Conservatism & Liberalism Concluded

If the recent primary cycle for the republican presidential nominee has shown anything, it is showing that the odd convergence of free market capitalists and social conservatism in the Republican Party too is showing its signs of stress.  The two are bound together only by an ostensible distrust of government.  On the one side of the republican party, it is chaffing under the reigns of the regulatory state, all that which limits the acquisition of profit, corporate profit in particular.  It s the republican party of Mitt Romney, a member of the 1%, whose tax rate of 15% is likely less than that of his secretary, whose Caymen Island accounts all signal a life unavailable to the vast majority of Americans.  That no less than Newt Gingrich and his conservative opponents are referring to him as a vulture capitalist signals an irony, if not an outright hypocrisy.  For the proponents of the free market, like Hayek, "the right of choice," the right of economic self determination, "inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right."  Of course the most recent banking crises and recession has raised the question of just who carries that responsibility.  The most passionate proponents of laissez-faire economics, it seems, are those least damaged by the crises, giving some credence to populist writers like Noam Chomsky, who points out that "for you, market discipline, but not for me, unless the 'playing field' happens to be tilted in my favor, typically as a result of large-scale state intervention."  The American economy has never really been, nor can it be wholly, a free market economy, but is rather a state sponsored capitalism.  The ideological wars of the 20th century, and the military-industrial complex they spawned, provided a level of sustained government intervention supporting, if not guaranteeing, a certain level of Keynsian prosperity.  This is money, taken from the tax-payer, laundered through the government, and placed in the hand of defense contractors, who returned it to the tax-payer in the form of wages.  While it supported corporate wealth, one could also argue that it supported national wealth, that it was a cycle both vicious and virtuous.  The Bush attempt to reinstate the cold war dynamic in a crusade against terrorism failed in part because the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan simply did not require the infrastructural support required by the cold war, the sustained investment in everything ranging from uranium mining to missile silos, most accomplished by American workers on American soil.   Beyond that, the Bush attempt to reinstate Reganomics with the laissez-faire deregulation of the banking industry, among others, served simply to tilt the money trough in the direction of the wealthy.  The subsequent democratic bail outs of those deregulated industries once again took money from the tax-payers, laundered through government, and placed in the hands of bankers, who in turn kept it, thank you very much.  It is the welfare state -- a welfare state predicated on nothing resembling social justice, but a welfare state nonetheless. 

It is not a story that inspires much confidence in government, and gives some credence to the argument advanced by Robin that "conservatism is a meditation on, and theoretical rendition of, the felt experience of power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back."  It is difficult to imagine the conciliatory centrism of Barak Obama as much of a threat on this front, but perhaps any threat is a real threat and deserving of the hyperbole heaped upon it.   In the meantime, on the other side of the republican party, the social conservative side, there may have been a sense of power possessed under the Bush administration, and the evangelical tone of his administration may invoke a momentary nostalgia, but the social conservative tilt of the Republican party, I believe, portends something more ominous than power politics pure.  The redemptive reactionary, like Christ, is in possession of Truth, revealed incontrovertible Truth,  not power.  Their conservatism is not so much "the theoretical voice of animus against the agency of the subordinate classes." The rank and file of the social conservatives perceive themselves to be members of a subordinate class, an oppressed class, and they are distrustful of wealth as any liberal, and if they can occasionally bring themselves to forgive it, they can do so because wealth, as such, is not the principle threat.   Their conservatism, if it can be called conservatism, is a reaction to and resentment of that which threatens their Truth, whether it be the Roman Empire or the secular state represented by the conciliatory liberalism of Barak Obama.  Robin is right in part.  If I can quote him out of context, the social conservative "reaction is not reflex," and goes on to write that "it begins from a position of principle -- that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others -- and then re-calibrates that principle in light of a challenge from below" or rather, re-calibrates that principle, not simply in light of, but rather more directly as a challenge from below.  The social conservative seeks their own freedom from subordination.  It is the re-emergence of the Puritan America, the desire to be free from a corrupt and cynical state, the desire to be free to create a state under God's law -- one that at the very least prohibits abortion and sanctifies the nuclear family -- one that, in short, exemplifies an evangelical frame of reference.  Those who are fit, and thus ought, to rule others but as one evangelical, quoted recently in the New Yorker, put it, "I teach our congregation that we should make our political decisions like we make all our other decisions: based on how closely aligned the candidates are to the Bible."  The liberal state, a state predicated on the great separation, should be replaced with the new Eden of the evangelical state.  That such a state would be anything but free, in any conventional sense of the word free, and would devolve into the same sorts of factionalism that plague the middle east, is an irony lost on those who most desire the evangelical, the Christian, state.