Conservatism: A Libertarian Challenge
Efron, Edith
will hardly be in a position to criticize them as they too make adjustments and rapprochements in their relations with the East, however politically, militarily, or economically discomfitting such...
...individual reason is not significant...
...Congressional investigating committees are dangerous institutions and need to be watched and curbed if they are not to become a serious threat to freedom...
...But the point is, nobody would stare blankly and answer: I haven't the faintest idea...
...Judging from SALT and Helsinki, the lengths we are prepared to go and the concessions we are willing to make in order simply to achieve this occasional, fleeting feeling of relaxed reassurance about the future of mankind in a nuclear age, are becoming truly astounding...
...the individual mind is not inviolable...
...But religious belief and Platonic forms of the Good are not rational political theory —and thus they can coexist with the most startling political opposites, and can be consistently betrayed without noticing it...
...Libertarianism forbids the use of force on people who have not, themselves, initiated the use of force...
...In the total state, everything may be dedicated to Labor...
...One of these penalties is the political disaster called Watergate...
...What was I to make of the vocal free enterprise tradition in the conservative world...
...The conservative community has long since sold out free enterprise—to the total despair of its members who do hold free enterprise as rational economic theory...
...Conservatism's Anti-individualism When I examined this "affirmative" social theology carefully, I discovered that it is organized to combat one central evil—the individual and his unfettered mind...
...I agree...
...We received formal Soviet endorsement of vague, rhetorical affirmations of the importance of a whole laundry list of civil liberties—all of which, of course, will be absolutely unenforceable...
...I realized that if I were to boil the content down to the simplest, most unpretentious English sentence I could construct, I would end up with this one: "God made society this way, Grandpa liked it this way, so it should remain this way...
...Preaching, teaching, criticism, moral pressure, cooperative voluntary organization, economic boycotts—all are acceptable means of influencing one's fellow citizens...
...But the inalienable right to liberty is mankind's—and America's—flaming political ideal...
...And in the process of studying the affirmative works of conservatism, I learned some things about the fundamental conflict between libertarianism and conservatism, which go to the heart of what is often described as the "conservative dilemma...
...All that is left is pressure groups and their Congressional representatives, mutually hostile mobs fighting like piranhas for chunks of the public treasure, with the mediating Supreme Court torn by the identical conflicts...
...And I'm going to cite those 20 liberal statements with which I agree because they provided me with my first insight into the invisible content of conservatism...
...Kirk is not alone...
...Every one of these anti-individualist pro-totalitarians is, simultaneously, a pro-individualist anti-totalitarian...
...I didn't know what on earth these writers (whose names I immediately forgot) were talking about, and a reasonable intelligence, a background in both literature and philosophy, and two university degrees did not help me...
...But I agree...
...Typically, a conservative is given the chore of rounding up a collection of writers or lecturers to answer that mysterious question: What do conservatives think...
...I agree—but would further qualify: the primary goal of international policy in all areas ought to be peace, by which I do not mean spineless capitulation to acts of aggression against us...
...I agree, save that people should never be given the right to vote in a manner that would violate any individual's rights...
...But the hypocrisy of the judges does not wipe out the crime, nor its uniquely conservative style, motivation, and psychology...
...It has remained for the arrogance of the doctrinaire socialist and state planner, in our time, to deal contemptously with the traditional incentives to ordinary integrity...
...I agree...
...The tragic truth is that Watergate is a quintessentially conservative phenomenon...
...One batch of statist authoritarians sitting in righteous judgment on another batch of statist authoritarians—particularly when their specific illegalities have been identical, historically—is bound to present an unedifying spectacle...
...If nothing else, ratifying the current political division of Europe should have been viewed as an important bargaining counter in what former President Nixon styled an "era of negotiation" rather than "confrontation...
...And many are aware that economic freedom is the arch pre-condition for all individual freedom...
...At a bare minimum, it seemed to represent a view of man that does not enshrine reason—for the exercise of reason is a purely individual affair...
