Conservatism & Liberalism Continued

Excursis Cont.  Although extremists have always been among us, both on the left and on the right, the history of the 20th century has been one of disappointment in the promise of the rational secular state -- it's devolution into Stalinism and Maoism on the left, the various forms of fascism on the right.  While capitalist democracy seems to be the last secular state standing, it too is showing a legacy of disappointment.  As Lilla reminds us, "the first neoconservatives were disappointed liberals like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer, who saw the failure of a large number of Great Society programs to deliver on the unrealistic expectations of their architects."   If a government dominated by "the habits of thought of the natural scientist and the engineer," to use a phrase of Hayek's, could not make rational determinations, then perhaps the invisible hand of the market could make better decisions on our behalf, and along with that comes the imperative to remove the more visible hand of the state.  As Hayek put it, "the economic freedom which is the prerequisite of any other freedom cannot be the freedom from economic care which the socialists promise us and which can be obtained only by relieving the individual at the same time of the necessity and of the power of choice; it must be the freedom of our economic activity which, with the right of choice, inevitably also carries the risk and the responsibility of that right."  Or to quote McChesney on Friedman, "because profit-making is the essence of democracy, any government that pursues anti-market policies is being antidemocratic, no matter how much popular support they might enjoy."  As a consequence, following thinkers like Hayek and Friedman in the  direct equation of a free market and a free people, many of the social welfare programs of the Great Society have already been eviscerated, and if the debates of the current presidential electoral cycle are any indication, next on the list are the social welfare programs of the New Deal.           

Again McChesney paraphrasing Friedman, it is "best to restrict governments to the job of protecting private property and enforcing contracts, and to limit political debate to minor issues" like abortion, like gay marriage, and if not exactly minor according to those affected or those who care, at least ancillary to the core issues surrounding the distribution and the uses of wealth.  Lilla argues elsewhere that the "great separation" of church and state, for which he credits Hobbes as the point of origin, was a point of departure for Western culture and world history.   It opened the path for the development of the rational secular state, with the necessary constraints of any state posited on the material and economic conditions of life.  It's principle opposition has not been the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, but rather the revealed the revealed theological state.  The state predicated on a revealed theology -- in Rawls' term, a comprehensive doctrine, whether Koranic, Biblical, or Marxist -- has a much longer standing historically, and also a much greater appeal, in part because the rational secular state posits no greater end for the whole humanity, the entirety of the state, and leaves it in the perpetual position of arbiter against the individual "pursuit of happiness."  For those who know the truth, and who wish their government to reflect and protect this truth, who wish it to serve as the governing intentionality of their government, the very rationality of the rational secular state is drawn into question, particularly when it appears that the social consensus around that revealed doctrine is under threat, when it appears that the government is going to hell in a hand-basket and taking those who know and those who believe down with them, when it appears there is no escape from the anti-Eden of Gomorrah.  Lilla, I think, is correct when he writes that what we are seeing now "are redemptive reactionaries who think the only way forward is to destroy what history has given" -- everything from the devaluation of redemptive labor in the social welfare state and the devaluation of labor in Roe vs. Wade -- destroy what history has given "and wait for a new order to emerge out of the chaos."  They are redemptive reactionaries defined less by their aspirations, more by the intensity of their aversions.