decadent that they are no longer capable of acting as if they had souls, that we have become so apathetic and self-absorbed that we are incapable of acting compassionately and courageously.
There is almost nothing less true than the libertarian view that high technology will cause the state to wither away and produce a new birth of almost unconstrained human freedom. Political will is needed now more than ever to defend human liberty against two dangers posed by technological progress. The first is the threat that technology poses to human nature or the soul itself, and the second is the threat posed by the access those that hate us have to that technology. Compassionate conservatism turns out to be about how government can defend and encourage the virtues characteristic of a free human being under God.
Peter Augustine Lawler is a professor of government at Berry College in Georgia.
URL: http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/guest/01/lawler/compcons.html
Ok fine, the job of the government isn't to protect the human soul.
The only foundation for legitimate government is the protection of the physical lives and property of citizens.
says who? Also, this seems fairly broad: what is your definition of property to fall under this scheme? And how about lives: to what extreme can the government go to protect "physical lives"? Throwing folks in jail because of threats made on peoples' lives?
Anything else is thievery, banditry and slavery. In other words, a con job.
How will the government finance the protection of property and physical lives? Also, even at it's most basic level, a government would still be guilty of all three, wouldn't it?
ok. what are these"peaceable methods"? And, where does the "ONE SIZE FITS ALL deal" come from? Is it implied somewhere? The "one size fits all" of gov isn't necessarily bad. There are some instances where government is needed; some conflicts that cannot be solve by "peaceable" or other "methods," and are better solved by the gov (take when dealing with criminals, for example).
However, such individual conflicting rights are negligible problems and quite silly when compared to the overwhelming power of a government breaking the limits that restrain it.
If this threat exists, then why have gov't? why not just get rid of it so this problem of government breaking limits is gone? When put like your above quote, it would seem that government costs more than it's worth.
maybe i should clarify: when i said the "road is long" i wasn't referring to "time" but rather the distance between the two extremes (more like length). As for my making "broad generalizations": how so?
My "dilemma" is not false: "compassionate conservativism" is a tepid form of socialism, a cowardly abdication to the nanny state that will continue leading us down a highway of increasing collectivist control of our lives and fortunes, whereas libertarianism, and especially its minarchist form to which I adhere, is much more in line with the principles of privacy and property rights. Once a nation is on the road to socialism, it's very difficult to make a u-turn, at least not without the loss of many lives. The Republicans are leading us down that road.
If i accept your definition of "compassionate conservatism" as a "tepid form of socialism" (which i think is a bit unfitting) you're probably right in that there's no false dilemma. If i don't (which i am a bit incredulous of), then i think your dilemma is still false and your broad generalization is still just taht. Even then, i don't think this causal chain will follow as you say: first of all, you offer no time period of how long this road will take to travel, so there's no way to effectively gauge the accuracy of your prediction: in other words, you can always blame it on the "compassionate conservatives" or whomever, and be right, even if the evidence points otherwise. i also don't think the snowball effect is gonna come that easily. The ball isn't gonna get that big that fast. There's a difference between socialism and conservatism, including the "compassionate" kind. The road to socialism is far -- far from compassionate conservatism (even if i believe that it's a form of "tepid socialism")And the republicans are leading us down the road to socialism? how are they doing that?
that seems far to broad an assessment to place it between "authoritarianism and freedom." This dichotomy of authoritarianism and freedom is false. ok, socialism is an aspect of authoritarianism: lawler's conservatism (or conservatism in general) falls into this how?
The road between the two is not long, however, so long as freedom loving people struggle endlessly it will force those seeking more authoritarianism to move in smaller increments making it seem to be a long road.
so let me get this straight: even if we keep struggling, socialism's gonna happen? why struggle at all if it's gonna be here anyway? that seems kinda worthless. And where do freedom-hating people fall in this mix?
Whether long or short, that road is unstable, and as government seeks to grow it's own power and influence, that road is always heavily weighted toward authoritarianism.