...The Watergate syndrome, with its obsession with order and its hatred of those who flout authority, with its secretive violations of individual rights, with its totally negative anti-liberal focus, with its overpowering anti-intellectualism, with its helpless inability to do ideological battle in a rational affirmative manner, with its unthinking tribal spirit, its blind obedience and leader-worship, is a perfect dramatization of that psychology which is embedded in the conservative philosophy I have been discussing...
...Both are honorable men, and both are appalled by Watergate...
...It is crucial, in this connection, that thereligious young understand clearly that the radicalism of the libertarian position requires no renunciation of religion...
...No matter who had authored the statement of conservative philosophy, or whatever its subtle variations, it always added up to a fierce negation of individualism...
...But, tragically for America, that is also the epistemological status of the individualist, free enterprise elements of conservative belief...
...In their loss of purpose, in their abandonment of even the themes they most sincerely espoused, Britain, France, and most of all, because of their immense power and impartiality, the United States, allowed conditions to be gradually built up which led to the very climax they dreaded most...
...I am not sure how one answers that, finally...
...It is time for the betrayed young of this generation to launch a philosophical crusade to resurrect and restore that ideal...
...I do not believe in universal free speech and free assembly...
...Barry Goldwater has been disgusted by it...
...All these themes, too, ring out in the writings of serious conservatives...
...All American citizens have a right to express their opinions...
...Corporal punishment is wrong—and most particularly for small children...
...It means: a total renunciation of any attempt to coerce others by law into submission to one's own religious, ethical, or sexual views...
...on the contrary, it explicitly asserts its mystical base, and its contempt for reason and intellectualism...
...The authoritarian sins in both camps have come home to roost in a catastrophic manner...
...The conservative denies the individual's right to think, value, and act freely, save in one realm: economic production...
...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked recently in New York, "How do you warn a people who have never suffered...
...If the conservative is a government official, his working definition of loyalty to the free enterprise system is executing these very favors for specific businessmen...
...My recognition of this fascist, anti-intellectual strain in conservative thought shocked me so severely that I sought out other descriptions of conservative beliefs to discover whether Burnham's was atypical...
...Libertarianism only requires a complete acceptance of intellectual liberty, and the separation of Church and State...
...Here we are dealing with a quaint historical development...
...I believe in restricting political rights to those who conform to some unstated standards of race, color, sex, language, religion, family, property, and opinions—political or other...
...In any given mind, the combination is only possible if at least one of these sets of contradictory principles is held, not as rational theory, but as a lesson recited by rote—in other words, only if it has the epistemological status of a religious belief, a dogma taken on faith...
...Libertarianism's Promise It is my deepest conviction that young Americans, both liberals and conservatives, who are hurt, bewildered, and frightened by the philosophical bankruptcy of their elders, and the catastrophic deterioration of their country, must make it their most serious business to study the works of libertarian scholars, and to rethink the assorted rationalizations for statism which they have been taught...
...It was not...
...It appeared to be an implacable dedication to the status quo dressed up as metaphysics...
...They constitute about thirty to forty percent of the people and they even have a national political party—the Republican Party, most of which considers itself conservative...
...The contrast between the clarity and intellectual independence of libertarian writers, and the murky conformism of these metaphysical writers, was striking...
...I agree...
...Authority for the sake of Authority—even if the authority is butchering you...
...I agree...
...The mystery of conservatism, and the chronic incapacity of conservatives to explain it, was becoming clearer...
...At a bare minimum, it seemed to be bigoted, racist, and religiously authoritarian...
...I very much suspect that by now you know why Burnham preferred to present these crucial test-ideas in their liberal form, and to leave their mental translation into conservative ideas up to the unusually diligent...
...Liberal Sentence 2...
...Indeed, Burnham granted that liberals perceive such ideas as "fascist" (his quotes...
...9.) "All nations and people, including the nations and peoples of Asia and Africa, have a right to political independence when a majority of the population wants it...
...Few have ever meant a word of it...
