1,361 Days to Go: Stop Helping the Statists Divide Us

posted at 5:59 pm on April 30, 2009 by CK MacLeod
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Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute, published a thoughtful op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal under the combative title “The Real Culture War Is Over Capitalism,” and under a less provocative but more useful subtitle referring to “ethical populism” and “the moral case against redistribution.”

Brooks moves beyond the caricature of Tea Partiers and of “fiscal conservatives” as money- and tax-obsessed hollow men and with assorted crazies in tow.  Citing poll numbers showing overwhelming support for “free markets, limited government, and entrepreneurship,” he claims that “[f]ree enterprise is culturally mainstream,” then goes a step further, arguing for the movement’s moral dimension:

Advocates of free enterprise must learn from the growing grass-roots protests, and make the moral case for freedom and entrepreneurship. They have to declare that it is a moral issue to confiscate more income from the minority simply because the government can. It’s also a moral issue to lower the rewards for entrepreneurial success, and to spend what we don’t have without regard for our children’s future.

Yet, though the tone of Brooks’ piece is thoughtful and factual, not remonstrative, he and his headline-writer still succumb to an unfortunate fratricidal impulse, implicitly framing the rise of economic conservatism as requiring the decline of social conservatism on the right.

There’s a lot of that going around these days.

Just as on our “local” level we’ve seen many a discussion thread at HotAir devolve into warfare along these lines of demarcation, we’ve seen the Republican coalition vividly fracture in the same way, from the ground up and from the top down.  It can get nasty, and, frankly, most (not all) of the derision and derogation lately seems to come from one side – whether temperately as from Mr. Brooks, or less so in the highly personal assaults on Sarah Palin and her core supporters; snarling and uncomprehending attacks on people supposedly obsessed with “God, guns, and gays”; or the deployment of stereotype targeted against stereotype via demographics.  Reviewing the resultant carnage and devastation, many a social conservative or sympathizer may want to reach for a Bible, and, like the greatest Republican (if to lesser immediate purpose), quote the apostle Matthew:  “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!”

It’s not merely an emotional or tribal reaction to attack and betrayal, but the reaction to an obstacle that impedes all of our political goals.  As The Apologist put it to one “FiCon” during last night’s advance headline discussion on the Books piece:

You can’t find enough Northeasterners and Westerners who care MOST about economic liberty to make up for the ones who care MOST about social liberty. That’s your weakness, not ours. We get you the Plains and the South, what do you bring to the table? BUILD. YOUR. ARMY. Then you’ll have an equal say in who the nominee is. Then you’ll HELP build the party and win elections, instead of tearing the most reliable Republicans down.

I don’t mean to yell. I’m not angry WisCon. I’m frustrated. We lost the last election and your attacking the strongest wing of our coalition instead of building up the weakest. It drives me crazy.

Most of us already know how the E-Cons and Fi-Cons and R-Cons and RINOs and whoever else reply:  Something along the lines of “How can we build our army when rubes like you guys keep on scaring off the recruits?”  But this problem is just the superficial appearance of a deeper fact:  Social conservatives and economic conservatives come into conflict not because they are pre-destined to fight as much as because, whether they like it or not, they are first pre-destined to come into (sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes creative) contact:  The expansion of the state in all dimensions is a mortal threat to both So-Cons and E-Cons.

What gives the issue an even greater political potential is that the expanding state is, as Brooks shows, also increasingly sensed as a danger by people who haven’t thought of themselves as politically highly engaged.  It will eventually draw in allies from groups, including even many core Obamaists of the present day, who do not yet realize how threatened they are.

With this potential in mind, I’d like to leave the polls and the short-, mid-, and long-term play-by-plays aside, and, at this widely acknowledged low point in conservatives’ political fortunes, encourage a focus on guiding principles and central commonalities:

• The only way that the massive expansion of the state wouldn’t be a mortal threat to E-Cons would be if it “worked” – if it turned out to be possible, after all, to expand the state massively and also expand the realm of economic freedom massively.  If you believed that it was possible you wouldn’t be an economic conservative.
• The only way that the massive expansion of the state wouldn’t be a mortal threat to So-Cons would be if the state happened to embrace some perfect socially conservative program, but that’s an impossibility except as the primordially un-American “establishment” of one or another religion, the doctrine and dogma of one or another sect, to the exclusion of all others.  Much more likely, to the point of certainty, would be a massively expanded, increasingly aggressive secular humanism and multiculturalim under familiarly deceptive claims of non-preference.

To re-apply the Great Emancipator, again:  Just as the government that could give you everything would have the power to take everything, the government that could realize your every spiritual value would have the power to pervert and destroy your every spiritual value.  It turns out that the key issue for Republicans is now as it was in the beginning:  slavery - if not in the spectacle of our fellow human beings in shackles and under the lash.  (We may therefore also hope that the current struggle won’t end in blood sacrifice.)  We oppose, as Governor Palin put it recently, “enslavement by the federal government,” as well as enslavement by other forces – activist groups, corporations, unions, etc. – that use the federal government as their proxy:  We reject having our values as well as our valuables confiscated, re-distributed, and forced into artifical conformity according to anyone else’s notions.

As important – practically as well as theoretically – the meeting, and creative tension between, social conservatism and economic conservatism is what each wing needs to keep from flying off into irrelevance, extremism, and eventual perversion and contradiction of its own precepts.

• Economic conservatism broadly defined – libertarian, federalist, fiscally responsible, etc. – should be the positive, practical check on social conservatism:  Where social conservative commitments can’t be understood and implemented in ways that make sense from a federalist, libertarian perspective is usually where social conservatism begins to become counterproductive to its own ends and values (for instance, by threatening to “establish” the doctrines and dogmas of one religion or sect).
• Similarly, social conservatism should be the positive, practical check on economic conservatism.  Libertarian and free market ideas begin to turn into their opposite when forced to one or another extreme – anarchy, or anarchy sooner or later giving way to brute corporate force.  Traditional values and value-based communities trace the practical as well as the moral limits of pure libertarianism.

To provide one example of how the above can work practically and politically, relating to the WisCon/Apologist exchange, it’s neither dishonest nor insulting for an E-Con to hear out someone whom The Apologist might call a “SoLib FiCon” (socially liberal fiscal conservative) as a potential recruit, and openly state that it’s one role of E-Cons to capitalize on So-Con engagement while channeling So-Con passions – to help them emphasize and realize the positive content of the Culture of Life, for instance, without inducing defensive counterreactions catastrophic to all (including the unborn).  A winning rather than a whining Republicanism can afford to make that argument, without anyone taking offense, feeling slighted, or reinforcing an insulting stereotype – and without signing up a “moderate” to coercion against his or her perceived interests.

Of course, having each side mainly concerned with checking – squelching – the other isn’t much of a way forward.  Perhaps under the sign of Brooks’ “ethical populism,” we also need concrete initiatives that tie economic and socially conservative principles together, as when the first Republicans tied together the economic forces of business and free labor with the gathering moral force of anti-slavery.  Both tendencies, then as now, were and are about freedom, and about a definition of liberty that excluded ownership of one class or caste over another.  When they have united, they have re-shaped the nation (and shocked the world).  It’s therefore no suprise that preventing that union has so often been a primary strategic goal of Democrats, and also of the enemies of the American experiment.

Let’s stop helping them.

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