If the government doesn't seek to grow in its power and influence, does the road become more stable? can people stop the government from growing? And, how long will it take to get to authoritarianism? in fact, what do you define as "authoritarianism"? I think different degrees exist, and there are differences between being a government such as we have and an "authoritarian" government (say stalin's russia) which we don't have.
lol, got it. i'm coming from the perspective that government (society might be better) has the right and possible obligation to act as sovereign -- basically, individual rights ain't absolute, and there are times when rights conflict and individual rights have the possibility of losing (say, two folks consumating on a church lawn as people are walking out: do the people on the church lawn have the right to do that w/abandon? or, does the church -- or the people of the church -- have the right to forbid such actions? although i'm thinking that private property rights come into play here some how...)
This threat exists. Government exists to prosecute coercion. It also exists to protect it's citizens from outside threats. You can't get rid of it, it's necessary, but it's only really useful when it's limited to prosecuting coercion, which includes defending it from outside threats.
that i think i can agree with, although i think government (or maybe again this is "society") has a bit more leeway than you allow (just a bit. not too much).
Once government disregards, eliminates, or "reinterprets" those limitations out of existance...it IS MORE TROUBLE THAN IT'S WORTH.
definately.
In the US, that realization comes to people as incrementally as it occurs.
yep
The dichotomy is true, the one suggested was false, it set economic authoritarianism on one side and overall abstract freedom on the other. Lawler's conservatism seeks to choose an arbitrary point along the road and say, "This is Utopia." Doesn't work...government, once given a little power beyond simply protecting people from outside threat and prosecuting coercion between it's people will always...always...(Yes I said an absolute) ALWAYS leverages that power into MORE power. Conservatism as I understand you describing it sets the big ball of power on a downhill run into government's court and tries to stop it after it's built up momentum.
which one is the dichotomy suggested? i've forgot. As for this freedom vs. authoritarianism dichtomoy: i think it's more complex than a simple one absolute or the other; on this i figure we can agree to disagree. As for conservatism: you've got a point there. I suppose it takes a bit more momentum and distance before we're in all out authoritarianism, though. Your assessment of libertarianism i like.
If government has the power to use socialism to enhance it's own power further, yes, socialism's going to happen. The only way to prevent it is to struggle to limit government from using that power...it'll require criminal and civil penalties against politicians doing so to work IMO.
civil and criminal penalties? very interesting...
Depends. There needs to be something to which people can appeal for redress. For government expansion, we can see that a Constitution of Enumerated power simply isn't enough as the judiciary can be corrupted to reinterpret "enumerated powers" to unlimited powers except where the Bill of Rights is concerned...with incremental infringements against all of those.
no disagreement here (although no doubt if we were to get into particulars there'd be something to disagree about, lol)
When the government has the power to overrule the citizen in most aspects of life, arbitrarily, it is an authoritarian government.
Again, i think that's open to broad interpretation. At the basic level, imo, laws -- gov itself -- "has the power to overrule the citizen in most aspects of life" and does (although in simple ways: traffic laws and such; certain other laws which might take me awhile to think up when not on the fly).
I don't think there are degrees of authoritarianism per se, but only phases toward authoritarianism away from individual liberty.
interesting interpretation
I happen to think that Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany is in America's future unless limitations on government power are quickly enforced. I'm absolutely positive that if the current situtation is allowed to continue that Stalin or Hitler or Mao will be remembered as pussy cats in comparison to what happens in the United States.
It's a matter of time...how much, I can't even guess, but I currently believe it'll be in my lifetime.
let's hope you're wrong.
i neither said nor implied about republicans. I asked a question. Thanks for answering it.
Stop asking stupid questions like "how do you define property?" If I buy something, it's my property, a-hole. There's your definition. With respect to the protection of lives, I'm referring to protection from bona-fide threats caused by others that violate my free will. For example, if somebody sells me a drug, it's not the government's business. If I end up killing myself with the drug, it's not the government's business. However, if I drive under the influence I constitute a bona-fide threat to someone else's life. The government has a right to restrain and/or punish me in the latter case, but not in the former ones. Hey, the logic is simple enough even for you, dill-hole.
Thanks for the clarification.
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.