...the individual may not use his own thought as an exclusive guide to his life...
...And America is drifting, disintegrating, slowly dying for lack of rational political principles calculated to guard individual rights above all else...
...And similar or identical ideas were to be found in the works of Michael Oakeshott and Peter Witonski...
...it would shortly be crushed by pressure groups and by the State...
...If it were actually possible, it would be a good thing...
...The answers might beinaccurate, they might often contradict themselves, and members of these groups might protest that the explanations are caricatural...
...Everyone is entitled to political and social rights without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status...
...Given this striking set of contradictions, what then could be concluded about the mysterious philosophy of conservatism...
...At the base of this conservative set of ideas lies the precise opposite of Hook's statement about liberals—namely, the conservative does not have faith in intelligence...
...individual rights are not immutable or inalienable...
...The national government should guarantee that all adult citizens, except for the criminals and the insane, should have the right to vote...
...The primary goal of international policy in the nuclear age ought to be peace...
...Neither old guard has recognized its paternal relationship to the phenomenon it so detests...
...Indeed, what was I to make of the fact that the very same conservative philosophers whom I have been describing in this essay can often be such partisans of individual freedom...
...In fact, both philosophies are authoritarian, both philosophies are elitist, both philosophies are coercive...
...Nonetheless, I agree with the sentence, as it applies to both situations...
...But all these are various aspects of the special talent, produced by intelligence, which is independent of routine or of brute strength...
...But, hesays, he can spot a liberal at fifty paces...
...I agree—but would reverse the qualification...
...For conservatism is generally graspable or intelligible only in this negative aspect—in the dissection and flagellation of liberal and radical irrationality...
...another is membership in a reputable undertaking, as distinguished from impersonal employment by the all-embracing state...
...Except in cases of a clear threat to national security, or, possibly, to juvenile morals, censorship is wrong...
...The answer is distressingly clear—virtually nothing...
...There is not one who does not express a respect for ability, a desire to protect the rewards of achievement, a concern for private property and individual security, a contempt for bureaucratic intervention into the economic area, a condemnation of the omnipotent state, a desire to protect the productive individual from state coercion...
...There is no rational way to integrate them...
...All are dedicated to limited government and individual economic freedom...
...10 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 ences in intelligence, moral or civilizing capacity among human races and ethnic types...
...On confronting this list, I began to understand why nobody quite manages to define conservatism...
...and, above all, "the primacy of the organic community...
...It happens about once every four years...
...I was indeed facing the philosophical lineaments of religious totalitarianism, replete with its usual baggage of religious andracial bigotry...
...the individual may not choose his own values...
...This is the voice of the Divine Primacy of Society and its voracious demand for the renunciation of individual thought...
...Tradition for the sake of Tradition—even if thattradition is enslaving you...
...will hardly be in a position to criticize them as they too make adjustments and rapprochements in their relations with the East, however politically, militarily, or economically discomfitting such actions may, in the future, prove to us...
...I mean that quite literally...
...And this remains true, however one-sided and hypocritical the Congressional and media onslaught may have been...
...It consisted of 39 statements of belief which he had selected from assorted liberal documents, including the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, American Civil Liberties Union questionnaires, and the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
...Libertarianism honors both the liberals' and the conservatives' most fundamental traditions of freedom, those which forbid the use of government coercion against individuals...
...It means the total exclusion of the state from the economic realm, leaving producers free to compete, subject to the risks and hazards of the law of supply and demand alone...
...During this particular season of America's decline, "rights" tend to mean, on the Left, the right to the foulest and most nihilistic forms of self-expression, and the right to other people's money, while, on the Right, they tend to mean the right to muzzle the foulmouthed and nihilist, and to hold on to one's money...
...Gentlemanly thuggery was not what they had intended, when they preached their respective collectivist-statist philosophies, and it revolted them...
...Both liberals and conservatives have attempted to integrate freedom and slavery, and have failed...
...they cannot logically coexist, in theory or in practice...
...certain races, in particular, are presently less educable than others...
...It integrates both traditions—the liberal's spiritual laissez-faire and the conservative's material laissez-faire—into one consistent system...
...Unfortunately, the road to hell is paved with good intentions...
...another is the sense of security and permanence of possession...
...William F. Buckley has angrily—and correctly—denounced Watergate as a "proto-fascist" phenomenon...
...Without this freedom in a system of public education, no intellectual life could exist...
...the organic community, with its accumulation of concrete habits, customs, traditions, institutions, and entrenched hierarchies, has primacy over the individual...
...All forms of racial segregation and discrimination are wrong...
...Between these two groups, he reported, there was much variation, but to the degree that people consciously considered themselves strong liberals or strong conservatives, they agreed or disagreed with most of these sentences...
...The Tsars of Holy Mother Russia would have found these conservative visions quite congenial...
...Indeed, if Burnham was accurate, conservatism considers intelligence to be largely unnecessary...
...But in attempting to clarify this opposition, he constructed a fascinating little test...
...Liberal Sentence 3.) "Political, economic, or social discrimination based on religious belief is wrong...
...The Soviets seem remarkably unafflicted with similar obsessions in the conduct of their own foreign policy...
...There are no significant differActually I am not a conservative, but a lifelong liberal who, twenty years ago, after growing disenchantment with proliferating government, became a "limited state" libertarian...
...At a bare minimum, this seemed to represent some sort of mystical collectivism, which places the alleged authority of the tribe above the interests of the individual...
...In holding such views, Mr...
...The liberal (in principle, at least) acknowledges intellectual and value freedom—but denies the individual freedom in the realm of production...
...I use my own numbering here, but the liberal sentences are precise quotations from Suicide of the West (the second printing, in 1964): Liberal Sentence 1...
...order, unity, equity, stability, continuity, security, harmony, the confinement of change" as "the marks of a good society...
...I agree...
...The Constitution has become a rubber document, betrayed by generations of pragmatic liberals and conservatives who shy away from principles as vampires shy away from the cross...
...At a maximum, it would be a blueprint for fascism...
...they were just asserted as self-evident truths...
...Ability is of various sorts: there are philosophical ability, mechanical ability, commercial ability, directive ability, and persuasive ability...
...And that raised a battery of questions in my mind: Was this what was tucked away behind these concepts of Authority, Tradition, Order, and Duty which, somehow, were never derived, defined, or illustrated...
...Conservatives have paid desperate penalties for the core contradiction at the heart of their philosophy, and for the mystical epistemology which renders its principles impotent...
...It is the same "affirmative" metaphysics and social philosophy that has underlain all theocracies since the days of the cave man...
...They merely choose to strangle the individual in diferent realms, according to their professed theories...
...I checked myself against Burnham's list of ideas, and found the process very revealing...
...He did it by contrasting liberal and conservative philosophical assumptions about the nature of man and society...
...It cannot be allowed to degenerate into the grunting of pigs, and to perish...
...Among his key ideas, he believes "that a divine intent rules society" and that the "leading classes" are those "who have been placed by a divine tactic in positions of responsibility...
...I believe in using physical torture and physical terror on political enemies...
...While Marxian-socialism, however, claims to be a rational, scientific system of ideas, the Hegelian political philosophy carried to its fascist extreme does not...
...But this never seems to occur...
...No scientific information about this subject exists—but if it did exist, it would have no bearing on inalienable rights...
...Edith Efron Conservatism: A Libertarian Challenge • (This essay has been adapted from a lecture given by Miss Efron at the Harvard Institute of Politics...
...One can well understand why...
...But the contemporary businessman's working definition of "free enterprise" is bribing specific government officials for favors—for contracts, for subsidies, for monopolies, for protective tariffs, for preferential tax treatment, for shelter against competition at home and abroad...
...Nothing save our own wistful and self-deceptive think-ing has ever really suggested otherwise...
...affirmative presentations of conservative political theory on which all or most conservatives would agree...
...I agree—simply as part of my respect for freedom of thought...
...This is not the case with conservative thought...
...What they seemed to agree on was that Society—any society—with any Order, and any Tradition, was worthy of preservation, loyalty, honor, and obedience...
...The libertarian traditions are being crushed to death by the authoritarian traditions...
...When they do, they will extricate themselves from their presently untenable position—that of blindly conserving authority, tradition, and order in a state moving fast toward socialism...
...When I first confronted philosophical works by conservatives detailing their affirmative beliefs—initially, in the form of occasional essays in National Review—I couldn't understand them...
...So would the Pharaohs, the Emperors of Ethiopia, the feathered Princes of the Aztecs, and the Kings of the Watusi...
...I agree—and take due note of the odd isolation of the peoples of Asia and Africa...
...The blunt truth is that such ideas are simply totalitarian...
...Defining Conservatism This is particularly odd, since there are so many conservatives around...
...Any interference whatever with free speech and free assembly is wrong—and I will allow parents to worry about the corruption of juveniles...
...Burnham had answered my questions, and confirmed my darkest suspicions...
...We always ought to respect the religious beliefs of others...
...Above all, both reject the concept of individual autonomy...
...Beyond that, we got little more than the dubious pleasure of seeing Fordand Brezhnev in innumerable moments of good-natured, back-slapping, hail-fellowwell-met bonhomie, which is supposed to make us breathe a sigh of relief at this "visible relaxation of tensions" between the superpowers...
...So long as it is public education, no such discriminatory selection is appropriate...
...Our position on this issue was apparently a matter of some import to the Soviets...
...Never were they defined, applied, or integrated into any system of principles...
...I agree...
...The plain fact, today, is that the two dominant philosophies in the United States have broken down under the weight of their own inner irrationality...
...this was a liberal position when conservatives investigated liberals...
...So long as young liberals accept the fundamental contradiction of liberalism—the belief that one can have freedom and a big controlling State as well—they will merely continue to build their own socialist-totalitarian prison, and, helplessly cry out in rage against their vanishing liberty...
...They can point with pride at America's magnificent system of individualism and free enterprise—a system which no longer exists—only because they speak a symbolic-religious language Like the liberals whom they so brilliantly criticize, conservatives are collectivists and statists...
...today, when liberals are investigating conservatives, they would not say this...
...Conservatism's Anti-intellectualism I continued to read Suicide of the West seeking clarification, and, shortly, Burnham made both this philosophical minimum and maximum explicit...
...he Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 13...
...Liberals, he pointed out, define Man by his capacity to think, hold that there is no higher authority for men than reason, and believe that free intellectual inquiry and expression, education, and plebiscitary democracy can solve most human problems...
...They assumed I was a conservative because in my book The News Twisters I had come up with findings of political bias that supported many charges of the Republican and conservative world, among others...
...I think censorship of speech, literature, science and the press is legitimate...
...Or of the growing body of brilliant free-market economic literature...
...Since people began describing me as conservative, however, I became increasingly curious about what it was that I was supposed to be—and what it was that I was supposed to be thinking...
...What kind of philosophy was this, I wondered, that cannot grasp the primacy of the individual mind, its right to self-assertion, to thought, to value judgments, to self-interest—its right to flout tradition, if that tradition is fatuous or irrational, its right to repudiate authority, if that authority is imbecile or immoral, its right to destroy order, if that order is unjust or malignant...
...They will become radicals, intent on a drastic reformation of their society...
...Never were these Platonic abstractions derived in any rational way...
...Why we should expect the leaders of the Russian Communist Party to pay more attention to such declarations when signed at Helsinki than they do to the similar sentiments expressed in their own constitution is past reasonable comprehension...
...I agree—except that I would be immensely cautious in applying the standard of national security, and would never consider juvenile morals an excuse for censorship...
...Here, for example, is the kind of thing that Russell Kirk says when he is not insulting Man's "puny stock of private reason": "Ability is the factor which enables men to lift themselves from savagery to civilization, and which helps to distinguish the endeavors of men from the routine existence of insects...
...Qualified teachers, at least at the university level, are entitled to academic freedom: that is, the right to express their own beliefs and opinions, in or out of the classroom, without interference from administrators, trustees, parents or public bodies...
...Conservatism: A Mystical Collectivism...
...But to take both liberals and conservatives at their respective words about individual freedom is as radical an action as can be conceived...
...I began to look for such affirmative presentations when people started calling me conservative...
...For the tragic truth—the many honest and morally distinguished conservatives notwithstanding—is that Watergate is a quintessentially conservative phenomenon...
...I do not acknowledge freedom of thought for all...
...another is the assurance that thrift and diligence will bring some degree of decent independence, as distinguished fromthe uneasy condition of pensioners of the state...
...They very much resemble such distinguished Old Leftists as Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, and Irving Howe, who were equally appalled in 1968 by the explosions of dictator-worship and totalitarianism in the elite liberal world...
...The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government...
...For conservatives, I learned, the individual is not the primary The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 11 unit of social life...
...For most conservatives, support for the Horatio Alger, free enterprise tradition is really a vestige of Calvinism...
...At least, that is the case for most conservatives, if not for the small brilliant band of rational economists and the minority of intellectuals who genuinely understand them...
...That is certainly the epistemological status of the conservative's authoritarian collectivism, the view that Society is a Divine Primary...
...They profoundly share the view that man is a being who can be conceptually sliced in two—with one half free, the other half slave...
...Now, other political philosophies and movements do not induce a comparable amnesia...
...I believe in religious discrimination...
...I discovered that Burnham, too, was unable or unwilling to define conservatism—save in opposition to liberalism...
...For two hundred years, American thinkers and politicians have talked piously about the inalienable individual right to liberty...
...I accept dictatorships and tyrannies, and disapprove of revolutions against them...
...the social cohesion of this organic community is far more important than free thought, free speech, free academic inquiry, and free dissent, which threaten its stability...
...12 The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 that has no connection whatever with reality...
...I agree...
...It is not uncommon in the intellectual world for an occasional course to be given in conservative thought—either in the form of a published anthology or a university lecture series...
...One would think that such a group would be ideally situated to make known its dominant values, principles, and goals...
...I agree...
...Indeed, writers of this type often expressed overt disdain at the very idea of firm definitions or principles, and appeared to pride themselves on not having any...
...The Calvinist believes, as an article of religious faith, that individual competence and productive zeal (Russell Kirk would say Ability and Labor)—and their result in the form of wealth—are the signs of spiritual grace on earth...
...Indeed, Buckley collapses, however wittily and eloquently, whenever he tries to present conservatism in a coherent fashion...
...The individual must be left free to pursue this state of spiritual grace: hence, free enterprise...
...and Strength, moreover, could have been used in righteous causes with little risk of bloodshed...
...and secular social goals should be eternally subordinate to moral religious values taken on faith, without the possibility of majority revocation...
...5.) "A popular movement or revolt against a tyranny or dictatorship is right, and deserves approval...
...It is almost, in the words of George Ball, as if detente were "more an obsession than a policy...
...Everyone is en- titled to his own opinion...
...The conservative commitment to free enterprise has long since degenerated into a mere commitment to cash...
...He is most successful when—to use John Roche's apt description—he sets out "to smite the liberal hip and thigh," to impale "the contradictions, the hypocrisies, the pretensions of liberal and radical pontiffs," and to publish journals and anthologies of writers doing the same...
...Burnham quoted philosopher Sidney Hook to sum up: "The Liberal has faith in intelligence...
...Indeed, if they want a future at all, young conservatives must take their own libertarian tradition seriously...
...I have always been ready to use force in order to defy tyranny or ward off ruin...
...The experience is strangely akin to eating a Chinese dinner...
...8.) "Corporal punishment, except possibly for small children, is wrong...
...Dissecting the Conservative Psyche I got my first disturbing glimpse of the applied meaning of these abstractions when I read James Burnham's Suicide of the West—a famous conservative work with an extraordinarily brilliant dissection of the liberal psyche...
...it is an avowedly religious belief, along with the social virtues it suggests: Obedience to Authority, Tradition, etc...
...He rejects, on the other hand, the "dogma" of "freedom of choice" and the view that "nearly every man is fit by nature to choose for himself in all things...
...It clearly emerges from the philosophical context I have been describing...
...I do not believe in academic freedom...
...After much puzzling, I grasped something about this type of conservative literature...
...Force is not...
...4.) "In political or military conflict, it is wrong to use methods of torture and physical terror...
...It is, in fact, the libertarian position on government force which makes it the most radical philosophy in America today...
...Coexisting Contradictions But having discovered this theocratic and totalitarian strain in "affirmative" conservatism I was completely baffled...
...I agree...
...One of these rewards is the ownership of private property, in its many forms...
...Only, for some reason, if, two months later, you ask those who have read the book or attended the lectures to explain what conservative philosophy is, their answers will be extremely vague...
...I agree...
...The very level and content of the battle is contemptible...
...And with each successive generation, they have increasingly forgotten the meaning of the concept and continued to fight merely over which aspect of the individual to enslave, and how much...
...Steps toward world disarmament would be a good thing...
...Ultimately, it is this last which stands as the most frightening aspect of Helsinki...
...All anybody ever really seems to remember about conservatism—and this apparently includes most conservatives themselves —is that whatever liberals are for, conservatives are against...
...No one, with minimal political literacy, would find it too difficult to tell you what black militants advocate, what Communists seek, how liberals perceive the role of government, or what values are stressed by the New Left...
...In determining who is to be admitted to schools and universities, quota systems based on color, religion, family, or similar factors are wrong...
...But this means: a conscious repudiation of theocracy, explicit and implicit...
...Finally, Helsinki makes little sense even if one prefers to ignore its moral implications or its possible deleterious impact on the policies of our allies...
...Order for the sake of Order—even if you are in the grip of a tyrant...
...Russell Kirk's work, for example, attests to his scorn for man's "puny private stock of reason" and to his reverance for the organic community...
...Now how can such authoritarian and libertarian elements logically coexist in any philosophy—conservative or liberal...
...There is only one way to find and encourage Ability, and that is to reward it...
...man is often irrational...
...Shorn of their "right" to use brute force against peaceful men who have committed no crimes, liberals and conservatives would be left, disarmed, facing the true meaning of the freedom in which both claim to believe: Hands Off People...
...For if he had been willing to make this translation himself—and to state these conservative ideas in the first person—here is what Burnham would have been obliged to write: "I believe in racial segregation and discrimination...
...they deny the individual's right to think, value, and act freely, save in one realm...
...In a genuinely free society, ninety percent of all liberal and conservative political action would cease...
...Rather, their actions over the last several decades—if not always their words—indicate that their ultimate ambition, their only obsession, remains pretty much what it has always been...
...and so on and so on...
...One begins to suspect that obtaining this ephemeral, falsely comforting sense that "we can get along with them" and "there doesn't have to be a war" is what detente is really all about...
...the rights of man as something earned, not given...
...The answer to the question is simple: they can't...
...6.) "Any interference with free speech and free assembly, except for cases of immediate public danger or juvenile corruption, is wrong...
...I agree—with the understanding again, that the will of the people does not sanction the violation of individual rights...
...The two most common explanations heard from Watergate participants were: "I did it for my country" and "I didn't think for myself...
...And this is exactly what has happened...
...the individual may not challenge or rebel against society's traditions and edicts...
...The late Clinton Rossiter declared that conservatism constitutes a belief in: "the need for a ruling and serving aristocracy...
...reason, science, and education, accordingly, cannot solve many or most human problems...
...Inevitably, the most common responses in both groups to this libertarian integration are incomprehension, hostility, and hysteria...
...I believe in concepts of racial and ethnic superiority and inferiority...
...Conservatives, on the other hand, according to Burnham, believe such ideas as these: man is contaminated by original sin...
...But that is not a silly perception: there is a fascist-Hegelian strain in conservative thought, just as there is a socialist-Marxist strain in liberal thought...
...For what was I now to make of the clear and obvious fact that it is conservatives alone, today, who constantly proclaim their devotion to individualism and economic freedom, who constantly warn that the growth of the State threatens that freedom, who characteristically resist all expansion of the State's power over economic life, who occasionally even try to wrest power away from the State...
...I agree—but disagree with the qualification...
...William F. Buckley, who is widely viewed as the father of the modern conservative movement, confesses with perverse pride: "I have never failed to dissatisfy an audience that asks the meaning of conservatism...
...There he is to be a state-regulated beast of burden with the duty of carting the incompetent through life...
...There (in principle at least) he is to be free...
...Again, we are facing here a quaint switch in liberal views...
...7.) "Communists have a right to express their opinions...
...So long as young conservatives accept the fundamental contradiction of conservatism—the belief that one can have value-authoritarianism and freedom too—they face only two possible futures, both of them tragic: They will march toward cultural extinction—or toward fascism...
...For one thing, I agreed with a little more than half of the liberal statements...
...Certainly, it seems less and less a responsible course of action...
...but with the crushing of Ability, that dedication will result in the rapid impoverishment of Labor, too, and probably in consequences yet more grave...
...They have only to repeat the same well-meaning, short-sighted behaviour towards the new problems which in singular resemblance confront us today to bring about a third convulsion from which none may live to tell the tale...
...individual actions may not be based on private judgments...
...Most conservatives do not know the difference...
...It is rare indeed to find...
...This: Like the liberals whom they so brilliantly criticize, conservatives are collectivists and statists...
...What kind of a mind was it that perceives society—any society—as some sort of irreducible Holy Unit to be respected, obeyed, and revered—while viewing the individual as some eternal private in Life's Army who must say Yes, sir, Yes, sir, until he dies...
...Burnham tested out these liberal sentences quite systematically and reported that most people who defined themselves as liberals believed anywhere from 85% to 100% of them—and that 100% of was a common record...
...A lot of this material seemed to me to be strikingly hollow verbiage, a fusion of metaphysics and pop-sociology couched in the language of Corneille and Racine—perorations on Society woven around such concepts as God, Authority, Order, Tradition, Duty, Patriotism, and so on...
...In a free society, the individual is free to interpret the universe as he wills, and to join or preserve the religious institutions he cherishes...
...Conversely, he said, people who defined themselves as reactionaries or hard conservatives repudiated 85% to 100% of them—and 100% disagreement was also a common record...
...If Burnham is right, and a significant number of conservatives believe a significant number of these ideas—even in qualified form—such conservatives, at least, have good reasons to be vague, even amnesiac, about their "affirmative" beliefs...
...Indeed, conservatives and liberals often defend and rationalize fascist and communist dictatorships respectively...
...What, one may respectfully ask, did we get in return...
...but it cannot hurt to recall the 1948 remarks of Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm: "There can hardly ever have been a war more easy to prevent than this second Armageddon...
...The so-called American capitalist, today, usually does not know what genuine free enterprise is...
...Actually I am not a conservative, but a lifelong liberal who, twenty years ago, after growing disenchantment with proliferating governThe Alternative: An American Spectator October 1975 9 ment, read writers like Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, and Henry Hazlitt, and became a "limited state" libertarian...
...Such questions can be readily answered even by casual observers...
...But they will be paid back in their own coin, once Ability has been reduced to mere Labor—labor with the mind as well as the hands, dull and routine...
...It clearly emerges from the philosophical context I have been describing...
...the individual person is not untouchable...
...But had our British, American and Allied affairs been conducted with the ordinary consistency and common sense usual in decent households, there was no need for Force to march unaccompanied by Law...
Vol. 9 • October 1975 • No. 1
